The Colour of Death

by Elizabeth Davies

  Oh, so gently, he shampooed my hair, his fingers massaging my scalp until it squeaked. Then he rinsed me off, manoeuvering my wooden body this way and that, checking me over to see if he’d missed a bit. Satisfied, he turned the water off and encouraged me to step out of the shower.

  He was sodden, dripping puddles of water over his white-tiled floor, but he didn’t tend to himself until he’d wrapped me in a fluffy towel, clumsily turbaned my hair, draped a clean towel on the closed lid of the toilet, and sat me down on it.

  Without ceremony, he peeled off his wet clothes and threw them in the bath, then stepped into the shower and washed himself down. He had a good body, hard and trim, with defined muscles, and a smattering of hair on his chest. I noted the cluster of dark hair and the accompanying manhood nestling at the top of his legs, the curve of his buttocks, the length of his legs, but my gaze was entirely dispassionate. My mind and heart were numb and cold.

  I watched absently as he sluiced himself down, turned off the shower and reached for a towel, wrapping it around his waist before using another to dry himself properly, my mind fuzzy and my wits dull.

  Still damp, he shepherded me into his bedroom, where he gently sat me on the edge of the bed and found clean clothes for both of us. Then he dressed me. The process was entirely functional, like a parent dressing a toddler, and when we were both fully clothed, him in T-shirt and jeans, me in a too-loose pair of joggers and a T-shirt which drowned my much smaller frame, he took me downstairs and made me drink hot, sweet tea and tried to force-feed me bacon sandwiches.

  The tea was welcome, but all I did was pick at the food. I had no appetite, not for breakfast, not for anything. I just wanted to curl up in a corner and be left alone, much as a dying animal would.

  ‘You can stay with me for as long as this takes. In fact, I’d feel happier if you did,’ he said, when the meal was finished. He collected the dishes and put them on the counter near the sink.

  ‘Whatever. Fine. I don’t care.’ I really didn’t. Here was as good as anywhere, and at least Crow’s scarlet glow didn’t bother me as much as it once did. I was becoming rather used to it. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was comforting, but seeing it did give me a certain peace of mind.

  ‘I wonder if he’s got a reflection,’ I said, trying to focus on something useful and not on my pitiful circumstances. I realised that if I wasn’t careful, I was in danger of sliding back into shock. It was there, hovering, waiting to grab me with dark, twisted tentacles and drag me down into the abyss. I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t.

  Crow stopped, poised over the bin where he’d been scraping my barely-touched bacon sandwich into it.

  ‘Rochdale’s got no aura, he doesn’t show up in photos, he can’t be seen on film,’ I said. ‘I bet he hasn’t got a reflection, either.’

  He put the plate down and straightened. ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘You know why he set fire to my house, don’t you?’ I asked, abruptly.

  ‘You said it’s because you see auras.’

  ‘That’s part of it. It’s also because I told him to leave. I withdrew my invitation. He had no choice. I guess he thought that if he couldn’t come in, he’d force me out. Or kill me in the process.’

  ‘Okaaay...?’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m out in the open, where he can get to me. I’m a sitting duck.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘He can’t get to you in my house. You have to invite him in. And I’m as sure as hell I’m not going to do that. But we should find out as much as we can about him,’ he suggested.

  He was right, we should. Information was knowledge, and we had far, far too little of it.

  ‘Let’s get on with it. If you want to,’ I added, acutely conscious I was neither his problem nor his responsibility.

  ‘Oh, I want to. I have to.’

  It was then I remembered Meadow.

  Rochdale had her.

  Crow’s sister was in the clutches of a vampire.

  And neither of us had the foggiest idea what to do about it.

  Chapter 46

  Crow

  For a while there, Crow was worried Olivia was beyond his help. He’d seen it before, the almost catatonic state brought on by shock. So, he did the only thing he could – took care of her physical needs and hoped to give her enough time to process and deal with the mental ones. More often than not, his men had come out of their funk without him having to call the head-doctors in. He prayed Olivia would too.

