Falling Apart (17 page)

I stared down at the York streets from the office window. Dawn was beginning to glaze the rooftops and I was feeling the lack of a good night's sleep. Behind me, at his machine, Liam tapped his way through yet another stream of film from yet another camera, as we tried to find out what time Sil had left the Records Office. If we knew how long he'd been there we might have some clue as to what he'd been doing.

‘Nope. Still no sign and I'm at half an hour after they closed.'

‘Could he have come out another way?'

I turned to see a shrug.

‘Maybe, but everyone else has used the front door, even the staff. And I've checked all the other cameras around, doesn't look like he snuck out of a fire escape either. And besides'—he stood up now—‘wouldn't that line us up a whole new set of questions?'

I leaned the back of my head against the office wall. The plasterboard rocked slightly under my weight and I briefly wondered whether we should take up Zan on his office share suggestion. All the Otherworld offices were properly built, and didn't shake like an earthquake zone every time an overweight person walked past outside. ‘Such as, why would he want to sneak out without being seen?'

‘You got it.' Liam flipped his wrist and squinted at his watch. ‘Are we considering Kit Kats to be a suitable breakfast food? Because I've got the feeling this is going to be another of our legendary “long days”, and I'm not sure that confectionery is going to get us through. At least not without the sugar rush from hell and another layer of podge around thighs that can't take much more without having to go up a dress size.'

‘Are you calling me fat?'

‘No, I'm trying to get your attention. Jess, we need to think here. We have to know why Sil went to the Records Office, because this whole memory loss thing – is it because he
can't
remember, or because he doesn't
want
to remember? And, if it's the latter, then …'

‘Shut up, I'm still focusing on you calling into question the size of my thighs, and wondering how I can punish you without the screaming attracting the neighbours.' I perched on the edge of my desk and stared, without really seeing, at the assorted papers, Post-it notes and files that lay in a sort of wafer-layer effect over its surface. Much as I hated to admit it, Liam was right. I knew, first-hand, how good vampires were at repressing bad memories and emotions – good enough that most people believed they didn't
have
emotions at all. Keeping it all down, out of conscious thought, was the only way they could function without being driven mad by the thought of all the evil they'd seen and done, all the pain they'd caused and been part of.
Could Sil have managed to push the memories of his time in London so far down that even he believed they were beyond retrieval?

‘Jess …' Liam said, but shook his head when I looked at him expectantly.

‘No, what? You know I hate unfinished sentences almost as much as I hate an unfinished HobNob, don't go catching my attention and then tailing off.'

He picked up the mugs but didn't head to the kitchen, instead he leaned against the wall opposite where I perched, and looked at me seriously. Liam's face, with its wide mouth and gentle eyes, wasn't made for ‘serious'; trying to be solemn always made him look as though he was searching for a punchline. ‘I'm worried about you.'

All of a sudden I felt horribly, terribly tired. As though I could lie down on the carpet, or what passed for a carpet, and fall into an endless sleep. I think I even slumped slightly, because suddenly Liam was there, arm around my shoulder and nearly-empty mugs sliding cold coffee down my back. ‘Jess?'

He sounded almost panicked. It told me all I needed to know about the face I had to show to the world. If I – daughter of the almost-immortal demon Malfaire, vampire-spotter extraordinaire, and able to ‘down' Otherworlders faster than I could eat a HobNob – if I began to give in to the feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness that were threatening to overwhelm me … where would that leave everyone else?

‘Get off, I'm just feeling the effects of being woken up by Mister Angst and his scarily elusive memory, that's all. I mean, it's still not even time we should be here and I haven't had a
single
cup of coffee yet, so what do you expect? I thought you had to sign something that said you'd always do your duty, and your duty is making coffee, so come on.'

‘You're thinking of the Boy Scout promise, not a work contract,' but Liam let his arm fall away casually, as though it had been workaday contact, not reassurance. ‘But you're right. Coffee and some thinking and we can put everything right.'

