Excerpt: The Bearbrass Inmate

Melbourne had put on a spectacular Autumn this year, and the plane trees at the cemetery stretched out with armfuls of colour. Late sun beat down hard on Anna's neck and shoulders, and she was glad of her hat. She shifted discreetly from foot to foot as people filed past her mother's coffin. She could feel the silent disapproval from her father, his back ramrod straight despite his age. A Navy man doesn't slouch or fidget, and neither should his daughter.

***

News had evidently spread around the department, because nurses and residents had gathered around the edges of the diagnostic area to gawp. Anna should have been angry at the rubber-necking, but it really was spectacular: the axe was indeed lodged deep between the bones of the patient's shoulder and collar bone. Only the butt of the blade was visible, and though the patient's shirt and pants were soaked with blood, very little was actually escaping from the wound itself. Anna probed the surface of the skin around the blade; the man's skin was pale and clammy – the metal blade was probably providing a temporary seal. She met the eyes of the ambulance officer who had been holding the handle of the axe still. "Keep that steady." The man gave her a nod and a wry grin, he was a veteran of Friday-night specials, and if he hadn't seen a patient with an axe to the neck, he'd certainly have seen something equally as bizarre.

***
The man's eyes were open. Her gaze was naturally drawn to his – and suddenly Anna understood why the whole room had fallen still, for his eyes were very blue, quite a deep blue, the bluest blue she had ever seen. Cornflower. Iris. Indigo. She could look at those eyes for a lifetime, and never be able to identify the colour. Somewhere behind a woolly barrier, logic screamed at her that this was not relevant – that the man had what was probably a fatal wound to his neck, that his eyes were not the priority, that there was something she should be doing right now. Instead, Anna took a long, slow, delicious breath, and let the diagnostic mnemonics fall away.

***
The man was pulling her hair, gently but inexorably. He looped it around his hand once, then used it to tilt her head sharply to one side while he pushed her against the concrete wall, immobilising her with his own body. He brushed his lips softly against her neck, cool and dry. She tasted blood in her mouth; he had pressed her face into his wounded shoulder. The recoil of horror from this realisation brought life back to her limbs and she flailed with her arms and tried to kick him away from her body. Then there was a sharp tearing burn at her exposed neck, and very soon after that, she felt nothing at all.

***
Anna looked down at the neckline of her scrubs, there were a couple of spots of blood, not enough to be concerned about. She shook her head. "No. That's enough, I don't want anyone else touching me. I'm not in shock – look, I'm perfectly coherent. All I need is a hot shower and bed." She took Belinda's hands off her neck and pushed them away firmly."I'm fine. It was unlucky that he grabbed me, but fortunately he was too high to do anything else except run off." She slid gingerly off the exam table, and stood up straight. Her body felt like it had been beaten with tennis racquets, but she pressed her lips together and determinedly looked Belinda in the eye. "I will be fine. I don't have a concussion, I wasn't assaulted, I don't have any injuries other than a scratch on my neck, and I really want this revolting day to be over. I'll call you when I get home, and in the morning we can try again for those samples. I promise I'll call you if anything goes wrong."

***
The mirror was cheaply made enough to give a clear reflection, and he took a few minutes to wash his face – in his madness he had been rough with that poor woman, and her blood was smeared all about his mouth and speckled through his fair hair. He paused, looking at his own reflection; his hands trembled, there was a high colour in his cheeks, and he almost boiled with energy. It was a stolen vigour, he reminded himself, one that had cost a life. He would not be allowed to forget it, even if he could banish the forbidden, delicious, awful sensation of drinking until one was completely satisfied. He pushed damp hands through his hair to put it in order, then shrugged into a stolen shirt and went out to meet his gaoler.

***
He was drifting in a strange place – a jumble of mismatched images crammed into one confusing dream: aboard the Mermaid with iron shackles on his legs, but somehow past his transformation, standing in the formation for a quadrille. Foxley, all manners and ornament, came at him with an axe, and he put his hands up, not to protect himself, but to shield the person behind him. He awoke with a gasp. There was a soft laugh from further down the corridor.

"Dear Tylo, dear little Cornish sea-prince, did you dream? What did you see, bonny Tylo? What did you see, golden man? Full blood opens the inner eye. Remember what you saw, my sweet little fisherman. Taste it on your lips, and remember."

Tylo's mouth was dry and hot, as though he hadn't fed for a week. He swallowed, rolling his tongue around his lips. How long would he have to wait until they fed the prisoners next? He wrapped his arms around himself; why had this happened to him?

