Falling Apart Read online

  ‘Have you heard from Sil?’ Zan answered my question with his own, but he didn’t swivel his leather office chair (another source of friction between our council-funded department and the vampires’ – we had to make do with nasty plastic that smelled of wee) towards me. His tone was level, but Zan’s tone was always level. I thought he probably practised.

  ‘No. That’s why I’m here.’ I moved a bit closer. ‘He’s not been in touch and it’s not like him. He … he says he can feel me … inside him.’ I left the obligatory pause that Liam had trained me into after five years of office sharing but, of course, with Zan no innuendo dropped into the gap. ‘So he knows when I’m thinking about him. If he … feels me …’—another tiny unentendre-filled space, just to make sure—‘he usually phones, or texts or something. But this time’—my throat tightened—‘he just went.’

  Zan finally turned to face me, cross-legged in his chair, like a male model turned Bond villain. ‘And you think …?’ He slotted his fingers together and held them under his chin, eyes interrogating me.

  But I’m immune to the vamp-glamour. In fact, to blow my own trumpet just a bit, I’m better than the five per-centers who can tell a vampire just by looking at them, I can not only spot them, I can react almost as fast as they can to a situation. It means that I’m really good at my job: when an out-of-area vamp shows on our system I tranq them and send them back. I’ve also got blood that’s pure vampire-heroin, but we keep quiet about that. If York Council find out about it they’ll think of a way of using me for something else. And still not paying a proper salary. ‘I’ve thought lots of things, Zan, but now I’d really like some actual answers. So, come on. Where is he?’

  Zan spun the chair back around to face the screen. ‘Sil is a free agent. With the fiction we uphold of his being the City Vampire in charge of Otherworld York, he is perfectly at liberty to move around without being subject to the permits and paperwork that the Others would normally require.’

  ‘You don’t know where he is.’ Sudden panic buzzed behind my eyes. ‘Even you?’

  In reflection, his eyes met mine. ‘Now, what gives you that idea, Jessica?’

  ‘Because you love to know more than I do. If you had so much as a whisper about where he was, this place would be more full of hints than’—I glanced around for a really good metaphor—‘than it is of anything else,’ I finished, rather feebly.

  A shrug. ‘He told me he would be away from the office for a few days. That there was some work he wished to do that necessitated his travelling. I have perpetuated this story for the sake of the press and all public agencies; we wouldn’t wish to spread the rumour that we cannot keep an eye on our City Vamp, now, would we?’

  ‘Okay, so what’s “a few days” in vampire-speak? Is it “I might not be back for breakfast” or “don’t expect to see me for six months”?’ My voice was a bit high-pitched and the words came out rushed and jerky, like sheep herded by a collie on amphetamines.

  ‘I am … concerned.’ Zan pushed his chair away from the desk and stood with the smooth speed of the vampire. ‘Not that he has gone, but because he has been gone for so long without word.’ He came towards me, his tall, slender figure crossing the beech laminate flooring silently. It was like being crept up on by an egret. ‘And that it may be something to do with you, Jessica.’

  ‘Oh, now, wait, you’re not pinning this one on me! Okay, fair enough, things are a bit … well … awkward between me and some other people’—like just about every human who’d found out that my father wasn’t really a retired English teacher but a semi-immortal demon—‘but Sil and I are good. We’re strong together, Zan, we …’ No, I really wasn’t going to go into detail about our relationship, particularly with someone who regarded sitting on a seat previously occupied by another as being too much physical contact. ‘He wouldn’t run out on me. He wouldn’t.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. He could just wait for you to die. And, as ninety per cent of the world seems to have a grudge against you, Jessica, he probably would not have to wait long.’

  ‘Bitch.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing, just … clearing my throat.’

  ‘What do you wish me to do?’

