Ravenfall

by Narrelle M. Harris

  ‘You drink a lot of tea,’ Gabriel said to James, to have something to say, and felt inane for making the observation. He bloody knows his own tea-drinking habits.

  James didn’t seem to mind. He smiled, a boyish expression that made his solemn face instantly sunnier. ‘Aye.’

  Gabriel found himself smiling easily back. ‘It’s very English of you,’ he teased.

  ‘I fake being English very well. I’ve painted a birthmark in the shape of Westminster Abbey on my right buttock and I once filled an awkward half hour gap in a conversation with a wounded American soldier with apologies about the weather.’

  ‘Brilliant camouflage,’ Gabriel agreed, fetching milk from the fridge. He left the teabag in James’s cup for a minute longer than he brewed his own, the way James liked it, and took both cups to the table.

  Gabriel set James’s cup down right next to his hand. Gabriel’s fingers brushed against James’s wrist for a second. James’s skin was cool to the touch. It made the hair on Gabriel’s arms stand up, like with a faint touch of static electricity. It was thrilling.

  Gabriel skirted around James, closer than he needed to, closer than was polite, so that his flat stomach skimmed past James’s strong upper arm and his elbow, before Gabriel sat opposite him.

  For a while, they drank in companionable silence.

  Then James set his once more empty cup down. ‘I see the way you look at me, Gabriel.’

  Gabriel made himself keep looking James in the eye.

  James’s mouth pulled into an unhappy scrunch. ‘I’m not good for you. Like that,’ he said. He seemed regretful.

  ‘I’m sorry if I bother you,’ Gabriel replied, wishing he’d had better control. But they had been laughing together again, and it had been so nice, and frankly, he hadn’t been able to help himself.

  Well, learn to help yourself. Idiot.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me. To tell the truth, I like it. But it’s not fair on you. I’m not… I’m not in a position to…’

  ‘James, it’s fine. I’m not your type. I get it.’ Gabriel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Look. I don’t want to move out–’

  ‘I don’t want you to move out,’ said James hastily, ‘And it’s not that you’re not my type.’ He pushed his hand through his hair in frustration. ‘Inasmuch as I have a type. You’re lovely.’ He winced. ‘You are. Lovely. Gabriel. But I’m not. I’m fucked up. I wouldn’t be any good for you. I could hurt you.’

  ‘No you couldn’t. I can see what kind of man you are.’

  James shook his head. ‘I could. I might. I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of man I am these days, or what I’m capable of. I know I’m… dangerous. I could be a danger. I should have warned you before you took the room. But I liked you right away, and I needed a lodger. You made me laugh, and I thought… Anyway, I’m sorry. If you want to stay, I’d like you to. I promise that I won’t ever put you in harm’s way, even if I have to lock myself out of my own flat. But we can only be friends.’

  Gabriel took a deep breath, then another. ‘I’m not frightened of you.’ He’d lived on the streets for months at a stretch, with all the hazards that implied. He wasn’t scared of much: of his own mind, sometimes, which had concocted gruesome imaginary friends in his childhood, and the things that had happened to him after those apparitions.

  ‘I am,’ said James bleakly. ‘I’m frightened of me.’

  Gabriel didn’t understand.

  ‘But I can help you with your missing persons thing, if you want that,’ James continued. ‘I’d like to, if you’re okay with it. With me. Helping.’

  ‘It’d be good to have some help, to be honest,’ said Gabriel. ‘Whatever’s going on is bad and getting worse. And, well,’ here he tried a lopsided smile, ‘If you’re a bit dangerous, that could be a good thing. To have some of the danger on my side, if you know what I mean.’

  Hell, Gabriel didn’t even know what he meant, but the idea of having James helping him out with whatever this whole mess turned out to be made him feel, if not precisely confident, then less vulnerable. The idea of having someone at his back was novel and appealing. That someone being James made him feel he could take on anything.

  You’re an idiot, Dare, he derided himself, He’s just told you that nothing’s ever happening between you. Besides. He dates women.

