Falling Apart (8 page)

‘He had
what
?' Liam stopped mid-stride and a shower of biscuit crumbs fell off the side of the plate he was carrying.

‘Not sure what it was. But stills from some other camera loop. I only had chance for a really quick look; was a bit worried they might have some sort of surveillance set up in there.'

‘And you saw …? Or is this twenty questions?'

I bit my lip and tried to twist the fear down, screw it up into a little ball somewhere I didn't have to feel it. ‘Film from a private camera. Don't know where it came from but …' I blinked hard. ‘I managed to scribble down the web address. Oh, and if it's password protected'—I dragged my phone out from my pocket and flashed up the picture—‘you might want to try some of these.'

‘Wow, Jess.' Liam actually looked impressed, and it was hard to impress Liam without some quite specialist equipment. ‘You're actually beginning to
listen
to some of the things I've been telling you.'

‘Yeah, yeah, just not all that stuff about
Star Trek
, obviously. Quick, get on here before someone suspects that I might not be as stupidly girly as I look and changes all his passwords.'

Liam fiddled about with his computer for a moment, raising his eyebrows now and then. Eventually he swung the monitor around. ‘Is this what you saw?'

The figure was stooped, folded up, like an umbrella that's been kept too long in a bucket in the hall. He held his arms in front of him, crossed over at the stomach, shoulders raised and head bent, like a mummified corpse walking. ‘Something … yes. But not this bit. Can you take it back to when he appears?'

‘Can't see where he comes from. He just walks into shot from behind that tree like he springs up in the middle of the square.'

We watched the film as the vampire, hair straggled around the back of his head and shoulders, walked on, still hunched as though confined to an invisible box. There were a few more shambled steps, a gradual ‘opening out' of his body and then he was running, so fast that the slightly shoddy camera film caught him in stop-frame motion, moving towards the crowded shopping area. ‘And that's moving, even for Sil. Like he's heading for something irresistible.' I watched for another couple of seconds. ‘So he was somewhere in that square. What's in Soho Square, apart from trees, a sort of shed thing, and grass?'

‘Squirrels?'

‘Liam, you had better not be suggesting that Sil was kidnapped by squirrels. Because there is a very special hell reserved for people who think like that, you know.'

Liam gave me a look. ‘No. But he was walking as though he'd just come out of somewhere, and if it had been one of the houses then the camera would have picked him up before. Unless it was behind the camera.'

‘But see how he kind of straightens himself up? Just here …' I rewound the film.

‘I suppose'—Liam began, very carefully—‘if he'd just got the scent of blood from the main street …'

I shivered and found that I was blinking hard. ‘This is wrong. Just wrong, on so many levels. I mean,
Sil
, behaving like this? I know he's not Zan, but even so … and if he wanted to bite, well, there's the clubs and the groupies and'—a sudden image of the Forces' Sweetheart and her designer pants—‘his fan club. Running amok in Central London when he must know it's a death sentence?' I rubbed my hands over my face. ‘Wrong.'

As though the force of habit was strong in him, Liam got up, collecting our mugs and heading out to the kitchen. Unwilling to be left alone with my thoughts, I followed him along the landing to the little kitchenette which sat beside the office and, I was willing to bet, the council didn't know about. They still forwarded any post to us labelled ‘To Whom it May Concern', and if they thought we had a kitchen then they might start charging us rent for our own department.

Liam leaned against the wall, waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘Okay, so what's the next step, Jess?' He was looking very hard into my face. ‘I know you, don't forget, so please don't give me any of that “let's get out and blow the bastard away” crap that you're about to start. You love Sil. And him going rogue and tearing out throats isn't going to change that. Oh, Lord, this is what I've been worried about all this time …'

‘No you haven't.' I sniffed hard and tried to knock tears away from my eyelids with my arm as I pretended to stretch. ‘And, if you remember, it was
you
who told us we should get together in the first place!'

