One Must Hide

Flight

Things seldom went wrong for David. Obsessive that he was, he invariably applied himself to ensuring that everything and everyone would fall neatly in line with his plans. Like a chess master, he had a talent for thinking several moves ahead, keeping his avenues clear and defences solid. The confidence that many would deem arrogance derived from a well-founded belief in his own abilities. So on the rare occasion when events did wrest themselves free of his controlling hand, David tended to take it very personally.

Dwayne studied the expression on his leader's face. Curious. The lines of displeasure that should have contracted David's brows and fanned out from the corners of his eyes were conspicuous by their absence. There was no unconscious clench of teeth to harden the set of his jaw. His hand, resting on the doorframe through which Robin had just fled, betrayed no tension in whitened knuckles or corded tendons. To all appearances he seemed calm and relaxed, as though the current focus of his attention and energy hadn't just run from him in fear and confusion. While Dwayne didn't presume to know David's mind, he was certain that Robin had not reacted quite as anticipated. In the face of that, David's composure seemed odd.

“Want me to go after her?” Marko volunteered.

David turned, letting his hand slide down the doorframe. His expression remained serene as he pocketed the dragon earring Robin had rejected. “No,” he said. “She won't come to any harm.”

Paul made a disparaging sort of noise, softly enough to make it clear that he only wanted his opinion noted, not challenged. “Why'd you let her go, David?” Marko asked. “We nearly had her.”

“We already do,” David replied. “She'll be back.”

Dwayne acknowledged with the least inclination of his head the look David cast him from the corner of his eye, and took the opportunity to sit down in the place Robin had vacated. The smell of her lingered there still.

“She did well,” he commented to no one in particular.

When no one replied he glanced up. The flames reflecting in David's eyes only emphasised the ardency of his stare. Dwayne wondered if Robin realised how relentless her pursuer could be. Probably not. Marko was straightforward, and Paul bled his emotions freely, but David's armour boasted few chinks. Interesting that Robin herself had exposed one of them. You seemed very sure of yourself when you kissed me last night. Dwayne treated his thoughts on that with care, then set them aside for later consideration. Some things were better handled from a distance. David took no such precautions, but that was David. It wasn't the first time the leader of the Lost Boys had pursued a goal with all his energy, but Dwayne had never seen him quite so single minded.

At length, David raised his contemplative gaze from the fire. “And are you satisfied, Paul?”

That more than anything cemented Dwayne's suspicions. David was more than pleased: he was exultant. Nothing else would have made him deliberately provoke Paul. Dwayne exchanged a pained look with Marko. In more than ten years Paul had never once resisted rising to the bait.

“She has no idea what you're leading her into,” Paul retorted.

“You're not giving her nearly enough credit,” David said in his most reasonable voice.

“You scared her shitless!”

“I didn't.”

Paul's simmering temper made Dwayne's head hurt, but he resisted the temptation to tune it out. “She saw something,” Paul said. He looked at Dwayne.”Didn't she?”

“That should be enough for you,” David said, before Dwayne could reply. “Tell me you really believe she belongs anywhere but with us.”

“With us?” asked Paul. “Or with you?”

The flare of anger that escaped David's control shocked Dwayne nearly as much as the rawness of Paul's accusation. Within the next moment David had his emotions reined in again, but Paul still radiated frustration and resentment like heat from a pyre, and the old pain smouldered underneath like banked coals.

“With us,” said David, but in a flat tone. “Don't take it so personally.”

Paul glowered.”It's not fair,” he insisted, as he had so many times before. “She doesn't have a choice.”

“And do you think any other rank would have given her a choice?” David's face went cold. “You know what would have happened to her if someone else had found her first.”

Paul looked away, but Dwayne didn't need to see his expression to feel the sick little stab of dread.

“Someone would have found her eventually,” David went on, pressing his advantage. “She's lucky it was us.”

“Lucky,” said Paul. He spoke softly, hoarsely, staring into the middle distance, meeting no one's gaze. “Like Anna was lucky, and Victoria, and Erin.”

“That won't happen again,” said David. His voice no longer mocked Paul. He stared at him without challenge or rancour, and then, as though Paul had spoken the words they all knew he held inside, he added, “It won't.”

For a moment it seemed as if Paul would be appeased. Then he looked up again, and the stubborn set of his jaw said it all. “You wouldn't change your mind now anyway.”

“Paul,” said David, in his most silky tone. “Why don't you do me a favour and go kill someone?”

“I don't need to,” he said sullenly, but the briefest shift of blue to gold made him a liar.

David smiled, triumphant. “Marko?”

