Falling Apart (15 page)

Liam raised one eyebrow and knocked his hair away from his face with the back of a wrist. ‘He's in our system. And there's only one way that could happen … Well, no, there's two ways, but one of those involves Daniel Craig, two albatrosses and an enormous quantity of rubber bands, so I'm betting on you being involved.'

I stared at him. ‘How did you know?'

He rolled his eyes dramatically. ‘Jessica Grant, I've been here five, nearly six years now – and I want some kind of celebration when I reach the anniversary, not an In Deepest Sympathy card like last year.'

‘
I
thought it was funny.'

‘Hmm. Anyway. When I came you were trying to get by with a defunct Casio calculator and a word-processing machine that York council must have found on a skip somewhere. I
built
this system! I know this computer like I know my own daughter, better probably, given the length of time I spend in this office, and you expect me not to notice that someone is remotely trawling through our files and then hiding his trace by using a load of ISPs from all over the country?'

‘You and Zan, do you two get together and compare the size of your motherboards or something?'

‘Technology, Jess. Just because you think it's all done with magic and kittens doesn't mean the rest of us don't get it.' He came and sat down in front of me, perching on the edge of my desk with his legs crossed. ‘So come on. Tell Uncle Liam what laws you've broken this time.'

I leaned right back in my chair, threw my head back and let out a huge breath. ‘How long have you got?'

‘That depends. Is crying involved?'

I thought of Sil's face, those huge grey eyes full of anguish and hopelessness. ‘I can't promise it's not.'

‘In that case I've got all day.' Liam leaned forward, catching the arm of my chair and swivelling it so that he could see my face. His voice was lower, serious, and his eyes were full of concern. ‘If you've let him into our system, you are going to need me to cover his tracks, otherwise Head Office are going to be in here in— Well, knowing them, about ten years' time. But they are going to want answers, whenever they get round to finding out that they need them. Tell me; then you've at least got one person to watch your back.'

I told him. About Sil contacting me, about my hiding him, about … oh, about all of it. It was such a relief to unload, to let out the misery of my dad's illness, Sil, Zan, all of it. I splurged it all in possibly the world's longest unbroken sentence, with gulps of coffee to help me over some of the more unpalatable statements, and an occasional tissue-usage. ‘It just feels as if it's all coming at me at once, Liam. All directions, just shit flying towards me, and here's me armed with nothing but the latest council print-out and some very unflattering newspaper articles.' I finally forced myself to meet his eye. I'd been so afraid that I'd see censure there for my actions, I was steeled to start justifying myself again, but the only expression in those chestnut eyes was thoughtful consideration. ‘What?'

‘Thinking.'

And, incredibly, I felt the air start to move in my lungs again. As though I'd started holding my breath on the day the news about Sil had broken and only just let it out. Knowing that Liam was firmly on my side, that he might actually be able to help me through this mess, made the day seem just a tiny bit brighter. ‘Well okay, but don't let it become a habit.'

‘I'm not paid enough to have habits. Even biting my nails got too expensive,' Liam said, without losing that concentrated expression. Then, still staring into space and frowning slightly, he leaned further forward and touched my arm. ‘We can sort this, Jess,' he said, and his eyes finally came back from staring at some computerised version of the future. ‘We can. I'm not sure how much we can sort, but I can at least make sure Head Office don't know that your boyfriend is playing fast and loose with our darkest secrets.' He pushed away from the desk and sat in his own chair, cracking his knuckles over the keyboard. ‘Some of us have far too much to hide to let Head Office have the run of the system.'

‘Liam, you are a star,' I said quietly.

‘And please remember that next time the pay comes up for review.' He started typing, staccato bursts as though answering on-screen prompts. ‘I'm also putting a false track through into the Otherworld system, it won't hold Zan forever but it might just make him think he's been hacked by some random crawler for long enough to give us a break.'

‘You think so? He's pretty clever. Plus, he really doesn't have a life.'

‘You are underestimating my complete lack of hobbies, social activities and interests outside the home.' Liam thought a moment; then started typing again. ‘I grew up with computers; Zan had to pick them up from scratch. Let's just hope that those critical years that I spent clicking on the image of a teddy-bear's stomach to get giggle noises paid off.'

‘Yes, let's.'

