"When you reach three figures, then you can lecture me about age. You're talking to a man who's four times older than you, or near enough."
"Yeah, and you look no more than five years older than me. Bastard."
"Death becomes me; what more can I say?"
"Yes, Granddad."
"Don't get cheeky with me."
"You know, you almost sound like you were telling me off, there. Look, Nathan. Sergeant Nathan Stephenson." She knows of my rank during the Second World War. Not what I had to do to earn it. The things I've seen.
I've seen men get their legs blown off, heard dying men wailing for their mothers while bullets separated soul from flesh. It wasn't all shiny brass buttons and "I say, isn't this frightful war simply ghastly? " Unless you were a fucking officer back home moving model soldiers around on a map while one's butler fetched another bottle of port for the General.
Okay, that's closer to the prevailing attitude during the First World War, but my sentiments remain.
The Great War indeed. What was so bloody great about it, God alone knows. My own father was killed--- slaughtered---during that so-called Great War. I have no memories of him, and even photographs I once possessed have become dog-eared and creased beyond all recognition.
Oh, books and television programmes glamorise it all, make soldiers returning home seem like conquering heroes. Downton Abbey has a lot to answer for. The poems of Wilfred Owen tell a story closer to the truth.
So the First World War killed off Major Reginald Stephenson. And in a way, the Second did for his son.
"Yes, Miss Palmer? What is it now?" I outrank the uppity civilian, but she still has a commanding air about her, a way of making me pay attention.
"I'm fine. Honestly. Don't worry. I'm---"
"Don't make me pull rank."
"Is that your old service revolver in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?"
"Not too ill to make terrible jokes, I see. Listen, Alyssa. I won't drink from you while you're still recuperating. I won't have your mother making accusations that I'm careless with her daughter."
"I wish I hadn't told you now."
"You had to. It was obviously worrying you. I'll escort you home then go find---"
"Escort? You're terribly old-fashioned sometimes, Stephenson."
"That's Sergeant Stephenson to you."
"Oh, fuck off."
"I could have you court-martialled for insubordination."
"I'd like to see you try." Again, she winks.
"Bloody waste, if you ask me. Good-looking man insisting on seeing me home, and he's as bent as a nine-bob note."
Unable to help myself, I tut. Sometimes, it amazes me, this twenty-first century nonchalance about homosexuality---something else besides measles that would have got me a death sentence way back when. Quietly, I laugh.
"Nathan?"
"Hmm? Oh, nothing, nothing." Death sentence indeed. My propensity for the love that dare not speak its name did kill me in the end. Sort of. Oh, the irony. "Let's get you home. If you're a good girl, I might even tuck you into bed and read you a story."
"Shut up, Nathan."
"Much more of your cheek, and I'll sing you to sleep. That would really give you nightmares."
"Idiot." Alyssa elbows me in the ribs, not standing a chance of hurting me, even if that was her intention. "If you insist, you can walk me home, but no singing. Then you can go out and do your thing."
Do your thing. It sounds so modern, so civilised, so accepting. Very avant-garde and forward-thinking. So contemporary.
Which is a good thing, I try to tell myself.
Living in the twenty-first century might go some way toward curing me of my addiction to the past.
Chapter 2
"YOU REALLY DON'T HAVE to do this, you know."
Alyssa stops at the entrance to her tenement and looks back at me.
"But I want to."
"You do this every time you see me home."
"And you complain about me being over- cautious, so why don't you just let us into the block, I'll see you to your door, we can just pretend we've had our usual conversation, and I'll leave. Everyone's happy."
She uses her passkey to get us through the security door. "God, you're like an old woman sometimes."
"I'm not giving your mother any more cause for complaint about the way I treat you."
" Yo u smother me. Both of you." Alyssa's voice echoes in the cold stone block as we ascend.
"And you haven't given her any cause for complaint. It's something she just likes to do anyway. She doesn't approve of what I'm doing. What we're doing."
