The Rising
The Rising
Will Hill
Blockbusting sequel to DEPARTMENT 19, the biggest boy teen launch of 2011 – with over 25,000 copies sold in hardback and a devoted legion of Facebook fans.Amazing author Will Hill will be out on the road again in April to promote THE RISING, as well as maintaining a constant presence on Twitter.91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR.THAT'S 91 DAYS TO RUN.91 DAYS TO HIDE.OR 91 DAYS TO PRAY FOR DEPARTMENT 19 TO SAVE YOU…After the terrifying attack on Lindisfarne at the end of the first book, Jamie, Larissa and Kate are recovering at Department 19 headquarters, waiting for news of Dracula’s stolen ashes.They won’t be waiting for long.Vampire forces are gathering. Old enemies are getting too close. And Dracula… is rising.
DEDICATION
For Charlie and Nick, the best partners in crime I could have asked for
EPIGRAPH
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
How much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Victor Frankenstein
Contents
COVER (#ulink_2c02ceea-9e15-515b-afa5-c4712b84e29a)
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
MEMORANDUM
12 WEEKS AFTER LINDISFARNE
91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
1
ON PATROL
2
TRIANGLES HAVE SHARP EDGES
3
THE ART OF COMING CLEAN
4
GROWING PAINS
5
REBIRTH
6
CARPENTER AND SON
7
VALENTIN RECEIVES A VISITOR
90 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
8
THE BIG LEAGUES
9
NO STONE UNTURNED
10
SLEEPLESS NIGHT
11
THE BARE BONES
12
INSIDE THE VOID
13
HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE
14
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT
15
ALL FALL DOWN
16
ALWAYS AND FOREVER
89 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
17
FAMILY TIES
18
KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
19
AT THE CROSSROADS AT MIDNIGHT
20
MASTER AND COMMANDER
21
HEROES’ RETURN
22
TINFOIL HATS
88 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
23
THE INTERROGATION OF VALENTIN RUSMANOV
24
THE FOURTH MUSKETEER
25
THE ILLUMINATED CITY, PART I
26
FULL DISCLOSURE
27
THE ILLUMINATED CITY, PART II
28
THINK BUT THIS AND ALL IS MENDED
87 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
29
IN CONVERSATION WITH A MONSTER
30
THERE IS NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS FOR REVENGE
31
ECHOES OF THE PAST
32
THE DEPTHS OF KNOWLEDGE
33
IN THE COURT OF THE VAMPIRE KING
34
HOW TO STEAL FIRE FROM THE GODS
35
HOPE IS A DANGEROUS THING
36
VISION QUEST, PART I
37
FROM PILLAR TO POST
38
VISION QUEST, PART II
39
BACK FROM THE DEAD
40
VISION QUEST, PART III
41
AND A TORCH TO LIGHT THE WAY
42
VISION QUEST, PART IV
43
THE TIES THAT BIND
44
BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN
45
CURTAIN CALL
46
THE TWIST OF THE KNIFE
47
NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE
48
SOME WOUNDS NEVER HEAL
49
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
50
REDUCED TO ASH
86 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
51
A COUNCIL OF WAR
52
ONLY FORWARD
FIRST EPILOGUE: IN THE FLESH
SECOND EPILOGUE: THREE FATHERS
85 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
MEMORANDUM
12 WEEKS AFTER LINDISFARNE
91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
1
ON PATROL
THE PILGRIM HOSPITAL BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE
Sergeant Ted Pearson of the Lincolnshire Police stamped his cold feet on the pavement, and checked his watch again. His partner, Constable Dave Fleming, watched him, a nervous look on his face.
Half ten, thought the Sergeant, with a grimace. I should be at home with my feet up. Sharon’s making lasagne tonight, and it’s never as good warmed through.
The 999 call had been made from the hospital’s reception desk at 9.50pm. Sergeant Pearson and his partner had been finishing up the paperwork on an illegal immigration case they were working on one of the farms near Louth, both men looking forward to getting the forms filed and heading home, when they had been told the call was theirs. Grumbling, they had climbed into their car and driven the short distance from the police station to the hospital, blue lights spinning above them, their siren blaring through the freezing January night.
They had reached the hospital in a little over three minutes, and were questioning the nurse who had made the call, a young Nigerian woman with wide, frightened eyes, when Sergeant Pearson’s radio buzzed into life. The message it conveyed was short and to the point.
“Secure access to potential crime scene. Do not investigate, or talk to potential witnesses. Stand guard until relieved.”
Pearson had sworn loudly down his receiver, but the voice on the other end, a voice he didn’t recognise but which was definitely not the usual dispatcher, was already gone. So he had done as he was told: instructed Constable Fleming to cease his questioning of the nurse, and informed all staff that access to the hospital’s blood bank was forbidden without direct permission from him. Then he and his partner had taken up positions outside the side entrance to the hospital, shivering in the cold, waiting to be relieved. By who, or what, they didn’t know.
“What’s going on, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, after fifteen minutes had passed. “Why are we standing out here like security guards?”
“We’re doing what we were told to do,” replied Sergeant Pearson.
Fleming nodded, unconvinced. He looked round at the dimly lit road; it was a narrow alley between the hospital and a red-brick factory that was falling rapidly into disrepair. On the wall opposite, in black paint that had dripped all the way to the ground, someone had sprayed two words.
HE RISES
“What’s that mean, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, pointing at the graffiti.
“Shut up, Dave,” replied his partner, giving the words a cursory glance. “No more questions, all right?”
The young man was going to make a fine copper, Pearson had no doubt about that, but his enthusiasm, and his relentless inquisitiveness, had a tendency to give the Sergeant a headache. The uncomfortable truth was that Pearson didn’t know what was going on, or why they were guarding the hospital door, or what the graffiti meant. But he was not going to admit that to Fleming, who had been on the force for less than six months. He stamped his feet again, and as he did so, he heard the rumble of an engine approaching in the distance.
Thirty seconds later a black van pulled to a halt in front of the two policemen.
The windows of the vehicle were as dark as the panels of its body, and it sat low to the ground on heavy-duty, run-flat tyres. The noise of its engine was incredibly loud, a deep roar that Pearson and Fleming felt through their boots. For almost thirty seconds, nothing happened; the van stood motionless before them, squat and strangely threatening under the fluorescent light emanating from the hospital’s side entrance behind them. Then, with a loud hiss, the vehicle’s rear door slid open, and three figures emerged.
Fleming stared at them as they approached, his eyes wide. Pearson, who had seen things over the course of his career that the younger man would not have believed, was more adept at hiding his emotions than his partner, and managed to keep his confusion, and rising unease, from his face.
The three figures that stopped in front of them were dressed head to toe in black: their boots, their gloves, their uniforms, belts and military-style webbing. All black. The only splash of colour was the bright purple of the flat visors that covered their faces, visors attached to sleek black helmets that looked like nothing the policemen had seen before. There was not a millimetre of exposed skin to be seen; the newcomers could easily have been robots, such was the anonymity of their appearance. On their belts, two black guns hung in holsters alongside a long cylinder with a handle and a trigger on one side. It was obviously a weapon, but it was not one that either of the policemen recognised.
The tallest of the figures stopped in front of Sergeant Pearson, the shiny material of its visor centimetres away from his face. When the figure spoke, the voice was male, but it had a flat, digital quality that Pearson knew from his time on the Met with SO15 meant the person behind the visor was speaking through several levels of filter, to avoid the possibility of voiceprint identification.
“Have you signed the Official Secrets Act?” the black figure asked, turning its visor-clad face sharply between the two policemen, who nodded, too intimidated to speak. “Good. Then you never saw us, and this never happened.”
“On whose authority?” managed Pearson, his voice shaking heavily.
“The Chief of the General Staff,” replied the figure, then leant forward until its visor was a millimetre from the Sergeant’s nose. “And mine. Understood?”
Pearson nodded again, and the figure drew back. Then it stepped past him and strode into the hospital. The other two dark shapes followed.
“The blood bank is—” began Constable Fleming.
“We know the way,” said the third of the figures in a digitally altered female voice.
Then they were gone.
The two policemen looked at one another. Sergeant Pearson was visibly shaking, and Constable Fleming reached a hand towards his partner’s shoulder. The older man waved it away, but he didn’t look annoyed; he looked old, and frightened.
“Who were they, Sarge?” asked Fleming, his voice unsteady.
“I don’t know, Dave,” replied Pearson. “And I don’t want to know.”
The three black-clad figures strode through the bright corridors of the hospital.
The tall one, the one who had spoken to Sergeant Pearson, led the way. Behind, shorter and slimmer than the leader, came the second of the trio, who appeared to glide across the linoleum floor. The third, shorter again, brought up the rear, its purple visor sweeping slowly left and right for any sign of trouble, or witnesses to their presence. As they passed the double doors that led to the hospital’s operating theatre, the tall figure at the front motioned for them to stop, and pulled a radio from his belt. He keyed in a series of numbers and letters, then activated the handset’s wireless connection to his helmet’s comms network. After a pause of several seconds, he spoke.
“Operational Squad G-17 in position. Alpha reporting in.”
“Beta reporting in,” the second figure said, in a metallic female voice.
“Gamma reporting in,” said the final squad member.
Alpha listened as a voice spoke on the other end of the line, and then replaced the radio on his belt.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the squad moved on into the hospital. After only a matter of seconds, Gamma spoke.
“So who made the 999 call?”
“The nurse at reception,” answered Alpha. “One of the night porters saw a man leading a young girl into the blood bank, said the man had red eyes. He told the nurse he thought it was probably a junkie.”
Beta laughed. “He’s probably right. But not the kind he’s thinking.”
The three shadowy shapes pushed open a door marked RESTRICTED, and moved on.
“Fifth call in three nights,” said Gamma. “Is Seward punishing us for something?”
“It’s not just us,” answered Alpha. “It’s everyone. Every squad is flat out.”
“I know,” replied Beta. “And we know why, don’t we? It’s because of…”
“Don’t,” said Gamma, quickly. “Don’t talk about him. Not now, OK?”
A small noise emerged from behind Beta’s helmet, a noise that could easily have been a laugh, but she let the subject drop.
“You were pretty hard on the police,” said Gamma. “The old Sergeant looked terrified.”
“Good,” replied Alpha. “The more he pretends that tonight never happened, the safer he’ll be. Now no more talk.”
They had reached the hospital’s blood bank, the door of which was standing open. Alpha stepped slowly into the dark room, and flicked the light switch on the wall.
Nothing happened.
He pulled a torch from his belt, and shone it up at the light fitting. The bulb was smashed, leaving a ring of jagged glass surrounding the filament. A slow sweep of the torch revealed carnage; the metal shelves of the blood bank had been ransacked. Blood and shattered plastic dotted the surfaces, and pooled and piled up on the floor.
“Don’t come any closer.”
The voice came from the corner of the room, and Alpha instantly swung his torch towards it. Two more shafts of white light joined its beam, as Beta and Gamma stepped into the room and followed their squad leader’s example.
The beams illuminated the trembling figure of a middle-aged man, crouching in the corner of the room. At his feet lay a sports bag full of plastic sachets of blood. In his arms was a girl, no more than six years old, with an expression of pure terror on her face. The man had a razor-sharp fingernail to her throat, and was looking at the three black figures with an expression of desperate panic.
Alpha reached up, turned a dial on the side of his helmet and watched his view of the room change. The helmet contained a cryocooled infrared detector, which showed the heat variance of every object within the visor’s field of vision. The cold walls and floor of the blood bank were a wash of pale greens and blues, while the little girl was darker, studded with patches of yellow and orange. The man bloomed bright red and purple like a roman candle, distorting Alpha’s vision.
“I’ll kill her if you come any closer,” the man said, shifting nervously against the wall. He tightened his grip on the girl’s throat, and she moaned.
Alpha twisted the visor’s setting back to normal.
“Stay calm,” he said, evenly. “Just let the girl go, and we can talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about!” yelled the man, and jerked the girl off her feet. She cried out, her eyes wide with terror, and Alpha took a half-step forward.
“Let the girl go,” he repeated.
“This isn’t right,” said Beta, in a low voice.
Alpha flicked his head towards her.
“Don’t make a move without my go,” he warned.
Beta snorted with laughter. “Please,” she said, then pulled a short black tube from her waist, pointed it into the corner of the room and pressed a button.
