Ravenfall

by Narrelle M. Harris

  ‘Or make double the mess.’

  Gabriel had to admit to the truth of that.

  Finally paying attention to his reluctance to speak of the killings or James, Helene changed the subject to talk of art, Gabriel’s progress with his latest works, whether he needed more supplies yet. They drank more tea and Gabriel ate all but one of the macarons. Helene handed over two more cheques, one made out to James for the rent, the other in Gabriel’s name.

  ‘Don’t you think you’d better hang on to that for bail?’ he challenged.

  ‘If you need bail, I will pay the bail,’ said Helene sternly. ‘But it won’t come to that.’

  Gabriel wasn’t convinced, but he let the matter rest.

  ‘I must be off, Gabriel. Don’t see me out, I know the way.’

  ‘Did you leave a trail of crumbs?’ he asked with an arched eyebrow. ‘It’s such a vast, palatial residence you might get lost.’

  ‘Don’t be so grumpy,’ Helene admonished him mildly. ‘You like this flat and it is palatial enough for you. You need to relax. You should see if your James will have sex with you.’

  ‘I thought you said I should steer clear of him.’

  ‘You should,’ said Helene with an impish and sympathetic crinkling of her eyes. ‘But you won’t.’

  ‘Off with you, wicked woman,’ Gabriel said, shooing her out. ‘I have painting to do.’

  Helene skittered ahead of him, laughing, while Gabriel carried the dishes to the sink. He heard the door open and Helene’s sudden oh! before a low voice rumbled something inaudible.

  Then he heard Helene say, ‘Well if he’s expecting you, do come in.’

  He heard the door shut and the skin along his spine, his neck, his scalp, prickled with apprehension.

  Gabriel turned from the sink, clutching the letter opener, the only implement at hand. He relaxed marginally when he saw a very pale man regarding him with supercilious disinterest.

  ‘I’m not in to visitors. I’m working,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘I am here for Doctor Sharpe,’ said the man. His accent was cultured. Mannered, even. Gabriel suspected it was not the man’s natural accent.

  ‘James isn’t home.’

  ‘I will wait.’

  The stranger walked into the living room and perched on the sofa. He arched an eyebrow at the cushions as though suspecting them of harbouring bedbugs. Gabriel decided that, whatever else he was, the stranger was a poser, a wanker and an insufferable snob.

  ‘I’m working, and you’re leaving.’

  ‘I am not leaving.’

  And god, what was with all the refusal to use contractions? All that waxy pale skin and stilted speech made the git sound like a cheap TV vam–

  Oh.

  Gabriel refused flatly to be frightened. ‘Deathly white skin, precise speech patterns, standoffish mien,’ he observed, ‘I assume you’re here on vampire business?’

  The stranger arched an elegant eyebrow at him. ‘Pale skin and standoffishness equally apply to you, Mr Dare.’

  Gabriel registered the lack of response to vampire business. ‘Except that I have a pulse.’

  ‘I have,’ said the stranger, smiling ferally, ‘noted that. Yes.’

  Gabriel held very still, considering how his familiarity with James’s state, and his lack of real familiarity with any other vampire, might have led him to this miscalculation. Then he gave the vampire a slow smile of his own. ‘Don’t imagine that I’m not prepared. I live with a vampire.’

  ‘A tame one,’ sneered the stranger.

  Before the exchange could go further, the door opened and James walked in.

  To be fair to the visiting vampire, James – in his habitual neat- casual attire and carrying a Tesco’s plastic bag of milk and teabags – looked every bit as tame as a rabbit.

  James took in the scenario, nodded a casual greeting to Gabriel, and crossed the room with the economical grace of a tiger to put the meagre groceries on the table.

  Tame, my arse, thought Gabriel with satisfaction. The stranger appeared surprised as well, though he covered it swiftly.

  ‘Doctor Sharpe,’ he said, rising. ‘I am Mordecai Grimshaw.’ He waited expectantly.

  James folded his arms. ‘How very nice for you.’

  Now it was Grimshaw’s turn to be put out. ‘Of the Grimshaw Coterie,’ he elaborated stiffly.

