Chapter Twenty

The water clanged closed over our heads like a bell. Sil was a whirling presence beside me; the frantic rippling and gasping seemed to indicate that vampires had all the natural buoyancy of a house-brick. The sinking went on as we were swept downstream. The hull of a moored barge threatened to crush us, I grabbed at Sil, at passing flotsam, but the current carried us too fast to fight. We surfaced and sank, sank and surfaced, finally crashing into a small rowing boat which had jammed against a bridge support, and managing to surface together.

‘Police.’ I gasped. ‘I ought …’ My lungs ached. I tried to hang on to the side of the boat but my fingers were numb and had no grip and we were swept another hundred yards before an underwater obstruction provided us with another breathing space. ‘It was an accident, Sil! I never meant …’

‘Forget police.’ Sil shook his head. ‘We have to get out of here. Going to freeze to death.’

The spring had brought the usual flood of meltwater down from the high moors, and although the air temperature was pleasantly mild, the water was bitterly cold. I’d lost the feeling in my legs. I wouldn’t be able to make the scramble up the nearby bank without falling back into the water. ‘Can’t.’

Sil closed his eyes. ‘Me, neither.’ Under the water his hand fumbled for mine and squeezed. I felt the cuts along my palm.

‘Your demon can.’

Now his eyes opened. ‘What?’

‘You don’t need to separate, just let it have control. Call it.’

‘It isn’t like having a dog, Jessie. My demon …’ He let go of my hand and crossed the released arm over his chest. ‘It will try to preserve itself, do you understand?’

I held up my released hand. The cold water had washed clean the cuts, but they gaped like open mouths. ‘Use blood.’

‘I – ’ He tried to turn his head away, but his eyes wouldn’t move from the bright beads of blood appearing along the edge of my hand. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘Have you got a better plan?’ My teeth chattered.

‘No, but – you can’t.’ His face was paling. ‘You don’t understand. When … when Malfaire had us … we were going to die. My demon is all about self-preservation. If I let it have control it will save me, if it can but … it will be the demon in charge, not me.’

I looked him in the eye and whispered, ‘I trust you. You won’t let it seed.’

There was a moment’s silence. Then he said, ‘Jessie,’ and let loose.

It only took a second – his demon must have been hovering under the surface. It burst its way free, half in and half out of his body; a snatch and it had grabbed my hand, licking the arc of blood from my grey-white skin with a tongue which felt like fire against the chill. I closed my eyes so as not to see. ‘We need to get out of the water,’ I said, trying to sound calm. I didn’t want to panic the demon into doing something unnecessarily brutal – of course, being a demon, it wouldn’t see anything unnecessary in brutality – but I was becoming increasingly aware that outlying parts of my body were no longer receiving brain signals. ‘Can you get us out?’

And now I met the demon’s eyes, black-red, like domesticated hell. ‘Out?’ it said, pulling its mouth free of my hand.

‘Out of the water.’ Then, because it seemed to want to go straight back to licking my palm. ‘There’s more blood, if we get out of the water.’

‘More?’ It moved Sil’s body like a puppeteer, moving as part of him and yet distinct. I’d never asked a vampire what it felt like to let the demon have control and I didn’t think I wanted to know. ‘More!’

The grip on my hand intensified and the demon propelled us through the water, then leapt for the bank. He hit it, dragging me along by the wrist, which smacked me into the concrete embankment, then crawled up the near-vertical wall and on to the cobbled rise.

Then he struck. I didn’t have time to brace myself or prepare at all; he hit me in the vein in the side of my neck, but maybe because I was so cold it didn’t really hurt. All I could feel was the heat of his mouth against my skin and a kind of aching, heavy sensation which ran down the muscles of my arm.

There was something very sexual about it, the closeness of our bodies and the firmness of the demon’s grip. Dreamily I felt his skin heating up as I lay in his arms, a warmth that made me tingle where our flesh touched, along with a pleasant drowsiness. My eyes flickered, lids too heavy to stay open.

