far away. I’m sorry Alex and Kurt are dead, but I’m not the one who killed them.’
‘You sure as hell didn’t save them,’ Sal snarled.
Yuka pushed her slender body between the two men. Neither of them made the mistake of thinking that because she was small she wasn’t strong. She could probably have broken at least one of them in thirteen places with only her left hand and a well-aimed drum stick.
Laszlo, in fact, had seen her perform a similar feat against the undead in that factory in Budapest, so when she glared at the two much taller men, Laszlo did the sensible thing. He took a step away, dropping his gaze to his feet. ‘Sorry, Yuka.’
Sal had backed off fractionally, his expression mutinous, his eyes glittering bright. He transferred his glare to Yuka.
She glared right back, her accent clipped and firm. ‘Laszlo is not the enemy.’
A shudder ran through him. Sal closed his eyes and the glittering brightness in his eyes escaped in wet tracks.
‘I know. Sorry, Laszlo.’
‘And I, Sal.’ Laszlo managed to tilt an awkward smile at Sal. He felt bad that it had spiralled out of hand so quickly. They were new to each other, Laszlo and the others. One week acquainted, when Alex, Kurt, Sal, Yuka and Steve had been a team for years. When three of them were still mourning their murdered friends.
Laszlo is not the enemy, Yuka had said. It made him… he didn’t know. Sad. Determined. Afraid.
I am not the enemy, he told himself firmly, I never was.
That felt like a lie.
I never will be again.
There. That felt more like a true thing.
The sound of Steve clearing his throat garnered everyone’s instant attention. If their bass guitarist – the eldest of their group at nearly sixty and the most experienced in both battle and loss – had something to say, everyone was going to listen.
‘You know,’ Steve said in his slow drawl. ‘We can do it as a three piece if we have to. You can sing lead and play lead guitar, Sal, you’ve done it before.’
‘I…’
‘Ain’t no disrespect to them that’s gone. It’s wrong Alex and Kurt ain’t here, but that ain’t no-one’s fault but the fang-faced bastards what killed ‘em. We got guitars and drums. We got singers. We can do this.’
‘It’s not enough.’
‘It’ll have to be. Hey, Laszlo,’ Steve nodded at the Hungarian. ‘You played a mean fiddle when we needed you. You told Alex you used to play.’
Laszlo’s left hand twitched involuntarily. ‘A long time ago.’
‘Reckon you can learn some songs in a week?’
Laszlo shrugged, the gesture disguising the thrum of excitement that travelled from his heart to his fingertips. ‘Yes. If you need.’
‘We need, and it’ll be a lot easier to pick up the melodies when you’re not trying to slay vampires at the same time, I promise you.’
Laszlo snorted a wry laugh. ‘Oh, but it’s so motivational.’
‘I can give you motivation,’ Yuka said. Laszlo couldn’t tell if she was joking. She grinned, somewhat savagely, which was not enlightening.
Steve’s mouth twitched smile-ward and he settled back into his previous taciturn calm, hip hitched on the corner of the small table in their dorm room. They were short on funds – nothing new there – so the four of them were sharing a room at a backpackers’ joint at the north end of Melbourne. Beds were covered in duffel bags and instruments. A small, battered metal chest was shoved between two of the bunks.
‘You teach Laszlo the songs,’ Yuka told the band. ‘I will get food.’
With that, Yuka patted her belt, checking that her drum sticks were held in place, and left them to it.
She checked her reflection in the hostel’s foyer window, satisfying herself that she was neat enough to venture into public. ‘Foyer’ was putting it grandly. The shabby sofas, chairs and tables were filled with a scattering of equally shabby travellers, and the battered reception desk, jammed to overflowing with brochures and notices, boasted a perky and chaotic receptionist festooned with piercings and bold tattoos.
Yuka wasn’t tattooed – she’d left the inking to Kurt all these years. Only her earlobes were pierced, and they remained unadorned at present. She had the slightly misshapen once-torn ear to prove that wearing too much embedded jewellery while battling an armed and armoured mermaid, for example, could be a very bad idea.
What Yuka did have were her wrist cuffs and the necklace; her mementos of the dead. Her leather wrist cuffs were decorated with the parts of smashed drums, keyboards and guitars she had retrieved over a decade ago – all that was left of her first band.
She fingered the chunky necklace, made of the strings of Alex’s guitar and keys from Kurt’s keyboard. The weight of it around her neck was like the weight of them in her heart. Yuka’s grief was heavy but her anger held her up. Her rage had been helping her to carry grief for 15 long years.
Enough. Food now. Rehearsal later. They would take their respite while they could by simply playing music that was music and not a weapon, and decide how next to move. They were no longer Rome’s Burning. Alex had forged that band when he’d become its leader a decade ago. Alex was gone and they needed a new leader, and with that leader would come a new name. That had been the system for hundreds of years.
The drummer’s short, fast stride took her away from the hostel and to the dying activity of the Queen Victoria Markets, in the final phases of closing up for the day. Her plan had never been to do any actual shopping. For that sort of thing, she needed actual money. They had some, of course, but everyone became adept over the years at not spending it unless absolutely necessary.
Yuka walked through the undercover section of the markets that traditionally housed the fruit and vegetable stalls, redolent with the scent of overripe bananas, citrus and cabbage. Abandoned boxes not yet collected for disposal held discarded produce, more or less edible but not strictly saleable. Yuka found some plastic bags and, keeping her movements swift but unobtrusive, filled them with salvageable refuse. The overripe, split tomatoes would make a good base. A couple of broken carrots; a chunk of cauliflower; a bruised eggplant: a beggar’s feast right there. A half-smashed watermelon would pass for dessert.
Down the road apace was a supermarket. She’d be able to find rice there, oil, spices. There’d be enough for dinner, at least. Yuka was just wondering if she might splurge on a few fillets of chicken when she felt it. The movement, under her feet.
Like pins and needles, but on a string, wound around her feet and wriggling. The pins and needles were tugging her to the east.
Yuka’s toes curled inside her shoes, but the sensation didn’t go away. Her toes tingled. Her arches, too. Everything still felt like it was pulling to one side. Even the weight of her necklace seemed to have a magnetic drag to the east.
Not good.
She
