Chapter Seven

Angelus had a new policy: William had to bring in the Evening Standard every day. That meant the younger vampire had to get up early enough for the damn thing to still be on sale, risking the treacherous half-light of London at dusk. The crux of Angelus's plan was that William had to pay for his copy: he had to queue up and hand over a penny to some disrespectful little urchin - politely, huff and fold it over like all the other busy stuffed shirts waiting in line. Angelus found this funny. He liked the defiant look the fledgling always attempted when he returned and tossed the paper down, trying to hide how much the ritual riled him.

That evening it was different. William strolled in hours late, his footsteps a swagger that Angelus found instantly irksome, the boy's eyebrows raised and face arranged in an image of studied curiosity. Angelus had extracted himself from Dru and Darla's entwined limbs and begun dressing when William banged noisily into the shed, a late alarm-call, letting the groaning door slam shut behind him. He approached the family group without making eye contact, clicking his tongue against the inside of his mouth in an affected display of academic interest.

"I say," he pronounced, "George Eliot's dead."

The other three vampires stared at him. "Anything to do with you, William?" sneered Darla. "I understand you're at the heart of society events."

"Not this one, no," he retorted, less riled than Darla usually got him.

"What's that in your belt?" Angelus demanded.

The young vampire looked over at him with eyebrows raised in an expression of inquiring affability. "This old thing?" He produced the last of the spikes from Stoker's site and spun it casually between his thumb and forefinger. "It's a railway spike."

"See? Like a hedgehog! Like I said." Dru scrambled free of the bedclothes and trod an invisible fairy path to her lover's side. "My little Spike."

Darla snorted.

"Bring me the paper, boy," gravelled Angelus.

Without meeting his eye, William let Dru encircle his waist with her arms. Dru's touch made him stand even straighter, smile even wider, and he opened the paper with an ostentatious snap of the pages.

"Our brave troops at Jallalabad are well dug in," he read aloud. "And the rotten starving Irish are in a terrible state again." Dru clucked and rested her forehead on his shoulder. An unstoppable grin began to invade the young vampire's face, the propriety he'd been attempting slipping away second by second. "A relief operation was quite mobbed at Kilkerran," he continued. "Nasty parasitic creatures, the Irish."

Angelus stood up from the bed, knocked William to the floor without looking at him, and snatched the paper. Dru, who had let go presciently the second before Angelus's blow connected, bent over her boy and held her hands out as though encouraging a toddler to stand. She seemed almost a different girl from the night before, more childish and more strange, but the hands that connected with William's held an unexpected strength. As Spike hauled himself up, affecting an insouciant expression less convincing than the one he'd come in with, Angelus closed the paper to read the London headlines on the front page.

"The Standard?" Drusilla pressed tenderly at the swelling purple to the side of her boy's injured nose. "You promised me the Stars."

"This is just the small fry," insisted William.

"The big fish are too shiny to wrap up in chip-paper!" exclaimed Dru, kissing him with excess interest, to see if any blood had trickled backwards into his throat. She finished, and turned excitedly toward Darla. "My boy's killed a Great Man, Grandmama," she informed her proudly, pronouncing the capital letters.

With great, obvious effort, Darla replaced the look of bored indulgence she'd adopted during the last exchange with a thin, murderous smile. By contrast, Angelus's snort of laughter was light and full of real malevolent humour: "A great man, d'y'say? A great, grand, soot-smeared railwayman?"

William frowned and sniffed noisily, trying to staunch the thin trickle of blood from his nose. "Railway magnate, or something, they said."

"Both of them? They sound mighty scrawny little railway magnates."

"Let me see that," said William, perplexed, biting his lip when he registered the tone of his own voice.

Angelus was too busy smiling nastily to clout him for it. "Didn't read it before you handed it over?"

"Knew what it would say," brazened William, all conviction falling out of his voice as he spoke. Angelus dropped the paper at his feet, and William read. The headline was as he'd thought when he'd glanced at it, but the article reported not the scandalous death of Henry Inglis, but the grubby murders of two Patrick Stoker and Nicholas Hudson, workaday labourers. William affected a shrug to hide the uneasiness building unaccountably in his stomach. "Well, it's all true. Killed those two to see what it'd be like. They've missed the big story, though. Perhaps they're covering it up, want to keep panic from breaking out."

