Falling Apart

by Jane Lovering

  I opened the door to let the dog potter out of the front, to cock his leg against a stone bootscraper. ‘Dad’s going to be allowed home soon, and what am I supposed to do, shunt you around the country under a dog blanket for the next ten years? And when Zan was talking about you he almost seemed to have some kind of emotion going on, supposing it wasn’t a nasty case of haemorrhoids. It might be worth a shot. And …’ I hesitated, a momentary uncertainty creeping in. ‘I want you to bite me again.’

  Sil hissed, his breath so loud that Gem let out a bark, lips wobbling. When I turned to look at Sil his eyes were alight and his fangs showed on his lower lip just a touch. ‘Dangerous. I like your blood way too much.’

  ‘We need to know if there’s anything else you can remember about the Records Office. They did something to you to wipe your memory for a reason.’

  ‘Oh, good. So much better than them just deciding to clear my mind of several days on a whim.’

  ‘Shut up.’ The dog pottered between my legs again, claws clacking on the tiles, nose snuffling for any so-far-undiscovered crumbs. ‘And I trust you.’

  His eyes moved from the vein in the side of my neck up to meet my gaze. I didn’t know whether he knew it but his tongue had come out and run over his lower lip, almost as though he were salivating at the thought of my blood. ‘Knowing what you know about me?’

  ‘Because of what I know about you.’

  ‘Oh Jess …’ He raised a finger and ran it down my throat, around my neck. Traced the tip around, I presume he was following the lines of blood vessels under the skin, his eyes an almost-hypnotic dark, like water of unknown depth. ‘Jess.’

  ‘Do it. Quickly, before I lose my nerve.’

  And then there was space between us and his hand had fallen from my skin. ‘There is no need.’

  ‘What?’

  Sil turned his back on me, almost as though he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control himself if he had to look at me. ‘I have other information,’ he said, and his voice was deeper, heavier, with a kind of longing. ‘I do not need to bite you.’ Then he turned and I was slightly scared by the blackness of his eyes and the fact that his fangs hadn’t retracted. He looked ready to take every drop of blood I had in me. ‘But I’m not sure of my control at this minute, so please don’t ask me again.’

  ‘What information do you have?’ And then, when he didn’t answer straight away, ‘Sil?’

  He sighed so deeply that it must have sent his demon scuttling lower within him, for cover. ‘I was searching the house.’

  ‘This house? My parents’ place? But what for? What kind of information could you possibly hope to find here?’

  Another sigh and he held out the blue folder again. ‘This. Oh gods, Jessie, this.’

  I couldn’t take it from him. My hands were shaking so much that he had to push me back to the sofa and place it on the seat beside me, and, as soon as I saw the familiar writing on the outside, carefully lettered in black felt tip, I felt the cold dread rising again. ‘But this is my mother’s writing. Jen, I mean, not Rune.’

  ‘Open it.’

  Not a suggestion, not a command. More of a tired statement of a fact that hadn’t yet happened. I turned the folder around so that I could read the deliberate lettering. ‘To my daughter Jessica Amelia. Only to be opened after my death.’

  ‘But she’s not dead! Well, she’s drinking hospital coffee, but it doesn’t immediately follow, you know.’

  Sil sat beside me again and waved a hand at the file. ‘You need to know,’ he said. ‘Please. I’ll wait.’

  I flipped back the cover and pulled out sheets of paper. Gave one a quick look, then another, and then flung them back onto the sofa, leaping to my feet as though the words were scorpions and cobras. ‘These are …’

  ‘They are letters. To you. From Rune.’

  ‘You’ve read them all?’ I was staring down at the sheaf of carefully hand-printed stationery, scattered like spent bullets on the mocha fabric of the couch. ‘Sil?’

  ‘Yes. They hadn’t been opened. Your mother … Jen … had instructions to keep them for you “until she felt you were ready”. Most seem to have been written not long after you were born, or maybe even before that, while she waited for your arrival. There are a few later ones.’

