Falling Apart (13 page)

Sil stood at the window watching the darkening sky. He sipped occasionally from the bottle of Synth that swung between his fingers and tried to pretend that this was just a holiday, just a break from the everyday world. After all, many people would pay to stay in a place like this: a cosy, tastefully furnished house standing with views over the point where the fields blurred into heather and bracken. It was achingly picturesque and he'd not seen a soul all day, apart from a Barghest out hunting in the form of a giant black dog. It had been trotting up to some sheep, which had predictably reacted by becoming hysterical. Sil had waved a hand at it, whereupon it had transformed into the shape of a headless man and, rather sulkily, vanished in flames.

Is this loneliness? I don't believe it. Haunter of the dark places, the terror that comes from within, child of the night
 …
and I am seriously prepared to put early evening television on just for company.
He took another swig of the blood and let his head fall forward, trying to make sense of his thoughts.
Otherworld office doesn't know anything about what happened to me, and they don't seem to be trying too hard to investigate. Gods. I cannot conceive how Zan can believe that I have run amok, but all information on the system shows that he is willing to hand me over to the human authorities, to the Hunters.
Sil tried not to remember the e-mails, Zan's promises of co-operation, his assurances that Sil would be found and brought to justice as a rogue vampire. Despite his snug surroundings, his isolation from the world, Sil gave a tiny shiver of fear.
I found nothing, nothing to help me. That means I am relying on Jessica.
He thought of her strength, her unwavering devotion to whichever path she set herself on. Remembered her desperation in the face of the knowledge that she was going to have to kill her father, and the single-minded way she had done it. And then he remembered her tears, her helpless misery, when the deed was done.
Is she strong enough? The situation looks hopeless: if I can't find a way out, how can she?

Perhaps I should go. Yes. Leave this place to its memories of her as a little girl, innocent of the world that made her. I should run north, head for the border, maybe lie low somewhere in the mountains where I can't easily be tracked, try to keep my head down and
 …
And what? He dipped his head again.
Die in a filthy bothy somewhere, wrapped in a dead sheep?

He felt the connection with Jessica give a sharp tug. She was thinking of him, concentrating on him, not as a passing thought but as a serious consideration. He gave a half smile, which vanished from his face when the tug came again, hard enough to cause a thrust of pain this time.
Jess? What
 …
?
And again. This time the connection felt like fire, like red-hot metal that spiralled and sparked somewhere in his gut, a line of flame that ran between him and her, a bond that felt as though it had been forged in hell.

He doubled over and the bottle of Synth fell from his fingers, spilling the remaining blood over his shoes as he crouched, arms wrapped around the pain's centre. A few words wheezed from his throat as the agony built and his demon reacted by sending out a shot of adrenaline that would have killed a horse, or at least enabled it to win several races concurrently, and his fangs lengthened in response.

Sil dropped to his knees amid the blood, feeling his demon building to take control, to remove the threat, and had just about surrendered himself to the loss of consciousness when he heard the door slam back against the wall of the room.

‘What the
fuck
did you think you were doing?' Jessica stood there, framed in the doorway, hands drawn into fists and her face pink with anger. ‘Zan knew you'd hacked the system and he bloody nearly got me to admit I knew you were here!'

The connection exploded. In his stomach, in his head, pinpricks of silver embedded in his skin and behind his eyes, but the pain died away and he found that he could move. ‘I … needed … to find out …' he gasped, still cupping his abdomen, afraid that if he stood up too quickly, his entrails may slide out. ‘I cannot … just
sit
here …'

She kicked the door shut. ‘Well, tough, bitey-boy.' She almost snarled. ‘You came to me for help, so you should … what the hell are you doing down there anyway?'

‘Indigestion.'

‘Seriously? There's some Rennies in the kitchen cupboard … Hey, hang on, I'm really angry with you here, this is no time for medical advice! I almost had to make a pass at Zan to get him to stop thinking about you and, okay, so we were sitting in the Veyron at the time, and there's a lot of things I'll do to keep sitting in a Veyron but, let me tell you, shagging your boss is
not
one of them!'

Now Sil wasn't sure if the buzzing in his head was the after-effects of the fiery connection, or his brain's attempts to make sense of what Jess was saying. ‘You … and
Zan
? You … and
ZAN?
No, I'm sorry, I'm not even sure that's physically possible.'

