"Thanks," said Hamish faintly. "I wish, I wish I'd picked you."
Gary looked startled; his frown deepened. "I don't do that."
"Oh."
"You shouldn't either," I couldn't help saying.
"No," Hamish said, but doubtfully. He lifted a hand to his red-tinged throat, brushing his fingers over the partially healed gash. "No," he addded, more firmly.
"Can we get out of here now?" Gary asked pointedly, "This place is still on fire."
Hamish tried to stand up, wobbled and fell halfway through the attempt, so I slung an arm across his back and supported him. That worked for about two minutes, but the smoke haze was starting to thicken. Hamish began to cough, an action that threatened to tear the healing wound and set off the bleeding again. We got briefly entangled in the sodden, smoke-stinking curtains before we staggered into the main bar.
"What's that awful smell?" Hamish choked out and I was glad I couldn't see Jack's body at the top of the stairs.
"This way." Gary grabbed my arm and steered us towards the window. He tried to take me out first but I pulled back.
"Him," I said, pushing Hamish at him. The poor kid was half unconscious with shock.
"Stay down," Gary told me, pushing me towards the floor in case I didn't get the message. He was all take-charge and energised. I'd only ever seen him like this once before, when he'd saved my life exactly as he'd just saved Hamish's. Flushed with my blood, his brain finally sparking the way it never did in his blood-free existence. He'd been getting me and Evie out of a burning building then too.
"Hold on tight," I heard Gary say. Hamish muttered something back, prompting Gary to reply, "You can't hurt me, but she'll be really angry with me if I drop you."
There were scrambling noises at the windowsill, and then "I'll be right back!" followed by the receding sound of a laden vampire climbing down brickwork.
I lay on the floor and sucked in the slightly-less-sooty air, thinking of Evie and how right she had been to run away to a commune last year, and that if I'd been smarter I'd have joined her. We really have to stop doing this, Gary.
The air tasted of smoke. It sometimes tasted like the smell of charred meat, so I was trying not to vomit. I was also trying not to think about Kate. She would be so angry with me for getting myself in this god-awful mess to begin with and she would never forgive me for dying on her and leaving her all alone.
You are not going to die. Really. Gary's coming back for you.
Hands seized my upper arms and I reached up to meet the assistance.
"Hang on tight, Lissa," Gary's voice was in my ear. I nodded, unwilling to attempt speech in the acrid atmosphere. I clambered onto his back with my arms wrapped around his neck - another flash of déjà vu - and with his strange, easy strength he climbed out of the window. The sudden availability of clean oxygen made me gulp for air, then cough violently. He paused and reached around to steady me.
"Don't let go." His voice was hoarse, from the frantic grip I had across his Adam's apple. I remembered he didn't have to breathe except to talk and locked my hold even tighter. I pressed my face into the bright cloth of his shirt and felt his muscles move as we resumed the downward climb.
Then we were level, steady, and there was the rustling of desiccated leaves and paper in the blind alley, and hands gently making my own unlock their death grip. I let go and would have fallen, but he was quick and caught me, and lowered me until I sat in the debris, leaning my forehead against my bent and shaking knees and learning how to breathe again.
CHAPTER 4
Crouched in a dead end next to a burning building, surrounded by an unknown number of vampires and their cronies while feeling responsible for at least one of their victims is not a good place to be. Especially when you can hardly see for the grit in your eyes and your only backup is a geekvamp who would be picked last for the team, if the undead played sport.
Attempting to listen closely to your surroundings when you can't see or properly breathe yet is also high on the 'not fun' list. I could discern faint groaning, some papery susurration, rapid laboured breathing, the distant sound of clanging metal, and the also distant, separate sounds of breaking glass and, growing swiftly closer, sirens.
"Are you okay?" Gary had crouched beside me. His voice, close to my ear, was barely above a whisper.
I nodded weakly in answer and found my breath. "How's Hamish?" I murmured back. It was probably pointless, vampire hearing being what it is, but the instinct to keep my vulnerable, human concerns private from all these unfriendly people was strong.
