Thank you so much to all the spectacular, summery sweethearts of you who reviewed last time round :-) I loved knowing what you thought, and thank you all for your patience! Thanks: Persephone, Tough Fluff, Starwisher, Myst, Dead Flower, Aquilla, Me, Kittykatt, Dark Angel, Diomede, Jen, and the fantastic Fin.
Comments and criticism would be worshipped like sunlight, songs and summer.
The lyrics are from Planet Perfecto's 'Bullet in the Gun'..
Remember Part Five
There's a bullet in the gun; there's a fire in your heart
You will move all mountains that stand in the way.
"Ouch!" Tam moved uneasily, glaring at Rob. If it wasn't enough that they'd had to climb in through his window in case his mother saw them, whatever the hell he was using on her cuts, it stung, though his hands were gentle. "Look, what exactly is this supposed to do? Apart from itch like hell."
Rob looked amused, his grey eyes with that playful glitter in them. "Look in the mirror."
She picked her way over the rubbish all over his floor to the mirror. "Do you ever clean—" She stopped.
The cuts were gone, like they had never been there. She tapped a finger on the side of her neck. Flawless skin. No sign of fang-marks, no ring of bruises where Aspen had nearly choked her, not even a tingle.
"What is that stuff/" she said in awe.
Her friend grinned. "A witch made it for me. Toya Irkil – works at the Blood-Rose Café at weekends?"
"She's a witch?" Tam knew the tall girl, whose hair fell like a sheet of frozen ink, but she hadn't even suspected she was a witch. A Wiccan, maybe, with those silver pentagrams that so often glittered in her ears, or a Goth, but not a witch.
"A damn good one." He laughed at her surprise. "You really didn't know?"
"I really didn't know." She waded back through the junk. "That's it, Robert Slivan, I'm going to make you spring-clean this missile-testing site and I don't care if it means genocide for innocent bacteria. But..." She sighed, glancing at her watch. "It's going to have to be after this party. I have to go home and get changed."
Party. What a farce. Ellie's parties were an excuse for her to invite new groups of people and see whether there was anything suspiciously supernatural about them. And to arrange the next hunt.
"Fine, but if you want to clean this, don't expect help," he demurred. "See you at seven."
X - X - X - X - X
"Well, don't we look nice," remarked Therese dispassionately as the trio met just outside the vermin party. Sunset cast hellish shadows across the predatory faces. "I feel like the opening act of Macbeth – and when shall we three meet again?"
In her eyes, Aspen could not see his own reflection, or the light of the sun. Some people believed mirrors stole your soul. He believed that Therese was a living mirror.
"Why, when the battle's done and won," Blue said dryly. "You look ravishing, my dear spider."
She had gone for a soft silvery top that looked like velvet, cut low, chopped off at her midriff and matched with a darker pair of trousers that flared out at the bottom. On her feet...Aspen stared...were five inch heels.
"Therese," he said slowly, "I thought you were planning on hunting tonight?"
"I am, Aspen," she purred, pouting black-painted lips. "But they're hardly going to let us in if we look like a bunch of slobs." Her pointed ebony glance swept him, taking in the navy combats, faded sneakers and snug white top.
Blue shrugged. He was in a tight ripped azure T-shirt that showed glimpses of his torso and black, white and blue trousers in a camouflage pattern. His feet were bare. "They're going to be hammered, my dear spider. By now, they'd let America's most wanted in. And who said we were going via the front door?"
"Hammered?" she repeated with a raise of her eyebrows, plucked into one razor thin line. "I didn't know we were taking weapons."
Aspen's voice was filled with mischief. It always delighted him to know something Therese didn't. "Hammered. Out of their tree. Off their trolley. Drunk. You know what vermin are like with alcohol."
Her thin mouth curled. "They have so little restraint. Remember, the vermin boy's mine."
"All of them?" he said. "Greedy of you, Therese. Share and share alike..."
"Not all of them," she corrected, bringing a compact out from the depths of the top – how anything could fit down there, he didn't know. She flipped it open and dabbed her finger in it, then brushed powder over her eyelids, turning them soot black. "Just one...the blond one that your vermin girl runs with."
"He's all yours," Aspen said shortly, rubbing at a nearly-faded bruise. "I hope you tear his throat out."