"Which we haven't done in a while because you've been ill, which she in turn blames on me." I roll my eyes. Alyssa's illness isn't my fault, but I still feel guilty. Not for the chicken pox, but for causing a rift between parent and child.
"I still think I shouldn't have told you."
"Look. Alyssa." I grab her hand, and we stop, halfway up a flight of stairs. "When we got into this, we promised we'd tell each other everything. Everything. Even what's..." I bite my lip. "Even what's on our minds, things that might seem irrelevant but aren't---" The arrival of someone else, another of this block's tenants, cuts short my speech. Echoing footsteps preceded the arrival of a man from farther up the stairwell, and upon turning the corner of the last flight of stairs before us, he stops short, almost comically.
"What's..." he begins, and seems to think again. Cocking his head, he catches sight of my hand on Alyssa's wrist and frowns. "What's going on here?"
"We're having a conversation. Or trying to," Alyssa says, glancing over her shoulder but returning her gaze to me immediately after.
"In the stairwell?" Our kindly visitor advances a few steps, eyeing my hand for a moment here and there.
"Looks like it," I say, adding a heavy sigh.
For effect, of course. I have no need of breathing and have to remind myself that to sigh, I first have to suck in air and whoosh it out again. Unpractised, I borderline-groan instead. Still, my clumsy attempt does the job.
"So you have to have a conversation in the stairwell? Look, what's---"
"I live here, okay? If that's all right with you?" Alyssa snaps, and I try not to smile. Instead, I content myself with running my thumb back and forth over her wrist. Attuned to her by now, I detect her pulse, much stronger than it has been recently. I realise with a jolt exactly how thirsty I am.
And I try not to look at our impromptu visitor as anything more than a bag of bones. Not a potential blood smoothie.
"I was going to ask if you were all right," the man says, glaring at Alyssa with the insulted air of a man who's had his chivalry spurned. "But..." He mutters something under his breath; I don't even offer him the dignity of trying to translate his mumblings.
He pushes past us---that is, I let him; no man can get past a pissed-off vampire unless such an action is permitted---and trots down the stairs.
Halfway down the next flight of steps, he looks back up, glaring through the mesh of balustrades and banisters, and I contemplate snarling at him.
But no; years ago, I promised myself not to act as anything other than human unless the occasion truly calls for it. In this instance, it'd just be showing off. So I keep my fangs to myself and merely glare back.
It does the trick. He shakes himself into action and exits.
The bang of the tenement door downstairs punctuates this little incident and prompts me into speaking again. "Look. Alyssa."
"You can let go of my arm now."
"What?" I look down. "Oh." I didn't even realise. But now, I let her go. With her free hand, she rubs the opposite wrist, saying nothing but still managing to make me feel guilty in her silence. I gripped her a little too hard, evidently. I shouldn't have gripped her at all. It's too strong a word, too vicious, too uncaring. "All I wanted to say was don't feel you have to keep anything from me."
"I don't."
"I mean it. Anything." I leave even if you w
ant to stop this unspoken.
"I know." She nods. "Nathan, I know."
Strange how she sounds as if she's trying to reassure me, when I feel it should be the other way round.
We continue the rest of our climb in silence.
She lives on the top floor, which sets my mind at rest. Yes, I worry about her and want her above street level and those ground floor flats, which are so easy to break into. Yes, I nag. On occasion.
But only because I know the kind of people who are out there. The kind of things. Creatures.
"Thank you for seeing me home, Sergeant."
She mock-salutes me outside her front door, with the hand that holds her keys, and the playful tinkling makes me smile.
"So formal."
"I tried my 'piss off, Nathan; I can get myself home' routine earlier, but it didn't work, so..."
She shrugs. "Now you've escorted me right to my very doorstep, so you can stop worrying."
"It's my job."
"I know you're supposed to look after the people you drink from---"
"Person, singular," I correct her.