***
In between seizures, Anna was barely aware. She knew she lay on icy slate tiles, made even colder by the sweat pooling in the small of her back and behind her knees. Her feet were bare – she remembered kicking off her slippers and peeling away socks while her body temperature soared. Now she shivered until her teeth clattered together. A cool hand rested briefly on her forehead, and she struggled to sit upright on the kitchen floor. Her mother stood before here, hands neatly folded over a crisp floral apron.

"Oh, my darling, I think you have a touch of the flu." Her mother beckoned her forward, and Anna clambered clumsily to her feet. "Best to tuck you up in bed until the fever passes, don't you think?" She shooed her hands at Anna, herding her towards the hall. Anna stumbled down the hallway towards her bedroom, but her legs gave out again, and she folded onto the floor, heels drumming the wooden boards. When she woke next her skin was on fire, her body so hot that the wood beneath her must surely be turning to ash and char.

Kirsty leaned over her, lips bruised with kisses and arms cut all to ribbons. "Burn, baby, burn," she said with a bitter curl to her lip that made Anna reach out a hand to smooth it away. Kirsty pulled away from her reach like a skittish horse."You always were too scared to feel it. You never would go all the way." She held out her cheap blue plastic lighter and snapped it open. Anna's skin lit up, all blue and purple like brandy-fire.

***
There was something very wrong; she was terrified, not of Tylo, but of something that boiled and grew and loomed over them. "What is it? What's going to happen?" Her voice broke with trembling, and she realised tears were sliding down her cheeks. She scrubbed them away with her knuckles in frustration. Everything was coming to an end, and it was so sad. She choked down a sob.

"Oh, love. Oh, Anna. There's no need to cry." Tylo took her in his arms, and despite all that had happened, she clung to him like a child, sobbing and gasping. He folded his legs up, dragging her down to the mattress on the floor, and wrapped a quilt around the two of them. "It's just the sun, love. It's just the sun, and it will pass. Hush now, it's just the sun, it's just the night dying that you feel." He smoothed Anna's hair as she pressed her face against him and cried. "It will come again, the night. It always does, I promise you that." Under the quilt, he rocked her in his arms and sang while she cried for the sunrise she would never see. His voice was untrained but sweet, and it was the last thing that Anna heard before a great sizzling, tearing sound ripped her mind away.

"Hush, hush," Tylo rocked her gently, even though he knew the sun had taken her. He had forgotten how much each sunrise hurt at first; he had been able to resist the terrible melancholy for nearly a century now. Even so, as the sun climbed higher and higher into the sky, the weight of that ball of fire and light pressed hard against his mind, too. He couldn't hold off sleep much longer himself, so he settled down on the mattress, making sure that Anna was tucked under the quilt. He pressed his face against her hair, and was surprised to find his cheeks were wet.

***
She shivered. "I don't want to do this!" It was all too close, too physical. She pushed her head back against the wall, trying to force herself to turn away, but she could not drag her gaze from Tylo's arm.

"It's all right, love. Your mind is telling you this is wrong, that it's too much like being with a lover, and, you're right: it would be so much easier if we knew each other that way. We don't, and I don't want that from you, I promise. Think of it like this: I want to lend you my strength. You've given yours to me, and it saved my life. Let me return the same to you."

As he spoke, Anna leaned a little closer to the crook of his elbow, and he leaned his arm on her shoulder, but didn't try to hurry her along, just rested there and waited patiently. She reached up a hand to touch the skin of his forearm, letting her thumb trace the line of the brachial vein as it branched like a river towards his hand. Her mouth was wet, but she didn't really know where to begin. Tylo slid his index finger down from his makeshift tourniquet, and pointed to a spot where the artery nestled close to the vein, deep in the muscles of the arm. "Just there. Go deep, avoid the shallow vessels. The one you want has a bit of strength to it, it will fight the tooth. But go easy, go slow. Don't tear."

Before he had finished talking, Anna's mouth was on his skin, and her teeth cut through the flesh. She felt the layers slide paste her teeth, and counted them as they went: skin, fat, muscle. She tilted her head expertly, picturing the anatomy in her mind as she angled her approach, skipped the softer, sluggish basilic vein and punctured the elastic wall of the brachial artery. There! Her mouth filled with blood, and her eyelids fluttered with the sensation of it. Above her, she heard Tylo hiss between his teeth, but she ignored him, wrapping her hand around his arm and pulling him closer. He released his hold on his upper arm, and the blood flowed faster, not with a discernable pulse, but strong and steady. She swallowed, and swallowed again as heat rushed through her body. This was all that mattered. Time blurred, and she lost count of the number of times she had let her mouth fill and empty. All she knew, when Tylo tried to prise her from his arm, was that she never wanted to stop. Tylo made a small noise, then hooked his fingers in her tangled hair, tugging her away with a sharp pull.