A thick beam of ultraviolet light burst across the blood bank. It hit the man’s arm and the girl’s face dead on, and both instantly erupted into flames. Screams and the nauseating smell of burning skin filled the air, as Gamma gasped behind her visor.
The little girl wrenched herself free of the arm that had been holding her, beating furiously at her face until the flames were extinguished. She dropped to her knees, tore open one of the plastic pouches of blood, then drank hungrily, slurping the crimson liquid into her mouth.
The man watched her, a helpless look on his face, then suddenly seemed to notice that his arm was burning. He began to leap around the corner of the room, beating at the limb with his good hand. When the flames were out, he pulled a blood bag from one of the shelves, and devoured its contents. As Squad G-17 watched, the girl’s face and the man’s arm began to heal before their eyes, the muscle and tissue regrowing, the skin turning pink and knitting back together. When the injuries were healed, so completely that there was no evidence that they had been there at all, a process that took only a matter of seconds, the girl looked up at the man, and wailed.
“Daddy!” she cried, her mouth a wide oval of disappointment. “You said this would work! You promised!”
The man looked down at her with an expression of great sadness.
“I’m sorry, love,” he replied. “I thought it would.” He looked over at the three dark figures, which hadn’t moved. “How did you know she was turned? The poor thing sat in a bath of ice for an hour so she wouldn’t look hot to those helmets of yours. Her teeth only just stopped chattering.”
Beta reached up and lifted her helmet from her head. The face beneath it was a teenage girl’s: beautiful, pale and narrow, framed by dark hair that brushed her neck. She wore a wide smile, and her eyes glowed red under the bright lights of the blood bank.
“I can smell her,” Larissa Kinley replied.
The little girl hissed, her eyes flooding the same red as Larissa’s.
“So it’s true,” said her father. “Department 19 has a pet traitor. How can you hunt your own people? Don’t you have any shame?”
Larissa took half a step towards him, her smile fading.
“You are not my people,” she said, in a voice like ice. Alpha gently laid a hand on her arm, and she stepped back, without taking her eyes from the man in the corner of the room.
Gamma removed her helmet, and shook her head. Short blonde hair flew back and forth above a pretty, heart-shaped face, from which blue eyes stared out above a mouth that was set in a firm line.
“Was it you two who hit Lincoln General last month?” asked Kate Randall.
The man nodded, his eyes still nervously fixed on Larissa.
“And Nottingham Trent the month before that?”
He shook his head.
“Are you lying to me?” Kate asked.
“Why would I lie?” the man replied. He appeared to be on the verge of tears. “You’re going to stake us both anyway, so what would be the point?”
“That’s right,” said Larissa, a wicked smile on her face.
The little girl began to cry. The man placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered soothingly to her.
Alpha looked over at Larissa, who rolled her eyes. Then he reached up, and removed his helmet.
The boy beneath it was no more than sixteen or seventeen, but his face looked older, as though he had seen, and most likely done, things that had taken their toll. A jagged patch of pink scar tissue peeped above the collar of his uniform and climbed across the right side of his neck, stopping before it reached his jaw. His face was handsome, and possessed of a stillness more befitting an older man. His blue eyes were piercing, but he trained them tenderly on Larissa.
“Nobody is staking anyone tonight,” said Jamie Carpenter. “You know the new SOP. Pass me two restrainers, Kate. Lazarus can have these two. I don’t think they’re dangerous.”
The man began to cry along with his daughter.
“We were hungry,” he said. “I’m sorry. My name is Patrick Connors, and this is my daughter, Maggie. We were just so hungry. We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
“It’s all right,” Jamie replied, taking the two restrainers from Kate’s hands and tossing them to the man and his daughter. “Put these on, under your armpits. Pull them tight.”
The restrainers were thick belts that looped over the shoulders and crossed in the middle; where they met was an explosive charge that sat over the heart of the person wearing it. Patrick and Maggie shrugged the belts over their shoulders, and tightened them as they had been told. When they were securely in place, Jamie pulled a black tube from his belt with a small dial on one side and a red trigger on the other; he twisted the dial two notches clockwise, and red lights on the explosive charges flickered into life.
Jamie looked at his squad.
“Larissa, you’re going to lead us out of here,” he said. “Sir, you’re going to follow her, then Kate, then you, little one, and I’ll go last. We walk straight out the way we came, we don’t stop, and we don’t talk to anyone. Oh – and normal eyes, please.”
He grinned as Larissa and Maggie’s eyes reverted to their usual colours. Larissa led them out of the blood bank, and strode along the corridor towards the exit, and the waiting van. The rest of Squad G-17 and their prisoners followed in the order that Jamie had instructed, and less than a minute later they marched past Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming, who averted their eyes as they passed, and slid the van’s rear door shut behind them.
The inside of the vehicle was silver metal and black plastic; four seats ran along each side of the wide space, between which were fixed a series of moulded stands, with half a dozen unusual spaces in them. A wide LCD screen lay flush against the ceiling, and a series of slots in the floor lay before each seat. Jamie told the man and his daughter to take the two seats closest to the front and strap themselves in. They did so silently; when they were in position, Kate pressed a button set into the wall. A barrier of ultraviolet light appeared from a wide bulb in the floor, cutting them off from the three black-clad teenagers, and both Patrick and Maggie cried out.
“Don’t worry,” said Jamie. “You’re perfectly safe.”
He began to unclip the weapons and devices from his belt, and slide them into the slots on the stand beside one of the seats. The brand-new T-21 pneumatic launcher, the Glock 17, the Heckler & Koch MP5, the torch and the short beam gun that Larissa had used inside the blood bank – all were placed into purpose-built compartments and clicked into place. The detonator he kept in his hand, resting it on his knee as he took his seat and announced that they were ready to go. Instantly, the powerful engine of the vehicle, which was in reality less a van and more a combination of a mobile command centre and an armoured personnel carrier, surged into life, and sped them away from the hospital, leaving Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming shivering on the pavement.
“What do we do—”
“Nothing,” interrupted Pearson, before his partner had a chance to finish his question. “We do nothing, and we say nothing, because nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Clear?”
Fleming looked at the older man for a long moment, taking in the pale colour of his face, the lines of worry around his eyes and the firm set of his jaw.
“Crystal, sir,” he replied. “Let’s go home.”
An hour later the black van sped through deepening forest, heading towards a place that didn’t exist. Its official designation was Classified Military Installation 303-F, but it had long been referred to by the men and women who knew of its existence by a simpler, shorter name.
“Welcome to the Loop,” said Jamie, as the van drew to a halt. Patrick Connors and his daughter regarded him with polite incomprehension, and said nothing.
Outside the van there was a low rumble, a metallic sound like a gate being rolled back. Then they were moving again, creeping slowly forward.
“Place your vehicle in neutral.”
The voice was artificial, and it appeared to be coming from all sides at once. The driver of the van, an invisible figure to the men and women in the rear of the vehicle, did as he was ordered. A conveyor belt whirred into life beneath the van, and moved it forward, until the artificial voice spoke again.
“Please state the names and designations of all passengers.”
“Carpenter, Jamie. NS303, 67-J.”
“Kinley, Larissa. NS303, 77-J.”
“Randall, Kate. NS303, 78-J.”
There was a long pause.
“Supernatural life forms have been detected on board this vehicle,” said the voice. “Please state clearance code.”
“Lazarus 914-73,” said Jamie, quickly.
Another pause.
“Clearance granted,” announced the artificial voice. “Proceed.”
The van began to roll forward again, picking up speed. Less than two minutes later it stopped, and Jamie stood up from his seat and slid the rear door open. Kate pressed a button in the wall and the ultraviolet barrier imprisoning Patrick and Maggie disappeared.
“This way,” said Jamie, motioning towards the open door. The man led his daughter slowly down the steps, into a world he had heard rumours about, but could never have possibly imagined.
To the back of the van, an enormous semi-circular hangar stood open to the night sky. The huge space was mostly empty; a line of black SUVs and vans were parked along one wall, and a small number of black-clad figures moved across the tarmac floor. Standing before them, patient looks on their faces, were a man in the same black uniform that Jamie and his squad were wearing and a young Asian man in a white lab coat.
Patrick looked around, and gasped. He had a moment to take in the enormity, and the incredible strangeness, of what he was seeing: the vast curved fence beyond the runway, the labyrinth of red lasers, the ultraviolet no-man’s-land, and the vast holographic canopy of trees that hung across the sky above his head. Then there was a hand on his lower back, and he was being ushered forward, towards the waiting men. His daughter grabbed for his hand, and he gripped it, firmly, as Jamie stepped round him and handed his detonator to the man in the white coat, who thanked him, then addressed the two disoriented, frightened vampires.
“Sir,” he said, his voice low and gentle. “My name is Dr Yen. Please will you follow me?”
Patrick glanced at Jamie, fear blooming on his face.
“It’s OK,” said Jamie. “You’ll be safe with him.”
Patrick glanced down at Maggie, and found her looking back up at him with a determined expression on her face. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“We will,” he replied, as steadily as he was able. “We’ll follow you.”
The doctor nodded, then turned and walked briskly across the hangar. After a moment’s pause, the man and his daughter followed him across the cavernous room, and through a wide set of double doors.
Jamie watched them go, then smiled at Larissa and Kate. Behind them, an Operator from the Security Division climbed into the van and began unloading their equipment from the moulded stands. It would be checked, cleaned and returned to their quarters within an hour, as it always was. Jamie nodded to the Operator, before turning to the Duty Officer who had been waiting to greet them.
“Cold out here tonight,” he said, watching his breath cloud in front of his face.
“Yes, sir. Bloody cold, sir.”
“How’s my mother?”
“She’s fine, sir,” replied the young Operator. “Asking for you.”
Jamie nodded, and started to walk into the hangar. He was suddenly exhausted, and his small quarters on Level B were calling to him.
“Admiral Seward requested a debrief, sir,” called the Operator, before he had got more than a couple of steps. He sounded apologetic, and Jamie sighed.
“Personally?”
“Personally, sir.”
Jamie swore. “Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said, then marched towards one of the doors at the rear of the hangar, Larissa and Kate following closely behind him.
The three members of Squad G-17 slumped against the walls of the lift as it descended into the lower levels of the Loop.
On Level B, Jamie said goodnight to the two girls, and almost ran to the shower block marked MEN that stood halfway down the corridor. He stood in the shower for a long time, his head under the searing water, trying to prevent the aches and pains that were the accumulation of active service as a Department 19 Operator from returning with a vengeance, as they usually did once the adrenaline of a mission had worn off.
Eventually, with great reluctance, he twisted the shower off, and dressed in a T-shirt and combat trousers. He could almost feel his narrow bunk beneath him, could perfectly visualise the moment when his head would touch the pillow and his eyes would close. He picked up his uniform, opened the door to the corridor and stopped. Larissa was standing in the doorway, her eyes red, her hair wet, her body wrapped in a green towel, a wicked smile on her face.
“Where’s Kate?” asked Jamie.
“Gone to her quarters,” replied Larissa. “She said to tell you she’ll see you in the morning.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but Larissa closed it with her own, her lips on his, and Jamie discovered that he wasn’t nearly as tired as he had thought.
2
TRIANGLES HAVE SHARP EDGES
ONE HOUR LATER
Larissa Kinley flexed a muscle that the vast majority of the population didn’t possess, and felt her fangs slide silently down from her gums, fitting perfectly over her incisors, the white points emerging below her upper lip. She ran her tongue across the tips of her fangs, pressing until the slightest increase in pressure would have broken the skin, her eyes never leaving her reflection in the mirror in her quarters.
She hated her fangs with every fibre of her being.
They disgusted her, filled her with a revulsion she could not fully articulate to anyone, not even Jamie. She knew he would listen to her, sympathise with her, and at least try to say all the right things. But the simple fact was that he didn’t know what it felt like to be a vampire, and how it felt was impossible to explain.
She would have torn the fangs from her mouth with a pair of pliers if she didn’t know full well that they would regrow the next time she fed; she would have smashed them out with the butt of her Glock pistol, filed them down to nothing with sandpaper, or simply pulled them out with her bare hands, if she had believed that anything would have rid her of them.
But she knew nothing would. Her fangs were part of her, and there was nothing she could do about them.
I’m stuck with them. I’m going to be looking at them forever.