"Shall we go, then?" Blue inquired. His eyes were dark and hooded, death to any vermin who looked into them tonight. Aspen couldn't shake the feeling that since he'd seen Blue three years back he had become more powerful than he had any right to be. "Try not to cause any more trouble than you can help...I'd like to at least find out what they're up to before we start killing."
They slid down towards the waiting cattlemarket of vermin. A tune floated into Aspen's head, and it reverberated through the darkness as he hummed it.
"Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be..."
X - X - X - X - X
"You took your time," Eleanor Saxoine murmured dangerously as they walked in, Tam in her crimson dress feeling like a rag to a bull. Music was pounding through the house, and half the high school was there, either high, drunk, dancing or a combination of the three. And Ellie, as ever, looked stunning.
She looked like – and indeed, was – a model, with a sultry smile and layered chestnut hair that always seem to fall perfectly into place, unlike Tam who had to spend twenty minutes of every morning pouring detangler into her wavy hair. But her brown eyes always held a venom that made Tam want to shrink back.
"I've found the perfect hunt tomorrow," she purred, scooping up three bottles of lager and passing two to Rob and Tam. She stopped and spun, putting a manicured hand on her hip. Her eyes stared into Tam and for a moment, she saw something that disturbed her. Pure black hatred. "It's something else."
"We're looking forward to it," Rob said brightly, pasting a smile on his face. "Hope it's better than the last one. I'm dying for a good hunt."
She ran a hand up his arm and Tam saw the quiver of revulsion he couldn't quite hide. "Oh, Rob...you're going to love this one... Meeting in the study in ten minutes." With a sly glance back, she swanned off.
Tam let out her breath in a shaky gasp. "What is up with her tonight?"
"That was weird," Rob agreed. Both of them put the bottles she had given them down on a table. "I think we need to be sober tonight. I don't like this at all."
X - X - X - X - X
"They've got some sort of get-together in the study," stated Aspen. His head was tilted on one side, the blond streaks turned hot orange in the sunset. "She's...worried." And afraid, but he didn't say that aloud.
"Excellent," Therese said, flashing a discreet amount of fang. Her earrings, he noticed, were a pair of serpent's teeth. He'd only seen them twice before, and it meant she was in a killing mood.
"Cue the evil cackle," Blue murmured. "Do you know where the study is?"
Aspen dipped into his soulmate's mind again. He had to do it carefully; Tamara's thoughts were a meadow of crocus fires, sudden and lovely and sensitive. He didn't want her to sense him, and he dared not stay too long in this bewitching place. "Yeah. There's a door, a window and a skylight. One of us at each exit?"
"Skylight's mine, I think," Blue declared. Aspen knew the lamia did mountain climbing...the crazy way. No safety harness, no partner – just Blue, his hands and feet and a few thousand metres of sheer rockface.
"Window," said Therese. "I'm not going through a mess of drunken, vomiting mortals to get to my prey."
"Done." The scene was oddly reminiscent of something he'd seen once. "Follow me, loyal sidekicks."
He yelped as Therese booted him in the knee. "What was that?"
A smile, cool as the curve of the crescent moon, turned up Blue's mouth. "A side kick, of course."
Aspen bared his teeth. "Try it again and you'll be eating your food through a straw."
There was a deadly silence. Threatening them wasn't wise, but he didn't give a damn. He could use some pain. It made everything easier...you couldn't worry about anything except when the pain would stop.
"I usually do anyway," was all Blue said, but under the light, his eyes had mutated with power, turning an inhuman silver-blue, and two pearled fangs slid between that proud mouth. Aspen looked at Therese and saw her pupils were black and cavernous, and her forked tongue flicked between her canines. "Ready?"
They had been in this situation so often. The three of them, against the world and everyone in it. Aspen beamed. He'd forgotten the good times...the music of screams, soaked in the blood of others, drinking in power with every breath.
"Oh yes."
X - X - X - X - X
Tam couldn't shake the feeling she was being watched. It niggled at her, making the hairs stand on the back of her neck. But she didn't dare look around in case Ellie noticed.
They were all there; the score or so that were the in-crowd. In nothing but trouble, as far as Tam could see.
Of all the people in the room, she and Rob were the only ones who didn't want to be here. The rest of them loved it. The guys got to be the heroes, while some of the girls got to jump about pouting and pretend to be Buffy. They saw vampires, shapeshifters and werewolves as nothing more than prey, nothing more than animals.
