The Other Side Of The Tracks
by frimfram

Chapter 2: Untitled

To see how excited the railway made Drusilla, you'd think she didn't know life offered richer pleasures. They'd set up home here by the railway a month ago, perhaps. Whenever it was that the neighbours at that funny little place in Finsbury Park had got too enthusiastic with the flaming torches, chanting priests and impromptu fire grenades. They'd all had quite enough of neighbours for a while, so this place suited them well: an abandoned rail shed, comfortably dark and large, just the right distance from the hunting grounds to be discreet. Darla was relieved to have space enough that she didn't have to listen to Dru, and now this damn nuisance fledgling of hers, all the time. Angelus liked the low profile: commandeering hotel suits and upmarket townhouses was fun, but it was never long before the unwanted visitors became overwhelming. There were only so many concerned relatives you could eat. Far better to use that kind of place for special occasions, and have somewhere like this to spend most days, sleeping undisturbed. Somewhere deliciously obscure, which everyone thought someone else must be responsible for. A place even the shady types thought better of breaking into. Darla saw to that. It wasn't that fighting off mobs wasn't vampire style, she just found it terribly common.

But it was Dru who was truly in love with the place. Every night when she woke, even before feeding, she went out to admire the trains. Great, hulking, screaming demons that belched acrid smoke, rending the air with their terrible groans and clangs. They set the earth below reverberating as though it was muttering secrets. She liked the brass and bustle of the station nearby, the way the halls and sheds stammered with the echoing percussion of a hundred passing feet. Best of all, she liked the streams of stiff passengers, all looking so earnest and gullible, who stepped forth willingly to be swallowed up by these raging beasts. Often, she climbed out on the roof of the rail shed to watch them, giggling maniacally til she fell down onto her back, entranced by the heavens, limbs splayed under a white empire-line dress that had been screamingly outdated even when she was alive. She was up there now with William, the pair of them fawning over each other, Dru tracing the fascinating outlines of the newcomer's body with a finger like a child given a new toy. An arriving service let out a piercing, shrieking whistle and Dru's delighted laughter was audible in the shed below.

"Can't they go out and eat someone?" Darla hissed and glared at the ceiling. "Playing with the choo-choos isn't on the list of awe-inspiring creature-of-the-night pursuits."

Angelus grunted. He had been in a worse mood than usual since Drusilla brought this awful new creature home with her. "They've killed twice as much as they can eat already tonight," he growled. "All we need's a Peeler to follow the trail of blood and we're all dust."

Darla propped herself up on a crooked arm and tried to scrutinise her lover's screwed-down face. He was on his back in the bed, a brooding hulk, features twisted with discontent almost as thoroughly as they were when his demon surfaced. "You're scared?" asked Darla, her lip curling unbidden. Angelus growled and fixed her with a vicious scowl. "I'm angry." He wrenched himself out of the bed, pulling away carelessly from Darla's soft, white limbs. She swathed herself in the heavy sheets, sat up and watched him sceptically. She didn't know that she'd ever seen him scared. Jealous, on the other hand ...

Angelus stalked to the far end of the shed and snapped the ties binding the wrists of a terrified, half-dead young man whom Dru had discarded there earlier. He dragged him back toward the bed, entwined his fingers in the youth's dirty dark hair, and yanked his head to one side. The exposed neck was grimy and Angelus regarded it with distaste before biting down. "I think I'll kill him," he said decisively after a brief, deep suck. He raised his eyebrows to Darla and inclined his head toward the body he held by the hair. Darla shook her head disdainfully, and Angelus dropped the still-twitching corpse to the floor.

"William?" Darla asked.

"Of course William. I'll take his head off."

Darla grimaced. "Thought you said you were glad to have another cock in the henhouse."

"Sure and he's nothing but a chick," spat Angelus.

"Oh, I don't know," drawled Darla expansively. Her lover turned on her with narrowed eyes, and she decided to needle him. "He's got something about him. Quite a lust for life."

"He's a damn idiot. He'll have himself caught and torn apart soon. But I'll not wait around for him to bring hunters to our door."

"I was surprised you let him live til I returned. I think you are scared."

Angelus balled his hand into a fist but before he could even move, Darla slapped him across the face and drew her fingernails down through the flesh of his cheek, making blood spring in jagged red lines. He looked at her with hatred and desire, then sprang on her, pinning her to the bed. "Poor Angelus," she told him, her lips inches from his face, then kissed him.

"I'm not having a little fop ruin us because he wants some pissy pay-back," he intoned.

"Forget about him." Darla knotted her fingers into his hair and pulled him in for another kiss. "He's boring. If he's so annoying, I'll kill him and save you the effort. Dru's just showing off to keep you on your toes. You said already he'll have himself dead in a month."

"Dru did this - " brooded Angelus.

Darla did not want to hear about it. She pushed him off her and onto his back, then seated herself on top of him. "She did it because you let her. You didn't think she'd dare, did you? But she did and now you're sulking, and I hate to see my boy sulking." He was plain boring when he was sulking. "Kill him, then, darling, if it's what you want. Have Dru back all for your own and ignore her to your heart's content." She stopped any more words with a string of urgent kisses, and slinked down his body for the only sure way of shutting him up.

