Rose buried the blood bag at the base of the garden wall, pushing it deep and compacting the soil on top of it. Then she sat motionless for a while, hiding in shadows and looking around to make sure she was not being observed. There were still several lights on in the terraced street—she rarely saw places like this where everyone was asleep—and from the open window twenty feet from where she crouched she heard the sounds of lovemaking. She felt a twinge of sexual stirring, but only a pang, a memory more than a sensation. As the man groaned and the woman cried out, Rose leapt the wall and started making her way through the gardens.
She startled a cat and sent it scampering. An urban fox drew back, hissing, hackles raised as she ran past and jumped into the next garden. A dog started barking, but quickly stopped again when she moved beyond the range of its delicate senses. She climbed the walls with ease and cleared the gardens in three paces, and within a minute she lowered herself into the street and watched again for the boy. She had only been away from him for five minutes—she knew the route he always took home, and she could already smell him on the still night air.
A taxi passed by, driver a vague hunched shape. Sometimes—on late evenings, mostly—she rode in taxis, enjoying the driver’s banter if he was a talkative one, relishing the silence if not. Sometimes she simply craved the company of humans.
She walked quickly, passing through the oases of light beneath streetlamps. A few late revelers approached on the other side of the street. Rose kept her head down, her stride confident, her bearing assured. Passing before the barred gates of a small garage forecourt, security lights flashed on and threw her shadow across the road. The revelers’ voices grew quiet, and then stopped altogether. Still they walked, staggeringly drunk, only one of them looking her way. The man had a smile frozen on his face, and she almost felt the way his eyes rode up and down her body. She met his gaze, and he looked away. Tonight, she thought he might have a nightmare.
She passed across an area of derelict land—it was rumored the houses here had been bombed during the Second World War, and ever since the place had been “scheduled for development”—and heard a gang of winos arguing over the last sip in a bottle. They were gathered around a fire, shielded from the road by a thick mass of shrubs and small trees. She passed close enough to smell their blood, and it was rank. Their shouting accompanied her into the darkness again, and she slipped through a rent in the wooden hoarding surrounding the forgotten site.
The boy was close now. This was his usual way home from his friend’s house, and ever since she’d diverted to pop one of the blood bags she always kept on her, a consistent clock had been ticking in her mind. She knew where he would be, and berated herself a little for losing sight of him.
But she couldn’t be there for him all the time, could she? He was growing now, seventeen years old, tall and lean and strong, and one day he’d have to face the future without her because—
Why? Why should he? I can always be here for him, and perhaps as he’s starting to grow old…
But she couldn’t face the idea of turning Marty. She was handling her own condition as well as she could, but she would never visit it on someone she loved. Not without giving him the choice.
She crossed a street and jogged along another road, and just as she caught sight of Marty disappearing around a corner at the far end, she sensed that she was being followed.
Rose’s first instinct was to turn and face her pursuer, but she kept jogging as if unaware. She tried to work out exactly how she knew. Even after five years, it sometimes felt as if she were still settling into this new life, a stranger thrust into an unknown body and told to live with it. The disorientation sometimes sickened her. So she listened, tasted the air, felt the caress of a gentle breeze passing along the street, and it was all and none of these things. She heard and felt and tasted nothing out of the ordinary, and yet the night was suddenly alight with glee.
For a moment, Rose was taken aback with shock. She paused directly beneath a streetlamp, wide-eyed, and when a curtain to her left twitched she saw a young girl’s face watching from an upstairs window. The girl did not blink or look away, and the shadows at her throat danced minutely to her heartbeat.
Rose ran.
Something after him. Chasing. Hunting!
Her feet slapped the pavement without making any sound, and she started moving only by shadows, avoiding the streetlights and passing through the night like a part of it.
It was only as she heard the cry of terror that she let herself speak her brother’s name.
“Marty.”
Marty Volk was not a people person. His T-shirt attested to that—Do I Look Like a Fucking People Person?—and his friends were often eager enough to confirm it as well. Usually when there was a girl he was trying to chat up. Sometimes it worked in his favor, when the girl saw him as the strong, silent type. And when he was just a miserable bastard, sometimes not.
There’d been no girls that night. In fact there had been just him and Gaz, spending the evening in his friend’s room playing CDs, downloading music, and drinking cider. It had been a fun night, and Marty always felt comfortable and safe in Gaz’s company. They were best friends, and he even believed that Gaz understood a lot of why he was quiet and withdrawn. More than the others, at least. They’d been friends five years ago when Rose disappeared, and as Marty had watched his parents crumbling before him, Gaz and his family had been a great support.
He could still be a bit of a dick, though. Like tonight, drinking a flagon of cider before Marty even arrived and ending the evening puking from his bedroom window. His dad’s lean-to greenhouse was below, and the sound of his friend’s vomit striking glass had turned Marty’s stomach. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and it wouldn’t be the last, and he knew that Gaz would be busy with a hose and scrubbing brush next morning. Twat. He smiled softly as he walked along the darkened streets, and realized for the hundredth time how much he treasured his friends.
Marty never got that drunk anymore. He’d done it once a couple of years ago when their little gang had managed to procure a bottle of vodka from a shop owner who should have known better. That night had ended in a fight, Gaz falling and slicing his hand open on broken glass, and Marty passing out in the gutter on the way home. Right about where he was now, in fact. He’d banged his head somehow as he went down, and when he came to…
It had been early morning. His parents had agonized later about how many people must have passed him by in cars and on foot, but Marty could understand their caution. He was out later than his parents most nights now, and he’d seen enough stuff on the streets to make him just as reticent about helping others—junkies, pissheads, and once a dead guy who they reckoned had been a hit-and-run victim. Marty had opened his eyes, and through the alcohol haze and the pain of his bashed head, in the weak streetlights, against the background of all London’s night lights reflected against low-lying cloud…
Rose.
He shook his head and looked down at the gutter where he’d lain so long ago. Standing about here, he thought he’d seen his sister. Missing now for five years, presumed dead by his parents, but not by him. He could never say why he thought she was still alive, and they didn’t ask. Sometimes he thought he saw jealousy in his father’s eyes that he could hold out such hope.