"I think I should get him out of here. Beryl's giving him funny looks." The instinct was clearly just as strong for Gary.
"Can you get him out?"
"I don't want to leave you here."
"I'll be fine," I said, which was more an expression of hope than of confidence. "You better make it quick, though."
I rose with him, thinking I looked less like a target if I was on my own two feet. Sight, oxygen intake and sturdiness of limbs mostly restored, I watched Gary crouch in front of Hamish. Hamish did not look well - waxy-skinned and on the verge of hyperventilating. His stupid friends had disappeared, along with Smith, which meant they'd abandoned him to this mess. Half of me couldn't blame them. The other half cursed them for cowards.
Gary stood and helped Hamish to his feet. Hamish wilted. Gary slipped an arm across his back and glanced around quickly and searchingly for the most suitable escape route from this menacing oubliette. Hamish leaned trustingly against Gary's side, and Gary led him across the space to the opposite wall, their feet swishing in the detritus of decades of newspaper and food wrappers. With some fussing and stumbling, Hamish nearly slithered to the ground, then he was hanging on to Gary's back and Gary was climbing up a length of pipe. They reached the roof and disappeared over the rim.
Leaving me alone with the sharp-toothed collective. I stood as straight as I could and turned to meet Magdalene's eye. I managed to hold it for a whole thirty seconds before deciding my eye was better spent looking for the bag I'd dropped. The bright blue nylon was easily found in the debris and I scooped it up.
Either of those things was better than looking at Thomas, lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. His left leg and arm were at grotesque angles, smashed by the final fall. His limbs and back were twitching with his efforts to right himself. I was momentarily grateful that he wasn't making any noise. He looked like he was in agony. Then I shuddered at the silence, which made him seem like a possessed puppet lurching around, face distorted in noiseless agony.
He was trying to use his relatively good arm to align the broken limbs. When he was done he grinned triumphantly through the blistering and soot. Or he tried to. His jaw flopped on one side, the bone so splintered and skin so torn it was barely attached.
Then he turned his head, and I saw it was worse. The side of his head bore a misshapen dent, not merely smashed in by the fall but excavated. Exposed skull and a wet hollow seething with dark, strange blood, and that look of dazed confusion on his face. He knows something's wrong. He hasn't worked out what, yet.
What functions does that part of the brain control, I thought in the midst of overwhelming pity and horror. What memories will he never know again? The fall had taken this beyond the fact that Thomas would never be handsome or suave again, forever now a wreckage of destroyed skin and muscle, even if the bones mended. It meant brain damage. What did that signify for the undead?
The skin on my wrist tingled with the ghost of an imaginary scar that had never formed. My first bite. Thomas had been under the impression he was being charming when he did it. In hindsight, his approach, though creepy, was streets ahead of others, who had generally just tried to tear out my throat with their teeth. By comparison, I realised that Thomas had been darn near chivalrous. I could hardly believe I felt any kind of compassion for him.
Beryl had surreptitiously scarpered and I craned my neck in search of her. Anything to avoid looking at Thomas.
"Wha? Wha?" said Thomas, unable to make the 't' with his broken jaw, and maybe unable to frame a word past 'what'. His voice still whistled strangely with the air that escaped from somewhere in his neck, the crusty skin at the corner of his mouth shifted. Revulsion overtook pity and I hoped I wouldn't be sick.
Instead I looked at Magdalene, who was glaring up at the window of her burning club with disgust, probably calculating how much it was going to cost to set it all right again.
"You insured?" I asked, unwilling to bear the quiet and unable bring myself to ask her what was going to happen to Thomas.
Her acid gaze shifted to me. "Of course," she said, then looked up at the window again, her head cocked as though she was listening to something besides me and the burning of her livelihood.
When vampires hear something you can't, it's best to pay attention. I peered around the space. At only four or five metres square and surrounded by tall buildings, you wouldn't think someone could sneak up, but the area was studded with little alcoves and stumpy insets of alleys that had been built over. Any number of shadows to skulk in there. Then I noticed that Magdalene's head was angled upward and I raised my eyes to the roofline.