Anger trickled through Larissa’s body, and her eyes began to turn red. She leant in close to the mirror, and watched as crimson spilled slowly in from the corners, obscuring the natural dark brown. The dark red swirled and pulsed, until it filled her eyes to their edges. The black holes of her pupils expanded until she thought she would fall into them, and she took a step backwards, away from herself. A low snarl burst from her throat, and she reared back, her muscles vibrating with fury.
Larissa swung her fist into the mirror, faster than the human eye could have followed, and the polished glass exploded, sending razor-sharp slivers flying through the air. Two shards dug into the pale skin of her neck; she barely noticed them until blood began to flow, and the scent filled her nostrils. She withdrew her trembling hand from the remains of the mirror, and stared at the blood pouring out of the holes in her knuckles. She pulled the glass out of her neck, savouring the pain, and wiped the blood away. Then, with guilt and sorrow in her heart, Larissa shoved her hand into her mouth, and hungrily sucked away the running blood, her head swimming with primal pleasure and self-loathing.
The cuts healed almost immediately, and she let the hand fall to her side. Staring into the mirror, she waited until the crimson in her eyes began to recede, then let the towel she was wearing fall to the floor. Her body had been changed by the endless hours of training since she had instantly accepted Major Paul Turner’s offer for her to join Department 19, grown leaner and more toned. But the thick bands of muscle that had emerged on the bodies of Kate and Jamie were nowhere to be seen; the vast majority of her strength and speed and stamina now came from somewhere else.
Larissa walked across her small quarters to the locker at the end of her bed, pulled a vest and a pair of shorts out of the drawers, dressed quickly and stepped easily into the air. She folded her legs beneath her and floated, two metres above the floor, in outright defiance of the laws of nature; there, she closed her eyes, and focused on remaining completely still.
Her powers were developing with a speed that frightened her.
The acceleration of her abilities was a result, partly, of simple ageing – but more down to the fact that she was using them every day. She could now stay in the air almost indefinitely, and fly huge distances without tiring. The truth was, she didn’t even know how far; it had been a long time since she had attempted a flight that had turned out to be beyond her. And she was strong now too; so strong that the possibility of accidentally hurting someone she cared about was never far from her mind. She opened her eyes, slowly, and looked at the series of dents in the wall beside her door. They were the results of arguments with Jamie, of missions that had gone wrong, of petty fights with Kate, and of the days when simply being herself was too much for her.
All the punches had been pulled. The only time she had lashed out at the wall with all her strength she had smashed a hole clean through the thick concrete, setting off an alarm that woke everyone in the Loop. The following morning, she had been forced to explain herself to Admiral Seward, who had gently informed her that the combination of teenage petulance and superhuman strength was a dangerous one.
Larissa closed her eyes again, and let her mind wander. As it so often did, it made its way back to the months that had followed her turning at the hands of Grey, the oldest British vampire, a man who had committed himself publicly to peace while he fed on teenage girls in private. She had eventually confronted him in Valhalla, the vampire commune he had founded, and from which he had been expelled for what he had done to her, but his banishment had brought her little peace; it had made nothing better.
The almost two years she had spent with Alexandru Rusmanov were her deepest secret, the one thing she refused to discuss with anyone, even Jamie. He had asked her about it for the first time during the bedlam that followed the attack on Lindisfarne, when the two of them were tentatively getting to know each other, were, in essence, meeting each other properly for the first time. The persona she had presented to him during her time as a prisoner of Department 19 had not been far removed from her real self; she had played up certain aspects of her character and played down others as she fought desperately for the chance to survive the madness that was taking place around her. But it was still a persona, an act, one she dropped as soon as Marie Carpenter was rescued and she came to realise that her life was no longer in danger. Jamie had phrased his question innocuously, but there had been a tightness to his voice, a sliver of excitement, that let Larissa know how much he wanted to hear about her past.
She wanted to tell him too.
The attraction between them was tangible, and she knew with absolute certainty that their time spent as merely friends was going to be extremely brief. But more than that, she trusted him; the thought of having someone who she could tell her story to, who would not judge her for the things she had done, would not think less of her or turn their back on her, someone who might help her carry the weight that hung so heavily around her neck, was the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world.
And for that reason, she told him not to ask her about it again. She could not face the possibility of being wrong about him, of being let down and disappointed again. Instead, she clung to the hope that he would ignore her instruction, and ask her again one day; when he did, she would be ready to tell him.
But she wasn’t. Not the second time he asked her, or the third, or the fourth, and eventually he got the message and stopped persevering. Each time, she had tried to tell him, tried to will herself to open this last door to him, and to hell with what lay behind it. But she couldn’t. Her panic at the thought of driving him away before they had even had the chance to become something more than friends had been replaced by an overwhelming terror at the thought of losing him now that they had. She understood now that the chance had passed, that she should have told him at the beginning, and that she was now trapped. The memories of those two terrible years ate away at her, poisoning her sleep and her dreams, and she had rejected the chance to let someone help her, someone who wanted so badly to do so.
He saw me when his dad was killed, she thought, as she floated in the cool air of her quarters. And he knows I was sent by Alexandru to kill him the night his mother was kidnapped. He knows both those things and he’s still with me. Why can’t I tell him the rest?
But she knew the answer to her own question.
Because it’s worse. Oh God, it’s so much worse. Because I don’t know if he or Kate could ever look at me the same way again. And because they’re all I’ve got.
In the quiet of her quarters, her hair almost brushing the ceiling as she floated, Larissa fought back the rage that suddenly spilled through her, making her muscles vibrate and her fangs burst involuntarily into her mouth. She growled, a low rumble full of imminent violence, as she tried to control herself, tried not to swoop down and add a new dent to the collection by the door.
Calm, she shouted at herself. Be calm. Without Alexandru you wouldn’t be here, would never have met Jamie, or Kate, never had the chance to make amends for what you did. Calm down, you stupid girl.
She felt her fangs retract, and she slowly unclenched her fists. It was a source of constant amusement to Larissa, who possessed a jet black sense of humour, that she had come to fall for a boy she would never even have met had she not been the obedient servant of the monster that had tried to destroy his family. But there had been no way for her to know that as she flew with Alexandru and his followers towards the house that the unsuspecting Jamie Carpenter shared with his mother and the ghost of his father.
No way for her to know that her new life, her real life, had been about to begin.
Kate Randall closed her laptop, sat back in her chair and stared at the wall above the small desk in her quarters. She had showered and changed into a T-shirt and shorts, and her blonde hair was wet; she could feel water dripping down her neck and across her shoulders.
It was her turn to write Squad G-17’s post-operation report, but she found herself unable to concentrate on it. She was tired, but that was not unusual; endless interrupted sleep patterns came with the territory of being a Department 19 Operator. What was distracting her, and preventing her from focusing on the report, was something that had become an almost constant source of annoyance to Kate.
Jamie and Larissa.
Kate had known about their relationship, or whatever they called it when they were alone, since the very beginning. The two things that annoyed her, that sometimes made her so frustrated that she wanted to scream “I KNOW!” in both their faces, was the fact that they seemed to genuinely believe she was unaware, and that they felt the need to keep it from her at all.
The former was an insult to her intelligence, and she hated being thought of as stupid almost as much as she hated being patronised. The latter was even worse; she knew, with absolute certainty, that they both believed she had a crush on Jamie.
Kate was a girl with a highly developed sense of self-awareness, and would have admitted, had anyone asked her, that there had been a tiny period of time during which she had possibly, just possibly, thought about Jamie in that way.
During the madness of Lindisfarne and the days that followed it, days in which the shape and course of her life had been altered forever, when she had been faced with decisions that she would spend the rest of her days second-guessing, he had been there, by her side, helping her through it. He had rescued her on Lindisfarne, as the bodies of her friends and neighbours lay discarded on the streets she had grown up in, and saved her life, all their lives, by destroying Alexandru Rusmanov. Then, when it was over, she had seen him with Frankenstein, and with his mum, and for a few short moments, she thought that she had maybe been a little bit in love with him.
Maybe.
But the feeling had passed, and passed quickly; partly because it was obvious to her from the moment they woke up at the Loop on the morning after Lindisfarne that he had fallen for Larissa, and that Larissa felt the same way about him, but also because in the cold light of day, away from the blood and the screams and the horror of the night before, the aura that had glowed around him as he stepped forward to face Alexandru was gone. She loved Jamie; in the months since her home had been attacked he had become one of the two closest friends she had ever had, and she would have done anything for him.
But she was not in love with him.
That was what hurt her most about the deception that he and Larissa were perpetrating; she was genuinely, unreservedly happy for them both. She had waited and waited for them to tell her, convincing herself they were looking for the right moment, until she had been forced into the bitter realisation that there wasn’t going to be a right moment. They weren’t waiting for anything; they had decided to keep her in the dark.
Well, to hell with that, she thought. Tomorrow I’ll tell them I know. No more of this.
After all, it wasn’t as if Kate had been without problems of her own to deal with in the aftermath of Lindisfarne; real problems, unlike the adolescent nonsense occupying her two supposedly best friends.
After they had arrived at the Loop, after the wonderful, heart-stopping moment when the news had been passed to her that her father was among the survivors who had made it to the mainland in John Tremain’s fishing boat, Kate had been escorted down to the secure dormitory on Level B and crashed into a deep, dreamless sleep. She had slept until a female Operator, in the same black uniform that Jamie and his colleagues had been wearing when they arrived on Lindisfarne, shook her awake six hours later and told her that she needed to get dressed and follow her up to the Loop’s Ops Room.
She had done so without complaint, still half-asleep, rubbing her eyes as they made their way into a lift and up to Level 0. The Operator had pushed open the Ops Room door, and held it wide; Kate walked through it, and looked around the large circular room.
There was only one other person in there, a strikingly handsome Latino man in his mid-forties, wearing the now familiar all-black uniform, and sitting casually on the desk at the front of the room.
“Miss Randall?” he asked. His expression was entirely neutral; there was no malice there, no threat, but no warmth either, and for a second, the strangeness of the situation she had found herself in sank into her, and she felt a sharp rush of fear as she nodded.
What if they’re going to lock me up for what I saw? What if I’m never going to get out of here? What will happen to my dad?
“My name is Major Christian Gonzalez,” the man said. “I’m the Interim Security Officer at this facility. Please, take a seat.”
Kate did as she was told, crossing the wide room and sitting in one of the plastic chairs that were ranged round a grid of long tables. She turned it so she was facing Major Gonzalez.
“Did you sleep well? Is there anything you need?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good. Now, Kate – do you mind me calling you Kate?”
She shook her head again, and his lips curled at the edges.
“Thank you,” he said. “So, Kate. We have a problem, you and I. We need to work out what we’re going to do about it.”
“What problem?” she asked, her voice low and nervous.
“That you were never supposed to see the things you’ve seen. The creatures that attacked your home last night, the men who rescued you; as far as the general public is concerned, none of them exist. Neither does the building you’re standing in now. And that’s the way we need it to stay.”
Fear pulsed up Kate’s spine.
They’re going to lock me up. I’m never going to be allowed to go home.
Major Gonzalez saw the look on the teenage girl’s face and smiled.
“We’re not going to hurt you, Kate,” he said, his voice kind. “We’re the good guys. But we do need to protect the security of what we do, and that means you have a decision to make. A big one.”
“What do you mean?” Kate managed. “What decision?”
Major Gonzalez picked a small sheaf of paper from the desk he was sitting on, and showed it to Kate.
“This is the preliminary report into the events of last night,” he said. “It is based on statements from eyewitnesses, including senior members of this organisation. It describes the circumstances leading to the destruction of one of the most powerful vampires in the world at the hands of a teenage boy with nothing more than the most basic training, and the actions of the men and women that helped him. It mentions you, several times. It says that you exhibited remarkable bravery and resolve in leading Mr Carpenter and his colleagues to the monastery where Alexandru Rusmanov had made his base, and that you continued to demonstrate those qualities when confronted with a hall full of hungry vampires, led by one of the most evil creatures ever to walk the earth. It claims you destroyed one of the vampires yourself. Is that true?”