  I stared again. The loops and curls of the script seemed almost to hang in the air above the papers, and I found I was reaching out a hand as if I could somehow touch Rune if I could touch the space where she’d been. ‘She wrote to me,’ I said, wonderingly. ‘My mother … oh, this is confusing, my other mother said that they’d stayed in touch with Rune for a long time after they moved up here.’

  ‘You need to read them.’ Sil caught my hand as it floated, trying to touch atoms of Rune. ‘Now.’ And he pushed my fingers down until they hit the papers. ‘I am here.’

  So I did. I sat in the living room while the air darkened around me and read the letters. Sometimes through tears, sometimes I laughed, but all the time Sil stayed beside me, unmoving, until the implications hit me and I held onto him as though somehow we could unhappen the past.

  ‘She was bred by the government to bring down vampires.’

  ‘A succinct appraisal.’ Sil’s lips moved against my hair. ‘Her mother was one of the Twelve brought in when the Otherworlders first came through.’

  ‘And her mother was … mated with another of the Twelve. My mother was born and then managed to get away after the Troubles.’ I stroked the letters softly with a fingertip. ‘It’s funny, she goes into a lot of detail about her life up until the end of the Troubles, and then she glosses over things a bit, almost as though she’s ashamed, but with nowhere to go and no experience of living outside the facility … no wonder she ended up with Malfaire. After what the government had done, he probably looked like a good bet.’ I riffled my fingers over the letters. ‘To someone who’d never met a nice person, obviously.’

  ‘It is unlawful, it is unethical … no wonder the government don’t want this to become public. No wonder they tried to prevent me from telling anyone that your mother had no birth certificate. They fear that someone, somewhere, may make connections.’

  ‘If we’d only said something my mother may have given these to me. She had no way of knowing that Rune and you being starved would be connected.’ I breathed carefully. ‘She was going to make me wait until she was dead to know any of this.’ My father’s words came back to me, Your mother thinks we did something wrong in keeping you. ‘She didn’t want me to know about Rune.’

  ‘The letters were sealed. Your parents didn’t know either. That letter we found under the carpet, the government were fishing for information your parents didn’t have. Rune never told them where she came from, what had happened to her, probably to spare them just this sort of thing happening.’ Sil stood up. ‘Your bloodline must be very, very important to them. I wonder what they think is going to happen; why they need to bring in all those who may be immune to vampires.’

  We looked at one another for a very long moment. ‘And now we fetch Zan,’ I said. ‘On so many counts.’

  A long, slow nod. ‘But you realise that he may still call for my end?’

  ‘I hate to say it, but we need him. I think I may be able to persuade him to scale back on the hunting you down and killing you thing.’ Without looking at him I reached out and touched his face. ‘But we can’t do anything without him. If we’re going up against the human government … if word gets out about me being Rune’s daughter … I hate to say it, but he might be the only thing that can protect any of us.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sil nodded. He had his back to me, and there was something very defeated about the dip of his head and the roundness of his shoulders. Of course, the shrunken sweater and low-rise chain-store jeans were also the epitome of subjugation for a vampire. ‘May I keep the dog? It is lonely here,
and I long for …’ He turned his head; his hacked hair mostly concealed his face, but what I could see looked haggard and vulnerable. ‘You, Jess.’

  ‘If an elderly, overweight dog can stand in for me then you had better be prepared to apologise profusely when this is all over.’ I didn’t dare touch him or kiss him farewell: he looked as though he might break completely. ‘I’ll message you when there’s more news.’

  A quiet moment, then he turned. There was still grace in him; he still had the gorgeous, sculpted face and the poise, but there was also an acid-stain of defeat blurring his features. ‘Thank you for assuming there will be an end,’ he said quietly. ‘Because I feel that this is my entire life now. Hiding.’ His voice tailed off and he shook the rag-tag ends of his hair. ‘Tell Zan I …’ Another shake of the head. ‘Just tell Zan: if he ends me, then so be it. I cannot live like this.’

