Night Work: vampire meets witch in this darkly comic urban fantasy romance, page 1
Night Work
Harlow Rowe
Night Work
Published 2023
1st Edition
Copyright © Harlow Rowe 2023
The right of Harlow Rowe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Author's note
Dedication
1. A Series of Existential Crises
2. Fresh Blood
3. From Zero Into One
4. Self-Destructive Idiot
5. Radiant Dark
6. Indistinguishable From All The Others
7. The Same Maker
8. I Talk. You Listen
9. An Excellent Evening
10. Outside Looking In
11. Really Weird
12. A Drink Sounds Good
13. Does It Bother You?
14. Far From Normal
15. Ninety-Nine Percent Sure It Will Be Fine
16. Like A Handful Of Gravel
17. A Treatable Disease
18. Show’s Over
19. Back To Square One
20. The Shadow Of The Valley
21. Obliviated
22. Even Nice Boys
23. Past Midnight
24. You're A Monster
25. Humble And Dutiful Friend
26. The Pleasantries Concluded
27. Anything Other Than Horror
28. Said The Spider To The Fly
29. The Only Way to Avoid Temptation
30. A Lot Of Shoulds
31. Human Remnant
32. We Could Be Hurt Like This
33. Hardly Stronger Than Human
34. No Plan For The Dawn
35. This Is What I Am
36. What The Body Wants
37. Not VEAL Thinking
38. I Deserve This, Don't I?
Thanks!
About the Author
Author's note
This book is set around 2011. It uses British English terms and spellings, e.g. “realised” instead of “realized” and “travelled” instead of “traveled”.
You can't go back.
Chapter one
A Series of Existential Crises
There’s a poster outside the blood donor clinic that sort of sums up the whole problem with my existence. It says, ‘Give blood.’ And as if that isn’t bad enough, there’s a picture of an angelic little girl with pleading eyes. She looks about six years old, which, ironically, is how long I’ve been dead for.
“Party Marty to String Bean,” says Martin, “this is Party Marty to String Bean, come in, String Bean.”
I’m crouched on top of a tall brick wall across the street from the donor clinic. Martin is on the clinic roof, three floors above. He’s not using a walkie-talkie, just whispering, but I hear him as though he’s right next to me.
It’s two in the morning. The park behind the wall I’m on is empty of everything except the mingled smell of tramp piss, spilled cider, and the few rats that scurried off as soon as they sensed me. To my left, across an access road, is the back of a hospital: seven squat floors of brick and concrete and glass, humming with lights and humanity. But there is no one here in this quiet side street. Just me and the poster and my guilt.
“Shut up, Martin,” I say, not bothering to whisper.
“No copy, Captain. What’s the hold-up? Just blow the bloody doors off already.”
The tinny, distant sound of Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones is coming through my headphones, the volume down to almost nothing as the song isn’t chiming with my current mood. Which, as usual, is contemplative to the point of misery. I push my headphones down and leave them hanging around my neck.
Hey ho, let’s go...
With a sigh, I jump down into the street and run across the road too quickly for CCTV to capture. I snap the lock on the door with a twist of my hand.
As the door swings open onto a corridor that smells of disinfectant and underfunding, I hear Martin behind me. He must have jumped straight from the roof, and I might have been reasonably impressed if he hadn’t then ducked in through the door, back flat against the wall, humming the Mission Impossible theme tune.
I shake my head and follow him down the corridor to where the blood is stored. There are more posters on the walls, repeating the same plea. Give Blood. If only. Our kind can’t give anything at all. We can only take.
“Coming to the after party?” says Martin. Like the song, the question very much does not chime with my mood.
“Huh?”
“The after-raid party. There ain’t no party like a Marty party.” He throws a few shapes. Big fish, little fish, cardboard box. He died in 1996 and is still very much a proponent of the early-nineties rave scene.
Other than being dead, and a vampire, I sometimes think the strangest thing about my life is being best friends with Martin.
“I’m all partied out,” I say.
“At your age? Good job you’re not immortal. Oh. Wait.”
But then we need to concentrate—a tiny bit—because there is a camera in the corridor. We speed past it, and then we are approaching the clinically clean, sparkling white part of the building where the blood is stored.
Both the cleanliness and the whiteness are oppressive, and I feel like a slob who’s gatecrashed heaven as we hastily shove handfuls of bagged blood into the black plastic bin liner I’ve brought.
We run from the building, then slow, and slope up the street to Martin’s car: an aged green Vauxhall Golf. Ange is sitting on the bonnet, heels on the bumper. Konrad leans against the car, smoking a cigarette.
“Gee, guys,” says Martin, “thanks for keeping a lookout.”
“There is no one around,” says Konrad. He’s a strongly built Polish guy, with short brown hair and blue eyes, and looks exactly like the bad guy’s henchman in an eighties action movie, right down to the worn leather jacket. I’m ever so slightly afraid of him.
