Walking Shadows (2 page)

"Lissa?"

"
What
?" I snapped and was instantly contrite. My brain goes off on its own
sometimes when I'm stressed. "Sorry, Gary. I'm a little spun out."

"I shouldn't have come. I just didn't know what else to do." He stared down at the
plastic bag, caught between frustration and self-disgust. "My brain got stuck, and I thought
you might be able to..."

I could see him trying to figure what the next verb should be.

"Never mind. I'll wait at the Gold Bug."

"
We'll
wait at the Gold Bug," I offered firmly. Hope made a reluctant return to
his expression. "That's what friends do for each other," I informed him. Yeah, right. We
bring each other body parts and conspire to get rid of the evidence.

Gary grinned sheepishly. "You have some weird friends."

"I surely do." I patted his cold hand and then ran my fingers through my hair, which
sprang out into long, dark, devil-may-care wildness - which it does at the slightest provocation,
despite my best attempts at grooming. "First things first. We need an insulated bag and some
frozen peas."

"Peas?"

"Nanna used to use frozen peas as an emergency ice pack when we were kids." My brother
Paul was the most common recipient of Nanna's frozen-vege first aid, usually as a result of
knockabout football field hijinks or failed tree climbing expeditions.

That was a long time ago, when I'd still had a whole family. Before my eldest sister died at the
age of 12, and everything fell apart. Before our parents became useless with loss, and Paul fell
into drug addiction and death, and Nanna wore herself out to the point heart failure trying to keep
us all together.

And Mum? Well, she had chosen to become a vampire. Then she tried to turn my sister Kate and me.
Not exactly a parenting paragon, my mother.

Only Kate and I were left now, really, if you didn't count our alcoholic father. Which I usually
didn't.

"Peas and a bag, you reckon?" said Gary, sticking to the present.

"An insulated bag, a bit like a floppy esky," I elaborated.

"Where do we get those?"

Gary followed in my wake as I strode to the nearest supermarket. I paid for the necessities and
stood sentinel while he packed the incriminating evidence into the blue padded bag, stacked the peas
around it and zipped it up.

Afterwards, Gary stood with a blue bag in one hand, a yellow DVD bag in the other, and a relieved
expression on his face.

I felt anything except relieved. I hoped to high heaven that Mundy would be at Magdalene's club
to take delivery.

Fretting for that old bastard's wellbeing was absolutely my last concern, but
damn
. His
hand had been literally torn off. His place had been utterly trashed. Mundy himself was missing. I
had no idea what had the strength to do that to a centuries-old vampire. It was terrifying to
contemplate, let alone consider what it might do next. And there would be a 'next'. There always
was.

The best thing that could be said about this whole situation was that the lack of accompanying
buckets of blood was a sort-of-nice change.

Of course, the blood would probably come later, along with the mandatory running for my life.

A peak hour tram ride through inner city Melbourne with a hand in a bag is not the
most relaxing way to end the working week. I spent the whole ride thinking that someone was going to
notice
.

From time to time I sniffed surreptitiously, trying to work out if the stew of close-packed
bodies on public transport in summer was going to make the hand go off, despite the insulation and
the peas.

Gary, pressed close beside me on the crowded floor, was no help. Mostly we took turns at glancing
furtively at the bag, out the window and at the other passengers while willing the tram to hurry the
hell
up
.

Finally, the tension got too much. My eyes were going dry from all that furtive glancing.

"Say something!" I hissed at Gary.

He blinked at me in his owlish way. "Like what?"

"I don't know. Anything. Distract me."

"Ah…" Of course, when anyone asks you to change the subject, you can never think
of anything to change it to. Then he brightened. "I got a new film today. About a kid. I
haven't seen it yet, and I bet it's all wrong, as usual…"

And he reached into the yellow plastic bag and plucked the DVD out. The DVD that had spent I
don't know how long cover-to-palm with a severed hand. I stared at Gary as he held the box out to
me, his response to my look of horror one of bewilderment. "It was on special," he said
after a moment.

