Barking (48 page)

For the record it was bitter black treacle with thick chewy chunks of undissolved instant granules floating about on top. ‘Fine,' Duncan replied. ‘Just how I like it.'

‘Oh good. I used to like coffee, but ever since - I mean, it doesn't really agree with us, for some reason. We tend to have tea instead. Earl Grey or lapsang, without milk.'

You can tell when mere attraction is starting to coagulate into a Relationship when she tells you what she likes to eat or drink, and instead of saying ‘Yech' or ‘You really like that muck?' you smile inanely and say ‘Yes, that's my favourite too.' Interestingly, this is one of the few lies that not even the cleverest lawyer can bend into a new reality.

‘Is it really? I mean, that's rather unusual. I thought all men liked their tea extra strong with tons of sugar.'

‘Not me,' Duncan replied, and all around him the universe stayed grimly the same. Oh well. ‘Strong coffee and weak tea, that's how I like it. About the unicorn.'

He hadn't really meant to press Veronica for information. It was just that he felt the need to break the silence, and he didn't want to trash the fabric of reality by continuing the hot-drinks theme. But she looked up at him, as though this was something she'd been expecting.

‘She's Sally's client, really,' she said. ‘Mainly. But you know how it is, we all do bits and pieces of work for her. I mean, if she needs some conveyancing done, Rose or Matilda does it, because Sally's strictly litigation. I did a couple of leases for her a while back. Would you like a slice of Battenberg cake? We bought one for Rose's birthday on Tuesday - there should be some left.'

Vampires eating Battenberg cake? Well. A small, rebellious part of his brain did the maths (Tuesday: by now it's probably so stale you could sharpen scythes on it) but got no support. ‘Yes, please,' Duncan said. ‘That'd be nice.'

‘I expect you think we eat nothing but raw liver and black pudding,' Veronica went on, as she opened a cupboard and fetched out a big Tupperware cake box. ‘Actually, most of us have a sweet tooth. And no, before you ask, it's not long and pointed.' Her fingers lifted the lid, and a few stray molecules drifted out; enough for a werewolf's nose to detect a familiar but unexpected smell . . .

‘No,' he yelped. ‘Don't open—'

Too late. She'd opened the box. The smell of fresh garlic wafted up, hitting her like a truck. Her mouth dropped open, her eyes glazed like fogged-over glasses, and she slowly fell backwards onto the floor. The sound of her head hitting the lino was—

Duncan was on his feet, standing over her, but of course he hadn't the faintest idea what to do. He grabbed the box, of course, and looked round for somewhere to dispose of it. But no window to hurl it out of, naturally, and chucking it in the bin would be rather like stuffing a pinless grenade under a sofa cushion. A choking, gargling noise at his feet started him shivering with terror. He was stranded in an ocean of cluelessness.

‘Bit like kryptonite, really,' said a familiar voice. ‘Only cheaper, of course. Also organic, biodegradable and produced from renewable resources. Hello, Duncan. Bet you weren't expecting to see me.'

Luke Ferris straightened up from an empty space under the worktop. He was in human shape, which was something. He looked rather as though he'd just spent twenty minutes trying to climb out of a running combine harvester. His clothes were comprehensively ripped, his hair was full of dust and grit, and the sole of one of his shoes was lolling out like a rude boy's tongue.

‘Rescue time,' he said. ‘Come on, I haven't got all night.'

Duncan stared at him. He didn't say anything, because they don't make words that can handle that kind of strain. Luke took a step forward, then looked down at Veronica, who was beginning to twitch.

‘You have no idea,' Luke said, ‘how hard it is to get hold of a simple string of garlic at three in the morning when you're a wolf. I had to ram-raid a greengrocer's in Islington for that lot. It says
produce of more than one country
on the label, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but it seems to have done the trick. Well? You coming, or not?'

There was one word that Duncan could just about manage. ‘No,' he said.

Luke had never been top of the class in English at school, but you'd have thought he could understand ‘No.' Apparently not. ‘Don't muck about, Duncan,' he said irritably. ‘I think our best bet is to make for the roof and see if we can jump across to next door. It's about thirty-five feet, but we'll be transformed so we should make it. Unless there's a fire escape, but—'

‘Fuck you,' Duncan said. ‘I'm not going.'

