burning building and burly men clad in yellow jackets were poking at the entrance. I wondered how long it would be before they went inside and found Jack's body. Or Mundy's hand and Thomas's heart - if those hadn't already burned to unrecognisable ash.
I rested my head on Gary's shoulder again. "How did you go with Hamish?"
"Good. Got him through a window into the bathroom of a bar. I belted on the door until I heard someone coming, then left."
"Was he still conscious?"
"Yeah. He kept giving me funny looks."
You just saved his life by licking his neck. I'll bet his looks weren't half as funny as his actual thoughts.
"He's had a weird night," I said.
Another moment of silence and then Gary said: "Thanks. For your help."
I sighed.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Do I look all right?" A bit of snark leaked out.
"Um. Yeah. Pretty much. Your breathing's more regular. Your heartbeat's a little fast but it's not racing any more."
Great. Mayhem, murder, arson and secrecy were the new normal, and I was in fact fine. I'd probably fail to cope if my life ever looked like other people's.
In due course, we got to our feet and I followed him across the rooftop, over abandoned tiles, lengths of wood, sheets of corrugated iron, bits of pipe and the occasional chair leg. While trucks and onlookers gathered on the street side, I made sure my bag was settled across my body and let Gary piggy-back me down into the alley side. We got to the ground without being seen and walked back to my place.
First I collected my mail, then we went up in the lift and I opened the front door. Stepped through. Paused.
It was a thing with Gary that I didn't specifically invite him in. Not since the first time he had made a choice to cross that threshold uninvited to be my friend. The few occasions that he visited me - invariably when Kate was not around - he would take a moment to steel himself, then step inside.
Vampires were not supposed to be able to do that - enter homes uninvited. I don't know that he could have done it at any other house, or at churches or other places of communal gathering which were also on the list of places he couldn't enter. Vampires always liked to claim that they could go inside, if they really wanted to, but somehow that never translated into actually wanting to.
Except for Gary and my home, and he stepped across that threshold, uninvited, on a semi-regular basis.
Defying his nature looked deceptively easy, except that once over it he would shudder, head to foot. Like someone had stepped over his grave, as my Nanna used to say. I wondered if it hurt him, but he'd always blink then beam a pleased smile, and we'd get on with things.
Things, in this case, consisted of giving Gary back his DVD, throwing the now empty esky bag in the bin and Gary putting the kettle on while I went to scrub myself raw-pink in the shower. The hot water didn't relax me so much as make me slightly less tense. I didn't think I could sleep. I felt simultaneously exhausted and wide awake.
In the living room, Gary was fingering the splotches of blood on his jeans and layers of T-shirt and Hawaiian overshirt with distaste.
"You should clean up too," I suggested.
"Yeah." He made for the bathroom. A few minutes later I heard the shower running and shouted through the door that he could find a spare towel in the cupboard. Vampires don't sweat, but he was looking grimy. I suppose they accumulate dust. Like bookshelves.
Track pants and a baggy T-shirt for comfort made up my fashion statement for the evening. Brushing my hair was an exercise in futility in the long term. For now I controlled it with an elastic tie.
Then I sat on my bed and opened the mail - a large envelope from the university. The contents confirmed the doubling of my post-grad workload from one unit to two next semester. Returning to part time study late last year had been a good professional and personal step, one that Kate had enthusiastically encouraged. Anthony was helping me encourage her in turn to get back to her own interrupted legal studies.
I was too fatigued by the evening's events to do the Excited Dance, but the sense of satisfaction the confirmation gave me went a long way towards calming me down.
Back in the living room I found a cup of tea on the coffee table and the new DVD loaded into the machine. The TV screen and sound were both still off - Gary couldn't remember which buttons on which of the various remote controls activated what device. At his own place, he had the buttons labelled.
Gary sat on the sofa with a slim, battered book in his hands, clad once more in his now damp-in-spots jeans and T-shirt, the Hawaiian shirt draped over the back of a kitchen chair to dry. The book looked like it had been jammed into his jeans pocket and had suffered the consequences. I refrained from giving him a lecture about the treatment of books. Normally he kept his reading matter in excellent condition. He even kept his shelves at home alphabetised and deweyfied without my prompting.
"What's that?"
He held up the book for me to see. Clearly second-hand, it was one of the long-running 'Sunny Meadows High' series aimed at tween-aged girls. This one had a ridiculous title and an even more ridiculous cover.
"What on earth are you reading that for?"
"There's a vampire in it."
Of course. Gary collected any old tripe if it had a vampire in it. Films, books, magazines, comics, music. He had some good stuff in his collection, but a lot of it was bizarre.
"Is it good? I mean, is it accurate?" I sat next to him.
"Hell no. Look at this." He thrust the open pages at me and I read the offending paragraph, which mainly concerned an undead boy full of sad pain because he had a crush on one blonde twin sister and so had eaten the other's pet kitten in an attempt to curb his vicious killer appetites. A single tear had fallen from his black-as-midnight eyes before I decided I'd rather stab myself than read another word.
"How about we watch this then?" I pointed at the DVD case. I wasn't willing to touch it yet.
Gary gathered up the various remotes and thrust them all at me so I could get the film underway. That done, I tasted the tea. For a man who couldn't drink or eat, he made a good cuppa. He claimed the secret was in the time you gave it to brew, something he'd learned from his father.
Gary made notes about the film on a sheet of paper he kept in the back of the 'Sunny Meadows' book. I tried to pay attention and failed. Perhaps I was dealing with all this crap spectacularly well. That didn't mean I could stop thinking about it.
Magdalene and Mundy's certainty that Gary was taking blood from me was irritating but not for obvious reasons. They were right about him being different these days, and it annoyed me that it had taken their comments for me to really notice.
Was he getting blood from somewhere else? And if he was, why did that thought make me feel both repelled and possessive? When had it started? Why hadn't I noticed? Maybe it had started so long ago that it hadn't struck me as notably different to how he usually was.
"What's up?"
I
