This was not the stuff great romances were made of.

On their first date, Ella had come on so strong that Leon had scurried back to the safety of his room without daring to risk a goodnight kiss. On the second - well, the second hadn't been so bad. Apart from the fact she'd got carried away in the heat of the moment and had them both half-undressed and breathless with anticipation before coming to her senses and telling him to back off. And when she'd finally cajoled him into a third, what had she done? Stripped him, tied him to a tree as a sacrifice for a demon and then scuttled away into the night to avoid the fallout.

Faced with such a shambolic excuse for a courtship, even Romeo and Juliet would have decided it just wasn't meant to be.

Since then, though, Ella's turbulent love life had been the very least of her problems. She'd endured a forcibly-induced psychosis, got hooked on the innocent-looking herbal remedy that was killing her - ironically, the same herbal remedy that mortals used to treat depression - and then gone through the screaming, shivering torture of withdrawing from it.

So now here she was, lying between faded flower print sheets in a dingy flat that rocked to its rafters whenever a train rumbled past on the adjacent railway line. She should have been glad to be alive: but she felt half-dead. She was numb with exhaustion, but although she longed for sleep, it wouldn't come. She was intermittently freezing and then flushed with fever, her joints stiff and aching. It was all she could do to muster the strength to raise herself from the pillows and sit up straight.

It was hardly a time to be worried about how she looked - and she was too weak to do anything about it anyway - but she knew just how awful a sight it must be. She didn't need a mirror to tell her that her hair was dank and dull, thick with grease and stringy with sweat. Or that her skin was pale and clammy, her eyes ringed with black as much from the remains of make-up she'd never had chance to remove as from too many nights tossing and turning in a drug-induced mania.

Sometimes, when she swallowed, in an attempt to rehydrate a throat that was raw from vomiting, she could taste blood. She suspected that her gums might be bleeding too, and that even if they weren't, her breath would not be anywhere close to fragrant.

All in all, she'd done, said and spat out things that would have been enough to make most men run a mile.

But he was here.

She was wide awake but both her eyes were closed, the lids ton weights she didn't have the energy to lever open. After a while lying flat on her back she'd turned on her right side, partly to escape the fluorescent light flooding in from the window on the left, and partly to relieve the nagging ache that had developed at the base of her spine in defiance of all the painkillers she'd downed.

Her body might have been broken but her mind was perfectly clear, and she was in the middle of hoping she wouldn't have to lie there for so long that she'd develop bedsores when she heard Leon, clattering noisily around the kitchen. He'd just come back from the shopping trip Max had sent him on - to Thelma's audible disappointment, taking his instructions to heart and returning with nothing more exciting than bread, juice and jam. Judging by the sounds of clinking glass, he'd cleared the shelves of every variety of conserve there was.

Thelma, unexpectedly, had passed up the chance of a trip into town and the supernatural shoplifting that went with it. Instead she'd stayed at the flat to keep a watchful eye on Ella while she tried and failed to sleep. She could tell Thelma was worried about her. She was worried about herself. She wasn't used to being sick - she never was sick. She would never have lasted five hundred years if she'd had to take to her bed every time there was so much as a common cold going around. She healed well, and she healed quickly, sometimes before she even realised that she'd been hurt.

But she wasn't healing quickly this time. If it was too soon for her to be back to full strength, she should at least have recovered to something approaching it. Instead she was lying languidly on a lumpy mattress trying not to count the many different ways and places her body was hurting. Ella had the uneasy feeling that instead of getting better, she was actually getting worse, and instead of saving her, Leon and Thelma had just booked themselves a ringside seat to the inevitable.

While Leon had been out, she'd tried to use her powers to fetch a glass of water placed just out of her reach. But nothing had happened. In the end Thelma had seen her struggling, picked up the tumbler and held it under her cracked lips while she sipped from it, battling between being comforted by the ghost's attentiveness and annoyed by it. She'd spent more years than she could count not relying on anyone, alive or dead. Now, she was as helpless as a child, and equally as needy.

She hated the idea of being a burden. But the prospect of being without her powers was even more of a concern. Ella put their loss down to fatigue, hoping that time and rest would restore them. She wasn't ready to believe the alternative, or consider the consequences of it.

Instead she concentrated on Leon, listening to whatever it was he was doing in the kitchen, deducing from the acrid stench of burning wafting in that he was trying and failing to cook something. In between muttering hopeful wishes about leftovers, Thelma was venting her frustration by barking curses at him like a ghostly Gordon Ramsay.

She couldn't quite believe that he'd stuck around and hadn't bolted back to school and left her in Max's capable hands the second the going had got tough. At first she'd thought it might have been a sense of duty, a desire to see through what he'd started, that was keeping him there. But then she'd remembered the look on his face when she'd floated back to reality, at once tired and thrilled and tender; the heat of her hand in his that suggested he'd been sitting there all night holding it, willing her to recover.