  Yes, and he also said that you’re lovely. And he came home early from that one date. And so what if he’s a fuck-up. Aren’t we all?

  Gabriel inhaled slowly, calming thoughts that were leaping way too far ahead.

  ‘We’d best get back to your questions, then,’ he said, in a commendably level tone. ‘I’m sure you’d like more background information.’

  James tapped the edge of his empty tea cup. ‘You lived on the streets for a time, I gather. That’s how you know these folk. Maybe it’s why they trust you.’

  Gabriel leaned back in his chair, displaying a studied, feigned nonchalance.

  ‘My father insisted that I study industrial chemistry, if I was going to study the sciences at all. He’d have preferred business studies, politics and international relations, and I couldn’t think of anything more repugnant. When I switched to a fine arts major in my second year, he said he’d disown me if I didn’t return to the career path he’d selected for me. I didn’t back down. When the money ran out not long after, I kept on with the arts degree with a chemistry minor – it proved handy when I was experimenting with all manner of art media – but things were very precarious. My brother Michael tried the same “play along and you won’t starve” bargaining. I told him where to stick it. I even sent him a helpful sketch in case he was confused about the process.’ Gabriel smiled tightly. ‘And after that I slept on dorm floors until people were sick of me. I sometimes managed to crash in the library for a few days. On and off I was on the street for the night. Or for several.’

  Or several weeks or months at a time, but James didn’t need to know that.

  ‘That must have made it hard to study.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gabriel airily, dismissing what had indeed been a very tough few years. ‘It’s marvellous how motivating it can be when you’re telling the old man and his heir to go fuck themselves. There are plenty of ways to survive if you plan. Showers on campus, the occasional boyfriend who’ll let you stay the night and eat jam sandwiches in exchange for a little light housekeeping.’ And things best not gone into now. ‘People waste a lot of food in the cafeteria. I managed. In my third year I ran into Helene again, and she gave me a hand. She was starting up the gallery then, so she let me sleep in the back room for a while until I found a room to rent. She began to represent my work. I got by.’

  ‘The university couldn’t help you with accommodation?’

  ‘According to them, I didn’t need help. I had a family with pots of cash. My father liked to remind them of it. He was very keen on me giving up my childish notions.’

  ‘Which only spurred them on,’ suggested James with a grin.

  ‘Of course.’ Gabriel decided to confess the worst of it, sure that James wouldn’t do anything as stupid as pity him. ‘The worst patch, over one semester break, had me living in a tunnel for a month during winter. Not an experience I’d care to repeat. My brother Michael said that I was playing at poverty, like I could just go home if...’

  Damn. Too much.

  ‘Going home isn’t always an option,’ observed James gently. ‘People don’t always see that.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ agreed Gabriel, ‘It wasn’t one for me. I don’t… I didn’t–’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said James. ‘Nobody chooses to spend a month of English winter in a tunnel if they think there’s an option.’

  Gabriel was grateful for the understanding; for not having to explain why he couldn’t return to his father’s house, his father’s authority. ‘The closest they came to making me obedient was after that semester in the tunnel,’ he said. ‘I caught pneumon
ia and spent the next three weeks in hospital. That’s when Helene found me, found out what my father was playing at, and offered me her store room.’

  Gabriel pushed away the wearisome memories. His father’s house – he never thought of it as home – had never been an option, once he’d escaped from it.

  The one time he’d tried to make himself go back, he’d ended up hiding in a pub loo having a panic attack so severe it took hours for the shaking to subside. The days of being sent away to psych wards had long gone, replaced by the combined rigours of bullying, control and emotional neglect, but the fear of it remained. And then there were the other things in the house. The things that didn’t frighten him, really, but the consequences of them – hard beds and sedatives and restraints and worse – those things terrified him.

  One way or another, he had meant to escape, and he’d managed it, with Helene’s help and without self-medication. It was a triumph of sorts.

