Ravenfall

by Narrelle M. Harris

  Gabriel moistened his lips nervously, then figured that if confessions were to be made this evening, they had to be made in full.

  ‘Ghosts. I used to think my house was haunted. Nobody ever believed me. My father said I was over-imaginative, and that I made up invisible playmates because I was in that huge house on my own so much. Then I described one of my imaginary playmates as having her entrails spilling out of her stomach, and the boy in the coal cellar had rope around his neck and his tongue was black and stuck out of his mouth like a sausage, and that the creepy baby would cry and cry and cry until the lady in the white dress picked it up and smashed its head into the fireplace.

  ‘My father said I was sick in the head. He sent me to a lot of psychiatrists and the occasional institution and he fed me a lot of fucking pills before I learned to keep my mouth shut.’

  Gabriel leaned towards James. ‘What you did tonight. That’s the first time in twenty years I’ve thought maybe I’m not deep-down crazy. Maybe my house really was haunted. You don’t understand what this means to me.’

  ‘Gabriel…’

  ‘Because if you’re real, then the ghosts were real. And if they’re real, I want to know what they are. Ghosts and vampires, and those other things I thought I saw. I want to know everything that can be known about it, because it’ll keep proving I’m not mad and I never was.’ The relief in his expression, the hope in it, was nearly heart- breaking.

  Then Gabriel, fierce and earnest, wrapped his long fingers around James’s blunter ones. ‘You’re not a monster, James. My father is, sometimes, but not you. You’re a good man. You saved my life; in more ways than one. And I want to find out exactly what it means. Being a vampire. You can tell me how it works. There must be rules–’

  ‘I don’t know how it works,’ James snapped. ‘I didn’t come with an instruction manual. I woke up as this thing, and was left to work it out on my own.’

  ‘I could help you work it out. I’m a chemist, remember. We’ve got somewhere to start.’

  ‘I’m not a science project, Gabriel. Don’t make me into one. I couldn’t stand it.’ Not from you.

  ‘Don’t you want to know?’

  To know what West turned me into? The myths are no good. So much of what’s in the movies and books isn’t true. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know what this is or what it means.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘And of course you won’t be a science project. How could you think you would be? James, you’re my friend.’

  James saw no fear in Gabriel’s eyes. He saw burning curiosity, yes, but also warmth. Pleading. He saw something he had not seen since before that day in Helmand. A friend, offering to help.

  ‘I’ve never seen a ghost,’ James admitted slowly.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ James grimaced. ‘There’s so much I don’t know.’

  ‘Then let’s find out together.’

  ‘All right.’ James swallowed. ‘Aye. That’d be good.’

  ‘It would be good,’ Gabriel agreed. ‘We’ll be pioneers in the field. That’s fantastic, that.’ He grinned broadly.

  ‘It’s mad, is what it is.’

  ‘Bloody mad,’ Gabriel agreed.

  Their eyes met and then they were both giggling in fits.

  James felt like something had been unlocked inside. With this secret gone, he’d be able to help Gabriel find out what the hell was going on – because Gabriel was right. The police wouldn’t do much here. They couldn’t. Not if they spent their time seeking a simply human reason for it all.

  And, James couldn’t help thinking, with a fluttering sense of hope, he could finally have more of his life back. You were always right, Granda. It’s a lang road that’s nae got a turnin.’

  ‘So. Do you have a cape?’ Gabriel asked cheekily on the way to the kitchen.

  ‘Opera cape,’ James replied, deadly serious. ‘And spats. I’m like Bela Lugosi when I frock up.’

  ‘You’re much better looking than Bela Lugosi,’ Gabriel protested. ‘You’re like a paler, blonder Frank Langella.’

  ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘Yeah, you do.’ They reached the kitchen and Gabriel poured and gulped down two glasses of water. James sank onto a chair, everything as superficially normal as usual.

  The pensive moment froze.