"I told you." Dru smiled delightedly at Angelus. "Mister Henry Inglis, isn't it, my duck? Big man with his own carriage, and pretty horses."

"Henry Inglis Of Inglis Locomotive Investments?" asked Darla, dryly.

"What?" William's eyes were growing uncontrollably wider.

"Henry Inglis of Euston, director of Inglis Locomotive Investments. They're paying to build railways right across London."

William looked between Angelus and Darla in bewilderment. "You know a lot about mass transport investment?" he demanded.

"No one with so little talent comes so far in business unless they get a shade of magical assistance," Darla declared. "And that means I get to hear about it. You're not the only one with such noteworthy connections."

William couldn't tell what to make of it all. Of course Inglis was big news. He'd known as much when he went after the man: it was his overblown reputation that earned Inglis those crowds of sycophants, and the power and right to stamp on smaller people. Killing the bastard was something to be proud of; to show Angelus and Darla he wasn't some cowed little novice but a bona fide contender. So why this trembling sense that something very bad was about to happen? Why, at his side, was Drusilla almost vibrating with an odd kind of excitement, reminding him of how the air felt just before a lighting-storm fried it?

Because there were storm-clouds gathering; there on a heavy brow, and a rumble of thunder that came with a Galway accent. "You killed a man famous in the human and demon parts of the city?" demanded Angelus.

"Both sides of the tracks," honeyed Darla.

William swallowed, but Angelus pressed on. "You drank someone who the politicians, the police, the demon clan masters, the witches, and the press were all watching?"

William was horribly aware of the blood coagulating in his nose. "Didn't drink him. I did the same as I did to those railwaymen." He held up the railway spike uncertainly.

Angelus folded the newspaper and dropped it onto the bed. He seemed to have gained several inches of height in the last few minutes. William swallowed hard and set his jaw, biting lightly on his lip from the inside, caught in Angelus's dark-brown, narrowed-eyed stare like a wild thing in a poacher's torch-beam. The bigger vampire held out a hand and William reached out as though hypnotised, pressing the remaining railway spike into it.

Angelus examined it silently, testing the blunt end against his fingertips, weighing it in his palm. William could feel neither Drusilla's light hand on his arm, nor the demon couched cold in his chest; only the spot between his eyes – the one he'd struck on Stoker's skull – where Angelus was focusing his stare.

Angelus stuffed the spike into his pocket and walked out.

William watched him go with rapid-dawning astonishment. The shed door banged shut behind him and the draft of evening air it let in felt like a sigh of relief. Even the electricity crackling around Dru seemed to have earthed. William glanced furtively at Darla, who, absorbed in the paper, had ignored the scene altogether. She was still reading, mouthing the words perceptibly, her fair brow furrowed and her lips parted in a near-comical expression of disbelief.

"Quite alright there, Darla? I can read it aloud to you, if it'd help."

She looked up at him with poison in her eyes, hands shaking so hard they made the newspaper rustle. "I can't tell you how much I'm going to kill you."

"Just as soon as Angelus says it alright?" asked William, blinking with exaggerated innocence. Dru shut her eyes, giving him a second to regret the jibe, before Darla's palm connected extremely hard with his cheek. She was halfway out of the shed before William's vision levelled back to normal. "Oh, do it again, Darla," he called after her. Watching the white skin flush to match the bloodied nose, Drusilla's eyes darkened.

Arthur would be perfectly alright, just as long as he was unconscious. After that, the situation deteriorated rapidly. He kept his eyes screwed shut valiantly, trying to mesmerise himself with the dance of phantom shapes on the insides of his eyelids, but lasted only minutes before a crawling sensation spread across his skin and he began to feel as though someone was standing over him, watching. He sat bolt upright with a gasp.

There was no one there.

Arthur's temples resumed the throbbing of the previous night. Unsteadily, he hauled himself from the bed and swathed his aching body in a thin gown, groping for the nightstand and its pitcher of cool water. He splashed water liberally on his face, the freezing sting making his sore chest constrict, then raised his head cautiously to examine his reflection.

What he saw in the mirror made him stagger back in shock.

