Vampire State of Mind, page 22
‘That bad? So he’s more than just a nutter?’
Zan gave a muted shrug. ‘He seems truly invincible. If you could not kill him, then … who can?’
I had a sudden thought, a memory of my mother … of Jen, sitting at the farm table, head in her hands, mourning. ‘My family – Zan … are they in danger? He threatened …’
The low-level shrug was repeated. ‘His invincibility may save them. If he feels himself supreme, then why should he concern himself with a petty collection of humans? I fear that they are beneath his notice now.’ He glanced down at something on his desk. ‘You, however, have taken a stand against him and he will have you punished as an example to others.’
A movement behind Zan. ‘Hey.’
‘Hello, Sil.’ My heart shot up into my throat at the sight of him and I had to do some special breathing exercises to get over the feeling that I was going to fall off my chair. While I was wearing the first clothes that I’d stepped on, he looked sassy and slick. Black shirt over black T over black jeans. It made his hair almost purple-dark and his skin very pale. No trace of the tears or the anguish, or of the ecstasy either, come to that. ‘How are you this morning?’
His face appeared in front of Zan. ‘Yeah, I’m good.’
My heart sank down into my stomach. His tone was brisk, upbeat, nicely impersonal; no softness in the way he spoke or looked at me. Everything that had happened between us, everything, was nothing to him. ‘Well, that’s nice.’ God, I was proud of myself. Jonathan, whispered a tiny voice deep in my mind, his name is Jonathan. And another piece of me folded in half and curled around itself. I focused on the webcam.
Zan was standing up now, readjusting the camera, so all I could see was a close-up of his stomach. A wide leather belt rode around his narrow hips, a shirt which looked very much as though it was made of silk was tucked into it. Even as things were falling apart, Zan dressed for the catwalk. His face had thinned. Become feral. His fangs were down and his pupils red. ‘Stay there,’ he said and abruptly ended the call. He seemed to have dropped the pretence of being in charge of nothing more dangerous than a particularly savage stapler and I wondered where that left Sil.
I was shaking. Liam came and perched on the desk in front of me. ‘So, then,’ he said carefully. ‘You reckoned you were a murderer, now you know you’re not, but you still look like you’re minus one Happy Hour and Sil is being way too laid back for it to be natural. What exactly has been going on, Jessie?’
‘Sil – ’ I tried to start again but words wouldn’t come past the lump in my throat.
Liam raised his eyebrows. ‘So he’s the vamp responsible for the bite on your neck then, is he? Thought it must be something like that … Oh come on, Jessie, did you think I wouldn’t notice? You can pull your collar up all you like, but how long have I worked in this office?’
My hands flew to the incriminating marks. ‘It wasn’t – it’s not like it looks.’
‘Yeah? Well, you tell me what it looks like to you, and I’ll tell you that to me it looks like you and the city vamp have been getting down and dirty, and if you don’t tell me everything then you could be watching your coffee for laxatives for the next three weeks.’
And then I started crying again.
Liam watched me impassively for a moment, then disappeared into the kitchen. There were clanking sounds and the noise of the emergency bucket being displaced, before he reappeared carrying a bottle of whisky. ‘When biscuits are no longer enough – ’ he explained, pouring two mugfuls – ‘time for the heavy stuff.’
I sobbed down a mouthful. Liam was still watching me. ‘This is horrible.’
‘Yeah. I use it to clean the spoons.’ He moved suddenly, to crouch in front of me. ‘So. It was Sil. It’s all come to this.’ Gently he hooked a sticky strand of hair behind my ear. ‘Just tell me, Jessie.’
So I told him. All of it. Even the bits that made me blush to admit. Liam listened and drained his mug, poured me another even though I could hardly bear to sip at it. ‘You and Sil. You were always hot for each other.’
‘It’s worse than that.’ Tears flowed faster. ‘Oh God, Liam, what am I going to do? I think I’m in love with him.’
I bent forward, crying so hard that whisky slopped up my arm. Liam put the mug down and took my hand. ‘Fuck, Jessie. After all we’ve been told, with all that you know? Talk about a slow boat to nowhere.’
