Once Bitten (18 page)

When I looked up it was to find Terry's face looking back at me from the mirrored cabinet. I turned round quickly and the wallet fell to the floor. She knelt down in front of me and picked it up and tapped it against her leg as she stood up. She had on a black silk robe with an orange and green dragon on the back that rippled as she moved as if it was preparing to breath fire.

“I didn't kill him, Jamie,” she said quietly. “You must believe me.”

“That's his wallet, though,” I said, trembling. “And you were found over his body.”

“He came around her one evening when I wasn't at home. But my friend was. He surprised my friend in the laboratory, and he reacted without thinking.”

“There was no blood in the body when it was found.”

She lifted her chin and tutted as if I'd said something irrelevant. “Christ, Jamie, my friend stabbed him in the chest, what else do you expect?”

“And you moved the body to the alley?”

“We both did. I mean, I could have managed on my own, either of us could, but we did it together, he was in his car when the police arrived so he left. There was no point in both of us getting caught.”

“He left you?” I said in disbelief.

"Like I said, there was no point in us both getting caught. We knew there was no murder weapon around so there'd be no hard evidence. We'd removed all his identification. We thought he was a burglar, it was only afterwards that I discovered that Greig had hired him to track me down.

Jamie, come back to bed." She hugged herself in the robe, the wallet still in her hand.

“There was blood on your face, Terry. On your lips.”

“I don't know how that got there. I suppose I must have got it on my hands when I helped move the body and then maybe wiped it across my face. Let's go to bed, Jamie. Please.”

“I want to sort this out first. This friend, this man. Who is he? A lover?”

She shook her head. “No, he's not a lover.”

“Where is he now?”

“Around. He doesn't live here, if that's what you mean. I live here alone. In fact most of the time I live in the apartment upstairs, it's cosier. This is more of a storage place and somewhere to work.”

“Why do you keep all that stuff? The pictures, the portraits, the books?”

“Memories,” she said, and there was genuine sadness in her voice. “They're all I have left. The people who gave me those things, most of them anyway, are long dead. I can't keep them, but I can keep what they gave me. I owe it to them. Can you understand that?”

I leant back against the sink and felt the marble dig into my spine. “What are you planning to add to your collection that'll remind you of me in years to come?” I said bitterly.

She took a step forward and put a finger up against my lips, silencing me. “It won't come to that, Jamie.”

I seized her hand and pushed it away. “How can you say that?” I shouted. “How can you possibly say that? How many others have you left, how many have you walked away from? Why do you think I'll be any different?”

“Because of the work Neil was doing,” she said softly. "He had isolated the gene that gives us our longevity, and he was close to designing a way of incorporating it into normal human DNA.

Jamie, he can make you one of us. If that's what you want."

She held out her hand for mine and I slowly reached out and took it. She squeezed gently. “You have to decide, Jamie. I want you with me for all time, and if you want it too it's yours for the taking. No bites on the neck, not like it is in the movies, just a straightforward scientific procedure.”

“But this Hamshire guy is missing.”

“We'll find him,” she said. We, she said. Not I. That's what I remembered as she led me back along the hall to the bedroom. We.

The Dream I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up. Couldn't, or didn't want to, I'm not sure which it was or to what extent there was an element of free will, but no matter what the reason I just let what was happening flow over me. Terry was there, and maybe that was the reason I didn't want to wake up. She was dressed in black, a jacket that might have been my motorcycle jacket over a black tshirt,

black jeans and black boots with what looked like silver tips on the toes. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and I remember thinking that I'd never seen her wearing her hair that way before and how good it looked.

We were in a wood, but not the normal sort of forest you find in real life, it was a caricature, the sort you'd see around the wicked witch's castle in a Walt Disney cartoon: deformed, gnarled trees with spindly branches that seemed to writhe and grasp as we moved close to them. It was a cold,

dark, fearful place. The trees had no leaves or buds and there was no grass on the floor of the forest,

just damp musty-smelling soil the colour of coal.

