One Must Hide

The female of the species

Robin had driven the twenty-five miles from York to Leeds a few times since starting university. The journey usually took about forty-five minutes outside rush hour. Paul had just done it in a shade over twenty.

“The speed camera on the A64 probably got you,” she said, climbing a bit unsteadily off the back of the big Triumph motorcycle, feeling numbed with the cold.

Paul shrugged, shoving his wind-blown hair back out of his eyes. “It’s not like I have license plates.”

“How come the police don’t tow you away?”

“I’d like to see them try,” he replied, with a derisory snort. “It’s protected.”

‘Protected’ meant that, at some point, Paul had deliberately and voluntarily spilt his own blood over his bike. Dwayne had explained the procedure to Robin a couple of nights ago. The supernatural properties of vampire blood could be harnessed to infer a combination of persuasion, warning and threat on curious parties, depending on their intent. There’s nothing to see here. I’m warning you, bad things will happen if you get much closer. Touch it and I’ll tear your head off.

David had performed the same arcane little ceremony on the ground by C-block to protect Robin from unfriendly attention. She shivered for a moment at the thought of the leader of the Lost Boys, and put her hand up to the dressing on her neck to make sure it was still there.

“Stop messing with it,” Paul told her sharply.

Robin pulled her fingers away guiltily. “Sorry.”

He frowned. “Is it hurting?”

“No. It’s just...” She groped for the right explanation. “You know, thinking about it.”

“Don’t do that, either.” He scowled at her, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.”Come on.”

Robin made a conscious effort to pull herself together. “Where are we going?”

The tall Lost Boy didn’t reply for a moment, striding on down the dark street with his trademark easy grace. Then he turned around, though he didn’t stop walking.”There’s a coffee shop down here that stays open all night, and the coffee’s even pretty good.”

She hurried to catch up with him. “That’s a bit tame, isn’t it?”

“You mean compared to blood?”

“I mean compared to beer.”

Paul shook his head. “David’s out of action and Dwayne’s out of town. You need your wits about you. This is the place.”

The frontage wasn’t promising, with a narrow doorway sporting a sign so weathered as to be illegible, and only a small notice posted beneath it suggesting that refreshments could be found on the first floor. Inside, a stairway led up to a wooden door with light leaking around the edges. Robin followed Paul up, slightly put off by the alarming way their footsteps made the stairs creak.

But the door opened into a surprisingly large space, with windows making up one entire wall. The floor, of scuffed and worn planks, had a well-swept look to it; the lights overhead cast a dim light; a heater somewhere kicked out a pleasant warmth. Mismatched leather sofas and armchairs, piled with tattered cushions and fraying throws, had been grouped erratically around small tables, each supporting a collection of candles and oil lamps that added a friendly, flickering illumination to the room. Even the music felt comfortable and familiar; something from the Seventies that Robin recognised, though she couldn’t immediately identify it. A faint smell of incense partially masked the stronger whiff of pot smoke. The atmosphere was distinctly mellow, the ambience bohemian. It made Robin want to sit down with a notepad and write something profound.

Four or five of the table clusters were occupied, but Paul strolled over to a free one. He pulled off his greatcoat, dropping it negligently over the back of a chair, then sank down onto a battered couch with a long sigh, closing his eyes. After a moment, he opened them again. “Take a seat.”

Robin followed his example, taking off her jacket and draping it over the arm of the sofa on the other side of the table. It was even more comfortable than it looked. Slowly, she felt the tension uncoil itself from her body.

A waitress came over from the counter, smiling at Paul. “What can I get you tonight?”

“You can line me up a couple of espressos,” he replied lazily. “And whatever she’s having.”

The waitress obviously hadn’t spotted Robin; she half turned, and her face fell fractionally. Robin sat up straighter in her place, intrigued. “Er...”

“Menu’s on the board,” the waitress said, a trifle frostily, gesturing with her thumb at the large blackboard hanging above the counter.

Robin scanned it rapidly.“I’ll have a mocha, please.” She thought she probably deserved the chocolate, after the night she’d had.

“Anything to eat?”

“Maybe later,” Paul said.

Robin might have imagined it, but she thought the vampire had put just a hint of a command in his reply, just enough to make the waitress jump half a step, as if physically shoved into motion. She looked at Paul. “Did you do that?”

“She wants me,” he said casually, “and she doesn’t take a hint. First time I came here I thought I’d have to kill her to get her off my back.”

It was hard to know if he meant it, and for a moment Robin considered the incongruity: she felt safe with this most natural of killers, who could speak so indifferently of murder. But relaxing there on the couch, Paul didn’t look like a killer, and Robin spoke before she thought. “Why do you keep protecting me, Paul?”