‘But we've had more practice at the coffee thing, so let's start there and work up.' I flopped down onto my chair, which spun its customary half-circle underneath me, like a fractious pony, put my elbows on the desk and rested my head in my hands. ‘I'm okay, as long as I can keep thinking about one thing at a time, I can cope. So, we have Sil going in to the Records Office two weeks before he … well, before he turns up on camera again. There's no sign of him coming out, and the next time he's seen
anywhere
is up in Soho Square, which is not that far away but …'

Liam headed for the kitchen, mugs rattling. ‘He goes into the Records Office, doesn't come out as far as we can see, and then turns up going all Dracula on the population's asses.'

‘Thanks, Mister Continuity Announcer.' I stared at the freeze-frame image of Sil walking towards the office doors, just before he vanished from the camera's view. ‘There's no chance that he didn't go in? Walked off somewhere else?'

‘Could have done, I suppose.' There was a sound like a small bell ringing as Liam levered the lid off a tin. ‘If he crouched down and ran with his knees bent along under the concrete canopy in front of the offices and I think someone doing a Groucho Marx impersonation for half a mile along the Embankment might have been remarked on. There's nothing, Jess. No reports of unusual activity down there, no Enforcement calls or Liaison work, nothing. I double-checked with all the London branches: it was like a dead zone the whole time. I think the Merc being illegally parked was the most exciting thing that happened during the entire fortnight, I'd take bets that there wasn't even any litter dropped.'

The fragrant steam of overdue coffee preceded Liam's re-entry by a considerable margin, and my sleep-deprived ears detected the dull rattle of chocolate-coated biscuits accompanying him. Life was looking up. ‘We need to know what he was doing down there.'

‘He doesn't remember, Liam. Nothing.'

Liam put the mugs down, and the distance he placed mine from my hand, plus his carefully neutral expression, told me that he was about to say something I wasn't going to like and he didn't want me armed with a cup of recently boiled water when he said it. ‘Are we sure about that?
Seriously?
'

‘Look.' I tried to keep my voice steady.
It's not his fault, he's only voicing what you've already thought.
‘If he weren't telling the truth'—the doubt tasted sour on the back of my tongue and lay like an unacknowledged weight on my heart—‘then why didn't he just set himself up a cover story? Or even just lie? Why pretend not to know?'

He chewed his lip, paying very close attention to the biscuit delivery system. ‘What did he say about it all? I mean, you know vamps, especially the old ones, they're pretty much remembering systems in fancy suits; the only things they can't remember are the things they don't
want
to remember. Not being able to remember something that only happened a few days ago … well, that just doesn't happen to a vamp. To you, yes, because your brain is some kind of chaotic system, but not them.'

‘He said …' I raked through my chaotic system in an attempt to remember. ‘He said it felt scrambled. Like … well, like the time he fed from me.'

‘Your blood being vampire heroin?'

A momentary flashback to last night, to Zan's words, but I brushed that thought away; there was no time for worrying about vampires' scary stories. ‘I was attempting to skirt around that, but, yes. I presumed he meant he felt as though he'd been drugged. But, apart from the tranqs – which basically just put them to sleep without any after-effects – there aren't any drugs that work on vampires on account of their demon filtering everything out before it gets to their brains.'

‘Except your blood.'

‘Yeah. Zan's been fussing on about that too. Muttering something about “the Twelve” in the same tone you usually use for muttering about overtime.'

‘While he's looking at you and dribbling, presumably.'

‘Liam, Zan thinks a drug habit is something worn by headachy nuns. He really does sit down and think quite hard about me only being half human, you know. He keeps bringing it up, as if it's something I'm supposed to do something about, like … I dunno, getting a licence to go out in public. It's almost scary, if Zan was ever really scary as opposed to really really irritating.'

‘I think we need to talk to Sil.' Liam looked surprisingly serious. Well, as serious as possible for a man drinking coffee out of a ‘Bazinga!' mug with a Twix biscuit clamped between his fingers as though he were a genteel confectionary addict. ‘We need to sit down and work this out, logically and face-to-face. Get him to go back over what he
does
remember in the hope it loosens something up.'

‘It's nearly time for me to visit Dad, and besides, I daren't go up to the farm again. Zan's already stalking around keeping an eye on me, and I don't think the presence of four-foot-deep mud and two collies is going to put him off. He might take a while to work his way through the sheep, but, believe me, he'll be there.'

‘Yes, but he's not watching me, and neither are the press vultures. Look, you drop in to the hospital and I'll sort something out.'

