One Must Hide

Skirmishing

Robin had barely closed the door, let alone composed herself for the dressing down she knew she was going to get, when the tirade began.

Silhouetted against the window, Cathy Jenks resembled nothing so much as a Bond villain, especially when she swivelled her chair around to face Robin. She only lacked a white cat to stroke. “I wondered what it would take to induce you to darken my door.”

She could have been the archetypal eccentric academic: fifty-something, with long iron grey hair half braided, half left wild and uncombed; horn-rimmed spectacles; prominent teeth. She was a Dickens specialist, which was one of the reasons Robin had carefully chosen not to do the 19th century literature module as one of her course options. Cathy had a reputation for being highly opinionated, razor-sharp of tongue, and brutally scathing of any student failing to match up to her high standards. Robin had never liked Dickens anyway.

“I got your note,” she replied stiffly.

Cathy regarded her from behind her bottle-thick lenses with the air of one facing up to a mildly unpleasant chore. “Did you think no one would notice your window had been smashed in, Robin?”

The truth was, Robin hadn’t really thought about it. The whole previous evening was a blur. She remembered picking up her car on the way back from Leeds and driving up to the farmhouse with Paul leading the way on his Triumph, as wired and awake as she could ever recall feeling from all the coffee. She remembered sharing at least one bottle of wine with him in the lounge, in an attempt to counteract the caffeine. She even remembered lying down on Dwayne’s bed for a moment, just to rest her eyes, and waking up hours later, hungover and disorientated. But at no point could she specifically recall worrying about the shattered window of her study bedroom back at James College.

“It was the middle of the night,” she temporised. “There was nothing anyone could do to fix it then.”

“And just when were you intending to report it?”

Robin winced. It had been past two in the afternoon when she’d staggered unsteadily out of Dwayne’s room, almost tripping over Paul, who had been sleeping across the doorway, in the process. She’d taken over an hour to pull herself together and get back to campus, where she’d found the window boarded up, her housemates evading her questions, and a brief but very clear note from Cathy, demanding her presence. “I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.”

It was the feeblest of excuses, but Robin didn’t really want to lie, and she could hardly tell the truth. Cathy stared at her for a long moment, and Robin met the cold gaze, not insolently, but not with difficulty, either. Stern or not, Cathy wasn’t a vampire.

At last, the professor sighed and removed her glasses to clean them with a cloth she took from her desk. “I shan’t ask you how much you had to drink last night, Robin. Nor what other substances in which you might have indulged.”

“I’ve never –”

Cathy held up a hand. “I said I shan’t ask. Don’t dig yourself deeper.”

The accusation offended Robin deeply, but she bit her tongue and stared angrily at the floor.

“Young people always think they’re completely original in their rebellions. They never stop to consider that they might simply be retreading the same tired old territory of those who were young before them.” Cathy chuckled, almost kindly. “I suppose it takes being as old as I am to see that. And to have had ten years’ worth of students stand where you are now.”

Oh, really, Robin thought furiously, keeping her eyes resolutely on the carpet tiles. Ever had to deal with a part-vampire before, you patronising old cow?

“The fact is, Robin – look at me, please.”

Robin slowly dragged her eyes up to meet Cathy’s.

“The fact is,” Cathy went on, “it’s not surprising that you’ve been exploring the limits of your life here. Living away from home for the first time – and you are a long way from home, are you not?”

“Yes,” Robin admitted, though she resented offering any more than that.

“Living away from home, you experience a level of autonomy here that you’ll never have had before. And you should be enjoying your freedom. It’s part of why you came here. But you need to learn to moderate how you express your sense of liberty.” Cathy paused. “Do you follow me, Robin?”

Robin could have taken the reprimand, bowed her head to Cathy’s wisdom, and made good her escape from the uncomfortable situation, but something in her resisted the idea. She hated the suggestion that she was just another angsty teenager trying to rebel, lumped in with the stoners and the losers and the dropouts. Maybe she wasn’t a model student, but she’d had more on her plate than most. The dull ache of the bite wound on the side of her neck, hidden under the scarf she’d had the presence of mind to put on, was a very palpable reminder of that.

