His arms wind-milled as he tried to stay upright but when he landed the back of his skull smacked into the marble with a cracking sound only slightly muffled by his hair. The universe exploded in a sunrise of pain that endured an eternal moment before absolute darkness fell and put an end to a nearby animal whimpering as an onrushing agony prepared to destroy it.
Chapter Twenty Two
The real explosion, in the club’s kitchens, shook the whole building and brought him back to his senses, finding himself cradled in Roxane’s arms with her alternately looking at him with concern in her eyes and then at her brother with venom in them.
Cyrano stood still as a statue, looking down at them, disbelief in his eyes, the water from the fire sprinklers pouring down his face.
“You choose your pet instead of me.” He shook his head. “After all this time, these years, what we have shared…”
Call felt Roxane lay him back on the floor and get to her feet, going to confront her brother. He realised that, for the first time in as long as he had known her, she was not wearing those mirrored glasses. Brother and sister stood there, toe to toe, eye to eye, waiting for detonation the way only those who have lived together too long can do.
They might be separated only by inches but it was clear to Call that there was a chasm between them, a chasm that would be closed in the next second or never. After a while he realised he had stopped breathing, and it hurt to begin again.
“I tell you for the last time, he is not my ‘pet’, he is my friend.” Her voice was low and measured, but Call could clearly hear the fury behind it.
Cyrano laughed. “Friend! Friend! How can he be your friend? He’s meat.”
Her answer to that was to knock him to the floor with a single blow to his left temple. The impact made a dull, thick noise as though she had struck a baulk of wood rather than flesh stretched over bone and, for a moment, Call thought it was the surprise of the blow that lifted the vampire off his feet rather than the force of it.
Only when Cyrano tried to lift himself upright and his legs buckled beneath him like over-cooked pasta did he realise that the blow had shaken him to his roots. A thread of dark, almost black blood trickled from the vampire’s ear and down his neck.
The blow was a warning that he was trespassing where he should not go. She had intended to hurt him, to damage him. A chill as intense as any he had ever felt almost lifted Call from the floor. Like Cyrano he tried to get to his feet.
Unlike Cyrano, he succeeded. He took half a step towards them, only for Roxane to turn her head towards him and freeze him where he stood as surely as if she was Medusa. Her eyes were as cold and dark and distant as anything he saw looking up into the clear night sky.
When she turned back to her brother Call found himself moving backwards, as quietly and stealthily as he could. However much he wanted to just turn and run away he wanted to avoid having those eyes turn on him even more.
Roxane looked down at her brother. Call could hear the questions going through her mind despite the increasing roar and heat of the fire in the club’s kitchens. There was another explosion, less imposing than the first, and the fire sprinklers ceased to function, water dribbling from them uselessly.
Call heard the sirens ululating almost directly outside in the street. In a moment firemen would come charging through those broken doors followed by policemen, and he did not want to be there when they did. He got to his feet.
“Roxane, we have to leave, now!”
The sound of his voice made her look up, startled, and turn her head towards him, removed from the other world in which the confrontation with her brother had taken her.
“We cannot be here when the emergency services arrive!”
She looked at him for a moment, puzzled, then smiled and began to walk towards him, smiling. “There is no need for concern. I can disguise us, all of us…”
Her words were drowned by something deeper within the building collapsing. Call staggered towards her as the seemingly solid floor beneath him trembled and rippled, the tiles rising and falling as a wave of energy passed through them.
“He is not your friend,” Cyrano shouted above the rumble. They both turned to see him standing by the entrance to the right-hand gambling hall, from which were emerging the sounds and heat and light of the fire supporting himself on the door jamb. “He is not your pet either. He is your lover.”
Roxane looked from Call to her brother, her mouth opening and closing without any words emerging. She saw Cyrano turn into the gambling hall and walk into the fire.
Her scream seemed to make the walls shake, although it could have been another explosion from the kitchen area that sent a gout of flame billowing out into the foyer from where Cyrano had just gone, followed by the grumbling, groaning, screaming sounds of the building beginning to collapse. Vampires were immune to most things, other than silvered blades, but a fire of that intensity was not one of them.
Call took hold of her wrist and tried to pull her towards the doorway. He might as well have tried to do a Samson and pull the whole building down, although from the sounds emanating from the fire zone it would be coming down of its own accord sooner than he would be able to escape.
Desperate, he slapped her face and then screamed as a bolt of pain jagged up his arm, through his neck and head and seemed to explode out of the top of his skull. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, and the breath left his body as he glanced down and saw his right hand dangling from his wrist, the bones very obviously broken. Intellectually he knew that he was about to experience agony that would fry his wits, obliterate any possibility of movement. He was dead. The building was going to collapse on them and there was nothing he could about it.
Then he felt himself lifted from his feet and moving at such a speed that his brain, overloaded as it was by pain past, present and future, simply could not process.