  I hated it when Zan talked to me as though I were an equal. It was downright scary. Here he was, actual vampire in charge of the Otherworld occupants of York, possessor of a demon that gave him enhanced strength, speed, hearing and all the other Buffy stuff plus a ridiculously long lifespan, asking me, York Council Human/Otherworld Liaison employee, possessor of millions of pairs of laddered tights and a store card for Gap on which I owed a fortune, for advice. It made me even more resentful of my undersized pay packet than I already was. ‘Let’s give it another couple of days. He might just have got really absorbed in something.’ As long as the ‘something’ wasn’t an acid bath – there was a human faction that opposed the Others and would gladly seize the opportunity to remove one of its more high-profile members. And vampires weren’t that hard to kill, a stake or a bullet would do it, as long as you could move faster than a rattlesnake on military-strength drugs. ‘Sil can look after himself. And anyway, if anything had happened to him, we would have heard about it – I can’t believe that if someone took out a vampire as powerful as Sil it wouldn’t be splashed all over the Ten O’Clock News, can you?’

  Zan dipped his head in a slight bow. ‘Very well.’

  I really wished he wouldn’t do that whole ‘humble servant’ thing. I knew that he could tear my throat out in a second if he wanted to. Actually, he probably did want to, but the vampires owed their entire success to sublimated urges and artificial blood, and Zan was extremely successful. Only in the wary depths of his eyes could I find any trace of anything other than an obsessively tidy beta-male geek with nice eyes and a very understanding dentist.

  ‘Just … you know, if you hear anything …’

  Zan turned back to his computer. ‘You will, of course, be among the first to know.’

  Gee, thanks.

  ‘So, where did you get to?’

  After Vamp Central our office looked like something out of a Dickens novel. ‘I went to see Zan. I know it sounds weird but … when Sil went, he didn’t tell me where he was going or anything, and I thought Zan might have some kind of insight. But since “Zan” and “insight” are words that cancel each other out and leave a kind of verbal white noise …’

  ‘Nope, not weird at all.’ Liam swung around to face me. ‘What do you mean Sil’s gone and you don’t know where?’

  Even the words were painful. Gone. ‘If you think about that question, does it not answer itself?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, suppose it does, really.’ He stood up, scrubbed both hands down his thighs and then patted me on the shoulder. ‘But you don’t need to worry about Sil, Jess, let’s face it. He’s a hundred and thirty years old, give or take a candle, and he hasn’t got to that age without learning how to handle himself and if you so much as snigger at that last statement then you’ve had the last sympathy from me you’re ever going to get.’ Another pat. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Mmmm. But why would he do that? Go off? Okay, I can imagine that he might …’ I swallowed down the personal fear of abandonment and faced the practicalities, ‘but not to tell Zan? That would be like me emigrating and not telling you … Oh, no, wait a minute, that’s not odd, that’s sensible.’ I finally let the spiralling doubt move from where it had been hiding low down in my belly and auger its way up to my heart. ‘Do you think Sil has run out on me?’

  Liam stared. ‘What, you mean like “it’s not you, it’s me, no forwarding address” time? Jeez, is that what Zan said, that Sil’s buggered off? I know vampires sometimes have all the subtlety of an American Pie film but … seriously? I’m supposed to be Sil’s friend – wouldn’t he do the whole bloke thing, you k
now, late night calls from bars, turning up to sleep on my sofa and all that? Just to go?’ Liam rubbed his hands over his face. ‘No. No, sorry, Jess, I don’t see that at all. He loves you.’

  ‘As much as a vampire can. Come on, Liam, I wrote the pamphlets – they don’t really do affection. It’s like keeping a cat; they love you right up until someone rattles a spoon in a bigger tin, they have to, they need the thrills to keep their demons happy.’ I was astounded by the calmness of my tone – what, care, me? ‘Maybe his demon just got the better of him.’