Good God, had he looked this awful when he had been with Cecily?

He sighed deeply, tugged clothing out of the portmanteau, and dressed, rubbing his arms in an effort to dispel the persistent chill that began in his heart. He badly needed to shave but didn't trust his stiff, trembling hands with the cutthroat blade. Whenever his thoughts returned to the last night's events his stomach lurched. He could grasp at a few things – details, consequences – but they offered only a disorienting sense that the whole thing was impossible. He'd seen someone he couldn't have seen, doing something they couldn't have done. He'd heard things that, when he tried to recall them, didn't make sense. He brought his hands to his cheeks and pressed down, blinking and exhaling hard, trying to force things into clarity. It didn't work.

It was only when he stumbled into the living room, where the curtains were flung wide open, that he realised it was not morning at all. The sun hung low in the sky and orange light, its warmth long since leached away, spilled brokenly into the little room. Arthur glanced up at the clock over the mantelpiece: it was twenty past seven. He'd slept all day. He sighed hard and rubbed his temples. Now he'd sit awake all night, his brain frantically skirting the memory of the last, listening to the house's odd creaks and groans and falling deeper and deeper into a funk.

The one glimmer of consolation was the solitude. If it was gone seven, Arthur's neighbour Selden would be out. At this hour the man was invariably to be found – should you be masochistic enough to go looking – at his club, gossiping like an old woman. Selden was far from an ideal room mate: he stole Arthur's tobacco, drank his nice whisky, and cut the interesting bits out of the newspaper, but at least tonight Arthur could rely on his slavish devotion to the clique to keep him from asking questions.

The privacy, though, had come at the expense of Arthur's smokes. A fruitless search of his coat pockets made it evident that Selden had liberated his tobacco tin, again, and had left him with nothing to calm his raw nerves. He slumped into an armchair and stared out of the window hopelessly. He didn't feel in the slightest like eating, and hadn't a club of his own to go to and lose himself in papers and chat. The prospect of running into the members of that nasty circle filled him with a creeping dread. He couldn't go to the police, though every clear thought in his head began with them: he was bound by his promise to Cecily. Had he actually promised? He couldn't recall, but felt it underhand to be technical about it. Perhaps he could go to Cecily herself? No: how would it look if the police were there, and he arrived full of concern? How would he explain how he'd known something was amiss? Much better to stay here and keep quiet, think about it all a little more. Sit in his chair for a while and collect himself. Work out a thorough plan of action. In fact, perhaps he really ought to have some supper, however great a trial that seemed. It would be quite foolish to attempt a mission like this on an empty stomach.

He had himself convinced until he heard the long, thin whistle of a train from the overland line invisible beyond the houses. It had a deeply haunted tone, low and reedy and owl-like, and it sent a shiver right to Arthur's marrow. In that moment, he knew it wasn't enough to sit and wait and hope it would all go away. He closed his eyes briefly, rubbed his forehead and got to his feet, taking a deep, restorative breath as a substitute for the pipe he so badly wanted. Selden's pocketbook in the bureau yielded William's address, which Arthur noted on a scrap of paper and stowed in his breast pocket. He strode out into the hallway, meeting the scullery maid's quick ritual nod with his best expression of determined purpose, and this time kept it up for an entire half-minute. By the time the fear had quite engulfed his features again, he was out in the street.

It was cool enough out to keep him from dawdling. He bought a newspaper from a diffident boy on the corner and read the headlines as the sun dipped gracefully behind the townhouses. There wasn't a word about Inglis, but the front page splashed an excitable headline that made Arthur very uncomfortable indeed.

LABOURERS FOUND 'SPIKED' AND DRAINED – THE MARYLEBONE MONSTER HAS STRUCK AGAIN!

A disconcerting tingling sensation, beginning in the arches of Arthur's feet, spread upwards til it hit his throat and made him swallow hard. Two railwaymen, the article announced, breathlessly, had been found dead at track works past St Pancras. One had an iron spike planted between his eyes. The other, stammered eyewitnesses, displayed animal-like teeth-marks in his throat – a claim that the Evening News editorial dismissed as "the superstitious sensationalism of the lower orders."

