Falling Apart Read online

  Liam made a face and screwed the newspaper up into a fist-sized ball; then he flung it into the corner of the office with surprising savagery. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t want to disturb you. You said you were reading to Charlotte and that’s more important than having to listen to me whinge.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. No, Jess. You’ve gone through enough this last couple of days and you’re my friend – of course I would listen to you. Your poor dad. And this poisonous rubbish …’ He waved at the paper, which was uncoiling under the shelving unit like a shy snake. ‘You could have Facebooked me, at least.’

  ‘You know what I’m like, I’m not good at …’ I dropped my face into my cupped hands. ‘I wish Sil was here,’ I said in a small voice. ‘I want him back, Liam.’

  There was a short, quiet moment, which I let go without feeling that I had to make some snappy remark. I just felt the loss of Sil in my heart and my head.

  ‘Coffee?’ Liam eventually asked.

  ‘There is no other reason on earth for your existence.’ My hands fell away from my face and I took a deep breath. ‘Okay. Well, no-one said this job was going to be easy.’

  ‘No, but they did say it was going to be regular hours and paid at a rate beyond that of a sixteenth-century peasant.’ He picked up the mugs. ‘So I don’t think we can believe a word they say, quite honestly.’

  ‘I’d better drop an e-mail to head office, let them know what happened. Just in case they get shirty about our journalist friend.’

  ‘Blimey, they’ve never started reading the newspapers over at Town Hall, have they? Doubt they read the York Herald anyway, there’s never a sniff of a page three girl, and they only have the football in once a week.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’ I logged in and began drafting something succinct and pithy. ‘Even though they’ll have to go to Personnel to find out who I am. I swear they think Liaison is a place in Belgium.’

  ‘That’s Liege.’

  ‘Go tell them.’ I typed another line and Liam went out to the kitchen, but then came back in at a run when a strange, high-pitched pinging noise started coming from his computer. ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘News alert.’ Forgetting coffee, he sat down and started scrolling. ‘It’s coming down the feed from Vamp Central.’ He clicked on a flashing icon and a recorded image flickered into action on the screen. ‘Oh, shit.’

  I stared at the pictures coming down the line and my mind fell into the little black hole that shock had reserved for it. ‘I don’t … Liam … please, tell me this isn’t real.’

  Chapter Nine

  Like shooting one-winged birds. They panic so, rushing hither and yon as though it might save them. He bit and drank, feasting on the blood as his demon feasted on the terror. They’ve got soft, these humans, since the Treaty. They used to fight back, some of them, their attempts to free themselves from the onslaught was rather endearing, but these … these just stand and take it, or blunder about with no idea of packing tight, running with the herd and making me pick them off one at a time. No, they make it too easy.

  Sil ran. Each mouthful of blood gave him more strength; with the strength came the joy, the sheer singing of the heart that freedom and the rapture of attack brought. He wheeled and spun through the London crowd, sometimes holding and sipping, sometimes tearing and indulging the darker side of his demon’s demands, his brain barely capable of thought and his mind empty of everything except the need to feed. Power. Power to make fear and horror my friends, the power to take over and over and to feel the earth dance beneath my feet with the speed of passing.

  Vision was nothing but a blur of movement and light, the smudges of faces darkening as the blood sprayed them, and then turning ashen white, hearing so sharpened by the need to hunt that loud noises battered his ears. But the quiet, shocked cry of a child needled through the chaos direct to his senses. Child. Crying.

  Another heavy body against his, another deep bite that sent his demon skittering inside him, almost sickened with the surfeit. The child cried again, ‘Mum!’ Sil let the weight drop from his arms to the pavement, and stood amid the ruin that had, only a few moments ago, been a crowded street. Child.

  He turned, saw the boy, crouching half inside a shop doorway. Inside, the staff, who had closed and bolted the door against the blood-hungry beast, huddled behind their stationery display, screaming, a noise which intensified as he took one, two steps towards their windows. The child crouched lower, but raised his head as Sil approached and, to his astonishment, jumped up and began swinging juvenile punches at the vampire.