  She was scarily pale, dark circles around her haunted eyes, a faint tremor in her hands as she held her mug. Her dazed expression, lack of appetite, and reluctance to become involved in anything, all indicated shock, if not PTSD itself.

  He did everything he could think of to try to cajole her out of it, to revive her, but as each of his comments and suggestions fell on deaf ears, he began to wonder if he should take her to see someone, like a doctor or a counsellor.

  Then she’d said, ‘I’m out in the open, where he can get to me. I’m a sitting duck.’

  Her assessment was accurate. She was.

  But what about Meadow?

  The image in his mind of his sister writhing around in bed with her hands between her legs and that bastard’s name on her lips, filled him with a rage more terrible than he’d ever experienced before. Seeing Olivia so besotted by the creature had been bad enough; knowing his sister had been controlled in the same way by Rochdale for months, was tearing him apart.

  An image of a sharpened length of wood skittered across his inner eye. Olivia might hesitate to use it. Crow wouldn’t. He couldn’t wait to drive one into that fucker’s black heart.

  ‘It says here that they don’t have a reflection,’ he said, his head bent towards the computer screen. ‘We know he definitely doesn’t appear on camera,’ he added.

  ‘Rescinding an invitation to enter a house works,’ Olivia said. ‘I can vouch for that.’

  He was relieved to see she was actively thinking about the situation and not just responding dully to questions.

  ‘He wasn’t as concerned about the cross as I’d hoped,’ she continued. ‘It burnt him when he touched it, and it clearly hurt him, but I think he was trying to prove a point.’

  Crow scanned the page, clicked off it, and onto another. ‘Apparently, they can change into bats.’ He looked up from the screen. ‘Are we prepared to believe that?’ He wasn’t entirely sure if he was joking or not.

  ‘I think we may have to be selective,’ Olivia said. ‘Bats are a step too far. As are the twinkly bits and the altruism.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Twilight?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I’m talking about the film.’

  ‘No, sorry, you’ve lost me.’ He had no idea what she was on about.

  ‘Never mind. How about we start at the beginning with the old tales and the stories, and work our way forward. There must be some common threads. I have a suspicion Hollywood has its own take on vampires, and we’re going to have to be careful to sift out the movie stuff.’

  ‘Right.’ He clicked some more. Olivia made no attempt to see the screen, but her attention was on him and she’d lost the impassive, dead-eyed stare which had concerned him earlier.

  ‘There are references to vampires that go back to an ancient Sumerian and Babylonian myth dating to 4,000 B.C,’ he said, skimming the info to dig out anything remotely relevant. ‘That’s over 6000 years ago, but it doesn’t say much more, except that the vampire was something called an “uruku”, possibly meaning someone who wasn’t buried properly, and who became a vengeful spirit, and returned to suck the life out of the living.’

  ‘Humans have always been concerned about burial and grave practices,’ Olivia said.

  Crow raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I once did a photoshoot at a long barrow. It piqued my interest. How about, instead of worrying about the afterlife, those people were actually more worried about undeath? It might
explain some of the rituals surrounding burial.’

  Crow nodded and carried on reading. ‘Vampires don’t appear to be a modern invention. Tales about them have been around for a very long time. There’s mention here of a vampire in Greek mythology. A man called Ambrogio fell in love with a beautiful maiden, but Apollo, the sun god, wanted her for himself, so he cursed this Ambrogio guy with being burnt in sunlight. Ambrogio, in desperation, made a pact with Hades, god of the underworld, and another god, Artemis, yada, yada, yada. The gist of it is that Ambroigio has to drink blood, he has fangs, has super strength, and is immortal. That sounds suspiciously like our guy.’

  Olivia said slowly, ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

  ‘There are loads of these kinds of legends, some vague, others, like the Ambrogio one, which is quite detailed, from all over the world. They can’t all be make-believe and superstition, can they?’

