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Firefly Part Eleven

In the depths of dreams...

 Liam turned around and around slowly. He knew this place, though it was a half-forgotten memory. Suzanne clung tight at his side, that spill of crimson hair falling over her pale face. "Suzanne?"

 "I...can't stop it," she said simply and shivered. "You made me remember, Liam. And I-I can't stop it. Maybe I have to see. Maybe you do."

 "I don't understand," he told her, and wrapped his arms close around her slight form. His purple eyes flickered about the dingy street, taking in the rubbish hurled carelessly into corners and gutters, the graffiti covered walls, the bland rotting smell that hung about the place.

 She looked up at him, her skin chalky and face soft, fearful. "There's so much that's bad in my memory, Liam. I think about it all the time...I can't help but. I dream about it so often, until I don't know what year it is when I wake up, or even if I am awake."

 "Oh," he murmured and gently hugged her. Her trembling mouth was unbelievably tempting, but somehow so fragile he felt like he shouldn't touch her in case she broke. "I'm here now. I'll know what's real."

 She smiled tremulously. "One of us needs to."

 I always thought you were so fierce, he thought. When I saw you, for the first time in fifteen years, the first time since you changed me, you were so beautiful, the urban predator. I thought you had simply grown cold and harsh, become an iceberg floating the mortal sea. And oh, while there may be far more to you than meets the surface, there is nothing cold about you. Not anymore.

 He looked up as he heard footsteps. Himself at a prideful and agonised sixteen, storming away from Karen, Suzanne and the car after finding out that Karen had lied to him for two years. Walking away in a haze of confusion and befuddled grief, wanting to mourn the father he had lost without knowing; not able to lament a man who had drifted out of his life like a dazed ghost.

 Innocent, he thought, as he had before. Stupid and innocent.

 A human then, with suffering in his stare and utter carelessness as he strode into streets he didn't know and didn't care about. Deep into the heart of darkness, though he hadn't realised that, walking into the shadows and taking them all with him. And leaving one of them, leaving this creature beside him now who was breathing fast, panicked, behind to sink in that darkness and perish.

He glanced at Suzanne, a silent question in his face. She nodded and they followed the boy as he marched furiously through the maze of streets, further and further from the world he knew. Walking until he turned into a dead end, stopping and slamming his hands on the brick wall, muttering angry words that he didn't mean.

The patter of steps and Suzanne rounded the corner, face flushed and stopping short as she saw that angry human boy, leaning on the wall with his head down, biting his lip and trying very hard not to cry.

 "Liam?" Her voice ruthlessly cool and efficient; this was a sixteen year old Suzanne, or close enough as they could guess, who cared nothing - no, he corrected now, who seemed to care nothing for human emotion and human nature.

 The boy looking up, purple eyes wide and startled. Trying to make his face expressionless, failing miserably. "You followed me?"

 "Someone had to. It was me or Ren and I don't think you're in a mood to be...rational with her right now."

 Suzanne of then, in her elegant clothes, stepping forward confidently, arrogantly. She knew what she was by then; a rare, exquisite being, ravishing as a cloud of butterflies and as impossible to capture. And it showed in her movements, in her slow, reckless voice.

 "A mood?" His voice raising, the boy's face set with rage. "You think this is a mood?"

 She put her head on one side, hair slipping onto her arms. "Yes."

 "Oh well, you would," he spat. Venom in that boy's voice and Liam of now flinched away, horrified at how he was so cruel so easily. His Suzanne just touched a slender hand to his cheek and there was only forgiveness in her.

 The boy of then carried on fiercely, glaring at the redhead whose face was so impassive. "After all, what are emotions to you? Nothing, when you aren't human. You don't know what it is to feel and to hurt and-"

 She hit him.

 It wasn't a gentle blow; it knocked the boy to his knees, red marks flaring up on his skin.

 "Don't be so stupid." The words dropped like pebbles into a still pond. "Of all of them, I would never have thought you would be the first to say those words to me."

 He looked up, his face shocked. Not at her, but at what he had done. "Suzanne...I'm sorry."

 "Yes. You are." That passionless, hard little face staring down at him, her amber eyes as focused as hawk's but swirling in their depths...he had seen something then, years ago, that had startled him, something he had never thought he would see again since she had hardened and drawn away from him with the passing of the time.

 Pain.

 Pain, quivering under her voice, the faintest of faint whispers. Rippling in her stare, trembling in her fingers.

 "Suzanne, please..."

 "You can't take back your words, Liam." She helped him to his feet. That hadn't made it any better, he thought now. If anything, it had made it worse. "You can't take back what's been done. But you know what, Liam?"

 That boy staring at her with such intense agony and helplessness in his face. And again, Liam thought of himself; fool, fool, a thousand times a fool.

 "You hurt me." She turned away swiftly, and now he saw what he hadn't then - a single tear escaping her, slipping down her cheek until it fell to the ground. Yes, Suzanne of then had still been as achingly vulnerable.

