Authors: Debbie Johnson
He was silent. Which was unusual. That was the kind of speech that normally sent him into a huge rant about honour and duty and fate and all those pesky things. I presumed he was weighing up whether he felt tough enough to argue the toss with God or not.
He didn’t. At least for now.
Instead, he just nodded. ‘It’s been quite an ordeal, hasn’t it? Coleen’s death alone would have been enough … I understand that, Lily. You don’t live as long as I have without loss. So much loss, I sometimes wonder why I bother carrying on …’
‘Who?’ I asked quietly. ‘Who have you lost?’
‘Both my parents for a start. Friends, family. Human companions I’ve met through the years. Even the bloody dogs – it’s not easy, knowing that everyone you meet, everyone you allow yourself to love, will die before you.’
I’d never thought of it like that. I had – understandably – been too wrapped up in my own concerns, evading death, et cetera. I didn’t know what to say – this was a whole different side to him, and one that confused me. I should reach out. I should hold him. I should offer him comfort …
‘All right,’ he said abruptly, standing up so fast I fell over sideways, landing on my face on the bed. Elegance and charm, as ever. ‘We need to leave. Now. Is there anything you need from here?’
I looked around, at the terrible wallpaper and the ugly furniture and the half-drunk glass of water. Coleen was gone, and there was nothing left here but ghosts, memories and a really hard crossword book.
I walked over to the wardrobe, feeling the need to tidy it up and close the doors. If this was the last time I’d be here, I wanted to leave the house as she would have wanted. Which meant I’d better remember to switch the heating off before we scarpered.
‘I want that lion,’ I said, kneeling down to collect scattered shoes and rearrange them in the bottom of the wardrobe.
‘Really? The whole of the Tuatha are pursuing us, and you want a stuffed lion?’
I glared up at him.
‘Yes, I want the bloody lion – now make yourself useful and go get it!’
He rolled his eyes – dealing with prima donna goddesses was clearly testing his patience – and walked away.
As I leaned into the wardrobe, blindly feeling around to find the other half of an especially grim pair of slippers, my hand touched the edge of what felt like an envelope or package. I poked at it; it was about A4 size, and bulging with documents. I pulled it out. Maybe Coleen had left a will, and I’d inherit the gas bill. That’d show me.
I sat back on my heels, and looked at it. Plain Manila. Dusty and powdery, the way paper gets when it’s really, really old. Nothing was written on the front, and the flap wasn’t sealed. I quickly overcame a momentary qualm about invading her privacy – which went along the lines of ‘she’s dead, get over it’ – and lifted it open.
I poured the contents out on to the carpet, aware that Gabriel was walking up behind me and looking over my shoulder.
Photographs. School photographs – the type that get taken once a year, with tidy uniforms and neat plaits and gappy teeth and forced grins. The type that come in cheap cardboard frames, and are usually displayed on the mantelpiece of parental homes across the land. Mrs O’Grady’s house was full of them – portraits of her seven offspring over the years. Coleen’s, unsurprisingly, never had been. In fact, I vividly remembered that every year, she refused to fill in the little order form or send in the money, claiming it was a waste of cash – what did she need photos of me for, when the real bloody thing was forever getting under her feet anyway?
And yet here they were. Every single one. I laid them out in order – a parade of little Lilies: rarely smiling, always serious, getting older and bigger and even more serious in every picture. She’d bought them, she’d hoarded them, she’d hidden them. Tucked away in a plain brown envelope at the bottom of a wardrobe, in a room where I wasn’t allowed, like a dirty secret she wanted to avoid facing up to.
Maybe she didn’t want to let me know she cared. Maybe she was under instructions from Gabriel not to give me any warm and fuzzies, and spoil his dastardly plans. Maybe she just didn’t like them – my grim little face would be enough to scare anyone off.
But she’d kept them, all of them. Like her deathbed confession, it almost broke my heart. I saw a small blob of liquid splat on to the forehead of an eight-year-old me, and I realised I was crying.
‘I’m sorry, Lily,’ said Gabriel. I twisted round to look at him. He was standing behind me, tall and strong and eerily beautiful, with the stuffed lion tucked under one arm.
‘For what?’ I asked, wiping my eyes with my sleeve.
