Falling Apart Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Jane Lovering

  Published 2014 by Choc Lit Limited

  Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK

  www.choc-lit.com

  The right of Jane Lovering to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78189-115-5 (epub)

  ISBN 978-1-78189-116-2 (mobi)

  ISBN 978-1-78189-114-8 (epdf)

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Aslam – he was very much loved and is very much missed.

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright information

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Top secret

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  About the Author

  More Choc Lit

  Introducing Choc Lit

  Acknowledgements

  For the people of York, who never complain about the liberties I take with their lovely city, even when I drop vampires on it; my friends at work, the RNA and Choc Lit, who all creak under the effort of keeping me sane; and my children, whose life’s work is to drive me the other way …

  And to TMMQ, for the owls.

  TOP SECRET – FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

  From: Government Department for the Suppression of the Otherworld

  To: Members of Parliament (HUMAN ONLY)

  Date: 20 July 2012

  This document is covered by the Official Secrets Act and should be destroyed after reading.

  Gentlemen,

  To summarise the situation: there are increasing rumours regarding a possible uprising by those termed Otherworlders, despite the apparent peace in which we currently live. (For the purposes of this document ‘Otherworlders’ comprise vampires, werewolves, zombies, wights and Shadows, with whom we are forced to share this planet as a result of a magnetic flux fracturing the barrier between our universes.) These rumours are from a reliable source and we fear that this uprising may generate a renewal of the violence that followed the Otherworlders’ original incursion into our world, just over a century ago. For those unfamiliar with recent history, please advise this department and we can provide you with the documentation regarding the Troubles, the seventy-year period prior to our Treaty with the Others.

  You may have been made aware that we have not been idle in our attempts to ensure the safety of the human race, vis-à-vis a possible vampire uprising. We consider the vampires to be the leaders, and therefore the most dangerous, among the Others, since they wield most power, and offer a degree of control over other species.

  After the commencement of the Troubles our department established a small enclave of humans who seemed naturally immune to all vampire magick and glamours. These people were reserved by us and a process of selection was undertaken in order to produce a sub-species of human who could be used, if necessary, to fight and overcome the vampires without risk of their being infected with a vampire demon (communicated through the vampire’s bite – for further information please refer to this department). This enclave was somewhat divisive in terms of government approval and was largely disbanded prior to the signing of the Treaty for Peace. The whereabouts of the engineered humans is currently unknown.

  It is the opinion of this department that moves should be made to reconvene these individuals, or as many as remain alive. We are aware that it is some thirty-five years since the termination of the genetic experimentation, and many of these persons may have found adjusting to life away from the compound to have been beyond their capabilities.

  Sirs, your urgent attention is required on this matter.

  Yours,

  Deputy Minister for the Department.

  Chapter One

  Blood. Blood on my hands, dripping onto the carpet, staining my sleeves, staining everything I touch …

  ‘Jessie?’

  I jerked awake at the touch on my shoulder to see Liam, my co-worker, his face upside down in my field of vision.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?’ Life began to pull together in front of me, bleary shapes gradually resolving into boxes, weird noises into computer beeps and hums. ‘And why does my bedroom smell weird?’

  ‘I can only suggest that’s because you collect mould.’ Liam moved away and I heard the rattling of mugs being collected. ‘But this is the office. Such as it is.’

  I sat up slowly. My head had been resting on a sheaf of A4 paper and my left cheek had a seam running down it from the edge of the package. ‘Oh, bollocks.’ I stretched my arms and yawned. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘Fourteen e-mails, two phone calls and a cup of coffee with doughnuts. I thought the doughnuts might wake you, but you just dribbled a bit in your sleep.’

  ‘I am going to open your next pay packet and do something spectacularly horrible inside it.’ I yawned again and scratched at my head.

  ‘Oh, York Council do that already. It’s called my pay slip.’ Liam went out to the kitchen, fist full of mugs. Working, as we did, in the Otherworld Liaison office of York Council meant lots of contact with the Otherworlders, acting as their PA (which, in my opinion, stood for Professional Apologiser) and tranquillising them for Enforcement to deal with when they got out of line. It also meant a hefty dose of standing on school stages explaining to hyperactive teenagers what being a vamp
ire really meant. However, it did not mean earning very much money. They’d have paid us in book tokens if they thought we could read. Endless cups of coffee were our coping mechanism.