  I searched for something meaningful to say, but couldn’t find it. ‘Oh, shut up. If there’s any “ending” of you to be done, then it will be me doing it because I don’t want any doubts about you getting up again afterwards, all right?’

  There was a tiny puckering of his lips that was either a smile or his fangs. ‘I would expect no less.’

  ‘Right. And you’d better look after the dog, because my anger is nothing compared to my mother’s if she finds puddles on the good rug.’

  ‘Understood.’

  I couldn’t look back. I had to walk out and squeeze myself into Liam’s little car, drive away with an insouciant wave from the window, because if I’d caught Sil’s eye, or even seen him move towards me, I would never have left. I would have wrapped myself around him and never let go.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Zan was sitting alone at a bare desk. The chrome of the computer gleamed at me and my shoes made little squeaky sounds against the carefully polished wooden floor, it couldn’t have been further from the Liaison office if it had unicorns as coat hangers. ‘Jessica?’

  ‘That’s Sil’s desk.’

  ‘I know. I work here.’

  The computer wasn’t switched on. Zan had just been sitting, apparently staring at the empty screen and the neatly stacked papers that Sil had left. When I went over I saw that there was also a picture of me, newly framed, beside the keyboard – me standing alone at a party. One of the ones the newspapers were so fond of printing alongside made-up tales of my misdemeanours. Somehow it looked better here: I looked heroic and strong. He keeps a picture of me on his desk. The little ball of screwed-tight emotion that I was barely restraining made another bid for escape, but, in view of Zan’s opinions on crying women, I forced it down. There was another picture too, pushed slightly towards the back of the desk and framed in wood, a posed family group in sepia tones. ‘Is that Christina and the children?’

  ‘Unless he has taken to placing random photographs within his line of sight, I would assume so.’

  The woman was sitting in a chair, her son on one side and her daughter on the other, all immaculately dressed and precisely placed. Their features were mostly washed-out with age, but the rounded cheeks and carefully styled hair spoke of affluence; their steady, serious stares of determination. ‘She looks nice.’

  ‘Yes. He clearly decided to downgrade.’ Zan’s eyes were very green. ‘Why are you here, Jessica?’

  I looked at him, trying to decide what to do. He looked, as usual, precise and contained. I’d often wondered what would make Zan fall apart, but suspected that, if he did, gearwheels would have my eye out. ‘I think I need your help.’

  He went very still. He was always fairly still, but now he seemed to shut down every function except for listening, even his blinking stopped. ‘Sil,’ was all he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  And now Zan actually slumped. I’d never seen him do it before, at least not while he was conscious, but his shoulders rounded and his head dropped. ‘He’s alive?’ A whisper.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know where he is?’

  ‘Look, let’s stop playing twenty questions, shall we?’ I must have sounded fierce because Zan’s head snapped up and his demon moved, a fleeting presence behind Zan’s eyes for a second, making his fangs slide into place.

  ‘Do not attempt to order me, Jessica.’ He laid his hands flat on the desktop and stood up, using the smooth vampire glide that was so alien. ‘You have kept things from me.’ Alpha-vamp had come to the party again.

  ‘Indoor voice, Zan, please. I’m not impressed by you pulling the whole “I am Vampire, hear me gnash” you know, and I’m not scared of you either.’ It was a bit of a lie; I wasn’t exactly scared, but Zan was an unknown quantity when it came to actual aggression, so I was cautious at the very least. I wasn’t going to let him know, though: it would only make him even smugger, and Liam had used up York’s smugness quotient already. ‘I want some assurances from you before I say anything else.’

  ‘Assurances.’ Zan moved out from behind the desk. ‘From me? And what bargaining power do you have, if I may ask?’ He ran his hands down the lapels of his Neru-collared jacket, like a nineteenth-century businessman who’d just been asked for a discount. ‘Because I rather think I do not have to assure you of anything, other than that I can, and will, kill you if you do not reveal what you know.’