  Gabriel broke the silence. ‘Will you still help me find out what’s going on? Despite what happened tonight? We have to find out who’s doing this. That… vampire said I was a step on the way to something else. What do vampires want with me?’ He looked suddenly young and fearful.

  James rose, but he was afraid to reach out – although it was the only thing he wanted to do. Reach out and press a comforting hand to Gabriel’s shoulder; to pull him into an embrace.

  ‘I swear to you Gabriel, we’ll find out, and we’ll stop them. I won’t let anyone hurt you.’

  Gabriel’s gaze dropped to James’s torso, where the stake had torn a hole in his body; where the mouthful of Gabriel’s blood had made that wound heal like a miracle.

  ‘Don’t let…’ Gabriel cleared his throat. ‘Don’t let any of the bastards s-stake you, either. I don’t want to lose you.’

  It seemed too early for a declaration like that. Too early, or much, much too late, James thought. He did succumb to the impulse to reach out, though, and squeezed Gabriel’s shoulder gently.

  Impulsively, Gabriel pressed a kiss to James’s cheek, and then vanished into his room.

  James pressed his fingers to the spot. He could feel the shape of Gabriel’s lips on his skin; and he felt it there, warm and tingling, all the long and wakeful night.

  Chapter Seven

  Gabriel gave up on his attempt to capture elusive sleep. He stared at his clock, the digits glowing 03:52.

  He wondered if James was awake, then grimaced at his own idiocy. Of course James was awake. James was always awake, and now Gabriel knew why. Or part of the why. He didn’t know why vampires didn’t need to sleep. Maybe they did. Maybe James slept upside down in the attic when Gabriel wasn’t around.

  ‘Twat,’ Gabriel muttered at himself. He pushed the bedding aside, put his feet on the floor and wriggled his toes against the carpet, grounding himself in the texture of the cheap pile on his skin.

  He walked out to the kitchen, which was in virtual darkness. There, as predicted, was James, dressed again in his jeans and khaki T-shirt, the tail end of the caduceus tattoo just visible under the sleeve. He sat at the table, staring at a partially filled glass vial of dark red fluid which rolled sluggishly around the receptacle. On the table, sitting in a clear tumbler, were five similar vials, each stoppered with rubber. A pen lay beside an open, blank notebook.

  ‘Thought I’d make a start,’ James said, the calmness of his tone belied by the swiftness with which he’d set about drawing his blood for the experiments they’d only just agreed upon conducting.

  ‘The damned stuff is even harder to extract than it was when I first turned.’

  Gabriel sat beside him and stared at the viscous substance in the vial. It was the consistency of mercury and the colour of dried blood, except this blood was fresh and liquid. Carmine, Gabriel’s palette memory supplied, hex triplet 960018. He’d memorised the codes for two dozen reds during an experimental phase in digital art he’d abandoned back at university. He preferred art he could touch and smell. But the hex triplets had stuck.

  Gabriel lifted up one of the vials, swirling it around as he examined it. ‘We should check the folklore and literary tropes first,’ he said, pulling the notebook and pen over to draw a simple grid. ‘We’ll need silver, garlic, holy water, I suppose. I can find that later, but we’ll use tap water and distilled water as controls. Wasn’t there a TV show that threw salt at everything as well? Iron, too.’ He caught James looking at him quizzically. ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t silver for werewolves; iron for fairie
s?’

  ‘Worth checking. Elimination is as important as confirmation. Though I’m pretty sure you’re not a fairy.’

  James actually smiled. ‘God. This reminds me of medical school.’

  ‘We can make time for a cadaver lesson,’ said Gabriel with a sardonic quirk of his mouth, ‘Since technically I suppose you are one.’

  James regarded him gravely.

  Fuck. I’ve gone too far.

  ‘They used to prank the first years,’ said James. ‘They’d bring us in to watch a senior year student perform a dissection. We’re all sitting there, trying not to be squeamish, quietly freaking out, and we’d see what we thought was a scalpel making an incision in the cadaver’s chest, and then… AAARGH!!’ James shrieked and jumped up, waving his arms.