"Oh. Good," I replied faintly. I think I was supposed to take it out of his hands and
inspect the cover and film notes with interest, but I couldn't bring myself to touch it.

He flipped it over to look at the back. "There are some special features. And. Um. A
commentary."

"Who's in it?"

"That little kid from that film with that guy from the Lestat movie."

I have known Gary long enough for this sentence to actually make sense.

We stuttered through a conversation about this latest find for his collection until mercifully
the tram reached Exhibition Street and we piled out with a stream of other commuters. From there it
was a short walk down the shady side of the street to Chinatown. Gary wouldn't spontaneously combust
if he walked in the sunshine - that had turned out to be one of the many myths - but the light
itched like prickles under the skin, he said, and it affected things like his irritatingly acute
hearing. Some of the stories were, after all, true.

Our path led us down Little Bourke Street to a familiar alley that dog-legged behind the Chinese
Mission Church and a couple of restaurants and finally to a heavy door, inscribed with a yellow
beetle. The Gold Bug. I wasn't used to seeing it in daylight. The sinister atmosphere the door
generated at night was only partly diminished by being able to see the graffiti on the surrounding
brickwork.

I rapped on the door. No reply. The hour was early yet, though someone would be here to watch for
club arrivals soon.

"Is there a back way in?" I asked Gary. When you can clamber walls there is usually a
back way in.

"Yeah, but Magdalene locks it when she's not around."

I pointed out that opening time would soon be upon us and that however busy she was, Magdalene
was never going to keep her bar closed if money could be made from the punters. She'd been running
public houses of one description or another since the Gold Rush and had Bar Management 101 down pat;
whatever else her undead brain had trouble with. Gary agreed to check the status of the rear entry.
This, unfortunately, left me literally holding the bags.

The yellow DVD bag was folded and I reluctantly stuffed it into my satchel. The insulated bag I
held gingerly in my fingertips by the blue straps, as far from my body as I could manage. I watched
Gary scramble up the side of the building like an ungainly multi-coloured beetle. I could never work
out if it was creepy or comical when he did that. He disappeared onto the roof several storeys
up.

Long silence. The loneliness of standing in front of a closed door at the end of three lengths of
isolated Melbourne alley pressed in. I felt like a rat at the end of the maze, but a rat with a
sudden certainty that it was electric shocks and not cheesy treats waiting when the gate sprang
open.

Get a grip, Lissa Wilson!
And if there is someone brandishing an electric prodder, just
poke them in the eye and run like hell.

"Ah. Gary's little friend, I believe. What brings you here?"

My jolt of fear at the voice was certainly electric. I whirled right, left, around, looking for
the owner of that silky voice, then remembered to look up. A large woman was poised on the side of a
building, several metres above my head. One of her hands was firmly wrapped around a pipe, the other
hand and her boot-shod feet giving her purchase in indentations I couldn't see.

I hadn't seen Magdalene for a long time. I had made sure of that. I realised now that I should
have made it significantly longer.

"Ahh..." I'm not at my most articulate in the company of people who have previously
tried to kill me.

Magdalene was dressed in her usual taffeta and silk gown, looking like a cherubic grandma with a
sinful past who wouldn't hesitate to discipline you with a birch stick if necessary. She was all
ruffles and generous bosom in the Victorian-era dress. She had a kindly exterior, but inside she was
jagged and cold with a wide mean streak.

She delicately pushed away from the wall and with vampire-borne balance and strength, landed
lightly in front of me. With the end of the alley at my back, door to my left, brick wall to my
right, there was nowhere for me to go.

She took a moment to smooth her hands over her gown, then looked me in the eye.

"I wasn't expecting to see you again. You have made it clear on your few visits that you do
not approve of us, Miss…Watson, isn't it? Or, ah,
Wilson
, yes?"

"One of those." I tried for nonchalance, but my voice shook. I had no doubt her
heightened senses could hear my racing heartbeat.

Her smile was sudden and terrifying as she leaned in close to me. She was slightly shorter than
me and I was acutely aware that her mouth was close - too, too, too close - to my throat.