Suddenly I thought back to the girl in the club. Her half-drugged look after Sil had fed. How much blood could a demon take? How much blood could a human afford to lose, and how fast, before the body went into shock? And, given my previous experiences, I had about another thirty seconds before it seeded into me … ‘Sil!’ It came out as a squeak. The demon ignored me, although its eyes flicked open for a second; I saw them shine out hell-bright from under the fall of hair. ‘Sil. Remember, I trust you.’

‘He cannot hear you, human woman. I have his body and mind.’

‘But he can send you back down, can’t he? That’s how it works – you are the éminence grise of the relationship, but he runs you.’ Another rush of weakness. ‘Sil. Please.’

The demon jolted. Another mouthful of me and it jerked again, then hurled itself upright and away. When I managed to move my poor, battered body into a sitting position, Sil’s demon had slithered back to wherever it lived inside him and he was back in control, head down, on all fours.

‘Hey.’

He looked up as I spoke. The fire-glow died away from his eyes but there was still blood spread along his cheek and on his mouth. ‘God!’ Dazed, unfocused. He brought a hand up to his face and stared at it, as though he’d been expecting more fingers. ‘What a power!’

‘Oh, don’t worry about it; I’m fine, hardly bleeding to death at all.’

Sil sat back, inhaling and flexing his fingers with his eyes shut. ‘Oh,’ he kept saying. ‘Oh, let the devil take me now …’

‘We need to get under cover.’ I couldn’t just sit here, I was freezing again. ‘Sil?’

‘Can’t move. Need to ride this out.’

‘You don’t usually have any trouble in getting away from the scene of the crime. In fact, you’re usually all energetic.’

‘This is … your blood is …’ He put a hand to his chest as though to either quieten his demon or make sure it was still there. ‘It’s sensational,’ he slurred.

‘Oh, great. Well, we’ll both sit here then, shall we, while you enjoy the party in your head and I die of gangrene!’

‘I can taste you.’ He ran his tongue over his lips, over the tips of still-protruding fangs. ‘It’s sweet.’ He shook his head in slow motion. ‘God!’

I tried to stand. ‘Oh, damn.’ A wave of dizziness broke over my head and the lamp-lit night disintegrated into thousands of tiny grey pieces. I clutched at the air and stumbled a couple of steps forward. My knees finally gave way and I plummeted on top of the vampire, who, at least, managed to catch me, although whether he knew he was doing it was debatable. ‘Right. So I can’t walk, either. Great. Hypothermia, here we come.’

I hadn’t known it was possible to feel this cold. At least when we’d been submerged I’d been numb; now I could feel how much everything hurt. I tried to move from my position half-wrapped around Sil, his clammy coat dripping diesel-flavoured water on my face, and touched his skin.

‘God! You’re so warm!’ His body was a temperature that I didn’t think mine would ever reach again, outside the crematorium. ‘How is that possible?’

‘The blood,’ he said, eyes still closed. ‘It’s burning through me like a furnace. I can feel you in my heart, in my veins, you’re glowing like a sun in my head.’

‘Why? It doesn’t always do this, does it?’

A ponderous headshake. ‘You –’ he enunciated carefully – ‘are pure Class A.’ Sil stretched a hand free of his clinging coat and ripped the front of his shirt open, smiling as more of his pale skin was exposed to the night air.

‘You’re high.’

‘I am. But I am also warm.’ And Sil opened his eyes and smiled. His pupils were all over the place.

‘We need to get under cover.’ I looked around. A few yards further down, where the murky brown river’s edge lapped against the cement of the river frontage, there was an indentation; storm drain, sewage outlet, right now I didn’t care. ‘If I can get out of the night air, I’ll be okay. Just … get my breath back and we can go home.’

Cautiously I tried to stand up but the filmy curtains of unconsciousness threatened to draw closed again, and I ended up crawling the ten yards to the mouth of the drain. Sil crawled alongside me, still smiling. The ground inside the tunnel was dry and sandy and thankfully free from rats. It was also out of the wind.