The lead journalist was a hypocrite, then, since the article oozed lurid, macabre detail, and little else. Arthur swallowed hard and flipped the paper open, but found no reference to Inglis anywhere. He sighed. Cecily really hadn't gone to the police. Or, Selden had spiked Arthur's last wrap of tobacco with opium, and he'd fantasised the entire affair. Fantasised it in great detail, admittedly, and with elaborate corroborating evidence: unless there were two brutal railway-spikers at work in London, his fantasy would greatly interest the officers investigating these railwaymen's deaths.

The spiked-tobacco hypothesis was the only scenario Arthur liked at all. He lost himself in hopeful imagination of what would come next, if it were true: when he reached William's home, a beaming maid would usher him into a warmly-lit parlour with a heartier fire than Baker Street ever mustered. William, affably amused, would fetch him a glass of port and listen sympathetically to the tale of Arthur's convoluted dream. Nocturnal ramblings! Penny-dreadful crime! Kissing Cecily! William would laugh and clap him on the back, confess that he'd never cared for Inglis, but smile that he'd hate to have the man on his conscience and his soul. Arthur would apologise for troubling him, William would demur and pass the decanter, Arthur would do something charitable, perhaps clear the field and give William his blessings to pursue Cecily.

Nothing else bore thinking of.

Only here he was now, at the house, and the cool of the evening sat humourless around him, refusing to entertain his dream-theory. He checked the address with superfluous diligence. The place was rather grander than he had expected: didn't poets starve and freeze in romantic garrets? Not this one, evidently. Perhaps there was a correlation with the quality of output. He stood, considering, on the pavement for long enough to let the cold creep into his bones, then steeled himself and mounted the porch steps with a set jaw and hands shaking like leaves.

The bell's ring dissipated weakly into the thick, clammy night air. Arthur waited. After a minute, he rapped firmly on the door. Even that sound seemed uncertain and soft. No one came.

Arthur stepped back and looked up at the house. It was the only one on the street that showed no lights against the gathering dark. In fact, the place looked distinctly deserted: he should have noticed before. Turning slowly from the door, Arthur felt oddly-mixed relief and confusion clenching in his stomach. He hadn't a clue what he'd been planning to say if forced to confront William, and was quietly glad the issue hadn't been forced. But he was no nearer to understanding the previous night's commotion.

As he dawdled toward home, a policeman passed him in the other direction. Shyly, Arthur shot him a grateful, hopeful smile. The bobby returned his look with a suspicious scowl, and the light went out of Arthur's hopes again. Trying to ignore the disconcerting lightness of his wallet, he hailed a cab back to Baker Street. The only relief he had was to get out of the night.

Darla caught up with Angelus by the river. London was a labyrinth, where humans lost one another with consummate ease – she'd relied on it herself for simple, untraceable kills. But she could follow her boy directly, drawn by lust, the connection of blood, and a hundred years and more of familiarity. She'd recognised Angelus's footfall or shape in a crowd a month after she made him, and now she could more or less follow his steps amongst thousands of others. That evening he drew her magnetically, and she saw him long before a human could have done, down at the walkway high alongside the river, a blacker shape against a black sky. At first, Darla thought he was leaning heavily on the railings; then he shifted, and she saw he'd pinioned a woman there. Their bodies were undulating scarcely perceptibly in the dark. She approached, touched him on the shoulder, and smiled.

Angelus turned, the demon leaving his face, and he met Darla's calm, wry smile with its mirror image. She touched a finger to the blood at the corner of his lips and put it in her own mouth. The redheaded hooker whose blood they shared slumped earthwards as Angelus leaned away from her. Her eyelids flickered but never opened again.

Darla smiled at the hardness digging into her thigh, until Angelus leaned away from her and produced the railway spike from the pocket of his overcoat. Then she slapped him hard and demanded: "Well, is that enough for you?"

"It's enough."

Darla nodded in grim satisfaction.

"We'll leave London."

"You'd already decided that," gritted out Darla. "You said so weeks ago. Before I left London. Getting too noisy here, you said. The rumours have been building for a month. You already decided!"

"He's coming with us." Angelus looked her flat in the eyes as he spoke.

Darla simply stared. When she said nothing, Angelus looked away from her, out across the black Thames. "When you first made me, the world went into colour."

