The absent hand was a shape made of space, and it wasn't cool-tragic like Luke Skywalker, or comic-villain like Captain Hook. It was cruel-horrible, like he was still trying to pick up things with it, only realising at the last second his fingers were no longer there.
After a moment, he said to Gary, "Still bringing your pet with you, I see." He could still squeeze a lot of contempt into very few words.
Gary hesitated a moment. "Do you want me to help you open that?" he asked with curious neutrality. "You might find it difficult."
Magdalene snickered in vile appreciation of the dig and Mundy's expression hardened. There was no suave way to do this, so he put the bag on the ground, kneeled on the corner to anchor it and ripped the top of it open.
The hand looked terrible when he took it out, withered and discoloured. Mundy's expression was briefly desolate, then studiously bland. He put the arm on top of the tattered bag, shoved his dangling shirtsleeve up over the stump until the ends were trapped under his armpit, then drew a folding knife from his pocket. He had to pry one of the blades open with his teeth.
Having finally extracted the longest of the blades, Mundy scored a deep cut across the stump of his arm, then another, wincing only slightly as he opened the already mutilated limb. It didn't bleed, of course, but I could see the movement of the thick non-human blood in the cuts.
Then Mundy picked up what was left of his hand and held it against the fresh cuts. He moved it this way and that, as though it was a piece of a puzzle and only needed the right angle to click it into place. His expression remained set, but the agitated motion of the limb in his hand betrayed him.
Feeling pity for the old bastard confused me.
"It's too late, Mundy," I heard Magdalene say, the personification of schadenfreude. "It's too decayed. It won't take."
Mundy's reply was a strangled grunt. "Look," she continued, "it's closing up again."
Gary pulled a face of nervous sympathy as he watched. But sympathy of any kind was glaringly absent from Magdalene. She strode over to Mundy.
"It's a waste of time," she said, snatching the hand from him and, astonishingly, she pitched it with vicious accuracy through the second floor window into the flames of the burning bar. Open-mouthed at the brazen cruelty of it, I studied Mundy's response to this violation. His gaze was fixed on the smoke pouring from the window.
The smell and the smoke were terrible. They were nothing compared to the stark look on Mundy's face.
He must have felt me watching him, as an instant later his expression was shuttered. He stood straight, with his back to that awful fire, and directed a glare at Gary. Any trace of vulnerability or loss was frostbitten to death in that look.
In Gary's current mood a stare-off seemed inevitable, but Gary was suddenly quiescent. I didn't like the change. I was getting well past frightened now. I was far into pissed-off territory and preparing to sign a six year lease.
"Is someone going to tell me what the hell is going on? Who were those guys? Why are they trying to kill you?"
In the library, that tone of voice would have got me instant respect, even from the rowdy after-school teenaged boys. Here it earned me a collection of disdainful expressions. I looked defiant daggers back at them. Mundy and Magdalene looked about ready to put in some heavy duty ignoring. Only a cat can ignore a human more efficiently than a vampire.
Gary wasn't much help, except for the strange look he gave me, mingled with a modicum of concern. I think he was always amazed when I defied vampires who weren't him. If I'd had more sense than indignation, it would have amazed me too.
"Don't come the snooty King of the Undead with me, you asshat," I said to Mundy. "These bastards nearly killed you, pretty much did for Thomas, and they set fire to the Gold Bug. It looks like they're winning so far, and the two of you are way too calm to know nothing about it. So what gives?"
"It is none of your concern," said Mundy stiffly.
"It is if they're going to come after Gary."
Mundy and Magdalene exchanged looks.
"She's not his pet, Mundy," said Magdalene, "I think he's the lapdog now. She's keeping him on a blood leash."
"It would explain much," said Mundy, raising an eyebrow. "Gary is not as he was. He has betrayed so much emotion these past months." He said 'emotion' like Gary had done something dirty.