‘For many things, but right now, for Coleen’s death. She never told us she was ill. We could have helped her. We have … ways of helping. But it was her choice.’
‘You’re right,’ I said, squeezing my eyelids shut to get rid of any more wussy-girl moisture, ‘it was her choice. And nobody could ever change Coleen’s mind about anything. This one, at least, isn’t on you.’
I started gathering the photos together – they would definitely be coming with me, Gabriel and the lion – and put them back into the envelope. As I did, I noticed one more, tucked deep inside at the bottom. An old print, in that particular tiny square shape they favoured in the Sixties, before the age of digital cameras or Polaroids.
It had been caught in one corner, and I tugged it free. Black and white. Late Sixties, from the look of the clothes on the guests … the wedding guests. A predictable enough group shot, with some kind of garden in the background. Maybe Stanley Park, which was nearby. Happy, smiling faces – with the happiest of them all belonging to Coleen. Coleen many years ago; a different Coleen to the one I’d always known. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen – but it was definitely her.
I’d never seen pictures of my nan in her youth. In fact, I’d half assumed she never had one, and had sprung fully formed and miserable from the bowels of the Earth. But here she was, blonde and coiffed and wearing a very fancy frock with white lace sleeves. She was looking up at the man next to her, gripping on to his arm and grinning, a posy in her hand. The man – small, dark, just as happy – looked directly into the lens.
Coleen. On her wedding day. The wedding day I never knew she’d had, marrying a man who was most certainly not on the scene any more.
I looked up at Gabriel, and raised an eyebrow. Really, was there anything about my own life I actually knew and understood? One tiny little thing? One small scrap of information I could actually rely on?
He hefted the lion closer under his arm, and smiled sadly.
‘You have questions. And I have some of the answers. But not now, and not here. Gather those up and we’ll—’ I suspected he was about to say ‘leave’, or maybe ‘flee for our lives’, but it was drowned out by a loud boom from downstairs. The sound of splintering wood, and heavy footsteps pounding down the hall. He cocked his head to one side, and I knew he was doing something spooky and psychic.
He grabbed me and pulled me to my feet, me still busily shoving the photos back into the envelope as he dragged me towards the window. He glanced around, then picked up the bedside cabinet. The water glass, the tissues, the Rennies and my keys and phone went hurtling through the air as he lifted up the cabinet and smashed it through the glass of the bedroom window.
He used it to butt out all the remaining shards, the sound of the breaking glass competing with the hammering of feet running up the stairs. I grabbed my keys and phone, stashing them in my bag, before looking at Gabriel.
‘Do we really need the lion?’ he asked plaintively, arms swelling beneath his jacket.
‘Yes, I’m afraid we do,’ I replied.
He nodded, not at all surprised, and pulled me towards him, wrapping one arm around my waist and keeping the lion in the other. He used the broken cabinet as a footstool, and leaped out of the window. I gripped as tightly as I could around his neck, his hair and mine whipping together around our faces as we fell through the chill night air.
I felt the bone-grinding judder as we hit the ground, even though he’d broken my fall by lifting me up slightly at the last minute. The rough landing didn’t seem to bother him, and he bounded away towards the back gate. Lifting one black-booted foot, he kicked in the wood, clearing the way for us to run into the back alleyway. God. What was it with these men and doors? Would it have killed him to just open it?
Holding on to my hand, he sprinted down the alley, both of us leaping over black bin bags of rubbish and discarded milk bottles as we ran, my feet skidding on damp cobbles. A lone cat wisely scattered out of our way, and I could see the glimmer of the street lamps out on the road. He held me back with one hand as we reached the end of the passage, and I took a moment to catch a breath. It was all right for him. He was a super-fit, nigh-on immortal. I was a bloody journalist, for Christ’s sake – and on the whole we’re not made for sprinting.
He pushed me back into the alley, and I fell arse-over-tit backwards when my feet hit one of the bin bags. The bag split and puffed open as I landed, and I found myself covered in used tea bags and old banana peels as I dragged myself to my feet.
Gabriel was ahead, fighting with two black-clad men, and seeming to be on the winning end of it. Their limbs were a whirl of darkness, too fast to see properly, and I could hear sickening dull thuds as boots and fists made contact with flesh.