 The boy had reached for her unthinkingly, then hesitated. She tolerated no human gestures; had not for two years, for while she lived with these humans and considered herself in some way he couldn't quite grasp, part of them, she was set apart from them by her race and by her behaviour.

 She had bowed her head and that had been the deciding factor. Her utter defencelessness then had made that boy reach out and turn her around gently; all the while, Liam remembered, he had hardly dare breathe in case she ran, or struck out, or became that frozen girl again.

 Only despair on her then and she had whispered again, "You hurt me."

 "I know," he had said and curled his arms around her. "I was wrong. I'm sorry."

 And she had shaken her head a little, a gesture he saw now that meant silence. But he hadn't understood and disturbed by how her icy façade had evaporated so easily, continued.

 "Please...I didn't mean to hurt you." Breathing hard, all the pains and small wounds of the life he led falling out of his lips in a hurried flood of words. "I would never hurt you , don't you know that? Not intentionally..."

 Her golden eyes had seemed so huge then, filled with the hues of sunrise, a conclave of fireflies twirling in her eyes. And he had fallen silent and simply looked at her, and then kissed her. It was a tender, clinging kiss that lasted bare breaths.

 It was broken by the sound of applause.

 Someone clapping slowly, sardonically, as both spun to stare at the boy who stepped forward. Behind him, other forms slunk. Here and there, the glint of metal, the shimmer of teeth in the dim light, the bestial sounds of growling and snuffling.

 "Very nice," the boy drawled in a callous, bitter voice. "I thought you'd never get round to it."

 Beside him, Liam of now could feel Suzanne trembling. Of course, he thought and said nothing as her hand snaked down to grip his so hard he felt his bones grinding, it had to hurt her, seeing all this once more.

  "Anyway, now you've had that incredibly touching reunion...let's get down to business." The boy looked almost like a pirate with that chaotically tumbled black hair and the blue eyes that were a deep dark colour with flecks of brightness in them. "Your money and your life."

 "Isn't there supposed to be a choice?" that ingenuous human boy had asked, and the cool, hard part of Suzanne had taken over. That girl who glared at the intruders so severely was all Nightworld.

 "Oh, I'm sorry," the boy said mockingly. He grinned and his teeth were wickedly sharp. "Your money and your life; or your life and your money. Which order they come in is up to you."

Liam of now looked down at Suzanne, his Suzanne who seemed to have stopped breathing altogether as the ghosts of the past moved on. But it was the look on her face that stunned him quite still. It was something he hadn't expected at all.

 Pure, eternal loathing.

Je t'aime contre tout ce qui n'est qu'illusion
Pour ce coeur immortel que je ne detiens pas

 "Can you wake them?" Karen Ramirez kept her voice to a ghostly whisper, even though Hayley Thornight could quite cheerfully have informed her that Liam wouldn't have woken up if a marching band had stormed through the room.

 Hayley gnawed her lip. She didn't tell the human, but already her power was thin and stretched as the skin on a drum. She wasn't sure what adding yet another spell to the heap would do; she might have coped if she hadn't lost her night's sleep to the madwoman with the gun who currently had more room to rent than the city's worst hotel.

 "I can try," she said hesitantly. But in her head, she could sense Liam and Suzanne, both of them locked into an old painful memory and somehow, she doubted Liam even knew where to find Suzanne. "I have to tell your brother something first."

 Maybe it wouldn't be too risky. After all...if it was just a brief spell...surely that wouldn't break the barrier.

 The human woman blinked. "Tell...him something? How?"

 "I'm going to use the spell on myself. It won't be for long, but he still hasn't got what he came here for," though she added silently, he certainly got something he wasn't expecting, "and I'm not going to do this again."

 "All right." Karen followed as the witch padded into the sitting room, still wrapped in an old dressing gown, though underneath, she saw a flash of trouser-covered leg and the logo on her jumper and suspected Hayley had been sleeping about as much as Karen had. "Can I help?"

 "Not at all." The woman lay back on a couch and closed her eyes, hands relaxed by her side. "This shouldn't take too long."

 As her breathing slowed and a faint, dark blue fire undulated around her body, Karen Ramirez watched and waited but did not pray...any god remaining ruled in blood and hatred and blind prejudice. And so she sat, with her silent patience.

~*~

Liam felt Suzanne huddle closer to him, as if some deep, ancient chill had seized her. She was shivering convulsively, and all he could do was hold her tight and try not to tremble himself.

 Someone had once told him that the past couldn't hurt you. He suspected it was Karen; it sounded like one of her placid, undeniable phrases. It wasn't true though. It hurt so much, he wondered if his soul would always have these bruises on it, ready to ache again at the first whisper of ghosts and times long gone.

 This dark alley, where they stood and watched themselves of fifteen long years ago, was something he had buried a long time ago. The Nightworld boy had demanded, though that was too civil a word, all their valuables. In return, he would kill them. Coming from a werewolf, it was practically generosity.