"Miss Wilson, I do not like you," said Magdalene, barely above a whisper. Yet I could
hear every word. Piercing terror tends to heighten even human senses like that.

"I'm not that f-f-fond of you either." I'm not brave, but sometimes defiance is the
only weapon you have left. Besides, I was hanging onto the hope that Magdalene, who normally had
such good business sense, would not commit blatant murder at her own door. That would surely be bad
for trade.

Magdalene tilted her head slightly, regarding me with cold displeasure. "Do you think,"
she said, "That you would be missed, should something unpleasant happen to you?"

"Yes," I managed, firmly, then my voice started quivering again. "D-do you think
your volunteer blood d-donors would come back here if they found out you'd broken that p-particular
rule?"

"How would they ever know?" Her smile grew uglier, revealing her teeth, displaying that
expression that said I was nothing more than a potential, passing snack. Not even needed for
nourishment or survival. All my blood would do for her is make her feel alive again for a little
while.

Then the club door was opened by Becks, the whip-thin, professionally unimpressed door person. I
hadn't yet figured out if Becks was male or female and reckoned that on the whole it didn't matter
except to Becks and whoever Becks slept with.

"Gary said to tell you he's in the upstairs bar," Becks said, regarding me blandly from
behind a long, black fringe. I couldn't tell if the look was tinged with contempt, like most of the
looks Gary and I got here. Becks is hard to read in pretty much every way imaginable.

Door-person looked at Boss-lady, who had adopted a bored expression. "I will see you in my
office," Magdalene said to Becks, with a sudden shift in tone to 'approving', resulting in the
latter's inscrutability receding for a smug moment. Becks was, of course, a member of the Gold Bug
and naturally considered it an honour to be a blood hit for the boss.

Magdalene ignored both of us and leapt high up the wall and followed the route Gary had taken to
the roof, leaving me with what I suppose she considered the caterer's entrance. Belatedly, I
realised I should have given her the damned bag and its grisly contents.

The opportunity to offload the bag passed as Becks also vanished, leaving the doorway empty.
Leaving still looked like the smart thing to do, but I'd have to traverse a long, dark, dog-legged
stretch of alley to get back to a busy street. My skin crawled at the idea of walking the distance
on my own, even though it was still light. Bad things don't only happen in the dark, and there were
vampires even worse than Magdalene out there. Several of them would be making their way to the Gold
Bug for an early bite. Mundy, for a start, assuming he was still alive.

Despite our encounter, I decided that Magdalene wasn't immediately dangerous to me. She knew
better than to go spooking the volunteers, who preferred their dangerous experiences to be thrilling
without being fatal. It had taken months, according to Gary, for the Gold Bug to recover from the
last drained body found in the nearby street.

Mundy, however, had less business sense than Magdalene.

The conclusion was that I would, perversely, be marginally less vulnerable in the club. At least
there I could seek out Gary, hand over this awful bag to anyone who'd take it, and have Gary
accompany me out of Chinatown.

Screwing my courage to the legendary sticking place, I went inside.

In Becks' continued absence, I darted down the stairs to the basement. The potential fire hazard
candles no longer decorated the entry. I missed them. The much less volatile set of low lights
embedded in the concrete steps lacked ambience and, more importantly, the potential for self-defence
offered by a naked flame. Fire is not the vampire's friend.

This entry had once led to a private members club. Now the steps opened onto a regular cocktail
bar designed in wood and red velvet to capture the lucrative custom of your bog standard
wine-and-spirits crowd. Soft music played and irregularly placed shelves held up ancient curios. If
my great-great-great grandmother had run a bordello, this is what it would have looked like, a
strange combination of gentility and opulence with a suggestion of impropriety.

I hurried through the bar to a dark curtain at the rear which drew aside to reveal a long, narrow
staircase. Dodging around the thick golden rope that would later bar it firmly from
"non-members", I headed upstairs. I bumped into Jack, the skinny inner-sanctum bouncer,
coming down as I ascended past the ground level and onto the first floor. Jack barely acknowledged
my presence as I squeezed past him.