He looked up from his contemplation of the oil lamp on the table.”No one else seems to be,” he said slowly. “And Christ knows you need protecting.”

The warmth Robin had begun to feel towards him cooled off rapidly. “You know, I appreciate what you did tonight, Paul, but I’m not your problem.”

The old scorn shadowed the vampire’s eyes. “And that’s exactly what I mean. You have no concern for your own safety. You have no concept of what’s out there. Jesus, you have no idea what’s in here. You don’t know the first thing about me or what reasons I might have for bringing you here.”

So much for relaxation. “So why have you brought me here, then?”

Paul laughed, a suddenly savage sound. “How about to kill you while David’s out of the picture?”

Robin froze.

The Lost Boy held her shocked gaze for an instant, then shook his head. “There you go. You actually believed me. Because you still don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

The flood of relief actually made Robin feel ashamed. “That wasn’t fair, Paul!”

“Yeah, well you’ve got a whole lot of unfair coming your way real soon,” he said. “And it’s like I said before. You’re lucky we found you first. But for someone who’s meant to be smart, I’m not seeing you do much to find out what we’re really all about.”

“Oh, right, because there’re just so many books about vampires in the J B Morrell library!” Robin retorted.

Remarkably, Paul didn’t rise to the bait. “How long are you going to keep playing at this, Robin?”

She eyed him suspiciously, mistrusting his sudden calm.“Playing at what?”

He slipped a hand into the inside pocket of his coat and fished out the ever-present box of cigarettes. “Being a student.”

“I’m not playing at it,” she said automatically.

Paul shrugged, lighting up. “You could have fooled me. Didn’t you have a paper to finish?”

“It’s not my fault you lot keep disturbing me,” she accused.

“Oh, it’s so hard to twist your arm.” He threw the box down and took a long drag. “It’s not like I’m blaming you. Just wondering when you’re going to quit pretending.”

“And you know the first thing about me to know that!” Robin snapped.

“I know one thing,” he said. “You’re so tangled up with us now, you couldn’t get loose if you wanted to.” He paused, regarding her with a calculating stare. “And you don’t want to.”

The return of the waitress prevented Robin from firing back an irate response. “Here you go. One espresso and one mocha.” She put the two cups down on the table and set a plate of tiny chocolate-dipped biscuits in between them. Robin noticed the lingering sidelong look the waitress directed at Paul. She did fancy him. It fuelled Robin’s annoyance. What’s to fancy? she thought savagely. He’s like a reject from a bad 80s hair band.

It wasn’t strictly true, and Robin felt briefly ashamed of the unkind thought. The vampire lounging on the couch opposite her wasn’t the actor from the movie, and he didn’t look ten years out of fashion so much as his style was entirely his own. She picked up her mocha and sipped. The coffee and chocolate hit her system with a jolt she thought she probably needed.

“I suppose I should,” she said at last. She looked up for Paul’s agreement. “Shouldn’t I?”

He regarded her over his espresso. “There’s never been a whole lot of should or shouldn’t with you, Robin. That’s what I hate about you.” He kept looking. “And what I admire.”

Robin tried to look back at him, but the intensity defeated her and she glanced aside. If the Lost Boys shared one characteristic, it was their complexity. “Will David go back to normal?”

“He’ll be his usual friendly self again by tomorrow night.”

“And tonight?”

Paul scrubbed out his cigarette. “That’s why I brought you here.”

Thinking about David was too much, and Robin shied away from it. “I don’t even know where I’m going to sleep tonight,” she said, half to herself.

“Oh.” Paul flashed a smile. “The window.”

“The window,” Robin agreed.

He shrugged. “You can sleep in Dwayne’s room.”

Robin raised her eyes slowly. “Won’t David be there?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “But so will I.”

Protecting me again. Robin hastily changed the subject. “Where’s Dwayne gone?”

“He didn’t say and I didn’t ask.” The vampire shook his head. “He’s probably chasing one of his visions.”

She looked blankly at him.

“Dwayne sees the future,” Paul explained nonchalantly. “Bits of it, anyway. We can all get kind of a sense of what’s ahead, but you wouldn’t want to go betting your life on it. Dwayne gets details like you wouldn’t believe.”

Robin shifted uneasily in her place, deeply troubled by the concept, though she couldn’t have said why. “Doesn’t that make free will redundant?”

“Maybe. He doesn’t always tell us what he sees. Just what he thinks is important, and even then sometimes David doesn’t act on it.” He shrugged. “Dwayne gets the fine print, not the bigger picture.”

“Is he always right?” Robin asked.

“I’ve never known him to be wrong.” Paul cast Robin a long look. “But it doesn’t always work out the way you think.”

Robin sighed, trying and failing to push David to the back of her mind. “What ever does?”