  ‘Why so tired?’ Liam went on. ‘You and Sil having wild, rampant sex all night every night?’ He sounded slightly wistful, but then he and his girlfriend had a small baby to keep them up at night rather than anything rampant. ‘And please say yes, because anyone who lives with two gorgeous vampires had better not be watching late-night telly and crocheting into the small hours.’

  A small burst of pain erupted, as though someone had detonated a bomb just under my navel, but I contained it. Walled it in. ‘I don’t!’

  ‘Live with gorgeous vampires or watch late-night telly? Because being the girlfriend of the City Vamp and sharing a house with him and his sidekick qualifies you on the first count. Your lack of knowledge of Dexter would seem to rule out the second.’ More clanking and the sound of kettle-filling. ‘And I already know you can’t crochet. Or knit, but Sarah says thanks for trying. She’s going to use that cardi you knitted for Charlotte to cover the sofa. On account of our baby not being ten feet long and everything.’

  ‘Yeah, well, at least I tried.’ I worked my shoulders to try to lose the Quasimodo sensation and fiddled my mouse to wake up my computer. There was an odd feeling somewhere around my middle, as though someone had opened a window in my lower intestine. Not the same as the anxious pain that was pretty much permanently clenching my gut but something different.

  ‘Jessie, what’s up? You look weird. And considering I’m comparing you to zombies, werewolves, vampires and wights, that’s really weird. Here’s your coffee, but if you’re going to throw up, don’t drink it.’ He swept a few papers aside to make room on my desk for my mug, then sat at his own and placed his mug squarely on the coaster which sat amid absolutely nothing at all. ‘I am really tired of mopping.’ He adjusted the picture of his baby daughter, Charlotte; framed, dust-free and the only thing on his wall-shelf apart from a calendar and a pot of paper clips. ‘Love her to bits, truly, but there is one hell of a lot of mopping involved in fatherhood.’

  ‘I … don’t know,’ I said, rather faintly. ‘I think lack of sleep might be making me hallucinate. And, before you drop the inevitable innuendo, no, it isn’t nights of passion that are keeping me awake. I haven’t seen Sil for ten days.’ And here the anxiety came crowding in again, released from the tether that usually kept it away from conscious thought, and accompanied by the image of my lover – slender, with hair darker than a slate quarry at midnight and eyes like a storm at sea. Sensitive, sexy, overhung with guilt about what he was and what he’d done, but living with that pain for the sake of letting himself feel love for me. Where was he? ‘He said he had something he needed to do, and then he was gone.’

  Liam raised his eyebrows. ‘What, leaving York to run itself?’

  Liam didn’t know what Sil had told me in confidence, that Sil’s apparent Liam-equivalent co-worker Zan was the one who really ran the city; Sil was the figurehead, the apparent chief, the target. ‘I think Zan has got it covered,’ I said, rather weakly. The image of Sil kept repeating on the back of my eyeballs like cucumber-burps after a large salad. ‘Everything seems to be quite calm at the moment; no mental demons trying to raise an army like a few weeks back.’

  ‘So, where’s Sil gone? Setting up Gretna Green for the wedding of the decade? He hasn’t asked you about your preference in ring design lately, has he?’

  I gave him a conversation-killer face. ‘Liam, exactly what were you thinking, bringing me this cup of coffee without so much as a Rich Tea to dunk? You know that we’ve got a whole new biscuit allowance since I managed to save the world, and if you’re trying to siphon it off so that you can renew your Doctor Who Fan Club membership then you’re going to find yourself at the Job Centre with no reference and a ‘cyberman fetishist’ label against your name. Good luck getting another job for the council with that kind of stigma.’

  It worked. Complaining but distracted Liam got up and headed back into the kitchen, leaving me to worry about where Sil had gone. And, more importantly, why. Vampires are bad enough when you can keep your eye on them, when they start disappearing, it’s time to worry.

  Chapter Two

  I am vampire. I am top of the food chain, a mover-in-shadow; desired by women, envied by men. I have the grace of a cat, the sight of an eagle and the speed of a greyhound – so why can’t I find a bloody biro when I want one?

  Sil sighed and rested his elbows on the table. His demon, driven to action by the conflicting emotions scything through his body, scrabbled for attention within him, but he ignored it and rubbed his forehead with a finger, trying to ease the deep ache that he knew wasn’t strictly physical.

  I am vampire. So why do I feel guilty?

  He tried to distract himself by squinting around the tabletop in an attempt to locate the missing ballpoint, closing one eye and then the other and finally running his hands across the surface, riffling the papers that lay there. The girl sitting opposite, eyes fixed on his face with the intensity of a hawk scanning a hedgerow, pushed a pen in his direction. ‘Here.’

