LITMIR.BIZ

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is that foul expression Smith likes to use?" Mundy wondered.

      Magdalene's lips quirked in derisive humour. I got the feeling the two of them were participating in some pointed double act aimed at needling me. "Ah, yes. Gary, you are meant to… suck around."

      Gary didn't even bother to protest this time, though I nearly did. Of course I knew what they were all talking about by now. I'm slow sometimes, but I'm not stupid. And it was utterly ludicrous. Gary had never bitten me. The only time he'd even tasted my blood was when he had saved my life 10 months ago. Oh, and 15 minutes ago when he'd stuck my finger in his mouth. I wiggled my fingers carefully. The injuries had sealed and only the faintest dents remained as evidence of Thomas's bite.

      So why did they keep saying it? Was Gary… drinking? Maybe he was, as it had been so graphically put, sucking around. I caught his sidelong glance towards me before he looked away. No, I thought. That's not it.

      "And it explains why he hasn't been so available lately for any of our little errands," continued Magdalene. She transferred her flat gaze to Gary. "Her blood is making you excitable, Gary. It is so typical of you to get muddled. You are meant to be the one in charge. You are supposed to spread your favours."

      Mundy's lip curled. "Show some care, Hooper. You are simply a neutered consort. Women of her ilk only desire a companion they can rely on not to die. If not that, then you are just to pass the time, until she finds a breathing man."

      Gary sighed and ignored the whole thing. I decided that, on balance, it was best to follow suit. This was not a discussion I wanted to have with them until I'd first had one with Gary.

      Besides, I didn't want to get into the whole 'until she finds a breathing man' part. My boyfriendless state was all right by me thanks, and not the result of necrophiliac pining. It's just that when you end up in the middle of a bloodbath more or less because your last boyfriend has dumped you, and then the loveliest boy you've ever seen in your life gets murdered by an undead psychopath; it kind of takes the wind out of your dating sails.

      Bluntness, I decided, was the best way forward. God knows neither I nor they were any good at subtlety. "Who is trying to kill you?"

      "The situation does not concern you," said Mundy.

      "Bullshit."

      He gave me one of his most offended looks. Sometimes I swear just to make him twitch. Instead of making some old-man fuddy-duddy comment about me being a guttersnipe, he turned his back on me.

      "After you have completed the task I have for you, Gary, you are to break yourself of the habit of this person. Magdalene will ensure you have suitable replacements. I will not countenance having her in my presence again. If ever I set eyes on her after this day, I will ensure that I never have to do so thereafter."

      Gary's purported errand that had led us to this point had slipped my mind. This didn't seem like an appropriate time to bring it up again, but before I could share with Mundy my thoughts on what a prick I thought he was, Gary spoke. "What is this job you have for me?" He made no response to Mundy's outrageous attempt to control his social life.

      "Alberto needs you."

      Gary blinked, hard. "No he doesn't."

      "He requires assistance," Mundy amended with a mean half-smile, "Of the usual kind."

      "It doesn't have to be me."

      "Magdalene and I have our hands full at present," and just the faintest of pauses hung in the air after he said 'hands'.

      "Someone else can go."

      "Alberto doesn't want someone else."

      "Your reputation precedes you, Gary," interjected Magdalene, all nanna-sweet once more.

      "I don't want to."

      Magdalene sighed her exasperation and said, not bothering with anything as polite as sotto voce, "We really must do something about his attitude."

      Mundy's thin smile suggested agreement, but he said, "He wrote that if help was not forthcoming, then he was prepared to make someone to do it for him."

      At first I thought he'd misspoken, and then I considered his grammar, and I didn't much like it. Nor did Gary, apparently. He scowled while shuffling his feet and then nodded.

      "All right. When?"

      "At your earliest convenience," Mundy said in a tone indicating that 'immediately' had better be convenient. Smug bastard. He drew a crumpled letter from his pocket and handed it to Gary.

      Gary jammed the letter into his own pocket without looking at it and said to me, "We should go."

      Happy to oblige, I picked up the empty blue bag and stuffed it into my satchel, which was now full to bursting. Handling the bag was noisome, but I had enough presence of mind to ensure there was as little evidence of our passing as possible. If the authorities found Thomas's body, I didn't want anything to link Gary and me to it. If the police could put me here, they'd find my name in the unsolved case files for the murders Priestley had committed last year.

      The fact that I could solve all those killings, and Thomas's, for them wouldn't be welcomed. They wouldn't believe me. My life was complicated enough without being the centre of an official police investigation.

      Then I walked to the ladder that Mundy had used and sympathised with Gary's irked sigh on his realising it was there.

      "You first," he said, so I started climbing. The metalwork creaked alarmingly but held. When I reached the roof I looked down at Gary clambering up after me. Mundy and Magdalene had both vanished too, along with Thomas's crumpled shape. We're all getting rid of the evidence.

      Thomas had been injected with something, according to his description of the incident. Injected, then hideously wounded before being euthanased - if that was the word for the already-dead. Mundy had been maimed presumably by the same people. Who knew if Gary was on the hit list? I wasn't prepared to take any chances on it.

      Mundy and Magdalene might want to keep a lid on who was responsible for all of these things, but I'd be damned if I'd just let it lie. Stomach churning images of Gary - hurt, burned, homeless, zombified goddamnit were fuel to a massively indignant fire burning in my thoughts.

       Keep your stupid bloody secrets. Gary and I can do this without you.

      CHAPTER 6

      "Don't suppose you have a clue about what's going on?" I asked Gary as he joined me on the rooftop.

      "Maybe. I'm not sure."

      "Don't you go all cryptic on me, Gary. I'm having a terrible night and I'm not in the mood."

      "I don't know much about it. Mundy let something slip, years and years ago, in the seventies probably. I wrote it in my notes to make sure I'd remember it, but I haven't been able to corroborate anything."

      "And this slip was…?"

      "He was in one of his… moods."

      "Mundy is nothing but moods. All of them foul."

      Gary acknowledged this truth. "A worse mood than usual, then. He was complaining about missing what it used to be like."

      "Ah yes," I remarked bitterly, "the good old days, when occupying rugged castles and eating the peasants all unhindered by the pesky tabloid media made life grand."

      "Something like that. You know he's from England, originally."

      "So I gathered." My supposition was that Mundy originated from the early 1700s at the latest, given that his syntax sounded like he was reading aloud from Gulliver's Travels.

      "One night he made me go with him to clean up his new digs. He'd had to find somewhere new to live and he didn't trust the electricity to not burn the place down. Still doesn't, really."

      Not surprising for a man who had grown up human in the time of tallow candles.

      "He was trying to convince me to go

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