‘And I know that every fibre of your nearly-human body is screaming at you to get out onto the streets and hunt down those lowlifes that attacked Richard, but, for the love of everything Whovian, please be sensible.'

‘Wow, and they cloned my mother while I wasn't looking! I should tell you now that I'm not tidying my bedroom, however cross you get.'

Liam glanced around the chaos on my side of the office: strewn papers, sandwich packets and biscuit wrappers mingled with forms and printouts. ‘I sort of guessed that,' he said in a pained tone.

‘I need to be out there, Liam. I need to be showing them that we're not taking this lying down, and we're not afraid of bullies. If I'm out on the street, even if it's just walking around, it will send the right message. And, besides, I've kind of promised Rachel that I'd pop in and I've been putting it off for weeks.'

Liam gave me a straight look. His untidy bush of hair crept back over his eyebrows again and he shoved it away. ‘
Just
walking around, Jess,' he said, sternly. ‘No shooting anyone. Even if you see those blokes, even if they're burning down the minster and casting aspersions on your entire family, you just call the human police, right?'

‘Wise words, Yoda.' I stood up. ‘You're right, of course you are. How did you get to know so much about these things?'

‘From breaking the law on an almost daily basis,' Liam said, vaguely, stirring his mouse to life. ‘Now, go. And please be careful.'

‘Have you always been this paranoid?' I pulled my jacket on and shrugged my arms down into the sleeves. The familiarity of the action and the knowledge that I was able to do
something
,
even if that was just walk around trying to look unconcerned, reassured me.

‘Hanging around with you has given me a healthy understanding of the phrase “trust no-one”. Since your demon dad turned up, I've sharpened up my reactions a bit, that's what nearly getting killed will do for you.'

‘Okay. Right, I'm off to go and drink artificial tea with soya milk in and eat pretend biscuits. Honestly, it's like playing cafes with a three-year-old.' I turned around to leave the office, but stopped in the doorway. ‘Thanks, Liam.'

‘As I've said before, I always have one eye to the Christmas bonus.' A sudden smile gave him a schoolboyish look. ‘Besides, my God, this is better than filing.'

I ran down the stairs to the road outside with a lighter step and a heart that, while it wasn't singing, was at least beginning to hum.

Sil stared in amazement at the screen. A message box was flashing in one corner, its closed envelope managing to look like both an implication of hope and also of deep dread.
Has Zan traced me? If I open it, am I setting myself up for Hunters piling through that door, doing their slick-suited efficiency thing; then taking me out to the yard and shooting me?
His demon was moving so fast that it seemed to flicker inside him, preparing to save itself by separating from his body, although that would mean his death, bullets or no bullets. He laid a hand against his chest, trying to remember how it had felt before, being human, nothing operating inside his body save his own will and heartbeat.
Shit. Too long ago for me to remember. Vampire is what I am now, however I try to persuade myself and her that I remain human enough. I fed on humans. How long can I hide, how long can I avoid the punishment?
Without giving himself any more time to think about the consequences, he clicked the flashing box and the message opened.

‘I'm opening all the files to you, plus the recently loaded software that Jess didn't have the protocols for. Just, you know, stay out of my e-mails, mate, okay?'

The instant rush of relief slackened his muscles in a slump of relief.
Liam. She's brought Liam in.
Technology was no longer the enemy; now he might be able to make some use of it instead of tiptoeing through the random files he'd had access to, scared of leaving a marker that would lead straight back to him. And Liam, his friend, his partner in crime in dubious adventures they both hoped Jess wouldn't find out about, who was now settled with a girlfriend and a baby and still as willing to put himself on the line as ever … Sil grinned, and for the first time in a long while it was a proper, human grin, not something that showed fangs.

‘She's got you on board? Blackmail again?' he typed into the flashing line below Liam's message and waited, realising as he did so how much he'd missed interaction with others.
Jess, naked, eyes dark with concern and her body consuming mine with the kind of fire that comes from loss of hope. Tears on my skin, the connection between us running like water, like a silver chain of faith
 …
The only thing that stops me falling on my sword, walking out into the world and surrendering myself.

