the afterglow, any thoughts of anger had well and truly dissipated. ‘I’m starving,’ she said, her head nuzzling against his chest.
‘I don’t have food,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ll have to stock up if you’re sticking around.’
She smiled. ‘I can’t imagine you pushing a trolley around Tesco.’
‘The lighting does nothing for me.’ He absently ran a hand through her hair. ‘You can stay, you know. I mean, we’ll sort your flat out, too, but you can stay as long as you like.’
‘You don’t have other lady callers?’ she asked, idly playing with the tuft of hair leading up from his belly button, then moving up, tracing the blue vein lines across his chest.
He laughed. ‘No. Not for a long time.’
‘How long is a long time?’
‘Ah…’ he said, hesitating. ‘If I say since before you were born, does it make me some kind of deviant?’
‘I think you’re alright with someone once they’re in their thirties.’
They lay in silence; her listening to the slow rhythmic beating of his old heart. It was lovely and peaceful, right until her stomach let out a strange rumbling sound. Adam was so shocked by the sound he practically bolted from the bed. She laughed, pulling the covers over herself.
‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘I told you I was hungry.’
He relaxed. ‘I thought maybe you were possessed.’
‘I should eat,’ she said. ‘Be a darling and pass me my clothes, will you?’
He did as instructed, offering her a chance to ogle the rear view as he did so. He handed her the clothes in a neat pile before grabbing himself a robe from behind the door. ‘I’ll leave you to it for a moment,’ he said, before heading into the bathroom.
She dressed, listening to the sound of him brushing his teeth. Once he came out, she followed him in, finding a toothbrush, new in its packet, laid on the sink for her.
‘What’s the plan?’ she asked, coming back through to the bedroom where Adam had dressed in his usual array of muted colours. They left the bedroom behind and headed downstairs.
‘There are a few places I’d like to investigate,’ he said. ‘But I can’t go out for a few hours yet.’
‘I need to get some food,’ she said. ‘And I want to find out what happened to Adrian.’
‘Be careful, will you?’
‘I will. Back here at sundown?’
He moved across the room to kiss her. They shared a long, lingering kiss.
‘I feel like a teenager,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t happen often for me.’
‘So you say,’ she said, biting her bottom lip to keep from beaming. She shrugged. ‘Me either, truth be told.’
She kissed him once more and opened the front door. Adam was careful to manoeuvre his way out of the sun’s glare, and he flashed her another wry smile as she looked back one last time before stepping out into the sunshine. The day was nearing its end, but the low-hanging sun still shone bright enough to bring some much-needed warmth to Lucy’s face, and after so many days without its company, she smiled to see it again. She should take advantage of the vitamin D while she could, and the thought crossed her mind that she should head to a beer garden and get some kind of ostentatious gin drink inside her, until the memory of Adrian tumbling backward from her punch came back to her.
God. What kind of friend was she, falling into the bed of a handsome vampire instead of checking on a friend who she’d assaulted and left at a murder scene as the police arrived en masse?
Her stomach rumbled. Food first, then she could think about how to find out if Adrian was alright. Town wasn’t too far away, and she figured even if the police were looking for her, as long as she kept her head down, she should be fine. She stopped on the outskirts of town at Montey’s, a noisy rock bar that seemed the least likely place to run into police. She nodded to the doorman, who couldn’t look less bothered, and headed inside. Even late afternoon and with nary a customer in sight, the music was oppressively loud, some old grunge band warbling away while the video to an entirely unconnected AC/DC song played on the big screen in the corner. She headed to the bar, ordered a beer and a burger, and headed to the back booths, where she had a good view of the front door, access to the beer garden, and could vaguely hear herself think. The table was filthy, but she wasn’t planning on eating directly off it.
With guitars pounding all around her, providing a grumbling white noise that she could feel lost in, she watched the bubbles from her cheap lager climbing the glass. The glow of sex ebbed away as she slowly came back to the reality of her situation, and it occurred to her how thoroughly she’d broken every aspect of her life in the last clutch of days. Hiding from the police. Isolated from everyone she loved. Career in tatters. Oh, and the small matter of killing two supernatural beings and being witness to more murder than she’d seen in her years in an ambulance. The joy of a few hours earlier, the fresh flush of romance and excitement, the danger of who Adam was — it all seemed pretty stupid as she stared at her glass.
