Falling Apart

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Have you always been this paranoid?’ I pulled my jacket on and shrugged my arms down into the sleeves. The familiarity of the action and the knowledge that I was able to do something, even if that was just walk around trying to look unconcerned, reassured me.

  ‘Hanging around with you has given me a healthy understanding of the phrase “trust no-one”. Since your demon dad turned up, I’ve sharpened up my reactions a bit, that’s what nearly getting killed will do for you.’

  ‘Okay. Right, I’m off to go and drink artificial tea with soya milk in and eat pretend biscuits. Honestly, it’s like playing cafes with a three-year-old.’ I turned around to leave the office, but stopped in the doorway. ‘Thanks, Liam.’

  ‘As I’ve said before, I always have one eye to the Christmas bonus.’ A sudden smile gave him a schoolboyish look. ‘Besides, my God, this is better than filing.’

  I ran down the stairs to the road outside with a lighter step and a heart that, while it wasn’t singing, was at least beginning to hum.

  Sil stared in amazement at the screen. A message box was flashing in one corner, its closed envelope managing to look like both an implication of hope and also of deep dread. Has Zan traced me? If I open it, am I setting myself up for Hunters piling through that door, doing their slick-suited efficiency thing; then taking me out to the yard and shooting me? His demon was moving so fast that it seemed to flicker inside him, preparing to save itself by separating from his body, although that would mean his death, bullets or no bullets. He laid a hand against his chest, trying to remember how it had felt before, being human, nothing operating inside his body save his own will and heartbeat. Shit. Too long ago for me to remember. Vampire is what I am now, however I try to persuade myself and her that I remain human enough. I fed on humans. How long can I hide, how long can I avoid the punishment? Without giving himself any more time to think about the consequences, he clicked the flashing box and the message opened.

  ‘I’m opening all the files to you, plus the recently loaded software that Jess didn’t have the protocols for. Just, you know, stay out of my e-mails, mate, okay?’

  The instant rush of relief slackened his muscles in a slump of relief. Liam. She’s brought Liam in. Technology was no longer the enemy; now he might be able to make some use of it instead of tiptoeing through the random files he’d had access to, scared of leaving a marker that would lead straight back to him. And Liam, his friend, his partner in crime in dubious adventures they both hoped Jess wouldn’t find out about, who was now settled with a girlfriend and a baby and still as willing to put himself on the line as ever … Sil grinned, and for the first time in a long while it was a proper, human grin, not something that showed fangs.

  ‘She’s got you on board? Blackmail again?’ he typed into the flashing line below Liam’s message and waited, realising as he did so how much he’d missed interaction with others. Jess, naked, eyes dark with concern and her body consuming mine with the kind of fire that comes from loss of hope. Tears on my skin, the connection between us running like water, like a silver chain of faith … The only thing that stops me falling on my sword, walking out into the world and surrendering myself.

  ‘Nothing on me, mate. And, hey, stop chatting and get searching. Want you back in the world so she can start nagging you and leave me alone. L’

  Sil settled back in the chair and stretched out his legs. I’m not alone. Jess and Liam are out there for me. ‘On it now,’ he typed back, and split the screen, as half of his life set out to delve into the further reaches of the Liaison office computer system, while the other half watched the news channel.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The streets of York were full of tourists photographing buildings and each other, tripping over the cobbles in the Shambles and buying extortionately expensive key rings. Every green space was packed with people picnicking and toddlers chasing squirrels, a policeman was frowning at a double-parked van and everything was wonderfully, humanly normal. I could feel a ghoul somewhere, out of sight, trying to stay undercover until nightfall, but it didn’t seem to be up to anything furtive, so I ignored it and felt its shudder of relief when I walked past its hiding place.

  The sun was high, had burned the shadows back to stumps in the undercrofts of churches and the basements of the shops, and the humans, lulled as ever by the mistaken sense of security that full daylight gave them, were going about their businesses. I stood on the minster steps and looked around me. Yep, people being people, and a couple of vampires thankfully not being vampires but strolling along with only the usual number of heads turning and tongues lolling as they passed by. Situation normal.