The memory of the previous night burst unbidden into Kate’s mind. She remembered the screams and the crunch of weapons as the small group of men and the vampire girl fought valiantly against monsters that outnumbered them five to one, remembered the spray of blood and the tearing of flesh and bone, remembered with shuddering revulsion the vampire who had held her, and the sensation of his sharpened fingernail tracing a line across her neck. Then she remembered the primal roar that had echoed through her head as she sank her teeth into his arm and tore at it like a mad dog, the warmth of his blood coating her from head to toe after she plunged a metal stake into his heart, and the subsequent sense of overpowering elation that had shaken her to her core.
“That’s true,” she said, quietly. “I destroyed one of them.”
Christian Gonzalez smiled at her again, and this time the smile was wide, and dizzyingly beautiful. She felt his approval wash over her, and thought she might blush.
“Well done,” he said. “Very well done indeed. That you survived as long as you did on an island overrun by vampires, that you were then able to play the part you did in their defeat, is why you now have a decision to make. The first option is as follows: you can return home, with a cover story explaining your whereabouts for the last twenty-four hours, and never tell anyone about the things you saw. You’ll have to sign the Official Secrets Act, you’ll be monitored to make sure you comply with it, and if you don’t, you will be discredited so that no one believes you, to the extent that the likely result will be a period of evaluation in a secure psychiatric hospital. But you’ll be able to resume your life as it was before the events of last night, and you’ll be reunited with your father.”
Tears welled in the corners of Kate’s eyes as she thought about her father, her brilliant, loyal dad, who must be going through hell with his daughter missing and his home recovering from a massacre.
“I should be clear,” continued Major Gonzalez. “This is an offer that is made extremely rarely. Under normal circumstances, once a civilian is exposed to the existence of the supernatural, as you were last night, continuing a normal life ceases to be an option. There are obvious risks in allowing that information to be taken out into the world, and those risks are normally considered sufficient to see the civilian in question placed in classified custody. I’m not trying to scare you, or threaten you, I promise. I’m merely letting you know how this usually works.”
Kate felt both scared and threatened, but she tried not to let it show.
“What’s the second option?” she asked, her voice packed with as much bravery as she could muster.
The smile returned to Christian Gonzalez’s face.
“The other option is that you stay here and help us save the world,” he said. “You become an Operator in this organisation, and you help us stop what happened to Lindisfarne from happening anywhere else.”
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch is that the life you led until yesterday will be over. You will never be able to tell anyone who you are, who you work for, or what you do, and you will never be able to contact anyone from your former life. Including your father.”
Kate felt faint.
The idea that she would never see her dad again was so abhorrent to her that she thought she was going to throw up at the mere thought of it. But what the handsome Major was offering her was a way out of the life that had been stretching inevitably out before her on Lindisfarne: she would inherit her father’s boat, carry on fishing the same small stretch of water for the next forty years, maybe find a local boy to marry, have a kid or two, and live and die on the island where she had been born.
Kate knew she could never have left her father alone, could never have moved to the mainland and abandoned him to an empty house full of the memories of his family. She had come to terms with her lot a long time ago, but now this man was offering her a way to change it all, to do something that mattered, something that would be exciting, and dangerous, where there were no limits to the places she might go and the people and monsters she might meet. But even for all that, there was a price that would be too high for her to pay.
“What will you tell my dad?” she asked, carefully. “I can’t let him think anything happened to me. I need him to know I’m OK.”
“He’ll be told that you are the primary material witness to a major terrorist incident, and that you are being voluntarily detained for questioning. In a few months’ time, when all this has died down, he’ll be asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and told that you have been recruited into the Security Services. He’ll be extremely proud of you, I promise.” This time Major Gonzalez grinned, and Kate blushed, despite herself.
“How long do I have to make the decision?” she asked.
“About an hour,” replied the Major. She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. “I’m sorry, I know this must seem very unfair. But I’m afraid there are time factors at work here that controlling the public story depends on. If you decide to go, we need to get you home while there is still confusion on Lindisfarne.”
“And if I decide to stay?”
“Then we need to get started,” he said.
In the end, she had only made Major Gonzalez wait for ten minutes before she told him she would take the second option. He congratulated her, before escorting her along a curving grey corridor to one of the Briefing Rooms where she was reacquainted with Jamie Carpenter and the vampire girl, Larissa Kinley. And even then, as she looked back on the most important day of her life, she had noticed the small glances and half-smiles that passed between the two of them.
Tomorrow, she thought again. I’ll tell them tomorrow.
There was a knock on the door of her quarters, and she padded softly across the cold floor to answer it, smiling as she did so, knowing there was only one person who would be visiting her at this hour. Shaun Turner was standing in the corridor outside, his face breaking into a smile as she opened the door to him. Then he was pushing her backwards, his hands on her waist, his lips on hers, and a thought flashed through her head as they sank on to her narrow bunk.
At least I’m actually good at keeping secrets. Well, from one of them, at least.
Jamie stood outside the door to Admiral Henry Seward’s quarters on Level A, pushing his hair back from his forehead and tucking his T-shirt into his combat trousers. When he was as presentable as he was likely to get, he knocked on the door.
“Come,” called a muffled voice. Jamie pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside.
The Director of Department 19 was sitting behind his desk. Admiral Seward put the papers he had been working on atop the towering pile of his inbox, and regarded Jamie with a warm smile which the teenager returned.
They had become close in recent months, these two men; united in grief by the loss of Frankenstein, whom Seward missed almost as much as Jamie, and drawn together by the Director’s terrible sense of guilt over the death of Julian Carpenter. Jamie had never blamed Henry Seward for the loss of his father; for that, there was a jet black corner in the darkest, angriest depths of his soul set aside especially for the traitor Thomas Morris, who had died before Jamie got the chance to make him pay for what he had done. But the Admiral’s guilt was real, even if it was misplaced, and it had allowed Jamie the chance to get to know the man his father had really been.
They had spent many evenings in this room, the Director telling tales of Julian Carpenter, Jamie drinking them in hungrily, then passing them on to his mother, often after heavy editing for violence. It had made the Carpenters feel like a family again, had rebuilt the bonds between that had been eroded in the years after Julian had died, when neither mother nor son had known how to fill the void that had been left in the middle of their lives.
Now look at us, thought Jamie, and stifled a grin. I hunt and destroy vampires for a living, she IS a vampire and lives in a cell hundreds of metres below the earth, yet we’ve never got on better.
“Something funny, Jamie?” asked Seward.
He had clearly not stifled the grin as well as he thought, and drew himself up to attention.
“No, sir,” he replied.
Seward smiled at him.
“At ease,” he said. Jamie relaxed into an easy stance, his hands loosely together behind his back. “Give me your report.”
“Nothing notable, sir. Father and daughter vamps robbing a blood bank.”
“Were you able to capture them?”
“Yes, sir. I handed them over to Dr Yen, sir.”
The Director nodded. “Well done. Lazarus needs all the warm vamps it can get its hands on.”
“So I hear, sir.”
“Any signs?”
“Yes, sir. On the wall outside the hospital. The same two words.”
Admiral Seward swore, scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper.
“Sir,” Jamie continued. “Why does the Lazarus Project need so many captive vamps? What are they doing down there?”
The Director put down the pen he had been writing his note with, and looked at the young Operator. “The Lazarus Project is classified, Jamie,” he replied. “You understand what classified means, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me remind you, just in case you’ve forgotten. It means that everyone who needs to know what the Lazarus Project is doing already knows what the Lazarus Project is doing. Is that clear, Operator?”
“It is, sir.”
“Good. There’s a Zero Hour Task Force briefing scheduled for 1100 tomorrow. Mandatory attendance.”
“New information, sir?” asked Jamie, hopefully.
Admiral Seward shook his head. “Just routine, Jamie. Dismissed.”
Jamie nodded, and left the Director’s study. As he walked towards the lift that would finally, mercifully, deliver him to his bed, his mind drifted back to the speech Admiral Seward had given a month earlier, that had brought to light the existence of the Lazarus Project, that had birthed the Zero Hour Task Force, that had altered how every Operator in the Department went about their job.
The speech that had changed everything.
3
THE ART OF COMING CLEAN
TWENTY-NINE DAYS EARLIER
“Do you know what this is about?” asked Larissa.
She and Jamie were walking along the main Level B corridor towards one of the lifts standing near its centre. Larissa had a towel slung round her shoulders, and was dressed in a dark green vest and a pair of shorts. Jamie guessed she had been with Terry in the Playground, the wide, sweat-soaked space in the bowels of the Loop where the veteran Blacklight instructor ruled with an iron fist, and she looked deeply unimpressed about being interrupted.
“I’ve no idea,” replied Jamie, glancing over at her. “I got the same message as you.” He had been asleep when his console had blared into life, and was almost as grumpy as Larissa.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t bite my head off.”
“Sorry,” he replied, casting her a weary smile which she returned.
The two teenagers were tired, more tired than they could ever remember having been in their lives before Department 19. You never really got used to it, not completely, although they had both become skilled at not letting it interfere with either their performance as Operators, or the tiny sliver of each day that could charitably be called their social lives. But there was something looming on the horizon that was fuelling their bad moods, something that all the T-Bones and ultraviolet light in the world couldn’t stop.
In five days’ time, it would be Christmas.
Even inside the Loop, surrounded by men and women utterly committed to the secret mission they had undertaken, it was impossible to avoid the festive season. The Operators who had families, who lived off-base as Jamie’s father had once done, filled the officers’ mess with tales of trees and decorations, of presents that had been bought or still needed buying, while the younger men and women who lived in quarters at the Loop juggled days off and swapped shifts in the hope of seeing their loved ones at some point over the holiday. For Jamie and Larissa, it was nothing more than a continual reminder of the differences between them and everyone else, even Kate.
The two teenagers were unique, in that Blacklight’s Intelligence Division had taken them off the grid; they no longer existed in the outside world, on paper or in the eyes of the law. Although she didn’t know it, had Larissa’s mother walked into any governmental office and attempted to prove that she had ever had a daughter, it would have been impossible for her to do so; there were no longer any official records of her child having been born, or having lived, and her copy of Larissa’s birth certificate would have been dismissed as a forgery.
It was the same situation for Jamie; in his case because he was now the son of a creature that did not officially exist, in Larissa’s because she was a creature that did not officially exist. Kate still had a presence in the world; she was officially listed as missing after the Lindisfarne attack, and her father knew that she was still alive, even though he was sworn to secrecy on the subject.
Jamie and Larissa were voluntary prisoners inside Department 19, unable to live anywhere else, because they did not exist anywhere else. Jamie had asked Admiral Seward about it once, asked him what would happen if the time came that he wanted to get married and have a family, have some semblance of a normal life. Seward had told him that it might, might, be possible to reintroduce him into the world under an assumed identity. As far as Jamie was concerned, he had not sounded very confident about it.
Jamie would readily concede, however, that it was far harder for Larissa than for him. All that remained of his family lived in a cell in the base of the Loop, and there had been a small Christmas tree standing in Marie Carpenter’s cell for over a week. Larissa’s family, and in particular her little brother, were still out there, living their lives without her, making preparations for what had always been her favourite time of the year. They had talked about it several times, both of them trying hard not to make the other feel worse, but it had been clear to them both that they were united in a single wish: for Christmas to be over as soon as possible, so their lives could get back to what they had come to consider normal.
They reached the lift and pressed the button marked 0. The message that had appeared on their consoles had been sent to every single Operator, both the active and inactive lists, summoning them all to a briefing in the Ops Room. Admiral Seward had debriefed Jamie less than three hours earlier, after Squad G-17 had returned from a routine call on a housing estate south of Birmingham, and the Director had not mentioned anything about an imminent meeting. Seward had been so phenomenally busy in the weeks since Lindisfarne that Jamie was not surprised, although he was, privately, slightly hurt; he liked to believe that he had the Director’s ear in a way that the vast majority of rookie Operators did not.
Jamie and Larissa emerged on to Level 0 and made their way to the Ops Room. The wide, oval room was already almost full, and they found standing room against the curved wall at the back of the sea of black-clad figures. Jamie caught Kate’s eye as they made their way through the throng, and he nodded at her. She smiled back at them from her seat near the far wall, before returning her attention to the platform at the front of the room, beneath the giant wall screen that was currently lying dormant.
