Vampire State of Mind, page 23
‘Jonathan,’ I said, very softly. Almost under my breath. Rolled with the feeling, let the whole thing take me under until I felt it in my lungs, drowned in it. ‘Not Sil. Not with me.’
‘But I have to experience, to feel, the blood and the white-heat of the lust and the danger, do you see?’
I took a deep breath. If this was all going to end in war and death – and I was not accepting that as a foregone conclusion, but you never knew – I was not leaving unfinished business. ‘And that’s the problem. How on earth can I let myself love you when I’d never know where you were, or who you were with? Vampires are like Jeremy Kyle’s secret weapon in the viewing figures war; you said it yourself, Sil. You feed and fuck and it doesn’t touch you. Nothing touches you.’
The vampire moved closer and I didn’t know who I was seeing, Sil with his white-eyed disdain, or Jonathan, shaking with pain he was trying to forget. ‘Love?’
‘Four years, Sil. And every time I see you with someone else it’s like broken glass behind my eyes.’
A slow shake of the head. ‘I never knew.’
‘No, of course you didn’t! Too busy shaking everybody else up. Why did you think I slapped you when you tried to kiss me?’
Sil sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I thought you were scared of me. I –’ He broke off and ran his hands through his hair. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. So, last night was – what?’
‘An aberration. I slipped, all right? You were there and …’ the tears began to leak out, ‘and I’m frightened, and I was cold and you … you.’
The vampire closed his eyes and threw himself back on the bed, lying sprawled. ‘So you refused to allow your feelings for me even when I kissed you? You really are the most utterly exasperating person I have ever known, and I have known quite a few lawyers, so that is really saying something.’
‘That’s not fair, Sil. I can’t control the way I feel, but I can control what happens to me, and I refuse to trail along behind you with my tongue hanging out, just waiting for that moment when you decide to turn around and notice me. When your bed is cold and you fancy a quick fuck to warm it up ready for the next victim – I won’t be that woman, Sil. I might love you but that doesn’t mean I’m going to lie down and let you walk all over me.’ I sniffed hard and tried to drag the tears back up my cheeks by the power of suction.
His eyes opened; a dark, slate colour now. ‘You still have no real understanding, do you? Of my kind, of how we have to live?’ He moved from prone to standing beside me in one slick, vampire-move. ‘Try. Just for one second step outside your oh-so-human mindset and imagine what it is to be one of us.’
I was crying properly now. ‘What do you mean? Jonathan?’ I looked into his face, felt his demon relishing the moment.
His hands went up, reached around to cup the back of my head, hold me steady. ‘As you keep reminding me, I have been vampire for nearly a hundred years.’
‘What do you want, a party?’ I dropped my eyes from his, stared at the garish pattern on the carpet, where swirls and broken colour blocks made it look as though someone had been violently ill several centuries ago and no-one had cleared up.
‘Jessica. You judge me, you judge all vampires, by your human standards. You humans, you believe we can’t feel, that we are the ultimate in emotional detachment.’ His hand was insistent on my neck, not letting me turn my head away; all I could do was keep my eyes on that horrible carpet.
‘Well, you can’t, can you? You shag around and you party like it’s the end of the world and you don’t love or care for anyone except yourselves. I’ve seen you, Sil, don’t forget. I was at that club when you danced as though you and she were wearing the same knickers and then you …’ I swallowed. ‘Then you drank her blood.’ My gaze travelled back up, almost against my will. ‘Now tell me that’s the behaviour of a caring, compassionate member of society.’
There was a sudden draught at the back of my neck as his hands fell away. ‘All right,’ he said, and his voice was very quiet now. ‘All right. We party. We need the thrills and the highs … our demons need those. But tell me this, Jessica –’ His voice became so quiet that I had to lean in close to hear his words. Felt them breathed against my cheek. ‘If we have no feelings, if we care so little, why does the memory of my wife and children make me weep?’