Cathy exhaled heavily, apparently taking Robin’s silence as tacit disagreement. “If you won’t take constructive criticism, Robin, let me be frank. You need to start taking your degree seriously, or you won’t be here in a year’s time.” Her voice hardened. “Your attendance hasn’t been very encouraging in the last several weeks. You’ve missed seminars, and I don’t believe I’ve seen you at a lecture recently.” She headed off Robin’s objection with a raised finger. “And yes, I know that lectures aren’t compulsory, but you might give some thought to the idea of not taking your education for granted. There are many people less fortunate than you who would leap at the chance to learn even a fraction of what is available to you. It does you no credit to behave as if the opportunities we offer are beneath your interest.”

That stung, and Robin looked away again, not in anger, but in shame.

“You’re an intelligent young woman,” Cathy continued. “Your tutors have reported that your papers demonstrate real insight, and Bradley’s spoken especially well of your progress with Old English. No one begrudges you the right to go out and enjoy the company of your friends, but please, for the sake of your own prospects, prove that you have the maturity to correct this self-destructive path onto which you seem to have strayed.”

Squirming inside, Robin nodded awkwardly. “I’ll try harder.”

Cathy didn’t speak for several moments. Then she said, “I believe that you will.”

That made Robin feel even worse. She started to move towards the door, but Cathy’s meaningfully-cleared throat stopped her.

“There’s still the matter of your window, Robin.”

Robin turned back, full of dread.

“What exactly happened?” Cathy asked.

“I don’t really know,” Robin lied reluctantly.

“What’s strange about it,” Cathy said, with deceptive casualness, “was that the glass was broken inwards, which suggests that something smashed the window from the outside. Yet there was no obvious projectile in your room, and even had someone thrown a brick or some such item, it wouldn’t have destroyed the entire window and window-frame.” She paused for a long, expectant moment.

Robin hated lying, but she didn’t have much choice. “I…didn’t see it happen. I’d gone to the bathroom. It was broken when I came back.”

“And you were on your own at the time?” Cathy asked flatly.

“I…yes.” A thought came to Robin then, and she continued in a rush, “I think it might have been a branch of one of the trees outside. It was really windy, last night.”

It wasn’t a brilliant fudge, but Robin sensed that Cathy was genuinely perplexed by the circumstances of the incident. Any half-credible answer was probably better than none, and ‘a vampire flew through it’ wouldn’t have cut the mustard. Finally, Cathy nodded. “You might be right. I’ll ask the groundskeepers to look at the trees. In the meantime, you obviously can’t sleep in that room; it’s still covered with glass. The porters are arranging to have it professionally cleaned, and the window will be replaced tomorrow. I believe they’ve found a spare room in Wentworth for you to sleep in tonight.”

“Thank you,” Robin said humbly.

Cathy nodded briskly. “Just, next time, please try to report this sort of thing promptly. It will make things much easier for everyone.”

Robin went from Cathy’s office with a great knot of shame and frustration twisted up inside her. A sound bollocking would have been easier to bear than the guilt trip her tutor had pulled. She could have resented a bollocking; she couldn’t resent being told the truth. All the mitigating circumstances in the world didn’t change the fact that she’d been severely neglecting her studies.

The long walk from Langwith to the Wentworth porters’ lodge seemed to take forever, and walking westward in the late afternoon meant the sinking sun was in Robin’s eyes the whole way. She tried to defy it, squinting defiantly into the sunlight, but it was too strong and she had to avert her gaze. All around, her fellow students moved purposefully between colleges, singly and in groups, as if to emphasise Robin’s failure to take proper advantage of York’s facilities.

She arrived at Wentworth in bleak spirits, so wound up in her own dejection that she barely registered the sarcasm with which the porters handed over the key to her temporary lodgings; something about trying to find her a room with nothing breakable in it. If they were disappointed that she didn’t rise to their bait, Robin didn’t notice.

She did go back to her own room for a few things: a change of clothes, a towel, the books and materials she’d need for the next day or so. With the broken window boarded up, the drab little cell was even less homely than usual.

But it was luxurious compared with the room Robin let herself into in Wentworth College.

