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  You said you'd never let me fall from hopes so high.

 The study was in chaos. And Rob was not in a good mood.

 There was a girl crying on the floor. He pulled her up and pushed her in the direction of the door, glancing round to see if there was anyone else not running for their life. No. Good. Time to get out of here-

 "Ohhhhh," a husky voice said slowly, "you're so chivalrous."

 Therese was in front of him, tall and menacing. Her black mouth seemed swollen on her face, somehow wrong. She wasn't smiling, and her eyes were fixed on him with an intense craving.

She licked her lips.

 Oh no, he had not come here just to get some girl attached to his neck. Especially not Therese Orage, who was to sanity what the Monkees were to the Beatles. Not even close.

"Get lost, Therese," he snapped in the tones of the terminally confident. After all, he reasoned, there was easier prey than him around. "You've ruined the party, okay, now go."

 "Darling, darling," she sighed, shaking her head. He wondered absently what colour her hair had been, if it had been as dark as those eyes, as bewitchingly soft. "I'm not here for the party. And neither are you."

 "Really?" he said brightly. "What gave me away? Was it the high-powered weaponry? The revelation of the master-plan? The proverbial neon sign that said 'helpless prisoner of loopy model'?"

 Her face blazed with zeal. "There are weapons?" Damn.

 "Excuse me," he said, edging past her. "I have to go and give a monkey the key to the banana plantation."

 He was aware the room was emptying around him as people found the exits. Ellie was gone. First in the room; first out of it too, damn her. He made a mental note to buy himself a cattle-prod very soon.

 He almost got to the door, last in the crowd of people shrieking their way into the great beyond.

 Next thing he knew, he was flying across the room.

 Pity the wall was in the way. Rob hit it with an almighty thump that knocked his breath away, and made the world split into harsh rainbows, his head pounding like someone was playing pinball with his skull.

Unfortunately, when his vision cleared, Therese was above him.

 Her eyes were burning.

 It was at that point Rob realised he was in more trouble than just a hungry vampire. She could have chosen one of the other tail-enders. But she'd chosen him. Lucky, lucky him.

 "Oh, no, no," she purred. "I hope you're not trying to escape."

 "Not at all," Rob assured her. "I was just going to shut the door so you could tear my throat out in peace."

 "In pieces," she said absently. "I could never get it out in one chunk. Blue's more skilled at that. You're keen to die." Her smile was heart-stopping, appealing as a kitten chasing its tail. "I like that in a man."

 "So do I," he said wildly. Sarcasm obviously didn't work with her.

 She blinked. "What?"

 Perfect. He gave her the widest, most manic smile he could muster, scrambling to his feet. "Sorry, but I don't think you have the qualities I'm looking for in Mr Right. So not interested."

 The dark eyelashes lowered slowly, veiling her eyes. "I don't care. I like a challenge. You'll be my human slave...I'll make you beg and plead just to be near me...you'll love me."

 "Did you have a traumatic childhood?" he said, watching her with a dreadful fascination. He had never seen anything so deadly, or so truly beautiful. It made his heart ache just to look at her.

 Creatures like this were what had been missing. She filled an empty hole inside of him, a part of him that sometimes woke up in the night and wondered what prowled under the blind and secret moon, that knew the horror stories were true, that whispered that there was something else out there somewhere, something that would have all the answers to the questions that made his life so confused and unbearable.

 Here she was. And god, he thought that he'd never seen anything so enticingly predatory. His fear had curled up like a dying spider, and left this strange void.

 Her stare told him he should submit. Her every word told him that he was nothing to her splendour.

 His own thoughts told him she was right.

 She was beautiful, and she pulled at the part of him that ached for perfection, but even so...he didn't want to die. Or he didn't think he did. Or maybe he didn't think he should.

 He didn't know anymore.

 She had a smoky laugh, and that willow-branch of a body swayed backwards and forwards. "You might want to try Aspen if you're looking for that. I didn't come here to listen to your questions."

 "What did you come here for?"

 She wriggled like a cat in the sun. Rob knew no one should be able to move like that, as though every bone she had had dissolved into heavy ribbon. "You."

 You really do walk into these things, the tiny voice that he thought of as his inner adult said.

 "What the hell do you want with me?" he said curiously, genuinely confused. Rob couldn't imagine why anyone, even a vampire, would want him. He simply didn't see what others saw when they looked at him.

His life, Rob decided, was lacking something. About six bodyguards for starters.

 "You smell...nice."

 You had to be normal, the voice nagged. You couldn't have had a socially disfiguring hygiene problem.

 He didn't know whether to move or stay still. Staying still meant being too close to her famished eyes, and those slick, wicked teeth. But moving meant tempting her. "So did half the room."

 "Not like you." Her hawkish face held him, exotic yet familiar. "You smell like storms and sweetness."

 So the Lynx effect really did work. "I don't really see that as a good reason to kill me. I mean, no offence, but I'd like to at least die for a good reason. Old age would be tops."

 She was drooling.

 "Okay," he said cautiously. "Do you know that that is incredibly unsanitary, never mind disgusting?"

"I don't like my food to talk," she said, gliding forward. Her head swayed back and forth, and there was a strange blankness in her expression. I really don't want to die, Rob realised. Not like this.

 "Maybe you should switch to inorganic food then. Much more healthy, I hear. And free of those nasty gristly bits." Rob was backed up against the wall, and her gliding steps would bring her within touching distance soon. "Did I mention that I'm actually an android?"

 "No..." she said vaguely. "You're going to taste so good..."

 Way too close now...he was flat against the wall, feeling his eyes widen until the cold air brushed them, every muscle gone taut and painful. "I gave blood two months ago!" he yelled. "My doctor said I should wait another four months!"

 "Screw your doctor," she said lazily.

 "I don't think the Hippocratic oath covers that one," he muttered.

 That soft, smoky laugh rolled around his ears again, and she was tipping up his head. Rob tried to duck his head, keep his veins protected but there was too much strength in her. Those black eyes were filled with ancient promise, glistening like mica in coal. "Stop fighting. I can make this feel very good."

 "By going far away?"

 She licked his throat...and oh god, she had a forked tongue. Rob was paralysed for a moment before he brought one hand round in a no-holds-barred punch.

 There was the cold sound of flesh meeting flesh as she caught his arm in one hand then wrenched it at an angle that would have made his trigonometry teacher's eyes water. Rob screamed a word that caused pulses of seashell radiance to writhe in her eyes.

 "Later, darling," she promised, and bit him.

~*~

Once:

He loved her, of course.

 It was a secret that the comte had buried deep within his heart. It was one that stung at him often, making the mask of coldness and composure he showed to her ever more difficult.

 He loved her, but he would lose her.

 The witch had been certain of that. He remembered the murky colour of her eyes, thick as a quagmire, and the way she had stared before the click-clickety-click of her knitting needles had clattered on the air.

 "You've had lives before this one, you know," she had remarked, quite casually. He had understood why his parents revered her so; ancient and ugly and withered though she was, she was far more clever than he would ever be. Clever, and perhaps a fraction cruel. They had sent him to her to see his future. "With her."

 "I have?" he said, fighting to hide his astonishment.

 "Of course, mon enfant. But you have failed her every life. And this one won't be any different!" A laugh of glee. "There's another, you see."

 It felt as though the guillotine had hissed on his head. "Another?" he had sputtered. "She's betrayed me?"

 The witch had laughed, and the clack of the needles had ceased briefly. "Who knows? If she hasn't yet, she will. It's been that way since time begun. You have lost your soulmate to darkness."

 His heart was ice, numb with shock. It helped him to calm himself, tell himself she was only an unsightly crone who had nothing to do but toy with others, reading fortunes for a pittance. "How?"

 "Because the darkness understands her," she said, her voice as clear and chiming as the rest of her was not. "It will coax her and lure her, and speak softly to her where you turn away. She'll betray you, mon enfant, and maybe she already has. And until you understand her, and give her yourself, she'll walk into the darkness's arms and be glad of its comfort until the moment when it tears her apart."

 "I have given her myself," he said guardedly.

 She snorted. "No, you haven't. She's given you everything that she is and what have you given her? Trois fois rien. Nothing. You say sweet words, I'm sure, and bestow sweeter kisses, and maybe more, as all men do, but you hide the secrets of yourself from her."

 He had left there in a blinding fury that had chilled into this numb ice. If she would betray him, then he would not show by word or deed that he cared. She deserved none of him, and he wanted none of her.

 He had told himself.

 He saw now that he had driven her into the arms of that Other. He had seen the way the Court whispered about him, and how they looked on her with fondness as she became bright and lovely again, and as he became ever more miserable.

 He had given her a choice.

 And that day in the maze, she had made it at last, after days of dithering, of piteous tears and soft pleas. He was not immune to them, far from it. She had crushed his heart and trampled upon the pieces.

 "I am a bird in a gilded cage!" she had shouted in the privacy of her rooms. "It may be pretty, but it is still a prison! Why will you not smile? Why will you say nothing? I refuse to believe love can disappear."

 "You believe it can be born with one glance," he had said in the cool tones he had to use to stop himself losing his temper. "Why can it not die with one?"

 He had only himself to blame.
 
 But still, it had hurt. What he had done had hurt.

 She had chosen the Other. He had watched her walk the path of darkness, darkness that wooed her with velvety voice and voracious eyes.

 The Other had looked at him or a moment, and behind the cool blue eyes, a black hatred had squeezed out to pierce him once, before disappearing. Afterwards, he wondered if he imagined the loathing.

 She had chosen the Other. She had chosen death.

 He remembered his own words. So empty, and cold, and if only she had known, filled with all the hurt he would never express. "Death, I think, will become you."

 He had gestured to the guard, and the light had gleamed an icy blue from the axe.

 And the guard had raised the axe, and stepped towards his lady love. Had given her the blade, and those lovely eyes, so innocent and fresh, had widened. The soldiers had left; only the three of them remained.

 "Strike off my head," he had said flatly. "It would be easier than watching you dance to your own death."

 She had given a little cry, and let the weapon clang to the floor.

 The Other had turned those slow, cold eyes on him. "You are cruel, lord."

 "You are fortunate," he had said stiffly, and left. He mourned silently for her loss, and waited out the days. It became harder to be merciful within his province; he found that he hated the faces of the pretty girls in his home for now and again, one would tilt her head or laugh like Ana, and he would dream of her.

 He had not long to wait.

~*~

 The world swept around Tam like wings unfolding.

 "What was that?" she asked, feeling more confused than ever. Already the memory was fading away, cleaving into pieces of words and thoughts that made no sense. She stroked Aspen's hair completely absently, loving how kitten-soft it was, and the careful, close way he was holding her.

 Aspen blinked, his strange eyes focusing on her slowly. "It was...I don't know. I can't remember."

 She opened her mouth to remind him, but the details were already vague and hazy. She only knew that there had been sadness, and betrayal, and intense, awful isolation that she couldn't even grasp.
 
 "I guess it doesn't matter," she said contentedly, shrugging.

 The shy, startling smile made her heart melt into a sizzling puddle. "Maybe not...but what you did matters." He paused and the words came out, she thought, as though they tasted strange. "Thank you."

 "It was my pleasure," she said, pleased with the way she was handling this.

 See, no nasty bite-marks, no tantrums from either side, no one running in and shanghaiing them. Just two normal people, having a perfectly rational conversation, in a garden, in the middle of a party...that had not been merely crashed, but totalled, taken to the scrap yard and made into a little cube of useless metal.  

 "Was it? I...don't want you to feel like you have to be here, you know," he said softly. "You can leave if you want. I'm...not an easy person to be with." His smile had vanished like the sun passing behind a cloud.

 "Aspen, I think that's the worst understatement I've heard all year. You're crazy, and you're a vampire, and you're unbelievably messed-up, and I think just being here is risking my life-"

 With every word, she saw his face crumble a little more, the first cracks spreading across his eyes. It was a good act he put on, and as long as no one saw under all the meanness and wacky violence, it was safe. But if you knew where to hurt him...it was too easy to pry him apart.

 "-but apart from that, you're the sweetest guy I know, and you really are too cute for anyone's peace of mind. Oh, and we're destined for eternity."

