to conduct yourself."
His brow furrowed with puzzlement.
"While it is pleasing to see that you have finally come back to our way of thinking, you really should vary your sources. There is no point in getting too attached to only one. They wear out after a while. Look at Alberto."
Gary frowned more deeply still at the cryptic comments, before comprehension dawned. "It's not…we aren't…I don't."
"Of course you do," Magdalene said scornfully.
Gary stared at her, slack-jawed for a second, before closing his mouth on whatever response had occurred to him. Magdalene's tight-lipped smile contained a tinge of triumph that made no sense to me.
"What?"
"Later," Gary muttered, "not here."
Fine by me. I let him take me by the elbow and guide me back towards the stairs.
That was when the window at the top of the stairs smashed inwards and a smoking body, smelling of burnt cloth and charred meat, tumbled onto the floor in a shower of glass.
CHAPTER 3
Everyone froze - vampires, people, idiots. After a rigid second I looked for, but couldn't see, a fire extinguisher. Too late anyway - whoever it was, they weren't on fire any more. An ambulance was no good either. I'd figured out pretty quickly that, to have climbed over roofs and down walls to get to the dead-end window in that condition, they'd probably been dead for a good many years already.
"Who the hell's that?" Smith asked from behind me, more curious than shocked.
It took a moment for the body in the midst of the shards of glass to move again, dragging itself into a sitting position. It was a man, hair burned away, along with half his face, shirt hanging in sooty ruin over his thin frame. His arms were streaked with black too, and the fingers of one hand were fused together. A triangle of glass was sticking out of his upper arm. He jerked it bloodlessly free and tossed it aside.
"Magdalene?" The voice was a croak. I thought for a moment it was Mundy, then it lifted both hands in front of its blackened face to look at the devastation. His one good eye was wide as he inspected the damage, apparently unaware that his face was in a worse state. "Fuck, Magdalene, look what they did to me."
Magdalene moved to get a closer look and her face scrunched up in disapproval. "What who did to you Thomas?" No sign of the sweet nanna persona now.
One of the girls gave a little peep of despair and rushed towards the injured figure. "Thomas!" Head thrown back, she offered her throat to him. Thomas stared at her blankly.
"It's me, Ingrid," she reached out to him imploringly but was afraid to touch his skin. It would probably flake away, I thought, horrified on too many levels to count. "Please. Let me help." She held her T-shirt down, stretching the fabric, offering herself.
"Don't," I began. Too late. Thomas, with a frightening, guttural growl, buried his teeth in her skin. Into flesh and pumping blood. I could hear the wet sucking sound, and Ingrid's whimper. I could see her face, her little nose screwed up against the smell of burnt flesh.
"Why is she doing that?" Gary said, not bothering to whisper.
I dragged my eyes away from them. "I think she thinks it's going to heal him."
"That's stupid," said Gary.
As far as Gary understood and had explained it to me, the stuff in their veins could repair their flesh and bone - like gluing a broken vase back together, he'd said all matter-of-fact - but it couldn't grow brand new cells. Even a haircut was permanent. The destruction visited on Thomas was much too severe to ever repair itself. His skull showed cavities where his face used to be. Whatever he looked like under the soot, that's how he'd always look now.
"I don't know why he's doing it either," Gary sounded irritated. "Blood only makes you feel more alive. It'll probably make it hurt more."
"Maybe he's got it wrong too," I suggested. It wasn't like being undead came with a manual. How many of them ended up disappointed that they couldn't change into bats or smoke after achieving eternal life?
Perhaps right now, Thomas really wanted to believe that the girl's blood could restore him. Vampires feel less intensely than living people, but they do still feel. I hoped he wasn't in as much pain as it looked like he was.
Then I decided it couldn't be more pain than Ingrid was in. Her eyes were widening as belatedly she realised this was not the brightest idea she'd ever had. She gasped and pushed at Thomas's shoulders, gently at first, then more energetically. A layer of shirt and skin gave way and Thomas growled and bit harder.
"Thomas?" a weak plea was in her voice. I stepped forward at the same time as Ingrid's friend and while the friend pulled on Ingrid's shoulders, I went straight to the source of the problem.
Dumb ideas were clearly on a "have two get one free" deal this evening. I ignored Gary's half-vocalised protest and strode across the floor to crouch by Thomas' side. Ingrid watched me, unable to verbalise the plea in her eyes. For an awful moment, they looked like Belinda's eyes, back in those days when our parents were fighting over her hospital bed, forgetting their dying daughter in their hurry to blame each other for her cancer.
I had no idea how to detach Thomas from the girl. I mainly thought of how I had to stick my finger in the corners of my dog Oscar's jaws to make him drop the remote whenever he was in the chewing mood.
"Let her go, Thomas," I ordered. Predictably he ignored me, so I worked a finger into the corner of his mouth. His back teeth crushed down on the top knuckle and I winced.
"Come on, you creep. It's not helping you. You know it's just making it worse."
I was aware of the way his clothes and skin stained black against my shirt and my hand. Another outfit ruined, I thought, trying to render this horror into a minor nuisance. My finger was starting to really hurt. Oscar was never this much trouble.
"Drop it," I commanded gruffly, as though Thomas really was just a naughty puppy wilfully ruining the TV remote. He responded by biting down harder than before. Feeling his teeth tear my skin, I snatched my hand back, cursing.
"Enough." Magdalene closed in, dug her fingers into the back of Thomas' neck, "Let go of her. Now." She gave him a shake. He whimpered and let go. Ingrid scrambled out of the way, her friend helping to drag her back, and they both glared at Thomas like they had been betrayed.
Ingrid had her hand pressed over her bleeding throat. Magdalene drew a pale silk handkerchief from her cleavage, spat liberally on it and handed it to Ingrid, who dabbed it carefully on the wound. She'd done this before. I could see already that the flow was slowing. Ingrid would be all right. There probably wouldn't even be a scar by morning. I tried not to think of Belinda again, who'd had no such luck, and felt a surge of anger at Ingrid the Idiot for letting this happen in the first place.
"What happened?" Magdalene demanded of Thomas.
"Little one jumped me. Big one stuck me with something." Thomas's voice sounded strange. The oxygen he drew in to talk with was escaping from holes in his throat, like damaged bellows. I withdrew, nursing my injured digit, to stand beside the relative safety of Gary.
"What kind of something?"
"Dunno.