He was only voicing something that I’d wondered myself, but I’d pushed the thought away, squirrelled it somewhere under my ribs, behind my heart. If he felt … if he could feel … could he feel for me? And, if he could, then what on earth was all the vampire cold-bloodedness about? ‘I don’t …’
‘Jessica. The reason vampires don’t feel? The reason we dare not?’ And there he was again, right in front of me, head slightly tilted and his eyes holding me, preventing me from looking away. ‘It is because we are cowards. If we allow ourselves to feel, then we have to live with our guilt.’ He turned, swift and lithe, and began pacing the carpet of the ornate room, like a wolf moving through Versailles. ‘A century, Jess. A hundred years, and most of those spent living on the edge. Killing, feeding, turning those we desired.’ His voice was matter-of-fact, but I could see the way his hands twisted around one another, fingers interlocking and releasing, as though he was trying to squeeze the pain from his words to keep his tone level. ‘I’ve done … we’ve all done things … And after a few years, we learn to stop feeling. To lock away every trace of emotion, because otherwise …’ He stopped. Put his hands on the window ledge and leaned to stare out over the gardens. ‘Because otherwise the guilt would kill us.’
‘Sil …’
‘The only way to live is to forget. But I carry that guilt. And uppermost is the guilt of the night they died. Joseph and Constance. I wasn’t there, Jess. I wasn’t there to hold them or protect them or …’ A sudden biting-off of the words and his head dropped. His shoulders moved, jerked twice and when he spoke again his voice was thin. ‘Christie was right to send me away. Because I would have turned them. If I’d been there, I would have turned my own children. Her, too. I might have condemned them to lives that needed lethal amounts of adrenaline to function, and back then there wasn’t the synth; we had to bite to live.’ I felt his demon give a shiver, felt it rise within him, called by whatever feelings he was working so hard to suppress, and watched him straighten as though it drove steel through his spine. ‘And that is why vampires are emotionless. Not because we cannot feel but because we dare not.’
He faced me again, eyes pale grey once more. There was no trace of the suffering on his face now.
‘So you don’t want to feel, because you don’t like feeling guilty? Damn it, Sil, that’s like cutting off your head because you don’t like your hairstyle! What about all the good stuff – do you deny yourselves that just so that you don’t have to suffer a few sleepless nights? Because that’s pretty crazy.’
A shake of his head. ‘You still do not understand, Jessica. Half-demon, and yet you still think like a human.’ He sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Imagine the worst thing you have ever done.’ A flicker of a smile moved across his lips, almost invisibly fast, ‘and no, breaking the tracker programme was not the worst thing. Worse than that.’
I frowned. ‘I’ve never …’ and then a huge flashback to the sight of Malfaire, hands raking at the air and blood seeping through his immaculate jacket. The terrible feeling that had settled over me before we hit the river; I’d taken a life, and nothing would ever be the same again. ‘Oh.’
His eyes opened, dark now. Brewing-storm dark. ‘I have done terrible things, Jessica. Terrible, evil, wicked things. I have killed, men, women, children, just to satisfy my hunger. I took …’ Cool fingers touched my neck and I became aware of my pulse, leaping in my veins as if my corpuscles were taking part in a skipping contest; when I looked up at Sil’s face his fangs were down, touching his lower lip and making his mouth flex. ‘I could take you. Now, here, tear your throat out and walk away without even a moment’s remorse. Because that is what it truly means to be vampire. That is what sets us apart from the humans, not our desire for blood, but our ability to know that guilt exists, and to deny it.’
‘To save you from pain.’
‘Because we are spineless and weak.’
I looked up into a face that should have seemed cruel, predatory. But all I saw was the man behind the predator – the man who’d been willing to die for me, the man who had sat with me as I found out the truth about my parentage. The man who had held me and cried when he’d finally let himself feel. ‘No. You aren’t weak, Jonathan. You acknowledge what you’ve done, and a weak man could never do that.’
‘Thank you.’ Now his hands moved to tilt my chin, to cup my cheek as his mouth moved closer. ‘Thank you.’
