Chapter Thirteen

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?’

Sil dropped his eyes as though he was ashamed. ‘I’m the disposable one. Anything happens to me, things run on as normal. They just appoint someone else to do the high-visibility stuff, because all the real negotiations and political stuff is being dealt with behind the scenes by the same vamp who has been doing it for the last sixty years. Before me there was Strel, he was killed in a firefight during the Troubles, so Zan asked me to take his job. I do the face-to-face stuff but Zan briefs me on what to say and who to say it to. Except now, obviously,’ he added quickly. ‘This is just me.’

‘That’s quite clever.’ I almost smiled for a minute, before I remembered that I was more than a bit aggravated with him. ‘Oh, for a bunch of bloodsucking, parasitic life-forms, of course. What about if something happens to Zan?’

‘Who the hell would want to take out an admin assistant? You’ve got to admit it, Jessie, he plays the part well, all that fussing with computers and being obsessed with the state of the technology; he’s like Über Geek.’

‘You mean it’s like protective colouration?’

‘No, he actually is a geek. But a much more powerful one than anyone thinks. So then. What do you think?’

‘About Zan really being the one who runs the city? Why should I care? It’s only your bit he’s in charge of, after all, the Otherworlder part. I still have to work my way through ninety layers of council authority before I even get near anyone who can give permission to buy new biros.’

Sil snapped to his feet, vampire-fast. I carefully didn’t jump again. ‘No! Jessie …’ He let out a brief hiss and his fangs slid over his bottom lip. I found myself looking around the room for potential weaponry. ‘I told you all that so that you’d trust me!’

There was a wooden candlestick with a fairly pointy end on the table. It would do as a stake if nothing else presented itself. Why, why, had I left the tranqs in my room? ‘Oh yeah, ’cos you look really trustworthy right now.’

‘Sorry.’ He put both hands on the table again and took a deep breath. ‘You are winding me up beyond all mortal understanding.’

There was a pain where my heart should have been. I wanted to stretch out an arm and touch his cheek, make him look at me, make him smile … I shook my head fast enough to descramble my brain. God, I have got to get out more.

‘Remember … remember how it used to be?’ His voice had softened a bit and the fangs were gone. ‘You and me working together? We were a good team, Jessie; you could trust me then to watch your back. In fact, I saved your skin a few times, if memory serves.’

‘I might have …’

‘Jessica. When trouble came, it was you and me. Oh, and Liam, but then trouble rarely comes in the form of something that can be beaten off with paperwork.’

‘Unless it comes from the Town Hall.’

He nodded slowly. ‘True. For beating off bureaucracy, Liam heads the team. But for other things … without me, you wouldn’t be here, in this room!’

‘Being shouted at by you!’

‘At least you’re alive to be shouted at.’ Now he touched me, just the tips of his fingers against the back of my hand, but I felt every single nerve-ending go into overdrive. ‘I’m vampire, as you take pleasure in pointing out at every single bloody opportunity. All right, I got glamoured, but that will not be happening again, and I have the speed, the strength, the power to protect you. Whatever this Malfaire is, whatever he wants from you, you can’t win against him.’

‘But he knows I’ve survived so far. The hell-hound and you attacking me and all the other stuff – I got through it.’ The feel of his skin against mine was beginning to twist my thoughts, turn them hot and uncomfortable.

‘Yes.’ Now Sil lowered his voice until I had to lean closer. His fingertips slid to my wrist, where my pulse was banging away … no, not banging, don’t think about banging … beating fast. ‘Now he knows exactly how strong you are. He’s taken your measure, do you see? Now you’ve turned against him, next time he’s only got to –’ a sudden sweep of his elbow and he knocked the wooden candleholder to the floor, where it cracked and the end fell off in a particularly illustrative way. ‘Please, Jessie, please take my protection.’

I stared at him. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say please before.’

‘I will recite the works of William Shakespeare if it means you’ll do it.’

The air was thick and heavy and smelled of singed cat fur. I looked at the immobile figure of Rach, her arms still posed as though holding Jasper. He could do that. He could glamour, he could move like a rattlesnake and he had the power of every vampire in the city at his disposal – or at least, as I now knew, Zan did, but same thing.

And, call me Missus Superficial, but damn, he was gorgeous.