***
The room was a tiny jewel box – no windows, but that made sense, and the absence of a view was entirely made up by the lavish fabrics that hung from every wall – swathes of brocade and velvet and heavily embroidered panels covered every inch of brick. Beaded fringes of jet and garnet festooned the walls, and a lampshade with glass panels painted with peacock feathers cast shimmering pools of blue and green across the wooden floor. Anna could hear a muttered conversation taking place on the other side of the heavy wooden door, and not wanting to eavesdrop, she moved to look at the bookcase, running a finger over the spines of the books: modern paperbacks nestled side-by-side with the tattered spines of well-read romance novels of the last two hundred years. Photographs crowded the shelves – some were polaroids propped up between china figurines, and some were sepia-toned in vintage frames of various states of repair, but almost all of them were indoors, and only later when photography was a more portable art were any of them taken outdoors at night. Anna recognised Polly in some of them, sometimes with a taller woman with broad shoulders who dressed in suits and trousers, even in photos that were clearly a hundred years older or more.
She followed the age of the photographs – sometimes Polly was photographed with other women, and Anna could see them aging as the images became progressively younger, though Polly and the larger woman remained exactly the same in all of them. She flopped down on an overstuffed chair, and took a deep breath. It was a lot to process – she knew that Tylo and now Polly both were much, much older than they appeared, but when faced with the reality of it, watching Polly's friends age around her, Anna was suddenly overwhelmed.

***

Anna looked over her shoulder at Tylo. He pointed two fingers at his own eyes then back at Anna's. Anna had her doubts, but she turned back to look at the man, concentrating on what she wanted, willing him to slip into that trance-like state that Tylo had induced in the staff of A&E. I promise I won't hurt you, she willed at the boy, I'm only going to take a little.

The boy's breathing slowed, shallow and even, and his eyelids sank a little lower. From what Anna knew about hypnotic suggestion, the ritual of checking pulse and pupil response had a part in establishing this state; the more she believed that it was possible to hypnotise a man, the more likely her success would be. She reached out and touched his cheek with a trembling hand; his face was flushed and through her finger-tips she could feel a tiny pulse as blood rushed through the capillaries just under the skin. Her mouth filled, moist and metallic, and on the tip of her tongue she could taste the man's scent as it drifted up from his dry, warm skin. Tylo stepped up behind her, and took her arm, guiding it around the man's shoulder to cradle his head gently in the crook of her elbow. The man's knees folded a little, and she took the weight of his body against hers easily, marvelling at how the movement exposed the pale skin of his neck. Tylo placed her other hand at the base of the man's neck, and her fingers spread out instinctively, feeling the flexion of the wide band of muscle that shielded the viscera of the neck. Now she felt like a hunter, as she traced the lines of the great blood vessels that carried blood roaring from the heart, seeking the point where the muscles were thinnest, narrowing her eyes when she found the place where the pulse jumped hardest under her hand. Tylo's fingers rested gently at the corner of her jaw, but she didn't need him to guide her; with a delicate arch of her neck she rested her teeth on his skin a moment, then pushed them in, all the way to the pulsing wall of the carotid, then through. The blood rushed into her mouth, richer and warmer and faster than it had with Tylo, and for a few moments as Anna swallowed and swallowed, she wanted nothing more than to feed like this for ever.

***
Tylo sighed, and slipped past the police guard at the door; the only way to find out what really happened was to look himself. Dawn was less than two hours away, and he had to reserve enough time to get to Foxley's house in Kew; if they were under some kind of attack, it was the most secure place he knew. Then again, he would have said that the mighty brick walls of the warehouse here were strong enough to withstand assault. He cringed as he stepped into the building and filthy water dripped from the ceiling onto. It reeked of the chemical retardant in fire-extinguishers, charred plastic and something else, something faint but familiar. He walked gingerly across the dance floor, and the faux-parquetry oozed moisture underfoot as he made his way to the staircase that he and Anna had scaled together only a few hours ago. He slithered up the stairs fast and low, leaving it motionless when a patrolling officer walked past next. Tylo prowled along the walkway; the smell was stronger here, something sulphurous, it reminded him of dungheaps and charcoal. Something so familiar; he racked his memory to find the name for that brimstone reek.