Serafina and the Virtual Man (8 page)

“It comes with you,” Adam explained. “And since it’s hardly a 1940s thing, all its displays will be of actual times and events, not our VR.”

Jilly stopped and blinked at the phone screen. “According to this, we’ve only been here for about ten minutes!”

He took her free hand and swung it high into the air as they walked on. “See? We’re fast thinkers, you and me.”

****

The poltergeist clearly didn’t want to be sent away, and it was damned if it would stay still for long enough to let Sera disperse it against its will. She chased it around the house for nearly half an hour before she admitted she was wasting her time. She needed to corral the bastard somehow.

Dissatisfied, she slid her back down the nearest wall until she was sitting on the floor. Now what? she thought, dragging her hand through her short, spiky hair and taking stock. She was in a small, narrow corridor leading from the utility room to the back door. Like the rest of the house, it was spotless.

Or was it? Were those not muddy tracks along the tiles? She frowned and blinked, and the marks disappeared. Either her eyes were playing tricks or the present scene was overlaid with a past vision. Drawing in her breath, Sera opened herself.

Muddy tracks, made by the heels of shoes being dragged along the floor. They were attached to a man’s feet. And someone was dragging the man along the floor to the door.

Sera gasped, and the vision vanished before she could see either of the faces. She stumbled to her feet and lurched toward the back door, dragging her hand along the wall. Death surrounded her. Murder. Anger.

“You,” she whispered to the poltergeist. “It’s you, isn’t it? Oh God, I don’t want to do this…”

But she did it anyway. She always did. She wanted to call to Blair for help, lashed herself for thinking first of him and not of her earliest and longest ally, Jilly. It didn’t matter. Neither of them could help here.

She turned the key in the heavy door and stepped outside, still following death.

****

The pursuit and the sabotage might never have happened. War and occupation might never have been, for this part of Paris in spring 1942 seemed ridiculously serene. Sure, there were a few soldiers in German uniform in the café, two of them sitting at a table not far from Jilly and Adam, but the conversation surrounding her was civilised and jovial, and what she could see of the street outside the café window was quiet.

A man in the corner played soft, rhythmic piano music, and a few couples danced in the middle of the floor.

“I never imagined it like this,” Jilly observed. She had taken off her raincoat, beneath which she wore a figure-hugging cotton print dress. A tiny hat with a ribbon of the same print adorned her head. She’d found the hat in her coat pocket and looked at it quite carefully before she’d put it on under a corner streetlamp. “Shouldn’t we be surrounded by fear and tension?”

“We are. We’re just used to it and enjoying the lull.” Adam, his trilby on the table beside their wine, had put on a tie and unbuttoned his trench coat. He looked unexpectedly smart as well as handsome, although he still lounged untidily on his café chair and loosened his tie before raising his glass to her. “
Salut
.”

“
Salut
,” said Jilly, who’d done French at school. She clinked glasses with him and drank. Although wine wasn’t her usual tipple, she thought she could get used to it. There was something curiously beguiling about sitting in a Paris café drinking wine with him…having given the Nazis a successful kick in the pants and being about to make contact with their Resistance colleague, of course. Life didn’t get much more exciting than this. And it was stunningly real.

Unable to help herself, Jilly reached out and touched Adam’s coat sleeve. “Wow. It looks and feels exactly as if that’s what you’re wearing. And yet you’re in a T-shirt…”

He shrugged. “I’m in a box somewhere, six feet under. The T-shirt is just my default program from when the machine first scanned me.”

Jilly blinked. Stupidly, she felt as if her fondest illusion had been shattered. Although it had felt good, and strangely thrilling to be playing a game with him, she really wasn’t.

“Isn’t our contact late?” she said, just a shade desperately.

“Can’t say I mind,” Adam replied with a lazy smile. He leaned back even farther in his chair, as if he was about to put his feet up on the table.

Laughter caught at the back of her throat, and, as if he understood, his smile broadened.

Clearly rethinking his feet, he straightened. “Want to dance?”

Jilly laughed. “I can’t.”

“Me neither, but if we were around in the 1940s, I reckon we’d have been good at it.” He held out his hand like a challenge. “Come on, good for cover.”

What the hell. It was only a game.

Jilly laid her hand in his with pretended primness and rose to her feet with him. He swung her into his arms and onto the dance floor.

“See? How cool are we?”

“
Cool?
” she retorted. “You’re a walking anachronism.”