‘You've got a plan?'

‘Okay, drop the squeaky emphasis on the first and last words there, and remember that I've seen every James Bond film ever made. I'm actually
very
sneaky, and … well, that's pretty much it, but we need to do this, Jess, and, as your wingman, it is incumbent upon me to do
something
before we all fall into a black hole comprised of angst and bullets, all right?'

I stared at him. ‘Sometimes, Liam, you're so butch it scares me.'

‘Yeah well, it terrifies me too, but before I'm forced to hand in my subscription to
Metrosexuality Now
, get your sorry ass out there and let's get things moving!' He drained his coffee in one swig and slammed the empty cup down onto the desk. ‘Move it!'

‘Yes, all right, I'm—'

‘Ow, ow, hot hot hot! God, that burns! Jess, if I show any signs of coming over all Jean-Claude Van Damme again, just shoot me, please. I'm really not cut out for it. Or at least take the temperature of any beverages I may be holding.'

‘Well, that's reassuring.'

And, leaving him clutching at his throat and making little coughing noises, I headed off to the hospital.

Dad was ‘resting'. It crossed my mind to wonder how much actual rest was needed by someone who was hardly ever allowed to get out of bed, but it did give me a chance to have a cup of coffee with Mum, who took much pleasure in telling me that Abbie was, apparently, seeing quite a lot of the doctor from Urology, a small Scotsman – we called him the Wee Man, in a linguistic triple-whammy.

‘And how are you, Jessie, love?' She opened a sugar packet and squeezed the contents into the hospital-issue saucer. My heart sped up. My mother hadn't taken sugar since 1990.

‘I … busy. You know. Working, trying not to think.'

‘Is he safe?' She lowered her voice and the words were breathed at the table top.

‘For now, I hope …' Nothing else would come out of my mouth. I took a deep sip of too-hot coffee to try to force the tears back down. Her fingers were busy with the sugar. Heaping it into tiny piles, moving grains with the tip of a nail from one side to the other. ‘Mum?'

A sudden flash of blue eyes as she looked at me and said, ‘Do you ever think about her? About Rune?'

My real mother. Who had abandoned me – oh, to the care of my lovely adoptive parents, but still. Abandoned. Out of fear, I'd been told, fear that my demon father would find me; fear that I might be … not quite human. ‘I try not to.'

‘Would you have wanted to meet her? If she'd still been alive?'

‘No.' The coffee was bitter, stinging the sides of my tongue and moving past the widening of tears in my throat.

‘
Jess.
' Just my name, whispered with such gentle concern that it broke me and suddenly I was sobbing, coffee spilling from my mouth and cup while I tried to catch a breath, bringing my hands up to cover my face. To hide everything I was trying so desperately to keep away from – the huge emptiness that the fear of desertion had exposed inside me.

‘Why … do people keep leaving me?'

A tissue was produced from the maternal handbag. ‘She didn't want to leave you, Jess. She had to. She never talked about where she came from but, from what we could gather, her life hadn't been very good even before she met Malfaire. She had nowhere to go and no job.' A gentle dab at where my nose was running. ‘And I don't think, for one minute, that Sil would have left you voluntarily. Not for any length of time. You and him are made for each other, my love. There is more to what he is supposed to have done than his simply going mad. Are you going to try to find out what that is?' The tissue raised. ‘Now, blow.'

Obediently, I blew. The sheer childishness of the action made me feel better, almost as though I
were
a child again, and my parents could make everything better. ‘I just feel … a bit like nobody really wants me.
She
didn't want me; Sil says he does, but he went …'

‘Jessica.' Her voice was stern. ‘I did
not
bring you up to feel sorry for yourself. Your father and I gave you a stable background and a nice home; the best Rune could have done for you was to keep moving you from hostel to hostel and even then you probably wouldn't have been safe, knowing that … that
demon
who fathered you. Yes, she would have liked to have known you but that was just not to be. And something has happened to Sil, to the man you profess to love; something so bad that he is being hunted. Now, are you going to sit here and indulge yourself in thoughts of what could have been, or are you going to do something about something you can do something about?'

I opened my mouth and closed it again as little bits of damp tissue rained into it. ‘What?'

‘Oh, you know what I mean!'