  ‘Again, cheers, so pleased for you and your wee kingdom. Hope the weather stays fine for it. Goodbye.’ He turned and started to unpack the bag.

  ‘Doctor Sharpe!’

  The good Doctor Sharpe ignored the commanding tone and stowed the milk in the fridge, next to two vials of his own blood.

  ‘Doctor. Sharpe.’ The name was spoken through gritted teeth that time.

  James turned, raised an eyebrow. ‘You still here?’

  ‘I need,’ said Grimshaw through rigid jaws, ‘your…advice.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say? Take two aspirin, call me when you’re dead.’ A beat. ‘Deader.’

  ‘You do not make this easy, Doctor.’

  ‘I don’t intend to make this easy, Mr Grimshaw. I made it clear on my return to London, when I was approached by no less than five vampires with delusions of grandeur, I’m not joining anyone’s little vampire enclave. I’m not having any part of your silly power plays and those incredibly ridiculous standoffs where people in the undead equivalent of a posing pouch sneer and throw a perfumed hanky at some other moron with teeth and an inflated opinion of their own importance. I’m not interested, full stop. Not unless you’ve decided to start killing people instead of drinking delicately from those volunteers who’ve mistaken you for the lead character in a romance novel. I’ll have plenty of interest if that’s the case, and you won’t enjoy it. If you’re not here with information about these killings, you can get out of my house.’

  Grimshaw blinked. He blinked again. ‘What killings?’

  ‘Right,’ said James. ‘Out.’

  ‘Doctor Sharpe.’

  ‘I don’t plan to repeat myself,’ said James, ‘Who let you in, anyway?’

  ‘Helene,’ said Gabriel, who had been enjoying the exchange immensely.

  ‘Better ask her not to do that anymore.’

  ‘I had no intention of harming your… thralls,’ said Grimshaw in a voice dripping with acid and honey. ‘Merely inviting you to ally your own wee kingdom with my own.’

  ‘You’re starting to really piss me off.’

  Grimshaw, not used to such defiance, reached the end of his tether. In a vampire, that took the shape of him, teeth bared, snatching Gabriel by the throat with supernatural speed and reeling him in, nails biting into his skin.

  An instant later, Grimshaw was howling in agony and hopping on one leg. In the other was buried the solid silver letter opener that had been dipped in silver nitrate and garlic, which Gabriel had plunged into the nearest bit of meaty muscle. The only reason Grimshaw wasn’t falling over with the pain is that James had hold of his hair and was yanking it towards the ceiling. James’s teeth had descended too, vicious points close to Grimshaw’s face.

  ‘Two things, ye turnip,’ said James with deadly calm. ‘One: it turns out silver isn’t only for werewolves. Combined with garlic, it hurts like a motherfucker for vampires as well.’

  Grimshaw whimpered. He groped for the knife handle, but James seized one of his wrists in a grip like steel and squeezed until bones creaked. Grimshaw waved the other in the air in a feeble gesture of surrender.

  ‘And two: I. Don’t. Like. You.’

  ‘Please,’ sobbed Grimshaw. ‘Take it out. Take it out. It burns.’

  ‘Could he actually burn?’ Gabriel asked, his perturbation at Grimshaw’s reaction buried under a veneer of scientific curiosity. The wound was swelling nastily.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ James frowned. ‘Not unless we set fire to him.’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ said Gabriel, matching James’s tone with bravado. �
�We might set fire to the curtains while we’re at it.’

  ‘They are ugly curtains,’ offered James.

  Grimshaw whimpered again.

  James, taking pity at last, hauled Grimshaw upright. ‘I’m going to take the knife out, ye Jessie,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to treat the wound. And you are going to go back home and never come here again.’

  Grimshaw nodded frantically. Satisfied, James dropped him onto the sofa, tore the cloth of the expensive tailored trousers to get to the injury and pulled out the knife. A gush of sticky, almost black blood came with it, curdled by the garlic and silver.

  Gabriel stood guard over Grimshaw with the gory knife while James cleaned the cut, flushing the gash with water. When it was clean, it began to heal of its own supernatural accord.

  As the pain receded, Grimshaw stared from Gabriel to James in disbelief.

  ‘You know what that knife can do, and you let the human carry it?’

