“What, the induction training process? They’re going to give us a sodding aptitude test to see if we have a predisposition towards formal logic? Then send us on a ten-week residential circle jerk that’s going to teach us the basics we need to embark on the study of applied computational demonology? Stuff like binary arithmetic, basic set theory, and predicate calculus?” Evan doesn’t try to keep the offended pride out of his voice. “Before assigning us trainee roles?”
Evan chews the inside of his cheek. “You can do that in your sleep,” he points out. “If you want out badly enough, you can fake incompetence. They’ll let you go.”
“Yes, but then I won’t learn anything. Anything new.”
“So.” Alex shrugs. He’s half-enjoying watching Evan climb the walls. Admittedly the training course is a bit of a joke; he or Evan could teach it themselves, in their sleep, except for the exotic and recondite bits relating to the actual praxis of summoning—the core elements of magic. They’re ready to leap on that topic and get their fangs into it, given the opportunity. But clearly nobody in this organization is prepared for such enthusiastic and talented inductees; or perhaps they have other reasons for taking things slowly. A bureaucracy is all about standardization, so that necessary tasks can be accomplished regardless of the abilities of the human resources assigned to it. And the Laundry is impressing Alex as being a remarkably mundane and plodding organization, given the nature of the adversaries it is required to deal with.
“Why don’t you relax? You’ve got an all-expenses-paid month-long vacation from the Scrum, even if you decide to blow off the training. And nobody’s going to say boo to us when we go back to work.” The novelty of having a guilt-free working holiday from work has gone right to Alex’s head: even having a vicar for a mentor strikes him as funny, now he’s over his reflexive fear of holy water.
“I’m hungry, too, dick-weed.” Evan gathers up his dice and sweeps them into his briefcase. Beside them it contains a couple of energy bars, his iPad, and a water bottle. (The iPad caused some trouble with building security until Mr. Howard intervened and explained the ground rules, and now it sports a hideous asset tag that proclaims UNSEC PRIVATE NOCLASS inside a disturbingly eye-warping silver star. The mere thought of trying to put secret information on it makes Alex feel ill.) “I am so out of here,” Evan adds.
“But it’s only six thirty! And it’s Tuesday!”
“Not a banker.” Evan grabs a jacket from the back of the office door. “I need some R&R time. Call me if you get bored.”
• • •
EVAN SLIPS OUT OF THE SIDE DOOR OF THE BUILDING, OUT PAST the battered row of dumpsters and into the twilight of an alleyway. The van with blacked-out windows is waiting to whisk him to his apartment in Docklands. He leans back in the padded, comfortably dark capsule and closes his eyes, opening them only when the driver offers him a form to sign. Then he gets out and goes in through the front door to get changed for a night out on the town. He doesn’t notice the car parked with its lights turned off across the street from the building.
Alex, Evan thinks, is not merely a nerd—nerddom, and even a degree of Asperger’s syndrome, is entirely forgivable in the hothouse conditions of the Scrum—but a coward. He’s hungry, probably as hungry as Evan, but he won’t act. He’ll just sit there in a blue funk, shivering and complaining as the hunger gives him ulcers.
Evan happily embraces his inner geek, but harbors the conceit that he is an actor, a doer, not a sitter. He’s hungry. They are all—those he’s spoken to—hungry, having taken Mhari’s caution about feeding to heart. But there are limits, and this goes past anything that’s reasonable. They’ve told their HR contacts that they’re starving. And they’ve all received responses ranging from blank incomprehension to bovine fright and a promise to refer it to some sort of internal committee as soon as next month. Who will presumably look into the logistics of ordering blood donations from expired stock in the transfusion service and get around to it sometime in the next year, by which point the Scrum will resemble refugees from a death camp.
Evan’s been with the Bank nearly two years longer than Alex; long enough to climb the pay ladder a couple of increments, even if he hasn’t qualified for a major bonus yet. He’s got a very nice flat in a former Seaman’s Mission, and his eye on a Porsche Boxster after the bonus season. Evan pays a cleaning service to handle his clothing, along with his everyday mess: every day he gets home to find the laundry basket empty and the bed neatly turned back. It’s a lot like living in a gigantic hotel suite. Since the turn to the night side, he’s made special arrangements: had motorized blackout blinds installed inside all his windows, converted a cleaning closet into a panic room with a reinforced door frame and a futon on the floor.