  ‘No...’ Her eyes were still on him; she’d not dropped her gaze once.

  He read on. ‘Skulls have been found with rocks and stones rammed between their jaws to prevent the dead feeding on the living, and remains have been found with stakes through their chest cavities. Maybe our ancestors knew what they were doing.’

  ‘Go on, the more we can find out, the better.’

  ‘There are lots of tales about the dead being buried face down, so if the corpse came back to life it would claw its way down through the earth, rather than up. And the tradition of women cutting their hair and wearing black after their husbands died, stemmed from dead men coming back to life and claiming their wives as their first victims. So the wives of the deceased would try to change their appearance in order that their husbands wouldn’t recognise them.’

  He continued to scan page after page. ‘They mostly all tell the same story; vampires are dead people who have come back to life, and who may or may not be inhabited by a demon – the jury’s out on that one – but they all agree that the creature sucks the life out of the living. There’s frequent mention of blood, and the odd story or two mention the spirit being drained.’

  ‘The fucker certainly sucked the spirit out of me,’ Olivia observed, and Crow smiled at her dry tone. ‘He likes blood, too.’ She pointed at her breast.

  ‘Perhaps he works both angles, and blood is also a euphemism for “life force”?’

  ‘Father Andrew said Bram Stoker based his Dracula story on fact.’

  Crow’s eyes were gritty and he rubbed at them, blinking. He’d need to sleep soon, and if they were right about vampires, then sleeping during the day was the best option. Crow wanted to be awake come nightfall. Awake and ready.

  He scanned a few more pages. ‘Dracula isn’t the first work of fiction about vampires, though. Some guy called John Polidori wrote The Vampyre about eighty years before Stoker published Dracula. This Polidori guy based his vampire character on Lord Byron, the romantic poet. He wrote it around the same time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. No wonder people began to think of vampires as nothing more than horror stories; especially when Hollywood got hold of the idea and ran with it. Together with the growth of science and modern society, and the shrinking of the church, vampires became entertainment.’

  ‘Anything else? Anything we can use?’

  Crow rubbed a weary hand across his chin. ‘Not really. Most legends seem to agree that staking works. Cutting off heads also has a lot of votes, and so does burning. The cross, holy water, and garlic are also bandied about, but we know that a cross doesn’t kill them, so I suspect holy water doesn’t either, unless they’re immersed in a vat of it. As for garlic? Hmm. It’s mentioned a lot, but I suspect that’s more to do with the oil having antibacterial properties than anti-supernatural ones. Any facts are so mixed up with fiction and superstition, it’s difficult to tell what’s true and what isn’t.’

  ‘We’re left with educated guesswork, then?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Their eyes met over the top of the computer screen. Crow wondered if his worry showed on his face. Olivia’s did. She had every right to be. Rochdale had targeted her, and Crow was pretty sure the man wouldn’t give up easily. Maybe if Olivia was an ordinary woman, Rochdale would have cut his losses. But Olivia Parr was far from ordinary. She, and possibly only a handful of others in the world, could identify a vampire when she saw one.

  Crow could understand why Rochdale could never allow her to live.

  Chapter 47

  Lord Byron – Present day

  I wasn’t used to being thwarted, and it sat heavily on my mind, the way a hard-to-digest meal weighed down the stomach.

  I’d been too eager, I saw that now. I should have waited and watched. Humans are so short-sighted. Give her a few days, a week at the most, and she would have emerged of her own accord.

  The man she had allied herself with was a different proposition.

  Not that he posed a threat – he didn’t, he couldn’t possibly, despite his muscles – but he was becoming a nuisance. The priest was as ineffectual as any other man of the cloth, and I didn’t intend to waste my time on him, but this Crow creature needed to be put in his place.

  I could easily kill him, remove him from the scene entirely, but what was the amusement in that?

  I had a much better plan; one which would show him just how pathetic and inadequate he was. Then afterwards...?

  I hadn’t decided whether to allow him to live with the knowledge of his failure or to put him out of his misery.