“Not much.”

She turned the new piece of information over in her mind. Dwayne was the most guarded of the Lost Boys, though Robin didn’t think he behaved that way on her account. She supposed that having an insight into the future would make anyone cautious of what they said.

“Has he...” she began, and then noticed that Paul wasn’t paying attention. He was looking intently into nothing again, and with a flood of insight Robin caught a glimpse of what lay behind the sullen and hostile antagonist she’d come to know: a vigilant and perceptive guardian protecting her in more ways than she realised, who’d been protecting her since the moment they’d met, for whom the strain of keeping watch over her was becoming greater every night.

Paul started, as though surprised, and turned his head sharply to look at her with eyes that almost glowed more intensely blue than ever. “Don’t do that,” he said harshly.

“I didn’t do anything,” she protested.

“When are you eighteen?”

Robin didn’t expect the question. “January.”

“Are you sure?” he pushed.

“I think I know when my birthday is. Were you sensing something?”

“There are vampires out there. Not that close.”

The tension in him, the hint of distraction in his demeanour, made that a lie. Whatever he’d felt, he was keeping half an eye on it. “You didn’t answer me earlier,” Robin said, wondering if she could take advantage. “Why do you keep protecting me?”

He answered more readily that she’d imagined her would. “Because I’ve had to pick up after David’s screw-ups before, and I don’t want to have to do it again.”

“If they’re his screw-ups, why...”

“That’s the way it works. We don’t hang around together just for kicks.” Paul sighed. “You’re not the first, Robin. You’re not even the second. And it’s always wound up bad, and by bad, I mean dead.”

That was blunt enough. “Do you think that’s what’s going to happen to me?” Robin thought she did a good job of keeping her voice steady.

“It could,” he told her.

“Is there anything I can do to stop it?”

“I’d say run,” Paul said, “but it’s gone way beyond that.” He stared at her for a moment, though it was as if he didn’t see her at all. “Don’t fight me.”

“Don’t fight you?” Robin queried.

“I don’t see like Dwayne does,” he said. “But I know that one day soon, you’re going to feel you have to fight me.” He paused, then said, “There’s a lot of people out there who want to hurt you. I’m not one of them.”

“What did I ever do that they want to hurt me?” Robin objected.

“You were born.”

“So were you!”

“I was born human,” he said.”I chose to become a vampire. You were born...whatever you are. You never chose to be the way you are; you just are, and that’s the problem.”

It didn’t make sense to Robin. She shook her head, trying to understand. “So because I didn’t choose to be partly vampire, other vampires want to kill me?”

“There’s more to it than that, and I’m not saying I agree,” Paul told her. “The point is, you’re a target, and that’s only going to get worse.”

Robin picked up her mocha, just to be doing something with her hands. “I have to go home for Christmas.”

“Where’s home?”

“Exeter. About three hundred miles south west of here.”

“Your family’s there?”

“My parents, and whatever kids they have at the moment. They foster,” she explained. “My sister and her boyfriend will be down, too.” She looked up at Paul. “Are they at risk?”

“They don’t have to be,” he said slowly. “Not if you come back to Santa Cruz.”

“I don’t...I just...” Robin trailed off, at a loss.

“We can protect you there,” Paul went on, leaning forward now, as if to physically compel her. “Here, it’s hard. We don’t know what’s coming from where.”

“I just don’t think...” Robin stopped. “Would I be able to protect myself if you turned me?”

“You don’t want that,” he said softly.

“But you chose it,” she protested.

“It’s different,” he said.

Robin didn’t know why she was pushing the point: to see where it went, she supposed. “Why? Because I’m part vampire already?”

“No,” Paul said. “Because you’re a girl.”

Robin hadn’t expected that. “What’s that got to do with it?”

Paul looked aside for an instant, and when he looked back, it was as though he was steeling himself, holding himself ready for some kind of blow. “It doesn’t always work. Sometimes it goes too far. Usually with girls.”

“Why –”

“Don’t ask,” he said, with the same unconscious force Robin had heard him use earlier. Then, rapidly, he carried on, as if to shift the focus from his obvious discomfit, “You only have to look at Kae to see what girls can be like as vampires.”

The name made Robin tense. He’ll go entertain Kae tonight. Paul’s words from earlier made her insides twist. “You mean a bitch?”

“That,” Paul agreed. “But she’s vicious. If you ever see her in action – it’s not pretty.”

“Is it ever pretty?” Robin asked lightly.

“No,” he admitted. “But it can be quick.”

Robin shuddered at the grimness in Paul’s voice. The implication unnerved her. “And that’s because she’s a girl?”

“Seems they go that way more often than guys do,” Paul said slowly. “Sometimes...”

