Walking Shadows (7 page)

"After you have completed the task I have for you, Gary, you are to break yourself of the
habit of this person. Magdalene will ensure you have suitable replacements. I will not countenance
having her in my presence again. If ever I set eyes on her after this day, I will ensure that I
never have to do so thereafter."

Gary's purported errand that had led us to this point had slipped my mind. This didn't seem like
an appropriate time to bring it up again, but before I could share with Mundy my thoughts on what a
prick I thought he was, Gary spoke. "What is this job you have for me?" He made no
response to Mundy's outrageous attempt to control his social life.

"Alberto needs you."

Gary blinked, hard. "No he doesn't."

"He requires assistance," Mundy amended with a mean half-smile, "Of the usual
kind."

"It doesn't have to be me."

"Magdalene and I have our hands full at present," and just the faintest of pauses hung
in the air after he said 'hands'.

"Someone else can go."

"Alberto doesn't want someone else."

"Your reputation precedes you, Gary," interjected Magdalene, all nanna-sweet once
more.

"I don't want to."

Magdalene sighed her exasperation and said, not bothering with anything as polite as
sotto
voce
, "We really must do something about his attitude."

Mundy's thin smile suggested agreement, but he said, "He wrote that if help was not
forthcoming, then he was prepared to make someone to do it for him."

At first I thought he'd misspoken, and then I considered his grammar, and I didn't much like it.
Nor did Gary, apparently. He scowled while shuffling his feet and then nodded.

"All right. When?"

"At your earliest convenience," Mundy said in a tone indicating that 'immediately' had
better be convenient. Smug bastard. He drew a crumpled letter from his pocket and handed it to Gary.

Gary jammed the letter into his own pocket without looking at it and said to me, "We should
go."

Happy to oblige, I picked up the empty blue bag and stuffed it into my satchel, which was now
full to bursting. Handling the bag was noisome, but I had enough presence of mind to ensure there
was as little evidence of our passing as possible. If the authorities found Thomas's body, I didn't
want anything to link Gary and me to it. If the police could put me here, they'd find my name in the
unsolved case files for the murders Priestley had committed last year.

The fact that I could solve all those killings, and Thomas's, for them wouldn't be welcomed. They
wouldn't believe me. My life was complicated enough without being the centre of an official police
investigation.

Then I walked to the ladder that Mundy had used and sympathised with Gary's irked sigh on his
realising it was there.

"You first," he said, so I started climbing. The metalwork creaked alarmingly but held.
When I reached the roof I looked down at Gary clambering up after me. Mundy and Magdalene had both
vanished too, along with Thomas's crumpled shape.
We're all getting rid of the evidence.

Thomas had been injected with something, according to his description of the incident. Injected,
then hideously wounded before being euthanased - if that was the word for the already-dead. Mundy
had been maimed presumably by the same people. Who knew if Gary was on the hit list? I wasn't
prepared to take any chances on it.

Mundy and Magdalene might want to keep a lid on who was responsible for all of these things, but
I'd be damned if I'd just let it lie. Stomach churning images of Gary - hurt, burned, homeless,
zombified
goddamnit
were fuel to a massively indignant fire burning in my
thoughts.

Keep your stupid bloody secrets. Gary and I can do this without you.

"Don't suppose you have a clue about what's going on?" I asked Gary as he
joined me on the rooftop.

"Maybe. I'm not sure."

"Don't you go all cryptic on me, Gary. I'm having a terrible night and I'm not in the
mood."

"I don't know much about it. Mundy let something slip, years and years ago, in the seventies
probably. I wrote it in my notes to make sure I'd remember it, but I haven't been able to
corroborate anything."

"And this slip was…?"

"He was in one of his… moods."

"Mundy is nothing but moods. All of them foul."

Gary acknowledged this truth. "A worse mood than usual, then. He was complaining about
missing what it used to be like."

"Ah yes," I remarked bitterly, "the good old days, when occupying rugged castles
and eating the peasants all unhindered by the pesky tabloid media made life grand."