‘Nothing on me, mate. And, hey, stop chatting and get searching. Want you back in the world so she can start nagging you and leave me alone. L'

Sil settled back in the chair and stretched out his legs.
I'm not alone. Jess and Liam are out there for me.
‘On it now,' he typed back, and split the screen, as half of his life set out to delve into the further reaches of the Liaison office computer system, while the other half watched the news channel.

The streets of York were full of tourists photographing buildings and each other, tripping over the cobbles in the Shambles and buying extortionately expensive key rings. Every green space was packed with people picnicking and toddlers chasing squirrels, a policeman was frowning at a double-parked van and everything was wonderfully,
humanly
normal. I could feel a ghoul somewhere, out of sight, trying to stay undercover until nightfall, but it didn't seem to be up to anything furtive, so I ignored it and felt its shudder of relief when I walked past its hiding place.

The sun was high, had burned the shadows back to stumps in the undercrofts of churches and the basements of the shops, and the humans, lulled as ever by the mistaken sense of security that full daylight gave them, were going about their businesses. I stood on the minster steps and looked around me. Yep, people being people, and a couple of vampires thankfully
not
being vampires but strolling along with only the usual number of heads turning and tongues lolling as they passed by. Situation normal.

And yet. Out there, somewhere, a sub-set of humanity was rising like the green scum that grew on the river every summer, floating on the surface suffocating life and causing a nasty stain along the banks. The Britain for Humans party. Equal-opportunity haters – vampires, ghouls, were-creatures, they'd bring equal violence to bear on any member of any race that was not human or no longer human.

I walked down to the riverside, opened the door to the building I had known so well, and climbed the stairs that still smelled of cabbage-dinners and unwise amounts of alcohol. Even the smell stirred memories of normality. When the worst I had to deal with was a frisky out-of-area vampire trying to get to the designer sales without a permit, or a Shadow hanging around the Job Centre, feeding off the desperation and unhappiness that pervaded all government offices. And now … I shook my head and hesitantly knocked on the door.

It was answered by a buxom blonde; the bux was natural and the blonde wasn't.

‘Hello, Rach.'

We'd shared this flat until I'd moved in with the vamps, although not many meals since Rachel's vegan, non-biscuit diet and mine were almost fatally incompatible, but she probably hadn't noticed I'd moved out yet, since she spent her downtime obsessing over her cat, who was less of a pet and more of a psychosis in fur.

‘Oh, Jessie, you came! I'm so glad, it's been
yonks!
' She grabbed me by the arm and wheeled me through the door and into the flat. There was a nasty mark on the carpet from the demon attack a few weeks back, and the place still smelled of a cat who uses a litter tray only when all other surfaces have let him down. ‘You said you'd come over
ages
ago.' She wandered into the kitchen and made rummaging noises. ‘Is it really posh, where you are now? I mean, the vampires, they've got loads of money, haven't they?' Her words held an edge of envy, but underneath them ran a tiny wobble of insecurity.

‘No,' I said, and then, more quietly, ‘it's horrible, Rach. Sil has …' My eyes stung with the tears I wouldn't,
couldn't
allow. If I folded now and let the knowledge of everything that was going wrong fall upon me, I'd never get up again. The only way I could keep going was to keep going – there would be time enough for tears later.

And suddenly my five-foot-two, vegan, cat-obsessive friend snapped back into her old role of wary comforter. ‘Oh, Jessie! I'm so sorry. I saw the news, it must all be dreadful for you.' A waist-level hug knocked the breath out of me for a second. ‘I'm going to put the kettle on. There's only soya milk but it's better for you anyway; your blood pressure is probably off the charts, and your stress levels must be scary.'

The tears pressed at the back of my eyes again and I followed her into the kitchen, where Jasper, the most malevolent ball of incipient moult outside a convention of really bad-tempered werewolves, was rumbling gently to himself as she poured him a saucer of pretend milk. ‘Rach, I came to say …' My voice faltered, dammed up behind all the stuff that lay between us, ‘I'm so, so sorry for what I did.'

A moment's hesitation in the stream of milk. Maybe she hadn't heard; my voice sounded, even to me, hoarse and unnatural. Less like an apology and more like a phone call from the Other Side. But then, I didn't often apologise for anything, did I? Saying ‘sorry' wasn't part of my skill set … Maybe I hadn't sounded convincing; maybe my tone had still held too much self-righteousness.