‘I know. There’s nothing you can tell me about vampires. They don’t form relationships, they make stoats look sexually circumspect and they have all the emotional warmth of a slug. I know all this! Hell, I probably wrote the pamphlet. But – ’ I shrugged.
He rubbed a thumb across my cheek, smearing the tears. ‘Oh, Jessie. What do you want me to do? I can kill him, if you like.’
That made me laugh. I looked up into Liam’s oh-so-human eyes, a gentle brown without all the clouding and shifting that marks out a vampire. ‘No. You’re all right. I’ll have to deal with it as best I can.’
‘But can you? Can you really deal with him, feeling like this? What if – hell I hate to say it, Jessie, but you must have thought it – what if he goes rogue? Could you stake him?’
‘Look.’ I took a huge breath, regained some self-control. ‘I don’t know, okay? Last night he … he was almost human. He cried, Liam. He told me about his kids, his wife, and he cried. So, maybe there is hope for him. But for now, I can only take things a little bit at a time. And Malfaire is still out there, he still wants me dead, and now we have no idea what to do about it, that’s the most pressing problem. Being in love with a vampire – well, I’ll have to dig out that T-shirt you brought me back from London and keep wearing it until the message sinks in.’
‘The “What Would Buffy Do?” one? Jessie, you do know that Buffy wasn’t a documentary don’t you?’
I shrugged tiredly. ‘I’m not sure what I know any more.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Zan looked as though he had changed especially to come over. The silk shirt had been exchanged for a linen one, topped with a thigh-length black wool coat lined in red satin. The trousers were velvet, and fine calf-leather black boots finished it all off.
‘You look like you’ve dressed for the blind,’ I said. ‘Very tactile.’
‘You don’t want to know what it says in Braille.’ Sil slumped down on to my desk. Liam began fiddling with his computer.
‘Honestly, Zan, I’ve got Malfaire on my tail, threatening me with God knows what and you’re dressed like the poster-boy for the new undead revolution. Boy, do you have a problem with priorities!’
Green eyes laced with gold met mine and locked on. ‘Who gave you the mark, Jessica?’ Zan’s voice was deceptively gentle. ‘Did some demon feed from you?’ One long finger flicked the collar of my crumpled shirt away from the bite, still bruised and tender. ‘Was it with your permission?’
‘And you are changing the subject!’
‘It was mine.’ Sil shuffled paperwork, looking as though he was trying to keep his hands occupied. ‘It demanded payment in blood for getting us out of the river.’
‘Interesting,’ Zan hadn’t let the collar go yet, kept his finger between the cotton and my skin. ‘And how did it taste?’
Sil’s eyes were cool as they met mine, but there was a shivering remembrance of the rush behind them. ‘It was amazing, Zan. I’ve never tasted anything so powerful. It nearly knocked me out for a while. Back when I was human one of my friends … well, there was opium involved, and it was a bit like that, only more.’
‘Hmmm.’ Zan looked at the wound. ‘That may be her blood combination. Human and ghyst, something in the mixture of the two. Interesting.’
I didn’t like the thoughtful way I was being looked at. ‘Oy, excuse me guys. Things are bad enough without you two looking at me like I’m some kind of living happy-pill! Could you try to control yourselves for a few minutes? At least until you tell me why you came over here. I’m sure it wasn’t to give me the pleasure of watching you walk in velvet trousers.’
Liam went and fetched the bottles of synth for the vampires and two more coffees for him and me, then sat down on the edge of my desk, watching Sil.
‘We came to collect you, Jessie.’ Sil raised his head so that the light drew attention to his perfect bone structure. ‘Malfaire will need to make an example of you now you’ve actually tried to kill him, so we’re taking you back to where we may protect you.’
‘But surely, if Jessie can’t kill Malfaire, he’ll leave her alone.’ Liam kept his eyes on Sil, as though he expected him to leap up and defile me at any moment.