"Something like that. You know he's from England, originally."

"So I gathered." My supposition was that Mundy originated from the early 1700s at the
latest, given that his syntax sounded like he was reading aloud from
Gulliver's Travels.

"One night he made me go with him to clean up his new digs. He'd had to find somewhere new
to live and he didn't trust the electricity to not burn the place down. Still doesn't, really."

Not surprising for a man who had grown up human in the time of tallow candles.

"He was trying to convince me to go to Magdalene's club and I wasn't interested. He started
on about how great it used to be, and how when I'd had my first kill it would all be
different."

At the look I gave him, Gary shrugged. "The whole idea made me feel a bit sick and I told
him so. So he went off at me."

"Blaming you for the wrack and ruin of civilisation?"

"I hadn't been… dead… for long then; only five or six years. I thought he was an
uptight square. Then he ranted a bit about how he'd been driven out of London and then England and
then Europe by 'those damned hunters'. He said something about how they'd cleaned out the London
docks and later, in Paris, he'd escaped minutes before they found his squat. He got out the window
while they were busy killing the… other occupants."

Mundy was clearly not someone you could count on to watch your back. "Did he say anything
else about these hunters?"

"He said he'd killed one of them in London, around the time of the French Revolution. A few
years later another one was in his place; 10 years later they popped up again."

"Sounds like some kind of bogeyman."

"That's what I thought. Then I started making notes and he clammed up. I review my notes
pretty often, but nothing really connects." He tapped his forehead with his finger to indicate
the failure of his synapses to spark.

"Ah," I considered. "There were two of them there tonight. I saw this boy at the
bottom of the stairs. Someone in the bar called him Abe."

"Yeah, but Mundy was talking about stuff from over 300 years ago."

"He also said there were always more of them." I tried to envision a bottomless secret
society of slayers. Like ninjas, only in pantaloons. And, considering the few moments I had shared
with Abe, bug-eyed crazy as well.

"Hmmm." Which was not the kind of response I'd been hoping for. He seemed preoccupied
with peering over the edge of the building.

"You don't seem worried," I said drily.

"I'm…" the pause was so long I thought he'd forgotten what we were talking about,
but he sighed again. "I'm worrying about one thing at a time."

I knew the feeling. "What's number one on the list then?"

"Getting off the roof without being seen."

Gary's sense of priorities was frequently puzzling unless you looked at them purely in terms of
chronology rather than actual importance. In that scheme of things, of course that was number one,
ranked ahead of slayers and reluctant errands for Mundy.

"We can stay here for a bit, if it's easier," I said. "No-one's expecting me at
home."

We found a relatively comfy spot on the roof to watch the fire engines in Little Bourke Street.
The warmth of the summer night was pleasant. Gary's pale skin winked orange-and-grey with the
reflected light of flames and emergency vehicles.

Gary's shoulders were hunched unhappily and he looked troubled. Taking a leaf out of his book,
perhaps it was time to tackle issues chronologically. I bunched up closer to him and rested my head
on his shoulder, keeping my eyes on the lights.

"This errand you have to do for Mundy" - I felt his muscles tense - "do you really
have to do it?"

"You heard Mundy."

"Do you have to do everything he says?"

"Not everything. But this I do."

"What is it you have to do?"

No answer.

"Where do you have to go?"

"Ballarat. Figured I'd go tomorrow."

"Ballarat? That's pretty far afield for someone who never goes out of Melbourne. Do you
reckon you can find your way?"

I'd meant it jokingly - Ballarat's a big regional town, only a few hours north, so it's hard to
miss, and surely anyone can read a train timetable and follow a map - but it elicited a startled
response from Gary.

"Cripes, I hope so."

"Would you like me to come with you? It's Saturday, I'm rostered off work this weekend and
Kate's away with Oscar. I can keep you company on the trip."

Gary was unsuccessful at repressing a hopeful look. "You don't need to help. You can go
visit the local library or the museum while I, um, get on with it."

"Didn't Mundy say the guy's name was Alberto? You've mentioned him before haven't
you?"

