(no subject)
It was one o'clock in the morning. It had been ten hours since Linda died. Ten hours when my whole body tried to cringe away from the terrible truth of what had happened, but received the blow all the same. Or blows, I might add, because every time I thought of her, it was like a punch to the stomach. I felt like I had been chewing glass and ice. I wondered hazily if I had eaten anything today. I remembered having a cup of coffee at one point, but that was all. No wonder I felt faint and sick. Still, the thought of food turned my stomach. Mechanically I filled a glass of water from the jug on my desk and drank, and set the vessel down with shaking hands. My God, what things I had learned today. Of course, I knew that the Council had done terrible things in its time. It was older than any institution that I knew of, even if it had existed in various incarnations. Even just considering its history in England, it had been here for a thousand years. I knew what those times were like. Bad things happened. And I knew that the Council, having always been an antiquated organ, was prone to living in the past, with all its quaint traditions, like afternoon tea and organising bridge competitions. And killing those who stood in its way, with all the cold fury of the mailed fist of any medieval king. Oh, yes, the Council lived in the past. I had thought, however, that in my lifetime such practises had died out. Indeed, much as I had loved many aspects of my work, I couldn't help sneering at the Council's bungling efforts to adapt to life in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. I had seen that we had become something like the dodo, a dead curiosity, and I had hoped, after the tragedies of two years ago, that I could bring us back to glorious life. Now I was no longer sure I wanted to bring anything back. It seemed that the Council's darker powers had never really gone away; they had just slipped out of sight. Whilst in the thirteenth century they had conducted torture in the cellars with the approval of the authorities, in the twentieth they had practised torture in the basement, but had hidden the files and papers away, perhaps even destroyed them, so that all I had known of Linda Harris before I met her was a small entry in the continually updated and supposedly authoritative compendium Slayers from the Tenth Century to the Present Day. Linda, apparently, had been called, but had died within a matter of weeks, resulting in the calling of Huan An Chang. Lies. I looked around at my precious books and wondered how much truth lay in them. I had always had a historian's heart, and so I had doubted the words of outside authors, testing their hypotheses carefully. But I realised that I had foolishly allowed myself to trust too much to the integrity of my fellow watchers. I sat back in my chair, feeling confused and unsettled. Lynn was asleep in her room. After I had stormed out the car park, I had returned some twenty minutes later, apparently calm, and had discharged Lynn immediately before the dead woman was discovered in her room. Later I found out that someone disposed of the body for me. I think I thanked them. I do not know who had that noble duty, and I felt bitterly sad that in the end we could not even give Linda a decent send off. All the same, she probably would not want one from men like me. I had returned to the Council in a haze. I had met Tara, who told me that some new watcher - Anthony or Andrew Wills, or something - had arrived. I waved her off, not wanting to be distracted, telling her to tell him that he could arrange a meeting with me in due course. But not today. I also received a number of telephone calls, which I dealt with mechanically. One was from one of my informants who told me of potential slayer sightings. This possible slayer had been seen