I grinned. ‘I’ve told you before, I prefer it when you call me D’Artagnan.’ Then, without further ado, I started to climb. The watching crowd gasped loudly, a perfectly synchronised sound of excitement and horror.
I’d barely gone two metres when Lukas was by my side, climbing with me. ‘I will ask the question again. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m going to talk to your vampire and see if I can encourage him to come down of his own accord.’ I reached for the next steel section and hauled myself up.
‘Don’t be an idiot. You might fall.’ He was keeping pace with me. Higher and higher and higher.
‘So might you,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m a vampire. I have preternatural abilities.’
‘True,’ I answered, without stopping. ‘But if you fall, you’ll still go splat.’
‘So will you.’
‘I’ll wake up again twelve hours later. You won’t.’ I paused. ‘And, as it turns out, the more times I die the stronger I become. So not only is this easier for me than you might think but, if I slip and fall, I’ll be more powerful tomorrow. If you slip and fall, you’ll be dead.’
‘He’s a vampire. He’s my responsibility.’
‘I represent Supe Squad,’ I replied easily. ‘The responsibility is mine. You head down to your new friend. I’ll take care of this.’
There was a beat of silence. Lukas continued to match me step for step. I risked a glance down and estimated we were already about forty metres up. There was still no sign of the harnesses. This had definitely been the best call.
‘Paige does seem like a lovely girl,’ Lukas said finally.
‘Mmm.’ A gust of wind rippled past, ruffling my hair and tugging at the frills on Lukas’s shirt.
‘I wonder if she’s single.’
I didn’t respond.
‘You look annoyed, D’Artagnan. Are you jealous?’
‘Nope,’ I said. Forty-five metres up now. ‘But you’re trying to make me jealous.’
Another beat passed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am. You were supposed to come round to my house for dinner. I was … disappointed when you didn’t. I ended up being called to a meeting at Fairfax’s place instead. It was very dull. If you’d kept our … date, I could have avoided his pointless attempts at friendship.’
‘I called you about that. I had to cancel because I had an assault in Lisson Grove to deal with. A daft human bloke was trying it on with some of the Carr wolves and he ended up getting bitten. I had to make sure the paperwork was in order and double-check that all procedures were followed.’
One werewolf bite wouldn’t turn a human into a furry beast but two might, and three separate bites would almost definitely do the trick. The werewolf clans were only permitted to turn a small number of people each year because their numbers were strictly capped by the 1901 Limiting Act. Accidental bites had to be carefully logged and communicated to all werewolves to avoid inadvertent repeats and accidental transformations. It was a process the clans took care of for themselves but this had been the first opportunity I’d had to witness it first hand. I couldn’t pass that up. And, if I were honest, having an excuse to avoid dinner with Lukas had been a godsend. I was conflicted about him, both about my feelings for him and his activities as vampire Lord, so avoidance seemed like the better option. If that made me a coward, well then, so be it.
‘You’re scared of me.’
‘No,’ I answered. Sixty metres. Almost halfway. ‘It’s not you I’m afraid of, it’s your job. Especially when it’s compared to my job.’
‘Being Lord is more than a job.’
‘Yeah,’ I said sadly. ‘That’s what worries me.’
‘Emma,’ Lukas began.
Something fell from above, clattering past us as it bounced off the steel structure of the Eye. I stopped moving and stared down, tracking its fall. ‘What was that?’
Lukas frowned. ‘I don’t know.’ He angled his head up. ‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘He’s on the move.’
I squinted against the sun and spotted the vamp above us. He seemed to be moving across the top of the wheel towards the other side, away from us.
‘Can you see his face?’ I asked. Lukas had far better eyesight than I could ever hope for. ‘Can you tell who he is yet?’
His voice was grim. ‘No. He knows we’re here – he wouldn’t be moving away otherwise. But he’s not once looked back in this direction. It’s like he doesn’t want to be identified.’
Suspicion nibbled at me. There was more to this than met the eye, I was sure of it. ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ I muttered.
‘Yeah.’ Lukas’s jaw was set. ‘Me too. You should head down to solid ground.’
‘So should you,’ I retorted. I looked at the nearest pod. There was a large group of people inside, staring at us. I considered raising a hand to wave at them but I didn’t want to tempt fate. We were rather high up now and, despite my newly enhanced strength and stamina, I was starting to tire. This climbing business was harder than it looked.
At the front of the pod was a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years old. His mouth was smeared with chocolate from the ice-cream cone in his hand. With all the excitement, he seemed to have forgotten that he was holding it. Rather than gazing at Lukas and me, however, his saucer-wide eyes were trained on the figure above us. All of a sudden he seemed to gasp. My head swung round, just in time to see the supposedly suicidal vampire leap down from the steel beam he was balancing on to the top of one of the other observation pods.
‘Don’t move!’ I shouted, throwing as much force into my voice as I could. The wind whipped away my words and, even with the keen hearing granted to his kind, I doubted the vampire had heard me. By my side, Lukas cursed.
Then the vampire leapt down again, his hands catching another of the steel rods, and swung in mid-air for a moment. I was all but certain he was going to fall and plummet the hundred metres or so to his death. Instead he dropped and lowered himself further down with astonishing speed,
The wind gusted even harder. The vamp, who was still on the opposite side of the wheel, barely seemed to notice. He drew level with us but didn’t once glance over in our direction. He seemed intent on getting to the ground. In theory that was a good thing because nobody wanted him to jump, but I wanted to talk to him and find out what was behind this stunt. If he ran away before we reached him, there’d be a lot of unanswered questions to deal with.
I had to follow suit – if he was clambering down then so was I. I started to lower myself but, in my haste, my foot slipped. I let out a sharp cry. Within a heartbeat, Lukas was reaching for me and pulling me back up again.
His hand curved round my waist, gripping me tightly, and he looked into my eyes. ‘I tried to warn you, D’Artagnan,’ he murmured. ‘It’s dangerous up here and I don’t want you to fall.’
I stared at him, my heart hammering in my chest. Then there was a clang and I looked away, towards the descending vampire. ‘He’s still heading down,’ I said. ‘We have to get to him.’
Lukas nodded. ‘Be careful,’ he warned.