It was empty of possessions, bare of all but the most elementary furniture, cold and musty as a room that hadn’t been opened up in too long. The carpet wasn’t threadbare so much as it was bald. The greyish walls showed the marks and scuffs of decades, and a distinctive stain on the ceiling told of an ancient water leak. The wind whistled through gaps in the frame of the tiny, dirt-clouded pane of glass that served as a window.

The desk boasted a thick layer of grime, but it was more inviting than the bed with its mean, thin duvet and single flat pillow. Robin changed into her clean clothes and used her dirty t-shirt to wipe the dust from the desk. She set her books and pens down, then opened her notes on Beowulf and stared at them with fierce concentration.

A part of her was even surprised when the lines blurred, and the tears she’d fought for so long rolled down her face and onto the pages, drowning every last word.

Marko opened his eyes to darkness.

He lay still and silent for a moment, an old habit and a good one, stretching his senses, casting about himself for orientation. His awareness brushed past Lucas, awake; Paul, still asleep; the weaker but clear signatures of the under-rank in assorted stages of wakefulness. And then David: awake, alert, and boiling over with restless energies.

That made Marko wonder, and he swept the general vicinity once more for any sign that Robin was there. She wasn’t. Marko exerted himself a bit, and felt the faint, faint tug of her presence to the south.

He threw off the single blanket he’d draped over himself and padded to the bathroom. He’d come in very late – or early, depending on how you looked at it – and found Paul dozing on the floor outside Dwayne’s room, Robin asleep in Dwayne’s room, and David so deeply unconscious that he might have been dead. None of that had been sufficiently interesting at the time to have stopped him going straight to his own bed, though.

Marko didn’t have a watch. None of them did. The turn of the earth was timepiece enough for a vampire. The room was pitch dark, every last speck of outside light blocked by blackened glass and tight shutters and thick curtains, but he always knew when night had fallen. In the summer, when the nights were all too short, every minute of darkness counted. Here, though, and now, he reckoned it was a little before four. York was much farther north than Santa Cruz, and the balance of day and night much less even. He’d have liked the place a lot, if only it weren’t so damn cold.

In the bright electric light he noticed traces of crimson still ingrained in the skin of his knuckles. He washed up vigorously, a process that always seemed to leave more water on the floor than in the sink, then went looking for his least dirty clothes. Travelling light was a bitch. He’d only brought two t-shirts and he hadn’t got round to buying any more. One of them had oily smudges on it where he’d wiped his hands after doing some work on his bike. The other, balled up in the corner of his room where he’d dropped it the night before, was stiff with half-dried blood. Marko dragged the oily one over his head, pawing ineffectually at the grease marks. He really needed some new clothes. He grabbed his jacket from the end of his bed, and headed out.

Downstairs, Paul was clattering around the kitchen with his usual absence of subtlety. Lucas was at the table, smoking a cigarette with fierce concentration. By the looks of the ashtray in front of him, he’d been there a while. David was still seething away to himself upstairs.

“Bro,” Marko greeted Paul.

Paul glanced over from the coffee pot. “You cut it fine coming in.”

Marko rummaged through the cupboards until he found a box of breakfast cereal. He put it down on the table and sat down in front of it. “Found me a little rats’ nest out towards the other coast. Thought I’d clean it out.”

Paul set down three mugs of coffee and claimed a chair for himself. “Get hurt?”

“They took a chunk out of my arm,” Marko admitted, rubbing the place gingerly, though it had healed without a trace. “More lucky than smart, though. Dwayne been in touch?”

“Not with me.”

Marko stuck his hand in the cereal box and pulled out a fistful of Coco Pops. “Anything your side, Lucas?”

“Nothing much,” the lesser vampire replied. “Kyle’s car still sounds sick, though.”

“I told him he shouldn’t have bought it,” Marko said, shaking his head.

“He wasn’t expecting it to have to last this long,” Lucas said portentously.

Paul glanced up from his coffee to throw a look at Lucas that Marko didn’t like. “I’ll take a look at it,” he offered, trying out his most conciliatory tone. He had a feeling he’d need it before long. Like the minute David rousted himself out of his room.

He didn’t have long to wait. Lucas had barely smoked half of his next cigarette when David put in an appearance. Marko was so convinced that Paul would say something that, when he didn’t, he broke the silence himself with the first thing that came into his head. “Wow, bro, you look like shit.”