Magdalene's lips quirked in derisive humour. "The young ones do sometimes mistake the blood rush for actual feelings. Being such a late starter, he is perhaps more confused than most."
"What is that foul expression Smith likes to use?" Mundy wondered.
Magdalene's lips quirked in derisive humour. I got the feeling the two of them were participating in some pointed double act aimed at needling me. "Ah, yes. Gary, you are meant to… suck around."
Gary didn't even bother to protest this time, though I nearly did. Of course I knew what they were all talking about by now. I'm slow sometimes, but I'm not stupid. And it was utterly ludicrous. Gary had never bitten me. The only time he'd even tasted my blood was when he had saved my life 10 months ago. Oh, and 15 minutes ago when he'd stuck my finger in his mouth. I wiggled my fingers carefully. The injuries had sealed and only the faintest dents remained as evidence of Thomas's bite.
So why did they keep saying it? Was Gary… drinking? Maybe he was, as it had been so graphically put, sucking around. I caught his sidelong glance towards me before he looked away. No, I thought. That's not it.
"And it explains why he hasn't been so available lately for any of our little errands," continued Magdalene. She transferred her flat gaze to Gary. "Her blood is making you excitable, Gary. It is so typical of you to get muddled. You are meant to be the one in charge. You are supposed to spread your favours."
Mundy's lip curled. "Show some care, Hooper. You are simply a neutered consort. Women of her ilk only desire a companion they can rely on not to die. If not that, then you are just to pass the time, until she finds a breathing man."
Gary sighed and ignored the whole thing. I decided that, on balance, it was best to follow suit. This was not a discussion I wanted to have with them until I'd first had one with Gary.
Besides, I didn't want to get into the whole 'until she finds a breathing man' part. My boyfriendless state was all right by me thanks, and not the result of necrophiliac pining. It's just that when you end up in the middle of a bloodbath more or less because your last boyfriend has dumped you, and then the loveliest boy you've ever seen in your life gets murdered by an undead psychopath; it kind of takes the wind out of your dating sails.
Bluntness, I decided, was the best way forward. God knows neither I nor they were any good at subtlety. "Who is trying to kill you?"
"The situation does not concern you," said Mundy.
"Bullshit."
He gave me one of his most offended looks. Sometimes I swear just to make him twitch. Instead of making some old-man fuddy-duddy comment about me being a guttersnipe, he turned his back on me.
"After you have completed the task I have for you, Gary, you are to break yourself of the habit of this person. Magdalene will ensure you have suitable replacements. I will not countenance having her in my presence again. If ever I set eyes on her after this day, I will ensure that I never have to do so thereafter."
Gary's purported errand that had led us to this point had slipped my mind. This didn't seem like an appropriate time to bring it up again, but before I could share with Mundy my thoughts on what a prick I thought he was, Gary spoke. "What is this job you have for me?" He made no response to Mundy's outrageous attempt to control his social life.
"Alberto needs you."
Gary blinked, hard. "No he doesn't."
"He requires assistance," Mundy amended with a mean half-smile, "Of the usual kind."
"It doesn't have to be me."
"Magdalene and I have our hands full at present," and just the faintest of pauses hung in the air after he said 'hands'.
"Someone else can go."
"Al
berto doesn't want someone else."
"Your reputation precedes you, Gary," interjected Magdalene, all nanna-sweet once more.
"I don't want to."
Magdalene sighed her exasperation and said, not bothering with anything as polite as sotto voce, "We really must do something about his attitude."
Mundy's thin smile suggested agreement, but he said, "He wrote that if help was not forthcoming, then he was prepared to make someone to do it for him."
At first I thought he'd misspoken, and then I considered his grammar, and I didn't much like it. Nor did Gary, apparently. He scowled while shuffling his feet and then nodded.
"All right. When?"
"At your earliest convenience," Mundy said in a tone indicating that 'immediately' had better be convenient. Smug bastard. He drew a crumpled letter from his pocket and handed it to Gary.
Gary jammed the letter into his own pocket without looking at it and said to me, "We should go."