  I shouldn’t be here, with this woman whose desire is thrusting from her in waves that make a tsunami look like a slight swell. It is unfair to let her believe that she and I could share more than a smile and a notepad, when I have a heart engaged elsewhere. And not just a heart, my whole body burns with what I feel for Jessica, and cannot wait to close the distance between us, yet here is where I must be. Only here can I find the answers to those questions she carries so silently, with such strength that it weakens me to see it. Answers that may give her the gift she doesn’t know she wants.

  ‘Thank you.’ He picked up the proffered biro but instead of writing twisted it between his fingers. ‘I’m just going to … there’s something over here I want to look at.’ He stood up and the girl’s head moved to keep him in the centre of her vision, as though she was afraid he’d vanish if she took her eyes off him.

  ‘I’ll be here … if you need me,’ she spoke in what was obviously her best ‘seductive’ voice, and Sil’s demon gave an unwanted internal shiver of anticipation which made his fangs lengthen in his mouth and the blood-hunger writhe through his body like snakes dancing in his veins.

  He didn’t smile at her. She wasn’t one of the five per cent of humans who could tell he was vampire, she just thought she’d got lucky with a good-looking man – he knew that much by her flirtatious glances and the way she constantly stroked her hair back off her face. I wonder why women do that? He wandered off, further back into the stacks of books. Makes them look as though they’re constantly checking for lice.

  And then he saw it, the book he’d come looking for. Not hidden at all, just jumbled with a bunch of identical others, the only difference being the detailing along the spine – a date. Sil pulled the book free, with a little puff of dust, from its fellows and flipped the pages. I can’t remember what it was to read at human speed. The thought buzzed into his head. So many human things I didn’t remember, until Jess … She makes me remember, the times before I was this creature of blood and high drama, before the demon that makes me live on the edge so it may feed on the thrills. The time when I was a man, a husband and a father. A flicker of memory, followed by a flare of pain that he extinguished by depriving it of attention. Not now. I will not remember now. Only when she is here can I allow those memories that call forth the tears and the regret – the loss of my family, of my humanity. Jess eases the pain simply by being. And for that reason, I am here. Because she deserves payment in the only coin I know how to deal.

  A hesitation, and then a momentary astonishment made him frown. He started to turn, book in hand, to draw the attention of his companion to the peculiarity, but she was too far away, still sitting at the table behind the manifold shelves, hidden from sight by the ranks of dusty books. ‘This
…’ he began to say, before he heard the dull telltale thump of a gun firing and a sharp pinch of pain in the flesh of his shoulder. A hand came out, preventing him from falling, another caught his other arm. He was moving, semi-conscious, books streaming past him like dreams. And then, nothing.

  Chapter Three

  Zan lounged in front of his pristine state-of-the-art computer in the middle of his immaculate office. The sight of so much bare floor made me agoraphobic.

  ‘Do come in, Jessica.’ He spoke without looking away from the screen. ‘But please don’t touch anything.’

  ‘There isn’t anything to touch. It’s OCD Central in here.’ I went inside, careful not to accidentally knock any piles of books over, even though there weren’t any. Liam’s and my office was a testimony to the power of faith over filing; I kept most things on the floor. Liam was almost as tidy as Zan, but Zan had staff and cleaners and Liam dragged the weight of my incredible loathing for order and had, on occasion, debated the benefits of being demon-infected just to get to work in a tidy office. ‘Don’t you ever just … you know, put something down?’

  ‘Only humans.’

  I thought Zan had a sense of humour, although it was almost undetectable underneath his obsessions, social-phobia and general old-womanness, but it was often hard to tell when he was employing it and when he was just being nasty. ‘Okay.’ I wiggled from foot to foot as I waited for him to stop looking at the screen and look at me. ‘Anything exciting going on out there?’ I saw his reflection freeze for a second, one dark eyebrow rising. Zan was one of the oldest of the vampires, still harbouring a longing for his ages-past world of class structure, impeccable manners and top hats. Despite this, he looked about thirty, with demon-enhanced bone-structure and pale skin counterpointed beautifully by a pair of green eyes and dark hair. Women fell in their droves at his feet, where he stepped over them. We had yet to determine whether Zan actually had a sex-drive, and Liam and I quietly speculated that, if he did, it was directed at something a lot more exotic than the vampire-groupies and casual flirts who tested their wiles on him on a daily basis.