  And yet. Out there, somewhere, a sub-set of humanity was rising like the green scum that grew on the river every summer, floating on the surface suffocating life and causing a nasty stain along the banks. The Britain for Humans party. Equal-opportunity haters – vampires, ghouls, were-creatures, they’d bring equal violence to bear on any member of any race that was not human or no longer human.

  I walked down to the riverside, opened the door to the building I had known so well, and climbed the stairs that still smelled of cabbage-dinners and unwise amounts of alcohol. Even the smell stirred memories of normality. When the worst I had to deal with was a frisky out-of-area vampire trying to get to the designer sales without a permit, or a Shadow hanging around the Job Centre, feeding off the desperation and unhappiness that pervaded all government offices. And now … I shook my head and hesitantly knocked on the door.

  It was answered by a buxom blonde; the bux was natural and the blonde wasn’t.

  ‘Hello, Rach.’

  We’d shared this flat until I’d moved in with the vamps, although not many meals since Rachel’s vegan, non-biscuit diet and mine were almost fatally incompatible, but she probably hadn’t noticed I’d moved out yet, since she spent her downtime obsessing over her cat, who was less of a pet and more of a psychosis in fur.

  ‘Oh, Jessie, you came! I’m so glad, it’s been yonks!’ She grabbed me by the arm and wheeled me through the door and into the flat. There was a nasty mark on the carpet from the demon attack a few weeks back, and the place still smelled of a cat who uses a litter tray only when all other surfaces have let him down. ‘You said you’d come over ages ago.’ She wandered into the kitchen and made rummaging noises. ‘Is it really posh, where you are now? I mean, the vampires, they’ve got loads of money, haven’t they?’ Her words held an edge of envy, but underneath them ran a tiny wobble of insecurity.

  ‘No,’ I said, and then, more quietly, ‘it’s horrible, Rach. Sil has …’ My eyes stung with the tears I wouldn’t, couldn’t allow. If I folded now and let the knowledge of everything that was going wrong fall upon me, I’d never get up again. The only way I could keep going was to keep going – there would be time enough for tears later.

  And suddenly my five-foot-two, vegan, cat-obsessive friend snapped back into her old role of wary comforter. ‘Oh, Jessie! I’m so sorry. I saw the news, it must all be dreadful for you.’ A waist-level hug knocked the breath out of me for a second. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on. There’s only soya milk but it’s better for you anyway; your blood pressure is probably off the charts, and your stress levels must be scary.’

  The tears pressed at the back of my eyes again and I followed her into the kitchen, where Jasper, the most malevolent ball of incipient moult outside a convention of really bad-tempered werewolves, was rumbling gently to himself as she poured him a saucer of pretend milk. ‘Rach, I came to say …’ My voice faltered, dammed up behind all the stuff that lay between us, ‘I’m so, so sorry for what I did.’

  A moment’s hesitation in the stream of milk. Maybe she hadn’t heard; my voice sounded, even to me, hoarse and unnatural. Less like an apology and more like a phone call from the Other Side. But then, I didn’t often apologise for anything, did I? Saying ‘sorry’ wasn’t part of my skill set
… Maybe I hadn’t sounded convincing; maybe my tone had still held too much self-righteousness.

  ‘Jessie.’ For one nerveless moment I thought she was going to reject my words, tell me what a nasty, selfish, heartless excuse for a person I was, and my skin stung with the heat of my blood as I prepared to acknowledge the truth of the situation. But then she abandoned the milk carton on the worktop and flew to hug me, her boobs distressingly embracing my ribcage until I felt as though I were being sucked into a sofa. ‘It’s okay. Abbie and your mum explained it; you had to pretend to kill me to save the world. It’s pretty cool actually – I saved the world by being dead! Like Jesus or something!’

  ‘Um, yes, okay, I suppose, if you want to see it like that …’ I took a mouthful of the tea. It wasn’t that bad. ‘So. What have you been up to?’

  We fell easily back into our old parallel-chat-streams; I talked about work, about vampires and Liam and patrolling the streets, without making it sound glamorous, or easy or particularly fun, and Rach talked about people I’d never met doing things I’d never do in clothes I couldn’t afford. The high point of her life at the moment, it seemed, was becoming a union rep at work.