Admiral Seward was standing on the platform, talking in a low voice to Cal Holmwood, the Deputy Director. The expressions on the two men’s faces were sombre, and Jamie felt a pang of nervousness rise into his chest. Everything had been so chaotic since Lindisfarne, as the Department attempted to adjust to the revelations that had been uncovered by the successful rescue of Jamie’s mother: the unmasking of Thomas Morris as the traitor to the Department, the destruction of Alexandru Rusmanov and the tragic loss of Colonel Frankenstein, which Jamie could still barely bring himself to think about.
“Seward looks serious,” said Larissa, as though she could read Jamie’s mind. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” replied Jamie, softly, as Cal Holmwood stepped down from the platform and took a seat in the front row. “Looks like we’re about to find out.”
Admiral Seward stepped up to the lectern that stood in the middle of the platform, and gripped its edges with his hands. He looked out over the massed ranks of Operators, his expression unreadable. Then he cleared his throat, and began to speak.
“Operators of Department 19,” he began. “The time has come to put our cards on the table. Some of what I’m about to say is going to be hard for you to hear, but I believe it’s necessary that you hear it. I know many of you have had questions regarding the events of October 26th, questions that many of you have brought to me in person. I’m sorry that until now I have been unable to provide you with answers. There have been investigations and inquiries under way, and the full picture has only become clear extremely recently. That picture is what I’m here to describe to you today.”
Seward glanced around at his audience, and appeared to find what he was looking for on the faces of his colleagues. He nodded briefly, before carrying on.
“I’m sure the majority of you are familiar with the events that took place on Lindisfarne during the night in question; for those of you who are not, I have declassified report 6723/F, which provides a comprehensive account. What very few of you know is that despite the fact that the mission on Lindisfarne led to the destruction of Alexandru Rusmanov, to the uncovering of the treachery of Thomas Morris and to the loss of Colonel Frankenstein, the crucial event of that night took place more than two thousand miles away, at the SPC base in Polyarny.”
Standing at the back of the room, Jamie bristled.
And we rescued my mother. But I guess that doesn’t deserve a mention.
“On the lower levels of the SPC base,” continued Seward, taking a deep breath, “there is a vault numbered 31. Until the 26th of October it contained the most highly classified artefact held by any of the supernatural Departments of the world. It contained the remains of Vlad Tepes, the man who became known as Count Dracula.”
The room exploded.
Half the seated Operators leapt to their feet en masse, and the air was suddenly filled with hundreds of voices, many of them shouting and yelling. Admiral Seward raised his hands in a placatory gesture, then bellowed for quiet. The noise subsided, leaving behind it an uneasy, almost hostile atmosphere. The standing Operators retook their seats, but did so slowly, the looks on their faces shot through with fear and confusion, and more than a little anger.
“I know this must come as a shock,” said Seward. “The fact of the matter is that the confrontation with Count Dracula in 1892, the confrontation that led directly to the foundation of this Department, did not end with his destruction. This is a matter of open public record, since the account in Stoker’s novel is accurate. Any one of you could have corroborated his account with the documents in the archive, but it appears that none of you felt inclined to do so.
“Dracula was dangerously weak after his journey across Europe, and the knives wielded by Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris spilled the last of his blood, causing his body to collapse. They, along with John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Abraham Van Helsing, believed him dead; they were the first men ever to challenge, let alone defeat, a vampire, and they had no reason not to. The realisation that Dracula had been rendered dormant rather than destroyed outright wasn’t made until several years later, when Professor Van Helsing was able to begin his study of the supernatural and discovered that a vampire could be brought back to life by introducing a sufficient quantity of blood to the dormant remains.
“When Professor Van Helsing realised the implication of this work, he returned to Transylvania with an envoy of the Russian Tsar, to recover the remains and see them properly secured. The envoy betrayed him, however, and the remains were taken to Moscow. They remained in Russian hands ever since, until the 26th of October, when they were taken from the SPC base by Valeri Rusmanov.”
Seward paused, clearly bracing himself for a second eruption, but none came. A deep shock appeared to have settled over the men and women of Department 19; what they were being told raised a prospect almost too terrifying to contemplate.
“An investigation into the theft by the Intelligence Division has returned some preliminary conclusions. Firstly, it appears that Valeri had been searching for his master’s remains since the early twentieth century, since very shortly after they disappeared into Russia. Secondly, it is clear that he was able to locate and extract them using information provided to him by Thomas Morris, whose treachery appears not to have been limited to assisting Alexandru Rusmanov in settling their mutual grudge against the Carpenter family.”
Jamie felt his face redden as a number of Operators turned slowly in his direction. He stared up at the lectern, refusing to meet their eyes, and silently urged Admiral Seward to carry on.
“The whereabouts of Valeri Rusmanov,” said the Director, “are presently unknown. Surveillance of all Valeri’s known properties and associates has yielded negative results. Interrogation of well-connected vampires has proved equally fruitless. Simply put, we have no idea where he is. In addition, we have—”
“He’s going to try to bring him back, isn’t he?” interrupted an Operator, whose name Jamie didn’t know. “Valeri, I mean. He’s going to try to bring Dracula back.”
“Operator Carlisle,” replied Seward, a grave expression on his face, “I am sorry to say that the Intelligence Division reports an overwhelming probability that he has already done so.”
This time the eruption was punctuated by a series of what seemed to Jamie’s ears to be horribly close to screams. He felt a tight ball of panic close round his heart; he had never seen such a reaction to anything from the men and women of Blacklight, men and women whom he had come to believe could not be shaken by anything, and who were certainly never scared. But the fear in the Ops Room was now palpable, thick and cloying. What the Director was announcing, in his calm, straightforward manner, was something that no one in the room had ever considered, let alone made any preparation for.
It was quite literally the worst thing he could be telling them.
“Enough!” shouted Admiral Seward. “Don’t you think I know how serious this is? I’m telling you because I believe that all of you have the right to know what we are facing. Don’t make me regret that decision!”
There was a gradual shuffling of feet, an embarrassed dropping of eyes and voices, and an extremely uneasy calm settled precariously over the Ops Room. Most of the Operators remained on their feet, and when Seward realised that they had no intention of sitting back down, he carried on.
“Although there is a tiny chance that Valeri has either chosen not to resurrect his master or has failed in attempting to do so, the official position of the Department from this point forward is that Dracula is once more alive on this planet. We have no way of knowing precisely how long this has been the case, but since the resurrection process requires little more than a sufficiently large quantity of fresh blood in which to immerse the remains, we are assuming that it took place within twenty-four hours of the theft of the ashes, some time on or around the 27th of October.”
“Why haven’t we seen him?” asked Operator Carlisle, his voice trembling. “Why hasn’t he come in here and killed us all?”
“He’ll be weak,” Jamie heard himself say, and blinked as the entire room turned to look at him. “After the resurrection. He’ll be weak.”
“That’s correct, Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Seward, and the sea of heads swung back to face the lectern.
“Professor Van Helsing wrote at length about the recovery time of resurrected vampires, in the aftermath of the loss of the remains to the Russians. The Science Division has expanded upon this research in recent days, and has come up with some rough conclusions. There are several factors that affect the recovery time of a vampire, principally the creature’s age before it was rendered dormant, and the period of time since it was reduced to ash. It’s far from an exact science, but we have been able to create a workable timeline, leading towards a point that has been given the code name Zero Hour, the point at which we believe a properly tended Dracula will regain his full strength. That point, Operators, lies one hundred and twenty days from now, on the 19th of April.”
“Christ,” growled Jacob Scott. The grizzled Australian Colonel had not risen from his seat in the second row during any of the outbursts that had taken place around him, and even now his face wore an expression containing significantly more determination than fear. “Four months. If we don’t get him in the next four months, we won’t get him at all. That’s the deal, right?”
Admiral Seward nodded. “That’s our hypothesis, Jacob. Dracula restored to full strength presents a threat that none of our strategic simulations can accurately model. He is the first vampire who ever lived, the oldest and most powerful; we simply cannot predict what will happen if he is allowed to rise. So our strategy from this point onwards is to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have four months to find Valeri and Dracula, and to destroy them both. After that, it may not be possible to do so. As a result, I have three further announcements to make.” A series of dazed-sounding groans emerged from the black-clad ranks, but Seward ignored them.
“Firstly, I will be creating and chairing a task force with the specific remit of devising and deploying the Department’s strategy where Dracula and Valeri are concerned. Those of you who are selected for this group will be notified in due course. Secondly, I’m announcing the formation of a classified sub-department of the Science Division, code-named the Lazarus Project. Access to all information relating to this sub-department will be restricted on a strictly need-to-know basis, but it relates to the third thing I want to make you aware of. Until further notice the Standard Operating Procedure will no longer be to destroy vampires: it will be to contain them wherever possible, return them to the Loop and submit them into the custody of the Lazarus Project.”
There was a half-hearted outburst of objection from the dazed ranks of the Operators, but Seward had reached the end of his patience.
“Shut up!” he bellowed. “Any Operator who feels unable to implement this new procedure, or who feels unable to handle the situation that I have just outlined, should feel absolutely free to place themselves on the inactive roster. The rest of you I will expect to carry out your responsibilities to the same standards as always. If you have questions, come and see me or ask your senior commander. In the meantime, you are all dismissed.”
Seward stepped down from the platform and strode out of the Ops Room, closely followed by Cal Holmwood and Paul Turner. The reeling Operators began to talk among themselves, their voices low, their eyes wide. Larissa looked at Jamie, and gave her head a tiny shake.
“Holy shit,” she said, quietly.
“That’s a bit of an understatement,” replied Jamie.
4
GROWING PAINS
CHÂTEAU DAUNCY AQUITAINE, SOUTH-WESTERN FRANCE
On a chaise longue the colour of blood, in Valeri Rusmanov’s study overlooking the vast Landes Forest, lay the first vampire ever to walk the earth.
Three months after his resurrection, Count Dracula was finally beginning to look like himself; like the man he had briefly been, like the vampire who had lived for more than four hundred years before he had been condemned to a limbo that had lasted for more than a century. A mane of black hair spilled across the vampire’s shoulders, swept back from a forehead that was high and wide. Thick, unruly black eyebrows perched above pale blue eyes which flanked a nose that was sharp and narrow, like the blade of a scalpel. A black moustache covered the entirety of his upper lip, framing a mouth that was thin and cruel. The Count was dressed in a plain black robe, and he stared at the door of the study, waiting for Valeri to return with his supper.
He was weak. Maddeningly, pitifully weak.
Each intake of fresh blood, which Valeri dutifully brought him every evening, saw a tiny fraction of his power return, but he was still little more than a shadow of his former self. For several weeks after his resurrection, he had been unable to move, his body soft and malleable, as though made of wet clay, waiting to be fired. In time it had hardened into solid flesh and dense bone, but the terrible power he had once wielded, power that could lay waste to cities and obliterate men and women with little more than a glance, was still only a memory.
In time, I will be all that I was. In time. And then this world will pay.
But for the time being, the Lord of Darkness, the Impaler, the Cruel Prince, who had been feared from sea to sea by his own people and his enemies alike, was as weak as a sickly child.
Dracula lifted his head, grunting at the effort it took, and stared out of the window of his most loyal subject’s study, past the manicured grounds of the chateau to the dark expanse of the pine forest beyond. His mind throbbed with two ancient, primitive desires: for food, and for revenge on the men who had stolen a century of his life from him, the men who had reduced him to this pathetic state.
After the resurrection, as the ancient vampire began the slow, painful process of recovery, Valeri had started to carefully recount what had happened while Dracula had been lying dormant. The story of the twentieth century, in which humankind had advanced far beyond the imagination of even the most optimistic Victorian futurist, was long, confusing and, as far as Dracula was concerned, almost fatally tedious. It was not in his nature, the nature of either the man he had been or the monster he had become, to spend his time considering the achievements of others; his world view was fundamentally extremely simple.
As far as he was concerned, the rest of the world existed only for his use, and by his permission, and this new world that Valeri was describing to him would be no different.
He didn’t care about the growth of the cities, about the technological developments that Valeri described to him in infuriatingly simple terms, as though teaching a lesson to an infant. Aeroplanes, cars, space travel, television, telephones, the internet – none of these innovations interested him in the slightest. He saw no reason to doubt that his place in the new world being described to him would be whatever he decided he wanted it to be, providing that one thing had remained constant over the decades that had passed without him.
“Do… they… still… bleed?” Dracula had eventually interrupted, his voice barely audible to anyone without Valeri’s superhuman hearing.