I looked around me and saw a child’s broken scooter abandoned in the alleyway. I picked it up, ran screaming towards the flurry of arms and legs and karate chops and punches, and cracked it as hard as I could on the head of one of the bad guys. At least I hoped it was one of them – I realised at the last moment that I couldn’t see well enough to be entirely sure.
He went down like the traditional sack of spuds, and I felt utterly delighted with myself, considered doing a little Rocky dance and punching the air.
The elation didn’t last long, as the next thing I knew Gabriel was taking hold of the other man’s head in his hands. He clamped down on either side of his face, and twisted so hard and so abruptly that I actually heard the bone snap, and saw the head partly come off at the neck. He dropped the body to the floor, and the head lolled to one side, sinew and bone and glistening flesh exposed under the street light. I felt my stomach lurch as I stared, and put a hand to my throat as the vomit rose, burning into my mouth.
I looked at Gabriel in the shadows, knowing that I couldn’t possibly keep the horror from my face. He was huge now, over seven feet and built to go with it. There was blood dripping from his mouth – I had to presume he’d bitten something off at some point – and had a vicious curl to his lips. His hands were the size of shovels, and his nails had lengthened into talons, gleaming with gore. Even in the darkness I could see the battle lust in his eyes, as he kicked the body out of the way and took a menacing step towards me.
‘This is me, Lily,’ he growled, ‘in all my glory. Now get in the bloody car.’
I got in the bloody car. The car that now was, quite literally, bloody. Gabriel took a few moments to calm down – he had to, so he could fit in the Audi – then climbed into the driver’s seat. His hands immediately slid from the steering wheel, they were so slick with blood and tiny gobs of flesh.
The sight, and the coppery smell, made me want to puke again, so I turned away and stared out of the open window. Looked at the busted-down door of my former home, and saw the outlines of the invaders rampaging from room to room upstairs. I could hear the banging and smashing even from outside. They were destroying the place, but I couldn’t have cared less.
I had my lion. I had my photographs. I had the scariest protector in the universe. He was on my side, and even I was now a bit scared of him. That was a new one for me. Gabriel had aroused many feelings in me since that first night in the Coconut Shy: anger, frustration, affection, lust, a slight hint of hatred. But never fear. I’d always known, from the moment we first met, that he wouldn’t hurt me. Not in the physical sense, at least.
Now, having seen him in ‘all his glory’, as he put it, I wasn’t sure I could feel one hundred per cent that way ever again. Watching a man tear a head off will do that to you – and the fact that he was doing it all to keep me safe didn’t make me feel much better.
Don’t get me wrong – I had no sympathy for any of Fintan’s men. That would be stupid – they were trying to kill me, after all. But there’s a vast difference between preferring your own survival to theirs, or clonking the odd one on the head with a toy scooter, and seeing their torn throats shining in the moonlight.
That probably qualifies me as a hypocrite, but I couldn’t argue with the way I felt. I shuddered and huddled as far away from him as I could, arms wrapped around my own torso, staying silent and looking out of the window. There was nothing that could come out of my mouth right then that could do either of us any good. I caught him sneaking the occasional glance in my direction, and I knew he must have been feeling awful. I even felt sorry for him – but not enough to close that distance.
Fionnula had told me he was ruthless – and now I’d seen it first-hand. In the flesh, as it were. It made me wonder how well I really knew him – and made me remember Donn’s insistence that I be forced to accept Gabriel as my mate, willing or not. I’d been so utterly convinced that he would never walk that road, but now I couldn’t be sure. The monster I’d just seen in action would be capable of anything.
There was a lot to think about, and not enough time between traumas to do it. One minute he seemed like a man I could love, the next he seemed like the bogeyman who’d do anything necessary to get his own way. I felt like asking the real Slim Gaby to please stand up – but I suspected they were all versions of the same man. Heck, he was a complicated person.
We drove in silence through the darkness of the city, pulling into the underground parking garage beneath his apartment and getting out without a word. I managed a small smile as he pressed the buttons in the lift, but that was that. I’d taken the lion and the photos from him – I didn’t want him to get any blood on them – and followed him into the building.