 He stared at her, the dimming light throwing strange patterns on his face. He, she felt, was something wild that had strayed into her arms by pure and blessed mistake, and at any moment, he might snap or run.

 "I want this," he muttered quietly, eyes dropping to stare at the ground. "You're the only thing I've ever wanted in my life. I never asked to be who I am, or where I am, or what I am, even if people would kill to be those things. I just..."

 She understood him perfectly. "No one will mess it up," she said firmly, believing it with a hopelessly firm faith she hadn't felt in a long time. "I won't, and you won't and no one else stands a chance."
 
 He was hers. She felt it with a deep, protective instinct. He was on her list of the people she loved fiercely, who she would let no one hurt and who she would fight to the death for.

 "Why did they tell me vermin were bad?" he asked her, his fingers tracing up and down her spine, arms curling around her. He was someone who needed contact like air, she recognized, contact that didn't threaten him. "They told me that you were food, and that you didn't care about anything but yourselves."

 "They?"

 She didn't like the fragility that fluttered in his eyes like a butterfly caught in a tornado. "No one."

 "Someone," she corrected. Were they the ones who had made him this way? "Who?"

 "No one," he repeated, the first note of panic in his voice. "Leave it alone, ver-Tamara. It's...nothing."

 As she heard his fright, she realised that it was her hurting him. She didn't hurt her friends, and she didn't hurt him. "All right." His arms relaxed about her a little. But under her fingers, his pulse was pounding like the feet of a fugitive. "Why did you come here, Aspen?"

 Both of them jumped when another voice answered.

 "It seems obvious to me." There was a sharp click, and it sent terror spilling down her veins. She knew that sound.

 It was the safety on a gun.

 Tam turned, and Ellie was there. Calm and stunning, immaculate as the shine along the rifle. Tam recognised it; it was the same one Ellie had held to her head and threatened her with. It had been a birthday present from her father who reckoned that all girls should be able to do three things: cook, dance and shoot.

 It was the last one that had clued Tam in to just where Ellie got her interesting perspective on life from.

 She moved forward, hands out. "Leave it, Ellie. This isn't your business." I must be mad, she thought. I'm approaching someone with a gun and a serious mental problem.

 The girl laughed. There was the reckless abandon in her eyes that Tam had seen while she chased petrified shifters through the woods and fields. "This is exactly my business. This is how it's meant to be."

 For a moment, Tam was thrown. Meant to be? What did she think this was, some kind of game? "You are not going to shoot anyone. Don't you get it? I'm not playing your game anymore."

 "Because of him?" She gestured, and Tam swallowed as for a second she stared down the barrel. Silver bullets, she knew, and the gun oiled with oak resin. A simple combination that would kill anything Nightworld. Oh, and her. Last time Tam checked, she wasn't bullet-proof.

 "Not just that," Tam said levelly. She couldn't seem to drag her eyes from the gun. "Because killing anyone is wrong. I don't know why you don't understand it, but that's how it is."

 "I saw you with him." Ellie smiled faintly. "I thought I'd got it wrong at first. But it was you two, together again."

 She had seen them the first time? She hadn't noticed anyone, but then...Aspen was enough to take anyone's mind off anything, especially when he was being psychotic.

 "Get out of the way," Ellie said curtly. Her eyes were cool, shadowy wells, and her skin was camellia-blossom silky. She could have been a Nightperson herself, and maybe she should have been.

 "Make me."

 "No!" It was Aspen, and he was shaking his head. Tam turned to look at him, making sure she kept herself between the gun and him. "Tamara...don't. It's okay." His eyes seemed to flick up for a moment, above Ellie's head.

 Tam followed his stare...and saw a flash of shadows and cobalt. Blue! Her heart leapt. Blue was there. He was Aspen's friend...

 Her soulmate pushed her out of the way. His pupils were enormous, swallowing up his eyes, but calm. "It's all right," he said. "I am a monster. I know that. I guess I deserve to die."

 Blue was poised, a lean coil in the green-tinted light. The sun had almost set now, and their silhouettes were impossibly long and thin.

 She looked at Aspen. Trust me, his eyes said. I eat people like her for breakfast. Literally.

 And stepped aside.

 Ellie laughed, and raised the gun.

 Now, Tam urged Blue silently. His blue eyes flicked her direction for a second, electrically bright. Then he shrugged, and relaxed, and blew her a treacherous kiss.

 She was screaming as the gun fired.

 Aspen's eyes were burned into her mind as he fell to his knees. For a moment, she thought he would be all right. It was a tiny hole, a neat cut in his shoulder. Then she saw the exit wound. It had blown a hole the size of her hand in his shoulder.

 You promised no one would hurt us, the bleak horror in his eyes whispered. You lied to me.

 I lied, Tam was screaming silently, while she ran to his side, stupid, whimpering sounds escaping her, and a strange numb disbelief spreading across her body as she tried to stop the bleeding with her hands. But she couldn't, please no, she couldn't.

 Oh god, I lied.

  But never is a promise, and you can't afford to lie.

You brought this on yourself and it's high time you left it there.

 He was bleeding. For a moment, Tam had a horrible recollection of that day when she had walked into Rob's house and found him covered in blood. She had never let on how absolutely terrified she had been; how her hands had shaken while she dialled an ambulance, and then his parents, and then went back up to press compresses onto his wrists, and to try to bring him round.

 Then it was gone, and it was Aspen she was staring at.

 "I should shoot you too," she heard Ellie say.

 "Why don't you bugger off, you repulsive bitch," Tam snapped, losing all semblance of calm she had. "You just shot my soulmate!"

 "She was talking to me, actually," Blue Malefici said from somewhere nearby. There was a curious flat sound, and a thud.

 "What did you do?" Tam said absently.

 "Cooked a light salmon soufflé. What do you think? I removed the problem." Blue's feet appeared in her view. Bare, and covered in green marks and mud. He looked, she thought, as though he should have been running through a jungle with the wind in his hair and the roots clutching uselessly at his feet. A thing of controlled power and poise, almost elemental.

 It didn't make her hate him any less. She wanted to punch him right in that perfectly malicious smile.

 "You let him get shot!" she said furiously. God, god, he wouldn't stop bleeding.

 "I doubted if he'd really die for you," Blue explained as if it was perfectly justified. "Patently he would."

 "No, really?" she hissed. Stop the bleeding...pressure, pressure. She looked at Blue. "Take that T-shirt off."

 His eyes widened in mock astonishment. "I only strip to music."

 "I need something to stop the bleeding. Take it off. Now."

 "Why don't you take that dress off instead?" he said with sepulchral innocence. "You can't save him with first aid, my dear. However much the pair of you have been practising it lately."

 "What am I supposed to do?" she shouted at him. "You could at least call an ambulance!"

 "No chance." His voice had chilled like a dying star. "Anyway, there's a witch on her way."

 She was caught off-guard. "What?"

 Slow and patronizing tones, and the deliberate upwards curl of his mouth. "There is a witch on her way. I can say it in twelve other languages if it would make more sense."

 Please, she begged Aspen, stay here. She could still feel his mind, that rapid, manic whirlpool, but it was shrinking in on itself, waning...

 "Yes." He did something that surprised her then; knelt down, and put a hand over the wound. Tam caught her breath as what looked like black, oily fire covered his hand. "I can keep him alive until she gets here."

 "Why would you help?" she asked him, so, so confused by this strange and cruel boy.

 Blue glanced at her briefly. For a second, she saw something swirling in his eyes, something awful and monstrous which made the metallic taste of blood choke her suddenly-

Before Tam had even realised, she had screamed and covered her eyes. The dazzling, burning blue colour was burned into her mind like a sunspot.

 "I'm just bursting with charitable instincts," he purred, and a savannah wind filled her nose. There was something unearthly about him that made Tam's flesh creep until she thought it would slough free from her bones. "Now...while we're here, tell me about these vampire hunters of yours."

 "No." Whatever they did, none of them deserved to be given into Blue's hands.

"It wasn't a request."

 "I don't care," said Tam flatly, memories flashing through her head. "I-"

 His smile was sudden and daggered. "Maybe you should ask Aspen to teach you to shield your mind. That was most instructive."

 Agape, she stared at his cold, pale face. Her own thoughts had betrayed her. "What...will you do?"

 "Oh, now that would be telling," he whispered. His words were sharp as glints of light on frost. "But let's just say...people always underestimate how much damage you can do with a lighter and some wire."

 He was serious. Perfectly, deadly serious. She averted her eyes, looking at the body of her soulmate. That was better than what she saw in Blue, and it was only the sound of frantic footsteps that rescued her.

~*~

 Rob was drowning in an ocean of fire. It danced and hissed around him, and cindering lava melded his feet to it, so he couldn't do anything but stand and hurt.

 And god, it hurt.

 He kept thinking he could hear a voice that was telling him to stop fighting, to just relax and stop resisting.

 He couldn't remember how he had got here. There had been...a party. And windows shattering. And a pouting black mouth. Features seemed to grow outwards from the mouth, flowing into a blunt, flat nose, and round swelling cheekbones. A face like a snake's, curving and predatory. And-teeth. In his neck.

 A vampire had bitten him.

   Would you stop fighting? an exasperated voice spat at him. God, I hate the mental links this makes. You shouldn't be able to fight me!

 Yeah, he thought to himself, but Tam always said I was stubborn and stupid, and that I liked banging my head against a brick wall until I wore a hole in it.

 The fires were starting to shiver around him, and other ghostly shapes were laid over them, He rubbed his eyes, and blinked several times. The shape...of Ellie's study. And the horrible, nettle-like pain of teeth in his neck, only magnified, and ringed by the warmth of her mouth.

 Oh god, it was like having a huge leech attached to him.

 He could move his arms again. She had one in an armlock, but he pushed at her head frantically.

 It struck him that he was fighting for his virtue.

 He could sense her in some vague, eerie way. With every mouthful of his life she swallowed, the feeling grew stronger until he thought he had two hearts, one beating the slowing, comatose rhythm of himself, the other the strong drum of her pulse.

 The gunshot rattled twice in his ears, one seeming to echo the other.

 And then the voice came, curt and cold. Telerana. ana...ana...ana...

 She, Rob realised, was Telerana. That was her real name, not Therese. She lifted her head from his neck - oh, thank god - and he slumped limply, trying to cope with the unnerving sensation of being two people.

  Bane? ane...ane...ane... Her voice was fainter now that they weren't physically connected. But she was...influencing him, making him stand still. What is it? is it, is it...

 Got to do something, Rob thought sleepily. Really, he didn't mind the slow, balmy mist that trickled into his thoughts. He felt strangely reckless, as though nothing really mattered at the moment.

  Aspen's been shot, ot...ot...ot... And then came an image that pounded some of the stupid fogginess from Rob's mind altogether.

 Tam. With blood on her, and Rob didn't know whether it was hers or Aspen's. Kneeling on the ground, with blood on her. Who did that? he shouted, in a shockingly accurate imitation of a foghorn.

  Ouch! Tel-Therese pushed him away to clap hands to her ears.

 He recognised the dark voice then as Blue's. Your friend Eleanor Saxoine did. Tiny hints of malevolence. I don't appreciate her shooting Aspen. It's inconvenient.

 The drowsy feeling swept back over him as Therese wrapped a hand around his arm. Should shake her off, he thought. Should fight.

  No...you don't want to, her voice said, soft as silk. You don't want to fight me.

 I think I do, Rob thought, but all his defiance was seeping away. I think...I don't know what I think.

  Entertaining though this is, do you think you could possibly get yourself out here? Blue demanded. We need to discuss how this is going to affect the future.

 The world was a grey blur, and before Rob's eyes, it cleared into strange and wrong shapes. Someone lying on the ground, and a current running through him like voltage, and in the midst of all this wrongness, the heavy smell of blood.

 It made him hungry. Really, achingly starving-

  How are you doing that? Therese asked, her fascination intruding on the strange feeling. Malefici, he was seeing through your eyes.

   Telerana, I believe that your unhappy meal has got some witchblood in him. Think you could take it out? He's a little too perceptive and quite frankly, irritating.