  Gabriel almost fell out of his chair. He righted himself and glared at James, who was sniggering away.

  ‘The look on your wee face!’ cackled James.

  Gabriel’s glare morphed into a pursed mouth, then an answering grin. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I fell out my chair, of course, like a numpty,’ admitted James. ‘Then I laughed my arse off.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘In my senior year, I got to play the reanimated corpse. Prescient, now I think on it.’ He grimaced. ‘I’m half inclined to believe it really was a portent, nowadays.’

  ‘I’d call that superstitious nonsense,’ said Gabriel. ‘But, well.’

  ‘Fucks up your world view, this vampire thing.’

  Gabriel picked up the pen again. ‘Let’s get on with constructing a new world view then.’

  They spent the next few hours, side by side. They established a few baselines: James’s temperature was a steady 32°C; his heart thumped at a leisurely eight beats per minute; and it turned out that while his breathing was a reflex, he really did need to inhale once every hour or his heart rate slowed further and he began to drift into a sort of sleep.

  James refused to repeat his own early experiments which proved the only food he could ingest was black tea, water or blood. Solid food came up as quickly as it went down and, James said, he didn’t really need to go through that again with witnesses.

  For further tests, they syringed drops of vampire blood onto clean saucers. The stuff, as James had noted, was difficult to extract. It evaded the needle and then resisted being squirted onto the dish; not with any great force, but the sensation of resistance remained. They made notes to devise tests to determine if the strange effect was a physical property of the blood or a psychological resistance on behalf of the person extracting it. If the latter, whether it affected them both equally, or whether Gabriel’s impulse emanated from an evolved human response to vampire blood.

  Tap water had no effect on the stuff. Salt water made it skim around the depression in the saucer but no other change was visually discernible.

  Gabriel had bought garlic but not yet used it for cooking. He crushed it, to find that James instinctively recoiled from the smell. Speculation that this was merely the response of hyper-sensitive olfactory abilities was dismissed when the smallest drop of garlic juice made the vampire blood coagulate into an awful, thick, blackened slurry. A piece of the garlic made the slurry thicken almost to solidity.

  Before continuing, Gabriel found an empty jar and sealed the rest of the garlic tightly inside it. He washed his hands six times in hot soapy water before coming back to the experiments.

  ‘Put latex gloves on the shopping list,’ he noted, ‘and don’t let me shake hands with you for at least a day.’

  ‘Because holding hands is what we do so much of here at Ivy Gardens.’

  There was an odd, awkward beat of silence before they both ploughed right on past that notion.

  Finding silver for testing proved a challenge, until James remembered he had his mother’s mismatched set of silver-plated cutlery in the cupboard. He’d retrieved it from storage with his other belongings on his discharge, but had little call to use it. ‘The handles made my hands itch, so I got some cheap stainless steel ones.’

  They placed the tip of a silver-plated knife into a drop of blood, and the blood fizzed mildly.

  Curious, Gabriel stabbed the tip of the knife into the jar of garlic, and placed it in the blood. The blood fizzed, coagulated and gave off a terrible stink.

  ‘Better toss the silverware out too, then,’ he said.

  James, who had pushed well back from the table, shook his head. ‘Keep it in your room.’

  Gabriel was inclined to argue the point, but James was staring at the dish of blackened vampire blood in fascinated horror.

  ‘We don’t have to do this now,’ Gabriel offered gently.

  ‘We have to find out, don’t we? Apart from anything else, you need protection. You may one day need it from me.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not being ridiculous. You don’t… you don’t know what I… You don’t know.’

  Gabriel reached for James’s shoulder, echoing James’s earlier solace.

