Free Falling Apart by Jane Lovering Page A

Eleanor, who was more butch than the Incredible Hulk and whose only need for a big, strong man would be to have something firm to stand on when she was regrouting her bathroom.
    â€˜Thanks, Har—’ But he’d gone, so I had no-one to talk to while I waited for the pick-up unit. I sat on the concrete path, one eye on the softly snoring Vera-alike, and hugged my knees. She was wearing cute shoes with a little strap across them, which would have made my feet look like a pair of hay-bales tied up with string, and her whole forces’ sweetheart look was grating on me. Not only because the Troubles had been over for thirty years, so going around dressed like a Human Army supporter was nastily sarcastic in a way only a natty little floral dress could be, but also because she was neatly slim. I had a bosom that made me look like some kind of climbing hazard, so it didn’t matter how skinny I might be I was cursed with the ‘boob woman’ look and an inability to run without a bra that reached from neck to waist.
    I sniffed and hugged my knees tighter. What had she looked like as a human? The demon that infected the vampires gave them an enhanced beauty, although I suspected that neither Sil nor Zan had ever been hulking great ugs, so had she always been pretty? Or had she been a plain, overlooked girl who’d thought a demon would up her chances of meeting gorgeous men? Or had she fallen for some guy who’d used her as a free feed and not let her go in time, before his demon seeded into her bloodstream? Either way, she was right, even if she
had
talked about him in the past tense, the bitch. Sil should be with someone who could understand his way of life – the need for blood, excitement, the adrenaline rush that his demon got off on and that had made him …
    I shook my head at how wrong this all was. Something must have happened to him in London. Sil was almost painfully law-abiding; for him to be running amok through a crowd of humans something …
please, God, something
 …
must have happened. And then the sensible part of my brain cut in. Vampires were vampires. With the demon came a whole new set of moral standards – well, more a whole abnegation of any morality at all, really – a new body, new abilities and strengths. Who someone had been as a human,
what
they had been, no longer existed, except in their repressed memories.
    Sil was not who I thought he was. He professed to love me, to feel human with me, but … in the end, he was vampire.
    The circling blue light of the Enforcement van had almost never been so welcome. I clambered to my feet to greet the team, two officers I knew by sight, filled in the paperwork and let the irritation at this vampire’s expensive underwear wash away any residual feelings of displacement as she was hoisted into the van and driven off.
    Sil lay in the alleyway, covered with sheets of cardboard. Flat to the evil-smelling concrete, with his Ralph Lauren trousers in direct contact with something he really hoped was just rainwater and a pigeon giving him funny looks.
    Oh gods. How did it come to this?
Feeling relatively safe, from identification if not from dysentery, he let himself remember what he’d done. What the hunger and desperation had driven him to, the sheer power and high of the hunt and …
Please tell me I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t
think
I did, or that I let my demon seed into a human
 …
Oh gods. What have I done?
    Desperation dropped his cheek against the rough ground for a second, and the pigeon eyed him again, perhaps hoping that he was going to die and provide it with a meal.
Out there, out in the world that once hailed me as the Vampire of York, there are going to be Hunters, Enforcement crew all looking for me. None of them willing to listen, to let me tell my side of things – that I was so hungry all I knew was that I had to feed to stay alive. Would they care? Would