Happy to oblige, I picked up the empty blue bag and stuffed it into my satchel, which was now full to bursting. Handling the bag was noisome, but I had enough presence of mind to ensure there was as little evidence of our passing as possible. If the authorities found Thomas's body, I didn't want anything to link Gary and me to it. If the police could put me here, they'd find my name in the unsolved case files for the murders Priestley had committed last year.
The fact that I could solve all those killings, and Thomas's, for them wouldn't be welcomed. They wouldn't believe me. My life was complicated enough without being the centre of an official police investigation.
Then I walked to the ladder that Mundy had used and sympathised with Gary's irked sigh on his realising it was there.
"You first," he said, so I started climbing. The metalwork creaked alarmingly but held. When I reached the roof I looked down at Gary clambering up after me. Mundy and Magdalene had both vanished too, along with Thomas's crumpled shape. We're all getting rid of the evidence.
Thomas had been injected with something, according to his description of the incident. Injected, then hideously wounded before being euthanased - if that was the word for the already-dead. Mundy had been maimed presumably by the same people. Who knew if Gary was on the hit list? I wasn't prepared to take any chances on it.
Mundy and Magdalene might want to keep a lid on who was responsible for all of these things, but I'd be damned if I'd just let it lie. Stomach churning images of Gary - hurt, burned, homeless, zombified goddamnit were fuel to a massively indignant fire burning in my thoughts.
Keep your stupid bloody secrets. Gary and I can do this without you.
CHAPTER 6
"Don't suppose you have a clue about what's going on?" I asked Gary as he joined me on the rooftop.
"Maybe. I'm not sure."
"Don't you go all cryptic on me, Gary. I'm having a terrible night and I'm not in the mood."
"I don't know much about it. Mundy let something slip, years and years ago, in the seventies probably. I wrote it in my notes to make sure I'd remember it, but I haven't been able to corroborate anything."
"And this slip was…?"
"He was in one of his… moods."
"Mundy is nothing but moods. All of them foul."
Gary acknowledged this truth. "A worse mood than usual, then. He was complaining about missing what it used to be like."
"Ah yes," I remarked bitterly, "the good old days, when occupying rugged castles and eating the peasants all unhindered by the pesky tabloid media made life grand."
"Something like that. You know he's from England, originally."
"So I gathered." My supposition was that Mundy originated from the early 1700s at the latest, given that his syntax sounded like he was reading aloud from Gulliver's Travels.
"One night he made me go with him to clean up his new digs. He'd had to find somewhere new to live and he didn't trust the electricity to not burn the place down. Still doesn't, really."
Not surprising for a man who had grown up human in the time of tallow candles.
"He was trying to convince me to go to Magdalene's club and I wasn't interested. He started on about how great it used to be, and how when I'd had my first kill it would all be different."
At the look I gave him, Gary shrugged. "The whole idea made me feel a bit sick and I told him so. So he went off at me."
"Blaming you for the wrack and ruin of civilisation?"
"I hadn't been… dead… for long then; only five or six years. I thought he was an uptight square. Then he ranted a bit about how he'd been driven out of London and then England and then Europe by 'those damned hunters'. He said something about how they'd cleaned out the London docks and later, in Paris, he'd escaped minutes before they found his squat. He got out the window while they were busy killing the… other occupants."
Mundy was clearly not someone you could count on to watch your back. "Did he say anything else about these hunters?"
"He said he'd killed one of them in London, around the time of the French Revolution. A few years later another one was in his place; 10 years later they popped up again."
"Sounds like some kind of bogeyman."
"That's what I thought. Then I started making notes and he clammed up. I review my notes pretty often, but nothing really connects." He tapped his forehead with his finger to indicate the failure of his synapses to spark.
"Ah," I considered. "There were two of them there tonight. I saw this boy at the bottom of the stairs. Someone in the bar called him Abe."
"Yeah, but Mundy was talking about stuff from over 300 years ago."
