Walking Shadows. Narrelle M Harris

a member of the Gold Bug and naturally considered it an honour to be a blood hit for the boss.

      Magdalene ignored both of us and leapt high up the wall and followed the route Gary had taken to the roof, leaving me with what I suppose she considered the caterer's entrance. Belatedly, I realised I should have given her the damned bag and its grisly contents.

      The opportunity to offload the bag passed as Becks also vanished, leaving the doorway empty. Leaving still looked like the smart thing to do, but I'd have to traverse a long, dark, dog-legged stretch of alley to get back to a busy street. My skin crawled at the idea of walking the distance on my own, even though it was still light. Bad things don't only happen in the dark, and there were vampires even worse than Magdalene out there. Several of them would be making their way to the Gold Bug for an early bite. Mundy, for a start, assuming he was still alive.

      Despite our encounter, I decided that Magdalene wasn't immediately dangerous to me. She knew better than to go spooking the volunteers, who preferred their dangerous experiences to be thrilling without being fatal. It had taken months, according to Gary, for the Gold Bug to recover from the last drained body found in the nearby street.

      Mundy, however, had less business sense than Magdalene.

      The conclusion was that I would, perversely, be marginally less vulnerable in the club. At least there I could seek out Gary, hand over this awful bag to anyone who'd take it, and have Gary accompany me out of Chinatown.

      Screwing my courage to the legendary sticking place, I went inside.

      In Becks' continued absence, I darted down the stairs to the basement. The potential fire hazard candles no longer decorated the entry. I missed them. The much less volatile set of low lights embedded in the concrete steps lacked ambience and, more importantly, the potential for self-defence offered by a naked flame. Fire is not the vampire's friend.

      This entry had once led to a private members club. Now the steps opened onto a regular cocktail bar designed in wood and red velvet to capture the lucrative custom of your bog standard wine-and-spirits crowd. Soft music played and irregularly placed shelves held up ancient curios. If my great-great-great grandmother had run a bordello, this is what it would have looked like, a strange combination of gentility and opulence with a suggestion of impropriety.

      I hurried through the bar to a dark curtain at the rear which drew aside to reveal a long, narrow staircase. Dodging around the thick golden rope that would later bar it firmly from "non-members", I headed upstairs. I bumped into Jack, the skinny inner-sanctum bouncer, coming down as I ascended past the ground level and onto the first floor. Jack barely acknowledged my presence as I squeezed past him.

      Finally I emerged into the upstairs lounge. It was decorated in solid, antique furniture, the back of the room divided from the rest of the space by a heavy black curtain. There were booths behind there, I knew, and a faint smell of old blood. Also several first aid kits, kept discreetly out of view. At the top of the stairs was a black-painted window which overlooked a dead end, Gary had told me. I'd once seen it from above, a debris-filled space between buildings, its ground level access long since cut off by the press of time and real estate.

      Inside the lounge, a deep, low heartbeat reverberated through the top of my head and the soles of my feet. Just like it used to be, only two floors up.

      Gary stood at the bar between two other people, his expression studiously bland. The very pale, unbreathing person on his right I recognised as Beryl. She cultivated the prim look of an academic and had a preference for the shy punters who came to the club. She was looking at Gary like he was a bad smell.

      On Gary's left stood a man I knew as Mr Smith. He had a beating heart, technically speaking, but as he was the representative of Magdalene's shady business partners, I knew a pulse didn't make him any more trustworthy than her undead clients. Probably less. At least I knew what the vampires got out of this deal.

      I thrust the bag at Gary, pleased to be rid of it. "I want to get out of here."

      "What happened?"

      "Magdalene tried to wind me up. It worked."

      That's when Magdalene, with immaculately terrible timing, appeared from yet another staircase on the other side of the room. She had, I gathered, taken the private way to her ground floor offices then walked up to make her grand entrance.

      Magdalene's eyes wandered dismissively past me, for all the world as though the alley incident had never occurred, and then she strode up to Gary. Despite the fact that she was shorter than he - and Gary is not tall - she somehow managed to tower over him. The unspoken "What the hell do you want?" radiated from her large, soft frame.

      "You know Lissa's not a member, right?" Gary asked, a hint of defiant tension in his tone.

      For a moment she tried to look like she didn't know what he was talking about. Then she said, "I know this, Gary."

      "And you know that no-one can bite someone who's not a member. Volunteers only. Those are the rules."

      "I know the rules," Magdalene snapped, "I made them."

      "Good. Just checking." He nodded as though this settled the matter.

      "Does this mean you have brought your little friend to join us, Gary?" Magdalene asked waspishly, "I can't imagine why else you would bring her here."

      "This was at Mundy's place," said Gary, thrusting the bag at her, "I think it's his."

      Magdalene arched an eyebrow at the offering.

      "There's a hand in it," I expounded, since Gary had forgotten the important noun. I was also hoping to shock her, just a little. No such luck.

      The arched eyebrow was turned to me, but eyebrows don't bother me particularly, no matter how arch they get. Magdalene turned and got Mr Smith to hold the bag while she unzipped it. She dropped the frozen veges onto the bar counter and pulled out the limb in question.

      She raised it to her face and sniffed. "Smells like his," she concurred.

      "I thought so, yeah," Gary replied.

      "Why the bag?" asked Beryl, looking at the pale, all-wrong hand that Magdalene held so matter-of-factly in her own.

      "Keep it fresh, of course," said Smith, "Is the old bastard around then?"

      "Not at present." Magdalene was regarding the twisted stump of the hand speculatively, no doubt wondering, as I did, what could have torn it off.

      The sound of excited voices floated up the stairwell behind me and Magdalene rapidly dropped Mundy's hand back into the bag. Smith swept the bag of peas on top of it. Beryl's head lifted like a cat sensing nearby sparrows and she moved away from Gary. Three steps took me into the gap beside him. He shifted slightly to allow me room and seemed to relax marginally.

      "You should put that in the fridge," I told Magdalene, nodding at the bag, "in case Mundy wants it back."

      "If he still needs it," she said carelessly.

      "If," I agreed. "It'll be interesting if he does and you didn't look after it for him."

      She gave me a sour look and turned to Smith. "Take it to my office."

      She handed Smith the bag as the voices coalesced into a group of three young people - two girls and a guy. Just kids, really, enveloped in black clothes, dramatic make-up and an air of anticipation like they were off to a rock concert. The boy had a long, lanky grace that made me think, piercingly and painfully, of Daniel. My never-quite-a-boyfriend, not even a whole year buried. Drained of life so that a dead woman could pretend she still had feelings. Of everyone I knew who had died, the selfish bitch who'd killed Daniel was the only one I was wholeheartedly glad was properly, utterly dead.

      The guy looked nervously excited while the other two offered words of encouragement. "This is so a-maz-ing, Hamish, honest. There's nothing like it. It's so..." the taller of the girls flailed her hands as a general indication of how so it was.

      "Awesome," the shorter one supplied enthusiastically, light brown roots showing under black-dyed hair,