This time his lips were cool on my mouth, but there was nothing different in the way our bodies reacted to one another. Mine liquefied and his leapt. The mystery was gone but was replaced by a sureness, a deftness. I knew now how much he liked my fingers touching, stroking, rewarded by a hardness that reflected the fact that he was, still, really only twenty-nine. He knew how to make me squirm against the pressure of his hand until I gasped his name, his real name, and dug my nails into the skin of his back while he held my weight and looked into my eyes. And then, on the complex woven covering to the intricately carved bed, we rode one another hard. The confusion and the repressed emotion we both carried drove us on to extremes, to wordless sounds and our names, whispered over and over, as our bodies hummed with a passion that was almost flamethrower-strong.
Whoever said that it was better to have loved and lost had clearly never spent any time in bed with a vampire.
And, of course, I woke up an hour or so later, alone.
‘Stupid, stupid,’ I berated myself, once I’d blearily opened my eyes and stopped patting the evidently smooth sheet on the other side of the bed. ‘What did you expect?’ And I climbed out of the bed, although, given the height, it was more like climbing off, and headed for the shower, still chastising myself for having even considered the possibility that Sil would have held me until I woke; would have stayed.
My mobile rang as I stood in the shower, my head lathered as I sang ‘Gonna wash that man right out of my hair’ under my breath. I shot out from under the water to pick it up, my still-active inner teenager hoping that it might be Sil, whilst my over-thirty outer self knew that he would have just knocked on the door.
At first there was no voice on the other end, and I feared that I’d suffered shampoo-eye for a sales call, until I heard the whispered words, sibilant through the tiny speaker. ‘I have your family.’ Malfaire.
Hysteria didn’t even come close. I ran from the shower, covering myself with my mobile phone and the hand towel, with my hair dripping soap down my back. I dialled the farm, got the ‘unavailable’ tone and dialled again, one-handed, as I mopped water from my eyes. Unavailable. Again. And again, until I’d covered the bedroom floor in wet footprints and stood at the door, screaming. Zan arrived first, actually managing to look reasonably human as he pounded up the stairs still clutching a glass of freshly poured blood. Sil was close behind and Liam puffed along last, carrying an unexplained screwdriver.
‘If this is a spider,’ Sil began, but I flung myself at Zan with blatant disregard for the tiny towel.
‘This is your fault, you said they were safe! You said he wouldn’t touch them and – oh God, I never thought – he might have Abbie as well; he said he was going to try to hurt me through other people and now he’s at the farm, the phones are dead, and they could be dying; I never thought, I should have thought … it’s my fault. Why didn’t I warn them? My family … I need to get up there.’ I slapped at Zan’s rock-hard chest, wanting, needing him to feel my anguish, to hurry, to do something.
Zan’s hand was so cold on my water-warmed flesh that I nearly dropped the towel. ‘Go and dress, Jessica.’ Over my head, he and Sil exchanged a look. ‘Sil, find transport. Take her.’
‘On it now.’ Ignoring me, Sil swung away back down the stairs. Liam dropped the screwdriver and I realised that my boobs were totally uncovered.
‘Go and dress,’ Zan repeated, seemingly unmoved by my chestal anatomy. ‘And finish washing your hair.’
I managed a world-record shower and hair-rinse and found my discarded jeans and knickers at the foot of the bed. My bra and top were nowhere to be seen, so I pulled Sil’s black shirt from where it had fallen and been forgotten, and put that on. When I opened the bedroom door again, Zan was still standing there. He looked me up and down with what might have been a sigh.
‘We need to go now!’
Without speaking Zan turned and headed down the stairs. I followed fast and nearly cannoned into Liam who was waiting at the bottom.
‘It’ll be all right, Jessie. Don’t worry.’
‘Now say that again, to my face this time, Liam.’
He dragged his eyes upwards with an unashamed grin. ‘Sorry.’
The two vampires were muttering to one another in the hallway. Sil was juggling a set of car keys. ‘It’s outside. We can be gone in two minutes.’
‘And I shall hold things here.’
‘Yes. But be careful, this is probably …’
‘Can we just go!’
The vampires exchanged another look. ‘We cannot take the risk he is lying,’ Sil said. ‘We may have been wrong to assume that he would direct his anger at Jessica alone. He really may have her family. He did threaten to kill those close to her. First.’