"I know you cheat on me with those infidel fangs, Sarge. Don't lie."
"Only while you're indisposed. They're all second choice. They don't slake my thirst like you can," I add in a sing-song tone.
"Good God." She sighs and unlocks her door.
"You coming in?"
"No, I'm gonna go." I thumb over my shoulder, not needing to spell it out.
"You're thirsty. Right. Well, you can't say I didn't offer."
"I told you; you're not well enough yet."
"And as I was about to say, I know you have to look after me, but sometimes, I think you go too far."
I pause before replying, cock my head while studying her under the watery, yellowish light of the stairwell. Even with my sharp eyesight---no night-blindness for me, or little of it anyway---she still appears discoloured. Pale. Wan, even, to use a melodramatic word. "Do I?" I whisper and reach out to wind one of her black curls around my fingers. Louder, now: "Do I really?"
"Nathan, come on, you know I was only joking."
I want to say again, do I; do I really, but remain silent, at least with regard to whether or not I take my concern too far at times. I don't think I do, but as I've already acknowledged tonight, I know what's out there.
"Get some sleep." I run my hand down the back of Alyssa's head, draw her closer, and kiss her forehead. Like a lover, I think, and smile.
"I will."
I can't help myself. I have to fuss. Still with my lips against her skin, I close my eyes and whisper, "You'd tell me, wouldn't you?"
"Tell you what?" Her brow furrows, but I refuse to let her go.
"Anything. If anything bothered you. About this. Us. Our arrangement."
She draws back sharply, gasping, looking for all the world like she's about to give me a mouthful about bloody well smothering her again, but she must see something in my expression. Her scowl melts away, and she nods. "Of course."
"Anything?"
"Anything."
"Good." I nod and kiss her again. "Get some rest." I turn to leave, my steps slow, deliberate, only speeding up when I hear the click of her door and the key turning in the lock behind me.
I made her swear to tell me anything, but there's so much she doesn't know about me. Oh, she knows about my history during the war, some of the things I've done since. But not what made me, me. Not what or who made me a vampire.
The man who killed me, and the other who brought me back to life.
I head west after leaving Alyssa's place, regretting the fact that I didn't go into her flat this night. She never paid any attention to the old legend about inviting a vampire into one's home.
"If you were going to bite me, you'd do it on the street," she always says.
"I have more class than that," I always say.
I didn't think it would be appropriate to spend any time in her small flat tonight. She needs time to think. I need time to think.
So I think about where to go now, where I can find someone to play with. Back toward the city centre? I have cash to get a taxi. Maybe walk it and see who I meet on the way? It's not like the few miles will tire me out. If anything, they'll heighten the anticipation---
I stop in my tracks at the yelp that echoes through the grounds of the school I'm just passing.
A yelp, but definitely human.
Shake my head, carry on walking. Kids. Just playing.
But still. I look at my watch. Just after eleven o'clock, and on a Saturday night too. At this time?
On this day of the week?
Still, I reason, parents these days don't give a damn about what their kids do at night, or who with.
It's not really my business.
I stop again, attempt to tune my hearing in to whatever I did or did not hear. There's nothing else but the breeze, funnelled east along this long street by the tall buildings on either side.
Not a gang of kids; if it were, I'd hear voices in response, laughter, more of a ruckus.
Not my business, but I should make it so.
There's no harm in checking things out.
The fence lining the school grounds isn't impossible to climb over but is a bit too much to vault. I'm no Superman; I can't bend the bars enough for me to squeeze through. For convenience, I opt to double back on myself and take the public footpath down to the school gates.
I'm under no legal obligation to interfere, but a moral one, yes. I couldn't live with myself if I don't check it out. And it's not like I have anything to be scared of. No human would ever be able to take me in a fight unless they came mob-handed.
Yes. No human.
I reach the school gates in seconds and tilt my head, listening. Definitely no kids. No childish cries. So chances are, it was an adult I'd heard---
"Fucking stay still."
