Writing Fiction a novel - Exclusive for Steemit - Diamonds and Deviants 27

Diamonds and Deviants

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This picture my own - others from Google Free to use images

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26,

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Celtica went back to her apartment.

Her parents were out and she was grateful for that, it mean she wouldn’t have to answer their questions about what she’d been up to. It also meant that she wouldn’t have to think about what she’d done and what had almost happened.

The veil drawn across memories of the existence of dragons had taken a very talented and special Magi a lot of blood, sweat and tears in order for it to be effective for so long. She didn’t want all that effort to have been for just a couple of thousand years, not when it was supposed to work forever.

Anyway, beside letting down the whole of dragon kind, she’d be disappointed too. Celtica quite enjoyed the anonymity of not being recognised by the other preterdeviants. She was an unknown quantity and they didn’t know what they were up against until it was too late.

Celtica had a lot of homework to do so that she could make sense of the problems she was trying to sort out.

Gideon Grey, a werewolf from a family that had ancestry that could be dated back to England and into the Roman invasion times at least. Why had that family been wiped out systematically and who had wiped them out? Celtica suspected the vampires of that but nothing was certain, and therefore she had to keep looking for the answers.

The vampires employed warlocks to reanimate them if they were killed on a permanent basis by decapitation, or burning.

Staking didn’t always mean that they were deader than undead, the older vampires could reanimate from such a death by the right ceremonies - take the dust, wait until nightfall and then sprinkle it with enough fresh blood.

Of course it meant using someone else to do that for them but by the time a vampire was a couple of centuries old, he (or she) had usually perfected the glamour technique and they had a fair few minions at their beck and call, and from what she knew of the glamoured humans, they felt the death of their master (or mistress) keenly and would try anything to bring them back.

The Dragon Stone chip that she had gone to visit had told of a few things to come. One particular one that she couldn’t remember for the life of her - yet - but other things were proving to be spot on.

The warlocks that were helping the vampires must be living in fear of a visit from a strange and unusual young woman round about now.

Even if they were under their own glamour from their vampires, they could still feel fear of death, warlocks weren’t like ordinary humans, they could be glamoured only if they didn’t realise it was happening, like the first two she had encountered, but the older and wiser (and younger in looks) they were, the harder it was to glamour and she thought that if a glamour didn’t work and the warlock realised what the vampire was up to, then the reanimation services would cease.

That would possibly mean the end of that particular warlock because vampires can get really stroppy when they think that there’s a permanent death awaiting them.

The other thing that Celtica had picked up from all this was that the warlocks had a bit of a deal with the vampires in that warlocks would agree to reanimate only existing vampires and if any more were made, the deal would be off. Now, that may have been the deal that most warlocks were in agreement to, but Celtica was pretty sure that Pietrov would have an entirely different deal altogether.

Celtica wondered what that deal was.

To keep herself from dwelling on the things that she could only guess at, she picked up a few things and went out. She had an idea about getting some more information and she had had what she thought was a brilliant way of getting the information.

Celtica went across town to the seedier and poorer places. She dressed down, well worn jeans, work boots, scuffed leather jacket and t-shirt and she fitted right in.

She paused outside the Irish Pub - it wasn’t an Irish Pub - that’s what it was called, there was no imagination gone into the naming of it. It had once been called The Ha’penny but it had never caught on.

She went to the bar, ordered a Guinness and asked the barman if Mick was about.

She knew he was, he was always about, but protocol meant that she had to follow the procedure of getting to see him.

“Who wants to see him?” the barman growled.

“I do.”