“What?” Marty said.
“Eh? Nothin’. Spare some change?”
Marty found a pound coin and dropped it into the man’s outstretched hand. The dog lifted its head lazily and looked at him, then went back to sleep.
The man grinned, and Marty saw his teeth. The two front ones were missing, but those on either side seemed sharper than usual, their points darkened with rot but still capable of inflicting puncture wounds. Longer than usual.
Marty stepped back, heart thudding, and he thought, The sun’s right in his face, he’s no vampire, don’t be such a prick.
“Thanks, mate. Have a good day.” The beggar chuckled again—longer this time, almost like a twitch—and dropped the pound coin into one of the empty cider cans.
Marty had to shake this damn paranoia. He found a newsstand and asked where Otter Street was, and the proprietor jotted the directions down on a scrap of paper. Marty thanked the man and left. He looked behind him as he walked, certain that he was being followed, feeling eyes on him all the time. But it was all in his mind. He slipped into several shops, browsed products he didn’t want to buy, and lingered inside their front windows, watching people walking past. But he never saw the same person twice.
Finally he found the street, and then the house, and walked past three times before summoning up the nerve to ring the bell. He had to press it several times before it was answered, and the woman who opened the door looked as if she had lived a dozen lives. Her hair was graying and falling out, her skin was cratered, her hands were clawed, and her clothes stank of piss. But behind all this, he could see that she was not much past middle age.
“What?” she asked. She held a stained cloth in her right hand and was using it to wipe her left, scrubbing her palm and between her fingers, across the back of her hand and up to her wrist. It looked clean enough to Marty.
“Er…”
“What?” the woman snapped again.
“Ashleigh Richards?”
The woman’s hand froze in its wiping. She stared past Marty, along the street in both directions, behind him, head jerking like a startled bird’s.
“No,” the woman said. “She’s dead. Ashleigh Richards is dead.”
“Oh,” he said, stomach dropping, but he saw the truth straightaway. “Has anyone been?” he asked more gently. He took a step forward, aware that he was invading her personal space but keen to lower his voice, engender a feeling of complicity. If only he could get her trust…
“Been? Been?”
“Has anyone come and asked you… asked for her recently? Anyone… I don’t know. Strange? At night?”
“Night’s when it comes back to me,” she said, staring down at her hand. “The blood. That’s when the blood comes back.”
“I really need to talk to you,” Marty said, and he had a sense that he was getting through to her.
Her face slackened, and at first he thought it was tension leaving her. But it was not that at all. It was everything else falling away—awareness, presence, intelligence. And as she dropped the rag and brought the small, stumpy gun from her pocket, Marty wished he’d listened to his big sister.
10
“I CAN BRING IT down here,” Lee said. “The whole house is wireless. But I barely use half the rooms, so I just keep it in my office. Haven’t used it for a year or more.”
“You know it still works?”
“It’ll need plugging in,” he said, shrugging. “But no reason it shouldn’t.”
“No,” Francesco said.
“You’d rather just sit here and—”
“Yes.” And it looked like the tall vampire would be happy doing just that. Dawn was three hours ago now, and Lee had hardly seen him move a muscle. Francesco had had his eyes closed all that time, but never for a moment had Lee assumed he was asleep. He was starting to think they never slept.
“Fine. Let’s just sit here and waste a day, then.”
“It won’t be wasted,” Rose said. “Marty’s out there.”
“And who knows what’s happening to him? Let me get my laptop. I can scan police channels, try and keep a tab on what’s going on. I can even search for the Bane.”
“From down here?” Francesco asked. He opened his eyes at last.
“You forget who I used to work for. I have a name, an address, and an occupation. I can find out who she’s worked for, where she worked, what digs she took part in, where the stuff she dug up was cataloged and stored, what color underwear she was wearing at the time. I’m not saying it’s definite, but if there’s a trail of any sort, I’ll find it.”
“Maybe he’s right.” Rose was pacing the basement, slowly but consistently. Lee wondered what she was thinking. Speculating what it would be like chained up down here like a fucking animal, probably.
“You’ll run,” Francesco said. “No.” And he closed his eyes and sat back again, leaning against the damp basement wall.
“The vampires will be underground somewhere too,” Rose said.
“And the fucks they’ll have working for them?” Lee asked.
“Marty’s smart.”
“Has he ever killed anyone?” Rose glared at Lee, then looked away sharply. Ahh, Lee thought. Sore spot. He’d keep that in reserve for another time. But the smugness vanished quickly as he realized what that look meant: Rose had killed someone.
“Of course not,” she said.
“He might have to. Think what that could do to the boy.”
Rose didn’t reply, but went and squatted in front of Francesco so that Lee couldn’t see either of their faces. They conversed so quietly that he couldn’t hear; then, after a short silence, Rose stood and returned to him.
“If you make a run for it, we’ll find you. We’ll do things to you that even vampires haven’t dreamt of. You understand?”
“Yeah,” Lee said. She stood so close that he could feel the coolness coming off her. He found himself leaning forward. Then she turned and started up the basement staircase.
Lee followed. At the top he asked, “So, what did you say to him?”
“None of your fucking business.”
Lee squeezed past Rose and opened the door. She retreated several steps from the daylight. And for the next couple of minutes his life, and his destiny, would be his own.
She made him step inside.
All Marty wanted to do was run. He’d never had a gun pointed at him before. His mate Gaz claimed he had—said a bunch of gangbangers mugged him on his way home from a concert one night—but Marty had never been sure whether to believe him. There were guns in London, of course, but they were more prevalent in organized crime than street gangs. The gangs usually just dealt in blades.
It was a strange feeling, informed completely by his knowledge of movies and books. He’d spent months watching Vic Mackey on The Shield, wondering how many hours of training it had taken for the actor to hold his gun correctly. He’d stared down the end of Dirty Harry’s Magnum many times. But here he was, looking into the business end of an ugly, snub-nosed thing, held by a woman who was shaking so much her teeth clattered, and it was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was much worse.
“I said in!” she cried.
“Okay. Okay.” Marty started lifting his hands in the universal warding-off gesture, as if flesh and bone could stop a bullet.
“Keep your hands down. Three… three seconds. And then…” She waved the gun, and for a terrible second Marty thought it was going to go off.
He stepped through the front door. The smell hit him then, a stench of rot and neglect that made him gag.
“Keep walking,” Ashleigh Richards said. She slammed the door and the corridor grew darker.