Vampire State of Mind (13 page)

I had a momentary urge to throw myself into Liam's arms and cry on his shoulder. But it
was
only momentary. ‘No. Honestly, Liam. I just think, when it comes to Sil, distance is a good thing.'

‘Is it because of Cameron?'

No-one had dared mention that name to me for a good few months now. My whole body went still at the sound. ‘No,' I eventually whispered. ‘No, Liam.'

‘You know lightning doesn't strike twice, Jessie. You shouldn't let losing Cameron prejudice you against all men.'

‘I didn't
lose
him. Look, I'm really going now. Lock up, will you?'

The mood changed like a coin-flip. ‘Okay. But be sure to go straight home now. No hanky-panky!'

‘Would I commit “hanky-panky”?'

Liam gave me an arch look. ‘The way you're looking right now you're more likely to commit murder, and I don't think I can raise the cash to keep you out of prison, so, you know, hanky-panky would be cheaper. I've got the tea money to think of here, and if you ever want to see another Kit Kat …'

I threw my phone at his head again on my way out. This time I missed.

When I got home, Malfaire was waiting.

‘Jessie!' Rach looked almost shifty as I walked in. ‘You've got a visitor!' A heavy wink and a tactful withdrawal told me she'd got him down as a prospective partner for me. She was probably busying herself in the kitchen icing heart shapes on to a million fat-and-dairy-free fairy cakes, in case I hadn't fully got the message.

Malfaire stood up and held a hand out. ‘Hello, Jessica.' He took my fingers in his and turned my hand over to examine the palm. He was wearing those dark glasses again, and his hair loose. The magic that pulled and tugged around him like the swell of an invisible sea brushed my skin and raised a nettle rash along my arms. ‘I must say, you don't appear very pleased to see me.'

I breathed deeply. ‘I want to know what you're playing at.'

‘Playing at? Jessica, surely I have made it clear that I find you attractive. Why should I need to be playing?' Slowly he peeled the glasses away from his face to reveal his eyes clouded with what looked like disappointment, and he dropped his head so that his hair concealed his face.

I sat down on the couch, knees carefully together. ‘There's a lot of things that have started happening to me just as you turned up. I've got demons talking about some kind of danger, vampires trying to bite me – all right, I never trusted him anyway but, even so, it's not the kind of thing he'd do, and Enforcement tried to shoot me in a bloody
chemist's
for God's sake, and I only got away because curlers are really, really heavy!' I realised that my voice was becoming shrill and that I might not be making a lot of sense. ‘And then there was the Run, and you were there. And you are – whatever it is that you are, I don't know.'

‘You can't tell?' He looked pleased, raising those pale amber eyes to mine. ‘You can't read me, Jessica? Perhaps you haven't tried yet.'

‘Oh, I have. So has Liam, but neither of us can get anything.'

‘Then try again, now. Come.' He took my hands and drew me up again, so that we stood face-to-face in the middle of the living room. ‘Look into me.'

Taking a deep breath I looked. Stepped into his eyes, where the cool tawny shades met the merest hint of green, like walking from shadows into light. Gold flecks moved through the colours, dancing and weaving a complicated pattern and hints of distant, half-remembered things swam in the darker hues at the centre.

But nothing spoke to me. Not the weird duality that you got in a vampire's eyes, where the demon and the subjugated human co-existed in the single space. Not the tight, focused feel that you got from staring at a werewolf's eyes either. Zombies I'd never needed to identify from the eyes; the fingers hanging by gristle was normally the clincher there.

‘Well, Jessica?' Malfaire's voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘What are you seeing?'

‘I'm not … you bastard, are you trying to glamour me?' I took a rapid two steps back until I collided with the small table. ‘Wow, I nearly fell for that one!'

Malfaire looked a little perturbed. ‘Glamour you? Why should I want to glamour you?'

‘I don't know.' Suddenly I was riding a tiger. And I didn't know if it was safer to hang on, or get off and face it. ‘Why should you want to call a hell-hound, or glamour Harry and Ellie? Or get my name pulled out for the Dead Run? Or try to magic Sil into biting me?'

He turned to me, and the planes and angles of his face were harder. ‘Because I wanted to know how strong you are.'

‘Great, I feel so much better. You didn't actually want me
dead
.'

‘No. Although, if you
had
died, I would have had my answer, wouldn't I?'

I didn't know whether to laugh in his face or crumple up and cry. ‘Did you kill Daim Willis?'

Malfaire blank-faced me.