This time, it sank in - rather like a JCB in a swamp. ‘What the hell do you mean, not going?' Luke scowled at him, then made one of his trademark Oh-for-pity's-sake head gestures. ‘Look, if you're worried we're going to beat you up or tear you limb from limb, forget it, all right? Yes, you've got a certain amount of explaining to do, and yes, the atmosphere may be a trifle fraught around the office for a day or so until we've got a few issues ironed out, but - sod it, Duncan, we're your mates. We'll get over it somehow and everything'll be fine, you'll see. Now get your arse in gear and let's leave. This place gives me the creeps.'

‘No,' Duncan said. ‘And it's not that. I don't want to go. And I don't want to be in your gang any more.'

On the floor, Veronica had stopped moving. Duncan wasn't a doctor, or a vet or an undertaker or whatever was appropriate in the circumstances, but he was pretty sure that wasn't good. But he didn't know what to do.

‘I've got to get someone,' he said. ‘You go away.'

‘
What?
' Luke stared at him as though he'd just burst into flames. ‘Just a moment,' he said. ‘It's her, isn't it? That
thing
. Oh, for crying out loud, Duncan, you don't mean to say—'

‘Yes,' Duncan replied. ‘And if anything bad happens to her, I'm going to kill you. Now, unless you happen to know what to do, I suggest you go away, because in ten seconds I'm going to yell for help, and you may not want to be here when it arrives.' He looked up, and a spurt of anger filled his brain. ‘You think it's funny, right? Well—'

‘Duncan.' For a moment, he felt the tug of the old authority. ‘You're wasting your time, mate. That much garlic - she practically
touched
it. You can get the whole lot of them in here and there's bugger-all they'll be able to do for her. Sorry, mate, but she's had it.'

S
o your best friend has just murdered the girl you love. What are you supposed to do about it?

Well, it depends. You can go on the Trisha Goddard show and get helpful advice from a lot of strangers, and maybe even a publicist and some useful product-endorsement deals. You can check out
Yellow Pages
for an all-night silversmith who'll run you off half a dozen .357 magnum bullets while you wait, so you can kill your best friend and have two corpses to stare blankly at instead of just one. You can forgive your best friend (she was a nice girl but there's no point crying over spilt blood, plenty more bats in the belfry, &c) and go back to working for him with the rest of your boyhood chums. Or you can stand perfectly still with your mouth open, while what's left of your heart and brain howl
No
—

Rewind a bit. The girl you love: when had that happened? Duncan couldn't say. Didn't seem to matter. Now that she was lying on the floor gagging up her last few breaths, the chronology of it wasn't all that relevant.

Just to complicate matters further, Luke did something he'd never done before, something Duncan wouldn't have thought was possible. He cleared his throat nervously, like an Englishman about to speak French, and said, ‘Duncan, I'm sorry.'

‘What?'

‘I'm sorry. I had no idea. Sod it, I thought I was rescuing you.'

‘Oh,' Duncan said. ‘Right.'

‘I mean, last I knew, you were being abducted by vampires. You know, the Undead, our natural enemies. It didn't seem likely they were bringing you here so that you could find true love.'

Duncan remembered something. ‘You were just about to kill me,' he said. ‘For being a traitor.'

Luke conceded the point as though it was a minor typographical error. ‘We were upset with you, yes. All right, maybe we'd have beaten you up a little. It's not a nice thing to do to your mates, treason. But we weren't going to kill you. We couldn't have. Physical impossibility, without silver ammunition or the unicorn. I suppose we assumed you'd know that, but—'

‘Doesn't matter.' Duncan tried not to look at Veronica, and failed. ‘You're right, you're not to blame. You were trying to help. It's just one of those things.'

‘Right.'

‘And so is this.' He went to the doorway, pushed the door open and whistled.

All his life, he'd been pathetic at whistling. He'd practised for hours when he was young, but all that came out was a rather moist blowing noise. Wrong-shaped face, or something. This time, though, the result was perfect, if a trifle loud. If they failed to hear him in Birmingham, it was because they had earplugs in.

‘What the hell are you playing at?' Luke demanded.

‘I'm calling for help,' Duncan explained. Odd that Luke, normally so smart, hadn't figured it out for himself. He moved slightly, so as to block the doorway completely.

‘Damn it, Duncan, I told you. You can fetch in all the vampires in London and they won't be able to do anything.'

Smile. ‘I'm not calling vampires,' he said.

Duncan waited for a few seconds, then sniffed. Sure enough, the smell he needed was there, and a moment later he could hear the soft thump of hooves on carpet. ‘Help is on its way,' he said.