Darla's clenched her teeth in exasperation. "No soliloquies!" she demanded. "Angelus!"

"Listen to me. We made him to keep, am I right?"

"Are you ever? Drusilla made him, and you let him live since he might make a babysitter for her! Not to provide material for the penny dreadful writers, and set Scotland Yard on our heels!"

"I've never known a demon worth that name that would've made a good babysitter," Angelus reflected.

"Well perhaps he'd better broaden his repertoire! I'm not indulging another feckless waif who wants to turn himself into a horror story staple."

"Another feckless waif?" Angelus regarded her coldly.

"I meant like Penn."

"He's nothing like Penn. Penn's all about form. He's a bore, and he's not going to get over it. Obsessed with others' attention."

"And butchering minor nobles is a self-effacing slip? Angelus, stop smirking. You don't kill the ones who'll be missed. We picked London for this: thousands of people who don't give a damn about each other, so you can help yourself to them without worrying that someone might care! And he's picked on the biggest noise this side of the river. Even if we kill him, we'll still have half the city on our tails. Bravo, fledgling."

"He didn't do it for approval. He did it despite everything. Don't you remember doing things like that? Taking risks?"

"You have to calculate the risks." Darla gestured to the dead girl slumped at their feet. "There: you got it right, she got it wrong. That's why we're still standing."

"You know what? I'm tired of calculating." Angelus bent and scooped the girl up easily. "We leave London and try something new. They're dedicating a convent at Carcassonne. What's say we go sample the vin de pays and the virgins? It's been ages since I've had a decent go at some nuns."

"And Penn's repetitive?" Darla actually stamped her foot.

Angelus laughed mildly and kissed her over the bulk of the corpse in his arms. "Come on," he encouraged her. "It'll be fun. You remember fun?"

Darla refused to melt. "So you're taking lessons from a month-dead fop. That's the strategy," she accused.

"Oh no. I'm still doing the teaching." At last there was a glint in Angelus's eyes that Darla liked. He turned and lifted the girl gracefully over the railings, regarding her in the pale moonlight and brushing the hair off her face tenderly. Then he let go. Her hair streamed out and her torn dress billowed like angel's wings as she fell, and a faint splash resounded as she hit the water far below.

A faint answering splash echoed from further down the reach.

Darla and Angelus were too caught up in one another to hear or care.

The boat on the Thames held against the current, couched silently in blackness. The night and the cool and the queasy smell of the water all swathed the small boat, hiding it from eyes that didn't even know to look for it. Water slapped insistently at the boat's wooden sides and the lone figure aboard ran a rope through the waiting buoy, anchoring them against the river's flow, and waited.

The city was quiet out here so late, and halfway across the broad, ugly river the sounds from either bank were remote and unreal. The figure sat motionless. Anxiety gnawed inside but failed to disturb his impassivity. His cargo was behind schedule: mistress had wanted it disposed of the previous night. But there were arrangements to be made, even for business like this, and the padlocked trunk had had to sit overnight in a warehouse in the docks, watched over by a paid scout who kicked the feral dogs when they came sniffing around it. He just wanted shot of it now, the sooner the better.

After twenty minutes' stillness, when he was sure no one heard or saw, the figure heaved the padlocked trunk overboard. Instants before it hit the water, another, fainter splash seemed to sound a little way upstream. The figure froze and waited, staring desperately in the direction from which the sound had come, but could make out nothing against the black. And yet, within a minute, he caught sight of something floating in the strong current, drifting closer to the boat. He hooked out an oar to catch it and pulled the sodden weight up alongside the vessel. His eyes widened as he lifted the heavy, waterlogged form on the blade: the body of a girl, breasts spilling from her torn dress, hair clinging in mermaid strands around her white face. Her head lolled lifelessly to the side and he saw the puncture wounds in her neck. No blood beaded there now. What little would have been left had feathered out into the foul water.

The figure dropped the blade of the oar, letting the body lapse back into the water where the insistent current snatched it back away from him. He let out a low chuckle. Fledgling vampires were insatiable, he thought. Miss Addams wouldn't be able to keep this one quiet for long. He waited a little longer, silent again amidst the blackness, then loosed the rope and began to pull for the shore.