Chapter Eleven: Into The Tunnel

Hot feelings woke him. Thick and thrumming, as though a string inside of him was being plucked over and over again. Without a heartbeat, there was only one cause: Angelus woke with a fire in his stomach, and something better happening directly below it.

Darla lay on her side next to him, propped up one elbow, studying his half-conscious expression in profile. Gauging the effect of her hand's movement between his legs. Her small fingers wrapped around his erection in a practised grip, loose but unremitting, pulling him deliciously out of sleep. Her stare was surprisingly cool when it met his opening eyes, but she smiled quickly and squeezed him harder, running her thumb over the head and drawing out a moan from deep in his chest.

She was playing him like an accomplished musician giving a well-schooled performance, classic numbers thoroughly rehearsed and technically flawless. She knew one hundred ways to fuck, and she'd chosen an unfailingly direct and reliable routine: fast, relentless, and overwhelming. Her face burnt beside him, hot with determination. She'd dropped the mask, at least – sometimes she wore a steady face, a whore's face, here-to-please and selfless. Not now. Darla was there with him, unshakeable self-confidence backlighting the anticipation in her eyes. Almost despite himself, Angelus felt his body tremble at the prospect of what came next. A slow burn tracked down his spine to Darla's rhythm. Eight bars into her symphony, right on cue, he heaved out a longing sigh and shivered from head to toe. Grinning wickedly, watching a plan go well, Darla knelt up, straddled his legs, and dropped her mouth to his groin. She took him all the way in with her first swallow, her mouth and throat so tight around him he'd have felt the ridges on her palate if the sensation hadn't dazed him so. This old tune. Practiced, maybe, but perfect for it.

She kept her eyes shut, mouthing steadily and viciously, a picture of insatiable want. Sex for Darla was more often a means than an end, so it probably meant she wanted something else too, but he'd worry about that later. Thought, not yet woken for the night in his sleep-dissolved mind, stood no chance against the urgent, wordless sensations tearing him steadily apart. Darla did for thought altogether when she let blunt teeth gently scrape the underside of his shaft, making him clench his jaw around a moan.

No deviation on this path. She gauged precisely the moment he'd lose the ability to lie still and start thrusting into her mouth, and let him go. He groaned in protest but she moved up, planting her hands on the bed, staring down at him for a moment with a twisting smile. Just the sight of her, wicked, lustful, calculating and beautiful, made him grip her hips in his big hands and pull her body down brutally onto his erection.

Darla's head dropped forward and a half-sigh, half-moan escaped her gritted teeth. Her fair, undone hair fell wanton around her face, and when she opened her eyes they glittered with lust. It might have been a strategy, calculated to the last, but it was real, too; Angelus knew she starved without this. Beneath her, he shuddered, stabs of sensation snaking deep into his body where she trailed her fingertips at the side of his sensitive throat. She was melting gold above him, teasing before letting him move, and he felt his body trying to speed up beyond his control. She arched her back, squeezing him inside her, and he trembled - halfway down the road to blindness and moving fast.

Gold sparks burst behind his eyes. The swirl of Darla's hips, as she coaxed his knees up behind her and leaned back against them, burnt him to the core. He remembered dying. She was tipping forward now, her round breasts resting on his broad chest, heavy and soft. She looked for an instant as though she wanted to rest, lying on his body and staring down searchingly into his open-mouthed face. Her full lips were parted, close enough to kiss ... as if that were likely. She plunged back hard and fast; narrowing her eyes from tender to wicked, and squeezed him impossibly hard. Angelus was coming apart rapidly, choking with want. He slammed his hips up to meet her, the thrumming feeling so intense now it threatened to rattle his brains out. It was too much.

"Darla! Going to –" He opened stunned eyes and gasped.

Slow-motion amidst the storm, Darla smiled, twisted her arms up behind her head so her breasts pushed forward and out, and thrusts her hips forward violently. Angelus curled his toes into the sheets, threw his head back hard, and came in a rush that scoured him out from the inside.

"I get lost in you," he muttered, when he could think again.

Darla, lying on his stomach with her face at an appraising distance, smacked him half-affectionately on the arm. "Getting sentimental in your old age? That new boy's a bad influence." Then, inexplicably, she bit her tongue. Angelus frowned, but Darla quickly, and rather surprisingly, leant in and kissed him deeply. There went thought, again. "But go on," she whispered. "You can get lost in me."

She rose up off his body, her taut, stretching limbs and heavy-lidded eyes catlike, and sank down on her back beside him, knees raised. Angelus rolled over to cover her with his body and kissed her slowly, deeply, pleased to be back on top. He backed down the length of her lamplit-golden flesh, kissing first her breasts, then her stomach, then swirling his fingers and at last his tongue into the moisture between her thighs.

One way and another, it was over an hour before Angelus really got his brain working. "I've got to feed," he told a sated, supine Darla, resting on the sticky sheets.

"Fancy me monopolising your mouth, with so many deserving candidates out there," she murmured, eyes closed and smiling faintly.