She knew what his problem was, of course. Thinking too much about another woman. His Drusilla, his little girl, the one he'd made so methodically, had had the audacity to do something of her own. To sire a new creature, and to turn all her mad attention away from him. She'd been his precious thing: he'd worked on her painstakingly over years of obsessive effort, til every facet of her reflected his twisted whims. Darla had found her, but Angelus took up the task with a verve that awed her, and would have made the oldest, most sadistic demon proud. He'd started small, run through the classics: missing animals and odd letters, drawings of her sisters asleep, things left on the doorstep that made the maids faint. Hitched it up slightly worse every week. Disappearances, deaths, nocturnal visitations. Things his victim saw before they happened, in visions that made her scream til her voice gave out. At the end, Drusilla was trapped alone in the horror inside her head, with only him for company. He'd grown her like a limpid, clinging plant, shaped into bizarre and twisted forms by the frame he'd made her clutch to. He must have thought she was sunk forever in the world of insanity he had made for her, beautiful and fragile and weird. Personally, Darla thought she put half of it on.

And here she was to distract him at the least opportune moment. The warehouse door creaked open and Darla lifted her head, leaving Angelus groaning. Drusilla, a seraphically malign apparition, stood in the doorway with her head tilted to the side and an arm looped through that of the new vampire. She walked to the bed with finishing-school steps and looked primly down her nose at Angelus, who lay prostrate and squirming against the sheets. She should never have got away with such an expression, but Darla had Angelus pinned in place, and the look on Dru's face riveted him just as well. Sometimes she looked mad enough that he was almost scared to touch her. Now it was the lucidity and power in her eyes that stayed him. Darla had never seen her use this expression before, on Angelus or anyone else – not a surprise in itself, because Dru changed all the time, and no one but her ever knew what caused the changes. She bent like a tree to an ever-moving breeze. But this change seemed different, her mood stronger and more enduring. Darla liked it.

Beneath her, Angelus swallowed hard, making an attempt to compose himself that was so futile it only made the situation worse. He opted instead for a trademark threatening frown, which would have been more effective had he not been twice enthralled by Darla's grip and Dru's stare.

"William's going to introduce me to all his friends," said Drusilla imperiously.

Darla released Angelus long enough to laugh derisively. "And you're going to start a dead poets' society?"

"We're going to play, and have tea." Drusilla drew a finger under William's chin and kissed him affectionately on the lips. Sighing in exasperation, Darla sat up and pulled the coverlet over Angelus. "I've seen it all before," sing-songed Dru with a wrinkled nose. Before Darla or Angelus had time to reply, the entranced newcomer was kissing Drusilla passionately and with the enthusiasm of the eager novice. Darla leaned back and regarded the two with her lips pursed, but her eyes narrowed in interest.

This new diversion of Dru's was so far removed from Angelus that they were hardly the same order of being. He looked like a fop, all scrawny body and curly, tea-coloured hair, with an accent he was already obviously becoming ashamed of. And he was kissing Drusilla now as if he'd missed a lot of time and intended to make it up as quickly as possible. Darla was a connoisseur of people, in several senses, and knew for sure that she would never have chosen him. Admittedly, Dru had picked him, but then Dru picked her clothes, and consequently went around dressed as though she'd plundered a fancy-dress bazaar in the dark. When she'd chosen William she'd probably mistaken him for Ivanhoe or Sir Galahad. Or perhaps she'd been joking. In her more sceptical moments, Darla still wouldn't put it past Drusilla to have been stringing them along for the last twenty years.

There wasn't even anything about the boy that explained why Angelus had taken against him so. He'd been beaten down nicely by the wedding party business, taken to keeping himself quiet and scarce like someone who'd died once and didn't want to repeat the experience soon. Perhaps that was what upset Angelus: it was harder to beat a person back into line if you couldn't see them stepping out of it. Perhaps the fledgling vampire's spirit was broken, and they'd get no more rebellion out of him. But a spark she caught occasionally in his eyes made Darla think otherwise. Whatever it was, something about the boy was riling Angelus for reasons even the big vampire didn't seem to understand, and it had Darla thinking. Maybe this one had something about him.

Or, what the hell. Plenty of cracks for dust to fall down in this agreeably cavernous old shed.

"William would do well to stay out of the way," hissed Angelus, who looked as frustrated as he did menacing. Dru raised both eyebrows, undaunted, her arms firmly looped around William's waist.

"Run along and play," agreed Darla. "You're not up to the games in here." She watched William as she spoke, and thought she saw his eyes glint. He will be soon. She turned back to Angelus, but only after watching the two younger vampires leave, strolling hand in hand as though at the head of a stately procession. Off to exploit that other great perk of living within sight of the gaping maw of the new St Pancras station: the tides of itinerant, confused people with no one to miss them should they suddenly disappear.