“So we have the problem again,” he said, sighing. “It was inevitable. More has happened to our kind over the last ten years than in the previous hundred. Exposure. Ambition. Both are dangerous.”
“He was strong,” Rose said. “Surprise helped me, but I’m not sure I could beat him next time.” She closed her eyes.
“Strong because he feeds well. I’ve scanned the news but seen nothing yet. Perhaps he’s taking vagrants or runaways, but it’ll be noticed soon enough.”
“But why Marty?”
“Coincidence,” Francesco said. “You said the vampire was surprised. If he’d targeted Marty on purpose, he might have expected you to defend him.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll find it everywhere.”
Fucking hell, Rose thought, closing her eyes and sensing the night. She hated it when he fell back on his age. He had wisdom, yes, and knowledge, but when he talked to her like a kid…
She smiled softly. Perhaps he thought of her in the same way that she thought of Marty. A quiet superiority.
“Dawn’s close,” he said. “We should go down. Use the day to talk to the others, and tomorrow night we’ll catch him.”
“How?”
“By using your brother as bait.”
“The bastard will be expecting that.”
“Of course,” Francesco said. “So you’ll be bait as well.” He stood and stretched, and Rose heard his joints clicking, his muscles flexing. She could sense the dawn coming, a soft brightening to the clouds in the east, and for a moment she felt queasy. She hadn’t seen the sun or felt its heat in five years, and she still missed it.
Beneath them, the warren of London’s underworld.
Time to go down.
Marty knew he wouldn’t sleep a wink that night. He entered his house sober, watching the shadows around him, jumping at the slightest sound—a cat bursting from undergrowth in their small front garden, a car horn in the distance. Inside, the familiar shadows and shapes that made up the geography of the house were no longer comforting. They were somewhere for that thing to hide.
But Rose is one too.
He shook his head as he stood in the hallway behind the closed and locked front door and tried to make sense of his night. But there was no sense to be made.
“Marty?”
He jumped, letting out a small strangled cry halfway between laugh and scream.
“Mum! Thought you’d be asleep.” She was standing at the head of the staircase, a vague shape that he knew so well. Comforting. At least that hadn’t changed.
“Just been to the loo. You’re late. Are you drunk?”
“Not at all. And yeah, sorry, Gaz and I were watching a movie and time ran away with us.”
“Just you and Gaz?” There was that tone, the half-playful, half-concerned voice of a mother knowing her son was old enough to be fooling around with girls. It embarrassed him to hell, but he also found it quite sweet.
“Just the two of us. He got really drunk. He’ll have lots of cleaning up to do in the morning, and—”
“It almost is morning, son. Three o’clock. Don’t make a noise when you come to bed, sweetheart.” And she disappeared, shuffling across the landing into her bedroom to get some sleep at last. He felt a pang of guilt, and then he thought of Rose.
I saw Rose tonight, Mum. She’s a vampire, but other than that she’s okay. I’ve always known she wasn’t dead, but never guessed she could be undead. And she saved me from another vampire, a really nasty one, one that wanted to drink my blood and butcher me and… she didn’t. He barked a short laugh, startled at how loud it was, and as he walked through into the kitchen it turned into a silent, shoulder-spasming sob. He rubbed his eyes but the tears kept coming.
“You’d never believe who I saw tonight, Mum,” he whispered, and saying it, however quietly, seemed to settle him a little.
He poured some orange juice, but the darkness pressing against the kitchen window terrified him, so he decided to take the drink upstairs. He made sure all the doors and windows downstairs were locked first, moving quietly so as not to alert his parents to what he was doing. On the landing he passed the closed door to Rose’s old bedroom and a sense of unreality hit him.
She was in there, asleep. She had to be. He’d got really drunk, and on the way home he’d suffered a waking nightmare about Rose disappearing and being presumed dead, her reappearance, the thing that had almost torn him apart for the stuff in his veins… and as he closed his own bedroom door, he just managed to put the glass down before the shakes hit him.
He collapsed on his bed and sobbed into the pillow, desperate for his parents not to hear. If they did and came to see what was wrong, what could he possibly say?
Marty tried to remember what it had been like having Rose in the house. He’d been twelve when she disappeared; she was ten years older, and they’d had so little in common that sometimes they spent days, even weeks without really having conversations. They’d talked, of course—Hey, Hi, Shut up, Get lost—but he could not recall a time when they’d sat in his or her room and really talked. Sometimes she’d chatted at him, telling him about her plans to move to America and become a personal trainer. In his memories she was always doing something to keep fit, whether it was running in the streets or working out in her own room. Her weights were still in there, along with all the other things her parents had never got around to throwing away.
Marty wondered if she wanted her things back. The weights and clothes, the books and CDs, and… and what the fuck would a vampire want with all those things?
He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. It had not been a nightmare, and he hadn’t made it up. Perhaps it was shock, but there was a curious detachment between him and the unreality of what had happened. He remembered the vampire coming at him and Rose barreling into it, their fight, the thing fleeing after calling Rose “Weakling.” And he believed it all. Those couple of times he’d imagined seeing his sister over the past few years probably helped, but what made it easier to accept was the way Rose had changed. He’d recognized her more from her stance and movements than from her face and voice. And although even they were different—he’d never seen her fighting before, and she’d run as if the darkness eased her way—they were still more familiar to him than those dark eyes, so much older than he remembered. They were eyes that had seen things, eyes that craved. As well as scaring him, they made him pity Rose more.
Before tonight, his only thoughts of vampires had had to do with movies and comics. They were cool monsters sometimes, like in Near Dark. Not so cool in that Tom Cruise movie: too many fluffy collars and cuffs. Now he knew them to be real. Doubt had been shoved aside as quickly and surely as that vampire ambushed by his dead sister.
As the night drew on and sleep eluded him, the situation started resolving itself for Marty. Setting to one side Rose’s reappearance and its repercussions, the main factor to consider was the danger he was obviously in. As Rose had suggested, wounded pride and anger might bring that man-thing back for him tomorrow night—she should know—and, alone, there was nothing he could do to protect himself. Leaving was the only way he could ensure his own safety and that of his mother and father.
He had to persuade them to leave. Tomorrow. Without telling them about Rose, or claiming that a vampire had come for him…