Night Work: vampire meets witch in this darkly comic urban fantasy romance by Harlow Rowe

Author:Harlow Rowe [Rowe, Harlow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter nineteen

Back To Square One

I go past Libby’s house on the way home.

Of course I do. Have you been paying attention? What else did you think I was going to do? Give up?

Martin asked me back to his when we left the pub. I almost said yes, standing there on the damp pavement with the distant shouts of market traders in my ears. Money being made, meat on chopping blocks. Blood and business. For a moment going to Martin’s seemed preferable to the loneliness of my bedsit’s minty and non-too-fresh walls, but Martin lives with Konrad and Ange, and I don’t want to face Konrad.

I don’t want to face Ange either. I’m fond of her. I love her a bit like a sister, or a cousin at least. But that’s why I don’t want to have her look at me with eyes full of hurt because I’d heard the story of Konrad’s dead wife and managed to ignore it.

But it’s like they all think I’m showing signs. As though falling in love with Libby is somehow a sign that I’m losing my humanity and the demon is winning. Why can’t they see it’s the opposite? I’m not saying Libby is exactly a sensible or easy choice. But I’d made toast for Christ’s sake. Around Libby I’ve been ‘living human’ more than I ever have in the last six years—more human even than in the months before I was turned, after Jemma left me, and my parents divorced, and I failed my degree, and did nothing but lie in a dark room listening to the most depressing music I owned (and I owned a lot of depressing music). Because my misery predates my vampirism. And now my brain’s stuck, and I’m sort of stuck with it. Or that’s what I always thought. But I don’t feel miserable around Libby. I feel alive.

And everyone I know is telling me I can’t have that.

So yeah, I go past Libby’s house on the way home.

I only want to stop and listen for a while. Check she’s OK. Hear the sound of her voice, because the voicemail on her phone is just the default pre-recorded thing, and she is ignoring my calls.

But she’s not home. I can’t even hear her sleeping. And her scent in the street is stale, days old.

I don’t think she’s been home since the night we went to Simon’s. But where the hell is she?

I wait there for a while, standing as usual behind a damp privet hedge. There’s only thirty minutes or so left until dawn. I wonder what will happen if I just stay here. Stay until the sun comes up and makes a pile of ash, something easily swept away by the wind, no trouble to anyone.

Except I know the demon won’t let me. It will bury me in a shallow grave, or it will break into someone’s house and find a cellar and make me wrap myself in thick blankets, lying there cocooned, like some monstrous grub.

Twenty minutes until dawn.

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