  ‘That’s my mum!’ he was crying, tears preventing his punches from being anything other than perfunctory. ‘You bit my mum!’

  And Sil stopped. Fangs down, lips drawn back, ready to attack, he considered the child now attempting to kick him in the leg. His mother was, presumably, one of the many littering the paved way, some sitting up and groaning while others lay tumbled as they’d fallen. Child. Not much older than Joseph when the influenza struck. His fangs retracted. Strength – that superhuman, all-encompassing strength that had made him so fast, so invincible – left his arms, his legs, and he staggered. Turned.

  And ran.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Oh shit.’ It was all I could say. Liam and I held on to each other and watched the film Zan was sending from a security camera in central London. When it came to the end, we watched it again, slo-mo; even through the blood and the terror, I couldn’t look away.

  Finally Liam turned the video off and we just stood and stared at one another. ‘Shit,’ I said again.

  ‘Definitely him?’ Liam looked pale and his eyes were huge.

  ‘I … yes. Only Sil and Sherlock Holmes wear a coat like that.’ The shock had kicked in, leaving my brain driving uselessly forwards, like a clock with no hands, trying to force me into action. I had no idea what action I could usefully take right now. ‘And, yes. It was him. I suppose … we should call Zan …?’

  At that moment the phone rang and we both stared at it. ‘That will be him,’ I said, still distant with shock. ‘You’d better speak to him. I don’t think I …’ I waved at the handset and Liam, green-faced and shaking slightly, picked it up. There was a static buzz of words and Liam took a deep breath.

  ‘No, Jess has no idea either, he … no, we’ve not heard anything from him.’ I was glad Liam had taken the call; I had the feeling that I was going to come over all hysterical any moment now, and Zan’s phobia-list had ‘crying women’ right up there. ‘Yes. As soon as we hear anything.’ He lowered the phone and looked across the office at me, his eyes wide with panic now. ‘Shit, Jessie. What has he done?’

  ‘We know what he’s done. We saw him doing it.’

  ‘Zan found the footage in a live feed – he must be sitting there running all the cameras in the country, Jess.’

  I remembered Zan sitting there in front of his huge screen, alone with all those images, searching for … what? This? Was this what he’d expected? ‘Yeah,’ I said, almost inaudibly. Blood, fear … a vampire in a feeding frenzy.

  ‘Zan reckons’—Liam’s professionalism slid into a hoarse baritone of disbelief for a second—‘that nobody died. He didn’t kill anyone, Jess. There’s a lot of injuries, blood loss, shock, that kind of thing, but he stopped himself from killing.’ Liam flicked the screen back on; it was silently showing the attack on a loop. ‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? We both know what happens to a vampire that attacks, Liam. We know what has to happen. It’s not like a dog, where we can sometimes give the benefit of the doubt … I really don’t think anyone’s teased Sil with a stick recently.’ I swallowed down an encroaching sob and kept my eyes facing front. Pretending an interest in what we were watching, while my brain refused to believe it. The screen now showed a still-shot of the aftermath,
people strewn around the street, some unconscious, others sitting up and holding gaping wounds. ‘The Hunters have to take him down.’ A whisper was all I could manage past the huge swelling in my throat. ‘And if the Hunters can’t find him, then it’s a Liaison job, hush hush, behind the scenes.’

  Liam blinked at me. ‘And how are we supposed to do it? We’re not allowed anything more powerful than a tranq gun, and that’s like asking someone to take down a charging elephant with a straw and spit-pellets.’

  I took a deep breath and tried to push everything away, even the knowledge of what must be done. ‘You are disgusting. No, the clue is in the name: we liaise. Use our knowledge, the knowledge that’s on the streets, to track him down, tranq him and then bring Enforcement in. Or the Hunters, depending on how “immediate” we’re feeling.’ My hands were shaking, I put them either side of the monitor to try to warm the shock out of them. ‘There’s no “due process of law” for a vampire that’s gone rogue; we put them down like a charging elephant. Only with less spit.’