Angelus sat up and hauled his legs over the side of the bed, his body feeling pleasantly used and thrumming for new sensations. He found trousers and a belt by the bed and slipped them on, reaching over for last night's soiled shirt and throwing it over his head. He thought he'd probably go and browse on the Piccadilly hookers – quick and filling, not too fragrant with perfume like the ones in the upmarket streets, just good, honest eating. He'd finished up all his 'projects' lately, and wanted to get in a quick kill for simple belly-filling purposes. Plotting devastating assaults on an unsuspecting soul, searing away every vestige of normality, ruining a person utterly and then, at the storybook moment when salvation surely had to come, killing them – well, that was what he existed for. But there was a time and a place even for snacking.

"Will you not come with me?" he asked Darla, stretching his arms out above his head so the muscles in his back groaned into life.

"Not tonight. Got a few loose ends to snap off before we leave town."

Angelus froze mid-stretch. Ah. There was a reason he'd finished up his last bit of ongoing business. Rage and rigour, sure. And the fact that they were high-tailing it out of London, before the new fledgling's self-dramatising vengeance crusade got them all staked.

"Jesus Mary." He let his arms drop to his sides. "It's tomorrow night we leave."

"Elizabeth will be waiting for us," confirmed Darla. "We should go as soon as night falls. It's a slog out to Deptford, and I don't want to give anyone the chance to catch up to us. We've probably time to pack up tonight, but then we need to go." She got out of bed and found a dress, snapping her fingers loosely at Angelus so he came and began lacing her corset without a thought. "Why so sad, lover?" she asked, looking over her shoulder as he tugged the ribbons tight. "You like moving on. Life on the road. Just think: bright new places to lay to waste!"

Her words seemed to snap him to consciousness, and with a look of disgust he dropped the corset-ties. Acting like Darla's lady's maid? "Get Dru to do this," he grunted, striding off in search of his boots, frowning at the infuriating thought that she'd scored a point off him.

Darla hissed in exasperation and reached round uselessly to grab at the ties herself. The shed was uncharacteristically quiet. Dru and William were seldom up before their elders. They were altogether too committed to matters between the sheets to go risking the twilight hours. Not that it was so very early now. Darla'd kept him occupied and senseless for hours.

"Where is Dru?" he asked. "Does she know we're leaving? We need her to get ready." The dark shed was silent. "Dru? Drusilla!" He turned back to Darla. "She's not here."

Darla rolled her eyes. "Oh?"

"She'll be off carousing with that boy! What if they don't come back here for dawn?"

Darla, fiddling with her dress, made a noncommittal noise. Angelus snapped, gripped her by the shoulders and forced her to meet his eyes. "I'm deadly serious. They need to get back here now. I'm not leaving without them."

"I'm not staying to pay for their mistakes," gritted Darla with parodied sweetness.

"Then I suppose you'll up and leave. Done it before."

"Now, dear boy – so insecure..."

Angelus thought for an infinitesimal moment about shaking her, but the venom in her face brought him back to himself: if he hit her now, he lost. "I'm going to find my girl," he spat at her. He stepped into his boots and grabbed his greatcoat as he left, turning as he made the door to see Darla's mouth open and eyes narrowed as though about to call him back. "Jealous, my sweet?" he asked, then slammed through the doorway and out into the night.

"Oh, precious, come back," deadpanned Darla, her voice low.

She walked sedately to the doorway, leaning against it to look out into the darkness. The watery moon was high and large, its face streaked with torn autumn clouds. She'd heard Drusilla and William leave in the morning – they'd be hours away by now. It could take Angelus at least the whole night to catch up to the fugitives, even if he could track them – and his connection to the girl, though intense as any sire's, seemed confused and fractured like none she'd seen before, distorted by Dru's own strangeness. She'd sense him too, and, wherever they were hiding, be able to dodge further off.

Angelus would concede. He'd come back by daybreak, ashamed at having failed to find the pair in this city, and stay quiet and go with her willingly. He'd see the danger coming, see the neat solution to the last two decades of nerve-fraying babysitting since he'd made that ridiculous decision and turned Dru, and leave with her. She'd left him before and knew he wouldn't risk it again. He was hers, and she'd prove it. They'd go to France, like he wanted, and sample the abbesses, and start a new chapter in their lives. And she'd win.

The creature was huge. Long yellow teeth, squarer than a vampire's but almost half the length of its narrow face, were bared between black jaws. Clawed feet on which the beast rose up, every trembling sinew in its thick haunches primed to spring forward. A lashing, sinuous, scaled-looking tail trailed fetid sewer-water from the tunnels whence it had crept. William narrowed his eyes and found his features changing involuntarily, steeling himself to face the brute down.

"Rats," moaned Drusilla. "Said so."