Zan was on his feet now. ‘Jessica,’ he said, and his words were heavy as stones, ‘you are in danger. You are also our only weapon against Malfaire, however you may be used. And Sil has invoked the Protection Act.’
‘But I didn’t kill him …’
‘No. And yet.’
I felt my pupils distend with shock. ‘This is big, isn’t it?’ My voice crouched low in my throat and came out as a whisper. ‘He’s going to try to fight?’
Zan nodded slowly. ‘Everything we have worked for may be in danger. Malfaire is rallying all those who have been held in check only by their fear of a war that they would never win. This may be the end of peace, Jessica.’
‘Jessie.’ Sil managed to get past Liam. ‘Zan is right; you know it.’ He touched me then, just the lightest of brushes against my arm with his hand but I jumped like he’d burned me. ‘Please – ’
And I wanted to tell him my peace had ended as soon as I’d felt his body against mine. But this was about so, so much more than me and him. And yet … yet … Even though I knew we were in danger I wanted to make him forget his long-gone family, his Christie and the horror of the loss of his children, I wanted to say ‘I love you’ into those sea-grey troubled eyes, to feel his body eager against me again, that soaring hugeness inside my heart. But instead I whispered ‘Jonathan’. Watched him go still.
‘Oh, Jessie,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘It’s – maybe – I need – I don’t know. But it – ’
‘I know.’ And I did know. I’d always known I couldn’t have him. That was all there was to it. He was vampire, and that would always win out.
‘Wow, you two are erudite this morning.’ Liam broke the silence. I became aware that all three men were standing very, very close to me. I could have walked into either one’s arms with only half a step.
‘Can you lot back up a bit?’ I said, clearing my throat, ‘only it’s kind of hard to breathe with all this testosterone in the air, and I’d quite like to be able to turn around without facing a sexual harassment charge.’ I could do this. ‘Okay, I get it. We bed down at Vamp Central and try to work out what to do next. But please can we take the office stuff with us?’
‘You are dedicated to your job, Jessica.’ Zan moved obediently a few steps away.
‘Not really. End of the world or not, you know what they’re like if the tracker programme isn’t backed up every twenty-four hours.’
Sil was looking at me, unblinking. I had no idea what he was thinking, and that worried me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I left Sil and Liam manhandling office furniture into Zan’s chilly living room – well, Sil was handling and Liam was saying ‘up your end’ rather a worrying number of times – so that we could keep our office running whilst remaining under the eye of the vampires, or “safe” as Zan kept insisting on calling it. I had the feeling we would have been just as safe if we’d stayed in our own office, i.e., about as safe as we would have been inside a damp paper bag, but I’d lost the will to argue. I followed the old vampire up the huge oak staircase. We trekked along miles of portrait-hung corridor, past acres of ornate furniture and through swamps of deep-pile carpets, until Zan stopped outside a carved, gothic door. ‘This will be your room.’
‘What? I have to sleep here?’
Zan reached behind him and opened the door. ‘Sleep, play charades, whatever pleases you, Jessica.’ He stood aside and I walked past him into the room. It was the size of a small African country with a vast four-posted double bed in the middle, and windows looking out over an exquisitely landscaped garden. There was an en-suite bathroom with gaudily patterned gold taps, and a bowl of fruit on a small writing table just inside the door. Instead of paper, the walls were ornamented with embroidered hangings alternated with mahogany panelling; it was like a cross between a bridal suite and a porn set.
‘You do have electricity, don’t you? And the toilet flushes?’
Zan had followed me into the room. ‘Of course.’ He walked across to the window, pausing on his way to run a possessive hand over an enormously ugly chest-of-drawers and the spiral-carved bed supports. ‘Among the things that this century has to recommend it, the lavatorial facilities come fairly high up the list.’ He stood at the waist-level sill, gazing down over the gardens with his back to me.
‘It’s a bit Brideshead Revisited.’
Without turning around Zan said, ‘If you tell me that what this place needs is a woman’s touch, I am afraid I may have to tear your throat out.’
Whoa. I was going to treat that as a joke. ‘So. How long am I going to have to stay? I mean, is it worth bringing more of my clothes over or what?’