  ‘Jessie …’ Liam reached over as though to touch me, but I reared back. Human contact right now would have cracked my careful facade wide open. ‘Is that what you want to believe? Of Sil, of all people? That you mean so little to him that he’d just take off?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not what I want’—my voice choked down the scale—‘but maybe it’s what I have to believe. He’s normally a stickler for keeping at least Zan in the loop. To do this he must have … Something must have happened and it wouldn’t be the first time a vampire has upped and run out on a human …’ I tailed off; then cleared my throat. ‘Look, it’s nearly six. Let’s shut up shop for today. I need some sleep and isn’t it Sarah’s yoga night? You go home and put Charlotte to bed and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  I got up and started getting my things together. Liam didn’t move. ‘That has to be the longest self-justification sentence I’ve ever heard,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want me to throw something at you?’

  ‘It might help.’

  I threw the nearest thing to hand; it was the electric pencil sharpener, which trailed through the air like the world’s least aerodynamic weapon ever, hit the side of the bookshelf and took a chunk out of the MDF before crashing to the floor.

  Liam didn’t even duck. ‘Go home, Jess,’ he said gently. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  It was at that point I should have realised it really, really wasn’t.

  Chapter Four

  Sil opened his eyes, which made no difference at all to his ability to see, and groped forward in the darkness. His fingers brushed against rock on all sides, beneath his feet was a gritty loose surface and above his head … He stretched up, waving his arms until a fingertip touched something … More rock. What in the seven hells has happened to me? The last thing I remember is … being with Jess, talking, and then … I wake up in what feels like a tomb. Please don’t let this be a tomb … that’s just so clichéd and embarrassing. He could see the headlines now: ‘York’s Vampire Chief in Accidental Dracula Duplication’.

  Deep inside him the demon that had made him vampire nearly a century ago danced and dived, feeding on the adrenaline of Sil’s rising panic. It quietened for a moment as it felt the drag deep in his solar plexus that told him Jess was thinking of him. His heart ached for a second. Jess. The dragging sensation came again, as though he were attached to a tugboat, pulling him to harbour. She’s worried. He shuffled a half-step forward and banged his head against the sloping rock ceiling. And I’m beginning to feel a trifle perturbed myself. Where am I? How did I get here? And why?

  A faint tickle of hunger caught his throat. So I’ve been here long enough to need some blood. He lowered his head, as though gravity would assist the memory process, his hair dropping to tickle at his cheeks; the swipe which cleared it from his face caused him to scrape his knuckles against the rock and swear into the darkness. ‘Bugger!’

  His voice echoed more than he would have thought it could in such a confined space. The sound of it made him feel, paradoxically, lonely. A quick shake of his head prevented the longing getting out of control. Come now, Sil, think. You were … where? A vague not-even-memory of … books? Some kind of paper? Another headshake. Then, nothing. Not even a memory of darkness descending; his body bore no pains that might have indicated battle had been joined. Although that really didn’t mean much – if he’d been down here for more than a day any physical hurts would have healed, courtesy of his demon.

  But you still have the memories of the time before, said a little voice in the back of his mind, that little conscience-devil that competed with his demon in fights that made the Troubles look like Rocky Balboa versus a small kitten. The memories of your wife, your children. The loss of all that you knew, the stealing away of your humanity as you gave life to the demon inside. The things that you did to stay alive; power over humans exercised to the maximum, death dealt, pain apportioned. Is all this something to do with those memories? Has keeping the thoughts of pain and loss so suppressed somehow damaged my short-term memory? Is this some kind of vampiric Alzheimer’s?

  Sil took a deep breath and deliberately scraped the knuckles of his other hand down the wall. The instant flood of pain and anger pushed the guilt and memory back where it belonged, tucked somewhere in the space between love and rage, and blanketed by the knowledge that this was how it must always be. Letting everything out meant letting out the hate, the fury at what he had become, at what he had lost. It meant that any emotion, even his love for Jessica, must be handled carefully, managed in small parcels to prevent anger detonating from the fuse which burned deep within.