‘What?' Luke paused, and sniffed too. ‘Are you out of your tiny mind?' he said, and his eyes were wide with fear. ‘
She
's not going to be able to save your girlfriend. What the hell made you think—?'

‘That wasn't what I wanted help with,' Duncan pointed out.

Correction: Luke was pretty smart after all. At least, he didn't seem to have any trouble working that one out. He lunged for the doorway and nearly managed to barge his way through, but Duncan grabbed first his arm and then his neck, and hauled him back into the room. ‘I want you to know I forgive you,' he said, as Luke's flailing hand missed his nose by a quarter of an inch. ‘Deep down, anyhow,' he added. ‘Unfortunately, it hasn't worked its way to the surface yet.'

She was coming; they could both hear her footsteps. Luke turned frantic, kicking and scrabbling with more strength than Duncan would have thought it possible for a human body to contain, a strength matched only by his own. Matched and exceeded. After fifteen seconds or so of the kind of wrestling the big US networks would've paid billions to air, Duncan lifted Luke clean off his feet and threw him against the wall. More damage to the plasterwork. They'd need a full-sized reproduction of the
Night Watch
to cover up that one.

‘You can't let her get me,' Luke panted, as he tried to get up. ‘It'd be murder.'

Duncan shrugged. ‘So don't chase her if you don't want to.'

‘You know bloody well I can't help it.'

‘Same here.'

Luke sort of tipped himself onto his feet. Duncan picked up the fridge and threw it at him. Either a good aim or a lucky one. Luke stayed still for nearly ten seconds after that.

‘Sooner or later, somebody's going to have to pay for all this damage,' Duncan said. ‘But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.'

Luke went for another charge, but he was clearly tired and maybe a little woozy in the head. Duncan sidestepped, grabbed his arm as he shot by and swung him into the corner of the room. Add a worktop, a corner cupboard and a shelf of mugs to the bill. Oh, and the kettle, which Duncan bounced off Luke's forehead for good measure.

‘Having fun, boys?'

She was standing in the doorway. But she wasn't a unicorn. Instead, she was just this gorgeous sophisticated-looking female whose face would slip through the meshes of your mind thirty seconds after you left her. She was holding an old-fashioned wicker shopping basket in her left hand.

‘Mr Ferris, isn't it?' she said, smiling pleasantly. ‘We have met, though never this close. Oh, in case you think that any second now this room's going to fill up with vampires I can pretty well guarantee it won't. I had Carlo - he's my personal chef - knock up two dozen of his special vegetarian quiches, and I've just been round laying them down like landmines. Extremely talented boy, Carlo, though he does tend to be a bit heavy-handed with the garlic. Comes of having no sense of smell, I suppose. Still, you've got to make allowances for the disabled, and being dead's about as disabled as you can get. What happened to her, by the way?'

‘Luke murdered her,' Duncan said evenly. ‘But he meant well.'

She took a step forward into the kitchen and peered down at Veronica, who was lying perfectly still, on her side. ‘Call me picky if you like,' she said, ‘but like I told you a while ago, I used to be a lawyer myself, and it's not actually murder until they die.' She frowned, then looked up. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘I see. That's why you called for me. You wanted me to—' She clicked her tongue reproachfully. ‘That's not very nice, you know. If it was anybody else but you, I might easily have taken offence.'

Duncan shrugged. ‘Oh well,' he said.

Luke, he noticed, was trying to hide behind the wreckage of the fridge. Pathetic. Hard to believe, really, that he, Duncan, had once been in awe of such an obvious loser. What made it worse was that Luke was clearly in no danger from Bowden Allshapes. She wasn't remotely interested in him: why should she be, after all? Just another overgrown puppy, all bark and no bite. In spite of himself, Duncan felt a little warm glow of pride, and the muscles that would've wagged his tail if he'd had one twitched slightly, because she wasn't here for Luke Ferris, she was here for him. Furthermore, she was going to be disappointed. He didn't need her after all - why bother with revenge? Being Luke Ferris was plainly the nastiest thing that could happen to anybody, so why try and gild the lily? And by her own admission there wasn't very much she could do to him. He felt not a trace of an urge to chase after her; all that stuff seemed impossibly remote now - silly, like the sort of thing he used to do at school. The hell with the lot of them, he thought suddenly. There's nothing left for me here. I might as well just walk away.