Now Zan turned. He said absolutely nothing, he didn’t need to. The look in his jade eyes was enough.
‘What? Oh, no, that’s stupid, Zan. We have to do something.’
‘And you suggest …?’
‘We can’t just wait for Malfaire to decide the next move! There are people’s lives at stake here … remember the Troubles?’ Intimations of mortality were beginning to creep into my head. I didn’t want to die, not like this, cowering in a vampire’s glorified flat-share. Actually, I didn’t want to die at all, apart from possibly in my own bed aged a hundred and three.
‘I agree. We must seize the initiative.’ Zan’s voice was low, business-like. And also he was speaking to me as an equal, as though I carried as much weight in this as he did, and that scared me almost more than anything. ‘And yes, Jessica. I remember the Troubles only too well. And I also remember that many of the deaths during that time were caused by actions without consideration. We must take time here to consider what may best be done.’
Just when I thought I’d sunk as low as my spirits could possibly go, there was a slow knock at the half-open door. Sil stood on the threshold, propping himself by one arm against the door frame. ‘Jessie – ’
Zan gave me a grin. The very tips of his fangs showed. ‘You will need to talk.’ His expression was amused but the teeth gave the lie to the smile. ‘I shall leave you. But Sil, when you are ready, one of us needs to go to Jessica’s flat and fetch what remains of her possessions.’
‘Hold on.’ The thought of Sil rummaging through my underwear and trying to find wearable clothes in my jumble-sale of a wardrobe did not fill me with pleasure. And Zan would only do it if he was allowed to wear those creepy latex gloves. ‘Can’t I go myself?’
‘Of course.’ Zan inclined his head towards me. ‘If you feel that having coordinating shoes and bags is worth dying for.’ Another supercilious smile and he wafted from the room, passing Sil with barely a nod of acknowledgement. I sat on the bed and stared.
‘Does he know? About us, about what we did?’
Sil waved a non-committal hand. ‘Zan knows pretty much everything,’ he said. ‘Now, you going to let me in there, or have you got some hunky young stud naked in that bathroom already, now that you’ve broken your four-year celibacy rule?’
‘Where would I get a hunky young stud from? There’s at least one person too many in this house already.’ I didn’t exactly let him in; I just walked over towards the window, and he followed. He kicked the door shut behind him and the slam echoed down the landing like a cough. ‘Very butch. You don’t have to prove you’re a man to me, Sil, remember?’
I had my back to him, trying to fix my attention on the garden and not on Sil’s reflection in the window.
‘Jessie. What happened last night … I don’t think you understand what it meant … what it means to me. But you know it’s not like I can stop being vampire.’
‘A demon is for several lifetimes, not just for Christmas?’
He smiled. ‘You’re special, Jessie. And I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘Fine by me.’ I turned around to face him. ‘So, you can see yourself out then.’
‘There’s something in you, something that pulls me, something that I want more of. I can feel you, when you think of me there’s this …’ He made a fist and punched it towards his ribcage. ‘I don’t understand it.’
‘You’re going to get to the sex in a minute, aren’t you?’
‘The sex? Oh yeah, well, goes without saying, doesn’t it? I mean, it was incredible. It was – ’
‘All right, so I’m a world-class shag.’ I had to be cruel, had to be hard. Otherwise I was going to go down underneath the longing that hid inside me.
‘There were layers, it was feeling and thinking and being, all wrapped up in you. Jesus, Jessie, you made me remember the past like I never do, like I never want to do. You bring it all back, the sadness and the pain.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.
‘No! No, don’t be sorry. It’s good. You don’t understand, do you, Jessica? You think you know us so well; you read the pamphlets and the officially sanctioned books and you think that genuinely gives you an insight into our natures?’
‘Oh, I know you, all right. You’re a bunch of arrogant, emotionless, neutered killers.’
He dipped his head and took a small step closer to me. ‘And you truly believe that is all we are?’ A cool hand touched my cheek. ‘Truly? In your heart?’