“Yes, master,” replied Valeri. “The humans still bleed.”
“Then… I… would… hear… no… more.”
The study door opened, and Valeri entered, dragging the unconscious figure of a teenage girl behind him. Her head was starred with blood and the heels of her bare feet scraped noisily across the wooden floorboards as Valeri approached his master. The scent of the blood seeping from the girl’s head filled Dracula’s nostrils, and his pale blue eyes coloured a terrible dark red, the colour of madness, a colour that no sane person could have looked upon for more than a second or two.
“An offering for you, master,” whispered Valeri, bowing deeply.
“Thank you, Valeri,” replied Count Dracula, his voice like the scratch of a pencil on a sheet of paper.
Valeri lowered the girl towards his master, then slit her throat with one of his fingernails. As the blood began to flow, Dracula clamped his mouth over the wound, sucking hungrily, like a baby at its mother’s breast. Valeri held the girl in place, but turned his head away; it would not be appropriate for him to watch his master feed in such a way. Instead, he let his gaze wander around the study, a room he had not set foot in for almost fifty years until the day after his master had been reborn.
Château Dauncy had been the favourite place of his wife, Ana, her favourite place in the whole world. It had been the only thing, apart from Valeri himself, capable of soothing the madness that roared inside her. When she died, when she was taken from him, he had ordered the old building shuttered and boarded up, hoping to trap the worst of his grief inside the ancient walls. It was painful for him to be inside those walls now, far more painful than he had expected, but it was necessary; it was the one property he owned that no one else was aware of, the one place he was confident would not be under surveillance by Blacklight or one of its accursed counterparts. It was the place he could return his master to health, without interruption.
The girl’s blood gushed into Dracula’s mouth, and he instantly felt strength flood through him. He knew it wouldn’t last, but he also knew that each passing day, each mouthful of warm, running blood, brought him closer to himself, and to his revenge.
Taking advantage of the temporary rush of power, he spoke to Valeri, his voice booming through the study, rich and deep and momentarily full of the authority that had once commanded armies, and sent thousands to their deaths.
“Where is your brother?” he asked. “Why is Valentin not here, assisting you? I would not have you shoulder this burden alone, old friend.”
“Valentin is in America, master,” replied Valeri, a grimace of distaste flickering across his face as he spoke his brother’s name. “We do not concern ourselves with each other.”
Dracula’s face twisted into a snarl, and for a moment, Valeri was afraid. The resurrection of his master had been the result of a quest that had taken him more than a hundred years to complete, a quest he had remained doggedly loyal to even as Alexandru had descended into madness and Valentin had turned his back on his family, sinking happily into his life of shameful indulgence in New York. Now that the quest was over and his master had been returned to life, Valeri’s position as Dracula’s favourite would forever be secure; he would follow his master once more, obediently, gladly and proudly. But in the century that had passed, as Dracula lay dormant deep below the Russian snow, Valeri had forgotten what it was to be afraid. He was reminded now, and he shivered in the cool air of his study.
“Go to him,” said Dracula, the snarl vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. “Tell him that his master orders him home. Tell him there is work to be done.”
“Of course, master,” replied Valeri. “I will leave at once.”
Dracula grunted with satisfaction.
“Good,” he said, and fixed his eyes upon his subject. “You have always served me with distinction, Valeri. You have never sought to question me. When this world is mine, when I have piled high the bodies of the pathetic creatures that inhabit it and set them alight, when once again my enemies stare out at nothing from the highest poles, the place at my right hand will be yours, as it was before.”
“You honour me, master.”
“Leave me,” replied Dracula, waving a hand towards Valeri, who did as he was ordered, backing quietly out of the study and leaving the Count alone.
Dracula watched him go, then rolled back on to the chaise longue and stared at the ornate, painted ceiling above him. Already he could feel his strength ebbing away, but he refused to let it anger him. Three months had passed since he had woken in the pulsing gore of the pit beneath the Rusmanov chapel, naked and screaming, his body little more than coloured blubber, held together only by the strength of his own will. He had not known himself as he was birthed violently back into the world, had not known himself until Valeri had knelt at the edge of the pit and said a single word.
Master. When he called me master, I knew who I was.
His journey from that blood-soaked beginning had been long, and hard, but it was getting easier, with each passing day. He knew that he could be patient, for a short while at least. And he knew that he could bear whatever pain might come his way. As agonising as his recovery had been so far, it did not even bear comparison to the night his second life had begun, more than five hundred years ago.
5
REBIRTH
TELEORMAN FOREST, NEAR BUCHAREST, WALLACHIA 12TH DECEMBER 1476
Vlad Tepes fled through the darkening forest, the din of the battle and the screams of his men fading behind him. He had torn his royal armour from his body and cast it aside, but he could still hear the shouts and running footsteps of his pursuers, getting closer with every minute that passed.
Five Turkish soldiers at least; maybe six, maybe more. The Prince of Wallachia knew better than anyone the horrors that would await him in the Turkish camp if he was caught, and he redoubled his efforts, the soft forest floor thudding beneath his feet.
I’ll die before I let them take me, he thought. I will bow to no one.
The army that had advanced across his lands had outnumbered his own forces by five to one. Less than a year earlier, Stephen Bathory, the Prince of Transylvania, had helped Vlad to reclaim his throne; they had marched together into Wallachia, their forces combined, and Basarab, the foolish, cowardly old man who had succeeded Vlad’s brother Radu as ruler, had fled without a fight.
But Stephen had refused to stay and help consolidate Vlad’s third reign, and his departure – betrayal, it was a betrayal – had left him vulnerable. He had received word within months that a Turkish army was moving north, and when it had been clear that no help was forthcoming, he had ridden out to meet it on the plains beside Bucharest, accompanied by his elite Moldavian guards and a little over four thousand men.
They fought like they were forty thousand. Fought and died, as men should.
Blood ran down Vlad’s arm from the sword blow that had knocked him from his horse, but he felt no pain. Instead, an ethereal calm had settled over him, bestowing upon him the clarity of a man who is running for his life. Somewhere behind him, either fleeing the battlefield or lying dead upon its blood-soaked earth, were his Generals, the brothers Rusmanov. When it had become clear that the battle was lost, that his brief third reign as the ruler of Wallachia was over, Vlad had fled, without a backward glance. He felt a momentary pang of guilt, but pushed it quickly aside.
I never promised them immortality. They followed me with their eyes open, and took their share of the spoils of victory gladly.
The sun had slipped below the horizon to the west, and darkness was gathering around Vlad as he ran. At the foot of an enormous white oak tree, he stopped and caught his breath, listening intently for the sounds of his pursuers.
The forest was silent.
Not the slightest noise could be heard, in any direction, and Vlad’s savage pleasure at the thought of having lost the Turkish soldiers was replaced with a sudden uneasiness. The trunk of the oak in front of him looked ancient, gnarled and twisted beyond anything he had seen before, and he had hunted and ridden these woods a thousand times since moving his summer palace to the small town of Bucharest. Vlad looked around the small clearing in which he was standing and saw that all the trees were the same, towering structures of mangled wood, their bark splintered and grey. At the base of the enormous trunks sprouted plants that Vlad didn’t recognise, sprays of black flowers and barbed, midnight-blue vines.
What is this place? I have never been here before.
This is the deep, whispered a voice, and Vlad whirled round, reaching instinctively for his sword. But the short blade was long gone, left in the gut of a Turkish soldier who had tried to prevent his escape.
Your sword will not help you here, whispered the same voice. It was light, almost jovial, and seemed to be coming from inside his head, from all sides, and from nowhere.
“Who speaks to me?” bellowed Vlad, striding into the centre of the clearing. “Show yourself!”
There was no answer.
The silence in the forest was absolute as the last of the light faded away. Vlad Tepes felt fear crawl into his stomach, as he looked around the clearing, searching for the way he had come.
There was no sign of it.
He was lost.
There were no broken branches, no flattened patches of grass, nothing to indicate that a man had passed this way within the last hundred years. Vlad stared into the darkness, trying to calm his racing heart. He was trying to decide which direction to set out in when he heard a sound, the first sound, apart from the grotesque, light-hearted voice, that he had heard since he had entered this place.
The noise was a scratching, creeping sound, and it ran up Vlad’s spine like ice. It was the sound of something crawling through the ancient trees, something slow, and old, and patient. Vlad spun round, his fists clenched, searching for the source of the noise in the spaces between the trees and the dark undergrowth. Then he realised what was happening, and terror gripped at his heart.
The trees themselves were moving.
Slowly, two of the ancient white oaks curved out and down, crossing at head height to form a circular passage that led further into – the deep, it’s the deep – the dark forest.
Come to me, whispered the voice. Come to me.
Vlad stared incredulously at the opening before him. This could not be real, he thought; surely his mind had broken at the loss of the battle, the deaths of his Generals and his men, and this was nothing more than the vision of a lunatic?
Do not be foolish, hissed the voice, and Vlad cried out. The lightness of tone was gone; the voice sounded like death, old and deep and dark. Come to me, while I still invite you. There is nowhere else for you to go.
Vlad looked around the clearing, and saw that the voice spoke the truth. The trees on all sides had closed together, forming an impenetrable wooden wall that surrounded him completely.
He was trapped.
Sickly sweet bile churned in his stomach, as he realised he had no choice. Forcing his legs to move, Vlad walked slowly forward, his entire body trembling, and entered the circular opening. The darkness that engulfed him was total; it was the very absence of light. He heard the trees begin to move again, closing the entrance behind him, and took a tentative step forward.
There was nothing beneath his foot.
Vlad overbalanced, his arms grabbing at nothing, then pitched forward, screaming as he did so, and fell into the deep.
He awoke an unknowable amount of time later.
There was grass beneath his back, and as his eyes struggled open, he saw the night sky above him. Constellations of stars spun and swirled, impossibly low, patterns of light that he had never seen before. A group of pale red stars gathered into the shape of a bull’s head, then disappeared as a cluster of iridescent green lights drew the image of a vast, coiled snake across the black sky.
The images turned Vlad’s stomach, and he looked away. He pushed himself up so he was sitting on the grass, fighting to remember where he was, and what had happened to him.
The grass he was sitting on was a green so dark it was almost black, even beneath the spiralling, shifting kaleidoscope of light overhead. It grew in a circle, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Around its edge, statues of ancient grey stone stood watchfully, without the smallest of gaps between them. The carved figures were grotesque: men and women in contortions of agony, animals in the throes of violence and death, demonic creatures, horned and spiked and scaled, with expressions of lustful pleasure on their faces. Above the statues there appeared to be nothing but the inky-black sky. There was no doorway, or passage, that would explain how he had come to this awful place.
I fell. I think I fell.
Then memory exploded through Vlad’s head, and he cried out as he remembered: the battle, the forest, the ancient moving trees, and the awful, unnatural voice that had spoken to him. He forced himself to his feet, and found himself looking at the only thing in the circle beside himself.
It was an altar.
A large rectangular block, crudely carved from pale grey stone and standing at the edge of the grass, beneath a pair of intertwined statues depicting such violence that Vlad, a man who had visited tortures on his enemies that had been whispered throughout the entire European continent, could not look at them. The stone was carved with letters of a language that he didn’t recognise, and the top was stained dark brown with long-spilled blood.
Fury overwhelmed Vlad, and he ran forward. He beat his hands on the surface of the altar, screaming and bellowing at the alien sky above his head. This was not where he was supposed to have ended his days, alone and scared in this place of old horror; he had commanded armies, lain waste to cities and entire countries, walked with kings and emperors. He raged at the darkness that surrounded him, swearing death to whatever had brought him here, cursing his enemies, promising revenge on everyone who had ever wronged him, offering his soul for the chance to see his betrayers cold in the ground.
Nothing happened.
Above him, the stars spun, blooming into life and winking out, as though millions of years were passing in mere seconds. The statues around him stood silent and impassive, staring down at him with empty eyes. The altar remained nothing more than a lump of stone.
Vlad slumped against it, the fire gone from him as quickly as it had arrived.
Why am I here? If not for some devilment, then why? Perhaps I am mad.
You are not mad, whispered the voice he had heard in the clearing. But you are stupid.