Sometimes Tam thought that there were monsters in human form than the Nightworld could ever produce.
The scene was surreal. Twenty people, dressed for a party. Holding bottles, and under their clothes, weapons. Low dresses, designer trousers and shirts, strappy shoes, combined with metal and wood. The smell of aftershave, perfume and make-up mixing with sweat and alcohol.
"You're going to love this one!" Ellie called out gleefully, and people shut up. She smirked and flung open a cabinet. New firepower, hand guns and rifles. Some of this had definitely come off the black market.
"New kit...and new prey. I've found us some more vamps...and these ones are dangerous!"
"They're all dangerous," someone called. "We're not here to hunt rabbits, Ellie!"
"No," she agreed smugly. "We're here to hunt vampires...and we've executed twenty of them now – one each! So I thought I'd make this one a celebration. There's three of them, and they're powerful."
"We know 'em?" a girl called. God, Tam thought. Please don't let me know them.
Ellie pulled a firearm out. It was a handgun, shiny and black and harmless. She loaded it and put the safety on, as intent on playing the drama queen as ever. Her voice was muted, so Tam had to strain to catch it. As people moved closer, leaned forward, she had a sudden sense of wrongness. Something was out of place...
There was a shadow falling across the skylight.
She didn't dare look up, but let her eyes subtly swing sideways to the window. She caught a flash of gold and black before there was only the garden vista. Two exits blocked...only two?
She let her gaze slide back the other way, to the door that should have been shut firmly. But it was open, and there was a shape pressed close. A shape with three blond streaks catching white highlights, and a face that was watching her. Eyes filled with disbelief, and worse, betrayal.
No...
"Therese Orage," Ellie announced. Nodding of heads; no surprises there. "Aspen Martin." One or two raised eyebrows. "And the third one...well, you all know him—"
Glass exploded into the room.
X - X - X - X - X
She heard Ellie shriek while humans dived for weapons or cover, depending on how many braincells they had left, as the skylight shattered with a sound like discordant windchimes. Among the glittering shards of glass raining down, a lean boy dropped to land lithely on his feet.
Blue flashed a bright, predator's grin at the horde and dusted chips of glass from his tousled azure hair. "Hi. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Blue Malefici. I could use a good slay – volunteers?"
Ellie stared. "How are you here?" she managed to get out, her hand inching back towards the weapons.
"Inbreeding would be my guess," Rob muttered.
The vampire turned to pin her friend with a liquid, immortal blue stare. "Wrong side of the family." As Ellie's fingers closed on a gun, it flipped into the air, and straight into Blue's grasp. "Ah-ah...very precocious, my dear. By the way, burying one's victims is always a good idea. To ensure they remain dead if nothing else. Dismembered limbs lying about so carelessly always make me less inclined to suspect suicide or spontaneous combustion. And the only cause of freak amputation round here is me."
A gesture of his hands, and metal groaned...the twisted lump that had been the gun thudded to the floor.
The window smashed shrilly, and Therese slithered in, her body undulating like a charmed snake. Her eyes were heavy with hunger, her shiny black lips parting to show white fangs...and she was looking at Rob.
"I'm going to drown in you," she said huskily. "Hold still."
"Bite me," Rob spat, promptly realising his mistake. "Hell, no, I don't mean that."
Tam was ignoring them though; she had turned a sallow face to the door that she was half-expecting Aspen to fling open. But then she met his eyes, one a pure, sweet silver and the other a glittering diamond.
She thought lightning flashed in them, splitting his soul open and baring it to her whether he wanted it or not. And she felt, truly felt, his shock, his anguish before he turned and fled.
Oh god...she followed without a thought, ripping through the crowd, thrusting open the door and kicking off her impractical shoes to dash barefoot through the house, cursing and half-hopping as she trod on a bottle-cap some moron had left lying around.
He was fleet as a hare, parting the crowds easily. Yet she kept on chasing, desperate.
He could take his body away from her, but his soul was trapped. Tam reached out in a way that was solely instinct and called to him to stop, please stop and wait. Behind her, she heard screams and shouts, crashes of glass. She didn't care. The world could burn, and she would run through its embers to find him.
Outside now, into the syrupy sunset light, stumbling on the thistles and rocks that littered the garden.
Losing him...