Marko stirred himself from where he had been observing the disagreement. “Come on, bro,” he said in the conciliatory way that he did so well. “I'm hungry, if you're not.”

Paul cast one final resentful look in David's direction before allowing himself to be rousted out of his place.

“You don't approve, do you?” David asked quietly, when Paul and Marko had gone.

Dwayne met David's gaze. “Making Paul mad never accomplished anything.”

David shrugged, the rebuke glancing off him. “He's being unreasonable and he knows it.”

Dwayne kept his thoughts on that to himself. Instead, he asked, “How much longer?”

“You tell me,” said David.

It didn't work like that, which they both knew. Between David's broad but blurred foresight and Dwayne's vivid but fragmentary prescience they could occasionally puzzle out something of the future, but seldom in specifics, and even more rarely on demand. Still, Dwayne let his thoughts drift, focusing and relaxing at once in an effort to filter a shred of insight from the currents.

Light like milk spilled over cloud-blue paint in the night. A waxing gibbous moon reflected on glossy black glass. The sterile glare of halogen headlamps punched through the sky. Frosty grass whipped crazily around worn tyres. His shoulder burned, and the bitterness of his own blood filled his nostrils; the cold seared with each salty fit of wind. Far below, waves of a strange ocean ground against foreign rocks. In a movie the tyres would have squealed. They rumbled until they whirred, and they whirred until the collision shattered the peace with the sound of teeth of rock savaging metal and glass, and a watery gullet gulping down everything that remained.

The heat of the flames brought him back. Dwayne moved his feet back from the edge of the hearth, but he sat motionless for several moments, absorbing.

“What did you see?”

Dwayne rose abruptly and crossed the room. He twitched aside the heavy curtains that blocked out both light and cold. The sky, bluish to his adapted eyes, remained obscured, as if the moon were a treasure it hid jealously from sight.

He turned back to David. “Is she is danger tonight?”

The leader of the Lost Boys shook his head, his eyes lit with curiosity. “What did you see?” he asked again.

Dwayne dropped back into his chair. He stared up at the ceiling, and heard himself speak. “We'll fight before we leave.”

“And Robin?”

“She's part of it.”

David nodded. He looked thoughtful but not worried. Some of the edge in him had gone, Dwayne realised, since Robin had answered his cryptic summons. That she had then fled in anger and confusion seemed not to concern David at all.

“Paul's right, isn't he?” Dwayne asked suddenly.

David's eyebrow scarcely twitched when he countered with, “You ask as if such a thing is beyond credibility.”

Dwayne took the jibe with equanimity, but pushed anyway. “She doesn't have a choice.”

“She'll think she does,” David replied. “Besides, Dwayne. You led us to her. You of all of us know what the alternative is.”

The pointed reminder made Dwayne uneasy. His insight had dictated the direction of the Lost Boys countless times over the years. It had protected and benefited them on numerous occasions. The others trusted him not only to see what lay ahead, but to keep his interpretation free of any personal agenda. When he had glimpsed the incandescence of the seventeen-year-old Robin Stephenson David and Paul and Marko had not scrupled to cross half the world to find her on his say so. Dwayne had wondered then if they were not like moths drawn to a flame. Now, he feared that they would destroy her, as a fire fed too quickly and carelessly will fall apart. Robin demonstrated a disregard for her own safety that verged on the reckless. That she had run tonight had not surprised Dwayne: only that she had not run sooner.

David encouraged her, of course, and well did Dwayne know how addictive a drug David's approval could be. Marko invariably followed David's lead. Paul was too involved with his own complicated issues to take a broader view, and lost his temper too readily to stand up to David's manipulative logic. It left Dwayne in his accustomed role as the steadying influence keeping David's implacable determination, Marko's impulsiveness, and Paul's volatility in balance, but the new dynamic Robin had introduced disconcerted him. He felt responsible for her where previously he had concerned himself with the well-being of the Lost Boys first, their under-rank second, and everything else not at all.

“You really mean to leave her as she is?” he asked, at length.

“Certainly,” David replied. “I'm guided by you.”

Dwayne harboured a number of suspicions about that. David had always professed impatience with the archaic language and elaborate ciphers used in most of the histories of their kind. He openly left their study to Dwayne, though his knowledge of the most obscure laws and traditions occasionally betrayed him. David, not Dwayne, had been the one to speak the words aloud. David had insisted that he alone should track Robin in the first instance, he alone make contact when the time was right. David had devised the trials to test her nerve. And David would decide her future.

Dwayne voiced none of those thoughts. Instead, he asked, “And if we have to kill her?”

David's expression remained the same. “If we have to kill her, she'll be dead before she knows it.”

But he didn't meet Dwayne's eyes as he spoke.