He grinned. “Dancing anachronism.”

She tried to draw her hand free to slap him, but he held on to it and spun her around to distract her.

“I don’t think this is a real 1940s dance,” she observed.

“Hey, it’s Paris. Anything goes.” He drew her a little closer, and the odd comfortableness which had been growing all night suddenly vanished. He was too close, too real, ironically enough, and she felt suddenly overwhelmed, not so much by his hold which remained light and unthreatening but by her own reaction to his nearness.

She recognised it as sexual desire. After all, she’d felt it before—usually just before a man turned into an arch wanker and killed it. She knew how to deal with it then. But this was a totally new situation. She was playing a game with someone who wasn’t even real. And he didn’t immediately say or do anything crass, just continued to dance with her, as if it was enough. As if he liked just holding her in his arms and moving to the music. As she did.

Oh fuck…

“What sort of a name is Genesis anyway?” she blurted to avert her confusion. “You can’t really be called Genesis Adam.”

The breath of his laughter brushed her cheek, and she shivered. It was far from unpleasant.

“That’s what I said to my old mum,” Adam murmured. “In fact my dad may well have said the same thing. Never got the chance to ask him. I was supposed to be my mum’s new beginning, so she named me Genesis.”

She peered at him uncertainly. “Is that true?”

“That I was her new beginning? No, I was just a very short distraction. What about you, JK? You must have a real name.”

“It’s Jilly. Well, Jillian. But I like JK.”

“So do I,” he said.

She felt the involuntary contraction of her brow, just before a strange voice said in her ear, “Germans. Get out.”

She spun around, but Adam had heard it too and was already walking her casually toward the back of the café, his arm around her waist. “No wonder our contact was late,” Adam murmured, pushing through the doors to the kitchen. “She’s been caught and grassed us up.”

“Will we get away?” Jilly asked, making for the open door at the back through which she could make out a back alley. She couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to be shot in this game.

“Haven’t the foggiest idea. Let’s try.”

The alley was quiet, although Jilly could hear German commands barked from the main street. Still with his arm around her, they hurried down the alley.

I like this game…

Jilly’s phone rang, the incongruous strains of the Proclaimers’
Five Hundred Miles
blasting into 1940s Paris like a bucket of cold water.

Jilly stopped dead, her gaze flying to Adam’s. He didn’t drop his arm, just waited while she fished out her phone. It was Sera.

“What’s wrong?” Jilly demanded.

“I’ve found him, Jilly,” Sera’s voice said shakily. “I’ve found the body.”

Oh Jesus, oh fuck, oh no…

“Where are you?” she managed. She couldn’t take her eyes off Adam’s face. Expressions surged behind his eyes—hope, fear, sadness, and, surely, irritation. Jilly’s pain felt physical, huge, seeping upward from her stomach to her heart. Behind her, all hell was breaking loose. The German soldiers had entered the café. More were rushing round the alley to the back door.

“In the garden. Through the back door at the utility room.”

“I’m coming,” Jilly said and broke the connection.

She dropped the phone back into her pocket and stared at Adam. “I need to go back.”

“I know.”

“Wait,” she said desperately, and his loosening arm stilled.

Sera had found the body. Adam’s eyes and her own head both told her this was very likely to be the end, that his ghost would vanish with the discovery of his body. Surely that was his only purpose in coming back, in contacting Jilly in the first place. To find out what had happened to him. And now they would know. And she’d never see him again.

“Adam, if this is it,” she whispered. “If it is…I’m so sorry I never knew you, so glad I did this. Adam…”

She reached up to him urgently, with what intention she didn’t stop to think, and, ignoring the soldiers rushing toward them, he tightened his arm around her, bent his head, and kissed her mouth.

Perhaps it was the soldiers, perhaps it was surprise or just the fact that it was all a game. But Jilly felt no need to knee Adam in the groin.

Rough in texture, soft in action, his lips took hers and parted them, and she let him. She even kissed him back, pressing up into his mouth with desperate fervour. He dragged her closer, and the growing hardness between his legs thrilled her. She opened her mouth wider, throwing both arms around his neck, and suddenly his tongue was in her mouth, stroking hers, and she finally understood what it was all about: sheer, shattering sexual desire.

She clung to him, lost in the pleasure of her aching nipples against his hard chest, of the pressure of his shaft at the juncture of her thighs, so dizzy with lust that she didn’t even notice when the German shouting stopped. She didn’t notice anything at all that wasn’t him until his mouth loosened on hers.

