The Radleys (16 page)

And three, the boy’s body—the only ultimate proof of what happened—is never going to be found, as Peter assured her he flew a long way offshore before letting him drop.

Hopeful y, these things combined wil stop the police from ever suspecting Clara of being a vampire.

Yet Helen can’t help thinking it’s a very messy situation. There had been no time last night to clear away the tire tracks, something they would have never neglected to do in the old days.

Maybe Peter should have gone back later, during the early hours of this morning, and smoothed the rough trail he would have made dragging the heavy body. Maybe they should do it now, before it’s too late. Maybe she should stop praying for heavy rain and get proactive.

Of course, she knows that if she had tasted blood last night she would be as relaxed as her husband and daughter about the whole thing. The cup would be half ful rather than half empty, and she would think there wasn’t a situation they couldn’t blood-mind their way out of, not with Wil here. No police officer in North Yorkshire would believe their daughter was a murderer, let alone a ful -blown creature of the night.

But she has not drunk any blood recently, and her worries stay flapping and pecking around her head like a murder of hungry crows.

And the biggest, hungriest crow of al is Wil himself. Every time she looks out the window and sees his camper van, she can’t help but see an advertisement for Clara’s guilt, for the guilt of every one of them.

After the evening meal, Helen tries to air these concerns. To remind everyone it wil soon be twenty-four hours since the boy went missing and that the police wil soon be asking questions and that they real y ought to get their story straight. But no one is listening, except Wil , who just dismisses them.

He tel s Helen and Peter about how much things have changed with the police. “Vampires got active around the midnineties. They mobilized. They set up a society to deal with the police. They have a list of people that can’t be touched. You know vampires. They get off on a bit of hierarchy.

Anyway,
I’m
on that list.”

This offers Helen little comfort. “Wel , Clara isn’t. And neither are we.”

“Yeah. And the Sheridan Society only lets you in if you’re hard-core, but hey, the night’s young.

We could go out and feast.”

Helen scowls at him.

“Listen,” Wil says, “it’s not the police you have to worry about. Wel , not just the police. There are the people you
hurt
. The ones who real y give a shit. The mothers, the fathers, the husbands and wives. They’re harder to swing around.” He holds Helen’s gaze and smiles in such a knowing way that she feels the secrets leaking from his pores and into the room. “See, Helen, it’s when you mess around with people’s emotions. That’s when you have to worry.”

He lounges back on the sofa, drinking a glass of blood, and Helen remembers that night in Paris. Kissing him on the roof of the Musée d’Orsay. Holding his hand and walking up to the receptionist of that grand hotel on the Avenue Montaigne and watching him blood-mind her into offering them the presidential suite. He stil looks exactly the same as he did then, and the memories his face brings remain as fresh and wonderful and terrifying as they always did.

These memories break Helen’s flow, and she loses the thread of what she is saying.
Has he
done that deliberately? Has he just gotten inside my mind and thrown a few things about in
there
? Fol owing this loss of focus, Helen is frustrated to find the evening descending into
Interview with the Vampire
, with Wil relishing his role as bloodsucker in chief as Clara asks question after question. And Helen can’t help but notice that even Rowan seems more engaged with Wil , more interested in what he has to say. It is only her husband who seems indifferent. He sits slumped in the leather armchair, staring at a muted episode of a documentary on Louis Armstrong on BBC Four, lost in his own little world.

“Have you kil ed lots of people?” asks Clara.

“Yes.”

“Right, so you have to kil someone to taste their blood?”

“No, you can convert them.”

“Convert them?”

Wil holds the pause and looks at Helen.

“ ’Course, you don’t just convert anyone. It’s a very serious thing. You drink their blood, then they drink yours. It’s two-way. And it’s a commitment. If you convert someone, they’l crave you. Love you for as long as you live. No matter how much they know that loving you is the worst possible thing they could do. They just can’t help it.”

Even Rowan seems to be hooked at this revelation. Helen notices his eyes sharpen as he contemplates such a love.

“What, even if they don’t like you?” he asks. “If you convert them, they’l love you?”

Wil nods. “That’s the setup.”

Helen is sure she hears her husband at this point whisper something under his breath. “
Jazz
”?

Could that have been it?
“Did you say something, Peter?”

He looks up, like a dog who’s temporarily forgotten he’s got owners. “No,” he says, worried. “I don’t think so.”

Clara continues her inquiry. “So, have you ever converted anyone?” she asks her uncle.

Wil studies Helen as he answers. His voice causes her skin to tingle with anxiety and the involuntary excitement of memories. “Yes. Once. A lifetime ago. You close your eyes and you try and forget. But they stay there. You know, like some old song that you can’t get out of your head.”

“Was that your wife?”

“Clara,” Helen says, in a voice louder and firmer than intended, “that’s enough.”

Wil finds a smal triumph in her discomfort. “No, it was someone else’s.”

Black Narcissus

Hours later, when the other Radleys are in their beds, Wil flies west and south, to Manchester. He heads where he often goes on a Saturday night, to the Black Narcissus, and walks through the sea of bloodsuckers and wannabes, the old goths, young emo kids, and Sheridan Society vampires. He crosses the dance floor ful of cry-boys and sylvies and goes upstairs, past Henrietta and the little red sign on the wal : VIB ROOM.

“Henrietta,” he says, but she just blanks him, which he finds rather odd.

Bloodsuckers of every description lounge around on battered leather sofas, listening to Nick Cave and drinking from bottles and each other’s necks. An old German horror movie is being projected onto one of the wal s, al silent screams and unsettling camera angles.

Everyone knows Wil here, but tonight the vibe is distinctly less amicable than usual. No one stops to talk. But he doesn’t care. He just keeps on going until he reaches the curtain. He smiles at Vince and Raymond, but they don’t smile back. He pul s back the curtain.