David took plenty of time crossing the kitchen to the table. Sweat glistened on his brow, his eyes showed bloodshot red, and he moved uncertainly, as though disoriented. He looked very much like he’d just had a close encounter with the sun. He laid his hands carefully flat on the table, looking down at them. Every vein and tendon stood out in stark relief. “How bad was it?”

“The damage?” Paul asked, in a deceptively mild tone.

David halted a moment before replying. “What do you think?”

Paul shrugged. “It’s nothing that’s going to kill her.”

“Did you –”

“No, David, I left her bleeding to death.” Scorn shaded Paul’s careful neutrality. “What do you think?”

Slowly, David reached towards the dish in the centre of the table where they all dropped the keys to their vehicles.

Paul leaned unhurriedly forward and moved the dish out of David’s reach.
The two of them looked at each other. The potential for violence was sudden so immediate that Marko began to shift from his place, ready to intervene, but neither Paul nor David moved.

At last, Paul said, “Seventeen.”

“There isn’t a magic number, Paul,” David answered.

“And you’d take that chance.” Paul’s stare was very even. “Stupid question. Sure you would.”

“I told you to get her away.” Some of the weight returned to David’s voice.

“She wouldn’t leave. Or did you want me to force her?”

That was enough for Marko. “Okay, guys, step away from the sarcasm.” They both glared at him, and he shook his head. “Seriously. Look at yourselves. People’ll think you’re married.”

Dwayne was better at defusing situations, but the bad joke did, at least, make Paul subside. David just looked glassily into nothing. Marko wondered exactly what their leader had done.

“You’re in real danger of fucking this one up, David,” said Paul, and the quiet caution in his voice held no threat.

David laughed softly, bitterly. “Don’t you think I know that?”

Paul picked the keys to David’s BMW motorcycle out of the dish. He weighed them in his hand for a moment. Then he tossed them onto the table in front of their owner.

David looked at Paul as though he were insane, which, Marko thought, wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch. “You’re giving me permission?”

“No,” Paul replied. “I’m saying I’m not going to stop you.”

“Don’t condescend to me.” David forced the words out.

“You’re half out of you mind,” Paul said steadily, “and Dwayne’s not here. So go do what you have to do.” He paused, then added, “And for Christ’s sake, take a shower first.”

David rose shakily to his feet, radiating the unpredictable energies that had him in their thrall, and snatched his keys up off the table. He hesitated for a moment, as though to say something. Then he turned and walked out.

“He’s not going to thank you for that when he’s back to himself,” Marko said, resuming his breakfast with another handful of Coco Pops from the box.

“Actually I think he will.” Paul sipped his coffee moodily. “Lucas. Don’t give Kae too much rein the next few nights. She’s not going to like this.”

“You’re not kidding,” said Lucas. “Not at all.”

Robin started from her fitful doze, raising her head from where she’d propped it against her fist. The pen she’d been gripping had left its mark in the inky scribble on the paper and the imprint on her hand. She stared at the grimy wall in front of her without seeing it. “How long have you been there?”

“A while,” David replied.

Robin uncurled her stiff fingers from around the pen, capped it, and laid it down on the desk beside her finished course essay. “What do you want?”

He didn’t reply, not straight away, and after a minute, Robin turned around in her chair to face him.

David was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, one leg drawn up, the other stretched out in front of him. His face betrayed no expression at all, but he looked unusually tired and drawn.

“You’ve got a bloody nerve,” Robin said.

She might have known that David wouldn’t have the grace to look ashamed. “I don’t blame you for being angry.”

“I don’t need your permission for that, David,” she said, and then, fiercely, “Won’t Kae be missing you?”

Nothing could have pacified Robin, but nothing was exactly what David offered. Instead, he said, “Last night shouldn’t have happened.”

Robin waited for the rest, but it didn’t come. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say for yourself?”

David did a strange thing, then. He broke Robin’s angry stare to drag the fingers of both hands back through his hair. “You can’t hate me, Robin,” he said at last. “Not like I hate myself.”

He said it so simply, with neither plea nor entreaty in his voice; just a quiet, matter-of-fact statement of truth that Robin found almost impossible to answer. She looked at him sitting there and said, slowly, “I don’t hate you.”