Sil collapsed and lay immobile, which was reassuring. The heat of his body was tremendous. I could see steam beginning to rise from beneath his coat, his black leather jeans looked as though they were drying already. Very, very carefully I moved one hand and laid it on his chest, where the skin was almost improbably smooth, only a brief line of hair running down the centre. The heat hurt.

Sil lay there. I half-raised my head to look down on him and felt my heart move. I mean, who wouldn’t? Physically he was perfect. Slender and pale, stubbled enough to show off his faultless cheekbones and with eyes that changed colour more often than traffic lights. I couldn’t help it. Although, God knows, I’d tried. Feeling anything for a vampire other than pure, hot-blooded lust, was asking to get your heart ripped out and handed back to you, dripping. And probably not in a metaphorical way, either.

Sil spoke without opening his eyes, it made me jump. ‘You need to get warm all over.’

‘I thought you’d passed out.’

Eyes switched open. ‘Metabolising.’ A thoughtful look at where the neck of my T-shirt gaped, revealing the double bite mark. ‘I would really enjoy another hit though, if you’re offering.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Shame.’ He was still looking thoughtful, and his eyes were the pure grey of chinchilla fur. ‘Why won’t you let me warm you up? You’re freezing to death, you’ve probably got exposure, and I’m burning up. What is the matter with you, Jessie?’

‘Nothing.’ I scooted a bit closer. The heat was radiating off him like a car bonnet in the sun, making my skin ache. Very carefully he reached out and began pulling the sodden T-shirt off my shoulders ‘What are you doing?’

‘Take it off and you’ll warm up faster.’

I was clumsy, uncoordinated. My fingers hadn’t recovered enough to grip the hem and pull it up over my head and I wasn’t sure that what I was doing was sensible. Undressing in front of Sil, even an off-his-face Sil, had to have repercussions. ‘I can’t.’

‘Yes.’ Warm hands drew the T-shirt up my body.

‘You’re enjoying this.’

Huge, nearly white, his eyes dominated his face. ‘You have no idea.’

‘That’s it! I’m not taking anything else off. I don’t care if I freeze to death. I am not sitting around in a tunnel with you, in my knickers.’

‘You’re enjoying this too, aren’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Stripping for me.’ He looked down at my chest, which was quite nicely adorned with a pink-and-black stripey number, although I usually liked my nipples considerably less perky than they were at present. I folded my arms.

‘I’m cold, all right?’

‘Did I say anything?’

‘You looked.’

Sil, somewhat wobbly, got to his knees and faced me. ‘Jessie.’ He reached out and ran his hands down my arms, the heat was almost unbearable. ‘How long is it since you last had sex?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You’ve got this whole attitude thing going on, and yet something in you wants me. My demon can feel it. What in the seven hells is going on with you? You push me away all the time, but – ’

‘God, you fancy yourself a bit, don’t you?’ I shut my eyes. It wasn’t so bad if I couldn’t see him. ‘Four years.’

‘You’re joking! Four years since you last had sex? No wonder you’re leaving a trail of pheromones that every vampire for miles can pick up. Why? Why so long?’

I shrugged. This was the bit that really hurt. It had been four years since I’d met Sil for the first time. Four years since I’d fallen completely for his sharp-tongued comebacks, his sniping, argumentative ways and that loose-limbed body. Four years. I was mad for him, but I didn’t dare express it. And no-one else measured up. ‘Work, I suppose.’

Yes, I wanted him. But I didn’t want this. He had a demon riding his endocrine system, making him fight and crave and live on the edge so that it could taste the hormones and surf the highs. And, while I could just about bear to watch Sil behaving like all the others, I could only do it because no part of him, however small, had ever been mine. And it was moments like this, when he got close, which hurt the most.

‘I always thought, maybe you and Liam – ’

‘Liam?’ I was so appalled I almost forgot to shiver. ‘You think I was shagging Liam?’

A shrug. ‘He is a kind man.’

‘You shag him then. Anyway, he’s got Sarah and the baby.’