 And Suzanne, regaining her composure had looked him straight in the eyes - and curiously, he saw now, winced a moment and frowned as if something puzzled her - and drawled, in a voice that had been dredged through the arctic seas, "Don't be so undeniably stupid."

 "Excuse me, Miss Greek Tragedy," the boy had said, his piratical deep blue eyes flashing dangerously, the pale blue flecks in them glowing with unnatural brightness, "did I ask for your opinion? Money. Now."

 "Come near me," said that younger, more vibrant Suzanne, as other figures - henchman, Liam supposed and almost smiled at his own melodrama - slunk forward, "and I promise you'll regret it."

 "Is that it?" The werewolf boy gave a short bark of laughter, and drew out a knife. It was filthy, and anyone who didn't bleed to death from the exceptionally keen edge would undoubtedly die of tetanus. "I don't think you understand what we are."

 "Werewolf." Liam felt a slight shock as he heard his own voice. Flat, dead. Emotionless by his very terror, which had been not merely for himself, but for Suzanne. It was his fault they were here, and it would be his fault if she was hurt. As he looked at his own face now, he saw with a shock that he had adopted Karen's expression of unflappable calm.

 The boy with his glossy chestnut hair and vulnerable mouth had turned and glanced at one of the figures moving from the shadows, at the hauntingly wide eyes and sleek hair. "Owl shifter." Liam of then pointed at another. "Jackal." A swift glance around. "Made vamp. Mountain lion. Witch. You there...some kind of cat. A leopard?"

 The werewolf leader had stopped smirking. "Clouded leopard, actually," he had said quietly, and seemed more puzzled. "You're a human. And you know about the Nightworld. Interesting." He smiled again, shark-like and empty. "Now we have two reasons to kill you."

 "No." Suzanne stepping forward, shaking out her long red hair. The girl at his side now, that much older Suzanne, looked at him hopelessly.

 "I don't want to see any more," she whispered. "God, I hated him so much. I hate him for what he did to me, what he did to us. Why do I have to see this?"

 Liam stared at her, baffled. "Didn't you love him? He was your soulmate."

 Her laugh was dry, cold. "Love? Never. I hated all he was and all he wanted to be. Do you know what he wanted from me, Liam?"

 Liam glanced back at the scene. The wolf boy's eyes were hot as he looked at Suzanne, at her slender, elfin beauty and the riot of scarlet hair that clouded around her face. She was like an angel thrown forth from the fire, proud and burning and unassailable. They were arguing, Suzanne making a brief attempt at tact while the boy smiled and made her a suggestion that caused her face to withdraw indefinably, to become even more shuttered.

 "I can guess."

 "I was a thing." Her voice wasn't bitter, simply matter-of-fact. "And when I told him that...explained that, he was so surprised. I think he loved me in his way, Liam, as much as he could in the time there was. But I didn't want him. I'd already found my One."

 A phrase fell into his head. My soul's joy.

 "Soul's joy?" he repeated curiously, wondering where the phrase had sprung from.

 She gasped, her face pale and smooth as bone. A dead thing, he thought. She and I, both dead already, but now, living more fiercely than either of us have before. "Yes...I...how did you know that?"

 "I don't know. It's this, I suppose." He smiled a little and pressed a gentle kiss to her mouth. "I've...never been linked to anyone this closely."

 "No," she said, her gaze remaining steady. In her eyes, he saw tiny darts of orange dodging through the tiny, pure cobwebs of black that swam in the gold of her stare. It was like looking at a nebula, so rare and full of unparalleled splendour that even to look at her made something in his heart and stomach catch.

 There was no word he knew of for this sensation, just one of those odd little things that made living worthwhile; it was there when he saw sunrise for the first time, when he climbed his first mountain and stood staring down at the world spread beyond his feet, misty and delicate. It was there when Karen had made hot chocolate on a cold day, when Jan Tarrant, years and years ago, had opened the Christmas present a ten year old Liam had shyly made and smiled.

 "No," she said again. "That's wrong. We have always been linked, since I changed you. I just...went away so you wouldn't feel it. That was why you hurt so much after the change, Liam, you were feeling my pain too."

 "I've never heard of that happening."

 "It doesn't as a rule. But...usually, when vampires are made, it's done in several exchanges of blood. I...drained nearly all the blood from your body. It gave me unbelievable power, Liam. And when you drank my blood..." He remembered her hands cupping his head gently, while he floated in some distant land, and then the searing, intoxicating rush of liquid down his throat "...you got some of that power too. It bound us. That's...why it's normally done in several transfusions."

 "I'm glad it wasn't," he told her softly. "Is that why I saw you in the city that day? I never usually go along that street. I just felt...compelled to."

 "Possibly." The pain was stronger in her face again, like an old phantom that rose to the surface to possess her so often.

 He tightened his grip. "Don't start feeling guilty about it. Trust me, Suzanne, I would go through it all again - and I would have gone through it a lot more quietly - if someone had shown me you and I now." He glanced back at the scene - Suzanne had casually batted away an imprudent henchman who had laid a hand on her person.