"Vous êtes mon âme!" she screamed to the bruised sky, praying he would hear. On her knees, gasping in the dirt. The ground was gritty under her palms, and still warm from the smothering heat of the day.
He had stopped. She sensed it. He had stopped, but he wouldn't come back to her, because he was only a writhing mass of betrayal and hurt now. The half-healed wounds in him had split open, and he could do nothing but stand and ache as whatever haunted him howled through his damaged soul.
She got up, wincing at the pain in her feet, with her dress dirtied and creased and her styled hair falling down in tumbling masses. Like Red Riding Hood, she went to meet her wolf, her monster, hers.
He was leaning against a cherry tree, his back to her, alone under the thick canopy of green leaves. One hand rested on the trunk, one was over his eyes.
"Aspen," she implored softly, a lump in her throat hurting for him. "It's not what it seems."
He turned, and looking into his eyes, helpless and swimming in darkness, she thought: he is dead. The world is a ghost to him. He has only his pain and the cause of his pain.
"So you're the killers," he said, his voice low and taut. His mouth was stretched in a dreadful, circus grin, gaping like a wound. "Did you like it? Were you looking at me and wondering what I'd look like running?"
"No." It flew past the cracking madness in his eyes.
"Must have been a shock for all those idiots you killed. Pretty girl like you, hunting us big tough bastards." She saw his eyes break open, and poisonous hell came spilling out. "How could you? You were meant to save me! You were supposed to be good and pure and everything I'm not!"
She could scarcely believe it. This eerie, insane boy still believed in fairytales.
"I'm not one of them," she insisted. She had experienced Aspen in a way that was beyond physical; she knew how silk felt under his touch, and what the colour yellow meant to him, and how the intoxicating elixir of blood tasted, yes, she had experienced him...but she didn't know him.
He flung the words at her dully. "You have betrayed me." Then those bright burning eyes fell shut and he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. "Why don't you just kill me here? It'd be easier. It wouldn't hurt that way. You...you have hurt me more than anyone ever has."
"Have I really?" she asked gently. It hurt to have someone tell her that. But she knew it wasn't true, and knew she could prove that to him, if only he would let her. If he would leave the spinning, destructive whirlpool of his mind, he would see that.
"Part of me says no, that people have done worse to me than this." He laughed bitterly. "But then I realise that they never gave me hope."
How could he survive without hope? What was made him wake each morning, and sleep each night?
"No one ever touched me like you did," he continued. His voice was calm, but it was the patient silence that lay over a battlefield, a silence drenched in emptiness and carnage. "I thought...it would be different this time. That maybe you'd want me. But I guess all you wanted me for was your hunt."
Still he wouldn't look at her, simply hiding his eyes from her. Half his face was cast in shadow, moulded to the darkness. And the other half was bleak and beautiful. She walked to him silently, on her battered feet.
Somewhere, this had happened before, this invasion of self and soul. She could feel the bond, wanting to join them if only he would let it. She reached out, and ran her fingertips down his cheekbone, then nudged his hand from his face, until she was staring at him, into those terrified and vulnerable eyes.
His lips were parted, breath coming fast. But it wasn't her he feared, Tam understood that. She stood there, a scarecrow of the girl who had walked in and not even caring how she looked. She raised her hands and cupped his face.
"You don't have to be afraid of me," she told him. "Of all of them...I won't hurt you."
His mental voice filled her senses, nightmares rattling behind it. Of all of them...I can't stop you.
"But I won't," she whispered, standing on her toes so she could meet his eyes squarely and watch as a new emotion crept in, one that caused regret to rise in her throat like the jab of a fishhook. It was longing, a longing so powerful that it made him want to curl up and hide from it.
She seemed to see another person laid over his form for a moment, tall and proud. And she remembered the words that had been spoken as if recalling the lyrics of a long-forgotten song, falling from her lips.
"Laissez-moi toucher votre coeur caché."
It reached him, reached through time to the immortal part of him that had always been hers. Slowly, he inhaled, then touchingly hesitant, he lowered his mouth to hers, until they were almost meeting and the aurora borealis danced behind her eyelids.
"Yes," he sighed softly, present blurring into past as words dissolved into a far sweeter language.
Until the end of all time, I'll be by your side.
Always dream that I'm yours and I'll dream you're mine.
X - X - X - X - X
Comments would be absolutely adored – thank you for reading!