Vlad looked around, but still nothing moved inside the silent circle of statues. The voice was cruel, and mocking, and he tried to think what it could mean, why it was questioning his intelligence. His gaze landed on the brown stains atop the altar, and clarity burst through him. He dug the fingers of his right hand into the wound on his arm, tearing the flesh open. Vlad grunted in pain as blood began to run thickly down his arm, coating his hand; he lifted it high above his head, and paused.
If I am not mad, then only damnation awaits me here.
You were damned long ago, hissed the voice, and Vlad knew in his heart that it was right. He flicked his hand, and dark red droplets of his blood pattered across the surface of the altar.
Instantly, the air was full of energy; it crackled round Vlad’s head, lifting his long black hair from his shoulders. He watched the hairs on the backs of his arms stand up, and felt thick, greasy power in his teeth and bones. The statues began to move, rumbling to life on their pedestals, inflicting their tortures on one another in slow, gruesome thrusts, a writhing wall of agonised, abused stone. Before him, the altar began to run with a black liquid that appeared to be bubbling up from the microscopic holes in the stone itself, a thick oil that seemed to absorb light. When the entire surface of the altar was covered, a mouth, impossibly wide, and full of teeth the size and shape of daggers, opened in the liquid, and appeared to smile at him.
“What are you?” asked Vlad, his voice trembling.
You could not hope to understand, replied the mouth. It was the same voice he had been hearing since he had run blindly into what it had referred to as the deep, but now it was smooth, almost friendly. And it does not matter. What matters is that I know what you are.
“What am I?”
A monster. The mouth curled into a wide, awful grin. Capable of cruelty that impresses even one like me. A carrion bird. A parasite. A—
“Enough,” said Vlad, as forcefully as he was able.
The mouth on the altar grinned even wider.
And brave, up to a point. Often to the point of foolishness. Or danger.
“Why did you bring me here?” demanded Vlad.
You brought yourself. Your rage cried out across the deep. I merely lit the way.
“Why?” asked Vlad. “Why, for God’s sake? What do you want from me?”
I want to offer you something. In return for something you haven’t used for a long time.
“What are you talking about?”
Your soul, said the mouth, and bared its teeth. I want your soul. It will amuse me for millennia. And I will pay you handsomely for it.
Vlad stared at the slick surface of the altar. The mouth was still smiling, and he felt his stomach churn.
“What would you offer me?” he asked. “What price could be enough for what you ask?”
I can give you revenge, on everyone who has ever wronged you, or failed you. I can give you life everlasting, that you might hunt your enemies to the end of their days, without ageing, without dying. I can give you the power to lay your world in ruins. All this, I can give you.
“I sense deception,” said Vlad. “Such an offer is surely too good to be true.”
You are correct, replied the mouth. There can be no light without dark, no reward without punishment. But I deceive you not. You had not asked to hear the terms.
“I ask to hear them now.”
Very well. You will never see the sun again; to look upon it will mean your end. You will not take food, or drink, as humans do; only the lifeblood of other creatures will sustain you. You will be safe from mortal hands, and mortal weapons, and you may share your new life with others, as you see fit. But when your time on this plane comes to an end, your soul will belong to me, and Hell will await you. For all eternity.
“I accept.”
The words were out before he even realised he was going to say them. The abomination’s offer would condemn him to a life lived in the shadows, in the presence of death, and blood, but for Vlad this would not feel unfamiliar, and the alternative was not worthy of consideration. The life he had lived was over, he knew it all too well; the Turks would hunt him to the ends of the earth, and he would stand tall in the darkness rather than run and hide in the light.
I never doubted that you would, said the voice. But I wasn’t finished. The grin widened until it began to spill from the edges of the altar, running in thick black trails towards the dark grass.
“What do you mean?” cried Vlad. “What trickery is this?”
No trickery at all. You accepted my offer, without hearing the last of its terms.
“Tell me what you are holding back! Tell me at once!”
The mouth set into a hard, straight line, and when it spoke again, its voice was the sound of freezing blood, of pain and hopelessness.
You have nothing left to barter with. I suggest you refrain from issuing demands.
Vlad began to tremble, with rage and the terrible, creeping feeling that he had been outsmarted. Fear was again spilling into his stomach and up his spine, and he regarded the altar with horror.
“I apologise,” he forced himself to say. “I humbly ask to know the final term of the covenant.”
That’s better, said the mouth, its smile returning. The final term is this: the first blood you take is the sole key to your undoing. Your first victim will carry the only means of ending your second life.
“What kind of deception is this?” cried Vlad. “You promised me everlasting life!”
I promised you nothing. I told you that I could give you everlasting life; whether you achieve it is entirely up to you. If you were incapable of dying, then how would the contract ever be fulfilled? But I have given you more than any human who went before you, and I would see you more grateful for my generosity.
“What gift is this that I receive in return for my soul, full of conditions and caveats?”
I promised no gift, replied the mouth. I offered nothing more than the covenant that has now been agreed.
“Then I withdraw my acceptance!”
Too late, said the mouth, grinning widely. Then it moved, bursting forward from the altar and enveloping Vlad completely in black fluid that felt as cold and wrong as the end of the world. He screamed soundlessly, over and over, but the liquid held him tight, until it was over, and it withdrew.
He fell to his knees, a desiccated thing; his eyes had tumbled in on themselves, blinding him, and his skin was as dry and leathery as parchment. He was not breathing, but he was still alive, still able to feel the indescribable pain of what had been done to him. When he felt that he could bear the agony no longer, when he thought he must die or be driven mad by the pain, the black liquid moved again, coating him for a second time.
But instead of showing mercy, and ending his torment, as Vlad prayed it would, it sank into him, disappearing into his pores, and a sensation of power beyond anything he had ever felt surged through him. His eyes spun back into place, as his skin smoothed and coloured and his heart began to beat anew, and he rose to his feet on legs that felt as strong as tree trunks, clenching fists that felt as though they could shatter mountains. A primal roar burst from his throat, and then he was falling, towards the midnight grass, through it, into blackness, back into the deep.
When he came to, he was lying on the floor of the Teleorman Forest. He opened his eyes and recognised instantly the white oaks that rose above him towards the night sky, the smell of the grass beneath his body and the cold breeze that whispered across his face. For a long, disorienting second, he wondered whether he had dreamt what had occurred, whether his mind, ravaged by exhaustion and the horror of his army’s defeat, had rebelled against him, conjuring impossible terrors from the depths of his nightmares. But then he got slowly to his feet, felt power bubbling beneath his skin, and remembered the deal he had made with the terrible grinning mouth.
It seems you kept your word, devil. And I will do everything in my power not to keep mine.
He grinned in the darkness, and felt something shift in his mouth; new teeth slid down from inside his gums, fitting perfectly over his incisors. The tips of these new teeth were razor-sharp, and they cut through his lower lip as though it was tissue paper. Blood spilled into his mouth and he fell to his knees in the throes of an ecstasy beyond anything he had ever imagined, pleasure so overwhelming that he had no option but to close his eyes and wait for it to pass.
When it eventually did, he rose again, and looked at the patch of forest where he had awoken. In a wide circle around him, partially hidden by overgrown bushes and wild undergrowth, were pieces of stone that looked as though they had once been the bases of statues, and a small mound of rocks that might once have been part of something large and rectangular. But the stones were buried in the earth, covered in moss and dirt, and looked as though they had been undisturbed for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years.
This is the place I went to. But it’s old now. Where I went it was new.
He left the stone ruins behind, and began to walk in the direction of the distant battlefield. The occasional scream still floated through the night air, and in the distance he could see a dull orange glow emanating from the fires he knew the Turks would have built to burn the bodies of the dead. Although he did not know what he was going to do when he reached the site of the battle, he knew he no longer feared the invaders and their weapons, and he was determined that he would discover the fates of his Generals, the three brothers whose loyalty he had rewarded by leaving them behind. As the forest began to thin around him, he heard voices in the darkness, and headed silently towards them.
In a clearing, gathered round a roaring fire, was an encampment of villagers from the plains beyond the forest, who had fled their homes as the Turkish armies approached. There were perhaps fifteen families: men, women and children, warming themselves near the heat of the fire, nursing infants, boiling water in metal cauldrons, holding spitted meat over flames. A number of the women were singing an old working song, and it was their voices that Vlad had heard, the ancient melody carrying sweetly on the cold air. He circled the encampment, slipping silently through the trees, looking for an opportunity. He was hungry, and the smell of the roasting meat was invading his nostrils and making him salivate.
“Stand where you are, sir.”
Vlad turned slowly in the direction of the voice, and found himself face to face with a middle-aged man, standing in the shadow of one of the towering oaks. The man was dressed in the sturdy clothing of a farmer, and was holding a bow and arrow at his shoulder, the metal tip of the bolt aiming steadily at Vlad’s chest. He raised his hands in placation, and took a small step towards the farmer, who backed away immediately.
“No closer,” he said. “And speak, so I would know if you are friend or foe.”
“I’m neither,” replied Vlad, a smile creeping across his face. “I’m something else.”
The man lowered his bow by a couple of degrees.
“You are not Turkish,” he said. “Are you Wallachian? Answer.”
“I was,” replied Vlad. Then the hunger hit him like a bolt of lightning, and he folded to his knees, his head wrenched back in agony.
The hunger roared through Vlad Tepes like a hurricane, opening a huge abyss in his chest and stomach, a clutching pit of emptiness. He grabbed at his breast, tearing at his own skin with his fingernails, trying to pull himself open, trying to find a way to fill the gaping hole that had appeared at the centre of his being. His head thundered with agony, as though drills were being applied to his temples, and his limbs were suddenly as heavy as lead.
The farmer threw aside his bow, and ran to the stricken man. He knelt down and pulled at the stranger’s shoulders; the head came up easily, inches from his own. The farmer looked at the vision of horror before him, the glowing red eyes that stood out in the middle of the twisted face, the gleaming white fangs that extended below the upper lip, and drew in breath to scream. Then the stranger plunged his teeth into his neck, and the scream died in his throat.
Vlad lunged on instinct alone; the pain of the hunger had driven rational thought from his head. His new fangs slid through the farmer’s skin, piercing the jugular vein, sending blood gushing into his mouth and down his throat. And instantly, the pain and the hunger were gone, replaced by a feeling that was almost godlike. He swallowed the blood that sprayed from the man’s torn throat, until he was sated, and withdrew his fangs.
The two figures fell to the cold ground.
Vlad’s chest was thumping up and down, alive with power; the farmer’s was barely moving, as blood seeped steadily out of the ragged hole in his neck. The former Prince of Wallachia leapt to his feet, and found himself floating several inches above the ground. He spun slowly in the air, then laughed, a terrible cackle that echoed between the silent trees and floated across the fire at the centre of the encampment, drawing frowns from the men gathered round it. Several of their wives crossed themselves, and the infants among the group began to cry.
The laughter faded as Vlad resumed his course back towards the battlefield, floating slowly and effortlessly between the trees and over the undergrowth, spinning and swooping in the air, like a child who had been given a marvellous new toy. Where he had been, there was nothing but a patch of spilled blood, and the dark shape of the farmer on the ground, his body cooling as his life ebbed away.
6
CARPENTER AND SON
Jamie walked along the corridor of the Loop’s detention level, feeling as conflicted as he always did when he was about to see his mother.
Hers was the only occupied cell; the others had been emptied three weeks earlier, their inhabitants placed in restraining belts and taken into the depths of the Blacklight base to be handed over to the Lazarus Project. The ultraviolet barriers that filled the open front walls of the cells shimmered in the quiet air, the vampires they had contained long gone.
Marie Carpenter was in the last cell on the left, the same cell that Larissa had occupied for the three chaotic days after Jamie’s mother had been kidnapped by Alexandru Rusmanov, until her heroics on Lindisfarne had seen her released from custody and offered the chance to join the Department.
Jamie made his way down the corridor, aware that his mother’s superhuman senses would have alerted her to his presence as soon as he stepped through the airlock door and into the containment block, equally aware that she would pretend to be surprised to see him. His mother hated nothing more than drawing attention to the fact that she had been turned into a vampire. He reached the last strip of concrete wall before his mother’s cell, stopped and took a deep breath. Then he stepped out in front of the ultraviolet barrier.
Jamie’s first instinct, as always, was to laugh; his mother’s cell was like something out of a home interiors catalogue.