 It played out and Liam felt he had to watch. Willing or not, this was what he owed Suzanne for dragging her here fifteen years ago. All of this was his fault and he would at least acknowledge it, even if he couldn't change it.

 "He may be human," that teenage vampire girl said sharply, her gold eyes pinning the boy and then again, oddly, darting away. "But I'm not. I'm a vampire."

 "I know." The werewolf boy hiked up one eyebrow. "I know who you are."

 She had frozen still, everything slowing except her eyes which seemed to grow and glow until they blazed like stars trapped. "You...know?"

 "They've been looking for you for years. Fucking Redferns." The boy spat on the floor. "Their lost bloody child, stolen by us cruel barbaric shapeshifters, of course. Goddamn lamia who can't even keep track of all their bastard half-breed brats."

 "W-what?" Suzanne, losing her poise for a second time and suddenly, not confident or untouchable, but tiny and as delicate as the detail on crafted jewellery.

 "Oh, shut you up, have I, bitch?" said the boy triumphantly. "Yeah. I know you. You got the eyes and the hair. Perdita Redfern. Perdita means the lost one - ain't that ironic?" He laughed harshly. "Living with fucking humans? What a joke!"

 "Not just any humans," an icy cool voice said. Liam and Suzanne knew what was coming next and both hit the floor as silver bullets whined through the air. The boy had already moved, but most of his friends went down in piles of blood and bone. Nothing but butchered meat.

 When the firing stopped, only the boy and the vampire were left. The werewolf had had the sense to hit the floor. Janine Tarrant stepped forward, her eyes hard and empty of compassion. Her cropped blond hair was perfectly styled, her clothes scrupulously neat and practical in bland, terrifying contrast to the bodies heaped on the ground. The vampire rushed her and was staked for the effort. Jan was fast.

 "That one too?" a male voice said. Jack, short for Trigger-happy Jack.

 "No." Karen moving into the light, her face serene. She looked at Suzanne and Liam, both standing again. Always compassionate, Liam thought, from then to now. Almost always. Almost. How on earth did she managed to stay so gentle? After seeing this? "We could get information from him."

 Jan gave Karen a look which said she knew that was an excuse for not killing someone, but she would indulge it. Their friendship had been fractured by then, but Liam remembered better times, before Suzanne came, when the pair of them had sat up all night giggling about things he was sure only meant anything to a pair of teenage girls, even ones so hardened as Jan and Ren. "True. Trank him."

 Whoever had the tranquilliser gun fired, but the boy had moved, his sullen, hateful eyes glittering at them. A bullet in his foot had stopped him and he had finally been knocked out. Hours later, he would awaken in a dark room and try to kill everything nearby; it would be up to Suzanne to stop him, as the Nightworlder among them and the rest...the rest was painful, smouldering history.

 The boy - Thor, Liam remembered - would prove to be cooperative. He gave them names and places, information enough for a lifetime, in his bored, cold voice, all the time his gaze fixed on Suzanne. Without her, he would say not a word.

 He paused. How did he know that? No one else was allowed near the building; but somehow he knew that Jan had held a stake to Suzanne's throat, and when that had not worked, had threatened Liam and Karen. She had tortured Thor, knowing it would pain Suzanne too. And Suzanne had cooperated, she had used the soulmate link on that battered boy and his sharp, icy mind. And slowly, over the week the boy was there, she saw emotions in him that were familiar, that were uniquely Nightworld. She never loved him, no, but she came to respect him.

 "Suzanne?" he said softly.

 "You have to know," she said. "You have to understand all of it, Liam, why I acted like I did. I didn't hate him then, I only hated him after he died. After he destroyed me, and I hurt you. I hated him for it, and I hated myself, and I even hated you for making me love you so much."

 The building he was in would burn mysteriously, while Suzanne and Liam were laughing for the first time in months over the antics of a kitten Ren had brought home as a belated birthday gift, and something in Suzanne would die. Maybe she hadn't loved him, but that werewolf had still been a part of her.

And because whatever else they were, they were honourable, the circle would see him buried.

 "No-" He started to say and felt a powerful, soundless impact on his mind. The world rocked and horrifying fragments flashed past them. Voices floated round them, colours blurring, pausing only briefly so he would catch a few frightful seconds of a memory.

She's only looking for an excuse to hurt you both. Karen grabbing Suzanne, her grey eyes wide and wise.

 Suzanne hitting him, her long nails scraping his cheek. Don't be so stupid. Of all of them, I would never have thought you would be the first to say those words to me.

 A stranger he didn't know, staring at a vastly different Janine Tarrant, with her expression lovely and fresh and open. I rather think we're soulmates.

 Suzanne leaning over him, her face broken and almost angelic in its tragedy. I dream of my soulmate dying. I dream of a silent grave. I dream of the winter. Yes, I dream, Liam.

 Karen, just a day or two ago, older with her hair grey but her face still and serene. She's our monster. We made her that way.