It was night but I had no trouble seeing Terry or the trees because overhead hung a full moon,

the sky so clear that I could see the individual craters on its surface. Terry looked at me and smiled and her teeth were as white as the moon and sharp, as sharp as a wolf's. She slowly put her head back so that I could see her whole throat exposed and the ponytail hung backwards away from the upturned collar of the jacket and then I heard the howl. I thought at first that it was coming from somewhere far in the distance because it was so quiet, but as it built and echoed around the forest it became obvious that it was her, howling at the moon. It was a terrible, mournful sound, the sound of a she-wolf in pain, howling for some great injustice that had been done to her. The howl tailed off and she lowered her chin and looked at me again. She pointed her index finger at her throat and moved it down a short distance, to where the Adam's apple would be if she had one. The sign for thirsty.

I put my index fingers together at waist level, pointing forward, and then moved them to the left,

separating and bringing them together as they moved. The sign for also. I was thirsty, too. I knew too that it was important that we didn't speak, that whatever we were doing had to be done in silence.

She waved me behind a tree and I hugged a large trunk, its bark cracked and creased into deep furrows filled with a pungent brown moss. Terry moved next to another twisted tree but I could still see her clearly. It wasn't just the moonlight, something had happened to my eyes that allowed me to see clearly even though it was well past midnight and we were in the depths of the forest and I knew that if I reached up to feel my teeth I'd find them long and sharp, like her's.

She made quick, stabbing motions with her pointed index finger, then pointed both index figures at each other and made a series of rolling motions. They come. She pressed her index finger against her pursed lips. Be quiet. I scowled. I knew that. Who did she think I was? Did I have Dumbshit written across my forehead, or what?

I crouched down and waited. My hearing was intensified, too. It was as if I could hear the slightest noise no matter how far away it was. High overhead I could hear the feathery flapping of an owl on the wing, to my right, a hundred yards or so, a small mouse scuffled along the ground and if I really tried a could hear its tiny heart beating a hundred times a minute. I could hear the footsteps of men walking in the distance. Three men. No. I put my head on one side and focussed on the sound. Two men and a child. A small child, its steps hesitant and clumsy. I listened carefully and realised that the two adults were holding the child by an arm each because occasionally the small steps would disappear as if the child was being swung in fun. I heard the swish of a skirt against smooth legs and knew for certain that it was a man, a woman, and a child.

Almost half a mile away. So far away and yet I knew everything. That was why I didn't try to escape from the dream, even though I knew I was asleep. I was enjoying the power.

Terry looked at me over her shoulder. No deaf and dumb sign language this time, she just raised one eyebrow. Ready? I nodded.

She moved, so quickly that I couldn't see the individual motions, it was just a black blur like a shadow cast by a curtain waving in the wind. A flicker. One moment she was crouched down at the base of the tree, the next she was in the air, her arms outstretched, her ponytail streaming behind her. I stood up and tried to follow, not sure what I should do. I ran and then my foot caught in something, a tree root perhaps, but instead of falling I kept moving through the air, a few feet above the ground and then I arched my back and I began to move up, curving through the air, twigs brushing against my arms, my eyes stinging from the wind. There was no need to flap my arms, or push, or do anything, I kept moving faster and faster and I seemed to be able to change direction just by moving my head. Terry was ahead of me and she turned and smiled and beckoned for me to catch her up. I flew faster, not knowing how I was speeding up but doing it anyway, and then I drew level with her and she reached out and touched me lightly on the shoulder, congratulating me,

making me feel good.

We flew up so that we were skimming the tops of the trees and then she pointed and I saw the three figures in the distance, walking side by side down a narrow path that threaded its way through the forest. Terry grinned and licked her lips and then she swooped down and I followed, the sudden descent pulling the wind from my lungs and making me gasp. They didn't see us until we were right on top of them. The man was in his early fifties, a strong, weatherbeaten face, dark brown eyes, a firm chin, wearing a dark workman's jacket and dirt-streaked jeans, the woman a few years younger but still pretty, big blue eyes, a laughing mouth, her hair hidden by a colourful scarf,

she was wearing a dark green coat over a green and white checked dress. The girl was about four or five years old, curly blonde hair, giggling and tugging at her parents' arms, wanting to be lifted.