“Death has its charms,” he whispered against her lips. “Thank you, JK. It’s been fun.”

Her eyes flew open. They were back in Dale’s secret study, and Adam was letting her go. Her body felt cold, her mind numb.

Sera. I have to get to Sera.

She nodded, dumbly, grabbed up her laptop, and ran for the door, where she skidded to a halt and spun around. “I’m sorry, Adam,” she blurted.

But the room was empty. He’d gone.

Chapter Eight

She found Sera sitting on a pile of earth, clawing more up out of the ground with her bare hands. “Sera, we need shovels,” she pointed out.

Sera paused. “I know. Just passing the time. I didn’t want to leave in case I lost the right place.”

“You’re sure about this? Ewan’s going to kick our arses from here to Glasgow if we dig up his roses for nothing.”

“Oh, come on, Jilly. It’s not his roses he’s really going to mind us digging up!”

She had a point. Who but Ewan would bury a body in his garden? Jilly swallowed. “You think he shot Adam by accident?”

“Accident or design, it certainly explains his reluctance to talk about the burglary or gunshots,” Sera said grimly. “Although not my vision. This is a mess, Jilly.”

Jilly nodded, prepared to wait until her friend was ready to tell. Visions of violence and death upset Sera far more than she let on.

A quick scan had revealed a dark, square shadow that Jilly hoped was an open garden shed. “I’ll get a shovel.”

“Get two, but we shouldn’t have to dig for long. Blair’s on his way, and he can go a hell of a lot faster.”

****

Leaning against a nearby tree trunk ten minutes later, Jilly had to admit that Blair had his uses. The vampire, tall and muscled, dug in a blur without even raising a sweat and in no time at all threw down his shovel and reached down into the hole. He was horrendously strong and lifted out the dead body as if it were a child’s doll.

Show some respect, you bastard.

She didn’t want to see it, but she couldn’t stay away from the body. She dragged herself over, feeling like a zombie. Blair laid it out on the ground, then stood back, putting his arm around Sera. She leaned her head on his shoulder, which at least gave Jilly a push to look at the body instead.

He was wearing a black track suit, and there was mud all over what was left of his face. There didn’t seem to be much skin, so far as she could tell. There were insects everywhere, undulating in the dirt. Her stomach heaved.

Oh Jesus.

At least the smell wasn’t so bad. Yet…

Her torch wavered, catching a tuft of hair sticking out of the mud. It glinted in the beam of light. Jilly steadied her torch and shone it again. Her breath caught.

“Blair,” she said hoarsely. “Lie down beside the corpse.”

“What?” Sera demanded. “Jilly, for f—”

“No, look at him!” She could barely contain her excitement. It made her voice tremble. “I don’t think it’s Adam. Adam’s hair’s black, this guy’s is much lighter. And Adam’s as tall as Blair is.”

“Lie down beside the corpse,” Sera repeated, tugging at Blair’s hand. “Please?”

With a sardonic twist of his lips, Blair lay down beside the corpse, which was a good foot shorter than him. For a moment, he looked as if he was going to roll into the grave, just for a lark—or perhaps because it was his natural habitat—but Sera lunged to stop him.

“Wait,” she cried, grabbing him and hauling him to his feet. “Don’t spoil the crime scene any more than we have. How are we going to play this?”

“We’ve got to call the cops,” Jilly said. “It’s a body. That goes beyond Serafina’s discretion promise.”

“Way beyond,” Sera agreed ruefully. “Only how the hell do we explain why we were digging up the Ewans’ garden at nine o’clock in the evening?”

Only nine? It felt like the middle of the night. It was certainly cold enough.

Jilly stamped her feet to keep warm while she thought. “We could tell them the truth,” she suggested at last and flung up her hands as Sera opened her mouth to reply. “It’s all right. I realise I’ll be the first of my family ever to have knowingly told the truth to the police, but I’ll just have to live with the shame. For Serafina’s.”

“This will be
good
for Serafina’s?” Sera said doubtfully.

“Maybe. Think about it. You tell the police you were asked to get rid of the Ewans’ poltergeist, you chased it out here, sensed something, and dug it up to be sure. You’re now officially helping the police. Maybe they’ll send cases your way. Whatever, word is bound to get out. Dale Ewan is high profile. At the very least, it’s free publicity for Serafina’s.”