Everything blurred into empty darkness before pain eventually brought him back to consciousness, lying on the damp pavement on the side of Kensington High Street opposite the club. There were fire engines and police cars and ambulances in confusion everywhere, but even their lights and sirens were drowned out by the sound of the flames shooting up the chimney into which the club had turned when the roof and interior walls had fallen in sometime between his being carried out and his returning to the world.
Emergency workers ran around, some rolling out hoses to pour water onto the flames in the hope they would not spread to more of some of the most expensive real estate on earth as others tended to the dazed and injured - while a knot of senior policemen in pristine reflective jackets and caps with a stunning amount of gold braid around the brims looked on from a safe distance and wondered exactly what the fuck had happened here.
He became aware of two faces just above his own, Roxane and a burly female paramedic whose cropped purple hair was all he could see.
“Don’t move!” she growled as his arm twitched in an effort to raise his wrist to where she could see it. “You’ve broken it.”
Then the pain hit him full throttle again, and the only way he kept from screaming was by grinding his teeth together so hard he felt as though they were hurting too, and he know teeth could not hurt, just the nerves within them.
“Let it out if you want,” the paramedic said. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen and heard worse before.” She grinned at him, a companionable expression intended to reassure him that the proper order of things had been restored and he was going to be okay, eventually.
Allowing her to get on doing whatever she had to do to immobilise his arm, he looked anywhere but at her, up at Roxane, who appeared to have found a raincoat and an umbrella from somewhere to keep the rain off him, and a sensible pair of shoes. How had she done that? Then he remembered that everything about her was an illusion. Abruptly, a wave of exhaustion flowed over him and it needed all his resolution to stay awake. Falling asleep right then did not seem like a good idea at all. He looked at the name tag on the para
medic’s green overall. ‘Joselyn Cope’.
“You know something, Joselyn,” he managed to say.
“What’s that?” she grinned again. She had a very nice smile, one that took in her whole face, including her eyes.
“I’m getting too old for this shit.”
There was a moment of incomprehension before they both began to laugh, leaving Roxane looking from one to the other, understanding nothing. Eventually they calmed down, and Call glanced where she had been working to see his forearm and hand encased in a foam cast that looked as though it would keep everything straight no matter what happened.
“You just stay here while I get a trolley so we can get you into the ambulance.”
Call felt as though he would never have the strength to move again. He smiled, which hurt as well, but he tried not to show it.
“Does it hurt?” Joselyn asked.
“Only when I laugh,” he said.
Chapter Twenty Three
They released Call from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital at noon the next day, his broken arm properly splinted and with enough heavy duty pain killers and muscle relaxants to see him walking on the ceiling if he didn’t take them only as necessary, instructing him to see his GP when they ran out.
When they asked about his GP he gave a name from his local surgery, put their letter in his pocket and didn’t say he was not registered with any GP, walked away quietly grateful he didn’t live in America because he didn’t have any medical insurance.
He wasn’t sure whether he was up to date with his National Insurance or Income Tax, his occupation being one that slipped between the floor boards of society and existed down in the shade where rules didn’t apply. He hadn’t heard from either in longer than he could remember and didn’t anticipate living long enough to collect his pension.
As usual he made his way home on foot, observing everyday people going about their lives, secure in the knowledge the real world had not almost ended when a fancy night club up west went up in flames. Before he got there, though, the painkillers began to wear off. By the time he looked through his pockets with his clumsy left hand he was beginning to feel that gnawing through the splint with his own teeth and them through his wrist would be preferable to the sensations of constant prickling on his bones – and he knew that bones were not pain receptors or transmitters, but as inert as anything in the human body.
Nevertheless, he managed to get into his home, lock the door behind himself and fill a glass with water to take two more pain killers. His bed welcomed him as though the mattress was made of angels’ fingers and the sheets billows of gossamer. Sleep took him up and bore him off to the realm of Morpheus at the speed of delirium.
Only as darkness enveloped him in its warm caress he realised his blades were nowhere about him. Where could he have left them? Who had them now? Those were two of the many questions he did not manage to ask before consciousness left him.
He dreamed about her. Even though he could not remember his dreams when he woke – he never could remember his dreams in the morning, which he ordinarily regarded as a good thing because if dreams were the subsconscious’s way of making sense of the day’s activities then most of his dreams had to be nightmares because his days and nights could be filled with horrors, especially the nights.
Whether it was the narcotics or the dreams, he woke the following morning feeling more refreshed than he had in longer than he could remember, reminded from somewhere that the prickling sensation coming from his broken arm was the bones knitting together.
He also felt at peace with himself, which was an entirely alien feeling. He had not felt at peace in far longer than he could remember. Even as a child his life had been filled with never ending conflicts and frustrations, arguments and fights with his father whose genesis he could never remember.