  I'm not killing him! Therese protested. Rob squinted at her through his blurry vision. She was licking his blood from her fingers like it was ice-cream. If I leave him alive, I can taste him again.

  Get yourself out here, Blue ordered. If you stay there, you're just going to play with that human.

  No. Therese said defiantly. Rob was suddenly afraid...or was it her who was afraid?

 Pain smashed over Rob like a tidal wave, knocking him to the floor and leaving him breathless. It cleared the vagueness from his head. For the first time since Therese had looked at him, he felt like himself again.

 A very angry, vengeful self.

 He staggered up, rubbing at his itching neck, and saw Therese curled into a tiny ball, moaning...Blue had done something. He didn't like Therese much, or even at all right now, but that had just been...wrong.

 You should leave her, a voice said. She bit you. She deserves the pain.

 No one deserved that, a rather more shaken than stirred voice said.

  Get out here, Blue drawled. It rang in Rob's head, echoing the pain, full of absolute confidence and authority. Vermin, if she can't walk, drag her. Enough of my time has been wasted tonight.
 
~*~

  The witch - and Tam was surprised to see it was Chatoya Irkil - was flushed from running, and flung down a bag to the ground. Bandages spilled out. "You said he was shot," she said to Blue. Tam couldn't help but notice the loathing in the witch's eyes as she glanced at the lamia. "What kind of bullets?"

"They weren't at all kind, witch of mine," Blue drawled. "More of the lethal and metallic nature."

 Witch of mine? Were they...together? Tam couldn't see it. Chatoya was...weird. And Blue was weird, but in an acceptable sort of way. The kind of way that said accept me, or pay.

 "You-" The witch blinked slowly, her serene face astonished. "Tam? Tam Slone? Why are you here?"

 Why's Blue calling you? Tam wanted to say. Chatoya obviously didn't like him, and he was looking at her in an avid, peculiar way. She felt like she should be searching for cover right about now.

 "I was here when he got shot. He's...a friend."

 A pause, then the girl let out her breath and with quick, efficient hands, pulled her black hair back into a ponytail that trailed down to the middle of her back. "All right, let me have a look."

 Tam could only stare with awe as an aura of crisp green fire rippled around Chatoya, then expanded over the wound. The blood stopped, and as Chatoya made flicking gestures with her fingers, evaporated into a smoky mist that swirled up into the sky.

 "Tam!" She turned at the voice, and saw a pale Rob, half-dragging Therese with him, for reasons she couldn't quite fathom. "Are you all right? Toya...what are you doing here?"

  "Hiya Rob," the witch said quietly. "Right. Do you know what he's been shot with? There's something blocking me here...I've never felt anything like it before. And what are you planning on doing with him? He's going to have a nice scar from this, and it'll take at least a week for him to recover fully."

 "We're taking him to my house," Tam said.

 It was the equivalent of the Pope revealing his former life as an exotic dancer.

 "We bloody well are not," Rob snapped.

 They locked stares.

 "Yes," Tam said through gritted teeth, "We are."

Rob snorted. He dropped Therese, and she lay on the ground, whimpering quietly. "What are you planning to say? Hi Mom, I know that he looks like an audition for the Godfather, but really, they only shot him because he's humanly challenged."

 "I'm not going to tell them," she retorted. She had it all perfectly worked out...there was no way she was letting him out of her sight now. "I'm going to hide him in my room."

"Tam?" Rob waved a hand in front of her eyes. "Hello, is anyone home? Can we look at the practicalities of this situation? I mean...putting Aspen Martin in your bedroom?"

 "What are you implying, Rob?" she said levelly. I know, but I'm going to make you say it.

 He squirmed. "Look...the guy's got a reputation."

 "Rob, he's been shot. If he has the energy to get up and ravish me in the middle of the night, I'll be pleasantly surprised." You've got teeth marks on your neck, she noted silently. Interesting...

 "Pleasantly?" Rob's eyebrows shot up into orbit. "Where are you going to fit him so your parents won't see? Unless your wardrobe is a gateway to Narnia, nowhere! Be realistic."

  "I am." Her eyes flashed dangerously. "Chatoya...can you put a spell on him so they won't see him?"

The witch paused in her healing. "Do you know Aspen is a vampire?"

 "He bit me. That kind of gave the game away. And incidentally, if I hadn't known, that would have won you no prizes at all for subtlety."

Chatoya exhaled, her face briefly distant. "All right," she muttered to herself. "I can cast a hex to make anyone who sees him feel like he should be there. They won't realise anything is out of place. I can come over every day and check on Aspen. But look, it really would be easier to put him somewhere else-"

 "No."

 She had promised she wouldn't let anyone hurt him. She had left him alone for one fraction of a second and this had happened. She wouldn't trust anyone else with his life, however nice or powerful they were.

 She couldn't say that though.

 Chatoya looked taken aback. "Okay...well, we're going to have to carry him. Teleportation is beyond me."

 "One of many things," Blue put in, his eyes the deep, smooth blue of a shark's skin.

 The witch glared at him. Tam was grudgingly impressed; she couldn't have met Blue's eyes. Not knowing what she did.

 But Chatoya pointed a finger at him, and in a voice that shook with anger, told him, "Either help, shut up, or get out. I am not in the mood!"

 His voice became low and suggestive, almost purring, yet the air hardened into opaque marble. "You never are in the mood, witch of mine. Why don't you cast your mind back to just why you owe me?"

 "Why don't you cast your mind back a little further? To my brother. And my parents. And my friend."

 "Ah, the good old days," Blue sighed. Pleasure in his voice was a tiger rolling in the sun. "I miss them so."

  Tam didn't have a clue what was going on, or what either of them was talking about, but she had the feeling that this argument was like a minefield. One wrong step and they'd all be sushi.

"You do try so hard not to be afraid," Blue murmured. "I'm quite impressed. So...let me help you out. Ms. Saxoine used oak resin in that gun, but it was melted down then mixed with diamond dust. It's a little known fact that diamonds hurt us, because it's a rare day when one encounters a maniac armed with a diamond knife or diamond bullets. That's what's blocking your pathetic little powers. You might want to try one of those highly illegal purifying spells. Or alternatively, an industrial vacuum."

 "How do you know that?" the witch said sharply.

 "Diamond reeks." A little smile, as if he found them terribly amusing, like a kindle of kittens.

 "How do we know you're telling the truth?" Tam said sharply. Where had Ellie's gun gone? For the first time, she looked around - her eyes widened as she saw Ellie, heaped on the ground, a massive bruise sprawled across her skin like a blackberry stain. The firearm nowhere in sight.

 "You don't, of course. Oh..." He gestured casually, and there was a strange ripping sound. Tam suddenly felt as if she'd put her forearm on a hot iron, and her arm jolted up reflexively.

 "What was that?" she said angrily. Then she saw the black spiral burnt onto the hollow of her elbow.

 His eyes stabbed into her. "Just in case you think about mentioning our conversation to anyone."

 With that last cryptic sentence, he disappeared.

 Literally disappeared. Where had he gone so quickly? One moment there, and next...empty space.

 "I have got to start mining my house," she heard Chatoya mutter under her breath. "It wouldn't hurt him, but at least I'd know he was there."

 Tam prodded the mark. It felt just like the rest of her skin, and it was hardly noticeable against the dark tone anyway. "What is it?" she wondered aloud. "It looks like a tattoo."

 Chatoya glanced over. "I've never seen it. It's not a Nightworld mark. Okay...that's done it. Is your car here? Please don't tell me you walked."

 "I drove," Rob said cheerfully. "I passed last week. Tam - are you sure?"

  She met his eyes, and knew he could read the determination there. "Positive. What about those two?" She gestured to Therese and Ellie. Both, as far as she was concerned, could stay there.

 Rob grinned. "Why don't we leave them there and see who wakes up first? Survival of the fittest."

 Not to be speciest, Tam thought, but I hope Therese wins.

~*~

 You watch as they leave, your beloved and their escort. Such fools, wrapped up in their own problems. Not even noticing the figure watching, always watching and waiting.

 So close, that time. Almost close enough to touch.

 But the shot had ruined everything. Another moment and it would have been right, it would have been perfect...

 You blink, and for a moment, you see her. Anastacia, as she was the last time you met. The last time you stole her, and watched her betrothed's pain burn scarlet trails across his soul. So sweet, that victory.

 And then you see her as she was finally, with the noose tight about her neck and her dress still because there was no wind that day, only a light damp rain that dripped down her swinging form.

 You lost her then.

 Lost her to her own guilt, her own folly.
 
 But this time...oh, this time, you will only win.

~*~

 Tam opened the door cautiously. Silence and dimness, only the loud tick of the hallway clock. Good.

 She held it open as Chatoya and Rob shuffled in, carrying an extremely unconscious Aspen. Along the hall, stealthily creeping, feeling the relief sinking into her stomach. And-

 "Tam, is that you?" A light under the living room door, she realised. Damn, damn, damn.

 I can't let her see me like this! she thought, looking down at her torn, and blood-covered dress.

 Her mother was intensely wonderful. Unfortunately, she was also psychotically protective when it came to her children. Tam gave Rob a desperate look, knowing he would understand.

 Tam's mother's first reaction to Rob had been to sit her daughter down and teach her the facts of life, how men were only out for one thing and how you must never, never let them have it.

 All right, Mom, Tam had said. Can I go and play in the sandpit now?

 She turned her most hopelessly pleading, damsel in distress look on Rob. Since the day she had practiced judo on him ('It'll make men respect you,' her mother had said.), he had never been fooled by it.

 He shook his head.

 She turned her do-it-or-I'll-kick-your-ass look on him.

 "I'm going, I'm going," Rob muttered under his breath, gesturing with his head that Tam should come and get hold of Aspen. They switched and Tam and Chatoya began a hurried, desperate shuffle up the stairs.

 "It's us, Mrs Slone," she heard Rob shout as he disappeared into the living room. Tam fervently hoped her mother didn't demand to check her for signs of male ravagement.

 "What are those on your neck?" came the sonic scream.

 "Oh my god, the fang marks," Tam hissed. Her eyes met Chatoya's. "He got bitten..."

 They could hear Rob, slipping into his boy-next-door charm with bashful ease. "Aw, gee, Mrs Slone, there was fondue, and someone got me with a fork."

 Aw? Gee? Had they stepped into the Waltons?

 Tiptoeing up the stairs, Tam waited to hear if her mother would swallow such a blatantly obvious lie.

 "Fondue?" her mother said sharply. "Is that what you call it now?"

 Along the corridor - and god, Aspen weighed a lot for someone so disturbingly scrawny - past Billy's room, past Celia's room, kick open the door and kick shut the raging panic, and drop him on her bed.

 "That was close," Chatoya muttered. "I'll start setting the spells up...hang on!" she said, alarmed as Tam turned to go and assure her mother she was in good health.

 There was a blinding light, like a camera flash, and the smell of static. When Tam looked down, her dress was clean, and her hair back in its immaculate styling.

 "Well," her mother said when Tam came down. "Do you want to tell me how Rob got those marks on his neck?"

 Rob was making strange gestures behind her mother's back that suggested horrible skiing accident rather than fondue.

 "They had fondue," Tam explained. "It just got completely out of control."

 Her mother gave her the look that said she didn't believe Tam one bit. "Hmm." Then her eyes widened.

  Oh god, what have I forgotten? Dress still on, make-up intact, hair styled perfectly, no signs of mud or-

 "Where are your shoes?" her mother shrieked furiously. "What have you been doing?"

 Oh no...she had forgotten to go back and get them. Tam scuffed her feet and wondered if there was any possible way she could explain this that didn't sound highly suspect.

 "I was giving her a...uh...foot massage," Rob leapt in bravely, straight into the line of fire. "I have a...uh...fetish."

 No, no, bad phrasing. "What he means, Mom," she said hastily, "is that it's a hobby. Rob wants to be a chiropractor, and Ben didn't believe him, so he was proving his point."

 "And if he wanted to be a gynaecologist, would you let him prove his point?" her mother snapped irately. "If you think I believe that, young lady, you're in for a surprise. Now tell me the truth! Who was he?"