  ‘It was while I was on the street that I began to help my… compatriots of the road. The police can be complete arses if they think they have an easy mark. Being homeless isn’t the same as being useless.’ Gabriel’s tone was scornful. ‘They targeted a homeless man I knew once, accusing him of an assault that he obviously hadn’t done. For a start, he’d been in the park with me for the night. For another, his Parkinson’s was too bad for him to have held a weapon. I persuaded the senior officer on the case to leave the poor bastard alone. A week later I got Detective Inspector Bakare to investigate an attack on Hannah, when nobody seemed to give a damn about a couple of public school boys being vile shits. It was as well I got there before they got their lighter to work. It turned out they’d already killed someone else.’

  James, Gabriel noted, was both disgusted and unsurprised. Oh yes, here was a man who knew what the world could be like.

  ‘After that, people came to me for help with little things. Finding family members, sometimes. Difficulty with the police less often, but they did me the honour of trusting me, and they let me paint them. They live in a hard world, and they’re hard people, but they’re due as much respect as anyone else. A lot more respect than people like my father, who think they can buy and control and punish anyone who doesn’t agree with them.’

  Gabriel let out a long, slow breath. He hadn’t meant to get that heated. ‘So, that’s my life story, the highlights reel. Your turn. Why do you even want to help me?’

  James folded his hands on the table in front of him. ‘I’ve told you some of it. Grew up an only child with Mum and Granda in Edinburgh. Never met my dad. Came to London after Granda died. I lost my mum in a car accident while I was studying medicine. I graduated, looked for work, and joined the army. I got the bright idea that the infantry was a better use of my skills. GPs are ten a penny. A really good Combat Medical Technician can make a huge difference on the front line. I served in Africa and the Middle East. Things went horribly wrong in Helmand two years ago.’ He glanced down to his fingers, saw that they were clenched and made the effort to relax them again.

  ‘Honourable medical discharge because officially I’m a basket case if I’m around large quantities of blood. No use on the front line, not much better at a base. I came back to London eighteen months ago. I put a down payment on this place with what I inherited from Mum and Granda, and I’m paying the rest off as I can. Army pensions, lodgers, and whatever I can manage as a suburban GP. Trying to be useful instead of a useless wreck.’

  His tone wavered. Honesty for honesty seemed to be his resolution.

  ‘I’m acutely aware that I’m completely fucked up. Everything went to shit in Helmand. Things happened, to me and to… to others, that I can’t undo. But I have to believe I can still choose to be who I want to be. Choose who I am. I don’t have to be a victim of what happened to me and the… the consequences of that. So I choose to be a doctor and help those who need it most. If people are going AWOL and nobody else cares, maybe I can help. I can be more than just this fucked-up ex-combat medic. If that’s all right.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Gabriel. He held out his hand and James, after a quizzical moment, shook it. ‘Partners,’ Gabriel said.

  James smiled, hope brightening his blue eyes. ‘Partners.’

  James and Gabriel had their first opportunity to work together that evening. No visitors came for Gabriel, but someone threw stones at his window. Downstairs, he found a note scrawled on a used envelope shoved under a stone by the back door.

  James appeared at his side and they examined the message together. It read:

  Hannah Chelsea Bridge £20

  Gabriel turned the paper over and over in his hands. He sniffed the paper and grimaced.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said James with an amused but sympathetic smirk.

  Gabriel pressed his lips together. ‘Hannah dosses in a place out the back of a strip of curry houses, and Daryl, the one who was kipping under the Chelsea Bridge, smelled a lot more of low tide. It’s where I went last night, looking for them. This,’ he waved the piece of paper, ‘isn’t Hannah’s handwriting and it smells like–’

  ‘Soot and grease,’ said James.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Fished out of a dirty kitchen?’

  ‘Could be. It doesn’t seem right for Hannah.’ Gabriel frowned again. ‘Maybe she was simply using what was to hand. Oh well. I guess I’d better get to Chelsea Bridge.’

  ‘Want company?’

  Gabriel glanced at James’s neat dress and highly polished shoes. ‘That’d be good, but you’ll need to change.’