He had hoped that his father’s early death would put an end to his violent confrontations. Instead of that they had only intensified as he discovered the burden his father had borne, introducing him to the shedding of blood, fortunately very rarely his own. That he was the conqueror of vampires – who were all monsters – made him wonder whether there was not a strong streak of the bad guy in himself.
No matter how fast he shovelled the vampires out of this world he was always up to his neck in their shit, constantly angry, constantly arguing with everyone he knew. His relationship with Marion, his marriage, had not survived long. They argued and made up, argued and made up, argued and made up until they both understood they could not go on that way for the sake of the children.
Leaving Marion and the kids decreased the amount of lying he had to do, and being made redundant by his father in law as a consequence meant he shovelled no more shit there either, but being a full time vampire hunter was no guarantee of knowing peace. Quite the reverse.
Vampires might be monsters who deserved nothing more than to die, but when he killed them they still resembled human beings and that troubled his sleep. He knew it shouldn’t, but it did, every night. Peace of mind and he were passing strangers.
This morning, though, he was at peace. He might not be familiar with the sensation but there was nothing else it could be. The tension, the knots in his muscles, the dull, persistent ache at the base of his skull where it met his spine and the pain behind his eyes, all of them were gone.
He got out of bed and to his feet easily, without the leaden reluctance he normally felt, went to the window and looked out onto a huge, pure blue sky punctuated by bright white clouds being driven westward on a high level wind. Raising his hands to his chest, he opened his arms and took in a deep breath through nostrils miraculously unobstructed and filled his lungs to the extent he actually felt lighter on his feet, somehow clean, not ever so slightly soiled no matter how enthusiastically, masochistically even, he scrubbed himself in the shower. There was even no pain from his broken arm, although that could have been the result of the medication. He felt good, like a real, normal human being.
After brewing himself some proper coffee he got out his laptop to look for a holiday somewhere far away from the ceaseless throb and grind of London but opened up at his email account, more out of autonomic reflex than any desire to check his messages. That ghastly, anodyne, patronising female voice told him he had mail. Well, so what? Just because he had mail didn’t mean he had to read it. It wasn’t like it was Meg Ryan at the other end.
He closed down his email and lost himself in photographs and descriptions of Mediterranean resorts, the Canaries and the rest, drilling down to a choice between to an apartment in Calla d’Or on Majorca and an all-inclusive resort just outside Agios Nikolaos in Crete. He even checked his bank account and confirmed to himself he could choose either, flying out of Gatwick next weekend.
However much he didn’t like flying he could grit his teeth for the couple of hours. He could do it. It was only when he was about to toss a coin to decide which to choose that a nagging doubt made its way to the forefront of his mind. He went to the drawer in his desk that doubled as a filing cabinet and rooted around in the chaos until he found his passport. Just as he had suspected, it was three years expired. Was it really that long since he had been abroad?
Remembering the days when one of the supposed attractions of the European Union was the ability to travel through European countries without any need of a passport, before security theatre made it impossible to pass through a boarding gate at any airport without your passport between your teeth, your belt and shoes in your hands and no liquids in your carry on, he closed down the sites and finished his coffee.
It was cold. It didn’t matter how good the coffee was; like jazz, it might be delicious hot but it was always disgusting cold. Maybe he should just check out holiday possibilities in nearer home. That was so much fun he gave up after a few minutes and gave himself over to the intellectual delights of daytime TV.
Just after noon he left the house with a shopping list in his wallet, and when he returned he ached in a righteous manner, having bought
fruit and vegetables, some bread that had never been exposed to the Chorley Wood method and a large steak he intended to show the flame so briefly it would think it was still alive.
There was a note lying on the doormat, a note written on heavy quality paper and folded so it did not need an envelope. Putting down the bags and not looking in the red/purple grooves they had worn in the meat of his fingers, he opened up the note. ‘Call me’ was all it said, no names or even initials. Not that he needed any clue to tell him who had written and delivered the note.
They could wait. He wanted good food and at least another good night’s sleep before he would even consider the request.
The next morning Call awoke refreshed, again, certain he had dreamed good dreams without being able to recollect what they might have been. It was a minor annoyance, a tiny speck of grit in the balm, easily dismissed.
He went walking through the city, which was pleasantly sunny and warm without being excessively hot and sticky, as it all too often was at that time of year. A hat, a cane and a pair of sunglasses were all he required to become a boulevardier, a tourist without a camera; someone to whom the rhythm of walking and observing was calming, reassuring; someone to whom the world was really not such a bad place after all.
He walked with no great purpose or destination, no goal, and after lunching at a café he had never seen before and never would again, he found himself walking along the riverbank by a stretch of grass that seemed familiar to him even though he had no recollection of having been there before.
Leaning on the wall, looking out over the river, he bowed his head for a moment. Before he could do anything to prevent it, his sunglasses slid from his nose, bounced off the parapet and vanished into the sluggish grey/brown muddy waters. For a moment the reflection off the water dazzled him and he turned his head aside, cursing and rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands.
The Seeker Page 15