‘Oh, so you have thought about it. But honestly, Jessie, four years – ’ He sat back and dropped his hands. ‘Go on. You’re sitting there, horny as hell for me, well, here I am.’ Now he held his arms out wide. ‘Come on. Do it. Touch me.’

I shrugged again and tried to look away. ‘Some of us can go more than twenty minutes without sex, you know.’

‘Jessie.’ Sil was leaning in. ‘Your lips have gone blue.’ He leaned in further and kissed me firmly on the mouth and, for a second, the shivering stopped, as though he fed me warmth. He moved back and dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘You say you trust me. So prove it.’

Hands closed around my shoulders and he pulled me in, tight, against him, drawing my head up so that his lips could close over mine. I could feel his fangs sliding down half-inside my own mouth, one point grazed against my lip and I made a tiny sound of protest, but the warmth was too overpowering, felt so good against my skin that I was never in any danger of drawing away. As long as he was kissing me, just kissing me, it was all right. I could handle it.

So, what happened? One minute he was pouring heat into my mouth and I was kneeling there feeling the smooth, dry warmth from his skin, tasting the metallic tang of my blood on his lips, and the next I was kissing him back, running my tongue along the inside of his lip and feeling the hardness of the fangs as they locked into place. There must be a scientific explanation for the fact that I didn’t fight his hands as they travelled across my body, a chemical reason for my reaction to his touch. My whole body felt his skin like electricity, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as his fingers traced around the clothes I still wore.

‘Jessica – ’ His mouth left mine to whisper along my jawline, down my neck, across my shoulder.

‘Yes.’ Single syllable, he could take it to mean what he wanted. Was he asking permission? Questioning the reasoning behind this? I didn’t care.

He unsnapped the pink-and-black striped bra and I felt the pure heat of his body against my bare skin. His eyes flickered to mine; once, twice, and they were the bruise-grey of storm driven clouds, backlit with sunrise as I pulled his clothes away from his body and ran fingers down newly uncovered flesh. He kissed the score-lines down my face, stroked gentle fingers over the greenish bruising across my ribs, whispered words I couldn’t understand into my hair. How long had I dreamed of this? How long had I waited, wanting?

I unwrapped him as one might a longed-for Christmas present. Slowly, prolonging the moment of the reveal, loving the way his breath caught in his throat each time I dragged fingertips over his skin.

The leather jeans had shrunk skin-tight during our river swim, fitting so tightly the fabric was stretched and thick across the fly so Sil had to help, unbuttoning with one hand while the other stroked my skin, raising goose pimples that had nothing to do with the temperature.

He was impressively ready for action, his skin damp and so hot that when I reached my fingers in to touch him it made me jump. ‘You’re really hot.’

‘And you are dying of the cold. You just killed a demon, Jessica. I think, now, you are allowed a little fun …’ He smiled against me, as though he understood that I had been dying of a heart forced to remain cool, which was now thawing into mush under the heat of his longed-for attention. His hands wound into my hair, my hands slithered around the silky hardness of him until I was aching, gasping, wanting him so badly that I could hear his name breathed out with every sighing exhalation. And then, with one movement, he was inside me, breathing my name in time, in rhythm, as his own name was in my mouth. So warm.

We moved as though dancing, a tempo we’d never attained during even our most frenzied arguments; moved and turned and touched, and I felt every inch of him not only with my body but with my mind. I wanted to experience it all; to photograph it with my memory so that not one second of this pulsing beat would go to waste; that ever afterwards I would be able to call to mind the smell of his skin, the shadow moving behind his eyes, the drifting brush of his hair across parts of me rendered so sensitive that it was all I could do not to shout out.

I don’t know what I’d expected sex with Sil to be like. I think that I’d expected more violence – there was something in the way he walked, something that hinted at things restrained. But I’d never expected tenderness. Never expected him to cry my name as he came, never expected his wanting to make me scream for him, too – and God, he was good at that. Years and years of experience behind that mouth, those fingers, all combined in teasing and leading me on until I lay, pinned beneath his weight, shaking with unspoken words sobbing in my throat.

