‘Because you kept telling me that he’d gone rogue and had to die. Several times, if I remember rightly.’ This was odd. I always hated it when Zan treated me as an equal, and now here we were, practically doing one another’s hair.
‘But, if I had known that he was shut away … starved …’ Zan shook his head. ‘I would not have called for his end.’
I poured another cup. What I’d really wanted was a sturdy mug of builder’s tea, or one of Liam’s ‘proper coffees’, so thick that the spoon bent and biscuits bounced off the surface, but I’d thought Earl Grey was a little more Zan-friendly, so I was quietly perfuming myself to death. ‘There’s something else, Zan.’
‘Regarding Sil?’
‘It’s more about me, actually.’ I told him about the letters from Rune. I left out some of the more emotional stuff, but laid it all out about her having come from a government breeding programme, about her mother having been selected for being resistant to vampires.
And then Zan dropped the bottle.
It smashed against the ornamental quarry tiles of the kitchen floor with a noise that made my head sing, and when I looked at him his eyes were glowing the kind of red that really imaginative artists used when they drew hell. He was looking at me, but almost as though my skin had become invisible and he could see my bones moving beneath. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ Then he stood up and started pacing the floor, and what frightened me more than anything was the fact that he left the broken bottle beneath the table, ignoring the glass fragments and the remains of the blood that spiralled out from the impact and dotted the tiles with darkness. ‘No,’ he said again, reaching the doorway and jerking the door open with such force that the handle split and the carefully waxed solid wood panel tore away from the frame.
‘All right, that’s got that out of your system,’ I said carefully, putting the cup down. ‘Now, can we carry on our conversation? I understand your need to pull City Vamp out from under the bed every now and then, but I need to know what the hell is going on because my lover is sitting up on the moors with nothing but a deaf Labrador between him and any shit that is going to come down on his head because of this.’
Zan made an obvious effort to pull himself together. ‘Eloquent as always, Jessica.’ He laced his fingers together and cupped them in front of his mouth, thinking. ‘We need to go to him,’ he said, as though coming to a huge decision.
‘Sil?’
‘No, the Labrador. You do understand what is happening here, don’t you?’
‘Not really, but I know you’re scared, and that is terrifying me, so, yes, whatever, let’s go.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Sil walked back from the barn. The dog had given him a serious staring-at until he’d opened the door, and then the freedom of the air had called to him and he’d decided to stretch his legs as far as the property perimeter. No further, because the sole was becoming detached from one trainer and scraping the ground with every step, making him lift his knees like a trotting pony, although he hardly even noticed it now. I can go no lower.
The tug came, jerking at his midriff and making him flex uncertainly, a fish hooked but not yet flapping on the bank. Jess? Then the dog was barking and running stiffly towards the track and Sil saw the Veyron slithering like a metal ghost into the gravel circle in front of the house. His heart and demon jumped in a ballet of synchronised movement when he saw Jess get out of the passenger seat, and then died to a muted crawl through his chest as Zan climbed out next to her. Zan. My friend through all these years … now I find out where you stand.
Gathering his courage, he walked down the hill towards the house. If I am going to die, at least I can tell Jess what she means to me before I go. I can look into those lovely amber eyes and tell her how loving her has been the only thing that has kept my humanity in place.
Zan and Jess, looking surprisingly sociable, were in the kitchen, sitting on opposite sides of the scrubbed table. When he walked through the door they both stood up, and then looked at one another in a slightly awkward way, as though they had formed an orderly queue to throw themselves into his arms and weren’t sure which one was at the front. But Jess, as he had known she would, won and crossed the floor in two strides to encircle him with her arms and bury her face against his chest.
He closed his eyes and breathed the lovely scent of her. She smelled of faded light, of coffee on a breeze, of sweet things underlined in metal. Her hair rioted, so when he looked down all he could see was a mass of silken black threads.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said, her words brushing his skin. ‘It has to be.’
Zan was standing, impassive. ‘Jessica has told me everything. I fear she does not understand the implications, but that is Jessica in a nutshell, is it not?’
‘We need to work out what we do next.’ Jess pushed lightly at him until he stepped back and enabled her to turn around. He kept a hand on her shoulder, needing the contact. She was excited, he could feel the adrenaline running through her blood like sugar, and under his touch her skin gathered into bumps. ‘How we can save Sil.’
‘It is not Sil who concerns me at this moment.’ Zan’s words made her still under his touch. ‘It is you, Jessica. You have suddenly become a very dangerous person with whom to be connected.’
‘How the hell can I be dangerous? Zan, I practically define safety and moral rectitude. Well, all right, not moral rectitude, but safety, certainly. I’m not allowed anything more dangerous than a gun that puts you to sleep for twenty minutes – it’s like having an arsenal entirely made up of Kalms tablets! The worst you’re going to get from me is nightmares, or a date with an Enforcement officer who, on present evidence, is going to be Harry Leonard, the world’s biggest pushover.’