‘I only said
almost
. He is so not my type, with the green eyes and the hair and pulling the alpha-male stunt and that body … Okay, not doing myself any favours here. Let's just leave it at
almost
, shall we? And then I can go back to being terrified that you are going to give yourself away and they are going to come for you.'

She whirled away from him now, going to stand by the window, watching the night. He suspected that she didn't want him to see her cry. ‘I was careful,' he said, quietly. ‘I used at least three ISPs to disguise my trail. He could probably track back to here, but only after a lot of hard work, and I didn't do any damage in his system, I just looked up a few old files, checked out what he was working on to see if he was …'

She turned again and he could see the tears bubbling in her eyes. ‘He's not trying to save you, Sil. He wants you dead.' Her voice rose at the end of the sentence, almost in surprise, and her shoulders gave a small shake. ‘Even Zan.'

He nodded. ‘I already know.'

For a moment she stood there, the dark sky behind and her dark hair tumbling over her face. Then she just said, ‘Shit, Sil,' and closed the space between them, wrapping her arms around his neck and resting her forehead against his chest, pushing herself into him as though she wanted to possess him, to force his demon to relinquish charge and take him herself. ‘You stupid bastard,' she muttered. ‘You stupid, stupid
bastard.
' And all thoughts of running, of leaving this woman behind, disappeared, burned off by the heat of her body, the scent of her skin and the pain in her voice.

He pulled her in tighter, feeling the silk of her hair beneath his chin like the beginnings of a noose. ‘I am sorry. I didn't think that … I underestimated Zan. I just have to think now … to break it all down until I can find a way out of this.'

Her arms clung. ‘Maybe there isn't a way out. Did you think of that? Maybe there's nothing more to it than – you went off the rails.'

‘Which you don't seriously believe.' His demon was spinning around inside his chest like a sample in a centrifuge, feeding off her doubt, her fear, her desire. It made his mouth water.

‘And what makes you think I don't?' She stood back a little in order to look into his face. He felt the pull of those amber eyes almost as though she held a glamour of her own, a power into which he was falling.

‘Because if you did, you wouldn't be here now. You would have killed me yourself, Jessica, when I first came to you. You would have been swift and you would have been merciful, but you would have killed me.'

She looked deep into his eyes, moving her hands to the back of his head. ‘You keep remembering that,' she breathed, raising herself so that their mouths were level. ‘You just keep remembering that.' He leaned in and their lips made contact, hers softly parted, his slightly puckered by the fangs that occupied his mouth.

I was still angry with him, and that anger made me kiss harder than I should have. His fangs nicked against my lower lip and I heard his soft moan as the taste of my blood ran against his tongue. Clearly not enough to incapacitate him, just enough to inflame, because he suddenly pulled me in tighter, so tight that my ribs could hardly move enough to get air in, and I found myself gripped against his horrible sweater so hard that the Aran pattern was embossing itself against my neck. I moved back as far as his grasp would allow. ‘Back up, bitey.'

‘Or what?' His eyes were black, flashing to occasional glimpses of grey, dominating that pale face, making his cheekbones stand out like running boards. ‘Hmm, Jess? Bottom line?'

‘Bottom line is I kick your ass all the way to Otherworld Central.' He was rigid against me, physically excited and mentally too, if the look on his face was anything to go by. ‘I don't think this is a good idea right now. We're both too …'

‘Too …? I think we're always
too,
Jess. Yeah, we're too wound up, too edgy, too fucking
scared
, but that's rather the point of being us, isn't it? Always on the verge of something.' He let me go suddenly and I almost toppled backwards. ‘Remember before? Before we got involved, when we used to tiptoe around each other, both wanting and neither of us really knowing what it was we wanted?'

‘Oh yes, I remember,' I said darkly. The watching, the wanting, all the time knowing that I couldn't have him, that he could never love me …

‘Well, now I
do
know.' He stepped in again, cool and beautiful. ‘I know that it's you. And I want you, here and now, in case it's the last chance I ever get. If they take me, tomorrow, the next day, at least I can go knowing that we had this – that it was all real, you and me.'

‘So you want us to have sex here, in my parents' living room, in case the Hunters come and get you? That is the most ridiculous reason I have ever heard.'

‘We need a reason now?' One thumb trailed over my lips. ‘I don't think we have
ever
needed a reason.' And he kissed me, gently this time, making my heart skid inside my chest and my breath stop in my throat. ‘Love. It's the reason we've always had.'

