Descent - 2/16

Descent - 2/16

Kate's new apartment seemed purposefully designed to remind her how much she missed the old.

Where her former home was decorated in warm, natural colours, this was endless, stark white, interrupted by slashes of black and rimmed with steel. The old place was divided into rooms, each a small space meant for a specific purpose; this was uncomfortably open-plan. She would have had wooden bookcases everywhere, filled with dog-eared paperbacks and dusty photographs; this had bare, high-tech glass shelving. Her kitchen had been a hotchpotch of hanging pans, jars of utensils and recipes torn from magazines (never to be tried but optimistically saved anyway); this kitchen was a soulless corner, bright, clean and impractical. A kitchen clearly meant for a resident who ate out a lot.

In fact the whole place seemed ideally made for someone who was never coming home. The shiny surfaces picked up smudges and fingerprints easily and the lack of patterns meant that every stray hair, every piece of fluff or dust sprang into relief as soon as the morning sun shone.

She dumped her bag (a practical black canvas rucksack) on one of the sofas (also black, soft leather) and made herself a cup of tea in the detested kitchen. As the kettle boiled, she repeated her mantra. She told herself it didn't matter that she hated the apartment. It was just a temporary stay. It was convenient and the rent was low because she was taking it on from a friend on sabbatical abroad. It gave her a base in the city, which otherwise would be beyond her means. Its very ugliness was positive, encouraging her to get out and make a place for herself, a new life.

In her old apartment, she would have sat, hour after hour, wallowing in memories. She realised now (in fact, deep inside she had always known) that the place was a homage to her mother. She'd made it that way, unconsciously. Perhaps that's why her father had visited so infrequently. Perhaps that's why his place resembled a meeting room in a working man's club, no frills, nothing that wasn't plain, serviceable and necessary. (Aside from the small collection of awards and trophies, but those were for bravery outside the domestic sphere.) It was another strange symptom of their rift, the way they'd each dealt with her death in their own separate, entirely different way.

In the new apartment, there were no memories, and no corners where she felt like hiding. She stared ruefully at the sheet of plate glass in front of her. It didn't even have four walls.

Kate closed her eyes, partly to avoid looking at her surroundings and partly to analyse her headache in more minute detail. With each heartbeat a pulse of liquid thumped against her temples painfully, her frontal lobes seemed to cry out in protest and muscles at the back of her neck tensed and only half released. The meeting with Angel had been tough.

She hated herself for it, but as soon as she saw his face, she remembered.

Now she was away from him, she recalled his tolerance and eagerness to help when they'd first met. His clumsy but heartfelt attempts to sympathise when her father lay dead on the carpet. His forgiveness of her hatred, so undeserved and unexpected, and her failure to apologise or sufficiently acknowledge him for anything he'd done.

Most of all, she remembered being held up under jets of warm water, a frantic voice begging her to live, a physical presence trying to put the life back into her by force and simply refusing to accept her death.

She gave him credit for his guile in saving her from the demons in the museum.

But in his company, all those memories were ruthlessly swept away by one other. The fact that he'd overpowered her once; bitten her, sunk his teeth into her neck and taken her blood.

If she thought about it, she could still feel a separate and distinct pain in her throat, like a rheumatism, a wasting of the flesh. She wouldn't touch that skin with her fingers now, because she didn't want to feel the daisy-chain of scar-tissue that remained. Stupid, because she knew at heart that neither the pain or the scar were important, in themselves. Nor was it helpful that he'd done it to save her from something worse. The point was, for a moment, she'd been powerless. She'd really understood for the first time, how dangerous he was.

How ironic that, even as he was trying to save her life, he demonstrated how easy it would be for him to extinguish it, if he so desired.

She tried not to think about that.

Sometimes, she failed, and lay awake, wondering why she was alive, after everything she'd said, everything she'd done and tried to do to him. For a long time, she'd simply wanted him dead.

Kate settled her mug on the edge of a sheet of greenish glass claiming to be a coffee table, and took up the TV remote (at least in this apartment there was no chance of *that* getting lost). She flicked from channel to channel, looking for the local news. Eventually, an item about a murder in Sun Valley caught her eye. It was depressingly low on detail, but the anchorman and a perky roving reporter managed to make a handful of bare facts and a tight-lipped interview with a police spokesperson stretch over ten minutes of airtime.

The victim was a young Australian woman, Shawna Copeland. Embassy officials had been involved in notifying Ms Copeland's parents and there was no statement from either them or the embassy yet. Ms Copeland was not a resident of LA and police were working on the assumption that she was on vacation, and that this was a random killing, most probably a robbery gone badly wrong. Kate stared longingly into the flickering images, her mouth slightly open, as the reporter stood as close as possible to the fluttering, yellow police tape.

She was distracted by the brittle noise of her mobile phone, trilling to her from the rucksack. Wiping a drop of saliva from her bottom lip, she scurried over to the noise and pressed the button to take the call.

"Kate Lockley... Yes Ma'am, I do... Yes I can... All right then, tomorrow at nine sharp... I'll be there."

She was about to snap the phone shut, when a large sheet of violent pink paper, affixed to the plate glass window with sticky-tape, caught her eye. As the line went dead, she added hurriedly: "Thanks for your call."

The paper was blank, apart from a short phrase, scrawled in black marker pen. The same phrase was repeated on the fridge draw and on a sticky label affixed to her phone.

"Remember to say - THANK-YOU"

She took a deep breath, and dialled the Hyperion.