 "He wasn't!" Tam protested. "Look, Mom, you don't have to believe me, but that doesn't make what I'm saying any less true!"

 It was an argument her mother couldn't think of a reply to. Finally, she glared. "If I find you're lying..."

  It was half an hour later before Rob escaped, with a hasty, "No, I'll steer clear of the fondue next time," smuggling an exhausted Chatoya out with him, and an hour before Tam did, having reassured her mother that there had been no drinking, no drugs, no smoking and no rampant sex.

 She left out the gatecrashing murderers and shooting.

 It was with relief that she slept.

Lie here and rest your head and dream of something else instead.

  I don't believe in destiny, I don't believe in love
    I don't believe that anything will ever be enough.

Aspen woke up suddenly and mutely, with a terrible feeling of numb dread knotted in his stomach.

 Not again, not again, please oh please not again...

 He couldn't stop himself shaking convulsively, his arms locked around his knees. His teeth were chattering, because he thought he could smell them again in the dark, like they had always been there, smelling of expensive clothes and emptiness, shaped like people. Really monsters.

 When someone touched him, he flinched away and tried not to cry out, because if he made a sound they would hurt him more-

 "It's me," an angel-song voice whispered. "I can feel that something's wrong...Aspen, it's Tam!"

 "T-t-tam?" Was it really her? He blinked, and realised that he could see in this darkness, that it was only the light veil of a moth's wing, not the draped shrouded darkness of the bad place. "Where am I?"

 "In my room. We brought you here after Ellie shot you." She was warm, and in the thin darkness, he could see the graceful curves of her face, and her skin like velvet. Too good for him, too pure and too whole.

He was a mess, a useless mess, and so afraid that he would hurt her and wouldn't know until it was too late.

 "Can you put the light on?" he said timidly.

 "Not really. My mom and my sister are only down the hall, and my brother's next door, and they might wake up." The gentleness of her touch was safety. "Aspen...are you afraid of the dark?"

 He stopped breathing for a moment.

 "Dumb, isn't it?" he said finally, his voice caught between a laugh and a choke. "People like me shouldn't be afraid of the dark - we're supposed to revel in it. But...it was always dark back there. I'd always be waiting, and I'd never see them, but they'd be there all the same. And they'd be quiet. But I felt..."

 He stopped. He wouldn't let her hear it. He wouldn't taint her with that. If Tam knew, she would be disgusted, and she would hate him, and then she might leave and he didn't think he could survive that.

 "Talk to me," she said. "Tell me."

 "You don't want to know," he mumbled.

 "I'm asking, aren't I?" She knelt up, looking straight at him, her eyes as clear as glass bowls of water. He wanted to pool into her, to let her wrap him up in the secure strength of her mind and stay there forever.

 "You won't want to know if I tell you," he said flatly. His sister hadn't wanted to know.

 She had laughed and told him that monsters under the bed didn't exist, and he had told her she had got it wrong. Been called a liar, and a stupid kid, and she hadn't even noticed that he died that day.

 It had taken a long, long time before he was alive again. It had taken lives, and lives, so many lives he couldn't count. He couldn't count anyway, that was why he was failing all his courses, but this was just a number so immense that no one could count it.

 "Please tell me," Tam beseeched him, young and human in her top and the tattered trousers she slept in. Her hair, her lovely, shimmery iridescent hair fell all around her face with the same hue as her eyes.

 He would give in soon. That couldn't be allowed. That was asking too much.

 "I don't want to!" he snapped, trying to remember all the anger he had once felt. "Why can't you just leave me alone! You're..." It was hard, but he said it. "-vermin. Just vermin. Okay, I'm f-"

 And to his horror, the word caught. It stuck in his throat like a captive, slammed into silence.

 "I'm mucked-up," he said finally, "but why do you have to keep digging? I don't want to tell you!"

 Yet his voice had lost the bite, and he knew it. Still...he had hurt her. She took her hands away, and dropped her head so he wouldn't see her bite her lip like that, or blink her eyes so frantically.

 He saw it all anyway.

 Better to hurt her now, he reasoned, than kill her later. It had to be. Then she straightened, and put her hands on the bed so she could lean forward into the little corner where he was still clustered.

 Her scent was like a ghost of summer days, reminding him that there had once been something other than waiting in the dark.

 Tam watched him, and he couldn't shield himself from her. It wasn't like with them. He couldn't switch off, and send himself into imaginary places which were bright and beautiful, and where the sun never ever set. She was in his head, running in him like a fever, and he was trapped.

 "Aspen," she asked quietly. "Why can't you say it?"

They both knew what she meant.

~*~

She tried to see his face, and could make out only the odd shape that the light threw at her. The sharp cheekbones, a silver light embedded in his hair. She let her mind furl open, like a lotus flower in the dawn.

"I hate the word," he said dully. As though feeling was beyond him now. "I hate how people throw it about, not understanding what it means. I hate what it stands for. It's empty and violent and mindless."

She hated the numb suffering she heard, and could feel only pity. "You know what you remind me of?"

 "No," he said sharply. But this time, she felt the lie, a little lump of wrongness in the word. He was trying to be cruel. Deliberately. Why? Before, he had only embraced her help. "And I don't want to know either."

 "What's wrong with you?" She leaned in angrily, not understanding why he was shoving her away like this when it was so clear that he needed her. "I'm sorry if I'm not worthy enough to be told what's wrong because I'm vermin. I'm sorry that you're being such a goddamn jerk. You're like a kid, Aspen, a kid. But you're not a kid, and the monsters under the bed don't exist."

"The monsters in the bed are worse," he said so softly, Tam wasn't sure if she heard him right.

 It took a moment for it to sink in. Just what he meant. Emotions swamped her, knocking her perception of the world - of him - sideways. Disbelief, then with one brief look at his mind, that swum in solitary darkness surrounded by sharp shoals and deadly shadows, she understood the harsh truth of it.

 "Oh god..." Tam said in a thin, odd little voice that couldn't be hers.

 He shrugged, and drew in on himself even more. "It's okay. I get it. You don't want me anymore. Damaged goods and all. Don't worry about it." The worst thing was the way his voice was so tired and flat.
 
 That was why he was so innocent with her, yet so unexpectedly violent. Why he flinched so often, and was afraid of the dark, and couldn't trust anyone even if he wanted to.

 She felt his mind close off from her, sealing him into the stinking, filthy horror of his memories.

 No one should live through that alone.

 "No," she said, and reached out to him. She pulled herself up into the bed, and knelt in front of him, trying to make him look up at her. "No, don't do that! Don't make yourself alone."

 He had just curled up into himself, small in the corner of the room, head buried in his knees. She pulled frantically at his locked hands, screamed and shouted and hammered on the fortress of his mind.

 "Let me in," she said, not wanting the despair that was hurting her throat. "I want to know. I want to help."

 His head snapped up furiously, and those eyes were the curious cold colour of liquid diamonds, sparkling and shifting. "You want to know?" he hissed, reminding her of nothing so much as a wounded wildcat, fierce and afraid. "You can't help me. No one can, and you don't want to know. You couldn't handle it."

 "How do you know?" she challenged recklessly. Yes, she would have said, he was a monster then.

 "Fine!" he almost screamed, and then he moved so fast she didn't see him

 All she knew was that he was suddenly kneeling right by her, his face contorted in terrible, inhuman anger, and that he put one hand over her heart, with his teeth bared and harsh, broken breaths ringing in her ears.

 He opened his mind.

 She was launched into darkness, true darkness, not the midnight hush that she slept in each night. This was a place where the black was like liquid, drowning her and flowing over her.

 The room was cold stone, and she was shivering in a corner of the room. Always shivering, always waiting for the first rush of air into the room, the first wispy hints of the smell that was all the warning there was.

 Her heart hammered in her chest, despite being in this body that was more powerful than her own. Because she might be a vampire here, but she was still a kid and kids were always the ones who got hurt.  

 It curled into her nose, and she was scrabbling back into the corner as if she would sink into the stone, thinking nopleasenonono, and biting her tongue to keep from screaming or sobbing while the hot and silent tears slipped from her eyes, as they always did.

 And then that first spidery touch-

 "No!"

 It wasn't her, it was Aspen, and she was launched back into the comfort of her familiar, simple room.

 He had let go of her and had his hands over his face. She was puzzled, then she realised he was crying in the same quiet, heartbroken way, and there was nothing she could do to take away what she had just seen.

 She felt sick. Physically sick. And so, so angry at whoever it was. God, how could anyone do that to a kid?  

 She didn't know how long she sat there, wanting to say something, finding that the words simply were not there. Being a moderately good person did not give her the ability to wave the problem away.

 She didn't know if he wanted touch right now, but it was all the solace she could offer. She just put her arms around him and when he fought her, let go, but then he held on for a moment, and she saw the bleak drifts of his eyes, shellshocked and pleading.

 "You were right," she said, gathering all the courage she had ever believed that she had. "I don't want to know, but you have to tell someone, Aspen, because you can't deal with that on your own. You can't."
 
 He stared at her, not seeming to notice the tears that wove silvery mazes across his face. So wide, his eyes, so horribly young and trapped. "You won't leave me?"

 "I won't leave you."

 For a long time, he just clung to her and said nothing. And when he did speak, it was in broken sentences that sometimes trailed off in flashes of emotions that lit her head like the battlefield skies of the First World War. She only listened, because there was nothing she could offer to change what he said.

 Sometimes, you could only be there.

 His voice was her world in that gloomy night, her only entrance to a past that was long gone, yet still more real to him than the present. And when he stopped, and told her that that was it, that was all of it, she thought how little time it took to tell something so immensely destructive.

He fell asleep finally, the wall at his back, while Tam lay looking at his face in the growing light. There was no sign of the anguish she had seen, only smooth flawless beauty. How many people hid their own dark places under the clever masks, how many people were in truth crouched in a dark corner, waiting?

 She prayed she would never know.

~*~

 Light chiselled into her eyes slowly. Another day-hang on. The memories of the night filled her.

 Somehow she knew the events of that night would remain there. The knowledge would be between them, but not as a gulf. As a bridge. It would be their knowledge, something that evaporated with the light.

 For now, while the sun shone, she had other problems. The crashed party. Ellie. Rob and the fondue fun.

 "Oh, god," Tam groaned. "I've walked into the season special of Dawson's Creek."

 She turned on her side to look at Aspen. He looked strangely peaceful in sleep, with his vulnerability hidden, and his shoulder swathed in bandages, sighing softly as he exhaled.

 "You are way too cute when you're asleep," she muttered.

  "Thanks."

 She squawked and fell off the bed with a resounding thump. "You might have said you were awake!"

 "I didn't want to spoil the moment," he said shyly as Tam picked herself up. His smile was tentative, but grew as she met his eyes and held them. As the tide of night swept out, it had dragged with it his fractured fear. "But I think you managed that one okay yourself. And...thanks. For listening."

 A rap at the door, and they both froze. "Tam?" her mother called. The door opened.

 Tam's mother was an elegant divorcee, not at all pretty, but Tam had always loyally thought that her mother didn't need looks, not with her exuberant energy that touched everything. She fiercely believed in protecting wildlife, in a good Christian upbringing, in helping others and keeping well clear of vice.

 She should have been lining up a firing squad the moment she saw Aspen.

 "Morning," she said cautiously, preparing for Jodie Slone's inevitable screaming tirade.

 Her mother's eyes fixed on Tam, and then slid to Aspen, causing fear to seize her heart tightly. Then they glazed over, and her mother said dreamily, "Morning, dear. Who's that nice young man?"

 Nice young man. Tam checked that it was still Aspen sitting there. "That's Aspen Martin, Mom."

 "Oh," she said brightly. "What's he doing here?"

 It sounded rational, but there was a strange expression on her mother's face. She was being nice.

 "We spent the night making mad, passionate love," Tam said curiously, still waiting for the explosion.

  "That's nice, dear," her mother said. Where was the glare that could maim at a hundred paces and kill at ten? Last time Tam had brought a boy home, her mother's opening remark had been that he'd better respect her daughter because the flowerbed was ripe for expansion, and wasn't the new meat cleaver nice?