‘Are you armed?’
‘What do you think this is, the High Chaparral? Let’s leave, now! Sil!’
Sil and Zan gave one another a curt nod, which looked oddly formal and then Sil grabbed my elbow, dragged me out of the door, and I shut up totally. He was tugging me towards the most beautiful car I had ever seen in my life.
‘Is this yours?’
He shrugged and slid into the driving seat. ‘Among others,’ he said, as though owning a Bugatti Veyron Pur Sang was meaningless. ‘Get in.’
I hardly dared touch the immaculate chrome of the door; this was less of a car and more of a machine for taking your fingerprints. Behind the wheel, Sil looked so coolly at home that my throat hurt; something about his slender sexiness was perfectly matched to the vehicle. ‘But this car …’
‘Built by vampires, for vampires.’ Sil barely waited for me to belt myself into place before we were squealing our way out of the centre of York. It was like being strapped inside a bullet.
I stared out of the dark-tinted window, willing the countryside past faster. ‘He’ll have those Shadows with him again, and maybe more wights. Can’t this thing go any quicker?’
‘Have you got a plan?’
I shook my head. ‘No. No plan. But it struck me earlier, Sil. Nothing is unkillable. If he was, I mean really, truly immortal, then why would he need to be able to breed? And anything that can produce offspring must die. Fundamental rule of the Universe.’
‘Earlier. You mean when we were …?’
He looked so affronted that, despite everything, I laughed. ‘No! Good grief, I hardly had time to draw breath, let alone think deep thoughts.’
‘Well. Good.’
‘Can’t this thing go any faster?’
‘You’re repeating yourself. No, it can’t.’
Capable hands spun the wheel and I imagined my mother facing down Malfaire in the cluttered kitchen, with only the old Labrador as defence. ‘Please make it go faster.’
Sil nudged a bit more speed out of the engine. ‘So, we are hurrying now, are we? Have you spoken to your parents since you found out about Malfaire? Or are we dashing to the rescue of some people you’re going to pretend are nothing to do with you when this is over?’
I stared at him. ‘Don’t you dare moralise to me.’
‘Someone has to, Jessie. Think of what they’ve been through. First they lost a child, then they took on the offspring of a demon without knowing who or what you may turn out to be. Your own natural mother was afraid of what you might be and yet they lied and dissembled in order to bring you up, to keep you safe; they even moved here, away from what they knew, so that your identity would be kept secret. You are their daughter and a simple fact of genetics doesn’t change that. Haven’t you ever thought of that? And that they must have worried themselves sick about what you might be – but they loved you all the same, brought you up with human values despite it all?’ He shook his head. ‘You need to start thinking about that, Jessie, not just yourself.’
‘Turn here.’
‘You’re avoiding the subject.’
‘We need to turn left here to get to the farm,’ I repeated. ‘And we’re doing nearly two hundred miles an hour.’ I kept my tone level and even. The car started to slow, and made the turn with the rear spoiler brake fully extended while he concentrated on the ridiculously complicated gear-change mechanism and the Sat Nav device which was currently telling us we were in the middle of Hampshire.
I made him park in the small paddock out of sight of the house. ‘If Malfaire is still there, if he’s holding them there, he’ll be waiting for us.’
‘Then what do you suggest?’
‘I spent my teenage years going to parties despite being grounded. I know at least seventeen ways of getting in and out of the house without being seen.’
Sil raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Show me.’
His tight trousers weren’t the best things for skulking along the ditch line in, but he never mentioned the mud or the brambles or anything. We hustled along the sunken trench, crept through the old dairy-house door and in the back of the walk-in larder, arriving in the kitchen in time to cause my mother to drop an entire tray of scones.
‘Oh, my dear Lord!’ The Labrador, sensing a unique opportunity, began gobbling down the oven-hot scones as my mother … Jenny … collapsed on to a chair. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘Over the fields. Where is he?’
‘Over in the barn, I think. Jessica, I’m so glad you came …’