Then she changed her mind.

“No. Forget that.” Robin stood up so fast she knocked her chair over. “Get up. Get up.”

Amazingly, he obeyed. Out of his signature long coat, he seemed somehow diminished, a lesser presence than usual, as though all his force and menace had been directed internally. Robin sized him up, feeling every last bit of her anger and frustration bunch itself into a tight fist of aggression. “You’ve made me jump through hoops to prove I trust you, and like an idiot, I have. You’ve fed me the minimum possible truth you think you can get away with, and like an idiot, I’ve accepted it. You walk in and out of my life like you own it, and like a complete sodding idiot, I let you, and I’ve had enough, David, do you understand?”

David just stood there, head lowered, face superhumanly controlled, jaw tight, eyes hooded, offering no resistance to Robin’s fury, as though simply soaking it up, and Robin turned away from him, half in disgust, half in fear that she’d strike him just to get a reaction.

“I’m sorry.”

Robin took a deep breath to compose herself, then turned back to face David. “That’s –”

“I couldn’t stay away from you last night,” David went on, soft, but resolute. “I tried everything I knew and it wasn’t enough. You make me weak, Robin.”

“If that’s meant to make me forgive you for biting me and trying to – to – “Robin couldn’t quite get the word out. “Trying to force yourself on me,” she managed, instead, “it’s not going to work.”

“I don’t expect your forgiveness,” he said. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Then what are you even doing here?” Robin demanded. “Why don’t you just sod off back to your girlfriend?”

She realised, before the words had even died away, that she’d revealed too much, broadcast her sorest injury too plainly, in the second dig about Kae. David raised his head. “You think I went to her for comfort?”

“So you’re not even denying it?”

“I went to her to put you out of my mind,” he said. “To distract myself from pursuing you again. Did you really believe that she could be a threat to you?”

Robin almost laughed in his face. “Did you really believe you could go and sleep with another woman and I wouldn’t care?”

He looked at her strangely. “I make no such demand of you.”

“And there’s the difference between you and me,” Robin said coldly. “I can be trusted. Get out, David. I can’t even stand to look at you.”

He didn’t move. Slowly, he said, “This has happened to you before.”

“I mean it,” Robin said. “Get out.”

“Someone betrayed your trust,” David went on, and suddenly there was a tinge of something else in his voice; something almost like jealousy.

It wasn’t much of a weapon, but Robin seized it. “Did you think you were the first man I’ve ever been drawn to, David? The first I’ve ever kissed? The first anything?” She put infinite scorn into her words. “Did you think you had some wide-eyed virgin on your hands? Because if you did, I’m terribly sorry to disappoint.”

“Who was it?” he asked softly, persuasively.

His calm unnerved Robin. She’d hoped to provoke a reaction from him, to touch off the fight she’d been spoiling for. “What does it matter to you? You’re no better than he was.”

But David’s composure would not be shaken. Rather, Robin’s attack seemed to have re-established his defences, and with his next words he disarmed her, taking the crude blade she had brandished at him and threatening her with the sharp end. “So. He’s why you came here and not Bristol. He’s why you’re so far from home.”

“Not the only reason,” Robin insisted, raising her head, dismayed by the reawakening of David’s easy dominance. She knew he didn’t need any special abilities to see through that lie, but she didn’t expect his reaction.

David threw back his head and laughed.

His amusement stung Robin in a tender place, and she scarcely mustered a scathing reply. “I’m glad you find it so entertaining.”

“Oh, but I do,” David assured her, and then the mirth drained from his face like blood from a wound. “Faithlessness isn’t all you had from him. Don’t tell me you savoured his ignorance of who you are. His blindness to what you are.”

“He wasn’t blind or ignorant,” Robin retorted angrily.

“Of course he was,” David said. His eyes sparked in the same light that flashed from his suddenly bared teeth. “And there would have been more. Resentment. Fear. Disgust.”

“Disgust?” Robin objected.