 "He's a pathological liar," Tam prompted. "He gambles at casinos all night and robs the elderly of their pension books. He shoots small squirrels with a water gun and runs a local mafia, whilst paying devout tribute to the devil and holding nude jazz parties in his hot tub."

 "That's interesting, dear," her mother murmured. There should have been nuclear fallout by now. "And does he have any hobbies?"

 "Debauchery, robbery and loan-sharking."

 "Well, he seems a well-rounded young man." Obviously she was hearing something different. She picked up an ornament. "You need to dust your room," she chided gently. "Honestly, it's as bad as Celia's."

 "Mother, he's a vampire," Tam said, trying the ultimate test. If this was Chatoya's spell...wow.

 Her mother stilled, and met Tam's eyes. The odd glaze seemed to roll away like clearing mists. Oops...

 "Don't be silly, dear, vampires don't exist," her mother said firmly. "Now do come down to breakfast."

~*~

 Tam ended up wrestling her little brother - as always - for the sports section of the newspaper.

 "Hey!" Billy protested, his face screwed up. He slapped Tam.

  Did he just hit you? an enraged Aspen said. I'll-

 The words trailed off as Tam hit him back and neatly arm-locked him. The vampire gawked as Tam's mother stepped gracefully over her children, swiped the newspaper and swatted the pair of them with it.

"Enough," her mother said firmly as Tam and Billy, glaring, sat down. "You can have the newspaper when I'm finished reading. Tam, is your boyfriend going to eat breakfast or just hover in the doorway?"

 Boyfriend? As far as her mother was concerned, it was usually said in the same way most people said 'flesh-eating bacteria'. And she had that glassy, unseeing look whenever she glanced in his direction.

  Are you all right? Aspen asked, sounding appalled. That was brutal!

 Tam hid her smile. Fine. Look, if you don't come and sit down, Mom's going to notice something.

 He moved forward uneasily, slinking into a seat at the table. His eyes flicked over the toast and cereal with slight confusion, as though he'd never seen them. Nose wrinkling as he took in the steaming coffee.

  Does everyone do this? he asked, looking like Christmas had just come. Yet he didn't touch anything.

  Yeah. Don't you? He was hiding something from her, and it was fiendishly easy to dip into his mind and pluck it out. Tam flourished the evidence in from of him as if it were a gauntlet. You don't eat?
 
 He was starving, she realised. Absolutely starving. Not for blood, but for simple human nourishment. And he liked it that way because...

  I'm in control, he said flatly, reading her mind. I eat when I have to. And you can stop thinking I'm screwed up. I know it, okay, but this is how I am. And I am not anorexic. Guys do not get anorexia.

  You have a lot to learn about life, she told him calmly. Fine, if you're not anorexic, eat something.

 He glared.

"Cool eyes," Celia said. She had the same dark hair and deep bronze skin as the rest of them, but her irises were a pale hawkish amber. She stared hard at Aspen. "I like you better than the last one. You're cuter."

Tam pulled a face. "For all you know, he could be a vampire." Aspen's mental splutter sounded in her ears.

 "Ooh, he can suck my blood any time," Celia said, grinning. "Is that why he's not eating anything?"

  Are all your family this naggy? an irritated Aspen demanded. Why don't you just hammer in a big sign saying 'how do you like your stake'?

 "Is something wrong with the food?" her mother said in the faintly deadly tone that Tam was surprised to find she had missed. The tone that meant I am not accepting such bad manners.

  Oh come on, Aspen said in disbelief. Your mom can't be that bad.

 "Young man," her mother said, holding her fork in a way that suggested it might soon be aimed at Aspen's eye at high velocity, "do you know how rude it is to refuse food offered by your hostess?"

 She bent the skunk-eye stare his way, and turned it up from Mildly Peeved to Crash Helmets On.

 Aspen gulped and muttered an apology before taking some toast. Tam smiled behind her hand.

  Oh, stop being so insufferably smug, Aspen said sulkily.

~*~  
"Ow."

 Chatoya Irkil prodded the angry red wound with one finger. "That's why you aren't going anywhere," she said exasperatedly. "It's not healed yet. You're staying here today."

 "Ow," Aspen said as she carried on poking him, emphasising each word with a jab. "I'm fi-Ow..."

 "He seemed okay this morning," Tam said ruefully, looking at the nasty mess that was his shoulder minus the bandages as he sat on her bed wincing. "Thanks for those spells by the way. They're working a charm."

 "They are a charm," Chatoya said dryly, a brief grin lighting her. "And that's beside the point. He-"

"Ow."

"-is not-"

"Ow."

"-going anywhere."

"All right!" Aspen  yelped, leaping off the chair and grimacing. "Can you please stop using my shoulder to demonstrate your point? Jeez, just because you're missing breakfast."

 "You obviously know it's not healed," the witch berated. "Honestly, Aspen, you've been shot-"

"Fine! I'll stay. Unless you want me to go with you..." he said to Tam, tilting his head charmingly.

 "I'd feel better if you were home," Tam said. "Now that Mom's seeing you as one of the family, even if it is that nasty cousin she doesn't like much, she'll fight off the four horsemen if needs be."

 Aspen half-smiled. "She seemed really nice to me. Just scary." His face was wistful. "Maybe if my mom had lived, she'd have been like that...and by the way, was that the bus that just went past the window?"

 She and Chatoya ended up running for the bus, while a leering Celia and Billy laughed themselves stupid and didn't ask the driver to stop. When they finally got on, she found herself talking to Chatoya Irkil and finding out just why it was Rob had so much respect for her.

 Perhaps if Tam had known what would happen, she wouldn't have let Aspen out of her sight

~*~

Rob's arm muscles protested as he hit a volley that crept over the net and dribbled to a stop. His back was threatening to sue as he jumped to catch the return lob, and his legs were setting up a formal rally with imminent strikes due as he ran frantically to get the wickedly fast forehand that Ben Skykes smashed straight past him with his usual combination of pent-up hormonal violence and skill.

 "What's wrong with you today, Slivan?" an irritated Ben demanded. "We've got a doubles match in two days, and I'm giving up my lunchtime to practise while you're playing like a pensioner."

 "That's unfair," Rob muttered fuzzily. He hadn't been feeling at all right since he woke up this morning. The world kept sliding in and out of focus and a heavy, pounding tiredness seemed to have settled under his skin like a layer of metal. Whatever the buzz that had kept him on a fondue-fantasy high was, it had gone.

 "Yeah, it is unfair," as a fast-moving projectile whipped by. "Pensioners move faster."

 Luminous yellow tennis balls flew past his ears as Rob tried to dredge up the energy to move. The nightmare just seemed to drag on and on-

 Until the point when a ninety-mile-an-hour serve hit him in the forehead.

 "Oh shit!" The wide azure sky was suddenly blocked out by the other person that Rob couldn't quite place, waving a hand in front of his eyes. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

 "That's across," Rob felt the need to point out. Why was he flat on his back? "Who are you?"

 "What the hell's wrong with you?" The person kicked him in the leg which wasn't really conducive to helping his recovery. "You're supposed to be Rob Slivan, you know, faster than a speeding bullet?"

 "I am?" he said, feeling there had been a rational sentence in there somewhere. "You're blocking my sun."

 "I'm what? Okay, that's it, get up. I've given you enough sympathy, you're just being lazy."

 "I can't," Rob said peacefully. The sun was simmeringly hot, so hot it reminded him of something (or was it somewhere). It made the pain in his neck fade. "Did you know your nostrils flare when you're annoyed?"

 Ben came very close to practicing his backhand on Rob at that moment. And he would have, if someone hadn't moved smoothly past like a feather on the breeze, and knelt down.

 "Go away," a voice that sounded like distilled fantasy ordered. There was no disobeying.

 Rob blinked. The person seemed to have become thinner. And balder. Or was he imagining things?

 "What are you doing?" he asked. He was aware that his inner adult was shrieking that this was someone dangerous, someone very, very dangerous, but he couldn't summon up the energy to care.

 "I overdid it," the person muttered. One bony hand hauled him up to a sitting position. He felt like a ragdoll - if she let go, he'd just flop back down again. "Vermin, what's your name?"

 He should have known. Like he should have known his age, or the way home, or why he was lying down, but he couldn't quite catch hold of anything. Only her reptilian face had any clarity.

 "You're not going to start singing about trusting in you, are you?" he said.

 "Great. Just great." He thought a forked tongue flickered briefly. "All right, vermin, it's like this. I'm a vampire. I drank your blood, only I didn't get to finish what I started. I want to change you."

 "For what?"

 "Not for. Into. I want to make you into a vampire. You can have immortal life, massive powers, the whole shebang." She shook him, the oil wells of her eyes slicking over him. "You'll die if I don't, incidentally."

 "Oh." It didn't seem to be too bad to him. "Okay. Do I get a refund if I don't like it?"

 "No." He felt a cool hand on the back of his neck, and a burning sensation began near his throat.

The pain was replaced by something else, a feeling, a taste like the stars melted down and combined with the night. He was flying, filled with light and filled with strength, soaring out past the sky and into deep space, spinning past stars and into a source of power that was pure fire, pure blood.

 A strange sleepiness came over him. And when he awoke, he would be someone quite different.

  Oh, man, you should have seen us on the way to Venus
 Walking on the Milky Way - it was quite a day.

  So make the best of this test and don't ask why:
    It's not a question but a lesson learned in time..

 Aspen was asleep. That was his first mistake.

 He had felt so safe, even in her disgustingly girly room in its pastels and prettiness, that for the first time since he could remember, he just curled up and caught up on twelve years of missed sleep. Her pillow smelled like the rosemary shampoo she always used, and it made him miss her.

 Aspen couldn't imagine missing anyone.

 But he couldn't imagine needing anyone so much, either. Maybe he loved her a little too. Not in the live-in-your-eyes-die-in-your-arms sense, or he didn't think so, not yet, but purely for her kindness and her fear and her courage in the face of that fear.

 He also really, really wanted to bite her.

 But he had got the impression last time that it wasn't too polite.

 So there he was, in his floating empty sleep, absently walking the dreamwebs, when something woke him up.

 There was a girl standing over him with a massive bruise on her face and a gun. He had a very nasty feeling of déjà vu.

 He shouted for Tam. That was his second mistake.

  Tamtamtamtamtam...

 She was in some kind of a lesson, staring at squiggly symbols and numbers. For a brief moment, Aspen understood algebra, then she tuned in. Aspen? Are you okay?

  That girl's come back! he shouted at her, panicking. She's got a gun, and she's pointing it at me!

  Ellie?

  I don't know! I haven't stopped to ask her name! It's the one from the party...the one Blue let shoot me.

She had asked him why he wasn't angry at Blue for that. Do you get mad at your cat when it hunts mice? Aspen had said with a shrug. It's like being angry at rain for being wet. It was just vintage Blue. He'd known the guy for ten years, and he was like luck. Whimsical, weird and occasionally a right w-

  Stay there, she ordered. He sensed her getting up, ignoring the teacher's startled question and tearing out the classroom like a mad thing. I'll be there in twenty minutes if I run. Call Blue...call Therese...

  Done it already. He couldn't reach Therese, but Blue's cool voice was speaking in his ear. Aspen didn't know if it would work...but he could try. Don't know if-

 Her mind cut out suddenly, and left him alone.

~*~

 Rob blinked slowly.

 There was an astonishing cobalt radiance above him, like a thousand kingfishers had spread wide their wings. Wait. No. That was the sky.

 And he was lying on his back. But surely the sky wasn't so bright, and the sun didn't sear into his eyes like a blowtorch, and he normally never felt so strange...or...

 "How do you feel?"

 A face appeared over him, and a hand touched his forehead, strangely cool for the warm golden tone of her skin, a hand that swept short lines down to the sweat-dried curls of his hair. He looked at the round snake-like curve of her cheekbones, and the oddly flat nose, and the burning intensity of those dark eyes.

 Oh no.

 She was dangerous, she was very dangerous, and she had already bitten him once. But something...something was different this time. Her face seemed sharper, and he swore he could see the butterfly-flutters of her pulse in her lips and her skin, and hear the slither of her breath.

 He could smell her too. Like clean sand and sweetly fragrant heaps of sawdust.