‘Thankfully, knowing Liam has given me a thorough grounding in boll— I mean, in nonsense,' I stopped myself before I got pulled up for swearing and a hefty frowning-at. ‘Yes. You're right. I'm sorry, Mum.'

Now I got a smile and the tissue wiped quickly over my cheeks. ‘You're allowed to be fragile, Jessie; you're allowed to have doubts. It's the way you overcome everything that counts. Remember, you may not have had the greatest start in life, but from thereon all anybody has ever done is to try to protect you. Don't let us down now, will you?'

My resolve did whatever it is that resolve does, and forced me to stand up with a slightly wobbly smile. A deep breath drew in more tissue fragments. ‘Thanks, Mum.' My phone vibrated against my thigh, and I was so tempted to ignore it, to let this bubble keep me a while longer in my pretend world of humanity and horrible beverages, where I was my mother's younger daughter.
Just let me stay here
 …
let this be real life and everything outside be someone else's problem
 …
just this once
 …
And then I thought of Sil. Of his dark, anguished eyes, his desperate touch on my skin, of his unvampire-like fear.

‘Sorry, Mum, better get this.' I reached into my pocket and pulled out the phone, feeling its planetary weight against my palm. ‘Liam and I have something on at work.'

She launched into a monologue about how I worked too hard as I dragged up the text.

I've laid a false trail for you. Zan thinks you're staying at the hospital today. Can you get out round the back and come up to the farm?

I rolled my eyes.

Do hospitals have a ‘round the back'?

Try the Proctology Department.

I shoved the phone back in my pocket. Bum jokes are so not my thing.

‘Duty calls?' My mother said on a sigh, as though I'd spent my whole life running out of the house to the bleep of a pager, rather than dragging myself to the office twenty minutes late via the newsagents and any shops with a sale on.

‘Sort of. Can I borrow the car again? And, yes, I'll pop over to the neighbours and check that the dogs are behaving themselves and the sheep are … I dunno, doing whatever it is sheep do.'

‘Die, mostly.' The keys were handed over on another sigh. ‘It's practically their hobby.' And then her fingers clasped around my wrist in a warmer, more human echo of Zan's grasp last night. ‘Jessie, I meant to tell you. The vampire … he's been here.'

My heart slid along the inside of my ribcage in its attempt to get out. ‘Sil? He was here?'

A wave of a hand, barely raised above table height as though she was too tired for the motion. ‘No, the other one. The one with the eyes like …' She frowned. ‘Actually, I couldn't say what they were like, but green. Very green. And he had a computer thingie with him, like a book, he could write in it and everything.'

My heart rolled itself back where it belonged. ‘Oh, that's Zan. What did he want?'

Another frown. ‘He … he was asking questions about you. Odd questions. Things about what you were like at school, as a child, something like that. I just thought I should tell you, I'm not sure if it's important, or anything to do with what you're doing but …' She shook her head, almost as if a troubling memory was stuck somewhere at the back of her mind and could be dislodged by movement. ‘I didn't tell him very much, was that right of me? I mean, he's very …'—even though she was nearly eighty my mother's eyes flared with a sudden passion—‘very
tasty
isn't he? But even so—'

‘And that is an “even so” of such huge proportions that I'm surprised it can fit inside this room.' I stood up and patted her shoulder. ‘It's okay, Mum. Zan's weird at the best of times. Now with Sil … I think he thinks I'm up to something.'

‘Well you are.'

‘Only a bit. Nothing more than usual. Look, give my love to Dad, got to go now or Liam panics; panic makes him spend money, and I've had to get so creative with the petty cash receipts that they're almost a Booker contender now. See you later.' Dropping a quick kiss in the direction of her dry cheek, I headed off down the corridor towards, hopefully, a back door, or at the very least some laundry trolleys in which I could make a comedy exit.

In the end I found that my usual approach of being inept worked just fine. Some lovely kitchen workers believed my story of getting lost coming out of Gynaecology and, with disturbingly sympathetic remarks about my ‘lady bits', ushered me out between the cookers and fridges and down a little lane that led straight to the car park. There was no sign of Zan, no hint of any journalists, so, keeping low to avoid any cameras, I drove out under the barriers and headed for the moors.