‘Jessie.' For one nerveless moment I thought she was going to reject my words, tell me what a nasty, selfish, heartless excuse for a person I was, and my skin stung with the heat of my blood as I prepared to acknowledge the truth of the situation. But then she abandoned the milk carton on the worktop and flew to hug me, her boobs distressingly embracing my ribcage until I felt as though I were being sucked into a sofa. ‘It's okay. Abbie and your mum explained it; you had to pretend to kill me to save the world. It's pretty cool actually – I saved the world by being dead! Like Jesus or something!'

‘Um, yes, okay, I suppose, if you want to see it like that …' I took a mouthful of the tea. It wasn't that bad. ‘So. What have you been up to?'

We fell easily back into our old parallel-chat-streams; I talked about work, about vampires and Liam and patrolling the streets, without making it sound glamorous, or easy or particularly fun, and Rach talked about people I'd never met doing things I'd never do in clothes I couldn't afford. The high point of her life at the moment, it seemed, was becoming a union rep at work.

‘So you haven't tried to re-let my room yet?'

‘Well, I did want to, once I knew you were … when I knew you'd got somewhere else,' Rachel said with, for her, a remarkable amount of tact. ‘But no-one seemed very keen – do you know, it's surprising how many people are allergic to cats?'

I managed not to look at Jasper, who'd followed us back into the living room and was scratching behind the sofa in a way that usually preceded a nasty smell. ‘Really?'

‘So, are you going to pick up some of your stuff, while you're here?'

I opened my mouth to say that I didn't need it any more, but then stopped the words with another swig of tea. Yes, all right, I had some new clothes; Zan had started to make sniffing noises when I came in wearing my old gear and I'd had the feeling he was only a few minutes away from laying down newspaper before I was allowed to sit. But my old stuff was
me.
The proper, human me that I'd been before. ‘Yes, might as well.'

Back at Vamp Central I unpacked the box we'd borrowed from Rach's job in the chemist. It indicated to any interested onlookers that I'd either decided to buy enough Tampax to last the rest of my fertile life or that I might need some kind of gynaecological intervention, but it had been the only box large enough to contain my photo albums, diaries, a selection of my less-damaged footwear and my surprisingly large collection of books about vampires.

Zan wandered into the living room just as I reached the ‘boot and shoe' layer, and almost visibly recoiled. ‘Jessica? What in the world has possessed you to bring that … bric-a-brac into this house? Would a garden bonfire not be sufficient?'

‘Just because you lot regard memories as something to be ashamed of, it doesn't mean we all have to carry on like something out of
Memento
.' I didn't add that only memories were keeping me from packing up and moving back in with Rach – that, and the knowledge that leaving this house would be like an admission that Sil and I were over. That he would never come back. ‘These things remind me of the days before I came to live here. All the things I had then that I don't have now.'

‘Body lice?' Zan sat in front of me on the leather sofa without even a reassuringly amusing farty sound.

‘Freedom. The ability to come and go as I wanted without the local press trying to grill me for news about Sil. This.' I brandished the scrapbook of clippings, stray wisps of dusty newsprint trailing and waving loose from its pages like a tattered flag of humanity. ‘What?'

Zan was staring at me, his eyes as cool, green and unemotional as fathoms-deep water. ‘Do you wish me to assist you?'

‘I …' Good grief. Zan was offering to
help
? When that help consisted of his emotional equivalent of a rat-infested sewer? ‘No, it's all right.' Then, because he still hadn't moved, and was still staring, ‘Thank you.' And then, because the staring was
still
going on, ‘What?'

Zan shook his head and let his gaze fall to the perfectly aligned seams of his trousers. ‘Ideas. Possibilities. Posits. Nothing to concern you, Jessica. Yet.'

‘Oh,' I carried on sorting, without feeling reassured. It was like having a peckish tiger watching you cut your toenails. The scrapbook creaked open and I started to turn the pages slowly, pausing occasionally to read snippets, or smile to myself at half-forgotten images. There, laid out in black-and-white, was the history of my time in Liaison, the newspaper coverage of my successful cases, my intermittent failures; pictures of my attendance at various council functions, always alone, always with a wary expression and a borrowed dress, and some peripheral events that I'd thought worthy of note.