 Himself after his change, waking up with silvery threads webbed over his purple eyes and crying out in horror.Oh god, oh dear god, no! Not this!

 Hard green eyes, soulless and barren. She made you a what? In my own house? This ends now.And he, not understanding what she meant until she fetched the stake and Karen flew in front of her, furious.

You aren't a monster. Liam. Not to me. You're my kid brother. Karen hugging him in the long nights when he fought desperately against what he was and her soft voice.

 Jan. One foot wrong, Liam, and I'll see you dead, buried and burnt. I'd see you dead now, but I don't think Karen would appreciate that. And you've hurt no one. Impressive. See it stays that way.

 Suzanne, curled around herself in pain, sobbing her soul to the heavens out in some lonely place. Don't let him die...please, please God, if you're there, don't let him die. Don't let him hate me.

Karen a few days ago. I get angry sometimes. I get so angry, Liam. And this makes it right. It makes it better.

 Himself, fangs out, moving in the slinky predatory walk he never used around his friends and family towards a girl with frightened eyes who held her bag to him with shaking hands. No. I don't think you do understand. I don't want your money. I don't want your life. Just your blood. Hush, it won't hurt.

 You're my flesh and blood. I won't abandon you. His sister, kneeling by him years ago as he lay wound up in an aching ball in bloodlust and denial of what he was. But you need to feed. Dear, you can't deny it forever. Even if you have forever to deny it in.

 The images span and span until he felt dizzy and nauseous, deafened by the sounds, blinded by the memories. Sometimes there were screams and sobs, at others, laughter, cold, cruel, genuine, wonderful. As if one life had been packed into seconds, a frantic and impossible carousel he couldn't step from.

 A jolt that knocked them both to the floor and then blessed silence.

 He heard a sigh and then a familiar voice. "Oh bugger. I knew I shouldn't have tried that many spells."

 And then a feral, barely human scream. "You!" He sat up, incredulous, to see Suzanne, equally confused, pushing her scarlet hair out of her eyes, pale and shocked.

 Janine Tarrant was here. And she was trying to strangle Hayley.

 Liam's dazed mind suggested this was probably not a good thing. His body, which was ahead of the game, was running towards them and pulling them apart with inhuman ease.

 "What's going on?" he demanded, having grabbed both Jan's wrists and forced her to kneel. She was trying to bite him.

 Hayley sighed. "Oh...the spell went wrong."

 "How wrong?" Liam said tersely. Suzanne came to stand by him, eyebrows raised in mild curiosity. Jan was spitting continuous epithets which none of them listened to.

 "It seems to have linked all our minds. It was just meant to link you two and me."

 "A small mistake," Suzanne murmured. In front of others, she seemed to have regained her icy presence. "Rectify it?"

 "I'd love to," Hayley said mildly. "But first...we're going to sort some things out." She looked hard at Liam and her dark blue eyes were suddenly quite empty of emotion. "I've seen your mind, boy."

 He felt a ripple of panic. "My...mind."

"All of it."

 Liam swallowed, feeling Suzanne's curious eyes on him. "Oh god."

 "I wouldn't bother with that. You abandoned God a long time ago." The witch's youthful voice had no inflection at all. "You'd best tell them."

 He looked at her helplessly.

"Now."

Qui me reflète sinon toi-même je me vois si peu
Sans toi je ne vois rien qu´une étendue déserte
Entre autrefois et aujourd´hui
Il y a eu toutes ces morts que j´ai franchies sur de la paille
Je n´ai pas pu percer le mur de mon miroir

Who reflects me if not you yourself - I see myself so little
Without you I see nothing but an empty expanse
Between those other times and today
There have been all those deaths that I have crossed on straw
I have not been able to break through the wall of my mirror

 It was a long time since Liam had felt this alone. A long, dark time.

 He looked at the three faces; three people who he suspected he knew not at all. The one person he did know lay back in the waking world, hopefully silent in slumber and away from this chaos.

 "What do you want me to say?" he asked Hayley Thornight. Her blue eyes trapped the mysteries of the ocean and kept them. And like ocean, strange beasts lurked in the depths that he had no urge to rouse.

 "The truth." Her contralto voice fell like a wisp of silk. "End this. All of it. Isn't that what you promised?"

 The words of a promise that had bound him through the empty cold years. He heard again Suzanne, remembered seeing her shattered golden eyes and seeing that some part of her had been taken away and smashed into fragments.

 Promise me...if I ever lose myself...you'll be the one who ends it. Only you.

 She had lost herself; Liam thought perhaps he had never known anyone who was so lost, wandering through time and space with no direction, not even the murmurings of her heart to guide her because she had locked her heart away in a cage of ice so it would never ache again. And now she had given him her heart, and the sheer wonder of her gift was like being given the universe with all its blazing stars.

 "It is," he said calmly. "I don't know if I can end it though...I'm not sure I started it."