When he gets home, Evan ditches his work kit (including the annoying necklace-gizmo), then undresses and showers briskly. Afterwards he sorts through his wardrobe for an outfit. He would normally inspect himself in the wardrobe’s floor-to-ceiling glass mirror, checking for imperfections, but that’s impossible now; instead, he has to use his computer’s webcam to show him a suitably rotated view of himself. He’s aiming for a blandly anonymous clubbable hipster look, just distinctively different enough from every other aspiring Silicon Roundabout wannabe to be hard to describe from memory: skinny sixties mad men go after-work casual with big horn-rimmed glasses. (Never mind the optically neutral lenses.) He nods to himself, smiles, and inspects his dental work. Then he opens the locked medicine cupboard in the bathroom and removes his works.
It’s time to go hunting.
• • •
AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME THAT EVAN DECIDES TO NIP OUT FOR a nighttime snack, I am working late in the office. Mo’s en route to Lossiemouth—she texted from Aberdeen to reassure me, bless her—and if I go home there’s nothing to do but read or watch TV. Spooky will shout at me, I guess, but it’s hard to have a meaningful heart-to-heart with a cat. So: I have a stack of novels to finish for my book club report (continuing what I now realize is a long-standing tradition in this organization, even though it was discontinued a little over forty years ago), some more work to do on the cabling bid, and more logfiles to search. In a moment of anomie I glance around my office and spot the portable computer that time forgot. Hmm.
A sneaky thought suddenly occurs to me. If you can’t decommission it properly because it has no hard disk to shred, then it needs a hard disk. There’s no rule saying the hard disk has to work with the laptop, is there? As long as I’m not removing a disk from it, then I don’t have to jump through the decommissioning-a-disk hoops. Adding a disk is easy: I just need to order one. Say, a cheap 300Gb external USB drive. Never mind that the luggable in question predates the USB interface by more than a decade. I just need to nail the hard disk to the side of the computer, and then, hey presto! It meets our decommissioning checklist because it’s got a drive I can feed to the shredder!
Problem solved. I hunt through our intranet looking for the requisition form (“portable direct access storage device for backup, unsecured”) and start filling out the PDF. Then there’s a knock on the door.
“Come in—”
The door opens. “Bob, we need to talk.”
Jaw flaps, words flee: it’s my least favorite blonde. Finally I haul my scattered thoughts back into line, kicking and screaming. “Talk?”
“Yes, Bob. You know, that thing we do with our mouths? When we’re not eating and breathing?”
“Oh for—” I wave at my visitor’s seat.
“No, not here.” For a moment she looks uncertain, a flicker back to a ten years’ younger state of affairs for both of us. She’s wearing a sharp black suit and heels, with a hairdo that can’t be cheap; but it suddenly occurs to me that maybe she’s dressing up because she feels exposed. Office dress codes for women are more ambiguous and less forgiving than for men, and sometimes status signifiers can mean the exact opposite of what one might naively expe
ct. “It’s nearly seven. Did you have any plans for this evening?”
“Wait, what?” I shake my head. “I have to go home and feed the cat. Eventually. Other than that, no, no actual plans.” I glance instinctively at the pile of dysfunctional laptops. “As you can see, all work and no play makes Bob a sour boy.”
I think maybe I’m babbling a little because she gives me a strange look, appraising and cautious at the same time. And she’s still standing, despite the chair, looking a lot more subdued than the other day, after the meeting. “I was thinking there’s a wine bar I know about five minutes from here? They do food as well, if you’re hungry.” An unreadable expression flickers across her face for a moment, then vanishes, airbrushed out of her muscles. She’s wearing makeup, I realize, expertly applied to look natural. Then I look closer. No, what made me think there was eye-liner and lipstick? What made—
“You want a drink?” I say. “Okay, we can do that. But, please. Drop the glamour? It doesn’t work on me.” You’re not a patch on Ramona, I think. Or Raymond Schiller. I smile in an attempt to defuse the jab.
