Solace & Grief by Foz Meadows Read Free Book Online

‘ bugger .’
    Unlike Jess, she made it to a toilet. Given her peculiar allergies, she was no stranger to – as Mrs Plumber had once delicately phrased it – the finer points of regurgitation, and knew what she was in for. Almost instinctively, she remembered to keep her hair well back from her face, to shift her knees so that they didn't get sore from prolonged kneeling, and to keep one arm wrapped around the porcelain in front of her so that when her head jerked down violently with the first retch – thus – she didn't crack her skull or fall over sideways.
    At a non-specific point in the future, by which time it was the present anyway, but which Solace was unable to appreciate owing to being passed out, Evan and Manx rescued her and Jess from the bathroom. Sequentially, this was followed by a series of vague impressions: being first dragged and then half-carried through the rain, an argument concerning who kept dropping whose sister's feet versus whose idea the all-girl tequila race had been, some falling and a few slurred words about dancing fish which made perfectly good sense at the time, a period of blackness and then a different, more insistent kind of blackness, which Solace took, correctly, to mean she'd woken up without having opened her eyes.

    Solace opened her eyes.
    The room consisted largely of shadow, and was in any case unfamiliar, with a ceiling that extended high overhead into darkness. The bed she was lying on creaked. The sheets were black, the mattress was soft and her head swam like spawning salmon in bear country. Solace gave a small groan and wondered where everyone was, and whether or not they'd seen her apparently miscreant liver in their travels. Brushing strands of hair out of her face, she rubbed her eyes and tried to wake up. Halfway through this process, she realised that she was currently, as of now, officially, seventeen. Seventeen, going on eighteen, she thought distantly, then pulled a face as the whole song bloomed in her subconscious like the aural equivalent of Paterson's curse. Thank you, Julie Andrews .
    There was a noise. Blinking, Solace turned to the right, momentarily fearful of having lost her virginity to the ultimate teenage stereotype. Her heart leapt into her throat at the sight of someone lying beside her, but the gods, it seemed, were merciful – it was only Jess, who was still passed out and snoring. As flashes of drunken memory returned with the slow clearing of her head, it occurred to Solace that perhaps she was in the warehouse where Manx and Electra lived with the as-yet unfamiliar Glide. Certainly, the room seemed big enough, and she had a dim recollection of seeing it from the outside, albeit from the perspective of someone only vertical by the grace of an arm around Evan's neck. The recollection of her own drunkenness made her feel guilty, but less so than if Jess hadn't met the same fate. Begrudgingly, she made a mental note not to drink so much next time. Restraint was good. Although, the Vampire Cynic added smugly, you did enjoy yourself .
    Shaking her head and regretting it almost instantly, she determined to find the others, apologise for throwing up, and figure out what was happening, in that order. Her throat was raw and her stomach gurgled uneasily, but given that Jess was still blacked out, she suspected her hangover wasn't as bad as it could have been, were she normal. Briefly, her lips twitched into a smile. Thank heaven for small mercies .
    Stretching, she padded over to the door. Manx's room, as she rightly suspected it to be, opened out onto a long, elevated walkway running around the entire top level of the warehouse. Several metal staircases went down to ground level at various junctures: looking up, Solace saw that much of the roof was in fact a skylight, the glass gone yellow and brown with accumulated filth. The upstairs rooms, of which there were many, reached from walkway to walls, while the downstairs space continued beneath their