‘I don't want to lose you. I can't bear it, Sil.' My voice was still backed up, pulled down with the weight of unshed tears. ‘But I can't see how we're going to get out of this.'

He drew me down onto the sofa, fingers cupped under my jawbone, holding my head steady as he kissed me again, harder now. ‘No. Neither can I.' His eyes were burning now, clear and cold silver heated by an expression that called to me. ‘
Jess
 …'

And suddenly I didn't care that everything seemed hopeless, I just wanted him to keep doing what he was doing. Sil's mouth raked over me, his fangs bumping against my skin and sliding, carefully, never even so much as nipping, his fingers gliding along after them until I was coiled tightly as a spring beneath him. My hands reached up and pulled his horrible jumper over his head, revealing that glorious taut body, pale skin almost gleaming in the moonlight.

‘You're shining,' I murmured.

‘If you say one single word about sparkles, I will bite you right … now.' His voice fell into a moan as I unfastened his equally horrible jeans and his cool flesh settled against mine, like nightfall.

‘Jonathan.' I used his name, his
old
name, blew it into his hair as he raised himself above me. ‘Remember who you are. Not a vampire, not here, not now. Here you are Jonathan.'

‘I wish …' But whatever he wished for was lost in the rising heat as our mouths came together and I felt his hands slide down me, his body pushing us both down into the couch. Then everything became a pulse of bodies and heat and pressure, a labyrinth of limbs as we wove around each other, I became rootless and weightless and finally murmured his name again as the climax took me over; then clung to him as he fixed his eyes on mine, driving into me with a desperation that he could only show here, now, like this. ‘You, Jess. Just you.'

And then his demon was cartwheeling and spiralling, and he came on a moaned outbreath, gathering me to him and holding me so tightly that I could feel his bones pressing into my hips, burying his face against my hair. The smell of his skin seared into me, dark and deep, the mysterious smell of ancient papers with an undercurrent of thyme and rue. We sank back on the sofa and he was stroking my hair as I lay my head on his chest and tried to catch my breath.

‘So, what do we do now?'

His ribs heaved as he laughed. ‘It's a little too late for me to offer to buy you dinner, I think. Perhaps some wine?'

I raised my head and gave him a hard look. ‘About'—I waved a hand—‘all this. You can't hide here forever. Mum and Dad are going to come back eventually, and Zan is going to get suspicious if I keep dodging up to the farm all the time. Actually, scratch that, he already
is
suspicious.'

The laughter stopped. So did the hair stroking. Sil lay still beneath me. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘And I am afraid.'

We lay for a while longer, wound around each other, without speaking. The simple rise and fall of his breath was enough for me, for now. Just to know he was here, that in this second we were safe.

‘Did you find out anything at all from the Otherworld system?' I asked at last. ‘Or was it a complete waste of time? Apart from me getting to hear Zan pull the Big Man voice, of course.'

Another moment of silence. ‘I was trying to find out what I might have been doing on the Embankment. Whether I parked the car there purely for convenience, or whether I had business at that end of London.' He was speaking into the dark; I could hear the slight tremor in his voice. Sil wasn't just afraid, he was terrified.

‘And did you?' I decided to give him the dignity of pretending I hadn't noticed.

‘I scanned all the businesses within a mile radius of the point at which I was parked. Government offices, mostly, two riverside clubs'—a catch in his voice—‘and a boat-hire place.' I stayed quiet. That quiver in his tone told me more than I wanted to know about his self-doubt regarding the clubs. ‘I have no reason to visit any of those places,' he went on. ‘None.' A sudden jerk of movement as his demon reacted to his uncertainty. Or mine. ‘But I did establish one, small fact.'

‘Go on.'

‘Zan had been looking too.'

I struggled to sit up without leaving his embrace. ‘So, Zan hasn't quite given up on you, then?'

‘I didn't say that. All I know is that he had also been trying to track my movements. We cannot know whether that was to help establish my innocence or my guilt.'

A thin trickle of moonlight slid through the uncurtained window and illuminated our bodies, as though the couch was a stage set. He lay, full of the grace and ease that his demon lent him, as fine-boned and tautly muscled as a thoroughbred, but his eyes, black in this false light, were shadowed with anxiety. ‘Use our system,' I said. ‘I'm sure if you can hack into the Otherworld system, you can hack into ours. Then you can carry on looking without worrying about Zan tracking you.'

This probably counted as treasonable behaviour as far as York Council was concerned; there was probably some law on the statute books that said I could have my firkins crushed and my swoggle removed in public for doing this, but right now I would have done, and said, anything to help remove that tightness from his face.