  Maybe that is why I am here, he thought. Maybe this is some kind of vampire isolation tank, somewhere to think without distraction, to face what is happening to my life. The knowledge that I have fallen in love; that I must let myself feel love without giving power to the other emotions. And it is a very different love to that I knew with my wife, all those years ago – a love that winds through me, is a part of every strand of my being. This exclusion is exactly the sort of thing that Zan would come up with, for my own good. He’s probably up there now, watching the clock until he judges that I’ve come to my senses.

  His stomach growled at him. I do hope he’s realised that it is very hard to look into one’s soul without sustenance.

  Chapter Five

  I headed out of the office and along by the river and wondered if I was looking for trouble. Right now I needed distraction, anything to stop this awful, evil daisy-petal cycle of ‘he loves me, he wants me dead’. Something that would halt my relentless analysis of every second we’d spent together, dissecting it for any trace of resentment or restlessness.

  I could see a knot of people clustering around a bench on the embankment. At first I thought they were just the normal crowd of evening sightseers, hell-bent on eating their own weight in ice cream and waiting for the pubs to get going, but these seemed to be different. They were all men for a start, and I might not know a lot about men but one of the things I do know is that when they form a tight group like this, something’s going on in the middle. One or two of their faces were familiar, and I was pretty sure they were Britain for Humans’ supporters, or some free-agents in the market for a loud fight and beer afterwards.

  A little further down the river, on a bench, I saw a zombie filling his arms with the mixture of Araldite and bath sealant that a lot of them used to keep up and, if not running, then certainly lurching quite quickly. When I looked back at the group of men I realised what was going on.

  I strolled down towards the bench, my stomach settling at the prospect of movement, of action. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Er, hi.’ The zombie was young. He must have been good-looking once; his face bore a trace of chiselled bone structure and his eyes were still good, but he had the over-taut skin and general gloss of the PVA wash that they all used, like a cheap Californian facelift. ‘Jess, right?’

  I riffled my memory banks. ‘And you’re Ryan, yes?’

  ‘I’m just patching-up, that’s okay, isn’t it? Only I’m a bit …’ Almost apologetically he held out an arm and I saw the bagging skin. ‘You know.’

  ‘No, you’re fine. I’m just a bit worried about those guys over there.’ I nodded towards the men gathered around the railings, shouting to one another and raising fists. ‘They look like they’re spoiling for a fig
ht. Might be a good idea if you get out of here fast.’

  ‘Er, yeah, sure. I can still do fast.’ He stood up, with a creaking sound I pretended not to have heard. ‘I’ve just got this face looking right – I don’t want to have it rearranged any more than nature is going to anyway.’

  Ryan began to move away in a kind of rolling lope and I watched him carefully, refusing to turn around even when I heard the catcalls and whistles, then the single set of running footsteps that was some chancer setting out after him. As the runner drew level with me, I turned suddenly and grabbed hold of his shirt; his forward momentum wheeled him around me with his eyes bulging and his top button straining like an undersized gusset during ballet practice.

  ‘What the fu—’

  ‘Ah, now I’m glad you asked me that.’ I bunched his shirt under my hands, trapping him inside his designer label. He couldn’t whip around and punch me without garrotting himself with his hand-stitching. ‘What is it with you and the zombies?’

  ‘They’re just dead guys, yeah?’ came the slightly breathless answer. ‘Taking our jobs and our women.’

  ‘Yeah!’ A Greek chorus of approval, albeit at a distance they apparently considered safe, waved their arms. ‘Should have the decency to stay dead, right?’

  I sighed and released my hold, giving him a small shove as I did so. ‘Look, you lot. The only jobs the zombies take are the ones where the main qualification is Already Being Dead, and I think most girls would rather go out even with you lot than with people who are largely held together with Araldite.’ I eyed the unprepossessing faces in front of me. ‘Probably. So leave the zombies alone, all right?’

  A rising tide of muttering made my palms sweat for a moment, but the collective brain obviously decided that discretion was the better part of not getting thumped and arrested by a girl, and the group started a kind of trickling retreat back along the embankment.