“Do you doubt it?” he demanded. “Do you question the testimony of your own senses? Look at yourself! Look at how you’ve changed already, in the time we’ve known you; look at how you’ve left who you were behind you, look ahead, if you dare, and see what you can become, what you will become! This youth, this boy, this child could not have recognised it, could never have named it, but in time he would have seen it, Robin, and feared it, and despised you for being something toobig for his tiny world. You’re like a snake shedding its skin, and you’d have left him nothing but the husk of who you used to be.” David gestured angrily to the mirror that hung above the washbasin in the corner of the room. “Look at yourself, Robin Stephenson, and then tell me you’ve not outgrown the insignificance of your life.”

Robin fought to resist, fought to reject the crushing influence of his command, glaring up at him with every bit of defiance she possessed. It wasn’t anywhere near enough.

“You bastard,” she said, turning aside from his relentless stare to meet her reflection’s unwilling look.

The woman who gazed back at her could have been a stranger.

It wasn’t the features. They were the same. But the eyes penetrated through the obscuring layer of dirt on the glass, grey brightened almost to silver, alive with inhuman anger.

Inhuman. Robin had never imagined she could apply that adjective to herself.

She moved closer, to wipe the dusty film away, but her fingertips came away barely smeared. She scrubbed harder at the glass, but it seemed to make no difference.

Softly, David said, “It isn’t dirty, Robin.”

She left off trying to clean the mirror, though she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. “But it’s dark.”

Robin felt David step up behind her. The mirror offered no hint that he was there. “The darkness is yours,” he told her.

The shiver that went through Robin was half thrill, half chill. She moved to one side, then the other, and the shadowy haze moved with her reflection. The tangible evidence of her own difference made her feel oddly numb. “It wasn’t like this before.”

“Like I said,” David replied. “You’ve changed.”

“Is it because…” Robin focused suddenly on the dressing she still wore on the side of her neck. She put her hand to it, abruptly aware that she hadn’t been aware of it.

“No.” His denial was as calm as it was final. “That only changed me.”

Robin turned to face him, but he didn’t meet her gaze, studying instead the gauze dressing Paul had applied the night before. “May I?” he asked gravely.

She nodded her assent, an awkward motion to make, and tried to keep still as David deftly removed the dressing, though she winced a bit when he peeled off the surgical tape. There didn’t seem to be much blood on the gauze pad; at least, not compared to the sensation Robin remembered vividly, of blood running freely from the bite wound.

“I could have killed you.”

She explored the side of her neck gingerly with her fingers. It throbbed, but the bite wound didn’t seem too bad. “You didn’t get the vein.”

“I wasn’t aiming for it.” He met her look. “I don’t miss.”

The force of Robin’s anger had fled the moment she’d looked her reflection in the eye, but David’s closeness still bothered her. She stepped away, putting a more comfortable space between them, and noticed the tiniest twitch of disappointment in David’s face. “I can’t trust you,” she said at last.

To David’s credit, he didn’t dispute it. “We’re not safe when we’ve killed.”
“What about when Dwayne killed that half vampire?” Robin argued. “He didn’t lose it then.”

The leader of the Lost Boys hesitated, then allowed, “I’m not safe. I’m not myself when I’ve killed.”

“Maybe you are,” Robin suggested. “You’re a vampire. Maybe dangerous is your natural state.”

He regarded her steadily. “Do you believe that?”

Robin knew what he wanted her to say. She wanted to say it, too. She looked up at him, suddenly tired of fighting with him, tired of the wild ups and downs of their relationship, tired of guessing all the time. “I don’t know what to believe. When we met, it was like I’d finally found someone who could see where I was coming from. Now I know that’s because…” She glanced, just for a moment, at the mirror, at the darkness that betrayed what she was. “But I don’t know you, David. I don’t know anything about you. Not your name, not where you’re from – I don’t even know how old you really are! You could be two hundred years old for all I know!”

“I’m not,” David said quietly.

“But that’s just it!” Robin went on, and the frustration burst out of her with the exclamation. “It’s as if you keep these things to yourself for no reason except that you can. Like it’s a bad habit you’ve never broken. Secrets for the sake of secrets.” She recognised the echo of something Marko had once said in her own words. “You called L…you called my boyfriend blind and ignorant because he couldn’t see what I was. But I’m just as ignorant. I know what you are, David, but I don’t know who you are. You won’t let anyone in.” Then, miserably, she said, “At least, not me.”