Martin, on the other hand, is white-blond, round-faced, and looks like a children’s TV presenter. And Ange is a skinny redhead with a penchant for ear-bleeding heavy metal—and the kind of girl I probably should have fancied.
“How’d it go?” she asks.
“Fine,” I say. Martin blips the car open and I dump the sack of blood in the boot.
“Shall we party then?” says Ange.
Martin looks at me, which means Ange looks at me. Konrad flicks the end of his cigarette to the pavement and grinds it under his toe.
“Chris?” asks Ange. “You’re coming, right?”
“Not tonight.”
“Chris needs to go home and indulge in a series of existential crises, doncha, buddy?” says Martin.
“Bingo,” I say.
“Been there,” says Ange. “Done that.”
“You know your problem?” Martin addresses me cheerily.
“I do,” I say.
“Don’t say ‘being dead’ like you normally do, because you’re walking and talking ain’t ya? Besides, that’s like...offensive to the actually dead.”
Ange nods heavily in agreement. Konrad is watching, head cocked. He begins to smile slightly, which never bodes well.
“Guy’s problem is guy’s a whingy motherfucker.”
“That is definitely one of Chris’s problems,” Martin agrees.
“And guy needs to get laid,” adds Konrad.
I politely give him the finger.
“You think too much,” Ange tells me kindly.
“This is all very illuminating—”
“Come party!” says Martin. “Drink! Indulge! Let Bacchus into your life.”
But I’m already walking away. I wave. “It’s been a blast. Laters.”
I feel them watch me down the street. I hear the doors of Martin’s car open. Before they close, Martin calls after me: “We’re here for you, buddy.”
I raise my hand without looking back. As I turn the corner, he calls out again.
“Phone Simon!”
Simon is the leader of the London chapter of VEAL. The letters stand for Vampires for an Ethical Afterlife. Really it should be VEA, but the organisation started in America, and Americans like a good acronym, however tortured.
The American origin is also the reason our local branch is called a ‘chapter’, and it also goes some way to explaining the pseudo-religious overtones and smug self-satisfaction of most of its members. Sorry. That makes me sound like a twat. Before I joined VEAL, I lived in a hole in the ground and starved. I owe them my afterlife.
Simon is the oldest vampire I know. There’s a system for introductions and things: our human age—the age we were when we died—followed by how long we’ve been dead. It cuts out a lot of uncomfortable small talk. I’m twenty-two and six. Martin is twenty and fifteen. Simon is a disconcerting twenty-four and two-hundred-and-somethin
g. So we look the same age, more or less, but when Simon speaks, or you meet his eyes, you feel his age.
As members of VEAL, my friends and I are in the minority. Most vampires don’t have our qualms about feeding direct at the source. In other words, most of my kind are murderers. But sometimes, for some reason—a mistake, poor impulse control, strange sense of humour—a vampire decides to make a vampire out of a human like the one I’d been. The sort of drippy-not-quite-a-vegetarian-but-always-thinking-about-it human I’d once been. Or the simply good-to-his-core human Martin had been. Or the had-probably-never-killed-a-fly-ex-vegan Angela had been. I’m not sure what kind of human Konrad had been, but he’s one of us all the same.
We’re corpses. That’s my belief. We die at the moment of changing but our bodies are preserved. They don’t decay. And that means the brain I had as a human is still there—every synaptic pathway—and that’s why I can think and feel every single bloody thing just the way I used to. I’m still me, you see. I’m still that guy, except there’s a demon living in the place where my soul used to be. And instead of letting me die, it’s dipped me in carbonite and now there’s just a continual beingness—because vampires can’t sleep—a continuous sleepless fight against the monster that’s trying to twist me into something I never asked to be.
Melodrama. Sorry.
But if you can try to imagine it... I have the same brain, but I’m dead—despite what Martin tells me—and that means my brain isn’t plastic anymore. It’s stuck with the thoughts and ideas of my twenty-two-year-old self. But it’s like a computer shut off from the internet. I’m not getting any software updates and I can’t shut down and defragment all the shitty thoughts I’m having because I can never sleep. And just before they cut me off, someone shoved a horrifically violent video game in there, the one in which I died, and I’m stuck with images of gore just scrolling, scrolling—
We do degrade. That’s the thing. It’s a bit taboo, and no one in VEAL really talks about it. There’s lots of talk about control and centredness and a strong ethos on ‘nurturing and reconnecting with our humanity.’ But no one really sits you down and says, ‘Look, Chris, you’re an OK guy, it’s plain to see you’re not really the violent type, you’ve never even hit anyone except that guy in high school who was being a bit racist to your mate Tony Chen, and I know you’re trying, we all are, but this bastard demon that’s been planted inside you is going to eat away at you like a maggot until you’re mad, and psychotic, and every bit as brutal and blood-thirsty as it wants you to be.’