 He looked at the third face; the hard-cut planes of Janine Tarrant, whose hatred was no longer even thinly concealed. She twisted in his ruthless grip like a fire, burning and consuming where she touched.

 "Let me go!" she spat.

 "Not yet," he said. "First...there's something I have to say."

 "Why should I listen to you?" she said scornfully. "Lying, cheating parasite! I should never have left you alive after that monster changed you."

 Liam's grip tightened on her hands and she gasped as he leaned in close, his purple eyes now entirely swamped by the unholy silver light of the Nightworld.

 "You will never call Suzanne that again," he told her in a soft, deadly voice. "Or you will find exactly how much of a monster I am."

 She fell silent.

 "Though you'll know that soon enough," he murmured. A strange sort of calm had taken over, filling his body like icy water until he floated in this numbing sea that took away his fear. His eyes swung to Suzanne. "Do you remember why I came looking for you?"

 "There had been killings," she answered him, her eyes locked on his with a devotion he pushed to one side. If he allowed his emotions to get in the way of this, eternity would pass. "Humans, ripped to pieces."

 "And you should know," Jan said, her voice rich with hate.

 "That wasn't me." She looked at the human, at her hard desolate face and felt for the first time, pity.

 "It wasn't," Liam said mildly. "I know it wasn't."

 He let go of Jan and she leapt to her feet, glaring. "How would you know, Liam Ramirez?" Her voice oozed sarcasm. "Why didn't you leave when you were changed? Couldn't you tell we didn't want you?"

 He simply looked at her; Suzanne saw something she hadn't before then. Regret, sweet and strong in his face. "I couldn't leave. I had responsibilities."

 She laughed scornfully. "You? A leech? You only stayed because of Karen."

 "That's certainly true." He shrugged gracefully. "But there's something else you don't know." Bleak horror in his voice. Suzanne laid a hand on his arm in reassurance; she was surprised to find him trembling.

 She drew closer and leaned back against Liam, sensing he was glad of the comfort. She could feel his heart racing like a herd of stampeding bison against her. "There always is," she said softly.

"There was certainly a lot we didn't know about you," Jan drawled flatly.

"Those who kill their soulmates shouldn't throw stones," Hayley said sharply. Suzanne felt her heart fair stop. How many secrets had these people been hiding? "Whatever they are setting free."

 Jan froze and in that one unguarded moment, Suzanne saw the odd anger, almost madness, that kept her features bright and lively disappear. And it its place was left stark anguish. She was relieved when the rage came back and with it, the woman's harsh words. "Some things should not walk under the living sun."

 "Like us, you mean?" Liam said. His voice fell flat and strong into utter silence.

 "Correct."

 "Perhaps," he acknowledged. "But we do exist ...and for all the wrongs I have done, I am sorry."

 Suzanne twisted to look at the sorrow glowing on his face. So innocent, still innocent even when he kissed her with that silky mouth and talked to her of death and darkness. "You've done nothing wrong."

 "No," he answered, shaking his head. In the thin, false light of the dreamscape, his hair was a vivid chestnut that she yearned to touch. "That's not true. I have done one wrong...one great wrong."

 She looked into his eyes and there was so much torment, so much self-hate for a second that she saw her Liam wiped away by someone who was only haunted, afraid that if anyone knew, he might be left alone and thrown to the winter. She understood then, how she must have appeared to him.

 "Tell me," she said. "I will never run from you."

~*~

 He remembered...stumbling dazedly out of his room after Suzanne had changed him, trying to get far from the painful presence of the sun invading his room. His head had been spinning, his entire being felt as though it had been weighed down by lead, while at the same time, his senses were strangely sharpened. He could hear voices from the dining room downstairs, but they seemed to be talking about things he couldn't quite wrap his mind around.

 And he had fallen down then, clinging to the doorframe and unable to bear the dreadful pain that clutched at his lungs and heart like iron jaws. Staring at the enamel paintwork and seeing his own face, a tiny but distinct reflection in it. His face, he had realised, was absolutely colourless, his eyes huge dark pits where shadows moved and sighed.

 He didn't know how long he stayed there, swathed in pain and confusion, aware that he was dead and yet somehow alive with only the memory of two golden suns burnt into his skull, and a cloud of blood that had sighed under his hesitant touch.

 Thunder came towards eventually, strange hollow thunder and then he heard a great clattering sound. Later, he learned, it had been Jan dropping a bag of stakes down the stairs in sheer shock.

 "Liam?" He hadn't even known if that was his name, he remembered, simply raised up his head and stared at an oval of peach that wavered and shivered in his vision, oval with a pair of green gemstones sparkling at him. Someone slapped him. It was nothing. "Can you hear me?"

 He had been hauled upright, whimpering as the pain took hold of his body, contorting his hands into claws.

 "William Alexander Ramirez," a fierce voice drenched in tears commanded. He had a vague sensation of a face like his own peering at him. "You know who I am, don't you?"