And I hadn’t expected him to hold me. Although I was glowing with warmth, he put his arms around me and closed me against him. I could feel his breathing slowing, the fluttering of the demon locked inside as it fed off the energy and the desire. ‘Christ, Jessie.’

Had he guessed? I refused to let him see my face. ‘What?’

‘That was – I haven’t had sex like that since – before.’

‘Before what?’ My voice sounded thick because I was trying not to cry. Trying not to think that now it would all be different, that I’d never again be able to watch him drag another girl into some back room, and heckle him when he reappeared ten minutes later all dishevelled and unfocused.

‘Before the demon.’ His voice sounded as heavy with regret as mine did with tears. ‘I’d forgotten how good it felt to come without wanting the blood at the same time.’

‘And usually you do?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He moved beside me as though even the thought of it made him hard. ‘I want it, all the time, watching her throat, watching the blood rise, and knowing it’s there, for the taking.’

It made me uneasy, the cool lust in his voice. Made me wonder how many times he took the blood, whether it was offered or not. ‘But you didn’t want mine?’

A half-laugh. ‘I wanted more than your blood.’

‘So what was it like with me?’

He went very quiet then. Lay almost totally still. ‘It was like it was with my wife,’ he said at last. ‘Human.’

The lump in my throat was almost insurmountable. ‘What was her name?’ I asked.

‘Christie. Christina Margaret.’ He said the name slowly, as though he’d had it in his mind for a very long time but had forgotten how to say it. ‘Christie,’ he said again, faintly.

‘And what was your name?’

‘Does it matter?’ Sil sat up. It made me feel awkward and I found I was scrunching myself up, trying to cover myself with bits of my clothes.

‘I’d like to know.’

‘What, first fuck in four years, you want my name and address?’ Sil gave a ghostly smile. ‘Jonathan. I was Jonathan Charles Wilberforce.’

Jonathan. Jonathan and his wife, Christina.

‘What about your children?’

‘Stop it, Jessica.’

It hurt. God, how it hurt. Every word, every name, every detail, let me know how different it was now. That our friendship was gone, blown to dust by one momentary dream-realisation.

‘I thought you might like to talk about them. You never do, and it must be hard to pretend that they never existed, particularly when, well, when you’ve done something like this.’

For a long, long time Sil sat with his forehead resting on his knees. ‘Joseph,’ he said at last. ‘Joseph and Constance.’ And then he cried and I wrapped my arms around him.

Sil had to wait until Jessie fell asleep before he could even start to examine what had happened. His body felt better than it had for years – no sign of any adverse reaction to the immense high that he’d ridden, nothing but a slight heaviness, a slowness of thought and that, he concluded, was probably a result of the sex rather than the blood. Or it could be the feelings he was finally allowing. He glanced across at her, head pillowed on what was left of his shirt, skin still glowing from the heat he’d transferred to her, and there was a sudden contraction in his chest as his demon jolted. All these years. All these years I have managed simply by never acknowledging what I lost, Christie, Constance, Joseph. And the slow realisation of what he had become crept through his mind. I have never sat down and looked back at the things that made me human because, now I know that is how we must live, we vampires. We are only able to exist by never admitting that once we loved, once we, too, laughed and cried … because to accept the things we lost means that we must admit our loss of humanity. We deal with the guilt for the killings and the using of the humans by pretending that we were never one of them.

How many years now has it been? The flu pandemic was in 1918. Nearly a hundred years ago, and I’d been a vampire for four years by then …

His breath caught and broke into staccato gasps as he fought the tears again. First Constance, then Joseph. Seven and eight years old, too fragile to fight the virus that took so many; might have taken me, if I’d still been human enough to be subject to infections. Left Christie alone. Weeping and grieving and I’d been unable to comfort her; that’s when I lost what was left of my humanity, not when I was infected, not when the demon hatched, but then, that night when the children died and I could do nothing, not even help my wife through the pain.

He wept again then, this time without Jessie’s arms around him.