No. No one has ever said that. But it’s the truth all the same. And I saw it in Simon’s eyes during that first long conversation we had after I arrived in London. And I see it too, in the concern of my friends, in the buddy system VEAL has, the way we’re meant to look out for each other, spot any signs of eccentricity—of humanity, sanity, morality, starting to fade away.
I stop walking and realise I’ve walked right out of Tooting where the donor centre is and am almost on the other side of Tooting Common. I’m walking through the unlit wildland of inner suburban London with the blithe unconcern of one who belongs to the night.
I look at the trees moving against the starless purple sky, glad it’s starless, the moon behind clouds. Stars are just suns, and even their tiny pinprick light is enough to chafe, like sand in a sock. Just think about that. The whole universe, an infinity of suns, and every one of them lethal. I’m not welcome in this world. The dead aren’t meant to step among the living.
Sludgy brown clouds drift into the purple overhead. A fox startles at the sight of me and slinks away.
Why didn’t I go to the party? What good am I doing heading home alone to my bedsit with its meagre collection of bachelor tat and four walls painted, for some unfathomable reason, a shade of mint green by a previous tenant? Why have I left my friends behind me to exchange glances as though I’m an emo teenager who’s just stormed out of Christmas dinner?
It’s just...at the time...when I’d thought of the car ride to their house, soundtracked by Martin with Breaking the Law by Judas Priest or some other ball-numbingly obvious track, and when I’d thought about the energy needed to give him the necessary grief for that, and when I’d thought of their shared house, windows boarded, where the party would consist of drinking rum and blood, playing video games and pretending like anything mattered... When I thought of all that...it was beyond me.
Phone Simon. It’s good advice. But I’m good at ignoring good advice.
I leave Tooting Common and walk into Clapham, the gum-poxed pavements pools of orange light and shade. It’s Saturday night and I can smell the nightlife. Beer and cheap mixers, aftershave and sweat, cigarettes and kebabs and chips. Music comes from a dozen places, the low thrubbing of a bass track mimicking a pulse, a heartbeat. But it’s nothing like it, because it doesn’t make me senseless with want.
And then, cutting through it all, comes a woman’s scream.
Chapter two
Fresh Blood
I run towards the sound, stopping as I round a corner and see her running blindly down the street towards me. Her red dress is vivid; black hair wild around her white face. She glances back over her shoulder as she runs—which is why she runs straight into me. If I’d remembered how unyielding I am, I would have gotten out of her way. Instead, I put my arms out to stop her, and she bounces off them like a bird flying into a window. She lands on the floor, hitting her head on the pavement with a loud crack.
“Shit! Sorry!”
She can’t hear me. She’s out cold, eyes shut. I kneel by her, fretting, looking at her pale face, her dark hair spilling over the damp pavement, and I try to remember basic first aid. Recovery position? Or if they’ve hit their head are you not meant to move them?
Then I smell the blood.
Her head is bleeding at the back. Only a little, probably a graze. But the blood is right there, stinging the night, inches away, hot and fresh.
I swear that I tell myself to get up and run, but my hand moves of its own accord. There is the faintest smudge of crimson on my fingertips. And even as a disconnected voice inside me is remembering that head wounds bleed a lot, and even as another, louder voice is screaming ‘No!’ I’m bringing my fingers to my lips.
For the first time in my death, I taste fresh blood.
I can’t describe... I don’t know, I just can’t. Not without resorting to sexual analogies you really don’t want to hear. But it’s the agony and the ecstasy and all that. An aching want so big it wipes me out completely.
And my fingers are licked clean. And a shaking hand is tracing a featherlight line above her collar bone, the throb of her pulse moving up my arm, into my body, until it feels like I have a heartbeat of my own...
Her eyes open. She looks right at me.
I snatch my hand back, scrambling away so quickly I lose my balance. “I’m sorry.” My voice croaks with the ache in my throat.
But again, she doesn’t hear me. She’s too woozy, struggling to sit up. “Ouch. My head.”
I should help her, but I’m too scared of myself to move. So I just watch her struggle, so alive and warm and bleeding, her face white, her lips red. And I’m suddenly self-conscious about being sprawled off-balance on the pavement, staring like an idiot. Because it’s impossible to ignore that she is incredibly attractive, and looks about my age, and looks exactly my type, and looks like everything that is right with the world. And not just because she’s bleeding.
She notices me then, just as I’m trying to straighten myself into a less ungainly position. Our eyes meet. Then her hand goes to the back of her head and she frowns at the blood on her fingers.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Er...” I look away from her hand, swallow, and focus my eyes instead on her pale knee with its slight creases and its one short hair that has escaped the razor. “I saw you fall. You ran into a...lamppost.” I make a vague gesture. Luckily, there is one right next to us.
“I did?”
“Yeah.”
She starts to shake her head, but moans in pain.
“I should call you an ambulance or something,” I say.
