URBAN NOSGOTHIC
Chapter 6
As part of me waits for the inevitable sounds of the police breaking the door in, another part of me tries to explain a difficult point of law to an increasingly irritable ex-vampire.
"They are mortals."
"Yes, I know, but -"
"They are...fragile."
I really do not like the way he says this. It has the same implication as a man who is wielding a sledgehammer describing a rival's prized Faberge egg collection.
"I could easily kill them," he protests, and when he sees the look on my face, he amends, "Stop them. I could easily stop them."
From upstairs, my boyfriend chooses this moment to start screaming like a torture victim and kicking his heels against the bath. Clung. Clung-clung.
"Is everything all right in there, sir? We're going to come inside now -"
The Reaver snakes its way around Raziel's arm as he reacts instinctively to the sense of danger. I am cursed with a vivid imagination, and I can already see the police officers bifurcated by that glowing blade, looks of disbelief on their faces as they fall, cloven neatly in two, to the floor.
Clung-clung-clung. The bastard upstairs has actually started to shout for help, never mind the drugs, never mind the blood everywhere. I look up, desperate, at Raziel. There is no mercy in his blank, pale eyes, and I inwardly blame myself for forgetting: unlike me, he is not a creature given to running away. He no longer cares what he fights, as long as he can fight something. Because fighting something, doing anything, even if it causes him pain, steers his mind away from the memory of what has happened in his past. It does not remove the memory - for nothing can truly accomplish that - it merely fills the present with an active red blindness so complete that there is neither the time nor the inclination to remember.
I know this feeling well. Except that I tend to lean more towards obsessive vacuuming.
As I listen to the police outside discussing the relative merits of knocking the lock in, I give up any hope of this turning out to my advantage. My legs start to feel unreal, insubstantial as spider-web, and my vision bleaches out white as if I had fallen asleep sunbathing and only now awoken to a weird, over-exposed world. Raziel is a freakish negative of himself, his eyes glowing like the full moon at night. My head seems to be swelling, getting larger and heavier by the second -
clung-clung
-as my boyfriend redoubles his efforts to be heard -
thump-thump
-as my heart starts to race and skip beats -
I'm not aware that I'm falling until my head bounces off the edge of the sofa, and after that I only have a vague sense of movement and a dull, swift pain in my right wrist to help me account for what happens next.
A spray of water hits me in the face. Not fresh water, either - it smells like the sink-trap in a laundry. I gasp and my hands fly to my face to wipe it away from my nose and eyes.
"Wake up," says Raziel's voice. He sounds tense, but at the same time slightly bored, as if he's been waiting for me to regain my senses for some considerable time. "Wake up! I am not familiar with this area, and I need directions."
My eyes stinging from the vile water, I blink at him. I am sitting in a thin, litter-strewn alley that I most certainly don't recognise, and my wrist is swelling up to several times its natural size. I gape at it in dismay. Raziel, crouched on his haunches directly opposite me, notices my preoccupation and says: "Your arm hit the wall as I was carrying you out of your garden. I don't think it's broken."
My eyes narrow as I test the swelling with my other hand, gingerly. This is a bad one, even by my standards, but he's right, it's not broken. I must look more mortified than I feel because I elicit a grudging "Sorry," from him in addition.
"That garden wall is over ten feet high..." I say, somewhat stupidly (I must have caught that state-the-obvious disease from my boyfriend). Raziel shrugs.
"Is it?" he says. The night wind catches one of his ragged wings and lifts it clear of his back.
I sit up, cradling the wrist to me, and look around properly. At almost three a.m., the town around us is practically silent. The occasional car roars past in the street a few hundred yards away, and a dog starts yapping from a house somewhere in the suburbs.
Raziel has brought me to almost the centre of town. We are safe.
Something tells me it would be wiser not to ask why he chose to do it. For one thing, he does not look pleased with my slow recovery process, and asking how long it took him to ferry my unconscious form out of danger would probably be adding insult to injury, and might make him regret having done it. I choose to believe that he did it because somewhere inside him, maybe even at a basic instinctual level, he knows the difference between the bad guys and the good guys...and that he can't in all conscience see the bad guys win.
Raziel watches me stagger to my feet wordlessly, and waits at the mouth of the alley for me to join him. I am painfully aware of what a liability I am in my current state, and I force myself to hurry. A police siren wails, faint and far-off, and I jump, brushing his ragged wing.
"What is your name?"
Raziel is looking down at me with an unreadable expression. The question is so unexpected, so mannered and civil that I find myself stammering and thrown, unable to reply.
"I don't enjoy being at a disadvantage," he says, as if trying to be helpful. "And although you know my name and seemingly every detail of my life, I know nothing about you except that the man you call your mate tried to kill you. And I doubt that your name is 'bitch' as he seems to think it is..."
I could not have been more shocked if he had been a stranger flirting with me in a bar.
"Uh...Rhianna," I manage eventually. "My name is Rhianna. Rhi, for short."