It didn't take hexagrams and hieroglyphics to make some kinds of magic. And they'd found a real connection before it had all gone pear-shaped, she knew that. She'd felt it. But she'd felt the call of duty too, and this time she'd been strong enough to put her obligations first, to overcome that wild streak of weakness that insisted on allowing people into her heart who had no right to be there. It was a worthy victory, but with no forgiveness forthcoming from Leon and no way of explaining her behaviour that he would understand, it was somehow a hollow one.

Whatever it was that had been simmering between them, Ella had given up as lost, as something else that, true to form, she'd killed before it got the chance to flourish. But somehow, in their short-lived, seraph-baiting excuse for a relationship, he'd actually come to care about her. Really care about her. And as for her -

She heard footsteps, muffled by the threadbare carpet, and knew without looking they were his. Behind them were Thelma's, fairy light, as befitted the steps of someone who wasn't really there. There was no sign of Max, who had still not returned from whichever errand he'd disappeared on.

"She's asleep," Thelma announced, though only Ella could hear her. "Probably needs the rest after all that thrashing around..."

She knew Thelma's brusqueness was her way of masking concern. But still she flinched inwardly. Had it really been so bad? She wanted to ask, check that Thelma had been exaggerating. But weariness kept her lips nailed firmly shut as Leon hovered above her, casting a comforting shadow across her equally unresponsive eyelids.

"Better check she's still breathing while you're at it," Thelma whispered nervously from the side.

Ella shuddered as the smell of something overpoweringly sweet drifted towards her nostrils. Jam. The thing Max, oracle of all things drug-related, had supposedly said she needed. It was the very last thing she felt like eating, whichever one of the umpteen varieties Leon had brought back it might have been. Strawberry? Raspberry? The lemon curd Thelma had already announced her intention to smuggle into the bedroom and dig into later?

The idea of eating something so sugary made her teeth ache. The idea of eating at all made her faintly nauseous. She wasn't convinced she would even be capable of lifting a spoon.

"This isn't right," fretted Thelma, apparently in need of a sounding board. Ella wondered how often she ended up talking to people who couldn't hear her, just to have the reassurance of the sound of her own voice.

"She was better before. Not exactly in tip top condition, but better. Now she looks..."

Thelma flailed around for an appropriate word but not finding one horrific enough to describe whatever it was she saw in front of her, trailed off into silence.

"Maybe she just needs to sleep it off," she said eventually. But she didn't sound convinced.

Somewhere in the distance, a plate clanked as Leon put it down, abandoning hope of getting her to eat. Then he sat down on the bed, next to Ella. She felt him reach out and gently peel back a strand of hair that had adhered itself to her forehead. His fingertips brushed lightly across her face, lingering on her cheek like an embrace. For a second she thought he was going to kiss her. But then the pressure on the bed lifted, and he was gone again.

It infuriated her, that he was so close and cared so much and all she could do was lie there like a waxwork dummy, the colour and the life drained from her. It sparked something from the part of her that was still the teenage girl she was masquerading as and not the cold-blooded warrior she'd become: that she couldn't have looked just that bit more desirable. Instead, she looked like some washed-up addict. It wasn't possible to be any less alluring.

But he was still here.

So maybe it wasn't the height of romance. But she was old enough to know that it wasn't about the hearts and the flowers. It was about the moments - the crises - such as these. That was when the strongest of bonds were forged, when people proved who and what they were underneath the shields they put up to protect them from the world; when love, against all odds, blossomed.

Was it love? An attraction that had spilled over into affection? A close, enduring friendship? Gratitude?

Was it all of them?

It made her heart leap, which in turn made her question whether her thoughts were quite as lucid as she'd believed they were. Those kinds of feelings were a distraction she couldn't afford, not again. Not now, with Azazeal and his hellspawn to stop, with her growing suspicion that she wouldn't get the chance to stop them because her condition didn't seem close to improving. If she'd been thinking rationally, she would have known that.

Yet she was thinking rationally.

But believing you were completely sane was probably a sign of insanity in itself. Everyone had a trace of madness in them, an invisible thread that could be triggered by some memories - some places - some people...

She remembered counting her fingers in the hospital, one to ten and back again. At the time she'd thought it perfectly reasonable to be so interested in them. And a tiny awestruck bit of her, the bit that hadn't become so jaded from centuries of walking the world that it no longer stopped to appreciate it, still found opposable thumbs absolutely fascinating.

Perhaps her mind was as bruised and battered by what it had been through as her body. Ella decided, with reluctance, that she was still a little crazy.

But then, she realised, hearing Leon's footsteps coming back towards her and feeling a warm glow that had nothing to do with the fact she was running a temperature, her skin tickling with something quite separate from the pins and needles she'd been experiencing; that wasn't necessarily a sign she was losing her mind again.

After all - there was more than one way of being crazy.

END