Walking Shadows. Narrelle M Harris

threshold, uninvited, on a semi-regular basis.

      Defying his nature looked deceptively easy, except that once over it he would shudder, head to foot. Like someone had stepped over his grave, as my Nanna used to say. I wondered if it hurt him, but he'd always blink then beam a pleased smile, and we'd get on with things.

      Things, in this case, consisted of giving Gary back his DVD, throwing the now empty esky bag in the bin and Gary putting the kettle on while I went to scrub myself raw-pink in the shower. The hot water didn't relax me so much as make me slightly less tense. I didn't think I could sleep. I felt simultaneously exhausted and wide awake.

      In the living room, Gary was fingering the splotches of blood on his jeans and layers of T-shirt and Hawaiian overshirt with distaste.

      "You should clean up too," I suggested.

      "Yeah." He made for the bathroom. A few minutes later I heard the shower running and shouted through the door that he could find a spare towel in the cupboard. Vampires don't sweat, but he was looking grimy. I suppose they accumulate dust. Like bookshelves.

      Track pants and a baggy T-shirt for comfort made up my fashion statement for the evening. Brushing my hair was an exercise in futility in the long term. For now I controlled it with an elastic tie.

      Then I sat on my bed and opened the mail - a large envelope from the university. The contents confirmed the doubling of my post-grad workload from one unit to two next semester. Returning to part time study late last year had been a good professional and personal step, one that Kate had enthusiastically encouraged. Anthony was helping me encourage her in turn to get back to her own interrupted legal studies.

      I was too fatigued by the evening's events to do the Excited Dance, but the sense of satisfaction the confirmation gave me went a long way towards calming me down.

      Back in the living room I found a cup of tea on the coffee table and the new DVD loaded into the machine. The TV screen and sound were both still off - Gary couldn't remember which buttons on which of the various remote controls activated what device. At his own place, he had the buttons labelled.

      Gary sat on the sofa with a slim, battered book in his hands, clad once more in his now damp-in-spots jeans and T-shirt, the Hawaiian shirt draped over the back of a kitchen chair to dry. The book looked like it had been jammed into his jeans pocket and had suffered the consequences. I refrained from giving him a lecture about the treatment of books. Normally he kept his reading matter in excellent condition. He even kept his shelves at home alphabetised and deweyfied without my prompting.

      "What's that?"

      He held up the book for me to see. Clearly second-hand, it was one of the long-running 'Sunny Meadows High' series aimed at tween-aged girls. This one had a ridiculous title and an even more ridiculous cover.

      "What on earth are you reading that for?"

      "There's a vampire in it."

      Of course. Gary collected any old tripe if it had a vampire in it. Films, books, magazines, comics, music. He had some good stuff in his collection, but a lot of it was bizarre.

      "Is it good? I mean, is it accurate?" I sat next to him.

      "Hell no. Look at this." He thrust the open pages at me and I read the offending paragraph, which mainly concerned an undead boy full of sad pain because he had a crush on one blonde twin sister and so had eaten the other's pet kitten in an attempt to curb his vicious killer appetites. A single tear had fallen from his black-as-midnight eyes before I decided I'd rather stab myself than read another word.

      "How about we watch this then?" I pointed at the DVD case. I wasn't willing to touch it yet.

      Gary gathered up the various remotes and thrust them all at me so I could get the film underway. That done, I tasted the tea. For a man who couldn't drink or eat, he made a good cuppa. He claimed the secret was in the time you gave it to brew, something he'd learned from his father.

      Gary made notes about the film on a sheet of paper he kept in the back of the 'Sunny Meadows' book. I tried to pay attention and failed. Perhaps I was dealing with all this crap spectacularly well. That didn't mean I could stop thinking about it.

      Magdalene and Mundy's certainty that Gary was taking blood from me was irritating but not for obvious reasons. They were right about him being different these days, and it annoyed me that it had taken their comments for me to really notice.

      Was he getting blood from somewhere else? And if he was, why did that thought make me feel both repelled and possessive? When had it started? Why hadn't I noticed? Maybe it had started so long ago that it hadn't struck me as notably different to how he usually was.

      "What's up?"

      I clinked my teeth in agitation against the hard lip of the tea mug. Maybe it was time for me to ask the bloody question.

      "What did Mundy and Magdalene mean about you being all emotional?"

      "Nothing." Gary dug the pen nib into an already emphatic full stop at the end of his notes.

      I was fed up with this game of don't-tell-Lissa-anything. "Are you drinking from someone?" I was almost certain that he wasn't, but not certain enough.

      "Um. No."

      "What does the 'um' mean?" It always meant something.

      "Um..." His attention to the full stop, already about four sheets of paper deep, was impressive.

      "You know you'll tell me in the end. You always do."

      He grimaced at the truth of this statement. Even this mysterious thing he was doing in Ballarat, he'd eventually tell me. I liked that about him, that he never lied to me and when I asked him a direct question he eventually gave me an answer. Even when he didn't really want to. Maybe that was my secret superpower. Effective harassment.

      "I won't be mad at you," I said. And I vowed not to be, whatever it was. It wouldn't be right if he was always truthful and I wasn't.

      The look he gave me was sceptical, but he sighed.

      "I tried it. Once."

      My brain blanked for a moment, and then slowly ground into gear again. "When?"

      "A couple of weeks after I asked you if I could - from you - and you said no. I thought it would help me think."

      Oh. The way that he could think after he had healed the bite in my throat and discovered how blood made him feel.

      "I see."

      He flinched and soldiered on. "Only it wasn't the same. It didn't feel right."

      Not the answer I expected, though it was anyone's guess what I had expected. "How so?"

      "It just wasn't. And it was embarrassing. Nobody wanted to come out the back with me. They don't think I'm cool like the others. Magdalene was really pleased though. She thought it meant I wanted to join the club properly, at last. Anyway, she made one of the regulars go with me. It was awful. I mean, it, we, I…"

      When he found the words he was fishing for, he couldn't look at me while he said them. "I hadn't bitten anyone before and I couldn't work out where to... to not hurt them, you know. Didn't know where I was supposed to bite and how hard or how long or anything. He gave up and told me to use his wrist in the end. I hurt him and he pulled back and the timing was all shot. There was blood everywhere and it was kind of humiliating."

      "Oh," I said. And, oh lord! Gary Hooper: Worst. Vampire. Ever. Poor sod, I thought, even as I felt grateful that the escapade seemed to have ended there.

      "I haven't done it again. It didn't really work for me. It faded so fast it was hardly any use at all. Besides, it's not like when I'm with you." Now that the whole story was out, he returned to his habitual matter-of-factness.

      "Me? There was just that one time, and you weren't actually biting then."

      "No. I mean like when we go to the flicks, or you visit me at home or like tonight. You make me feel like I've done blood when I haven't. I think better when I'm with you. I feel