There were also some pictures of Sil. I'd hoarded these like snippets of gold, clipping and pasting them into my book whilst persuading myself that I was doing it to keep an eye on his comings and goings, his various alliances and his sporadic dating of, apparently, every eligible female in the Otherworld fraternity. I tried to flick through these more quickly, although my eye kept getting snagged by images of those silver-grey eyes staring out beyond the camera to reach into my soul. Something inside me pulled again, that curiously umbilical feeling, and I put a hand to my heart as though to steady it.

Zan leaned forward. ‘Are you ill, Jessica?'

‘No, I …'

Those frosted-glass eyes flickered to the page I'd been looking at. Took in those newsprint sheets pasted so carefully, to ensure they didn't wrinkle or tear, and scanned over my handwritten annotations of date, setting and other, more personal, notes. ‘The connection is open between you, then. He must be experiencing something pertinent to you.' Zan seated himself back firmly on the sofa, but I knew him too well to assume he'd dismissed what he'd seen as the jottings of an extraordinarily dedicated Liaison officer. He knew me, after all.

‘It's … it feels more like a lively case of heartburn to me.' I gave my chest one quick final rub and flipped pages more quickly.

And then, suddenly, there was a cold hand on my wrist and Zan was jerking me upwards until I stood facing him, the scrapbook falling at my feet like a tatty remnant of another life. ‘This is no joking matter.' Zan's voice was very deep, very even, and he was standing way too close to me for it to be an accident. ‘Jessica, your connection to this vampire, it is not to be taken lightly. Do you imagine that every female who'—his voice tiptoed over the word—‘
loves
a vampire has the same reaction? Those deluded women who paste our pictures on their walls, who create a fantasy in which we feature, night after night; who read those fictions that even you collect so avidly – do you believe that they too feel something when the object of their desire allows them to stray across his mind?'

He smelled of something acerbic, something lemony that cut through the alluring ‘vampire' odour of darkness, as though the night had been turned into an exclusive perfume and marketed only to
really
good-looking people. His hand was still chill on my skin and his eyes, when I met his gaze, were drawn down green, no longer a light, almost human shade. ‘I realise that you can tear my throat out any time you like, Zan,' I said, steadily, ‘but we humans have a little thing called “personal space” and you are invading mine like an alien task-force, so firstly, please back up a little.'

The hand dropped from my wrist and fell to his side, like a defeat. Then he took a prissy, markedly small, step back and gave me a curt nod.

‘Thank you. And secondly, whatever Sil and I have going on, whatever runs between us, is none of your business. Just because you run Otherworld York, it doesn't allow you to indulge your repressed mother-in-law tendencies, all right?'

‘It is not the fact of your connection which is noteworthy; it is what that connection implies.' Zan looked as though he was about to touch me again, and whatever movement I unconsciously made must have looked slightly threatening, because he pulled his hand back and interleaved his fingers at groin level, possibly protectively. ‘It, and your incredible ability to sense Otherworlders, are not a human thing, and therefore must be a legacy of your bloodline. We must ask ourselves why your father, a ghyst demon, would have ever needed such an ability.'

‘Must we.'

An elegant eyebrow arched. ‘Well, those of us with any interest in the future of this world might. Those whose main topics of interest seem to include cheap hosiery and a rather'—a pointed look at my scrapbook—‘
adolescent
approach to desire, may not care, of course.'

I gave him a look. ‘You really do spend way too much time thinking about my life, don't you, Zan? Can't you just take up stamp collecting?'

‘And then there is the matter of your blood being so … ah …
affecting
to us.' There was a slight edge to these words that made me think this was the real reason he was bothering to have a conversation with me. ‘Jessica, has anyone ever mentioned the Twelve to you?'

I stared at him. ‘The twelve what? Like, the
Twelve O'Clock News
? Or the twelve disciples? Twelve days of Christmas?'

Zan sat on the farty sofa again. There was a slope to his shoulders that might, to a susceptible onlooker, have looked like worry. ‘We vampires have … tales … just rumours, whispers, that the human government discovered twelve humans who were immune to vampires. Nothing we could do would touch them, not glamour, or demon seed or anything, they were … impervious.' Zan's voice slowed. ‘They were our bogeymen, during the Troubles. An elite force that we could not affect.'