"Have I?" The innocent tone was unconvincing.

"He's the one you said lives in Sovereign Hill, reliving the gold rush years and trying to
pretend the awful 20th century never happened.

Gary murmured an unhappy acknowledgement that this was, indeed, the guy.

"I wouldn't mind visiting Sovereign Hill, since we're going to Ballarat. I haven't been
there since I was studying Australian history at school. I can pan for gold while you do whatever it
is. I'll stay out of your way," I assured him as his troubled frown deepened. That seemed to
satisfy him. "Why don't you bunk over at my place tonight?" I offered, "You can watch
TV to kill time until we have to catch the train."

"Thanks."

"Are you sure you don't want to tell me what's going on?"

"I'm sure."

"Okay."

It wasn't, but I let it ride. Below us, fire trucks had dowsed the burning building and burly men
clad in yellow jackets were poking at the entrance. I wondered how long it would be before they went
inside and found Jack's body. Or Mundy's hand and Thomas's heart - if those hadn't already burned to
unrecognisable ash.

I rested my head on Gary's shoulder again. "How did you go with Hamish?"

"Good. Got him through a window into the bathroom of a bar. I belted on the door until I
heard someone coming, then left."

"Was he still conscious?"

"Yeah. He kept giving me funny looks."

You just saved his life by licking his neck. I'll bet his looks weren't half as funny as his
actual thoughts.

"He's had a weird night," I said.

Another moment of silence and then Gary said: "Thanks. For your help."

I sighed.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Do I
look
all right?" A bit of snark leaked out.

"Um. Yeah. Pretty much. Your breathing's more regular. Your heartbeat's a little fast but
it's not racing any more."

Great. Mayhem, murder, arson and secrecy were the new normal, and I was in fact fine. I'd
probably fail to cope if my life ever looked like other people's.

In due course, we got to our feet and I followed him across the rooftop, over abandoned tiles,
lengths of wood, sheets of corrugated iron, bits of pipe and the occasional chair leg. While trucks
and onlookers gathered on the street side, I made sure my bag was settled across my body and let
Gary piggy-back me down into the alley side. We got to the ground without being seen and walked back
to my place.

First I collected my mail, then we went up in the lift and I opened the front door. Stepped
through. Paused.

It was a thing with Gary that I didn't specifically invite him in. Not since the first time he
had made a choice to cross that threshold uninvited to be my friend. The few occasions that he
visited me - invariably when Kate was not around - he would take a moment to steel himself, then
step inside.

Vampires were not supposed to be able to do that - enter homes uninvited. I don't know that he
could have done it at any other house, or at churches or other places of communal gathering which
were also on the list of places he couldn't enter. Vampires always liked to claim that they could go
inside, if they really wanted to, but somehow that never translated into actually wanting to.

Except for Gary and my home, and he stepped across that threshold, uninvited, on a semi-regular
basis.

Defying his nature looked deceptively easy, except that once over it he would shudder, head to
foot. Like someone had stepped over his grave, as my Nanna used to say. I wondered if it hurt him,
but he'd always blink then beam a pleased smile, and we'd get on with things.

Things, in this case, consisted of giving Gary back his DVD, throwing the now empty esky bag in
the bin and Gary putting the kettle on while I went to scrub myself raw-pink in the shower. The hot
water didn't relax me so much as make me slightly less tense. I didn't think I could sleep. I felt
simultaneously exhausted and wide awake.

In the living room, Gary was fingering the splotches of blood on his jeans and layers of T-shirt
and Hawaiian overshirt with distaste.

"You should clean up too," I suggested.

"Yeah." He made for the bathroom. A few minutes later I heard the shower running and
shouted through the door that he could find a spare towel in the cupboard. Vampires don't sweat, but
he was looking grimy. I suppose they accumulate dust. Like bookshelves.

Track pants and a baggy T-shirt for comfort made up my fashion statement for the evening.
Brushing my hair was an exercise in futility in the long term. For now I controlled it with an
elastic tie.