In London you were never more than a yard from a rat. so the public health reformers reported, on average. William had spent his whole life in genteel surrounds without a whiskered snout in sight, and rather felt that his quota was being made up now. The sewer teemed with them; vast, shrieking things, the size of the scrawny cats that picked through the litter in the alleys near the rail shed. The vermin were quite unperturbed by the vampires' presence and ran skittering past them, so close that their shiny, filthy, slick, fur brushed against their limbs and the hems of Dru's dress. The beast stock-still ahead of them in the tunnel was now puffed up like a gang leader, hunched forward and ready to pounce, staring them down with daunting ferocity.

William tried to recall the salient points of Angelus's great diatribe on the nature of vampires, but the recollected pain from Angelus breaking his head at the same time spoilt the memories. The gist had definitely been to do with evil, though. Vampires are evil. Evil, William suspected, was not scared of rats. Well, that was reason enough not to bother taking this one on, then, or whatever it was one might do when faced with a hissing, looming, immense rodent with murder in its nasty black eyes. Not much point in a great evil supernatural monster trying to, fight a common London sewer rat. Foregone conclusion. It was for the rat's own good that William, holding Dru's hand, altered his course to stride past the vicious-looking rodent, giving it a wide berth.

Drusilla did not appear to be enjoying the journey. She shuddered up and down, uncontrollably, pausing every now and then to bury her head in William's shoulder. It made him feel braver: couldn't let his own disgust show with this frightened princess clinging to him for safety. Let him forget that he hadn't really a clue where he was going. For now, just 'away from the rats' would do.

"Going to take you somewhere elegant," he promised Dru, holding her thin white hand in both of his. Dru let him lead her, looking down in distress at the foul liquid spoiling her delicate slippers. "All the places they wouldn't let me go when I was alive."

Dru pulled his hands up and kissed them distractedly, saying nothing.

"The nice hotels and dance halls." He tried hard to sound like he'd get them through it. "Somewhere with a little ... ah ... class." He furrowed his brow as foul water sluiced around his ankles – he needed to get hold of some sound boots – and hoisted Dru up into his arms again. She didn't even giggle, just leaned her head in to his neck.

He nearly dropped Drusilla in relief when they reached a stone stairwell set into the sewer tunnel wall. "Here we are, love. Soon be out of here."

He set her down gently at the foot of the stairs and climbed; the exit was by way of a trapdoor like the one in the rail shed, but a frame of brilliant light emerging from the cracks around it reminded William that it was morning. He sighed and clumped back down to Dru's side, sitting on the step with a heavy sigh.

"Wait here for the moon," Dru told him miserably.

He nodded, shuffling on the step in vain search of a comfortable position, while Dru leant over and slumped into his lap like a tired child. Nothing to do but sit it out.

He sat statuesque for a full thirty seconds, then sighed loudly and began playing with Drusilla's hair. "I could take you to the museums, show you all the treasures from the colonies," he thought aloud, stroking Drusilla's silky hair regularly. "Art and beads and pots and so forth." He'd been looking forward to going for a month before he died.

"Shrunken heads," agreed Dru, without moving.

He noticed that her cool weight across his legs wasn't sending his toes to sleep. On the contrary, other parts of him were waking up and taking a marked interest in proceedings. He began to wonder, not for the first time, how on earth such things worked in the absence of circulation, but his head rapidly began to hurt and he gave it up. He wondered whether Dru had been a museum-goer when she was alive. By the accent, he guessed not.

"Or maybe you'd like to go and see the football?" He guessed it was early October. "Newton Heath will be down to play the Wanderers. A few fellows I was at school with went on and played for the Wanderers. I was useless at soccer at school, hated it. The masters thought it taught us moral rectitude, but mostly it was about getting stamped on."

He frowned at the memory. Dru lay unresponsive in his uncomfortable lap. Not much about school he had liked, really. Perhaps a few of his masters would still be around, and might appreciate a visit from an alum? That, at least, was a cheering thought. He glanced down at the lacklustre Drusilla.

"Or we could go and ... eat people," he suggested.

Even that had no effect. He had never seen Dru so wan and silent. He put his hands around her shoulders and rolled her back on his lap, so she was staring up at him. Her tired eyes were ringed with darkness and her parted lips were thin and white, like an invalid's. It was almost shocking, her pallor and listlessness, and it made William's chest tighten. He frowned and pulled Dru up to kiss her, smoothing her hair and planting kiss after kiss on her cold face. She looked so sick, and he was so used to taking care of invalids.

"Won't let anything happen to you," he promised, holding her close against his chest.

It felt strange, offering to look after this woman who had inducted him into a world he knew nothing about, taught him – in a disjointed fashion – how to survive, and taught him all those wonderful other things too. Strange, but pleasant.

Dru relaxed back into his arms and examined his face with a ghost of a smile. "I could show you," she murmured.

William frowned, trying to work out where the comment had come from. "Show me what, love?" He straightened the stray strands of hair around her face.

"Show you where I buried them." She hummed something that sounded like the off-key opening bars of a nursery rhyme. "My babies."

The sourceless breeze yawning in the sewer around them blew sharp with sudden cold.