Sera cocked her head to one side, thoughtfully chewing her lip. Blair actually grinned at Jilly, which startled her. Perhaps Genesis Adam wasn’t the only man with a charming smile, if you looked closely enough. Although, technically, Blair wasn’t a man.

Technically, neither was Adam.

I kissed a computer program. Is that kinky? Perverse?

It was certainly fun, she recalled, as her body heated from the inside all over again.

“Tell you what,” Sera said, fishing her phone out of her pocket and distracting Jilly from her daydream. “I’ll call Alex McGowan. He’s in CID now.”

Blair’s dying grin broadened. He sat down cross-legged behind the body like some kind of weird guard. His shoulders shook.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Jilly said doubtfully. “I know he had his eyes opened a bit last year with all that vampire stuff, and he
almost
believes you talk to the dead, but—”

“Who better?” Sera interrupted, lifting the phone to her ear. “Hello, Alex? Hi, it’s Sera MacBride.”

“Oh no,” said the constable’s voice clearly.

Sera grinned. “You on duty?”

“Yes,” McGowan said suspiciously. “Why?”

“I’ve found a body for you. You might want to get over here. I’m at the home of Dale Ewan—you know the guy? Owns Genesis Gaming.” She took the phone away from her ear for a moment. Even Jilly was surprised by the length of the constable’s string of expletives. “You’re welcome, Alex. See you here.”

She broke the connection and glanced from Blair to Jilly. “I suppose we’d better phone the Ewans too.”

“Give it five,” Jilly advised. “It would be better if the police got here first.”

****

“Why does my heart sink into my boots whenever I see you guys?” Detective Constable Alex McGowan strode toward where they still stood over the body in the garden.

“Because you know your life will be unbearably dull again when we’ve gone?” Sera suggested.

“You’re going?” Alex said hopefully. He came to a halt beside Jilly and gazed down at the body. Behind him came an older, larger colleague whose attention was all on those who’d made the discovery.

“‘Course not,” Sera said. “How you doing, Constable?”

Alex glanced up at her with a slightly rueful smile. But whatever he’d been about to say was lost when Blair chose to loom out of the shadows and offer his hand. Alex swallowed, then shook hands.

Watching, Jilly observed, “Cold night.” And heard Alex swallow back a choke of laughter. He knew what Blair was, and if by some chance he’d forgotten or talked himself out of the knowledge, the chill of the undead fingers would certainly have reminded him. How could Sera bear those cold if elegant hands on her body? Adam’s hands were warm…

And not real.

She needed to get back on the computer. She had to tell him the body wasn’t his. And stop imagining his hands all over her. Stupid. One VR kiss and she turned into a mass of raging hormones—like a teenager, probably, although she’d largely missed out that stage. She’d been more channelled toward aggression.

“This is my colleague, DC Vernon,” Alex was saying. “Sera MacBride, Blair, and Jilly Kerr.”

Vernon gave Jilly an extra-sharp look. Benefit of the famous Kerr name.

“So let’s see this body,” Alex said, kneeling down. “Know him?”

They all shook their heads; then Sera glanced sharply at Blair, as if he’d spoken to her telepathically. These days she was better at hiding that, so she didn’t talk to herself so obviously.

“We phoned the Ewans,” Sera said. “I think that might be their car.”

Alex only grunted. “Shine your torch on the body,” he ordered. Jilly obeyed with reluctance, and the beam slid off Alex’s bright, ginger head to the pale, grisly figure of the body. “The neck,” Alec added, taking something from his pocket that looked like tweezers.

He reached out with the tweezers and tugged gently at something. A chain which had been tucked into the tracksuit top. He drew it out until it hung outside the jacket. A gold rectangular pendant. Not a style Jilly admired, but not cheap. Worse, it forced his personality on to her. This had been a real man with a family and friends, ambitions, projects. He was more than just “not Adam.” Her throat closed up.

****

The car Blair had heard before anyone else turned out to be the pathologist. While she examined the body, the detectives accompanied Sera, Jilly, and Blair back to the warmth of the house and demanded a blow-by-blow account of everything that had happened.

They sat on the sofas in the big entrance hall in front of the glass wall and tried to explain, leaving out Jilly’s expedition to the secret lab. What would they make of her trip to Paris in 1942?

“So this poltergeist led you to the body?” DC Vernon said to Sera with blatant disbelief.

“No, not really,” Sera replied patiently. “I was chasing it round the house until I got fed up and sat on the floor for a rest. Then I felt that the body had been dragged that way.”