  They hadn’t formally discussed Gabriel being permanently armed with the thing, but it struck James as an excellent idea. ‘I insist that he does.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because,’ said Gabriel with a wicked gleam in his eye, ‘he likes to live dangerously.’

  Unexpectedly, James laughed, vampire canines nowhere in sight. ‘You,’ James, sobering, jabbed a finger at Grimshaw, ‘go home. I never want to see you again. You don’t want to see me, either. You don’t know what other surprises we’ve cooked up.’

  Grimshaw eagerly agreed that he did not. He struggled to his feet. With great dignity and a very strained voice, Grimshaw slipped his fingers into the breast pocket of his suit and withdrew a business card.

  ‘Should you change your mind, Doctor Sharpe, you may find me at home.’

  James didn’t take the card, and Grimshaw was forced to place it on the coffee table.

  ‘We may be able to help each other,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Your stubbornness and prejudice against your own kind are foolish. We are not all like–’ His teeth snapped shut. ‘Good day, then, Doctor Sharpe.’

  ‘I’d make a move on that pissing off now, if I were you.’

  The vampire walked out with studied poise and majesty, an effect undermined by his torn trousers and persistent limp.

  James watched him leave, all the way down the stairs, from the doorway and then from the window. His nostrils flared, as though he could smell something nasty.

  Gabriel was scrabbling among his papers for his notebook so he could dash down his new observations.

  ‘You’d better clean and re-garlic up that thing,’ said James warily. ‘Just in case.’

  With an aha! of triumph, Gabriel found the notebook and sat to write in it furiously. He drew an excellent and accurate depiction of the swollen knife wound from memory.

  When he was done he found James, arms folded, regarding the floor with a troubled expression. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Grimshaw’s coming here is no coincidence.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I think Grimshaw was sent here by the vampire that made me.’

  Gabriel stared at him. ‘How could you know?’

  ‘I could smell West, faintly.’

  ‘Smell?’

  ‘Vampires have an acute sense of smell,’ said James with a grimace, as though it were a disgusting failing. ‘And Major Cael West always smelled of stale tobacco, onions and old blood even when I only had human senses.’

  At Gabriel’s continued consternation, James went on.

  ‘He was in Afghanistan, last I knew. That was getting on for two years ago. I tried to kill him there. I failed. I thought he was still in the Middle East. Plenty of scope for a vampire in a war zone.’

  ‘Do you think he’s got something to do with the murders?’

  ‘I think it’s inevitable he has,’ said James.

  ‘Do you think it has something to do with you?’ But Gabriel’s tone was curious, not accusatory.

  ‘I can’t see how, but I can’t rule it out. If West has come back to England, he hasn’t tried to find me before now. I made it clear how I felt about his offer back in Helmand.’

  ‘What offer?’

  James shifted uncomfortably again. ‘After I woke up… changed, he said he’d done it because he had a job for a medic. He wanted me to join his little band of blood-sucking psychopaths.’

  ‘And you declined the offer?’

  ‘By trying to stake him, yes.’ James glanced away, and Gabriel thought that there must be more to the story.

  ‘I wasn’t a match for him. He got away.’ James shook his head. ‘If I’d managed to kill the bastard then, these murders wouldn’t be happening.’

  ‘This is not your fault,’ Gabriel told him. ‘Don’t you go taking stupid guilt on with everything else. You said this guy, West, had a gang of vampires. Even if you’d killed him, this scheme, whatever it is, may have gone ahead anyway. There must be a larger purpose to it than that one bastard. It’s… it’s too strange and pointlessly focused on me to be a simple case of thrill killing.’

  ‘It’s not down to you either, Gabriel.’

  Gabriel released a pent-up breath. ‘No. Right. It’s down to this prick, West, and his gang.’

  James picked up the business card from the coffee table. ‘Maybe we’d better go talk to Mordecai Grimshaw after all.’

  Gabriel reached for his wallet and keys, but James stayed him with a gesture. ‘Not right away.’

  ‘Why not?’

  James sighed. ‘There are so many things I haven’t told you yet.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I lost the last time I faced Cael West. I don’t dare risk a confrontation again without being at my peak.’