  ‘I’m an excellent judge of character, remember? If you can’t trust yourself, trust me. I lived with a father who did his best to grind me into the dirt to get back at my mother; a man who medicated me from the ages of eight to twelve and packed me off to psychiatrists and institutions rather than try to listen, let alone understand. I lived on the streets, and I’ve fought for my independence my whole life. I know what people who want to hurt me look and sound like. You’re not like them. You don’t want to hurt me.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  Gabriel’s leaned across the table to kiss James’s mouth. Their lips met, soft and chaste and sweet. James’s skin warmed under Gabriel’s tender touch. He didn’t kiss back, exactly, but with his head tilted up, his whole stance softened, relaxed, held still, and he received the kiss like a benediction. When Gabriel drew away, James’s eyes were closed.

  ‘James.’

  James’s blue eyes opened, and they were full of longing and sorrow and fear. ‘I don’t want to hurt you. That doesn’t mean I won’t without meaning to. It’s happened before. When I first woke like this. A vampire. I didnae know what I was yet. But I was so thirsty and… I did monstrous things, Gabriel.’

  ‘But you’re not a monster. Trust me on this.’

  ‘Eight hours ago, you didn’t know that vampires could exist.

  Now you’re telling the one you live with that you trust him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With your life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re daft. But please. Even if you can trust my intent, you can’t trust the thirst. Promise me you’ll defend yourself if I… if I forget myself again.’

  ‘I promise.’

  By the time dawn arrived, ten pages of the notebook were filled and they had plans to find equipment and materials to conduct further tests, including experiments with religious symbols in a variety of materials. Gabriel had made a list of things he’d need to obtain from Helene’s storeroom.

  ‘If you need to store blood from the butcher in the fridge, you should do that. I don’t mind. Can’t be worse than the urine samples one bastard kept in the fridge at university, right? It’s several degrees of magnitude better than some of the stuff I slept beside while I was between roofs.’

  ‘You’re taking this very well.’

  ‘I thought about having a panic attack when I went to bed, but to be honest, it makes parts of my life make sense for the first time. And I like you. So.’ He shrugged.

  James regarded him with soft-eyed wonderment. ‘You really are something special.’

  ‘Not so much.’

  James patted Gabriel’s wrist. ‘You are to me.’

  A sharp rap on the door interrupted whatever Gabriel intended to say next. A uniformed constable had arrived to escort Gabriel and James to the station to make their belated statements.

  ‘I have work,’ said James, annoyed.

&
nbsp; ‘You can call them, I’m sure, sir,’ said the constable, too firmly to encourage argument.

  James would have argued anyway, but he wanted the damned thing done and out of the way. He phoned the clinic while Gabriel dressed, then pulled on his dark green field jacket and suffered to be put into the back of the police car with Gabriel.

  James made his statement covering the discovery of the body under the bridge and the business at the Tiller crime scene (though not what happened afterwards) and then signed it. DI Bakare urged him to return to work, but James had already decided he wasn’t leaving until Gabriel was done. This whole urgency to get them into the station, to separate them as soon as possible, left him uneasy and stubborn.

  ‘I’ll wait for Gabriel,’ he said firmly, at Bakare’s third insistence that it could take time.

  Bakare returned with ill-concealed irritation to the desk where Gabriel was giving his statement.

  James took up a watchful position by the water cooler, watching Gabriel being interviewed – his posture stiff, Bakare being awkwardly solicitous – when Sergeant Datta came alongside. He cut a quick glance at her, then returned his gaze to Gabriel.

  ‘Don’t trust him,’ Datta said in a low, urgent voice.

  ‘Thank you for the tip, Sergeant, but I believe I’m old enough to choose my own friends.’

  ‘I mean it. He’s not quite right. He’s dangerous. He’s dangerous to you.’

  Her earnest tone was puzzling. She wasn’t being cold or malicious. Her heartbeat was elevated and her irises dilated. Sergeant Datta was genuinely anxious.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  A chair scraped and they both looked up to see Gabriel rise and walk their way.

  ‘Just keep it in mind,’ snapped Datta and she skulked away.

  James stepped towards Gabriel. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Apart from all the dead homeless people?’

  ‘Apart from them. No news of Hannah?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a start, then. We can look for her again tonight.’

  ‘What makes you think we’ll have better luck?’ They’d pushed through the doors and onto the street.