‘Jess.' He put a hand on my arm. The kitchenette was so tiny that he could do this while still leaning against the wall. ‘This is real. This is the tough stuff now, the stuff we trained for. I know it's all been tranquing and admin up 'til now, I mean, apart from when you had to kill that demon, but that was just one of those things. This …'

I took a deep breath. ‘Hang on. I killed my
father,
not just any old demon, so it was not
one of those things
unless having demon relatives you knew nothing about is so common that Jeremy Kyle is about to do some kind of special on the subject. And what training? Why do you keep on about training? When? I don't think you've been out of my sight for more than a couple of days since you came on work experience; you've not had time to do anything more than a fire drill.'

‘Stop it.' He tightened his hand on me. ‘Jess. Please. Stop the gags. This is me, remember?' He crouched so that he could look into my face and his voice softened. ‘You're the person who knows Sil best; you're his only hope of getting out of this. We need you to find him so that … so we can end this. And it's your call, because I have no idea what to do now, go looking or wait it out or … but it's not just us, not just York, not just Harry and Eleanor at Enforcement, it's the entire country, Jess. They're all going to be looking for him and, right now, we are the only ones who want him alive. Come on, show your badass side, here.'

‘Liam, I'm an admin officer, I don't
have
a badass side. I don't even have a badass
ass
! I'm still afraid of the electric pencil sharpener, for God's sake.'

‘Your father was a semi-immortal demon who had more magic than an entire Derren Brown show. You've got a badass in your genes, and now might be the time to pull it out and show it to us all.'

I stared at him.

‘Okay, so maybe that came out wrong, and actually, now I come to think of it, a little bit pervy, but you know what I mean.'

Inside me, in the place that I rarely acknowledged because I wouldn't,
couldn't
, I felt a quick prick of fear. That part of me that held all the doubts about what I really was, underneath it all. About which side I would come down on, if it ever came to it, the part of me that held my demon inheritance, unexplored and unknown. ‘It's not like a dog, Liam. I can't just suddenly decide to bring it out on its lead and use it to track him; I've lived with it all these years and never even known I
had
it, so why should a demon heredity be of any use now?'

I'd lowered my voice to a hiss, just in case anyone in the neighbouring offices might have a glass to the wall, and Liam lowered his to match. ‘Because this is where you choose. Okay, yeah, I get why you ignore it, I get that you want to be human and pretend that you're nothing more than the daughter of a couple of teachers with a peculiar talent for spotting Otherworlders. But it's in you, somewhere, and if there's any
tiny little
part of you that can come out and do something about what's going on here – then now is the time to let it.'

‘The car.'

‘What?
Are you just saying random words, or is there supposed to be a point?' The kettle boiled and Liam began pouring the water into mugs. The steam funnelled and twirled in his face like a thousand appetising ghosts.

‘The car. Did he drive to London? Because you know what vamps are like for public transport.'

‘I know what
Zan
is like, because he and I share a healthy appreciation for not sitting next to a nutter coughing “Abide With Me” while a small child attempts to push a crayon up my nose.'

‘Sil is pretty much the same. Vampires are not really cut out for buses and trains; they don't have the patience. So he will have driven to London, probably in the Bugatti, and if he did … where is it?'

Liam stared at me. ‘Should I check with Vampire High Command? Ask Zan what he took?'

I went through into the main office and froze the computer on a frame of the back of Sil's head just as he moved through the gateway of the small square. Let my mind cast back into memories of his touch, the coolness of his skin against mine. The words he'd whisper when only I could hear. The way I could truly be myself and let go when his arms surrounded me and he held me so tightly against him. I pushed the thoughts away in favour of practicalities. ‘No, let's keep it dark, shall we? Might be nothing and Zan …'

‘Zan wants him brought down just like everyone else.'

‘Seems to. But then Zan has all the empathy of … well, he pretty much defines lack of empathy just by existing. So, let's not bring him in on this, yes?'

Liam slithered down off the desk, rubbing his hands together. ‘Okay. Sil usually drives the Bugatti, so I think we'll start with that one. Hmmm. Bugatti Veyron in London. Not exactly needle in a haystack, but coming close … Do you know the registration?'

I tore my eyes away from the peculiarly hunched figure on the screen. ‘Sorry.'