 This was weird.

 "Are you going to bite me again?" he said edgily, sitting up because at least that way he didn't feel so vulnerable. Unfortunately, it meant getting closer to her, but Rob solved that problem by scrabbling back at the same time until he was half-crouched away from her.

 He was on the tennis court.

 How had he got there? He remembered being bitten, and taking Tam's bizarre boyfriend home because he had been...hurt somehow, the details were hazy, and there had been strange nightmarish dreams, but the entire morning - or maybe it had been days, he didn't know - evaded him, lurking at the back of his mind like a taunting imp.

 He could meet her eyes now, and the colour in them moved like a bird's shadow over a lake, rippling and changing strangely. Not black, like he had thought, but filled with deep swirling blues and surprisingly feminine glitters of pale yellow and green.

 He didn't even notice he had crept forward to gaze at her until he was impolitely close, and staring with unabashed fascination.

 She seemed to be having trouble forming words. "You're too close," she told him finally.

 "Huh?" Rob blinked. How had he gotten this near? He moved back a little, marvelling at the way his movements seemed to melt into one another, and ignoring the little warning voice in his head. "Well...are you going to bite me?"

 "No. Never again." The girl pursed her mouth, and the light rippled along it in white bars. Rob didn't even realising she was saying something until she stopped. "Did you hear a word of that?"

 "Of what?" The light hit her face in strange ways too, and how had he never noticed the light collected in golden speckles on her cheeks? And how long her lashes were in strange contrast to the rest of that bare and smooth face, sleek and slender as otter's fur, and right now stark against the hollows of her sockets as her eyes widened.

 Pretty, he thought. More than pretty, amazing, like watching a sunrise in someone's face. Seeing the world in a whole new way, only instead of being turned wonderful crimsons and pinks, she was a flushing gold.

 "Robert!" The first time she had used his name, rolling the 'r's and making it rich, exotic, not pronouncing the 't'. Even her voice was different, thrumming with layers of music like a symphony. Keep talking, Rob thought dazedly, I have to hear more. "I changed you."

 The words made no sense to him. Rob frowned. "I don't understand."

 "I made you a vampire."

 So flat, so easily said, but they thudded into him like bullets, one after the other.

 I...

 know that can't be true, said the little voice he had so stupidly ignored, but that now suddenly exploded at full volume, drowning out even the strange new brightness of the world. It

...made...

no sense. Common sense told him that things could be made but people were people. They just were. You couldn't make or unmake them and anyway, vampires didn't bite

...you...

or sink their teeth into your neck at a death of a party and tell you they would drown in you, and leave you so exhausted you collapsed and couldn't remember anything except strange and wonderful dreams and an odd sense of peace. But he knew that was

...a...

lie because she had. She had and he was a

...vampire.

~*~

 "Hello," she said quietly, pointing the gun at him. Her eyes were bright and lustrous, rich as autumn leaves drenched in sunlight. "I don't suppose you remember me."

 "I do," Aspen said flatly. He didn't know how pale his skin had gone, chalky and around his lips, almost blue. He didn't know that he looked suddenly very young.

 She might have been considered beautiful. Her features were symmetrical, her lips lushly pouted and her eyes narrow, made sultry by the clean arcs of her bone-structure, and graced by smooth skin. Her clothes fitted perfectly, and she was even smiling.

 They had been beautiful too.

 She laughed, and the sound scuttled through him like a cockroach, making him clench his teeth against waves of revulsion that turned his skin into goosebumps. "Go on, then. Who am I?"

 "You're a vampire hunter," he said quietly. Be calm, oh, be calm because people like this will drink your fear from the inside out and leave your empty shell to putrefy. "You're vermin, and you're called Eleanor something, and you hate Tam and you shot me."

 "Wrong."

 Aspen could only stare. He knew everything he had said was true, yet there was absolute confidence in her voice.

 "I was all those things," she said calmly. She gave an odd little shake of her head, making the twisted loops of her earrings glitter. "But everything changes. Anastacia."

 Runrunrun... How could it be so far to her house? It was only ten minutes by bus, but those minutes seemed to be stretching into eternity.

 "Want a lift?"

 The car that screeched to a halt beside her was an old sea-green Fiat, so battered it looked like it should have been crumbling on a scrapheap, or possibly in a museum. Blue gestured to the passenger door.

 "What are...you do...ing here?" Tam gasped out between choking breaths.

 "Aspen gave me a yell," Blue said casually. "Called in a favour I owe him. You know, did it not occur to you that leaving Aspen in your own home might be a fairly obvious place?"

 "Has anyone told you you're a complete bitch?" Tam said furiously as she got in, throwing him the quelling glare that had made so many people apologise hurriedly. It was the one useful attribute she had inherited from her mother.

 He flashed her an easy, charming smile that didn't reach the polar ice of his eyes. "Few have ever got to the end of the sentence."

 He floored the accelerator and to Tam's extreme shock, the car took off like a rocket. Something this old should not be able to go at...ninety...three...miles an hour... "How old is this car?"

 Blue looked over at her. Tam found it slightly disconcerting that he didn't seem to recognise that keeping your attention on the road was a vital part of driving. "Same age as me. Seventeen and a bit."

 Tam had something she had been wanting to ask him, and now it flashed into her mind as forgotten resolutions so often do. She brandished her arm in front of him, neatly obscuring his vision and completely coincidentally, elbowing him in the nose.

 "What the hell is this mark?" she demanded.

 Unbeknown to her, Tam was the first person to startle Blue since he had first met Chatoya Irkil.

 The blue eyes narrowed a touch, becoming two lines of sapphire in his pale face. "It's a guarantee."

 "Of what?" Tam snapped. "It had better expire pretty damn quick, or there'll be..." Her words trailed off as Blue turned his stare on her. It was like being blasted by a blowtorch.

 "You amuse me, vermin girl," he said softly. "Let me indulge you. That mark tells anyone belonging to a select range of organisations that they are free to kill you. And let me indulge you further and explain my motivations. I'm curious as to what happens if one's soulmate dies."

 Tam felt her body ice over at the calculated coldness. "You know about soulmates."

 "I have one." Blue tilted his head on one side, still utterly ignoring the road. "I also had a headache once. It too was a constant companion that interfered with my thoughts and my life. I got rid of it."

 "You're a monster," Tam said flatly.

 "Well, yes, but I don't like to boast." The brakes screamed, and Tam swore as she hit the front dashboard at a painful speed. But the pain was half-forgotten as she realised they were outside her house, and she could see a tall silhouette in her window, a silhouette she knew at once as Ellie.

 She hardly heard Blue's parting, "Next time, wear a seatbelt." But oddly, she didn't hear the car pull away.

~*~

 "Mwah?" was Aspen's brief and yet telling contribution. Then he recovered himself and said hysterically, "What did you call me?"

 The laugh was bewitching. It rippled like a nightingale's song through his head, swathed in pure darkness. Chilling, haunting, utterly enthralling...

 He had heard it before.

 No, no, no...it must have been at the party, it had to have been at the party, because-

 "It's true, my dearest," Eleanor whispered softly. Her eyes were shiny and full as conkers, briefly shielded by her eyelashes before she looked straight at him. "I don't suppose you remember, do you? We were in France then, of course, and you were just a shy court girl-"

 "I'm a man!" Aspen said indignantly. "I have testosterone, and a deep voice, and facial hair, and certain anatomical features which I'm almost certain women don't have-"

 She levelled the gun at him, and Aspen felt a sudden compulsion to be very silent and very still.

 "What you are and what you were are two very different things," she proclaimed softly, and her full mouth curled upwards. He saw the curve of an axe in her lips, and the plump sheen of light on them matched the gleam of sunlight from a blade...

 And he remembered.

 Oh god...the whole sordid affair. An affair with this girl, only then she had been a man with rich dark-blue eyes like a swallow's wing, who had lured him away from Tam. But Tam had been different then too, she had been a Comte with land to keep, and fathoms deep in her soul that she had never let Aspen...or Anastacia see...Tam had been a man with steely grey eyes, eyes as fierce as they were now.

 He had taken her aloofness for something it was not; he had made the same mistake in this life too, when he had first seen her. Thought of her as one of the proud and popular bitches that stalked around like they owned the world.

 Then, she, the Comte had been the Nightperson, and this fruitcake of a girl, this Eleanor, she had been a Nightperson too, and he the human.

 And now, the positions were reversed, except for, it seemed, one thing.

 Was he destined to be a victim in every life?

 Then, three hundred years ago, he had taken his own life. He had seen the love of the Other - this Eleanor - for the gaudy sham it was. It was lust, it was a desire to take Anastacia and tame her, and toy with her, and finally, Anastacia had cracked...or rather, her spine had in a noose.

 Because he could see it now, see what he had not seen that last fatal time.

 The darkness ran slick in Eleanor Saxoine's eyes, ran like a bubbling, terrible river of acid. It wanted to consume all it touched, to envelop all in herself.

 She had hated Tam then, and it came back to him now, the cold clear words of the Other in that final evening.

  He has everything. It has been handed to him on a platter, and he cares nothing! Well, I have taken what he shall miss, and I will destroy him. And the Other had fixed the tainted depths of his eyes on Anastacia, crouched there in her pretty dress with a bruise spreading the length of her side from where the Other had hurled her in a fit of rage. You're mine, pretty, and you don't ever mention his name again!

 "You took me to hurt Tam," he said slowly, hardly able to believe it.

 "Oh, but you were so pretty," Eleanor cooed. "I wanted you for you, too." Her face contorted. "But you wanted to go back to him!"

 "You hit me," Aspen pointed out. Not once, not twice, but time after time because the Other could not control its - and nothing so cruel could be human - jealous rages, imagining Anastacia to be flirting with others, kissing others, whoring with others.

 He could feel an indignant, strange anger rise in him. The anger of injustice, that the child he had been had once felt, that the French noblewoman he had once been too had felt every day. "I was chutney by the time you were done with me."

 Her lips drew back and she snarled at him. The sound reverberated, low and ferocious. "You were mine but you thought of him!"

 "If it's me you're after, why did you shoot me?" an irritated Aspen asked. This girl was about as rational as pi, but the anger was getting to the point where he almost wanted her to shoot him.

 It was why Therese and Blue had called him erratic. He didn't care if he died, just as long as he spited someone on his way out. Just as long as he didn't have to remember cowering in corners and waiting in shadows, just as long as this miserable life was gone-

  Aspen!  That voice, it was everything, and then he remembered why he couldn't die.

 The suicidal rage was quenched, because Tam was nearby and Tam mattered to him more than anyone. If he died, he'd hurt her, and there was nothing worse than that.

 They're right, Aspen thought evenly. I'm crazy. But she doesn't care about that, so neither do I.

 "Why?" The gun shoved under his chin brought reality in - metaphorically - a shot. "I wasn't aiming for you. I was aiming for her! But she screamed and I was...distracted..."

 The gun was drawn back. Eleanor stared down at him, and her face softened fractionally. "I never meant to hurt you," she murmured.

 Aspen did a classic impression of a goldfish. "You arranged a bloody party to hunt me down and kill me!" he shouted.

  Don't annoy her, Tam was saying. Oh god, where's the spare key, if Billy or Celia have taken it, I will kill them...

  "No!" She shook her head vigorously. "Only to punish you. Not to kill. The other two...yes..."

 "How did you know about us?" he said. They had been so careful - Blue had insisted. With a knife.

 Her laugh was harsh. "It was easy. I remembered the moment you arrived. Two years ago, when I had only just begun to find out about the Nightworld. I knew who you had been, and I had been a vampire myself, don't forget. It's easy to see others of your own kind...or who were my kind."

 She spun wildly, smashing at the crystal windchimes in Tam's room until they shattered. Not caring about the flakes that cut her smooth skin. "Why should they be born with those powers, when I can't have them?" she cried desperately. "The first one we caught, I asked him to change me, but he wouldn't, he wouldn't...so I killed him. And I killed all of them. They didn't deserve immortality."

  What are the prerequisites? Tam said sharply. Bloody minded insanity? Brutality? More problems than an agony aunt's column?

