stipulation the moment she got home — somehow it’d been turned round to her inviting Adam to her home the next night. If a vampire was coming to visit, she should probably tidy the place up. So she spent most of her second day off cleaning her flat, a job that needed doing, in fairness, but which didn’t seem the most auspicious start to her career as, what, a vampire detective?
Adam had one counter demand — that she lock Jones away. He wasn’t allergic to cats, but they tended not to like his kind, and he didn’t want to be attacked by a tabby ball of fur. It seemed fair, but made her extra conscious of cat hair, especially when he seemed to know already she had a cat from her general odour — that part of the myth about vampire senses was true, at least. Now she was terrified she smelled of cat piss to him, and even more worried about her flat doing so. Given the state of his house, he was one to talk. It struck her at one point, as she got the vacuum out, that perhaps housework was the least of her problems — she’d invited a vampire to her house, something she knew from every movie and book she’d ever seen rarely ended well.
Jones watched with his usual quiet disdain as she cleaned the toilet, the sinks, dusted the room, changed the bedding, cleaned the television and million other tiny jobs that seemed to thrust themselves into her eye-line whenever she thought she was about done. It allowed her plenty of time to order her thoughts. At least, it offered her plenty of time to think of a million questions she had about Adam and his kind. Did he use the toilet? Would he sweat? Did his hair grow? His fingernails? Did he brush his teeth? Could he perform in bed?
She tried not to think about Adam in that last way, what with him being a blood-drinking monster of myth and legend, but he was almost tailor made to make her slightly weak at the knees. Plus, there was the whole thing where she’d been conditioned by almost every vampire portrayal in popular culture to think of him as a romantic figure.
She had to stop thinking like that.
After the previous night’s abortive ‘date’ vibe, she dressed a lot more casually this time around. Black jeans with a simple black top and a jumper. She pulled on her battered old Converse with the thought that wherever the night took her, it’d be better in comfortable shoes, and sat on the edge of the sofa. The light of the day faded, and she wondered if she should try to eat before he got there — there was something decidedly weird about eating opposite someone who wasn’t. She’d have to avoid that in the future.
In future. God.
Jones leapt from the sofa and stalked toward the door, his hackles raised. He hissed and looked at Lucy. She checked the clock. Christ, he was early.
‘Come here, you little shithead,’ she said, picking up the ball of angry fur. He mewled back at her with whatever was cat for aghast. ‘Don’t give me that look,’ she added. She opened the door to the bedroom and placed him on the floor of the dark room, pulling the door closed behind her. At the very least, that would stop her taking Adam in there.
Get a fucking grip, she told herself.
She checked herself in the mirror, fussing over a few strands of red hair, putting a little effort into making them look effortlessly tousled.
Her visitor rapped on the door.
She gave it a few seconds so as not to seem too eager and tried to swallow whatever the hell was fluttering in her stomach. She wondered if the thing about having to invite a vampire in was going to be another myth. Maybe she could tease him about it, put a few little cracks in the conversational ice.
She put her hand on the lock.
The door burst open in a shower of wood splinters and noise, knocking Lucy backward. A blur of violence erupted through the doorway a second later. Lucy screamed in panic, but before the sound could even make its way through her oesophagus, there was a hand around her throat, cutting off the sound to a garbled squawk. The force by which the intruder grabbed her slammed both of them to the floor, cracking the linoleum and possibly a few of her ribs.
‘Don’t make a fucking sound,’ the vampire hissed. For a second Lucy thought it might be Adam, but as her eyes adjusted to the man crouched over him, she realised it was the blonde, the one with the bad curtains. He leaned over her as he spoke, pressing down on her throat, his rancid breath close enough to fill her nostrils with decay.
She coughed, spraying blood over her assailant’s face. He licked his lips with a horrid grin.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t tempt me.’
‘Not my intention,’ she tried to reply, but the words came out squashed, compressed into nothing but garbled noise.
Lifting her by the throat as he had the nurse back at the hospital, he yanked her to her feet so hard she thought he might tear her head clean from her body. Panic gripped Lucy as she tried to breathe.
The vampire cocked his arm back and threw her into her lounge. His strength was unlike anything Lucy had ever encountered; as she clattered into the rear of her sofa, pain ripped through her hip. She fell to the carpet, scrambling desperately to get away from her assailant.
He moved toward her like a boxer crossing a ring, half on his toes.
‘What do you want?’ she howled at him, grasping at anything to pull herself up. She hooked her hands over the back of her sofa and pulled, but the sofa broke apart, sending her back to the floor.
‘Darkness,’ he replied, the rancid stench of his breath even stronger when he spoke. Trying to remember what Adam had told her about his weaknesses, her hands cast about wildly, looking for a weapon, but there was nothing.
He reached down and dragged her back to her feet. She brought her hand up to his face, clawing desperately at his face, to no avail. She kept her nails too short, a habit formed over long years in an ambulance.
She stared into his eyes. Dark pits of empty rage; he barely looked human. His lateral incisors protruded like razors. His hair may be blonde, but his eyebrows were thick, coarse brown, wild and unkempt and sat atop a permanent scowl.
Whipping her hand round once more, she drove her thumb into the socket directly below those thick eyebrows and pushed.
Howling, he dropped Lucy, stumbling back toward her kitchen before losing his footing on the divider between her carpet and the linoleum. He crashed into her mirror, smashing it into pieces.
The door.
She sprinted forward, thinking that if she could somehow make it through the splintered remains of her doorframe, that somehow, she might find a way out of this. But even before she was halfway to the threshold, he was in front of her once more, sneering, his right eye bloodied but intact.
‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he sneered, but even as he readied himself to launch at her, he was whisked backward, back through the doorway and into the corridor behind. Stood in his place, his fangs out and a look of pure rage on his face, was Adam. ‘Stay there,’ he growled at Lucy.
Adam turned his attention back to the vampire on his arse in the corridor outside. Adam moved in a blur, scooping the blonde up into a fight so immediately brutal that Lucy’s first instinct was to shut her door on it, but it lay in splintered pieces inside her flat.
The two vampires pummelled each other with ferocious power and speed, each blow drawing blood. The white walls of the corridor splashed with sprays of muddy red.
The blonde laid a headbutt on Adam’s nose and tried to follow it up with the same move Lucy tried on him, but Adam was too quick for him. He pulled the roving hands back, snapping the other vampire’s wrists in a crunch of bones met with a feral howl of rage.
This was the opening Adam needed. He whirled round in a flash, grabbing the howling head of his opponent under his arm and dropping to the floor. They fell together in a grind of breaking bones, the howl cutting off abruptly.
Adam looked up from the ground at Lucy, his face bloodied to a pulp. ‘Knife,’ he said, his tone calm and even. ‘Big one.’
She ran back inside and grabbed the biggest chopping knife from the top of her knife block. By the time she got it back into the corridor, Adam’s victim writhed and buckled under him, albeit with limited success. It looked like someone trying to wrestle their way free from a tree root, so steadfast was Adam’s grip.
‘Heart,’ Adam said. ‘I cannot let go. You will have to do it.’
‘No,’ she said, affronted. ‘I can’t.’
‘He died a long time ago,’ Adam replied, his even tone struggling with the effort of keeping the other vampire in place. ‘Do it.’
Lucy hesitated. She’d been around death so much, but never taken a life. Had watched it slip away, held hands as it went, locked eye contact and seen the dying light, but never been the cause. Adam’s words hardly helped — it was impossible not to watch the panic in the blonde vampire’s eyes and see anything but life.
She slid the knife under the vampire’s ribcage, breaking the skin effortlessly and pushing the knife upward. It amazed her; the ease with which it travelled — for all his apparent strength, he seemed almost comically delicate.
Angling the knife, she pushed it through the diaphragm into the heart. Immediately, the squirming stopped, and the body went limp. She stopped, her breath ragged from the effort. ‘No,’ Adam said. ‘We have to be sure.’ When she looked at him, pleading, he shrugged. ‘He came back once. I killed him.’
Pulling the knife out slightly, she pushed it back in at an angle. Blood poured from the wound, coating her arms and hands with thick black. She’d spent enough time with her arms in blood to know this was different — the blood was cooler, not quite cold but not body temperature, either, and thicker, darker. It hardened at the edges if it had the chance to sit for more than a few seconds, pulling at her arm’s hairs as soon as it dried.
‘Has it stopped?’ he asked. ‘You need to check.’
The knife slipped out of her hands and she pushed a hand into the wound, searching inside his torso. Her hand touched the heart, which felt different from the rest of this creature, and for the first time she sensed how different, how completely alien it was compared to the bodies she knew.
‘It’s done,’ she said, out of breath from the effort, pulling her hand out from inside the blonde vampire’s ribcage, dripping blood over her hallway. It made little difference; the place looked like the inside of an abattoir.
‘We need to get you out of here,’ Adam said. ‘You’ve killed one of us. They’ll be hunting you.’
She looked up into his eyes, seeing his concern. It was the first time he’d looked scared.
‘Why did he come after me?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, but we don’t have time to find out. Autumn and the others may be outside.’
She got to her feet slowly, unsteadily. Her top was caked in blood, her ribs ached, along with most of her limbs. The corridor looked like a Jackson Pollock painted in a single colour; the scene capped off by the destroyed door to her flat and the chaos beyond. She imagined Mrs Phatak from down the hall coming out of her flat and finding this scene. God, was she in there, terrified for her life? ‘What the hell am I going to do?’ she asked. ‘You’re going to have to help me clean this up.’
‘There’s no time,’ Adam said, standing up and brushing himself down. She realised why he always wore dark clothes — the blood didn’t show up. Still, he looked in a bad way, his face covered in cuts and bruises, his nose broken and out of joint.
‘Like hell, there’s no time,’ she replied. ‘I’m not having my neighbours finding a dead vampire in the hallway. What the hell am I going to do about my door? If I leave it like that, my stuff will be stolen.’
‘If we don’t go, you’ll die.’
‘What about Jones? I can’t leave him trapped in my room. There’s no food in there.’
Adam grabbed her shoulders, firmly enough she thought the bones might shatter. That would be a logical next step for the evening. ‘They will be here soon,’ he growled, ‘and if we’re here when they are, I won’t be able to protect you. You will die. Your neighbours will die. These are not people. They have no mercy. They see humanity as a plague.’
Tears welled in her eyes. ‘The fuck have you gotten me into?’
‘I don’t know. But I will get you out of it.’
Composing herself, she wiped the tears welling in her eyes, careful not to get vampire blood in them. ‘I’ll have to leave Jones some food, at least.’
He sighed. ‘Let him out. He can come with us.’
‘I thought cats hate vampires.’
‘Believe me, the feeling is mutual. But you might never be back here.’ He frowned, and Lucy tried not to let the weight of that statement weigh on her in the moment.
'Okay,' she said.
'Though,' Adam said, frowning. 'At least tell me you have a cat box.'