  ‘Wow.’ Liam sat down so heavily that his chair rocked and creaked. ‘We’ve never … not since I’ve been here. I’m not sure we covered it in training.’

  ‘I keep telling you, you did not have training! York Council don’t do training; what you had was half an hour in an office with a man who kept trying to touch your leg. A vamp went rogue once, just after I started. They sent me out, but the Hunters picked him up before I got any further than asking around – he wasn’t the brightest saw-blade in the toolbox, that one.’

  ‘Wow,’ Liam said again. ‘What happened?’

  I swallowed hard. This isn’t happening. My brain was running the images on my own internal screen, over and over, to a frozen soundtrack of tears. This can’t be happening. ‘They chased him down to Rowntree Park and shot him in the bandstand.’

  Liam shook his head slowly. ‘So, this really is a real job? Liaison? We’re not just getting paid for you to do the PR in schools and chat up werewolves? There is actually a point to all this?’

  ‘Liaison. We liaise. To gain information or to give it, with a view to helping Human/Other relations run smoothly. I think that’s on some headed paper somewhere.’

  And inside my head, on another running loop, a voice was yelling at me, trying to break through the professional detachment. This can’t be it. This can’t be how it ends. A love like yours doesn’t end in a chase through the streets and a bullet through the head – that’s not in any script I’ve ever read, or anything other than the most hardboiled of novels. It’s not meant to go like this.

  ‘So.’ Liam blew out a deep breath. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Now, the London Hunters have the call. If he’s really vanished, the entire Hunter community is on watch, everyone in any branch of Otherworld comms is on standby. I have to go out and try to get information from York Otherworlders; see if anyone, anywhere, knows anything. But first, you make me a really sturdy cup of coffee.’

  As though he was happy just to have something to do, Liam leaped up. ‘Yes. Well, obviously.’

  ‘And before that, I think I just have to go and be a little bit sick.’

  ‘Jess?’

  I dashed down the flight of stairs and locked myself into the toilet. Disbelief. That was all there was, at first, a frantic denial of everything we’d just seen. Not him. Of course not, of course it’s not him. I leaned against the back of the door and let the doubt wash through me, followed by the little trickle of hope at our misapprehension. Of course. And then, finally, a hot flood of acceptance and grief, which pulled my head to my chest and filled it with the images again. My love shattered and I tried to grasp pieces of it and stick them back into order, to make sense of the betrayal. I rested my forehead against the mirror and wrapped my arms around my ribcage, trying to hold my breaking heart together, trying to stop my body from flying into a million fragments. I flushed the loo repeatedly to cover the noise of the guttural sobs that sounded as though bits of my throat were coming away, while my body shook. Sil. Four years of loving you. A few weeks of actually having you, and it was like all my dreams coming true together. And now, this.

  The ache in my soul wouldn’t go away.

  Finally I went back up to the office. Liam was on the phone and carefully averted his eyes from my face; he’d only once dared to ask me if I’d been crying and his computer still made a funny creaking noise, so he knew better than to repeat his mistake. Without looking at me, he pointed, dramatically, to a mug of coffee, now bearing a slight wrinkled skin, sitting on my desk.

  ‘Thanks,’ I mouthed across the room. Even cool, the coffee was warmer than I was, so I chugged it down and it soothed the chill in my psyche, made me feel a bit better. The caffeine hit my system and jerked it from numb horror into alertness. Liam put the phone down.

  ‘Head Office. They want to see you re your flagrant dereliction of duty. Oh, and they want you out on the streets as soon as.’

  ‘Because?’ I put my mug down and wiped my clammy hands down my jeans.

  ‘They reckon the word will be out among the general populace that our vamp went psycho down in London and that things might be a bit … uneasy out there. They think, and God alone knows why, because I know you, that having you out there patrolling might calm things down a bit. You’re to go in to the offices this afternoon. Three-ish.’ He put his hands flat on the desk and leaned forward, like a TV detective mid-interrogation. ‘Are you sure you’re up to it?’