  ‘So you haven’t tried to re-let my room yet?’

  ‘Well, I did want to, once I knew you were … when I knew you’d got somewhere else,’ Rachel said with, for her, a remarkable amount of tact. ‘But no-one seemed very keen – do you know, it’s surprising how many people are allergic to cats?’

  I managed not to look at Jasper, who’d followed us back into the living room and was scratching behind the sofa in a way that usually preceded a nasty smell. ‘Really?’

  ‘So, are you going to pick up some of your stuff, while you’re here?’

  I opened my mouth to say that I didn’t need it any more, but then stopped the words with another swig of tea. Yes, all right, I had some new clothes; Zan had started to make sniffing noises when I came in wearing my old gear and I’d had the feeling he was only a few minutes away from laying down newspaper before I was allowed to sit. But my old stuff was me. The proper, human me that I’d been before. ‘Yes, might as well.’

  Back at Vamp Central I unpacked the box we’d borrowed from Rach’s job in the chemist. It indicated to any interested onlookers that I’d either decided to buy enough Tampax to last the rest of my fertile life or that I might need some kind of gynaecological intervention, but it had been the only box large enough to contain my photo albums, diaries, a selection of my less-damaged footwear and my surprisingly large collection of books about vampires.

  Zan wandered into the living room just as I reached the ‘boot and shoe’ layer, and almost visibly recoiled. ‘Jessica? What in the world has possessed you to bring that … bric-a-brac into this house? Would a garden bonfire not be sufficient?’

  ‘Just because you lot regard memories as something to be ashamed of, it doesn’t mean we all have to carry on like something out of Memento.’ I didn’t add that only memories were keeping me from packing up and moving back in with Rach – that, and the knowledge that leaving this house would be like an admission that Sil and I were over. That he would never come back. ‘These things remind me of the days before I came to live here. All the things I had then that I don’t have now.’

  ‘Body lice?’ Zan sat in front of me on the leather sofa without even a reassuringly amusing farty sound.

  ‘Freedom. The ability to come and go as I wanted without the local press trying to grill me for news about Sil. This.’ I brandished the scrapbook of clippings, stray wisps of dusty newsprint trailing and waving loose from its pages like a tattered flag of humanity. ‘What?’

  Zan was staring at me, his eyes as cool, green and unemotional as fathoms-deep water. ‘Do you wish me to assist you?’

  ‘I …’ Good grief. Zan was offering to help? When that help consisted of his emotional equivalent of a rat-infested sewer? ‘No, it’s all right.’ Then, because he still hadn’t moved, and was still staring, ‘Thank you.’ And then, because the staring was still going on, ‘What?’

  Zan shook his head and let his gaze fall to the perfectly aligned seams of his trousers. ‘Ideas. Possibilities. Posits. Nothing to concern you, Jessica. Yet.’

  ‘Oh,’ I carried on sorting, without feeling reassured. It was like having a peckish tiger watching you cut your toenails. The scrapbook creaked open and I started to turn the pages slowly, pausing occasionally to read snippets, or smile to myself at half-forgotten images. There, laid out in black-and-white, was the history of my time in Liaison, the newspaper coverage of my successful cases, my intermittent failures; pictures of my attendance at various council functions, always alone, always with a wary expression and a borrowed dress, and some peripheral events that I’d thought worthy of note.

  There were also some pictures of Sil. I’d hoarded these like snippets of gold, clipping and pasting them into my book whilst persuading myself that I was doing it to keep an eye on his comings and goings, his various alliances and his sporadic dating of, apparently, every eligible female in the Otherworld fraternity. I tried to flick through these more quickly, although my eye kept getting snagged by images of those silver-grey eyes staring out beyond the camera to reach into my soul. Something inside me pulled again, that curiously umbilical feeling, and I put a hand to my heart as though to steady it.

  Zan leaned forward. ‘Are you ill, Jessica?’