What happened next came as a series of disparate images, like photographs shot with a time-lapse camera: the man looking up, his eyes widening with fear; the woman's left hand jumping up to her mouth to stifle her scream; Terry laughing; the child crying; Terry's hand reaching out, the fingers curled; the man's throat ripped clean open, blood spurting over his shoulder; the woman moving to scoop up the child; Terry laughing and rolling as she flew, her other hand curving to strike; the child falling to the floor, arms and legs scrabbling for something to hold on to; the woman's coat covered with blood as she crumpled to the floor. Then Terry and I were up in the air again, the cold breeze in our faces as we soared above the trees.

We circled, watching the girl kneel by her mother's side, taking her cold hand in her own and pushing it against her cheek, her tears mixing with the blood. Terry pointed at me and then at the girl. My turn. We dived down together, the ground rushing up and again it came as a series of separate images: the girl, blood on her cheek; Terry laughing; the girl's eyes open and blue, misty with tears; Terry's teeth, sharp and white making small biting motions; my hand forming a claw;

the girl reaching up with a small hand as if trying to fend off the attack; the forest floor leaping up at me. Then I twisted and turned and veered away from the girl and the two bodies and next I was standing behind them, my feet on the floor, my hand aching in its still-formed claw. I looked up and saw Terry whirling through the air, her eyes hard and menacing, then she flowed down and landed next to the girl and picked her up around the waist. The woman groaned as she lay dying on the ground but Terry ignored her. The girl cried out and struggled but Terry put her mouth next to her ear and whispered something and the child went still as if drugged. Terry kept her eyes on me as she walked up with the child.

“She's yours, Jamie,” she said as she got close.

“No,” I said. “I don't want her.”

“She's your's,” she repeated, only this time her face was changing, she wasn't Terry anymore she had blonde hair, blonde like the child's, and her eyes were the same blue. It wasn't Terry any more it was Deborah holding the child, only the child wasn't a child anymore, it was a baby.

“She's yours,” said Deborah and she held up the baby, and it wasn't healthy and laughing anymore it was crying and in pain and its lower half was as deformed and twisted as the trees in the forest around us.

“No!” I yelled. “No! No!”

Deborah narrowed her eyes and there was hate in them. “You can't kill a child!” she screamed.

“I don't want to kill her,” I shouted back. “I don't! I don't!”

Then I woke up to find Terry looking down on me, her hair brushing against my face. "Jamie?

What's wrong?" she asked as she put her hand up against my forehead. I was sweating.

“Bad dream,” I said.

“I'll say. What about?”

I shook my head and swallowed. “Nothing,” I said.

She smiled ruefully. “Jamie, if you don't want to tell me, that's one thing, but there's no need to lie. I've been lying here next to you for the last five minutes wondering whether or not to wake you up you looked so uncomfortable, so don't give me that 'nothing' crap.”

I closed my eyes. “I'm sorry,” I said. “It's my problem.”

“Problem?” she repeated, frowning. She lay down by my side, her chin resting on her right palm as she played with my chest with her left hand. “Was I in it?”

“Yes,” I said. It was easier to speak to her with my eyes closed. Strange patterns in red and orange danced around, spirals and circles, almost hypnotic. Her voice seemed very far away as if she was speaking to me from the end of a very long tunnel.

“You shouted something about a baby?”

“A child. We were hunting a child.”

“We?”

“You and me. We were in a wood, a terrifying, dark, cruel wood, blackened trees, tangles of brambles, a nightmare sort of place. We were flying.”

“Flying?” She sounded amused.

“We were flying through the woods, above them, and then we were attacking a couple and their child.“ I felt pressure on my eyelids and realised that Terry was kissing them softly. ”You killed them,“ I said. ”You ripped out their throats.”

“It was a bad dream, that's all,” she said soothingly. “We don't fly through the air, Jamie. We don't rip out people's throats. We don't kill children. We don't kill babies.”