 He shook his head dumbly and became aware of how close this creature was...he could feel the life pulsing nearby and it was a tempting, glistening crimson and he wanted it and-

 He had pounced, Karen had told him. Just like a cat, all big bemused stare and fangs. And Jan had hit him so hard she thought his neck would snap.

 The pain had helped. It eclipsed the other pain so Liam could gasp, and blink, and remember who he was and what had happened. "She changed me..." he had said, looking about the crowd of people with wounded eyes. "She changed me! Oh god, how could she!" and he had shouted and screamed and raved for hours.

 Jan had locked him up in his room while arguments raged that he heard only dimly through his fevered skull. By the time they opened the door, he knew how Suzanne, frozen and starving, must have felt when first they found her. But he was human enough by then and refused to feed. However the pain choked him, he fought it desperately. Three days passed, days without sleep and days with scarcely any breath.

 And one day...he snapped.

 Truly that simple. The life nearby was just too alluring, it was what he craved and dreamed of. He fed and fed until the pain was filled by a saccharine lethargy. And when he lifted his head, mouth scarlet with blood, the horror filled him like a flashfire.

 It was Karen. The chalky face, the flickering panicked eyes, it was his older sister who had only wanted to help him...

 He had done the only thing he could. He had changed her.

~*~

 "You what?" Janine Tarrant screamed, her face flushing. Her short hair flew as she shook he head violently. "No, you can't have done, I would have known! I would have known!"

 Liam shook his head. "You were out hunting. Ren volunteered to stay with me. It didn't take long. A few hours. And when she woke up," he shrugged, and Suzanne could feel his despair. "She was changed."

 "No wonder she's always been so sympathetic to the bloody vampires," Jan said furiously, then stopped. "But...she's aged."

 "No," Liam said calmly. "She looks like she's aged. There's a difference."

 "She has lines!" Jan shrieked. "Grey hair! Her skin is different!"

 Liam winced. "Make-up, hair dye, yet more make-up, I believe." He grimaced. "It's easy to forget. I do, often. I keep thinking she's still my human sister and I have to look after her...and she thinks exactly the same about me, I guess. I just don't think of her as a vampire now...or I didn't."

 "What's that supposed to mean?" snapped out Jan. Despite her anger, there was a blank, shell-shocked look deep in her eyes.

 He looked down at Suzanne and she smiled tentatively. She didn't like seeing Liam so afraid, so remorseful. It wasn't right for him. "I know that Suzanne didn't do those killings," he said very quietly, so she had to strain to hear him. "Because Karen did."

 Suzanne gasped as if he had stabbed her. He supposed, in a way, he had. Her skin was white as moonstone, her haze of red hair stark and bloody against it. "No."

 "Yes."

 In her eyes, something was beginning, like cracks spreading across ice. "Dear God, why?"

He could see Jan from the corner of his eyes, like a staring ghost. "It was my fault. I would have thought of all the people I could have changed, Karen would be the one to cope. And she did at first, but as time passed and Jan hated me more and more, it began to affect her."

 "I never..." Jan said faintly.

 Something about her struck him as pathetic then. Pretending to be so strong and cruel, but really, beneath, she was already broken into a thousand ruined pieces.

 "I didn't notice either," he said. "I think she hated you because you hated me. But she wouldn't hurt you because you'd helped us and her sense of honour wouldn't allow it. So...she found other people. People no one would care about, people who were so evil that whatever strange morals she had wouldn't mind."

 "How do you know all this?" breathed Suzanne. Her skin was clammy, as though she was in extreme shock. He held onto her, as much for his comfort as for hers.

 "I heard her going out one night - around the time you came back, I think," he said quietly. "I hadn't been sleeping well, and she woke me. I followed her...if it was Jan, I probably wouldn't have bothered, but Ren? It was strange."

 The memory world spun around them to a lit street. Karen, walking down it fast, her face not serene, but bright and hungry. Walking into the dark areas of town, Liam slipping after her like a forlorn shadow.

 "She hunted them down. Telepathy, I'd guess." He looked at Jan. "How did you think she managed to keep the peace so well? No one's that empathic."

 Jan shook her head dumbly.

 "She killed them. I don't know how many. That night I caught her, I tried to stop it. She just turned and looked me and she said..."

~*~

 Her face was not that of the thirty year old woman now, the clean, pure act she put on for the circle. An act that she had conceived because she didn't want Jan to hurt Liam, to make both of them homeless. Now she was young, the beautiful nineteen year old she had been the day he changed her. His older sister, still young.

 "I get angry, sometimes," she said and her voice was like wind rolling across a forest, bearing the scents and sounds of the velvet night. "I get so angry, Liam. And this makes it right. It makes it better."

 "Does it really?" he had said, looking at the blood. "How does stopping their lives makes yours better?"

 Her eyes were soft and liquid and pitying. "Oh Liam," she sighed. "Have you tried it? You can hear it when you feed, I know you can. The beat of their tasty little heart, pushing against you. Wouldn't you love to take that life for yourself? It's beautiful. It fills you and for a moment, they become you."