A shape lurched within a line of deepening shadow and I tried to define it. Someone was climbing down a ladder embedded in the bricks in one of the longer truncated alleys. Another fire escape. That made better sense than Smith and those girls having shinnied up Gary's drain pipe. None of them had a vampire's innate shinnying skills. Which meant that Gary could have left an easier way if Magdalene had bothered to inform him of it.
The ladder rattled. The figure steadied itself then resumed the descent, still moving awkwardly. After a moment I analysed where the lop-sided gait came from, and my fist closed over the esky bag's handle. With luck it wasn't too late for the contents to be of use to its owner.
Mundy reached the ground and spent a moment smoothing down his coat and trousers. I'd never really noticed before how slightly he was built. His crown of curly dark blond hair made him look vaguely fragile as well, but when he raised his head to glare a challenge at us I recalled that however much he looked like a pale Byronic poet, he was a bastard of the first water.
I know he saw me. Ignoring me as thoroughly as he did took some effort. Instead, his gaze raked over Thomas's huddled figure and then he nodded at Magdalene.
"You appear to have been visited by the same vexing trouble that has disrupted me today," he said impassively.
"And that idiot brought them here," Magdalene said, nodding curtly at Thomas.
"Naahh, aaaahh," protested Thomas, wagging his head. At least, I thought it was a protest. It wasn't clear that he really understood what was being said.
Magdalene kicked Thomas's broken leg, making it bend horribly. White bone protruded from the shin, surrounded by bloodless meat. Thomas groaned this time and grabbed at the limb with his one good arm. The one with the fingers fused together. "Naaaoooohhh," he groaned.
She gathered up her smoke-ruined skirts and kicked his broken arm. The limb flopped and twisted and he fell sideways trying to catch it. She drew her foot back for another go.
"Don't!"
"Feeling sympathetic, are you?" she asked me in her sweet nanna voice.
"Just don't," I said, wishing I could keep the tremor out of my speech, wishing I was not here, or, at any rate, not alone.
"Do ignore Thomas, my dear." I started violently at the voice in my ear. I hadn't even heard Mundy move that close to me, "There are better uses for you."
Compulsively, I stepped away from him, saying defiantly: "I hear you could use a hand." A cheap shot, but it wiped that mocking smile off his face. Unfortunately, the snarl that replaced it displayed his pointed teeth. My throat tingled in another ghost scar, where Mundy had tried to eat me. My second bite. He looked ready to try again.
Way to go Lissa. Piss off the bad-ass vampire. I didn't dare look away from him, as though staying eyeball-to-eyeball was the only way to stop him from lunging for my throat. Feverishly, I tried to think of a ploy to change the subject from 'let's eat the irritating girl' to, well, anything else at all.
Mundy and Magdalene both tensed, hearing something. I kept my gaze on Mundy's, not game to take the risk of breaking eye contact. Next there was a thump and the sound of someone walking over the crackling ground cover.
"Oh. Um. Hi." Gary appeared to have missed all the vital signs and wandered into our midst, hands in the pockets of his jeans. He looked around, as though surprised and stuck for words. "Did I miss something?"
"Only the usual," My breath hitched halfway through the last word. I wished snappy comebacks were half as easy as they look in the movies.
"Mundy." Gary nodded at him, casual as you please, as though Mundy showing up now was expected and right. For all that, Gary made a point of walking up to me, standing between me and Mundy.
Mundy regarded him speculatively and relaxed slightly. Switching from hunter-mode back to watcher. Deciding that, for now, biting me was more trouble than he could be bothered with, if Gary was going to make a fuss about it.
"Your little friend is being terribly sweet," said Magdalene, "She thinks we should help Thomas." She nodded at the wreckage. Gary's eyes widened at the sight.
"You should help him," I said, heartily sick of these foul people.
"Why?" Magdalene sounded genuinely puzzled.
"Because he's your..." What? Friend, colleague, partner? It was oh so clear he was none of those.