  ‘What do you need?’ asked Gabriel instantly.

  ‘I need to rest. It’s not sleep, more like being dormant.’

  ‘Like a volcano?’

  ‘Heh. If you like.’

  Gabriel’s eyes widened. ‘I knew it. You really do hang upside down from a ceiling.’

  ‘You’re a funny bastard, Gabriel Dare.’

  ‘I am,’ Gabriel agreed with an unrepentant grin. ‘You’re lucky you’re getting me for free now instead of having to line up at the Edinburgh Festival like everyone else.’

  James shook his head, but the corners of his eyes were creased with amusement. ‘It’s been a long couple of days and nights, and if there’s half a chance Cael West is waiting for us, I need to be rested. Give me two hours. And I should,’ he grimaced, ‘eat.’

  ‘Oh,’ replied Gabriel, stunned. He pushed up his shirtsleeve. ‘I can… we can sort that…’

  ‘Pig’s blood,’ said James firmly, taking Gabriel’s hand and tugging the sleeve down again. ‘I can get some from the butcher near Spitalfields.’

  ‘I’ll get some from the butcher near Spitalfields,’ said Gabriel.

  James hesitated, then said: ‘If you can’t get pig’s blood, cow’s blood will be fine, or sheep. Chicken’ll do in a pinch.’

  Gabriel was matter-of-fact, like this was the usual shopping-trip request. ‘Got it. You rest up. Or hang around. Whichever it is you do, and I’ll be back soon.’

  ‘When you do, don’t worry if I seem a bit…’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Startled, I was going to say,’ but there was humour in it. ‘I’m not used to anyone being around when I zone out.’

  Gabriel’s teasing vanished. ‘I’ll wake you up gently.’ He wrapped his arms around James and hugged. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Holding James like this felt good. Damn, but the man fit in his arms. For all that James was shorter, he was broader across the shoulder, his compact physique filling the space between Gabriel’s long arms. Thin and gangly, so much in Gabriel’s life had made him feel insubstantial: as a boy nobody had listened, as a young man on the street he’d been invisible. Yet here he was, heard and needed. James’s solidity, t
he weight of him in Gabriel’s arms, was a welcome anchor.

  When James squeezed his arms gently around Gabriel’s shoulders, Gabriel couldn’t help smiling, and he couldn’t help turning his head to press a kiss to James’s temple.

  James held very still, then relaxed. So Gabriel kissed James’s temple again. When James turned his face towards him, he placed a soft, undemanding kiss on James’s mouth.

  James, cautiously, uncertainly, returned the kiss. Then he sighed. ‘I don’t think I can be what you want,’ he said. ‘I know I can’t be what you need.’

  ‘You don’t know what I want or need,’ said Gabriel. ‘You haven’t asked.’

  ‘I’ve explained about… about sex.’

  ‘You say you don’t experience desire,’ said Gabriel. He rubbed his hand against James’s back. ‘But you desire touch. If sex gives you no pleasure, we don’t need that. This is good. This is nice.’

  James met Gabriel’s eyes but, tellingly, he didn’t pull away from the embrace. ‘I don’t even know if I’m capable of love any more. I don’t know if I have a soul.’

  ‘I don’t know if I have one either,’ said Gabriel reasonably. ‘But you like me, don’t you?’

  James’s fingers flexed against Gabriel’s arms. ‘Aye. Yes, I like you a lot.’

  ‘And I like you a lot,’ said Gabriel. ‘Isn’t that where most people start?’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘Then let’s start with that.’

  James’s Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘All right.’

  ‘Can I kiss you again?’

  ‘Aye, I’d like…’

  Gabriel cupped James’s jaw in his hand. He breathed warm over James’s cheek, his lips. James tilted his head up to meet him.

  James’s mouth was indeed cool and strange. And perfect and wonderful. Their lips parted and, tentatively, Gabriel ran the tip of his tongue over James’s lip, over the edge of his tongue. James made a lovely, tiny moan, restrained, yet with the hint of longing.

  Gabriel drew away. James reluctantly let him go.

  ‘I won’t be gone long,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Be careful,’ said James. ‘Take the knife. If West is mixed up in this, we can’t know what to expect.’