 All, Aspen thought uncomfortably, qualities either he, Therese and Blue had. But they were exceptions, not the rule. And besides...he was going to change. If she wanted him to. He'd do anything for Tam.

 "I tried so hard to feel guilty, you know," Eleanor said almost gently. "But in a way, I was glad when I shot you. You deserved it, for choosing her." Her hands caressed the gun in a way that was extremely disturbing. "How can I love what I hate?"

 "You don't love me," Aspen said angrily.

  Got it! Tam crowed. Her mind was cut off from him for a second in her victory.

 "But I do," Eleanor insisted. "That's why I'm going to kill Tam."

 Aspen managed a spate of inarticulate consonants.

Faint dreamy smile. "Daddy gave me a good Christian upbringing."

  What, he burnt her on a pyre daily? Tam snapped. Her feet on the stairs, stealthy but swift. Along the corridor, avoiding the squeaky floorboards with childhood ease: grace and humanity mingled in a way that awed him. I know 'Daddy' and the only thing he gave her was a credit card and a superiority complex. I'm going to slap her stupid... She hadn't heard what Eleanor said and he had to warn her now-

  No! Apsen shouted. Don't come up here, Tam, it's not me she wants to hurt, it's you, it's you and it was always you...

 But too late, the door was opening and he saw, as if in slow motion, Eleanor turning and raising the gun in the instinct of the shocked and startled, triumph roaring in her eyes as she saw Tam.

 "Well, if it isn't the Comte," Eleanor purred.

 He felt the explosion like fireworks searing wildly across the sky as memories burst into Tam's mind.

  We're...here again, her voice said in his head; but it was two voices, one laid over the other in perfect harmony. I remember this. I remember how it must be.

 "You leave him alone!" Tam snapped, her eyes flicking to Aspen. Funny, he thought dreamily, how they could be the same colour as Eleanor's...yet so different, so warm and kind.

 "Oh, I won't leave him alone," Eleanor said coyly. He saw Tam's face change as the gun was levelled at her. "After all, he'll have me. This time, there is no choice."

 "Are you mad?" hissed Tam, his soulmate, his saviour, more than he had dreamed.

  Get out! Aspen shouted at her. Tam, she has a gun! Those things hurt. I know!

 She turned her stare on him briefly, and for the first time, he saw the Comte's cold determination still in her, rising from where it had been buried. No. I remember what happened last time I left you. I will not do it again.

  I'll be fine! he said desperately. It's you she wants to hurt, not me.

  Mon ange, she said gently, and the words were an arrow in his soul, do you even know what she is? She's not a person, she's evil. Old evil. Did she tell she loves you, mon ange, and smile her pretty smile, and promise not to hurt you if only you'd choose her?

  How did you...?

  Because there's more to the story than you know, mon ange. The eyes that were focused on him appeared almost grey for an instant, and hauntingly sad. After you killed yourself, she came to see me. She brought an army with her, mon ange, and massacred my people. And me, finally. When I knew what she was. Pain flowing through to him, and underneath...

 He could feel Tam fighting against this knowledge, feel her fear. She was scared of losing herself in these memories; of forgetting who Tamara Slone was.

"What is she?" he asked gently.

 A dry laugh resounded about him, but it did not belong to Tam. Eleanor Saxoine was chuckling quietly, though her eyes were nothing human. Nothing recognisable.

 "She'd call it evil," Eleanor said softly. "But all I am is death, pretty."
 
 He shook his head dumbly, frozen by the inhuman artfulness that glimmered in her face. Something old, and something sly that tilted her smile into a crooked twist and moved with jerky speed.

 "I like your fear," she whispered. "It tastes like honey."

 She feeds off fear, he thought. There was something...something...

 "You're a wraith," he said flatly. Yes. Blue had told him once, when they were discussing extinct Night creatures. Wraiths, the trapped spirits of the cruel who refused to leave the world and instead, infested body after body until that person died. Malign, mad beings who lived for the suffering of others, who fed on it.

 He had sometimes thought Blue was a wraith. But Blue wasn't mad. Only wrong.

 "Well done, pretty!" she said brightly. "Now which of you goes first? Her, I think...she's only afraid for you...but you're afraid for both of you."

 She raised the gun.

 Aspen had never even imagined anything could move so fast.

 But Blue leapt through the window like a burning bullet, dragonfire haloed around him, knocking the gun.

 A picture on Tam's wall shattered with the erratic shot as Aspen threw himself across the room and pulled her down behind the door. "Stay down," he whispered, leaving Blue to do what he was so, so good at.

 Black fire crawled across Eleanor Saxoine as Blue wrapped his hands around her throat quite calmly, and the sounds that came from her mouth were unearthly and dreadful. Rising higher, and higher, and higher-

 A pale green light seemed to leap from her body, and Aspen thought he glimpsed a screaming, raging face in it for a second before it was scattered into ethereal dust.

 "Talk about regular exorcise," was Blue only dry remark. "Interesting. And we thought they'd died out."

 The human girl was limp in Blue's grasp, unconscious.

 "Oh my god," Tam was repeating into his shoulder, over and over again. Aspen tried not to wince at the pain, but let her clutch him with feverish hands, begging him to tell her that she hadn't seen that, that it was a nightmare, a dream, anything... "Stop me remembering," she was saying, "please, I don't want to see. Aspen, Aspen...it hurts so much..."

 He held her head in the curve of his neck as he saw Blue drop the human to the ground. Take out a knife. Spread Eleanor Saxoine's hand on the floor. Cut off the trigger finger.

 "No more hunts," Blue said softly. His smile gleamed like dawn on glass. "We're even now, Martin."

 "We're even," Aspen agreed, as he felt Tam begin to cry into his shoulder. No one could be strong forever. "Take that vermin with you, Malefici. She doesn't belong here."

 Not in Tam's home, this place of security and comfort, of family and friends. This home that he would make his, because it was quite clear to him now that Tam needed him too, even if she didn't always know it. She didn't understand the Nightworld. She didn't know what she was dealing with.

 And even though she cried for a long time in his arms, amidst the wreckage of her room, Aspen thought that he had never been so content.

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right
   I hope you had the time of your life.

  We'll fight, not out of spite but 'cause someone must stand up for what's right
    And where there's a man who has no voice, there ours shall all sing.

 It was a rare day when anyone surprised Blue Malefici.

 Aspen managed it by running over his foot.

 Blue was staring thoughtfully into the distance, over in the direction of Chatoya Irkil who was sitting with her bizarre friends. Aspen saw her grin as he hit the brakes and, by good aim and timing, Blue.

 He was quite pleased at the momentary narrowing of Blue's eyes and the high-power glare that could have cooked a microwave meal in two minutes (heating category D).

  Let me handle this, he said without looking at Tam. She was sat beside him, uneasily tracing the black symbol on her arm. Blue's less likely to hurt me.

  All right, she said softly, touching his hand. You be careful. Don't go all crazy.

  I'll try, he said, and that was more than he had ever done before.

 "Hi," he purred, leaning out to flash a neon-bright, wild smile at Blue. Anger felt good, warming him. "Want to tell me why the hell you marked my girlfriend for any assassin out there to hunt?"

 "I'm sorry, you ran over my foot to discuss trifles?" Blue said, raising an eyebrow. The guy was an iceberg, Aspen often thought, with nine-tenths under the surface and the ability to sink anyone stupid enough to try and take shortcuts with him. Not frozen water though. Frozen volatile radioactive material.

 "It's not a trifle," he said flatly. "I don't want her killed."

 "Diddums," the vampire drawled. "Do really think I give a damn about what you want? She's vermin, Martin, and people like us do not date people like her."

 "I do."

 "Tasted her yet?" Blue asked wickedly, innuendo on every word.

 "That's none of your goddamn business!"

Furious, Aspen leapt out of the car, not knowing how his eyes had lit up, one an oozing crimson, the other icy-pale grey.

  Aspen! Tam shouted, and he could sense her fumbling with her seatbelt, about to jump out and rescue him.

  You stay there, he shot at her. He's my kind, okay, and this is how you have to deal with Blue.

 "She looks sweet," the cobalt-haired boy drawled, his voice sounding like a lion's purr to Aspen's ears. "How is she?"

  An incensed Aspen slammed his fist at Blue's infuriatingly arrogant face.

 With most people, that would have been a seriously fatal error. However, he wasn't quite sure why, but Blue seemed to like him.

 It didn't stop him hitting Aspen against the car so hard it left a dent.

 "My, aren't you quite the antagonist today," the lamia remarked, stepping back and in his usual effortless and cavalier manner, telepathically coercing every human that was staring to look away. His lip curled slowly. "Remnants of a lost life? PMT perhaps?"

 Aspen glared. "Would you just shut up about that? It's not my fault I used to be a girl!"

 He didn't realise how loud he had said that until he looked around and saw Chatoya Irkil's wide eyes and open mouth.

 "I was born that way," he muttered more quietly

 That sinful, annoying smile was beginning to curve. "Are you sure? Maybe it's Maybelline."

 "I hope someone tortures you horribly," Aspen snapped.

 "Therese made me sit through The Sound of Music," the vampire said, with a roll of his eyes. "Does that count? Honestly, her passion for all things vermin is ridiculous. How on earth am I supposed to prepare the next stage of the scheme while she's trying to solve a problem like Maria, and incidentally, brown paper packages tied up with string contain small metal surprises that will blow you into string, in my experience."

 "In which case it's so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, goodnight?" Aspen said with false brightness. "I want you to take that mark off Tam's arm."

 "One should always aspire to the impossible," Blue said coolly. "It's good for the soul."

 He bared his teeth at the lamia. "You can't push me around like vermin, Malefici. I want that mark off now. I don't even know how you managed to burn the damn thing onto her arm-"

 "Dragon magick."

 It was like time stopped, and there was an awful, dead silence before the boom of his heartbeat sounded in his ears. No, no, no, Aspen thought, don't let me have heard that because if it's true, this could change everything.

 That much power in Blue's hands...no, that can't be right.

 "What?"

 "There are spells which will steal a dragon's powers from it while it sleeps," Blue said patiently, that cunning face that he had known for years and years becoming strange once again. He searched the sharp lines of it, looking for signs that there was a supernova sleeping there, for anything but the detached ice that was all Blue had ever showed to the world. "I invested in one."

 "Whoa..." Aspen said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around the idea. Dragon powers. What he couldn't do with those. In fact, never mind what he couldn't do, what he could do. "I thought I was the crazy one round here."

 "You're the crazy one," Blue agreed. Flash of the smile that meant only trouble. "I'm the smart one. Now, you were about to start threatening me...?"

 He knew why Blue had told him. To make it clear that as he always damn well did, Blue Malefici would carry on in his merry, destructive way and woe betide anyone who crossed his smouldering path.

 But Blue thought he knew him.

 He doesn't know what I'll do for Tam, Aspen thought. He doesn't realise that even if he harnessed all the powers in the universe, I'd still risk fighting him. Just for her.

 "If she dies, I'll kill you," he said quietly.

 Blue flicked his fingers. "Be still my beating heart."

 The passenger door opened, and Tam stomped out, her eyes wide and exasperated. He could tell without looking at her that she was wearing her mother's skunk-eye glare, the one that meant heads would roll.

 "You don't have a heart," she said. Her anger fizzled inside his head like a smoking barbecue and Aspen tried to warn her that annoying Blue was never a good idea, especially if you were human, but she wasn't listening.

 "Of course I do," the lamia said scornfully. "In a jar by my bed."

 "Don't be revolting!" Tam snarled, so angry Aspen decided he had better get hold of her before she took a swing at Blue. And of course, it meant he got to touch her. Either way, a good idea.

 "Tam," Aspen said in her ear, "Don't lecture him. He really doesn't like being lectured. It gets him all homicidal."

What'll happen if I'm polite? she asked, a little calmer. Her mind was a strange combination of feelings he had never seen as fitting together; the fresh aroma of daffodils, the silken heat of melted chocolate, the brightness of light in a kaleidoscope, the haunting coo of panpipes.

  We'll get to grow old together. Older, anyway.

