Stephen Leather - Once bitten

When I looked up it was to find Terry's face looking back at me from the mirrored cabinet. I turned round quickly and the wallet fell to the floor. She knelt down in front of me and picked it up and tapped it against her leg as she stood up. She had on a black silk robe with an orange and green dragon on the back that rippled as she moved as if it was preparing to breath fire.

"I didn't kill him, Jamie," she said quietly. "You must believe me."

"That's his wallet, though," I said, trembling. "And you were found over his body."

"He came around her one evening when I wasn't at home. But my friend was. He surprised my friend in the laboratory, and he reacted without thinking."

"There was no blood in the body when it was found."

She lifted her chin and tutted as if I'd said something irrelevant. "Christ, Jamie, my friend stabbed him in the chest, what else do you expect?"

"And you moved the body to the alley?"

"We both did. I mean, I could have managed on my own, either of us could, but we did it together, he was in his car when the police arrived so he left. There was no point in both of us getting caught."

"He left you?" I said in disbelief.

"Like I said, there was no point in us both getting caught. We knew there was no murder weapon around so there'd be no hard evidence. We'd removed all his identification. We thought he was a burglar, it was only afterwards that I discovered that Greig had hired him to track me down.

Jamie, come back to bed." She hugged herself in the robe, the wallet still in her hand.

"There was blood on your face, Terry. On your lips."

"I don't know how that got there. I suppose I must have got it on my hands when I helped move the body and then maybe wiped it across my face. Let's go to bed, Jamie. Please."

"I want to sort this out first. This friend, this man. Who is he? A lover?"

She shook her head. "No, he's not a lover."

"Where is he now?"

"Around. He doesn't live here, if that's what you mean. I live here alone. In fact most of the time I live in the apartment upstairs, it's cosier. This is more of a storage place and somewhere to work."

"Why do you keep all that stuff? The pictures, the portraits, the books?"

"Memories," she said, and there was genuine sadness in her voice. "They're all I have left. The people who gave me those things, most of them anyway, are long dead. I can't keep them, but I can keep what they gave me. I owe it to them. Can you understand that?"

I leant back against the sink and felt the marble dig into my spine. "What are you planning to add to your collection that'll remind you of me in years to come?" I said bitterly.

She took a step forward and put a finger up against my lips, silencing me. "It won't come to that, Jamie."

I seized her hand and pushed it away. "How can you say that?" I shouted. "How can you possibly say that? How many others have you left, how many have you walked away from? Why do you think I'll be any different?"

"Because of the work Neil was doing," she said softly. "He had isolated the gene that gives us our longevity, and he was close to designing a way of incorporating it into normal human DNA.

Jamie, he can make you one of us. If that's what you want."

She held out her hand for mine and I slowly reached out and took it. She squeezed gently. "You have to decide, Jamie. I want you with me for all time, and if you want it too it's yours for the taking. No bites on the neck, not like it is in the movies, just a straightforward scientific procedure."

"But this Hamshire guy is missing."

"We'll find him," she said. We, she said. Not I. That's what I remembered as she led me back along the hall to the bedroom. We.

The Dream I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up. Couldn't, or didn't want to, I'm not sure which it was or to what extent there was an element of free will, but no matter what the reason I just let what was happening flow over me. Terry was there, and maybe that was the reason I didn't want to wake up. She was dressed in black, a jacket that might have been my motorcycle jacket over a black tshirt, black jeans and black boots with what looked like silver tips on the toes. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and I remember thinking that I'd never seen her wearing her hair that way before and how good it looked.

We were in a wood, but not the normal sort of forest you find in real life, it was a caricature, the sort you'd see around the wicked witch's castle in a Walt Disney cartoon: deformed, gnarled trees with spindly branches that seemed to writhe and grasp as we moved close to them. It was a cold, dark, fearful place. The trees had no leaves or buds and there was no grass on the floor of the forest, just damp musty-smelling soil the colour of coal.

It was night but I had no trouble seeing Terry or the trees because overhead hung a full moon, the sky so clear that I could see the individual craters on its surface. Terry looked at me and smiled and her teeth were as white as the moon and sharp, as sharp as a wolf's. She slowly put her head back so that I could see her whole throat exposed and the ponytail hung backwards away from the upturned collar of the jacket and then I heard the howl. I thought at first that it was coming from somewhere far in the distance because it was so quiet, but as it built and echoed around the forest it became obvious that it was her, howling at the moon. It was a terrible, mournful sound, the sound of a she-wolf in pain, howling for some great injustice that had been done to her. The howl tailed off and she lowered her chin and looked at me again. She pointed her index finger at her throat and moved it down a short distance, to where the Adam's apple would be if she had one. The sign for thirsty.

I put my index fingers together at waist level, pointing forward, and then moved them to the left, separating and bringing them together as they moved. The sign for also. I was thirsty, too. I knew too that it was important that we didn't speak, that whatever we were doing had to be done in silence.

She waved me behind a tree and I hugged a large trunk, its bark cracked and creased into deep furrows filled with a pungent brown moss. Terry moved next to another twisted tree but I could still see her clearly. It wasn't just the moonlight, something had happened to my eyes that allowed me to see clearly even though it was well past midnight and we were in the depths of the forest and I knew that if I reached up to feel my teeth I'd find them long and sharp, like her's.

She made quick, stabbing motions with her pointed index finger, then pointed both index figures at each other and made a series of rolling motions. They come. She pressed her index finger against her pursed lips. Be quiet. I scowled. I knew that. Who did she think I was? Did I have Dumbshit written across my forehead, or what?

I crouched down and waited. My hearing was intensified, too. It was as if I could hear the slightest noise no matter how far away it was. High overhead I could hear the feathery flapping of an owl on the wing, to my right, a hundred yards or so, a small mouse scuffled along the ground and if I really tried a could hear its tiny heart beating a hundred times a minute. I could hear the footsteps of men walking in the distance. Three men. No. I put my head on one side and focussed on the sound. Two men and a child. A small child, its steps hesitant and clumsy. I listened carefully and realised that the two adults were holding the child by an arm each because occasionally the small steps would disappear as if the child was being swung in fun. I heard the swish of a skirt against smooth legs and knew for certain that it was a man, a woman, and a child.

Almost half a mile away. So far away and yet I knew everything. That was why I didn't try to escape from the dream, even though I knew I was asleep. I was enjoying the power.