“I’m not trying,” she says tensely, “it just is.” She glances away, breaking eye contact. “Can you will yourself to stop breathing?”
“No, but—” I stop. “You’re telling me you’re walking around in a level two glamour and you can’t turn it off?”
“Would I lie to you?” She sniffs. “Don’t answer that.” The lacquered mask of cool detachment is back in place. “Look, Bob, we got off on the wrong foot. Hell, we left off on the wrong foot, ages ago. But we don’t need to be enemies now. It’s . . . it’s childish and silly. Dangerous, too. So I was hoping we could, um, have a chat. Catch up on gossip. Bury the hatchet, if it still needs burying.”
“Oh.” I pull myself together. “Well, if you put it like that. Hmm.” I glance at my screen. There’s nothing here of pressing importance; I can requisition a scratch hard drive tomorrow. “One second.” I swipe my thumb across the reader, drop into the hypervisor, and kill the guest session, then tell the PC to switch off. When it’s done, I stand up. “Yes, let’s do that. Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes?”
“Okay.” She smiles momentarily, then pivots on a sharp black heel and sashays away. My gaze follows her as if my eyeballs are magnetized. Mhari used to have a hotline to my libido, and an older, more sophisticated, more powerful version of the Mhari I knew when I was younger is impossible to ignore when she wants to be watched. But I am disturbingly aware that I can’t tell whether she’s deliberately making a play in my direction, or whether I’m just falling victim to the vampire glamour even though I know I ought to know better. (Not to mention needing to pinch my arm and remind myself that I’m a married grown-up who shouldn’t be looking around and who especially shouldn’t be doing so in the vicinity of a crazy ex.)
More proof, if you needed it, that even a grown-up and self-aware Bob still harbors an inner eighteen-year-old who knows he ought to know better but just can’t help himself. But grown-up Bob will just have to arm-wrestle his inner eighteen-year-old into submission, because grown-up Bob needs to know what she wants, and there’s only one way to find out.
• • •
EVAN’S HUNTING PLANS ARE SIMPLE ENOUGH. WITH NIGHTFALL complete, he uses his smartphone to conjure up a pre-booked hire car. He tells the driver to take him to Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch, locus of far too many night clubs and restaurants and pubs, overspill from Hoxton and the whole Silicon Roundabout thing—the perfect happy hunting ground for a carnivorous hipster. There’s a cluster near the corner with Old Street, social venues for happy young people with brass in pocket who’re looking for food, drink, and merriment. Or in Evan’s case, food and a drink.
He’s thirsty and food won’t touch that, but he’s not immune to the lure of food. So first of all he hits a gastropub for a light bite, a stir-fry with tiger prawns and a cocktail on the side—a Bloody Mary. A Mary will do nicely tonight, he thinks, amused at his own impertinence. To tell the truth Mhari’s been getting up his nose a lot lately, cracking the whip and brandishing the chair at the Scrum as if they’re a mangy pride of performing circus lions. Fuck her and her little red wagon; there’s going to bed hungry once in a while and then there’s this awful gnawing emptiness, as if starvation is sucking the life out of his bones even though he can eat as much as he wants in the staff canteen.
Evan moves on to the East Village, where they’re having a Chicago club night. It’s still a bit early and the dance floor’s two-thirds empty, but that just gives him an opportunity to chill in the shadows near the bar, wrapped around another Bloody Mary as he checks out the talent. He can keep track of people better than he ever managed before Alex pointed him at that screen. He follows their gyrations and perambulations and holds them in his head, a cat’s cradle graph of which dancers spin into the personal space of others, a map of who’s comfortable and who’s stand-offish.
There are lots of groups here, gaggles of men and women and smaller numbers of single-sex groups, bros and girl couples out looking for a pickup or just some dance action. He can smell it on them: he barely has to look to see who’s on the prowl and who just wants to have fun. Which makes his own hunt almost ridiculously easy. He amuses himself by keeping score of their intersections, making silent side-bets on who’s going to trap off with whom—and so he’s taken completely by surprise when a blonde in a silver sequined mini-dress gooses him on the right thigh and giggles in his face. “Hi!”