Don't think. Just don't think.

Robin clung to the mantra as she ran for home. The fluorescent light strip over the front door of C-block flickered intermittently, casting the shadows of monsters and bogeymen. She sprinted across the quad, stumbling as the ground fell away beneath her feet and almost slipping on the frosty grass as she climbed the bank the other side. She barely checked her forward motion in time to stop. Somehow she crammed the right key into the lock and all but fell inside as the door yielded.

That front door had always been slow to close. Robin forced it shut until she heard the lock catch. Then hopelessness overwhelmed her, and the adrenaline finally drained from her limbs. She sank down onto the floor, her back to the door. What use was a lock against creatures who transcended physical barriers? She heard a strange noise, something between a laugh and a sob, and then realised it was coming from her own throat.

“Robin?”

Robin wasn't so far gone in despair that she didn't react to her name. She leapt up from her slump into a crouch, every muscle tensed to straining point.

But the shaggy head that emerged from the kitchen door belonged to Jack. “Something up?”

Robin's housemate cut a ridiculous figure, all bloodshot eyes and lank hair and the same stained khaki shirt he'd been wearing since the first day they'd met. Yet as he looked down at her, curious rather than judgmental, Robin felt suddenly grateful that, of all her housemates, Jack had been the one to find her.

“Bad night,” she managed, at last, rising slowly to her feet.

Jack regarded her without so much as a trace of perception, his demeanour dull with the after-effects of drink or drugs, or maybe both. “Cup of tea?”

Nothing could have been more absurd – or more welcome.”Please.”

Jack bumbled around the kitchen, apparently retaining enough co-ordination to wrangle cups, teabags and kettle. Robin watched him work his way through the milk in the fridge until he found some that evidently didn't smell too bad. The mug he plonked down on the grubby kitchen table was too full, slopping tea over the sides, but Robin picked it up and drank anyway. After all the things that had already happened that evening, drinking tea in a brightly-lit kitchen in the middle of the night with a fellow student seemed almost implausibly normal, even when that fellow student was busily crumbling a small lump of marijuana into his own mug of Typhoo.

“Mm?” he offered, extending the dirty hand whose fingertips still bore the last traces of pot.

Robin shook her head. Jack shrugged and licked his fingers. But the magic tea made Robin wonder suddenly. Could the Boys have put something in her beer to make her imagine what she'd seen and done with them? She'd blindly accepted the drink from them; they'd had plenty of opportunity to doctor it with whatever they wanted. If not that date-rape drug, then something else, something hallucinogenic...

Except that didn't explain that they were the Lost Boys.

And the memory of falling through insubstantial air was too vivid to be imagined.

And when David had offered her the dragon earring, Robin had known that accepting would tie her to him in ways she didn't comprehend.

And there was no way she could know that, except she did.

She felt giddy, and gulped tea mechanically, for fortification.

Everything was different when they were there. She had never thought herself reckless, yet tonight she had driven into the darkness on no more than a hunch and a few cryptic hints. She had never thought herself gullible, yet she had accepted every impossible word and explanation they had offered. She had never thought herself foolish, yet she had stepped from a cliff top on nothing more than David's suggestion. It was as though some part of her shouldered aside all reason when she was with them, as though that part of her knew better, and her sense only returned when she left them.

I'm somebody else when I'm with them. The thought sprang from her head fully formed, and she shuddered. But it was a thrill as much as a shiver. I like who I am when I'm with them.

They didn't make her feel reckless or gullible or foolish. When she met their challenges their approval seemed a tangible thing. Their explanations were reasonable, credible, set in the context of all she'd seen and done. And they had not betrayed the trust she had placed in them. Perhaps they were vampires, but they hadn't harmed her yet.

Robin cupped her mug between her hands, looking down at the stained formica of the kitchen table, and seeing again the intricate detail of the dragon earring David had offered her. The succession of images that had flashed through her mind had blurred, like half-recalled glimpses of a dream, but the dragon was sharp and clear in her memory. It would have been the mark of her inclusion, a symbol of the acceptance and belonging she'd been looking for. Inside, something uncurled from a tight knot, reaching out and out.

Nausea washed over her in the next instant. Robin gagged and choked, her gorge rising. Her eyes watered, and she rubbed them with a shaking hand as she swallowed back the bile that suddenly burned her throat.

The tea tasted watery, insipid, but she drained it to the dregs. Light-headed, dizzy and flushed with a sudden heat, Robin wondered if she had a fever coming on. She wiped again at her smarting eyes, and then it hit her: in the brightly-lit kitchen, before the wide, fragile window, she couldn't see anything outside – but she could most certainly be seen.