‘Jessica.’ Sil tried to intervene, to calm her. He could tell Zan was walking a tightrope of emotion, although almost none seeped out. Any onlooker would have thought the old vampire was calmly watching and listening, but Sil could sense the cocktail of hormones that Zan’s demon was currently feeding from as eagerly as a starving man at the remains of a feast. ‘What makes her suddenly so dangerous, Zan?’
A moment. Sil would remember that moment as the one on which time pivoted, when the world swung from its superficial Treaty-led organised state into one with layers of threat and treachery so deep that none of them knew how far entrenched they were. Then Zan spoke. ‘I believe … that if the government are trying to regroup the Twelve, then they may have plans for ending the Treaty.’
Meaning upon meaning slammed into Sil with such force that it drove him back from Jess, made his eyes ache and his skin burn. ‘No,’ he said, finding himself covering his mouth with his hands as though to deny the words. ‘No. Surely, we would know? After all this time?’
A pause. And then Zan looked at Jess. ‘Perhaps they have discovered the ultimate weapon,’ he said.
Now Sil looked at Jess too. The Twelve were never proven to be anything more than tales to terrify, rumours to force us to peace. But if Zan was right – If, he reminded himself – then this woman, who kept him from becoming the animal he despised in himself, was created by an evil that made her demon father look like a kitten in a snowstorm.
Chapter Forty
The two vamps were staring at me as though I was about to detonate. ‘What?’ I asked. I hadn’t missed the way Sil had pulled away from me either. ‘For God’s sake, what?’
Zan shook his head. ‘You must do this, Sil,’ he said, and he’d got that gentle tone in his voice again – he usually only sounded like that if he was talking to a cat. ‘You must tell her.’
‘I can’t.’ Sil sounded broken. ‘Zan, please.’
‘If one of you doesn’t come up with the goods in the next ten seconds I am going to take those car keys, wrap that bloody Veyron round the nearest tree, and then, never mind explaining things to me, you are going to have to
talk to your insurance company and, trust me, I am a much better listener!’ They were starting to spook me, what with all the staring and the weird quiet voices. I much preferred vamps when they ran around all toothy and bitey, this was just strange.
‘You need to sit down,’ Sil pushed me until I perched on the edge of the nearest chair. ‘It’s not good.’
I sighed. ‘Since when has anything ever been good? And can we hurry this up, only I have to go back to York and help my best friend sort out some very wobbly subscription forms.’
‘Listen to me. This is important. So, so important.’ Sil reached out a hand and touched my wrist. His gesture was cautious, as though he feared my skin was about to peel back and reveal knives. ‘The stories at the time said that the government took the Twelve. There was an incident, back in the eighties, where a whole load of vamps got slaughtered. They’d been part of an invading force down in Sussex, all bound for London to try to take out what remained of the human wartime Cabinet and …’ He shook his head. ‘We never found out what happened, but they were all killed, and the word went out that the Twelve had been involved. Our fear hastened the signing of the Treaty.’
I stood up. My spine felt as though it was braced with jelly. ‘And that has what to do with me?’
‘The Twelve were bred. Engineered. And their offspring were more powerful still.’ Sil stopped and shook his head, as though the words refused to be spoken.
‘And one of those truly powerful offspring mated with a demon. An almost immortal demon,’ Zan said.
‘And nowhere, Jess, nowhere in those letters does Rune mention how she met your father, does she?’ Sil’s voice was soft. ‘She came to your parents already pregnant.’
‘But they said that she left the programme in 1979! She didn’t have me for another two years …’ Both vampires were looking at me as though I were on the verge of discovering something they already knew but didn’t want to push me into. ‘Hang on, hang on … what are you trying to tell me with your big moody silences and your meaningful glances … you think Rune was deliberately given to Malfaire? That she escaped when she was pregnant …’
‘The government lied in that letter to your father,’ Zan said. ‘Hoping, perhaps, that he would get in touch and give them Rune’s version of events.’
‘I really hate this kitchen,’ I said. ‘Every time I come in here someone wants to tell me something that makes me just that little bit less human. Next time I’m going to sell tickets.’ My head had started to hurt. This was just … too much, too fast. I wiped my hands across my face to let my expression crumble without having to see the look in the vampires’ eyes when it did. ‘So my blood being vampire drugs is part of what they did?’
‘It would make sense.’ Zan’s voice was still calm. ‘Breeding humans with disabling blood would allow them to kill the vampire while he or she was knocked out.’
Shock was pinwheeling about in my chest; whenever I tried to think about what I’d just been told my brain refused to grip the words. Your whole life, Jess. Blown out of the water once, and now … Tears pushed behind my eyes, burned at my throat, and I fought my body’s demand that I lie down on the floor and howl with everything I had. ‘None of this is helping!’ I gulped. ‘All very interesting – the family history people are probably baying at the door – but it’s not going to get Sil out of here without him being killed, is it? Zan, there must be something you can do.’
‘Must there?’ Zan said. ‘If there is, I am afraid it eludes me. We cannot reveal what Sil was doing in London without exposing your history to the world, Jessica. And I am not willing to do that.’
‘Please.’ I clearly surprised all three of us with my tone. ‘Please, Zan. Come up with something, I don’t care what it is … What’s the point of you being about two hundred years old and all Master Vampire and stuff if you can’t help him now?’