‘All right, wrong question. Did you arrange to have Daim Willis killed?'

Malfaire turned away from me. ‘He was vampire. He deserved death.'

‘He was nineteen years old, Malfaire, and thick as a pig sandwich.' This was all moving way too fast for me. ‘All right then. Let's deal with the elephant in the room, shall we. Why the
hell
would you want to know how strong I am? Couldn't you have – I dunno – got me to take part in a lorry-pull or something? Because, I warn you, those things were all false positives and flukes. I am absolutely Missis Pathetico in the muscleman stakes.'

‘Oh, you are
so much more
than that.' Malfaire sat opposite me, leaned forward deliberately and seemed amused when I sat down and leaned back an equivalent amount so that we sat in a kind of reciprocating action. ‘One day there will be war again, Jessica. The vampires will be driven from this dimension.'

‘And what, exactly, does that have to do with me?' My brain was whirring – I must have sounded as though I had a clockwork head.
But if the vampires go … the Pact will break. It's only the fact that they are the strongest of the Others, that they want peace, that keeps everything holding together. And if they go, what makes them leave?
A cold feeling rose up inside me and chilled my throat as an unknown future stretched long and dark and full of conflict.

‘Because you will be at the forefront!' Malfaire's voice was almost inaudible. ‘That is why I wanted to test your strengths, your audacity.'

Uh oh. ‘I don't think so! I mean, what use would I be? I'm an office worker. In fact there's probably something in my contract about not fighting. I'm not even supposed to alter the height on my adjustable chair.'

The battle-light died in Malfaire's eyes, and his expression softened. ‘Ah, there's so much you don't know, little Jessica.' A finger traced along the line of my cheek. ‘And so much I hope you never know.'

‘All right, if you've quite finished patronising me.' I stood up. ‘I've known Zan and Sil aeons longer than I've known you, so why you'd think I'd take your part against them, I have no idea. And I've heard all this before; there's always some drunk raving on in the park about how we should kick the vampires out, send them back where they came from, crap like that. But, d'you know, there's a theory that says that it's having the Otherworlders to hate that's united mankind, stopped us fighting and hating each other. Made this world a better place. So, before you start spouting your tired rhetoric, perhaps you might like to think of that. Whatever you are.'

Malfaire sighed and picked his sunglasses up off the table, pulled them on tight against his eyes. He shook his head slowly, so that his hair fell over his face and caught against the cunning stubble decorating his exquisite cheekbones. ‘It wasn't that,' he said, flatly. ‘You must be with me.'

‘Okay, why now? I'm presuming you – whatever you are – came through when the field shifted? You and your kind have been here a hundred years?'

Malfaire gave a squeezed-looking smile, as though he was trying to avoid laughing out loud, and then tipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘If you must be precise, then yes.'

‘So, what's been stopping you up to now? I should point out that I only want to know so that I can make sure that there's much,
much
more of it.'

Again that small smile. ‘There is a rising faction, Jessica. Those who are increasingly unhappy with the terms of the Treaty; those terms that keep whole races suppressed, keep them from giving free rein to their natures. There is movement afoot to remove the vampires from their position of power and hand that power to those who have a more … shall we say
egalitarian
view.'

‘We all have to live here! We can all get along but there have to be rules!'

Malfaire moved towards the door. ‘But rules in whose favour? Perhaps you should think about that, my dear, before you lay yourself at the feet of your vampire lovers.'

‘You have
so
got the wrong idea about me!'

Rach bustled into the hallway, clearly distressed at the sound of my raised voice. ‘Oh, are you going, Mr Malfaire? Wouldn't you like to stay for dinner, or you could take Jessie out, she never goes out these days, she's always working, work, work, work; honestly, she never stops.' Over her shoulder in the kitchen I could see Jasper, poised on the work surface, frozen in the moment of a full-blown, arched-back, hissing session in the direction of Malfaire.

Malfaire moved like I'd only ever seen a vampire move – raised a hand and sent a stream of words in the direction of the cat, who shuddered once and fell quiet. There was a nasty smell of smouldering fur, Jasper gave a sudden un-catlike yelp and leapt into Rach's arms with the end of his tail scribing a smoky trail as he came.

‘And with that, you said goodbye to my
ever
being on your side!' I half-whispered, as Rach gave a strangled cry and tightened her arms around Jasper. It was a lie; he'd blown any chance of me siding with him when he'd said that Daim deserved to die. ‘Now, go.'

