'You're still not getting it, are you, Rabbit?'
'What don't I get, exactly? Who are you?' I was preparing to run for it, readying myself to get away from the wrongness of it all.
'I told you,' she said quietly. 'You know who I am, but you don't want to accept it. You know who you are, but you don't want to accept that either. You keep denying the existence of anything that doesn't fit within your cosy little world-view.'
'Blackbird… But… If you're Blackbird, how come you're wearing the body of this young woman?'
'How dare you!'
For a second, I thought she was going to slap me, her words ringing out across the tables, attracting more attention than I thought we wanted. 'How dare you suggest I would do such a thing?' She sat back and moved her chair sideways again, cheeks flushed, her breathing harsh as she controlled her anger.
I was distracted by sniggering from the group of guys near the door and my cheeks flushed in response. They obviously thought I'd suggested something quite different. I gave them a dirty look and they made a minimal effort to compose themselves. We were making quite an impression. I turned back to Blackbird, or at least I was beginning to think it was Blackbird, and found her grim and unhelpful.
'Look, just tell me. Are you Blackbird or not? You still haven't answered me.'
'Of course I'm Blackbird. How obvious do I have to be?' She sounded petulant, sulky even.
'More obvious than you are being, plainly.'
She cast me a disdainful look.
Exasperated, I kept my voice low to avoid being overheard. 'OK, so I accept that you're Blackbird, but looking like someone much younger. What was I supposed to think? You've just gone to a lot of trouble to explain how the bodysnatching thing works, after a close personal experience on my part, I might add, then you turn up looking like…'
'Like what?' She softened, her mood brightening like the clouds moving off the sun.
'Like a high…' her expression shadowed, 'maintenance, fashionable… girl, out for a day's sightseeing.' I adapted my words in a feat of mental juggling I hadn't realised I had the skill for. This was like walking a verbal tightrope.
'Do you not like it?'
It was the same question as 'Does this make me look fat?' and I had never mastered that one.
'It's maybe a little overdone, isn't it, for someone your age?' As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I'd said the wrong thing. So much for verbal juggling.
'My age? And what exactly is my age, Rabbit?'
'I'm sorry, I just meant you look a lot younger than… before.' I tailed off. I looked back over to the coffee shop, still hoping that Blackbird would be coming down the steps, exposing whoever was sitting opposite me as an impostor.
'Well?' She had me skewered on the question.
'About fifty-five or maybe sixty?' I really couldn't win at this.
I was surprised when she burst out laughing.
'Bless you, Rabbit. I am far older than that.' She flashed that heart-stopping smile at me again and I shifted uncomfortably. My heart had stopped enough for one day.
I turned back to her. 'Can't you change back or something?' I was disconcerted, both by the knowledge that Blackbird didn't look the way she should and also by the fact that I had been considering letting her seduce me. The idea of spending intimate time with someone more than twenty years my senior was disconcerting.
'You don't like me this way?' She was about to sulk again.
'No, in fact it's quite the opposite, it's very distracting.'
'Are you sure you would not like a little distraction, just for a while?' She twisted the curl around her finger, smiling wistfully.
'Look! I really can't deal with this teasing. I'm not in the mood.'
'You were in the mood earlier.'
I dropped my voice back down to a reasonable level, having suddenly become aware that I had raised it. 'Would you kindly change back to the way you were so we can continue this discussion in a civilised manner?'
'All right.' She collected her bag from the table and stood up, stepping around the table and leaned down to whisper close to my ear. 'Give me a moment. I have to slip into something a little more comfortable. For you, that is.'
She turned and walked back towards the coffee shop, skirt swinging with her walk, legs long and ankles slim, heels clicking on the hard paving. As she approached the glass door, one of the guys at the table nearby got up to open it for her. She smiled, exchanging small words of thanks and entered, lost behind the reflection of the glass. The guy went back to his mates and there was a degree of ribald teasing as he joined them.
If only they knew.
He didn't sit down again, but they stood up around him, gathering their things together and ribbing one another as they moved past the table where I sat.
'You've got your hands full there, mate,' said one as he passed, grinning.
'Wish I had,' remarked the one who'd opened the door.
'In your dreams.' The last one passed me, addressing his comment to his friend's back.
I watched them go, as they nudged and jostled each other, laughing. I had never had friends like that, never felt comfortable or at ease in the shifting rivalry of peer groups. My early managers had said I was not a team player, but I had made a career out of playing with teams. My ability to see through the mire of conflicting information, to focus effort on the elements that represented paydirt, had made me successful. I was well-off, if not actually rich, and while I was sure it wasn't just wealth and status that had attracted my ex-wife, I knew it had played its part. What I had perhaps been slow to understand was that being successful couldn't sustain a relationship. My success had given me power and influence, but marriages weren't built on power, they were built on trust. And power trusted no one.
Still, I had my daughter. She was power incarnate as far as I was concerned. I was coiled around her little finger and she knew it. Unfortunately, my ex-wife knew it too and it was a constant source of friction between us.
'What on earth possessed you to buy her those?' she'd demanded, when we returned from one of our weekend jaunts with her showing off sequinned hipster jeans with laces down the front.
'It was what she wanted,' I would always say, which would spark the age-old row about the difference between what she wanted and what she needed. In my view, what she needed was at least one parent who would occasionally give her what she wanted. The problem was it was never my ex. She always ended up fulfilling needs, not wants.
It wasn't fair, but then none of it was. My ex-wife played single parent while I played absent father, roles neither of us wanted.
Thinking of absence, I realised that no one knew where I was and I had meetings organised for today. My team would be wondering what had happened to me. I pulled my mobile phone from my pocket, intending to call the office, but then stopped when I couldn't think what I would say to them.
If I called and said, 'Hi, I've just had a heart attack, but I'm fine now' they would want me in a hospital for tests, assuming they believed me. Blackbird had told me my heart was fine, so why wasn't I at my desk, doing my job?
I looked at the signal on my mobile, showing a solid connection with the network. It wasn't my phone that was disconnected. It was me.
Blackbird returned, looking exactly as she had before, prompting me to look again to see whether there really were two of them. She sat down opposite, putting her bag at her feet and leaned her forearms on the table.
'Who are you calling?' Her eyes were back to their natural grey.
'I was going to call work and let them know I'll be late.'
'It would not be a wise thing to go into work, Rabbit. The Untainted are patient and they will wait their chance, but if someone gets in the way they will just kill them. You'll be putting the lives of your colleagues at risk.'
'I still don't understand why they would want to kill me. I know you said it was because I had this… Fey
