"Ready or not, Morgead, here I come."
Chapter 7
She emerged on the rooftop.
There was a sort of roof garden here-anyway, a lot of scraggly plants in large wooden tubs. There was also some dirty patio furniture and other odds and ends. But the main feature was a small structure that sat on the roof the way a house sits on a street.
Morgead's home. The penthouse. It was as stark and unlovely as the rest of the building, but it had a great view and it was completely private. There were no other tall buildings nearby to look down on it.
Jez moved stealthily toward the door. Her feet made no noise on the pitted asphalt of the roof, and she was in a state of almost painfully heightened awareness. In the old days sneaking up on another gang member had been a game. You got to laugh at them if you could startle them, and they got to be furious and humiliated.
Today it wasn't a game.
Jez started toward the warped wooden door-then stopped. Doors were trouble. Morgead would have been an idiot not to have rigged it to alert him to intruders.
Cat-quiet, she headed instead for a narrow metal ladder that led to the roof of the wooden structure.
Now she was on the real top of the building. The only thing higher was a metal flagpole without a She moved noiselessly across the new roof. At the far edge she found herself looking four stories straight down. And directly below her there was a window.
An open window.
Jez smiled tightly.
Then she hooked her toes over the four-inch lip at the edge of the roof and dropped gracefully forward.
She grabbed the top of the window in mid-dive and hung suspended, defying gravity like a bat attached upside down. She looked inside.
And there he was. Lying on a futon, asleep. He was sprawled on his back, fully clothed in jeans, high boots, and a leather jacket. He looked good.
Just like the old days, Jez thought. When the gang would stay out all night riding their bikes and hunting or fighting or partying, and then come home in the morning to scramble into clothes for school. Except Morgead, who would smirk at them and then collapse. He didn't have parents or relatives to keep him from skipping.
I'm surprised he's not wearing his helmet, too, she thought, pulling herself back up to the roof. She picked up the fighting stick, maneuvered it into the window, then let herself down again, this time hanging by her hands. She slid in without making a noise.
Then she went to stand over him.
He hadn't changed. He looked exactly as she remembered, except younger and more vulnerable because he was asleep. His face was pale, making his dark hair seem even darker. His lashes were black
crescents on his cheeks.
Evil and dangerous, Jez reminded herself. It annoyed her that she had to remind herself of what Morgead was. For some reason her mind was throwing pictures at her, scenes from her childhood while she was living here in San Francisco with her Uncle Bracken.
A five-year-old Jez, with shorter red hair that looked as if it had never been combed, walking with a little grimy-faced Morgead, hand in hand. An eight-year-old Jez with two skinned knees, scowling as a businesslike Morgead pulled wood splinters out of her legs with rusty tweezers. A seven-year-old Morgead with his face lit up in astonishment as Jez persuaded him to try the human thing called ice cream....
Stop it, Jez told her brain flatly. You might as well give up, because it's no good. We were friends then-well, some of the time-but we're enemies now. He's changed. I've changed. He'd kill me in a second now if it would suit his purpose. And I'm going to do what has to be done.
She backed up and poked him lightly with the stick. "Morgead."
His eyes flew open and he sat up. He was awake instantly, like any vampire, and he focused on her without a trace of confusion. Jez had changed her grip on the stick and was standing ready in case he went straight into an attack.
But instead, a strange expression crossed his face. It went from startled recognition into something Jez didn't understand. For a moment he was simply staring at her, eyes big, chest heaving, looking as if he were caught in between pain and happiness.
Then he said quietly, "Jez."
"Hi, Morgead."
"You came back."
Jez shifted the stick again. "Apparently."
He got up in one motion. "Where the hell have you been?"
Now he just looked furious, Jez noted. Which was easier to deal with, because that was how she remembered him.
"I can't tell you," she said, which was perfectly true, and would also annoy the life out of him.
It did. He shook his head to get dark hair out of his eyes-it was always disheveled in the morning, Jez remembered-and glared at her. He was standing easily: not in any attack posture, but with the relaxed readiness that meant he could go flying in any direction at any moment. Jez kept half her mind on watching his leg muscles.
"You can't tell me? You disappear one day without any kind of warning, without even leaving a note...
you leave the gang and me and just completely vanish and nobody knows where to find you, not even your uncle .. . and now you reappear again and you can't tell me where you were?" He was working himself into one of his Extremely Excited States, Jez realized. She was surprised; she'd expected him to stay cooler and attack hard.
"What did you think you were doing, just cutting out on everybody? Did it ever occur to you that people would be worried about you? That people would think you were dead?"
It didn't occur to me that anyone would care, Jez thought, startled. Especially not you. But she couldn't say that. "Look, I didn't mean to hurt anybody. And I can't talk about why I went. But I'm back now-"
"You can't just come back!"
Jez was losing her calm. Nothing was going the way she'd expected; the things she'd scripted out to say weren't getting said. "I know I can't just come back-"