Malfaire paused on his way through the door and smiled, an amused-as-though-I'd-been-a-clever-pet smile. ‘The time will come, yes, it is not far now, when you will
beg
for me.' Then he laughed, and clicked the door shut, leaving me steaming with anger on the inside.

Bastard. I didn't waste any time, I was straight on the phone to Sil, who, ten minutes later, appeared at the front door. I let him in and then went back to comforting Rach, who was slumped on the sofa still weeping into Jasper's, by now rather irritated, fur.

‘You're having a rethink?' Sil winced at the sight of the cat. Vampires actually like cats, they're very alike in a lot of ways. Particularly the killing ways.

‘Bloody Malfaire,' I answered, tightly, and brought him up to speed on what had happened. Sil sat and listened, one hand absentmindedly stroking Jasper's ears. When I'd finished talking, he sat back, his fangs showing a touch, which meant he was angry. Either that or aroused, and I was betting that a crying woman, an annoyed, if head-locked, cat and me were not the sort of things that Sil got off on.

‘Rachel,' he said. ‘Look. At. Me.'

Rach turned, instinctively, to look at him, and gave a little whimper. ‘Yes?' then went silent. Jasper jumped to the floor with a spiked-fur look of relief and began washing himself under the table. I glanced across and met a pair of eyes which shone pure black, iris and pupil bled together into one, like a hole in the soul. Sil's almost classically beautiful face was emotionless.

‘You're glamouring her!'

His eyes stayed fixed on Rach's eerily expressionless face. ‘Yes, Jessica, I know.'

‘Why?'

Sil waved a hand. ‘We need to talk. Seriously. And I remember you talking about your friend and her tendency to press snacks on people as soon as they sit down, and I'm feeling pretty hair trigger here at the moment, Jessie, I don't know if I can stand someone offering me hummus dip and carrot sticks without my turning round and doing something REALLY NASTY, okay?'

Definitely angry then.

‘So.' I waited for his eyes to return to as near normal as was normal for him. ‘What are we talking about?'

He dropped his head towards his chest, so that his dark fringe flopped over his face. ‘Jessica,' he sounded a bit strangled, ‘I don't know if you are being incredibly dense or incredibly brave here, but, knowing you I'd go for dense.' Now the head came up fast and I didn't look away quickly enough to avoid meeting his eye. ‘Take the protection, in the name of all that's holy, just
take it
.' The speed with which he jumped to his feet made the cat bristle at him suddenly and dash behind the sofa. It even made
me
start and I'd been expecting it; Sil was showing all the signs of buttoned-down anger that had manifested in our previous Great Bust Up. His eyes were flickering black to silver and his jaw was tight.

I took a deep breath and sighed it out, trying to lose the frustration and general low-level annoyance that being close to Sil brought on. ‘I'm not dead. Malfaire might be on my case but even with what he's pulled so far, I'm still here. So maybe I don't need your protection, and I am managing to deduce – even though by your definition I've got the intellectual capacity of a slug – that the whole protection thing is bigger than you presenting me with an Uzi and an instruction manual. Am I right?'

‘Like I'd let you loose with an Uzi! You'd probably manage to destroy all the major tourist attractions in one afternoon.'

Yelling at belt-level made me feel at a disadvantage, so I stood up too, to face him. ‘Yeah, well,
I'm
not the one who got themselves glamoured into trying to kill someone, am I?' We stared huffily at one another for a few moments, then I sighed and sat down again next to the unnaturally still Rachel. ‘Sil. You've got a city to run, all those meetings and civic things and being the Face of York. You couldn't do that if you were trying to keep me out of trouble, could you?'

He sat opposite me so fast that our knees nearly cracked together under the central table. ‘I'm going to tell you something,' he said, lowering his voice and leaning towards me with his elbows on the table. ‘It's confidential, all right? I mean, completely, not a word to anyone, Rachel or Liam or anyone.'

‘You're secretly a woman.' I leaned forward, too.

‘Well, obviously.' Unexpectedly he reached out, spreading long fingers on the tabletop like he wanted to touch me but was trying not to. ‘Jessie. I came to work with you …'

‘… to learn more about human/Otherworld interactions, I know, I remember. To help you run the city better.'

‘To report back to Zan.' The fingers curled back under his palms. ‘Do you understand?'

‘Well, yes, he's in charge of all the admin stuff … oh.' I let myself meet his eyes for the first time, properly. ‘You mean Zan is the one who's
really
in charge? He's running the city and you're like, what, a figurehead?'