 This was not his sister; this was some sensuous being whose mouth was parted as she saw a human walk past, whose eyes were starving and dark-filled. Every movement was sinuous and fluid, as she ran her fingers over the gaping wound in the man's neck and then licked them delicately, like a cat might.

 "Don't look so sad," she said dreamily. "It's better this way."

 "No, it's not." Liam took her hand and began to drag her out into the lit streets. He was glad it was night; under darkness, he could accept this horror and in the morning light, it would be destroyed like a nightmare in a dreamcatcher. "We are vampires. We are not killers."

 "Oh," she purred, "but we are." She tore herself from his grip. "There are so many of us, Liam, silent hunters, ghostly killers. All lapping at the sea of human blood, a thousand souls floating the same tides. Fine, by the light, we can be peaceful. But in the night...the truth is revealed."

 "No," he said flatly. "It's concealed. If you meant a word of it, you'd kill in daylight, in honesty. Not in cowardice. You kill at night because you know it's wrong. This stops here and now. No more deaths."

 "I won't promise that."

 "You will," he had said.

~*~

 Liam sighed. "I...made her in the end. I put a compulsion on her," he said. "I've always been more powerful, mentally. The blood's stronger in me. She can't kill now. Not humans, not vampires, nothing."

 "She's out of the circle," Jan said through gritted teeth. "I'll kill her when I wake up."

 "She came with you?" Brief shock in Liam, then he sighed. "She would...you have no proof. Nothing except what I've said - and who's going to believe you if you say you heard it in a dream?"

 She turned an ugly, mottled red. "And you can get out-"

 Liam looked at her, cold and uncaring. For a moment, he reminded Jan of Suzanne as she had been long ago. Now, the girl who stood at his side, her golden eyes glowing with determination and pride in Liam, was changed. There was something new in her, a hesitant light that made her radiant.

"There's nothing to hold me there anymore. When morning comes, you won't even know what happened."

 "What-" she began; and then a wave of mental energy hit her. Liam's eyes were narrowed. It was much easier to manipulate her mind on the dreamscape - it was less guarded. He simply altered her memories while Hayley watched, looking amused and a little respectful.

 "What have you done?" the witch said. "And don't even think about trying it on me, lad."

 He smiled, his old, shy smile. "I won't. I've changed her memories. I've just had a tragic accident when I tried to attack a strange witch, who incidentally, Jan has no recollection of rescuing or blackmailing. I've...made her forgot about her soulmate too and...changed one or two things. I'm going to do the same with Ren when you end this spell."

 "I'm impressed. You seem to have forgotten something though?" Hayley said with a pointed look at the red-haired girl beside him.

 Liam's face was utterly different as he looked at Suzanne; his eyes were filled with a degree of love and tenderness Hayley Thornight wished, in her millennia of tempting men and ensnaring their souls, had been turned on her but once. Suzanne, no longer the lost one, looked back with the same devoted expression, haloed by her tumbling hair.

 "Want to tell me where I can find you?" he asked.

 She put a hand behind his head and kissed him. It was tender, clinging and Liam could see the music chiming in her eyes as he drew away, the fireflies stirred by her soul's symphony. He loved her for it and for all she was. "La Rendezvous, sunrise," she said, a breathless inch away. "I'll be on time, I promise."

 He shrugged but didn't let go of her, tilting her chin up to see the smile on her full mouth. "You can be late. We'll have a lot of sunrises to watch."

~*~

 Three months later, Hayley Thornight was knocking on the door of a small house in a nondescript neighbourhood. Her hair was no longer brown, but inky, wavy black and her sweet face was leaner, longer. She grinned to herself. Enough of the temptress business, it was time to do something that *mattered*. Liam's compulsions wouldn't last forever and what vampire powers could do, magick could do.

It was opened by a tall woman with blond hair and startlingly green eyes. A bruise puffed her cheek.

 "Can I help you?" she said sharply, glance taking in the witch's suitcase and flushed face.

 "I need a place to stay," Hayley said softly, amber eyes guileless. "I was attacked by a vampire...a friend told me about this place."

  "Oh?" The girl shrugged elegantly. "Well...you can come in, but I should warn you - this is a hard life. We'll test you to make sure you're on the right side. It's dangerous. No one here slacks off, no one leaves. And...please *tell* us if you have a soulmate. We captured one that was someone's a while ago and he died accidentally."

 "Whose?" Hayley said.

 Janine Tarrant frowned. "Do you know, I'm not quite sure...everyone tells me her name was Suzanne, and that she was a vampire, but I can hardly remember her at all." There was a certain hardness in her face and eyes, the quick violence was gone. Killing was a job; not a pleasure anymore. "Who told you about us?"

 "I...don't think you'd remember them," Hayley said vaguely. "They...moved away."

 "Oh? Where to?"

 She smiled slightly, and there was something wise and ancient in her face that made Jan frown again and wonder why she looked familiar.

 "Who knows?"