He had taken out a membership card at a DVD rental store and he was probably their best customer: three movies generally got him through the worst part of the night. Trouble was, he’d already gone through most of the good ones. The tag line on one of them – a lousy vampire flick with too many bare bouncing breasts that had only served to remind him of what he was missing – had purred It’s cool to be a vampire. Well, a vampire was the walking dead like him, and Owen found it pretty bloody hard to come up with anything – any damned thing at all – that was in any way cool about being dead and still walking.
But he supposed that was Hollywood for you. If you asked an American movie producer, John Wayne won the war single-handed; Robin Hood was a Yank with thinning hair and the White Cliffs of Dover were a five-minute walk from Nottingham Forest; and the crew of the Titanic passed the last few minutes of their lives shooting the passengers. Vampires probably felt pretty pissed off with the rep they got from Hollywood, too. Maybe that was why they were sometimes known as Nightwalkers because, as Owen had discovered, when you were dead but the message hadn’t got through to your body, walking was pretty much all there was left to do.
So that was how Owen Harper spent the hours when decent folk went to sleep, and the not-so-decent partied.
And as miserable an existence as it was, being undead, Owen couldn’t help smiling at the irony of the situation. He spent hours every night walking the streets of Cardiff. He had already worn through two pairs of shoes. If he were still alive, he’d have been the fittest he’d ever been. He couldn’t drink, he couldn’t eat, and he couldn’t shag – but at least he still had his sense of humour.
Always look on the bright side of death, as Eric Idle had said.
Yeah, well maybe he wasn’t quite that relaxed about it. And he didn’t think he ever would be. But at least Torchwood was still paying him, dead or alive. That would keep him in shoe leather and it looked like he was going to need it.
Come to that, now he didn’t need to eat and he couldn’t drink and heating in his flat wasn’t really much of an issue as he could feel neither cold nor heat, his wages were starting to stack up in the bank. Another of the ironies of a living death.
He did still buy the occasional coffee, however. Like now. He never drank it. It just went cold in the cup before him, but people were used to people sitting over drinks that they hardly touched in all-night cafés like this one. The staff left you alone with your demons. At 2am on a Tuesday morning, if you weren’t some sort of shift worker looking for a caffeine buzz to get you through the night and you were hunched over a coffee in a dive like Constantine’s, chances were you had demons of one sort or another.
And it was demons of a kind that had brought Owen here tonight and every night for the last three weeks.
But they weren’t his.
Except that he had kind of made them his own by deciding not to tell the rest of the team about the man he had seen ripped to pieces by two women in an alleyway at the back of the café.
They weren’t really women, of course. As the two of them had torn the poor guy apart like two halves of a butchered pig, their jaws had distended and expanded and the small pearl teeth that they had flashed at the poor sod just a few minutes before grew into razor-edged spikes. Their flesh had turned to scales. Their eyes had grown large and black, like those of a dead shark.
Owen watched it all from the cover of a dumpster that stank of rotting food, and the odour of a drunk’s toilet. The man had been dead before Owen got there – the girls were pragmatic butchers: they had taken off their victim’s head first, effectively stemming any cries for help and killing him at once. By the time Owen had reached the cover of the dumpster, the guy had been nothing but dead meat and bone – and the two creatures had devoured it all, ripped dripping red flesh from living bone then ground the broken skeleton between their massive, powerful extended jaws. The sound of the dead man’s bones being pulverised and devoured was loud and industrial, like machinery rendering waste.
Thirty minutes earlier, Owen had watched the girls walk into Constantine’s coffee shop. They had smiled at him as they came through the door. They had looked at him in the same beat and both had curved and parted their lips a moment later and shown him small, perfectly white teeth as if on cue. Each smile was an exact copy of the other. And the girls almost were.
Twins, Owen had thought, and he felt that hopelessly familiar ache for the things he would have done before that bastard’s bullet put an end to more than just his life. As fantasies went, twins were right up there. And Owen had fulfilled most of his fantasies generally more than once with a succession of women. But he had never made it with twins. And he was never going to. That was why he looked away from the girls as they smiled his way, and that was probably why they moved on.
All the same, Owen was curious and he watched them in the night-time mirror-glass of the big coffee shop window as the twins bought cappuccinos from the bag-eyed student who did the Constantine’s nightshift three days a week.
They couldn’t have been much past eighteen; they were tall – maybe five-eight (and most of that was leg) with the lean, toned bodies of athletes – and they dressed in duplicate red outfits that displayed a lot of chest and lot of thigh. Each wore white boots.
Clubbers, Owen guessed. The only difference between them was their hair. Both wore it long, but one was black, the other was the colour of bleached silver. If they pulled (and why the hell wouldn’t they?) it was the only way their guys would tell them apart. And they were probably wigs that the girls switched in the toilets to have fun with their unsuspecting dates. They looked like a couple of girls who liked to have fun.
Boy, he thought later, didn’t he get that right.
But dressed like that at this time in this part of town was asking for trouble. There were five other guys in the coffee shop apart from Owen and the student barista. Owen wouldn’t have trusted any of them with his dog, never mind his daughter. All of them watched the girls as they waited for the coffees, and the girls spent the time leaning their slender backs against the counter watching the men. Occasionally one would whisper to the other, and the other would snigger, flashing a glance at one of the men who would know beyond doubt that they were discussing him. Owen knew how that would feel and these girls were playing with fire. Either they had just escaped from a convent school, or they knew exactly what they were doing.
Owen’s worries for the safety of the girls began to subside. He started to worry about the men.
The student behind the bar put the girls’ coffees on the stained and scarred stainless-steel counter and Owen watched as they turned and reached for drinks in perfect unison.
Unnatural unison.
And together, without discussion, they took a table next to a man in his middle thirties. His hair was long, tied back in a ponytail. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days but his clothes were clean and no shabbier than your regular Cardiff student. Like the rest of the men in there, he hadn’t failed to notice the twins, but he’d shared his interest in them with the book he was reading. Or, more likely, had the discretion to hide it behind the book. Owen couldn’t see what the book was, but it looked like some sort of paperback academia. The guy was probably a mature student, or maybe a lecturer. As the girls sat down, they both flashed the ponytailed guy those white smiles, and in them Owen recognised just the right proportions of shyness, interest and promise. Like they had used a formula to work it out.