Something changed in David’s face.

Abruptly he walked away to look out of the window, folding his arms across his chest. Robin noticed distractedly that he cast no reflection in that glass, either. She watched him there for a moment and then turned aside, feeling the tears from earlier sting her eyes again. She couldn’t hide them from him, but she wouldn’t let him see the weakness.

“My name was David Alexander Leon.”

He didn’t move from the window, or look away from the night. Robin looked at his back, seeing the tenseness of his shoulders, and didn’t dare move.
“I was born in 1965. My family lived outside of Sacramento, in California. My dad worked in construction. My mom left when my brother and I were twelve. She took our sister with her. She was four.”

He might have been reading a shopping list. His speech was completely flat, devoid of any emotion, but Robin held on to the facts. “Then you’re thirty-two. And one of twins.”

In profile, David was harder to read than ever. “I became a half-vampire in 1984, on my nineteenth birthday,” he went on. He related the numbers as though his life were nothing more than a balance sheet to be accounted. “A full vampire three nights later. I stayed with that rank for a year. Marko came with me when I left. We spent half a year with a solo in Canada. Dwayne joined us, and then Paul. We returned to California. We travelled for a while, getting ourselves into trouble with other ranks. Eventually we took on the Santa Cruz rank, and we won the territory. We found out about the movie by chance. We started calling ourselves the Lost Boys shortly after we got involved with it. We spent the next three years defending ourselves against ranks that took objection to the picture. Two years after that clearing the rest of the state for ourselves. And from then until now looking for something more.”

It was the scantest tale, less a story than a chronology of events, but like a candle in a snowstorm, David’s meagre narrative revealed the depth of what he hadn’t said. Robin sensed it was more than he would have given freely, but it wasn’t enough. The account still told her nothing of who David was. She didn’t doubt his truthfulness; rather, in his omission of all context and emotion, she inferred the significance of what he’d left out.

“What is it you’re so afraid to tell me, David?” she asked, trusting her instinct.

Still he didn’t move, but the least narrowing of his eyes, the slightest shift of his muscles, implied Robin had not missed her mark. “The early years were bloody, Robin. More so than you can imagine.”

“You underestimate my imagination,” she replied simply. She watched him for a moment. “You weren’t always as principled as you are now.”

“Robin,” he said, a soft warning.

She ignored it. “Something made you change. What was it?”

“Don’t do this.” His voice almost pleaded with her to stop. Almost.

Robin let her intuition loose on David’s story, finding tropes, making connections, weighting the negative emphasis, as though it were any work she’d been set to analyse. What she sensed was unsettling, but she couldn’t hold back. “Did you kill him?”

Sharply, David looked at her. “What?”

“Your brother,” Robin said. “Your twin. You killed him, didn’t you?”

The leader of the Lost Boys stared at her, incredulous, and then his face convulsed in an expression of such naked self-loathing that Robin nearly had to look away. “In thirteen years, no night has gone by when I haven’t wished I had. I didn’t kill my brother, Robin. I killed my sister.”

Robin’s brain made the calculation even as she flinched from the implication. “She would have been…”

“Eleven.” David spat the word out. “She was eleven. The only good Leon there ever was. She made me what I am.” He laughed raggedly. “Literally.”

“I’m –”

“You wanted to know who I am,” he said savagely. “I’m Jackson’s twin. Identical in every way, except he didn’t murder our sister.” With a visible effort, David asserted control over himself, but his armour was in pieces. “Will that do for you?” he asked. “Are you satisfied reliving that has hurt me enough?"

She’d never seen him so broken, imagined he could be so vulnerable. “I didn’t think you could be hurt,” she said. “Least of all by me.”

“Most of all by you,” David rasped, the warning of a wounded animal. “Because I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

Robin reached for his hand. It came up to catch hers, gripping almost tight enough to hurt. “I should resent you,” she said. “But I can’t. I should fear you. But I don’t. I should be disgusted by you.” She saw him flinch at the implication. “I should be. I should be.” She looked up at him, at the raw pain on his face, at the lambent fear in his eyes. “Oh, God, David, why am I not?”

He kissed her.

She should have fought him.

She didn’t.