 He hadn't told her, or let her know, but he was planning on growing old with her. It had been a month, four sweet and blissful weeks since Eleanor Saxoine had been dragged out of Tam's room by Blue.

 Four weeks with Tam's family. He had been walked in on by Celia in the bathroom (happily, he had a towel on), wrestled by Billy over the TV remote (he lost), glared at by Tam's mother for leaving his plate out on the side and he was even trying to eat a little more than he usually did, because Mrs Slone put the fear of god into him.

 And she had moved him - pointedly - into the spare room at the other end of the corridor.

 She might be bespelled to accept him in the house, but in the same room as her daughter was a little too much. He didn't mind though - every night, Tam hopped across the corridor (literally, to avoid the squeaky floorboards) and they talked and kissed and sometimes a little more.

 He was starting to feel better about being touched. But some things still scared him.

 He still woke up screaming a lot.

 But one of the Slones would always trot in. Last night, it had been Billy, explaining that he got bad dreams too sometimes. Before that, it was Tam, accompanied by Celia, who told him stories about each other until he was laughing so hard he couldn't even remember the dream. One night, it had even been Mrs Slone who had told him to stop making such a bloody racket.

 He might have been hurt if she hadn't brought a steaming cup of some vermin stuff called hot chocolate with her, and told him that she thought he was good for Tam, and left a tea light burning by his bed.

 The Slones were his family. And Aspen intended it to stay that way.

So now, before Tam could open her mouth and attempt being polite, he jumped in.

 "You do know," he said, watching Blue's reaction, "that I'm giving up the day job."

 He knew Tam didn't like it when he talked about killing people.

  Blue's eyes held an assessing, thoughtful quality as he looked at Tam that Aspen didn't like at all. "For her?"

 "Yup."

 Gold was flowing into Blue's eyes like raindrops down a pane of glass, pooling at the bottom of his iris. Uh-oh. "Just like that?"

 "No..." he said slowly. "When I've found someone to take over."

 "And the plans?" Blue said with an icy, worrying composure.

 "You can let whoever I choose in on them," Aspen said. "They'll be an outsider anyway. No one in Pursang's good enough."

 "All right. Fair enough."

 What? No calculated nastiness, no deceptively subtle threats? "What do you mean 'all right'?"

 "One condition." Blue must have seen his hesitation, because he added, "Agree, and I'll do something about the mark on your sweetheart's arm."

 "What?" Aspen said guardedly.

 Flash of a smile. "You do it the traditional way. They have to defeat you in single combat. Fair single combat."

 He wavered. It would take longer that way...but he'd get rid of the damn mark... "You're on."

 "Good," Blue said, and snapped his fingers. "Ms Slone, your arm."

 Tam held out her arm, and Blue wrapped a hand over the mark. Aspen watched, fascinated, as oily black sparks sizzled around the lamia's flesh. So that was how Blue had kept him alive after he'd been shot.

 He let go.

 "The mark's still there," Aspen said sharply. Tam was rubbing her arm like it itched, biting her lip.

  "It is. But I've added a little something to it." Blue looked alarmingly smug. "It'll start tingling whenever danger gets within a hundred metres of you."

 Tam was still clutching her arm. "Are you telling me I've got a spider sense?"

 "I am indeed," Blue said cheerfully. "I'll be interested to see how you survive. Au revoir, mon ange."

 Both of them froze at the endearment. The question formed on Aspen's lips-

 Next thing either of them knew, he had hijacked the car and gone.

 The question went unasked. He and Tam stared at each other, and he could see his own shock echoed in her eyes. How had Blue known?

 "Bastard," they said in unison.

~*~

 Late evening, and Aspen was holding Tam's hand and listening to Celia's running commentary on the television programme he was being forced to watch. The only comfort was that he was squished on the big sofa with the person he loved most in the world, and Tam's mother was nowhere in sight.

 "And he got her pregnant, only she's married to his brother, who used to be a woman who dated her cousin's boyfriend's uncle, who ran over his dog that he was bought by his ex-girlfriend's first cousin who performed open heart surgery on his fifty-sixth half-step-cousin-in-law-nine times removed..."

 Or something to that effect. All Aspen knew was that there was much clutching of men, swooning of women, gasping, general shock-horror factor and possibly the worst dialogue he had ever heard.

 "I don't think we need this soap musical when we have our own," he whispered in Tam's ear.

 "Soap opera," she murmured back. "Aspen, I'm worried about Rob."

 "I know," he said simply, stroking her hair. "But he'll come back. He was probably just upset when Therese changed him. She shouldn't have done that."

 He didn't really know Rob Slivan, the jock who'd fought him, Tam's best friend, but she seemed to like the guy. He'd run off a month back, and Tam hadn't seen or heard anything of him since. He didn't like how it made her face cloud over, and decided he'd try searching for this vermin...no, ex-vermin, soon.

 Ellie Saxoine was gone too. And with her gone, the hunts had ended.

 Plus the fact Blue had methodically and precisely mind-wiped every last one of the group and given them a sudden compulsion for long, quiet evenings spent playing canasta.

 Which had seemed a little nice of Blue, until Aspen discovered the contract that had been not-so-subtly distributed about the Nightworld, with a very specific, unique and vicious death arranged for each one in years to come. The first in five years, the last to occur in thirty. All those vermin would die.

 He didn't tell Tam.

 "-and he's about to declare his true love for her..." Celia wound down suddenly. "Aspen?"

 "Yeah, brat?" he said, grinning as she threw a cushion at him.

 "Do you love Tam?"

 Ah...

 "Yeah," Billy said, with the big toothy smile that usually meant he was about to pummel Aspen. "Are you in looooooove?"

 "'Course I do," Aspen said briskly, hoping they would leave it alone.

 "Shut up," his soulmate muttered through gritted teeth. "Cee, leave it."

 "Why don't you tell her then?" the smaller, more annoying version of Tam said.

 "Is this what our kids will be like?" he asked.

"Kids?" Tam said in horror. "We're having kids?" She lowered her voice, seeing Billy and Celia listening intently. "We haven't even got to the...you know..."

 "Loads of them," he confirmed quietly. "And we'll get to the...you know... You're the only person I want to with, and if we're going to get married-"

 "Married?" Tam shrieked.

"Yeah, in a couple of years, of course. You know, when we're both eighteen-"

 "Eighteen?"

 "You sure you got a girlfriend and not a parrot?" Billy inquired innocently. He and Celia were grinning hugely. "You really going to marry Tam?"

 "Yeah..."

 "Mom'll flip!" Celia said gleefully.

 "'Mom'," Mrs Slone's cool voice said and she strode in, and set her briefcase down on the floor, "is back."

 "Mom," Billy said, "Aspen wants to marry Tam when they're eighteen!"

 "Is this true?" Mrs Slone demanded, sitting herself on the edge of a chair. In her shoulder-padded business suit, she looked like she was a piece of Kevlar short of the All-Stars. Aspen couldn't shake the unnerving feeling that the wrong answer meant she'd charge him down.

 "Uh...yeah..." he said meekly. He gripped Tam's hand tightly, wishing she was a little taller so he could cower behind her.

 "At eighteen?"  

 Aspen quailed under the stare he got. "Nineteen?" he offered. The stare deepened. "Twenty-"

 Nuclear glare.

"-one?"

 Mrs Slone blinked, and then looked at her daughter. "I didn't think I'd ever say this, honey, but I think you might have found one that's worth spending time with." She scowled at Aspen again. "Once you start going to church and eating properly and dressing less like a hoodlum."

 Aspen could only nod in the face of such authority.

 As Mrs Slone strode out, Tam collapsed into helpless giggles. "She'll make you sign a contract," she warned.

 He shrugged. "I'll sign my life away for you," he said in an attempt at gallantry.

 "Thank you," she said, and that look appeared in her eyes that Aspen loved so much. The one that was heavy and potent, like the air before a storm, and meant she was going to kiss him-

 A cushion hit them, and Billy howled. "Oh, cut it out!"

 "Later," Aspen muttered to her, and strove to look innocent as Tam's mother came back in.

~*~

"Occasionally we're disturbingly normal. The rest of the time...disturbing."

Rewind. Squeals as the tape flickered backwards, as the figures in it moved in swift reversal.

 The camera was focused on the face of the boy with the spiky, short cobalt hair and eyes that were a soft fluid gold. He was flanked on either side; Aspen on his left, and a girl with a tumble of wild, gypsy-black hair that was streaked with impossible gold and copper bands that clung to the round swell of her cheekbones and chin.

 It would have taken one who knew her well to know it was Therese Orage.

But Rob Slivan knew her so, so well.

 "Back more," he said in a voice that was a rasp. He couldn't remember how long it had been. Only that he had run off when he had realised what she had made him. Out into the ghost roads of Ryars Valley. Starving, thinking he could kill himself because he wouldn't drink blood, he wasn't some inhuman animal.

 Wrong.

 When your lungs felt like a mass of bubbling acid, when your limbs ached like they were filled with wet sand, when there was only the hunger and you in all the world...you were just an animal.

 "Here," Rob said curtly.

 He missed his family, but not as much as he thought. They'd had a human son, not a vampire. That Rob Slivan had been another person. One who cared about petty things, like tennis games. One who'd been stupid and chivalrous and innocent.

 That got you nowhere.

 Play. The girl leaning forward and licking her lips slowly. He stared into her unaware, oil slick eyes and made her a promise.

 "We are not your worst nightmares. You won't fear us, or think about us, or even see us if you pass us. We're the things you haven't even dreamed of." A long pause, while he looked at her satisfied, triumphant eyes. "That's why we'll kill you before you even know."

 She was very stupid, Therese Orage.

 Leaving her house so trustingly unlocked. Not bothering to investigate her cramped, dim attic. Leaving this video where a pair of intrepid, cunning people could find them.

 He looked at Ellie Saxoine. As a vampire, she was beautiful beyond anything a mortal man could bear to see. But he wasn't mortal, and he didn't give a damn how pretty she was.

"I don't want to kill her," he said. "I want to take away all her power. I'll make her helpless like she made me helpless."

 Ellie laughed. Frenzied joy filled her now, he could see it in her feverish eyes, her ever-present smile. She was a lot nicer this way. A lot more useful. She spun the credit card between her fingers. "I'll look into it," she promised.

 I'm going to haunt you like you haunted me, Rob Slivan thought. You'd better look out.

 I'll make you regret what you made me.

 But that would be another tale.

~*~

 The middle of the night was cold and dark, but Tam was warm. She was huddled up against Aspen's side, and the talk was drowsy and infrequent now. Her head was tucked on his chest, hair half-hiding her face. The only light came from the liquid diamond glow of his eyes, for once the same colour.

 She had said the words to him so many times in the last month. Casually, off-handedly, intimately. I love you, she had said, and smiled at his childlike joy. He had never answered, only been enchanted and elated.

 She knew how hard he found it to say the words.

It was part of the desperately broken creature he was. The one who was scared of the dark. The one who touched her so hesitantly, and was so incredibly sweet and careful of her. Whose gifts weren't flowers or teddy bears, but a kitten and a hand-carven box inlaid with ivory.

 He was a strange boyfriend, and he hated her friends as much as they detested him, and he still had the scary, mad moments, and he wasn't the brightest candle in the chandelier, but he had an intelligence that dealt with the real world, not with history or English or maths.

 And Tam found that his friends - not Blue or Therese, but the grungy, carefree kids who were into extreme sports, were far more pleasant than any of her friends. Aspen had even persuaded her to go rollerblading on the halfpipe built in one of the fields. She had screamed all the way down, and then fallen over.

 She had broken her nails, and cut her face, and to the surprise of his friends, she laughed herself stupid. They had liked her a lot more after that.

 And then she had gaped as her boyfriend did the kind of stunts she'd only seen on TV.

But now he was simply looking at her. In any one else, she would have found it intimidating. In Aspen, she knew it was adoration.

 Not halfpipes or lessons or wild moonlight hunts. No guns, no people, no problems. Just them. She heard his soft whisper, and it made her shiver delightedly.

 "I do love you."

"I'll remember that," she said, and did. Forever.

  My hands are small I know, but they're not yours, they are my own
They're not yours, they are my own and
I am never broken.

- FIN -