She shoved back the plastic chair with such force that the table rocked, making Jack's tea slop over the edge of his mug. “Everything ‘kay?” he asked, happily vague.

Robin ignored him. Bed. That was what she needed. Everything would make sense in the morning, in the sunlight. The safe, bright, burning sunlight.

The dull glint at Jack's throat caught her eye, then seized her attention. “Jack.” To her own ears, her voice sounded thick, almost slurred. “That chain; is it silver?”

“Mm, this?” Jack poked a finger into the chunky necklace. “Guess it is. M'girlfriend gave me it. First girlfriend. Was called Susan. No.” He paused, frowning, as though something eluded his grasp. Then he smiled indistinctly. “Susan or Sarah. Might've been Sarah. Or Annabel. Or…”

“Can I borrow it?”

Jack blinked. That must be some good pot, Robin thought distractedly. “Borrow? 'Kay. But you got to give it back!”

Robin waited impatiently as Jack fumbled with the chain, but to her surprise, he got it off easily and dropped it in her hand. It coiled there like a little silver snake. Grubby bits of sellotape on either end of the necklace did the job of the broken catch. The links of the chain had trapped several coarse hairs, and Robin's skin crawled, her fastidious nature affronted. But she made herself put aside her revulsion. The silver represented security, or at least a last-ditch defence.

“I'm going to bed,” she said aloud, not for Jack's benefit.

She paused in the doorway, wondering if she should worry for his safety. Then she discounted the notion. She didn't think the Lost Boys would be so easily distracted.

Getting upstairs seemed to take an age, and at every landing in the stairwell Robin half expected to see one of them through the panel of glass, pressed up against the outside of the window. She took the stairs two and three at a time anyway, though the appeal of seeking refuge in her room was dulled by the knowledge that doors and locks, and fragile sash windows, meant nothing to vampires.

The wardrobe looked like it would move. Robin kicked a clear path through the books and clothes on her floor, then set her shoulder to the wobbly piece of furniture. It slid easily, even less substantial than it looked. Robin made herself disregard the thought that a flatpack wardrobe was even less likely to stand up to the Lost Boys than a solid door. It mostly covered the window, and she found some measure of comfort in the fact that at least she wouldn't wake up to find them staring in at her.

The door offered a greater challenge. She'd seen David open a locked door with a touch, and the catch on her door wasn't exactly robust. Besides, if they did get in through the window, she'd need an escape route, and fighting with locks and bolts wouldn't help.

Robin thought back to the previous night – less than twenty four hours ago – when David had done his trick with the front door. He'd had to touch it, actually make contact with the door handle, before it opened. And if he had to touch the door handle to get in...

Dread gripped her for a moment. What if she opened the door and found them out there, in the corridor? Robin steeled herself, and pulled the door open. Nothing there. She could have cried with relief.

Quickly, she wound Jack's chain around the door handle. Dull silver on dull silver, it wouldn't be immediately apparent in the gloom of the top floor corridor. She secured it there with the old scraps of sellotape. Not perfect, but any vampire grabbing hold of that door handle would be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Robin went back inside, and locked the door. She stood for a moment in the middle of the room, looking at the hasty, flimsy defences she'd erected. She'd left the place in a hurry, and in a mess, and she suddenly hated the smallness, the stifling walls and grim stained carpet and cheap formica furniture, the faint smell of mildew around the sink, the thin duvet on the bed and the rough, pilling sheets. The thought of spending another two and a half years living in this nasty little room made her stomach turn.

The world she now knew to be out there terrified and exhilarated her. The stale, tiny world inside sickened her. But she couldn't seek comfort from anyone for the first – and only the Lost Boys had offered her an alternative to the second.

Robin lay down on the bed, staring up at the greyish ceiling. What did they want? What did David want? The two weren't necessarily the same. The Lost Boys dared her, and she'd taken them on, but alone, David's every word, every action, was a seduction. He'd kissed her, and the others had reacted to that revelation. But when he'd offered her that earring, the world had shifted around Robin – and David hadn't seemed surprised at all.

What did he see in her? What did he know that she didn't? Why was he pursuing her so avidly?

And why was she so drawn to him?

They were killers, by their own brazen admission; supernatural predators who used guile and trickery and bestial strength to prey on the vulnerable, like a pack of wolves cutting the weakest out of the herd. Except that the 'herd' was the human race – and what if she, Robin, was the weak one, the isolated member, that they'd chosen to toy with before bringing her down? They'd dared her to risk her life, and like a fool, she'd trusted them.

But they didn't let me down.

Robin turned over onto her side, ignoring that little voice in the back of her mind. She closed her eyes. But she didn't turn out the light, and it was a long time before she fell asleep.