He stopped. Robin waited expectantly for him to complete the sentence, but the blonde vampire seemed to have lost himself in his thoughts. She finished her mocha instead, reflecting that of all the places she might have spent the night, and all the people she might have spent it with, a coffee bar in Leeds and Paul were about the least likely. But then she hadn’t seen David’s sudden character reversal coming, either.

“You want another one of those?”

Robin looked up. Whatever had been bothering Paul, he seemed to have put it to the back of his mind. “Is it safe to stay?”

Paul frowned.”Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You said there were vampires out there.”

“Yeah, but there’s one in here, too,” Paul said. “And I’m badder than they are.”

Lucas smelled blood long before he turned the corner into the alleyway, but when he did, the scent hit him like a fist, hot and metallic on the cold air.

Behind him, Kyle said, “Jesus,” and Don offered a more extended string of curses.
Lucas assessed the situation rapidly, setting down the half-full gas can he’d picked up on the way, then turned to his seconds. “You didn’t see this. Stay here.”

“...just flipped out...”

“...not taking a fall for her...”

Satisfied that they wouldn’t follow him into a situation he wanted to handle one on one, Lucas proceeded down the narrow alley, picking a path between trash sacks, broken bottles and splintered pallets. He paused to look at the hand lying outstretched from behind a big commercial dumpster. The hand was attached to an arm, but the arm wasn’t attached to anything else.

“Do you want to get out here and explain just what the fuck you were thinking?” he asked.

He could hear her breathing in harsh, ragged pants; feel her emotions charting a precarious tangent between rage and exultance; sense that she hovered on the edge of attacking him, but Lucas wasn’t afraid of one of his own. He’d eaten recently enough that the blood spattered liberally on the ground, the walls, on every last piece of garbage within a wide radius in the filthy alley, didn’t cloud his thinking. Rather, he was angry – a controlled, focused fury at the selfishness, the lack of discipline, and the sheer, criminal waste.

“Kae, get the fuck out here,” he said, with quickly thinning patience.

She obeyed, of course – crazy or not, she couldn’t disobey a direct order from her rank leader – but she didn’t emerge alone.

“For God’s sake,” Lucas said disgustedly. “Was he even old enough to shave yet?”

Given the amount of blood Kae had managed to splash across the general vicinity, she was relatively clean herself, but the crimson dribbles down her chin would have told the story even if she hadn’t been clutching the gory shell of her victim. “He shouldn’t have crossed me.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You went looking for him.”

“I don’t mean this.” Kae shook the boy’s corpse – missing more than just the one arm Lucas had spotted – like a ragdoll, and then flung it down.

Lucas regarded her for a moment, putting it together. “So I’m guessing David doesn’t want to play with you any more.”

“You cocksucker,” Kae raged. “Like you even care!”

“You’re damn right I don’t care,” Lucas said, his anger rising again. “All I care is that you’ve gone batshit on this poor bastard. What the hell were you thinking? You know the rules!”

“Fuck the rules!” she snarled.

Lucas abandoned any semblance of the reason that wasn’t getting through. He advanced on her faster than she could move, seizing her by the throat and slamming her back against the blood-stained brickwork of the wall. “They only need one reason to throw you out. One reason!” He let his claws dig into her neck for emphasis. “And if David gets wind that you’ve been killing like this, it’s all our necks on the line. Mine included.” He looked around at the carnage Kae had caused, curling his lip in revulsion. “You’ve spilled more than you’ve drunk. I ought to make you get down and lick this place clean.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Kae spat.

“Don’t tempt me.” Lucas let her go, and walked back to the mouth of the alley, where he’d left the gas can.

“What’s the crazy bitch done now?” Kyle asked.

Lucas shook his head. “You didn’t see anything,” he repeated. “This does not get back to the Boys.”

He spun the cap off the gas can and walked back to the scene of Kae’s kill. The dismembered body of her youthful victim was scarcely recognisable, but Lucas couldn’t hide the fact that the boy’s limbs had been torn from his body. Still, he kicked the parts he could see into a heap with the torso and poured gasoline over everything. He sloshed what was left around, and tipped the last of it into the dumpster for good measure, reckoning there’d be at least an old car battery or something to go up with the rest.

Kae stood by, glowering, as Lucas tossed the empty can into the dumpster. “You might want to move,” he suggested, poking around the rest of the trash until he found a filthy piece of rag. Still, she didn’t move until Lucas retreated almost to the end of the alley and took out his lighter to set fire to the cloth.

“I won’t forget this,” she threatened as she walked past him, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

Lucas waited until she was well past before he replied, watching the flames lick up around the balled rag in his hand. “No, I’m guessing you won’t,” he said, and tossed the burning cloth back into the alley behind him.