  ‘Call my professionalism into question once more, Liam Prentiss, and you are going to be explaining away the scars for years to come.’ I fetched the tranq gun out of its cabinet and pocketed a handful of cartridges. ‘I need to do something. I might as well make myself useful.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on the channels. If any more info comes down, I’ll ring you, all right?’

  ‘Please.’ I slid the gun into my other pocket and the weight was instantly reassuring. ‘Even … even if it’s bad, Liam. I need to know. Whatever it is.’

  A pause. ‘Okay, if you’re sure.’

  Keep moving. It doesn’t hurt so much if you’re moving. ‘I’m going to fly by Vamp High Command, check in with Zan too. He might have some inside information that I can use.’ Assuming an air of perkiness, I patted my pockets down once more and bounced out of the office. As soon as I stepped out of the door three reporters from the local paper bundled into me, cameras flashing in my face and devices poised to record anything I might say. ‘How do you feel about your boyfriend breaking the Treaty?’ A tiny blonde woman, who looked as though all her knowledge about vampires came from the teenage end of the popular fiction market, simpered at me. ‘Anything to say about that?’

  ‘No comment,’ I said firmly, and dodged through WH Smith, like a cut-price spy with a stationery fetish, popping out at the far side, away from the furiously inventive scribbling, and into the main shopping area, where I managed to reassure myself that the crowds would hide me from the spitefully inclined newshounds.

  The streets seemed a little quieter than usual, but not to a great degree. Vamps went rogue sometimes; it happened, and the majority of the population had great faith in the ability of Hunters to take them out before things got really bad. One had eluded capture for five weeks by hiding out in the Brecon Beacons, but usually justice was swiftly, and terminally, dealt. My hand shook for a second. Sil. What the hell happened to you? There was that feeling again, as though my lower intestines had turned to glass, my heart stammered mid-beat and I had the most peculiar sensation around my midriff. Was this the connection Zan claimed I shared with Sil? Was this my demon inheritance? Blood that was a vampire narcotic – knocked out anything that bit me – and all the symptoms of typhoid? How rubbish. In the world of superpowers this made me something like Heroin Withdrawal Girl. My father … my blood father, not Brian the ex-teacher now lying in York General Hospital with a dodgy he
art, had been able to glamour and to create and use hexes for his own protection. I got an upset stomach and a Class A vascular system. Typical.

  I made my way to Vamp Central through as many shops as possible, to avoid the possibility of reporters, noting, even in my distressed state, that Next had a shoe sale on. Zan was sitting in his office with a screenshot from the newsfeed on his computer. He was staring at the split screen, one half showing the grainy black-and-white image of a street littered with fallen humans; the other half was a portrait photograph of Sil. My heart squeezed. Face half in shadow, mouth unsmiling and hair unnaturally neat, it looked like the kind of pin-up picture that went up inside young girls’ lockers or on bedroom walls. Only I had seen him sprawl into a chair, hook one leg up over the arm and lean his head back, bottle of Synth swinging loose between his fingers. Only I had seen him with his hair swept back and a grin on his face after we’d made the kind of love that made him feel human and me feel special

  ‘How did this happen, Jessica?’ Zan’s voice was low. ‘How could he allow himself to become so … so debased?’ He didn’t take his eyes off the screen, although his fingers toyed with an iPad so up to date that it hadn’t even hit the high street yet. It lay alongside the computer in a pigskin casing.

  ‘I don’t know. But we need to get real here, Zan.’

  He turned around slowly. He looked, as ever, terrific. Carefully and co-ordinatingly dressed in clothes that all seemed to have their own tactile story to tell, which always made it seem as though he got dressed simply by touch: a white linen shirt and dark brushed cotton trousers with a silk tie cravat thing around his neck. With his dark hair and green eyes it made him look like a Victorian poet. Victorian he may be, but I would have taken bets against there being any poetry in Zan’s heart. ‘I fail to see how I can become any more “real” than is currently the case.’