‘Oh, all right then,’ I said, aware that I sounded less than bowled over. ‘I’ll take your protection stuff.’

‘All right!’ Sil said, more schoolboy than vampire. Trouble was, he’d been a schoolboy when Dracula was first published. ‘Then, Jessica Amelia Grant, I extend to you my protection.’

There was a momentary silence.

‘Is that it? I’m still waiting for the fireworks.’

Sil gave me a sideways grin. ‘No, Jessie. The fireworks come later,’ he said, in a tone I wasn’t quite sure I liked.

‘You look – is that expression happy?’ Zan swivelled to watch Sil’s entrance to the office.

‘Better believe it.’ Sil leaned against the doorframe for a second longer, enjoying the other vampire’s incredulity. ‘Jessica Grant has taken my protection.’

Zan whistled. ‘And you, of course, made her aware of all the … ahem … implications of this? Having you watching her for all the hours of the day?’

Sil shrugged. ‘I skirted round those.’ Deep inside his demon was turning cartwheels in the hormonal soup that he had become. Jessie. Why the hell do I want her so much? And why did it feel so good when I touched her hand? ‘And I had to tell her about you.’

Was it his imagination or did Zan jump a little. ‘What about me?’

‘About the city.’

‘Oh. Should I be concerned?’

‘Not sure.’ Sil slithered into the seat opposite Zan and put his feet up on the desk. ‘That Malfaire creature is up to something. Been mouthing off about vampires being thrown from this dimension and war coming, usual megalomaniac ramblings, but there is definitely something different about this one. You found out what he is yet?’

Zan shook his head. ‘Feet. Off.’

Sil wrinkled his nose, but complied. He let his eyes unfocus, riding the ridiculous high that simply having a conversation with Jessica had brought. His fingers still tingled with the warmth of her skin, but the rest of him was a nameless ache. His demon moved and he was suddenly hungry. ‘Think I might pop into Hagg Baba,’ he said, trying for casual. ‘Anything you want?’

Zan, debugging a file, barely looked at him. ‘I’ve eaten.’ He was nodding towards the empty bottles when his body gave a sudden twitch, and the old vampire’s green eyes slid to Sil’s. ‘Oh, no.’

Sil shrugged.

‘I felt that one. You are seriously affected by something, aren’t you? You’ve not got a problem …? Because, you know, this new synth is as near to the real thing as I have ever tasted.’

Sil felt slightly insulted. ‘You cussed fool; it’s easy to tell it’s been a long time since you were human. It’s not the blood. It’s her. Jessica. She makes me feel …’ He wasn’t even aware that his fangs were locked down until he bit his own lip.

‘Yes, I take the point, she is an unwilling doxie.’ Zan looked back to his screen. ‘Either bite her or let her go.’

‘She doesn’t want me to bite her.’ Sil licked the blood off his mouth. It made his stomach rumble.

‘Oh.’ Zan kicked his chair back away from the desk and leaned towards Sil. ‘Right. I see. If you truly wish her blood … Would you like me to oblige you by concealing her death? Let me see … an unplanned trip to the Americas, possibly? Or would her fellow worker find that suspicious?’ He sighed. ‘These damnable portable telephone devices …’ Another sigh. ‘Bodies were so much easier to dispose of in the old days …’

‘What? No. You’d do that? No.’ Wow! We like the idea of that way too much. No. Jessie is different. It’s not sex, it’s not blood, it’s something else that runs separate to those and yet entwined. And she won’t give me blood, I’m pretty sure of that, and I will not take it without permission, not from her – not from anyone. The sex… yes, she might go for the sex, she looks at me sometimes as though … but sex is nothing, it’s just a means to an end. ‘Truly. It will be fine.’ Sil got to his feet. ‘So, I’ll go and get food, then.’

‘To the Hagg Baba.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘To the only place in the city where you can obtain the genuine article? Apart from the clubs, which you know that I frown upon. Biting is biting and we cannot afford to sully our reputations, however willing the participants may be. Are you sure you don’t have a problem?’ Zan’s stare was like a needle. ‘Not going to run rogue on me, are you?’

‘No. It’s Jessica, something about her makes me …’

The old vampire raised an exquisite eyebrow. ‘And she’s asked for your protection? I sincerely hope you both know what you’re doing.’

Sil threw him a grin and wondered if he had time for a cold shower.