In an instant, I know I've done the right thing in following my suspicions. The low, growling voice came from what I suppose is a bike shed or rain shelter. A concrete oblong plonked in the school grounds mere feet from one of the exits.
Luckily, the gates are open; either the school authorities were careless, or they just couldn't imagine anyone wanting to break into a school or its grounds.
Chances are, whoever came through here before me unbolted them and opened them enough to squeeze through. I'm a tall man, though not too broad in the shoulders, or so I think. I still have to push one half of the gate to squeeze through comfortably myself, and as luck would have it, the damn thing squeals, alerting whoever it is to my presence. All speech and nearly all signs of a struggle immediately cease.
I listen for directional clues; very little incriminating sound reaches my ears but for something that sounds like the scuff of clothing against brickwork.
Definitely the bike shed. That's the obvious place to take someone.
If I had a heartbeat, it would quicken now, even though I have nothing to be afraid of. Nothing mortal can do me any harm without a damn good fight and a healthy dose of good luck.
Nothing mortal indeed.
"Oh dear. I do hope I'm not interrupting anything." I've long since mastered the art of lazy- toned sarcasm. I had a great teacher.
The man holding the obviously reluctant young woman in a twisted embrace freezes. She does not. Whimpering, she struggles. Pointlessly so, as it happens; he has her backed up against the wall of the bicycle shed with one hand clasped around her throat. Even as he turns his head to look over his shoulder at me, he easily keeps her under control, his fingers probably threatening her with an even tighter chokehold.
"What the hell do you want?"
Oh, a brazen one, then. He didn't startle or run away or falter in his limited movements when I announced my presence formally. He stands stock still, exerting barely any pressure to keep his captive under control.
"Forgive me." I bury my hands deep in my trouser pockets in an effort to look casual and near the pair by a few steps. "I was jus
t passing by, and I heard something."
He laughs, teeth flashing in the watery moonlight, which barely makes it into the plain outbuilding. "I'm not in any difficulty at all, thank you very much."
"Looks like she is."
"How about you mind your own fucking business?"
"F..."
His female captive's monosyllabic whisper is enough to grab my attention.
The soft "F" hardens, and she manages to force out more of the word she tried to pronounce.
"F...vam..."
"I guessed as much," I tell her, then look directly at him. I can't smell it; there's no malodorous stink wafting toward me on the evening breeze. No eau de putrefaction. Nothing about him that mirrors the undeadness in me. But his cockiness, that chokehold, the fact he holds a woman captive and isn't tearing her clothes off to use her body in another way, all give evidence of his true nature.
"Not too bothered about being confronted by a vampire, are you?" the man snarls, his words dancing around the border of laughter.
"Not particularly, seeing as I'm..." I let my words trail away. No point in saying I'm a vampire too. That way lies the undead equivalent of a pissing contest, only shades away from the playground-based taunt, my dad's bigger than your dad.
"Ah. Then you'll understand my need to, you know." He nods at his still-struggling victim.
Not victim, I promise. Captive, but only for the moment. And never victim.
"Oh, fuck," she manages to force out.
Adrenaline probably loans her strength and daring.
I try not to think about what that adrenaline would make her thick, warm blood taste like. "Two of them."
"Your lucky night, isn't it?" the other vampire asks. "Well, it would be, if I was willing to share, but I'm not, so if you wouldn't mind...?"
A gentlemanly way of telling me to push off if ever I've heard one, but I'm not going anywhere.
"Doesn't look like your companion is all that keen," I say.
He gives a one-armed Gallic shrug, his opposite hand still occupied with his lady friend.
"Yeah? So?"
"Don't you think you should let her go?"
"Um, no." He cocks his head, as if trying to figure out whether or not I'm for real. "No, I really don't. I'm thirsty, and I'd appreciate it if you, you know, fucked right off."
Bring Me to Life Page 2