Inside, he sees who he knew would be here. Isobel, along with a few friends, feasting on two naked corpses lying on the floor.

“Hey, I thought you weren’t coming,” she says, lifting her head up. At least she seems pleased to see him. He stares at her, trying to conjure his lust as he observes the BITE HERE tattoo stil visible amid the blood. She looks hot—a bit 1970s retro-vamp, a bit Pam Grier in
Scream
Blacula Scream
. And real y, given the sight of her, he should be craving her a little bit more than he does.

“It’s good,” she says. “Go on, taste for yourself.”

The bodies on the floor don’t look as tasty as they normal y would.

“I’m okay,” he says.

Some of Isobel’s friends check him out with their blood-smeared faces and cold eyes, saying nothing.
Sheridan blood sluts.
Isobel’s brother, Otto, is among them. Otto has never liked him, or indeed any man who wins his sister’s heart, but the hatred in his eyes gleams stronger than ever tonight.

Wil beckons Isobel away to a quiet corner, where they sit on an oversized dark purple cushion.

The second-best-tasting woman he’s ever known. Better than Rosel a. Better than a thousand others. And he wants to know he wil be able to forget Helen again. To walk away, if he needs to.

“I want to taste you,” he says.

“You can get a bottle of me downstairs.”

“Yes, I know. I wil . But I want something fresh.”

She seems saddened by his request, as if worried about the cravings he ignites inside her. Stil , she offers her neck and he accepts, closing his eyes and concentrating on her taste. “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

Wil wonders vaguely what she means and keeps on sucking.

“Alison Glenny’s been asking questions. About the girl at the supermarket.”

He remembers the goth girl—Julie or whatever she was cal ed—screaming and pul ing at his hair. He stops sucking on Isobel. “So?” he says, gesturing to the dead, half-devoured couple on the other side of the room.

“
So
, your camper van was caught on CCTV. It was the only vehicle in the car park.”

Wil sighs. If you are practicing, you are meant to play the game. You are meant to go for the easily explainable disappearances—the suicidal, the homeless, the runaways, the il egal.

Wil had never played that game. What was the point of fol owing your instincts if you couldn’t, well,
follow your instincts
? It just seemed so artificial, so fundamental y
unromantic
, to limit your desires to safe kinds of victim. But it is true he had once been a lot more careful at hiding the people he had kil ed.

“People are worried you might be getting a bit sloppy.”

Isobel really knows how to spoil the mood.

“People? What people?” He sees her sly-rat brother, Otto, glancing at him from above one of the corpses.

“You mean Otto wants to take me off the list.”

“You’ve got to be careful. That’s al I’m saying. You might get us al into trouble.”

Wil shrugs. “The police don’t care about lists, Isobel,” he says, knowing this is a lie. “If they wanted me, they’d get me. They don’t care about who’s friends with who.”

Isobel gives him a stern look, the kind more usual y seen on morality-addled unbloods. “Trust me, Glenny cares.”

“I have to tel you, Isobel Child, your pil ow talk isn’t what it used to be. What do you want me to do? Erase my past? Never wanted to start georging this early, to be honest with you.”

She strokes a hand through his hair. “I’m just worried about you. That’s al . It’s like you want to be caught or something.”

As she kisses him, he contemplates another bite of her.

“Go on,” she says, her voice seductive again. “Drain me dry.”

But it’s the same as it was five minutes ago. It’s doing nothing for him.

“Hey,” she says softly, stroking his head again. “When are we going to Paris? You’ve been promising me for ages.”

Paris.

Why did she have to say that? He can’t think of anything now but kissing Helen on the roof of the Musée d’Orsay. “No, not Paris.”

“Wel , somewhere,” she says, concerned for him, as if she knows something he doesn’t. “Come on. We could go anywhere. You and me. It would be fun. We could leave this shitty country and live somewhere else.”

He stands up.

He has seen the whole world, in his time. He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and, more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bel agio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto. But right now, he doesn’t want to be anywhere but North Yorkshire.

“What’s the matter? You’ve hardly had anything,” she says, padding a finger on her already healing neck.

“I’m just not that thirsty tonight,” he says. “In fact, I’ve got to go. I’m staying with some family this weekend.”

Isobel is hurt. “
Family?
” she says. “What kind of family?”

He hesitates. Doubts Isobel would be able to understand. “Just . . . family.”

And he leaves her on the plush velvet cushion.

“Wil , wait—”

“Sorry, got to go.” He glides down the stairs toward the cloakroom, where he picks up a bottle of the blood that he can stil taste fresh on his tongue.

“She’s upstairs, you know,” says the scrawny, bald-headed cloakroom attendant, confused by the choice of purchase.

“Yeah, Dorian, I know,” Wil says, “but this one’s for sharing.”

Pinot Rouge

In Manchester, among its considerable vampire population, there has been talk about Wil Radley for months. And the talk hasn’t been particularly good.

Whereas previously he had been highly respected as a fine example of how blood addicts could get away with murder, by general y sticking to the
right kind
of unblood, he was now taking a few more risks, taking unnecessary gambles.

It had started with the mature student who had been the wife of a police detective. Of course, he had gotten away with it at the time. The Unnamed Predator Unit, that technical y nonexistent branch of Greater Manchester Police, had made sure that even though a detective inspector had witnessed his wife’s murder, which they dressed down as a missing person case, he would never have been taken seriously.

Yet the careful relations that had been built up between the police and the vampire community—

relations which centered around dialogue between the UPU and the Manchester-based UK wing of the Sheridan Society, the loosely structured vampire rights organization—were put under phenomenal strain as a result of the whole Copeland affair.