  ‘No, I …’

  Those frosted-glass eyes flickered to the page I’d been looking at. Took in those newsprint sheets pasted so carefully, to ensure they didn’t wrinkle or tear, and scanned over my handwritten annotations of date, setting and other, more personal, notes. ‘The connection is open between you, then. He must be experiencing something pertinent to you.’ Zan seated himself back firmly on the sofa, but I knew him too well to assume he’d dismissed what he’d seen as the jottings of an extraordinarily dedicated Liaison officer. He knew me, after all.

  ‘It’s … it feels more like a lively case of heartburn to me.’ I gave my chest one quick final rub and flipped pages more quickly.

  And then, suddenly, there was a cold hand on my wrist and Zan was jerking me upwards until I stood facing him, the scrapbook falling at my feet like a tatty remnant of another life. ‘This is no joking matter.’ Zan’s voice was very deep, very even, and he was standing way too close to me for it to be an accident. ‘Jessica, your connection to this vampire, it is not to be taken lightly. Do you imagine that every female who’—his voice tiptoed over the word—‘loves a vampire has the same reaction? Those deluded women who paste our pictures on their walls, who create a fantasy in which we feature, night after night; who read those fictions that even you collect so avidly – do you believe that they too feel something when the object of their desire allows them to stray across his mind?’

  He smelled of something acerbic, something lemony that cut through the alluring ‘vampire’ odour of darkness, as though the night had been turned into an exclusive perfume and marketed only to really good-looking people. His hand was still chill on my skin and his eyes, when I met his gaze, were drawn down green, no longer a light, almost human shade. ‘I realise that you can tear my throat out any time you like, Zan,’ I said, steadily, ‘but we humans have a little thing called “personal space” and you are invading mine like an alien task-force, so firstly, please back up a little.’

  The hand dropped from my wrist and fell to his side, like a defeat. Then he took a prissy, markedly small, step back and gave me a curt nod.

  ‘Thank you. And secondly, whatever Sil and I have going on, whatever runs between us, is none of your business. Just because you run Otherworld York, it doesn’t allow you to indulge your repressed mother-in-law tendencies, all right?’

  ‘It is not the fact of your connection which is noteworthy; it is what that connection implies.’ Zan looked as though he was about to touch me again, and whatever m
ovement I unconsciously made must have looked slightly threatening, because he pulled his hand back and interleaved his fingers at groin level, possibly protectively. ‘It, and your incredible ability to sense Otherworlders, are not a human thing, and therefore must be a legacy of your bloodline. We must ask ourselves why your father, a ghyst demon, would have ever needed such an ability.’

  ‘Must we.’

  An elegant eyebrow arched. ‘Well, those of us with any interest in the future of this world might. Those whose main topics of interest seem to include cheap hosiery and a rather’—a pointed look at my scrapbook—‘adolescent approach to desire, may not care, of course.’

  I gave him a look. ‘You really do spend way too much time thinking about my life, don’t you, Zan? Can’t you just take up stamp collecting?’

  ‘And then there is the matter of your blood being so … ah … affecting to us.’ There was a slight edge to these words that made me think this was the real reason he was bothering to have a conversation with me. ‘Jessica, has anyone ever mentioned the Twelve to you?’

  I stared at him. ‘The twelve what? Like, the Twelve O’Clock News? Or the twelve disciples? Twelve days of Christmas?’

  Zan sat on the farty sofa again. There was a slope to his shoulders that might, to a susceptible onlooker, have looked like worry. ‘We vampires have … tales … just rumours, whispers, that the human government discovered twelve humans who were immune to vampires. Nothing we could do would touch them, not glamour, or demon seed or anything, they were … impervious.’ Zan’s voice slowed. ‘They were our bogeymen, during the Troubles. An elite force that we could not affect.’

  He stopped and looked at me expectantly. I looked back. ‘Am I supposed to be going “Ooh, yes,” to this?’ I said. ‘Because, so far, all you’ve done is give me visions of vamps telling one another scary bedtime stories.’

  He stood up again. ‘No, Jessica. I merely wondered if this had been mentioned to you. I can see that it has not. Since you do not wish my help, and you are beginning down a path that will only lead to further argument, I will bid you goodnight.’