  Bugger. I really should have gone back for the tranq gun. But I kept my voice steady. Not showing fear was the key to making Zan listen to me; if I broke and started to whimper he would have the upper hand over me forever. And that would be like being ruled over by a Praying Mantis, so, no, not going to happen. ‘First. I want you to tell me that you will not send the boys in to do away with Sil. Second, I want your promise that he will be pardoned of all crimes against Humans. Thirdly, oh, sod, there was a third thing … damn!’

  ‘Presumably it involved assurances of safety for yourself, Jessica? I cannot promise anything. I must hold the city to the Treaty that Sil has so wantonly broken.’

  ‘I think what happened to Sil has something to do with the human government,’ I said quickly, before I could chicken out, back down and pretend that I knew nothing. The words were incendiary, and I knew that once they were said things would never be the same again; the way Zan’s face set as soon as I let them out told me I was right. His long fingers curled, dragging splinters from the mahogany desktop and leaving score marks in the wood; his shoulders straightened as though he was prepared for a huge weight to settle on them.

  ‘I think …’—there was a new gentleness to his voice, but a gentleness that sounded as though it was wrapped around an iron bar—‘that we should go home and discuss this.’

  ‘But I …’ I was desperate to explain but had no time to get any more words out before Zan was in front of me, pushing a hand across my mouth, the fingers that had scratched those parallel lines into the hard wood leaving me with no uncertainty about what they could do to my face if I protested. I restrained the urge to bite him because I could feel his usual cool façade trembling – it was a bit like being silenced by a rockface when you can feel the earthquake coming.

  ‘We will go home,’ he said, into my eyes. ‘Yes?’

  He wasn’t trying to glamour me; he knew that wouldn’t work. He was using his eyes to convey some other message, but Zan was too alien to me, with his OCD and his fussiness. I’d never tried to forge any kind of bond with him, even friendship would have been like trying to befriend a plank, so I had no idea what was going on behind that moss-green stare. However, he’d overcome his hatred of personal contact far enough to risk my spittle, and that told me how serious he was without any eye woo-woo; so I nodded, and felt his fingers relax away from my face.

  ‘Just one question.’

  He gave me a cautious look as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe his palm. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Are you driving the Bugatti?’

  Zan s
ighed and looked at the ceiling. ‘Even now? Seriously?’

  ‘Appearances are important,’ I said, sulkily.

  ‘Yes. We will go in the car.’ He opened the door to the office and another vampire, not quite as top-rank sexy and classy as Sil and Zan but only one film-star notch down, handed him his keys. I’d never asked, but always assumed that some low-level kind of telepathic thing went on between vamps, and this seemed to prove it, unless Zan just had his staff really well trained.

  Almost bundling me, but without actually making any physical contact, Zan got us out of the office and down to their (underground, guarded) car park, where the Bugatti sat amid a series of other show-stoppers. It was like a Top Gear wet dream down there. Once we were in the car, he turned to me.

  ‘Do you understand why we must leave the office to talk? I ask only because I do not want you to start thinking that I am abducting you again.’

  ‘Are you worried that we may be overheard?’

  ‘I am worried all the time. I have ceased to remember how it felt not to be worried.’ He started the engine and steered the car expertly through the tight turns of the parking system and out onto the main road, while I sat silent.

  Zan was telling me how he felt? I wouldn’t have been more surprised if the car had piped up and asked us to ease off the throttle because it felt a bit peaky.

  ‘Is it safe here?’ Something in this general background level of paranoia must be catching.

  ‘I think so, yes.’ Zan fiddled with something on the dashboard and a little 3D image of the car sprang up with points of light dotted around it. ‘Yes. The car is clear.’

  I leaned back, closed my eyes and told Zan about Sil going to London and about the letter my father had received. It took the drive home and most of a pot of tea (me) and a large bottle of O negative (Zan), and when I’d finished we both looked a bit bloated.

  ‘Why did you not come to me?’ Zan tipped some more blood into his glass. He’d loosened up a bit, and had actually put his elbows on the table, but not to the evidently disgusting level of drinking from the bottle.