"He also said there were always more of them." I tried to envision a bottomless secret society of slayers. Like ninjas, only in pantaloons. And, considering the few moments I had shared with Abe, bug-eyed crazy as well.
"Hmmm." Which was not the kind of response I'd been hoping for. He seemed preoccupied with peering over the edge of the building.
"You don't seem worried," I said drily.
"I'm…" the pause was so long I thought he'd forgotten what we were talking about, but he sighed again. "I'm worrying about one thing at a time."
I knew the feeling. "What's number one on the list then?"
"Getting off the roof without being seen."
Gary's sense of priorities was frequently puzzling unless you looked at them purely in terms of chronology rather than actual importance. In that scheme of things, of course that was number one, ranked ahead of slayers and reluctant errands for Mundy.
"We can stay here for a bit, if it's easier," I said. "No-one's expecting me at home."
We found a relatively comfy spot on the roof to watch the fire engines in Little Bourke Street. The warmth of the summer night was pleasant. Gary's pale skin winked orange-and-grey with the reflected light of flames and emergency vehicles.
Gary's shoulders were hunched unhappily and he looked troubled. Taking a leaf out of his book, perhaps it was time to tackle issues chronologically. I bunched up closer to him and rested my head on his shoulder, keeping my eyes on the lights.
"This errand you have to do for Mundy" - I felt his muscles tense - "do you really have to do it?"
"You heard Mundy."
"Do you have to do everything he says?"
"Not everything. But this I do."
"What is it you have to do?"
No answer.
"Where do you have to go?"
"Ballarat. Figured I'd go tomorrow."
"Ballarat? That's pretty far afield for someone who never goes out of Melbourne. Do you reckon you can find your way?"
I'd meant it jokingly - Ballarat's a big regional town, only a few hours north, so it's hard to miss, and surely anyone can read a train timetable and follow a map - but it elicited a startled response from Gary.
"Cripes, I hope so."
"Would you like me to come with you? It's Saturday, I'm rostered off work this weekend and Kate's away with Oscar. I can keep you company on the trip."
Gary was unsuccessful
at repressing a hopeful look. "You don't need to help. You can go visit the local library or the museum while I, um, get on with it."
"Didn't Mundy say the guy's name was Alberto? You've mentioned him before haven't you?"
"Have I?" The innocent tone was unconvincing.
"He's the one you said lives in Sovereign Hill, reliving the gold rush years and trying to pretend the awful 20th century never happened.
Gary murmured an unhappy acknowledgement that this was, indeed, the guy.
"I wouldn't mind visiting Sovereign Hill, since we're going to Ballarat. I haven't been there since I was studying Australian history at school. I can pan for gold while you do whatever it is. I'll stay out of your way," I assured him as his troubled frown deepened. That seemed to satisfy him. "Why don't you bunk over at my place tonight?" I offered, "You can watch TV to kill time until we have to catch the train."
"Thanks."
"Are you sure you don't want to tell me what's going on?"
"I'm sure."
"Okay."
It wasn't, but I let it ride. Below us, fire trucks had dowsed the burning building and burly men clad in yellow jackets were poking at the entrance. I wondered how long it would be before they went inside and found Jack's body. Or Mundy's hand and Thomas's heart - if those hadn't already burned to unrecognisable ash.
I rested my head on Gary's shoulder again. "How did you go with Hamish?"
"Good. Got him through a window into the bathroom of a bar. I belted on the door until I heard someone coming, then left."
"Was he still conscious?"
"Yeah. He kept giving me funny looks."
You just saved his life by licking his neck. I'll bet his looks weren't half as funny as his actual thoughts.
"He's had a weird night," I said.
Another moment of silence and then Gary said: "Thanks. For your help."
I sighed.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Do I look all right?" A bit of snark leaked out.
"Um. Yeah. Pretty much. Your breathing's more regular. Your heartbeat's a little fast but it's not racing any more."
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