‘But Liam will know, Jessica. I cannot move through your system as easily as my own; there are passwords and …'

‘I'll give you the passwords.' And say goodbye to my one groat a year donkey allowance. ‘And I'll deal with Liam.'

‘
Jess
 …' He turned and breathed my name into my hair, pulling me in close again, as though he needed every molecule of my scent. ‘I cannot let you expose yourself like that.'

‘And I can't let you get shot down without at least knowing why.' Reluctantly I drew myself away, off the couch, and rummaged around in my jeans pocket, until I found the only piece of paper I had and, on the back of an old bus ticket, I wrote out the passwords to access the various parts of our system. ‘Liam thinks I don't know these. He thinks I never pay attention when he's logging in, but I have to, otherwise I'd never be able to hack his Amazon account. That boy has some seriously strange reading habits, and I have an entire set of Terry Pratchett paperbacks he hasn't found out that he's bought yet. Thank you, one click purchasing.' I scribbled the last code and held up the ticket. ‘Here.'

Sil raised a hand to take it; then closed his fingers, empty. ‘Do you know what you are doing? In effect, handing over the tools of your destruction to the enemy. I could blow your system open to all comers, infiltrate your Tracker program, alter all your files. I could—'

‘Yes, you could. But there are two reasons that you won't.'

‘Which are?'

‘You are Jonathan Wilberforce. Oh, yes, you might call yourself Sil these days, you might have a demon that lives off thrills and you might drink blood and all that, but … at heart you are Jonathan. Husband of Christina, father to Joseph and Constance.' At the sound of his children's names, Sil became very, very still. ‘You are a good man.'

Lips brushed my cheek. ‘
Thank you
.' Barely a breath. ‘What is the other reason?'

‘Oh, because you know that if you did
anything
to compromise my systems or to put the Treaty at risk, I would hunt you down.'

‘Oh yes. That.' After a moment, his fist closed around the paper. ‘I will not forget.'

‘Better not, bitey-boy.' I began to slide my jeans back up my legs and fumbled my head and arms back into my shirt. ‘And now, I have to go.'

‘Can we not have this night, at least?' He ran one hand up my arm. ‘We may never—'

‘Yes, I know. But if I stay out all night and it's not to rattle my chains at the office, then Zan is going to know that something is up, and since I haven't had a night off since we went decimal, it won't take him a millisecond to work out what's going on. So …' I turned, half-dressed, to face him. ‘I have to go.'

A long, slow nod, and then Sil was slipping back into his nasty jeans, wincing at the cheap chain-store label as he eased it over his hips.

‘Why don't you change into something else? I'm sure there'll be some clothes around here that would fit you better.' I finished climbing back into my generously discarded stuff, trying to ignore the fact that all this clipping and zipping held the coldness of a last meeting.

‘No.' Sil turned to face me. Bare-chested he looked more ‘vampire', composed and powerful. But then, that truly awful tank-top would have made Dracula look like a train-spotter. ‘These remind me of what is at stake. They remind me how much I have already lost, and how much more I stand to lose if I cannot solve this problem.' Suddenly his arms were around me with a desperate strength. ‘I promise you, Jessica, I will find out what happened. And then, if necessary, I will hand myself over to the Hunters, for due process of law.'

‘They'll …'

‘Yes. But it will be what I deserve. If … if I cannot be trusted. If I have … lapses, if I refuse to be bound by the Treaty, then …' He stopped speaking and kissed my shoulder. ‘Then I am better off dead.'

The weight of the hopelessness came crashing down again, but I wouldn't let it settle, refused to give it roosting room. ‘Then we'd better find out what happened fast, because, seriously? Those jeans? With that jumper? You are going to be looking for a new girlfriend – probably one who regards Walmart as a top-flight fashion emporium.'

He gave me a solemn look. ‘That will be no more than I deserve.'

There were no more words. Nothing to say that we couldn't hear from the silence and feel in the desperate hug and the kiss that made both our cheeks wet. I held him to me, felt his taut frame trembling against me; felt his demon brush lightly against my hands as if in another farewell kiss. All I wanted,
all
I wanted
,
was to lie down with him, close my eyes and forget. Sleep in his arms and wake to the familiar dark scent of his skin and the knowledge that this was forever – however long our forever might be.

And, as I drove away, it felt as though I left my soul behind.