  An hour later – an hour of curled lips and wide berths from their fellow commuters – James and Gabriel had emerged by the river and were walking towards the bridge. Night had fallen and their disreputable get-up was less noticeable from a distance. Both wore sneakers, track pants, old shirts and tatty jackets. James was wearing a spare coat of Gabriel’s.

  ‘If we look like we washed up in the last tide, no-one will ask a thing,’ Gabriel had told him and, apart from trying to avoid them, nobody had paid them much attention.

  ‘The art of being invisible,’ Gabriel had said, ‘is merely three square meals, two showers and a roof over your head away.’

  James tried not to be distracted by the fact that the jacket he wore, though tatty, smelled so distinctively of Gabriel. Keep yer heid, warned Granda’s voice. The jacket was threadbare but not dirty. It smelled faintly of perspiration and paint, a little of London exhaust fumes, a little more of the deodorant and shaving gel that Gabriel favoured and slightly more of Jammy Dodger. James pushed his hand into the left pocket and encountered crumbs. It made him smile.

  The expression fell away, however, as the two of them arrived at the foot of the Chelsea Bridge and peered into the darkness.

  That is, Gabriel peered. James could see perfectly well with his uncanny vision, and his whole mind and body were suddenly on high alert. He could see every stone and piece of detritus on the muddy ground. He could make out graffiti on the water-stained and algae-slick stonework of the bridge. He could smell a hundred things at once: ash and mud and murky water and the traffic exhaust and Gabriel’s aftershave, and he could taste things in the air too. He could hear insects humming above the low-tide water and waves slapping against a barge moored on the opposite bank, Gabriel’s breathing and the crumbling of cindered wood. He had an impression of an unidentifiable something, which made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, like in the war – the sense that something deadly was waiting just out of sight.

  James was never sure if this prickling sense of awareness was the same as it had been on the battlefield. He explained his strangeness to people as PTSD, but his body didn’t produce adrenalin any more. His heart never varied from its sluggish, lazy lurch and his mostly unnecessary breathing was steady. Was the sense of danger an illusion borne of trauma, or his new senses registering danger before his brain could catch up?

  James fell naturally into old army habits
. Alert and unhurried, he cautiously approached the pile of ashes he saw heaped up against the stonework. The Thames tide was heading towards its 10 pm low ebb, but by morning these ashes would be washed clean by the high tide.

  He didn’t need to approach the ashes. He could smell it, the burned meat. Horribly familiar from missions around Helmand, firefights with the Taliban. James wished he could pretend it was a stray animal, but his night vision clearly picked out the leg, the lined hands, the lumps that had once been torso and head. ‘Hold up, Gabriel,’ he said, wanting to keep Gabriel from the stench of it, ‘I think–’

  ‘Is it Hannah?’ Gabriel’s throat worked in a dry retch and he held still.

  James hunched his shoulders, unhappy that Gabriel had understood what lay in the circle of greasy ashes. Greasy soot. The letter. God. ‘I’ll see.’

  ‘No, wait. We’ll call DI Bakare.’

  James continued to approach the ashes as Gabriel made his phone call. He crouched and examined the remains, mentally reconstructing height and build. He could see a patch of pale, greying hair. The body’s frame was thin and poorly nourished, and the hand, curled into a rigid claw, appeared masculine.

  ‘It’s a man,’ he said to Gabriel. ‘Middle aged, I think. Didn’t you say Daryl was an older bloke?’ James picked up a broken coat hanger from the coarse ground and poked at the wrinkled hand. The hand was very pale and shrivelled.

  James leaned in and inhaled. The body smelled human, and of course if it had been a vampire killed in this manner, the whole thing would be nothing but dust. But the bloodlessness was a worry. James studied the ground and inhaled deeply. He couldn’t see any blood. He couldn’t smell any blood.

  Fucking vampires, he thought with disgust. This poor bastard was bled dry and burned by a fucking vampire.

  And then the next awful thought occurred to him. Did a vampire send Gabriel a note luring him to a kill?

  His senses snapped back to high alert. As James rose, he tried to detect once more that feeling of lurking threat, as though it was a real thing and not a Pavlovian response learned on a foreign battlefield.