"He's one of you," I tried, and Mundy actually laughed.
"What do you suggest we do then?" asked Magdalene.
"You could take him somewhere; let his bones mend."
"Yes. We could do that," she said reasonably. "What do you think, Mundy?"
"Oh yes. I believe that would be satisfactory for all concerned."
"Shall I?"
"This isn't a bloody joke." Bad enough that they were cruel without them trying to be funny about it.
"There's nothing we can do," Gary muttered beside me. "He's... His mind is not, um, there."
I thought I could detect fear in him.
"I suppose he's what you'd call a zombie now. He's just a body that won't die. Bits of his brain have gone. Literally. Even if the bones mend," Gary continued quietly, "all those memories and functions are gone. There's no coming back from it."
"What's going to happen to him?"
Magdalene gave me an indecipherable look before stepping up to Thomas. I thought she was going to kick him again. He obviously thought so too - he cringed.
He was right to.
She shoved him hard, sending him sprawling in the dirt and detritus, then punched down into his torso with all her considerable strength, through the burnt tatters of his clothes and the blistered skin and muscle.
Thomas tried to get away but he had no purchase and the second strike broke bone. Thomas moaned in pain and fear and confusion.
"Shut up, Thomas." She squeezed her hand into his chest and paused, a vile grin on her face.
Gary shifted uneasily as though deciding whether to intervene. "Don't do that," he said gruffly.
"Do what?" But she was smiling.
"Don't play."
But it's so much more interesting," she said.
"I'll remember that, if I ever have to do for you."
The anger in his voice startled me. More surprisingly, it startled Magdalene. Gary never worried her. Not ever.
She squeezed her fist and pulled, and Thomas's heart was torn out of his chest with a faint sucking sound. Red-black fluid ran like thick honey back into the hole in his torso. His eyes were wide open, his slack jaw working around sounds that might have been 'please'. She closed her fist and the lump of meat split like rotten leather. She dropped it. In Thomas's body, the fluid began to move and coalesce, and finally ooze out of the cavity and onto the ground. In minutes it had disappeared.
"He was getting to be a nuisance anyway," Magdalene said firmly.
"We have to bur
n the body," Gary insisted. "It's the only way to be sure."
"You are an obsessive," interrupted Mundy. "That happened once. Only once."
"Would you want it to be you?"
"I'll make sure of it," said Magdalene tiredly. She looked meaningfully at the ready-to-hand bonfire of the Gold Bug. She bent, picked up the mangled remains of the heart, and threw it through the open window two floors up, with perfect aim.
I glanced back at Thomas's body, shrivelling the way spiders do when they're dead. Bloodless and empty, the mummified shell simply collapsed in on itself.
True death was probably kinder than being a zombie. But that didn't make me feel any better.
CHAPTER 5
Between Mundy's severed hand, Thomas's immolation and the attack on the Gold Bug, there was absolutely no doubt by now that Melbourne's vampire community was being targeted. Whoever was looking down the gun sights, I couldn't say I blamed them.
On the other hand, indiscriminate slaughter was in no way on the list of things I was prepared to put up with. Not even of people I didn't like, and not without a fight. The fact that Gary, someone I very much did like, was potentially on that hit list was absolutely untenable.
Before I could launch into demands for an explanation, however, Gary remembered our original errand. He pried the blue bag out of my hands - it surprised me how tightly I'd been holding on to it - and held it out to Mundy. Thinking about anything other than Thomas seemed to be high on everyone's agenda.
"Um. I found this. We packed it. Lissa did. To preserve it. In case, you know, it wasn't too late."
Mundy took the bag gingerly and did not say thank you. I saw the way the stump of his right arm twitched, as though it was reaching for the zipper. I looked at Mundy properly for the first time. His pale, handsome face still made him look like an evil poet; a Dorian Grey, hundreds of years old, whose corrupted portrait was hidden behind his cold eyes. But now he was lopsided, with the sleeve of his shirt flapping at the end of the stump, like he didn't know what to do with it.
Walking Shadows Page 4