  It was a pleasant conundrum to have.

  Chapter 48

  Crow

  Crow persuaded Olivia to go to bed. She needed rest desperately, they both did. It was already early afternoon and neither of them would get in a full eight hours; if they actually slept at all. He hoped for Olivia’s sake she did. He wasn’t quite as concerned about himself. Crow decided to leave her in bed for as long as possible. As long as he was awake and alert, she was as safe as he could keep her.

  Rochdale would be unable to enter Crow’s house without an invitation, which was one of the reasons why Crow was pleased Olivia was under his roof. What if she’d gone to her parents’ house? They didn’t even believe their daughter saw auras – if she confided in them that she was being hunted by a vampire, they’d have her committed for sure. A hotel would be even worse; public buildings were fair game, Crow had read. Rochdale would be able to enter such places at will, although there didn’t seem to be any consensus regarding a vampire being able to enter individual guests’ rooms without an invitation from the person staying in it.

  Stripping down to boxer shorts and T-shirt, Crow got into bed, setting the alarm on his phone. He wanted to be up in plenty of time before the sun went down.

  As it was, he woke well before that, with one thought on his mind. Stakes. They didn’t have any. The ones Father Andrew had given them were charcoal now.

  He wasn’t sure they’d be of any use anyway, but in the absence of a hefty sword to cut the monster’s head off, or a flame thrower to turn him into toast, Crow didn’t have many other options in the way of defence.

  ‘Does it have to be wood?’ he asked the priest quietly, after he’d phoned him to tell him what’d happened and the Father had made suitable noises of concern, sympathy, and offers of help. There were enough things in his house that could be modified, if needed – a metal mop handle, a length of copper pipe in the shed...

  ‘I think it does,’ Father Andrew said. ‘Don’t ask me why though.’

  Crow hadn’t any intention of asking. He was more interested in where he could get his hands on some more, rather than what they were made out of.

  ‘I’ve got three left,’ the priest said when Crow enquired. ‘I can make more, but not in time.’

  The sun was low in the sky, although it would be a couple of hours before it would be fully dark. Vampire dark.

  ‘I hate to ask,’ Crow said, ‘but can you bring them to me? I don’t want to leave Olivia on her own.’

  ‘I’ll come right over.’

  Whil
e he waited, Crow made a sandwich, then did what he’d done so many times before – he checked the perimeter of his rented house, making certain the doors and windows were locked, and there were no other obvious ways in. Rochdale shouldn’t be able to enter without an invitation, but Crow wasn’t about to take any chances.

  Satisfied, he then checked his weapons. He didn’t have many at his disposal, just his double-edged Fairbairn Sykes knife and a Glock 17. The gun shouldn’t be in his possession, as it had been illegally acquired and he had no licence for it, but he’d hated the thought of being without a firearm.

  Somehow, he didn’t think it would be all that useful right now, not unless he could get his hands on some silver bullets. Or were they only effective against werewolves? Not that he thought werewolves actually existed, but then, he hadn’t believed in vampires, either... Who knew what was out there in the dark?

  He watched the Father’s car pull up alongside the pavement and waited for him to approach, scanning the area for movement. It was still light, but Crow preferred being overcautious to being dead.

  Father Andrew knocked. Crow waited and watched.

  Nothing suspicious.

  He opened the door on the second knock and ushered the priest inside.

  ‘Where are they?’ he asked. The Father’s hands were empty.

  ‘In the boot.’

  ‘Give me your keys and I’ll bring them inside. I’m going to shut the door behind me. Do not, I repeat, do not open it to anyone other than me.’

  ‘The car is parked right outside.’ The Father’s expression was one of confusion.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s still light.’

  ‘I know.’

  The two men stared at each other. Father Andrew wiped a hand across his mouth. ‘He wants her badly, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Crow opened the front door and peered through it. The street he lived on was a cul de sac, quiet and suburban. Apart from a couple of kids playing on their bikes, he saw nothing to concern him.