‘God, Jess, you are rubbish. What colour is it then?'

‘Um. It's shiny.'

Liam gave me a hard stare. ‘Just stop it. That girly act doesn't cut any ice with me; I've seen you with PMT when we've run out of coffee and you make Godzilla look like a misunderstood gecko on a locust come-down.'

‘No, seriously, it's a Pur Sang. You know, chrome?'

Liam did a complicated twisted-mouth expression, which managed to convey being impressed, annoyed and thinking deeply. ‘Okay then. Registered to who?'

‘Look, you wanted me to go badass. Checking vehicle registration is
not
badass. You're here for the non-badass side of things, I am going through this footage frame by frame for some kind of clue to what Sil's doing, which, given the level of eye strain I am enduring, is pretty badass.'

‘That's a long-winded way of saying you don't know, isn't it?'

I advanced the film another frame. ‘No, it's a long-winded way of saying find out yourself. Start by looking around the Soho Square area – he won't have left it far from where he was going. Vampires like casual walking about as much as they like public transport.'

Liam huffed, but started clacking away at his keyboard, making occasional noises of disapproval, while I raked through the pixellated images of Sil walking through the green square and then running towards Oxford Street to begin his feeding frenzy. Frame by frame, watching his figure start out groping like a horror-movie zombie, gradually flexing and straightening until he accelerated out of the camera's range, then watching the whole scene in reverse, as though something would become apparent in the cartoonish walking-backwards images.

Then I called up Google Images. Checked as much of Soho Square as I could, seeing nothing more than a small park containing a shed, but not much else, surrounded by select shops, large trendy businesses and some houses. There was a vampire club on one corner, marked by the typical Goth-font of the logo painted above the door and the dark-tinted windows, but nothing else noteworthy, unless your tastes ran to blurrily-captured pictures of pigeons.

So why was he there? If he'd been in the club, why had no-one come forward to sell their story to the gathering press-hoards: ‘My night of pleasure with off-the-rails City Vamp'? And it was eleven o'clock in the morning – the club would have shut at midnight, two a.m. latest
 …
Where had he been since then? And what had he been doing? Because, with the way he was walking, he looked as though he'd been doing it in a box.

‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?' Liam finally broke into my rapidly darkening thoughts. ‘You may want to have the biscuits to hand.'

‘Break it to me gently.'

‘I've found the car. Well, I've found
a
car, registered to Vamp Central. SLS 63 AMG.'

‘Is that the registration?'

‘That's the
car
,
you philistine. And the bad news is that it's been clamped and towed with a nice hefty parking fine; that's how I found it. Do you want the “well, that's slightly surprising” news now?'

‘Apart from the being clamped and towed? Which, to a vampire, is like admitting defeat? If you're going slowly enough to get a parking ticket you have failed in your basic mission to look cooler than the average fridge.'

‘It was lifted from the Embankment, five days after Sil left here.'

‘That's a fair way from Soho Square.'

‘Yep. Which begs the question, why was he parked down by the river if he had business in Soho, or vice versa?' Liam raised his eyebrows at me.

‘More coffee. Now.'

Liam hunched down into his ‘oppressed mass' stance. ‘Yessir!'

‘I need to think.'

As Liam left the office with the mugs again, I put my elbows on my desk and massaged my temples with my fingers to stop the encroaching headache.
Think. Think, Jess. If he left you for a more exciting life, well he succeeded there, but why go to London, where his face would be recognisable from any one of
Cosmo
's ‘Eligible Bachelors' articles. Why not go abroad? And why take one of the cars registered to York; why not go and buy something new, something fresh, start again?

I massaged harder as the headache threatened to kick in behind my eyeballs.
He took a Merc. A flash one, but not as instantly recognisable as the Bugatti, a bit more everyday. Was he trying to blend in? To pass as human in the crowd? Thinking he could blend in in a car that was bound to cost ten times an average salary would be a rookie vampire mistake though. And down at the Embankment? Why? Did he just fancy a quick look at the river before he went clubbing? Why not move the car?