She could undo this. She had to. But she needed to put things right with Adrian, though that was complicated in and of itself. What if the police were watching him? Or what if he was still in a police cell? She could call his husband Dan, but she suspected that wasn’t a conversation she’d particularly enjoy. She could call work to see if he turned up today, but they’d ask her why she wasn’t in, or why the cops kept showing up, or why….
Too many whys.
She fished out her phone to find the battery dead. Not surprising — she hadn’t charged it in days. Given how essential it seemed most of the time, the fact she’d not even thought about it for days said a lot. She supposed that was good, given the police were after her. Tracking a mobile was child’s play these days. Resisting the urge to go into the beer garden and fling it into the bushes to be free from it forever, she put back in her pocket. A bored emo teen brought over her burger — an insanely meaty stack of the kind you couldn’t find anywhere other than a sleazy rock bar. It was exactly what she needed. She ate in silence, save for the deafening roar around her. The music cycled through four or five songs and went back to the one playing as she came in.
The burger turned to regret pretty quickly, turning her stomach as it dealt with the sudden influx of meat, bread, and cheese. She felt a sudden need to smoke a cigarette, and as the bored emo who’d brought her lunch out earlier sidled out the back door with a packet in hand, she grabbed her beer and followed.
The benches were more full than the tables inside the club, each filled with laughing and smiling people enjoying the rare winter sun, the heat lamps blaring at full blast despite the relative warmth of the afternoon. Should be able to bum a cigarette off someone, she reckoned. She was about to ask the emo barkeep, but he joined a table of similarly bedecked teenagers, each of whom looked far too cheerful for their wardrobes and too intimidatingly cool to approach. Scanning the other tables, she found a familiar face.
‘Pawel?’ she said, approaching his table, where several burly men with short hair and far glummer expressions nursed the ends of their pints. She noted Patel was drinking coke and had a flash of guilt — he must have been put onto the rota with Adrian for tonight, in her place.
The big Pole looked up. ‘Lucy?’ he said, too loud, standing up so quickly he nearly sent the ends of everyone’s pints to the floor. He got up from the bench and came round to hug her, which was slightly awkward, something he seemed to realise just as he got to her. He gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder instead. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I have your cat!’
‘You do? Jones?’
‘Yes. Adrian come round last night with him in cat box. Said his husband very angry with him. Couldn’t stop sneezing, so he had to take it away. His husband sound like pain in arse. But I said we can look after until he sees you.’
Lucy frowned. If Adrian had taken Jones, he must not be arrested. And if he thought to rescue Jones he couldn’t be that pissed off at her, could he? ‘Could you keep Jones for a bit? A few days?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure, if nobody else mind?’
Everyone around the table shrugged their indifference. She took out a tenner to give to him for food, but he waved it away. ‘Don’t be silly. This is the most excitement I’ve had since I came here, and I love animals.’
‘Can you tell Adrian how sorry I am? That I’ll make it up to him, somehow? If you see him?’
‘Of course.’
‘Thanks, Pawel, I appreciate it.’
He shrugged. ‘No problem.’
She got up from the table, no longer needing the cigarette after smelling it on Pawel’s housemates.
‘You’re going?’ Pawel asked, disappointed.
‘Things to do, Police to avoid,’ she said.
Pawel followed her to the door, watched by his table and the table of emos.
‘You know,’ Pawel said in a low voice, walking close enough behind her she could hear every word. ‘Adrian told me what happen. In my home town, we have experience with the things you are dealing with. Witches. Dark Magics. Creatures. In my experience, the people who get wound up in these things never end up well. You be careful.’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Pawel.’
‘Another thing. Adrian said a vampire killed the witches, yes?’
‘That’s what it looked like.’
He stopped her by the door and faced her, leaning in to talk in a low voice over the loud music. ‘In the town where I was born, there were two women who lived together. Everyone said they were witches. We younger people supposed they were a couple, that this was the intolerance of our parent’s generation. We watched as they tried to drive the pair of them out, but the strangest thing happened. Our parents became convinced they had won. That the women had gone. But it was the opposite. The women bought up the land in town and forced everyone else out. But none of our parents could see it. When we saw these women in town, they smiled at us, like we were in on a joke about our parents. My parents lost their money, my father lost his job. Everything that happened, I… that story keeps coming back to me.’
She took this in and gave him a curt smile. ‘Thank you.’
With that, he was gone, bounding back to his table and talking loudly about getting a new cat for a few days before lapsing back into Polish.
His words weighing on her mind, she headed back into the bar.