“You
felt
it,” Vernon repeated.

“Yep. I’m afraid I do. I see things like that. So I followed the ‘feeling,’ tracked it to the garden. And then we dug it up.”

“What else did you see?” Alex asked curiously.

Sera’s gaze turned to him. “I saw someone being strangled.”

Jilly stared at her. Strangled? Not shot?

“Was it this guy?” Alex asked, jerking his head toward the back of the house.

“I think so,” Sera answered. “It feels like him, but he’s pretty unrecognisable. I can’t be sure.”

“Really?” said Vernon without troubling to veil his sarcasm.

Maybe the poor bugger was strangled first and then shot to finish him off.

“Do you know who he was?” Jilly asked. They’d left it to the police to go through his pockets.

“Nothing to identify him. Yet.”

When the front door burst open, Jilly jumped with the shock. White-faced, bewildered, Ewan and Petra all but fell into the house.

“Sera? There’s police all over the place,” Dale exclaimed. “What the hell’s going on?”

Sera stood up and went to them, touched both their arms at once. “I’m sorry. We found a body and had to call the police.”

Petra flung herself against Dale, hiding her face in his shoulder. Dale’s arm went around her at once, and Sera stepped discreetly back.

“A body?” Dale said in stunned tones. “A human body? In our garden? Who?”

“I think he was your poltergeist,” Sera said.

Petra turned her head enough to reveal one eye. “Is it gone, then?”

“Not necessarily,” Sera said with caution, “but I would hope so.”

****

It was midnight before Jilly got home. Tossing the Dave-maligned coat on the sofa, and kicking off her filthy high-heeled shoes, she immediately crouched down on her usual cushion on the floor and got out the laptop. She opened it and switched it on, drumming her fingers impatiently while it booted up. She clicked on chat and invited Exodus.

JK: It isn’t you. The body was someone else.

She waited, but there was no response. And yet, according to the program, Exodus was online. Where the hell was he? Back in Paris?

She supposed he might as well be. What else could he do to pass the time when he only existed in a program? Shit, how was that even possible?

She got up, made herself a cup of tea and some scrambled egg on toast—it was too late for anything heavier, and besides, she’d no energy and less interest in cooking right now. She returned to the computer, but there was still no response from Exodus. While she ate, she stared aggressively at the screen. After a while, she peeled the tape off the webcam. Still, he didn’t reply.

She typed, “Where are you?” Then, “Speak to me, you bastard.”

Nothing happened. Slowly, Jilly pulled herself up onto the sofa. Maybe he was just a different kind of wanker. Maybe her kiss had disappointed him. Maybe he just hadn’t liked it. Or her. Though he’d certainly seemed to at the time…so far as she could tell. And there was the rub—she didn’t exactly have much experience at this sort of thing.

So
not the point!

Why didn’t he answer?

Jilly dragged her hand through her hair—and froze halfway.

What if he’d gone after all? Somehow, he had to be connected to the poltergeist, even if it wasn’t actually him. What if the discovery of the body had got rid of him as well as it?

Although Sera hadn’t been convinced discovering the body was enough. According to her, the poltergeist seemed to want retribution. But then, according to Sera, poltergeists were pretty mindless forms made up only of negative emotion. What if this one was more? What if this one wasn’t Adam at all? What if it was the angry dead man taking on the VR appearance of Adam from the database? Was that even possible?

And why would he do such a thing? What was Jilly to the dead man?

The sister of the people who’d killed him?

“Oh fuck,” Jilly whispered.

****

Sera fell back on Blair’s pillow, purring. Blair licked the puncture wounds in her neck, ensuring they’d heal by morning, and trailed his mouth lazily down toward her breast.

Sera flopped her arms around his neck, stroking his head. After a moment, because the conversation they’d interrupted with sex came back to her, she said, “That was a good thing you did, with Jason. I think it might work very well.”

Blair’s shoulders rippled, perhaps in a shrug. Of course, he didn’t need her approval for whatever he chose to do, but she really did think it was a stroke of genius that would help Jason adjust at last to being undead and unemployed instead of the whiz-kid banker he’d been before last year’s bit of vampire trouble. He’d be good at keeping the other fledglings in line. Besides, it would free Blair up for more time with her…if that was what either of them wanted.

Vaguely dissatisfied with the direction of her thoughts, she turned them elsewhere. “I think it’s still there, you know.”