Zan gave me a considering look. ‘If I assist Sil to escape death … what price would you consider to be too great, Jessica? Your freedom for his? Your life for his? Because I fear this situation will not end without there being some penalty, some trade, and it may be one you are not willing to make.’
Adrenaline had burned out in me. I could almost feel my body trying to squeeze the last drop of reaction out of glands that had long since been exhausted. ‘Anything, Zan. If you get him out of this, I will owe you anything you care to claim from me.’ I met the cold, clear green gaze; it was like looking into interstellar space. ‘Only not sex, okay?’
Zan curled a lip in what could have been a smile or extreme distaste. ‘I can promise that will not be a price either of us would be willing to extract.’
Sil put his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t, Jessie. He will hold you to any promise you make, we both know that.’
‘But someone has to do something!’ I covered my face with my hands and let some tears seep through, tears of sheer powerlessness. ‘Otherwise you’re dead and I’m … without you.’
Sil leaned towards me, so close that his cool cheek touched mine. ‘Maybe that will be the price,’ he whispered. ‘Had you thought of that?’
‘I can’t do this. I can’t deal with this.’ I dropped my hands from my face and watched Zan recoil. Zan regarded tears as nature’s way of telling humans that they are prey. ‘I’ve got a job to do, I’ve got people to see and stuff I can’t …’ The words got sucked down into my chest and obscured by my breath. ‘I can’t.’ I wanted to lie down, I wanted to cry, to melt against Sil and sob until nothing made sense any more. To have him hold me, tell me that nothing made a difference, that the world would continue to turn and I would continue to be a mere speck on its surface. But somewhere deep inside me something was telling me that I had to keep going. Some central core was turning out to be made, not as I had previously suspected, of chocolate and biscuits, but of something cold and hard. Something that braced me, pushed me forwards, away from Sil’s comfort. ‘I have to get back to York.’
‘I will take Jessica,’ Zan said, moving to the doorway. ‘I must return to the office with this knowledge, to continue research into the human government’s possible plans for bringing about the end of the Treaty.’
I turned to look at him. ‘And my mother?’
‘If there is relevant information, we shall share that with you, of course.’
Relevant to whom? I thought, but I was still too shocked and horrified to make an issue out of it. ‘I must get back to the office. Liam will think I’ve decamped with the tea money.’
‘Then I shall return you.’ Zan gave another of those formal bows that looked as though he had Russian Cavalry officers in his genes, and left the kitchen, jingling the keys to the Bugatti, which left Sil and I staring at each other.
‘I need you, Jess.’ He breathed the words, moving closer so that his body touched mine, his hand slipping round to the back of my neck to bring me in still closer. ‘It is not something that lies easily with me, needing another, but you …’ His other hand came around, his index finger brushing my lips until I looked up to meet clouded eyes. ‘You are all.’
His mouth touched mine and I was filled with the desire to lose myself in him, to hide from the world in the arms of this strong, gorgeous man. To let him possess me, to take me away from everything.
‘Jess?’
‘I have to go.’ I pushed one hand into his chest, forced him back the step I needed to be able to turn and run from the once-so-familiar room, which now held the ghosts of so many terrible secrets.
Chapter Forty-One
I’d lied about going back to the office. The thought of walking in to find Liam measuring up my chair and upgrading my computer into something more suitable for his needs – which were mostly browsing eBay and Doctor Who forums – was more than I could take. So I went to the only place where I could be completely human, without question.
‘Oh good, you’re here. Hold th
is end, will you? I want to check the spelling.’ Rachel handed me a pole and stood back to examine the banner. ‘They lose concentration a bit half way through.’
‘I thought you might be at work,’ I said feebly, holding the broom handle above my head to stretch the sheeting out, until I felt like someone making the kind of bed that fought back. ‘I only popped in on the off chance.’
‘I’m going on a march.’ Rach gestured at me to let the banner drop. ‘Well, I say march … they can’t keep in step, poor things, and I have to tie the statements on to some of them.’
I looked around the flat. Every surface was scattered with bits of paper, forms and notes and random newspaper cuttings. It was enough out of character for Rachel to make me nearly forget that the vampires considered me to be a walking time-bomb. ‘What the hell is going on?’
Rachel stopped her perusal of the banner and stood back with her hands on her hips. ‘You were so right about them,’ she said. ‘The way that they were being abused when they do work that is so vital …’
‘And by “they” you mean …?’
‘We’ve decided to stop using the “z” word: it’s prejudicial. They’re marching as the Ambulatory Deceased. ADs for short. Plus, the whole “zombie” thing … it was just too far down the alphabet to be any use, and nothing rhymes with it, which is just hopeless when you need a slogan.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes. Honestly, Jessie, getting them joined up to the union was the best thing ever. Now we’re getting more and more on board, and we can threaten to close down loads of industries if they all come out on strike, you know. ADs do all the clearing out at power stations and running cables across pylons, all the stuff that results in almost certain death for people like us.’
‘Right …’
Falling Apart Page 23