Evan spins round but manages to block his instinctive reaction before he punches her in the face. A split second later he’s very glad that he did so. So what if she just tried to grab his balls? Her pupils are wide and she’s beaming delightedly at him and she is, indeed, exactly what he would have been looking for: large breasts plumped up beneath a plunging neckline that supports a fancy eye of Horus pendant on a silver chain, accessorized by bangles and war paint and a matching sequined bag slung over one arm. She’s dressed in silver from head to toe: silver dress and hose, silver evening gloves, silver glitter in her eyelashes. His nostrils flare: they tell him that she’s very female and very hungry. (Possibly in estrous, he thinks, although he’s not entirely certain, not sufficiently confident in his new senses.)
Her expression slips slightly as his face slides into view. “Oh man, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone—”
“No, that’s all right.” Evan reflects her smile right back at her and puts the full force of his will behind it, shoving at her inhibitions: “You’re beautiful and happy and that forgives all. What’s your name, love?”
“I’m Marianne,” she says automatically, and maybe she’s not an actual Mary but she’s close enough for Evan.
“Kiss me and make up, Marianne?” he asks theatrically. And to his not-quite disbelief Marianne leans forward and plants her lips on his face and her breasts against his chest, then wraps her arms around him with startling enthusiasm.
“Oh wow,” she breathlessly whispers in his ear, “I was so embarrassed! I thought you were—” Evan silences her by turning his head, until her breath steams his spectacles and she moans quietly as she melts against him. His chest is tingling where she leans against him. Marianne is a slick gelatinous mess of emotion stretched around his focussed will; he feels as if he can make her do anything.
“Did you come here with friends?” he asks quietly.
“Tracy and Debs, but they won’t—” Her breath catches. “This isn’t right.”
“Don’t worry, my intentions are nothing but honorable,” Evan tells her, mugging sincerity. And despite her expression of uncertainty her arms around his waist are solid. Using vampire mind control to pick up a clubber who’s already popped an E and who was halfway looking for a playmate isn’t so much easy as spurious. He eases up the pressure, afraid that if he doesn’t she might go down on him right there and then on the dance floor, which would be totally counterproductive and uncool.
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“How about we go somewhere more intimate and get to know each other better?”
“Oh yes. Yes. What’s your name?”
“Evan. I’m—”
“Oh, Evan. Yes, let’s go.”
Marianne is passably hot and she is wildly overexcited with Evan, which he finds flattering. Dick had to fucking zombify his pickups to get them to go with him, in Evan’s opinion. Marianne grabbed Evan’s ass and he’s actually back-pedaling on the willpower to stop her trying to drag him down an alleyway. Evan is, if not inexperienced, nevertheless very happy indeed to meet a lady who with barely any nudging at all wants to jump his bones. And so he decides that there’s no harm in playing with his food first: “I can call a cab,” he says, “if you want to come home with me?”
Evan and Marianne tumble into a taxi together. He gives the driver his address while she plasters herself against his flank and buries her face between his neck and shoulder. Her tongue is hot and moist in the secret spaces of his ear, and he finds himself sprouting wood. He explores her stockinged thighs by touch in the sodium-limned shadows of the cab. Things are burning too fast, nearly out of control: he’s past second base and in danger of outraging the driver when the taxi finally pulls into his street. The cabbie is silenced by a couple of purple drinking vouchers, a tip of investment banking proportions; he disappears into the night, leaving Evan with his arm around Marianne’s waist. “This is your pad?” she asks.
“One of the flats, yes.” She giggles.
He punches in the keycode and the door opens. They stumble upstairs hand in hand like giddy teenagers. Then Evan is at his front door and pulls out his key.
As the door closes behind them she drags Evan towards the living room, the great big bean-bag leather sofa. “Wow, this is great!” she exclaims. There’s a click as she opens her clutch. Then they’re sitting down, making out, and she’s massaging his cock through his skinny-fit trousers. Cunning gloved hands in lycra work magic at his fly. “Listen, I want you to wear this,” she says, holding up a ribbed condom.
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