Because she had voluntarily gone into Blacklight custody, and because she was the mother of an Operator, she had been allowed to request items that were not available to any other vampire that had been brought on to the block, and she had made the most of it. In the middle of her cell was the oval rug that had lain in the living room of their old house in Brenchley, and sitting on top of it was the coffee table which Jamie’s father had rested his feet on every evening after he got home from work. The chest of drawers from Marie’s old bedroom stood against one wall, topped with a cluster of photos of her son and her late husband. The battered leather sofa that had dominated their old living room filled most of the rear wall of the cell, and her bed was covered in the lilac sheets and duvet cover that she had slept in for as long as Jamie could remember.
His mother had politely, but very determinedly, imported her old life into this concrete cube deep below the earth. The Christmas tree that had sat on the coffee table, its multicoloured lights twinkling beneath the fluorescent strips in the ceiling, was gone, much to Jamie’s relief.
“Hey, Mum,” he said, stepping into the cell. “How’s it going?”
Marie Carpenter was sitting on the sofa, her nose buried in a paperback book. She looked up, the predictable frown of fake surprise creasing her features, then broke into a huge smile and leapt to her feet. She stepped forward to meet him, and mother and son hugged in the middle of the square room.
“Hello, love,” she said, squeezing him tightly. “Are you all right? Have you been out today?”
Despite the uniform he wore and the things he had done, Jamie was still a teenage boy, and never more so than in the presence of his mother. He blushed immediately at the enthusiasm of her embrace, while at the same time a broad grin emerged on his face. This was why he had walked voluntarily into the darkest depths of horror, why he had stood in the middle of an ancient building full of the dead and faced down the most dangerous monster in the world; so that he might be able to hug his mother again, and feel the love that radiated out of her when she was with him, a love that he had only realised he needed when it was taken away.
“I’m all right, Mum,” he replied. “Yourself?”
Marie gave him a final squeeze before releasing her grip, and stepping back to look at her son. She cast her eyes quickly up and down him, taking in the black uniform with a look of immense pride on her face, before she reached the pink patch of scar tissue on his neck, and a grimace flickered across her face.
“I’m fine,” she replied. Her gaze lingered on his neck for a moment, as it always did, before she forced her eyes away and broke into a smile. “How’s Kate?”
Jamie’s own smile faded.
His relationship with his mother had improved immeasurably since they had returned from Lindisfarne. The truth about Julian Carpenter, about the man he had really been and the circumstances surrounding his death, had liberated them; the dark mess of grief and betrayal that had crippled them both in the aftermath of his death, that Jamie had been unable to stop himself from taking out on his mother, had cleared, leaving them free to rebuild. They both still missed him, in their different ways, and Jamie had come to terms with the fact that he probably always would. But the grief now seemed manageable. What had been a yawning, unfillable chasm was now merely a hole, deep, and slippery at the edges, but that he could now avoid falling into, most of the time at least. Sadly, it was no longer the only one; there was now a hole of almost equal size with Frankenstein’s name above it.
It had been slow going at first, the thaw between Jamie and Marie. There were new complications, not least of which was the condition that required Marie to spend her days and nights in the depths of the Loop behind an ultraviolet wall. There was much to say, and over the first couple of weeks, as both of them adjusted to their new lives, it was all eventually said.
Jamie apologised for how he had behaved since his dad had died, cutting off his mother’s attempts to tell him he didn’t need to, plunging ahead until it was all out of him. Marie had listened, tears running down her face, until he was done, then offered an apology of her own, for failing to cope with the death of her husband, for failing to realise that her son still needed her. By the time she was finished, they were both in tears, tears that turned out to be as cathartic as they were painful. There was only one remaining aspect of their rebuilt relationship that caused Jamie to worry.
Marie Carpenter absolutely adored Kate.
And hated Larissa.
He understood why; it was Kate who had put her arm round Marie after the hunger had hit her in the aftermath of Lindisfarne, Kate who had escorted her on to the rescue helicopter, talking to her in the gentle, friendly way that came so naturally to her. Larissa, on the other hand, was a vampire, and as far as Marie was concerned, vampires were all monsters, despite Jamie’s protestations to the contrary.
He knew he was wasting his time; Marie had been kidnapped and tormented by the very worst the vampire world had to offer, and was appalled by the change that had been inflicted on her. But he tried anyway, because he knew that eventually the time would come when he would want to tell his mother about what was happening between him and Larissa, and he didn’t want her first reaction to be revulsion.
“She’s fine, Mum,” he said. “She said to say hello.”
Larissa is fine too. More than fine, actually.
“She’s a good girl,” said Marie, firmly. “I knew it from the moment I met her.”
Jamie didn’t say anything. Instead, he wandered across the cell, and looked at the photos his mother had arranged on top of the chest of drawers. A small picture in a silver frame caught his eye, and he leant in for a closer look.
His mum, heavily pregnant with him, was leaning back on the bonnet of the dark blue BMW he remembered from when he was very young, a wide smile on her face. The sun was shining from outside the frame, illuminating a bright green row of trees beyond the car, casting the dark silhouette of his dad across the bottom of the photo. The shadow’s hand was raised to its face, holding the camera that had recorded the moment.
She looks so happy, Jamie thought, then straightened up and turned back to his mum, as he realised she had said something he hadn’t heard.
“What was that, Mum?” he asked, and she rolled her eyes.
“I was saying that Henry came down to see me today,” she said. “Did he tell you?”
“Henry?” replied Jamie. “Who’s Henry?”
“Henry Seward,” answered Marie, the look on her face suggesting that it should have been obvious.
“Admiral Seward?” asked Jamie, incredulous. “My commanding officer? Is that who you mean?”
“Of course that’s who I mean, Jamie,” replied Marie. A look of concern had emerged on her face. “Is something wrong?”
No, nothing wrong. Definitely nothing weird about my boss hanging out with my mum in her cell. Not at all.
“I suppose not,” said Jamie. “What did he want?”
“He didn’t want anything. He just came down to say hello. He normally pops down about once a week.”
“Once a week? Like, every week?”
“I’ve upset you,” said Marie, a look of slight panic on her face. The possibility of her son stopping coming to see her was never far from her mind, and was the thing she was most afraid of. “Can we talk about something else?”
Jamie was still attempting to stretch his head round the concept of his mother and Admiral Seward socialising, but he let it go when he heard the nervousness in his mother’s voice. He took a deep breath.
“Of course we can, Mum,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”
Marie smiled a broad smile of relief, and floated over on to her bed, apparently so relieved she had avoided a fight with her son that she didn’t even realise she was using her vampire abilities in front of him.
“Tell me where you went this evening,” she said, settling down on the lilac bedding. “I worry about you, out there with all those monsters. Tell me what you were doing.”
Jamie crossed to the rear of the cell, flopped down on to the battered sofa and began to tell his mother about his day.
7
VALENTIN RECEIVES A VISITOR
CENTRAL PARK WEST AND WEST EIGHTY-FIFTH STREET NEW YORK, USA
Valentin Rusmanov stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his study, on the top floor of the Upper West Side mansion he had lived in since its completion in 1895. His ownership of the grand, stately building was, like most aspects of his life, a closely guarded secret.
Throughout the twentieth century, his long existence had required him to take certain steps to avoid attention, including the formation of a number of shell companies to administer his assets. His name appeared nowhere on any document relating to the building and, from the outside, it seemed little different to the other grand apartment buildings that faced Central Park from the west.
It was most similar in design to the Dakota, thirteen blocks to the south, but whereas that famous landmark had been originally designed as sixty-five individual residences, Valentin’s building was a single, almost obscenely spacious residence, arranged over seven vast floors, the majority of which were filled with the accumulated spoils of more than four centuries of wealth and influence. The seventh floor contained the suite of rooms in which Valentin slept, to which entrance was expressly forbidden without invitation. The study he was now standing in occupied the north-east corner of the seventh floor, from which the view of the park was nothing short of spectacular.
Valentin looked down at the wide-open space, an oasis of dark corners and shadows amid the blinding lights of Manhattan. The last of the joggers were making their way to the exits, leaving behind them the teenage couples, junkies, muggers and homeless men and women that made up the park’s nocturnal population. He watched them, observing their small lives from high above without objection or condemnation. He had never felt disgust, or anger, when he looked at ordinary humans; he had always left such sentiments to his brothers, and to his former master.
Valentin’s nose twitched, and a second later his face curdled into a grimace of disgust. He turned away from the window, flew swiftly across his study and landed gracefully in the blue leather armchair that sat behind his wide, dark wood desk. He leant back in the chair, staring expectantly at the door on the other side of the room. A moment later there was a polite knock, and the door slid open just wide enough for Valentin’s butler, a skeletal figure in exquisite evening wear, to slip through the gap and into the study.
Lamberton had entered service in the vampire’s house in 1901 and immediately demonstrated both impeccable professional ability, and an admirable willingness to ignore the horrors that routinely took place beneath his master’s roof; he had served Valentin for forty years as a human, and almost seventy more as a vampire.
His turning had been Lamberton’s idea; although Valentin had promised the butler that no harm would come to him while in his employ, a promise the ancient vampire had kept with great dedication, Lamberton had eventually been forced to confront his master with the problem of his advancing years.
After discussing the matter over half a case of 1921 Château Latour, Valentin had reluctantly agreed that no other solution seemed acceptable and, after checking for a final time whether the butler was sure, had bitten Lamberton’s throat with the tenderness of a lover, allowing the barest minimum of blood to escape. He had then flown out into the New York night and found a young nurse from Oklahoma who was about to ship out to the battlefields of Europe. He had brought her home and given her to Lamberton, when the turn was complete and the hunger gripped him for the first time. Once the girl was spent, the butler thanked his master, and returned immediately to his duties, duties he had continued to discharge admirably ever since.
Lamberton was now standing silently by the study door, waiting to be acknowledged before he spoke. When Valentin nodded in his direction, he spoke five words that his master had hoped never to hear.
“Your brother is here, sir.”
Valentin swore in Wallachian, his eyes flashing momentarily red. Then he regarded Lamberton, and sighed deeply.
“Show him in,” he said.
The door was flung wide, and Valeri Rusmanov strode into the study, as Lamberton exited silently. The oldest of the three Rusmanov brothers was wearing simple clothing: a black tunic, heavy woollen trousers and leather boots, and his grey greatcoat. He stopped halfway across the room, and looked around, taking in the opulence of his surroundings with obvious distaste.
Ridiculous old fool, thought Valentin, from behind his desk. He thinks he’s still a general, commanding troops on a battlefield. Pathetic.
Valentin opened a beautifully carved wooden box and withdrew a red cigarette from the velvet-lined interior. The cigarette contained Turkish tobacco laced liberally with Bliss, the heady mixture of heroin and blood to which he had become mildly addicted over the last three decades. He applied the flame from a wooden match to the tip of the cigarette, then leant back in his chair as Valeri, who had still not spoken since entering the study, paused in front of a shelf containing a glass tank in which three basketballs were floating in a clear solution.
“What do you call this?” asked Valeri, his tone gruff and unfriendly.
“I don’t call it anything,” replied Valentin, forcing himself to remain polite. “The artist called it Three Ball 50/50 Tank. It’s Jeff Koons.”
“And this is art, is it?”
“I would say so.”
Valeri turned away from the shelf, waving a hand dismissively at its contents. He crossed the study in three long strides and stood before Valentin’s desk, his nose wrinkling at the smell of the smoke from the cigarette in his brother’s hand.
“Is that Bliss?” he asked, spitting out the last word.
“Why, yes it is,” replied Valentin, opening the box again. “Would you care for one?”
Valeri stared coldly at him.
“Do you have no shame whatsoever?” he asked.
Valentin smiled, drew deeply on his cigarette and exhaled. The smoke floated up into the air in a thick cloud, enveloping Valeri’s head as it dispersed.
“Apparently not,” he said, lightly.
The two brothers faced each other for a long moment, until eventually Valeri spoke again.
“Our brother is dead,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice.
“I know,” replied Valentin. “He has been dead for more than three months.”
“You don’t seem upset by the news.”
“Are you?”
Valeri drew himself up, and glared at his brother.
“Alexandru and I differed on a great number of matters,” he said, slowly. “But he was still blood, still our blood. And now he’s gone.”
“That’s right, he’s gone. But we’re still here. Isn’t life marvellous?”
Valeri grunted, a deep, throaty sound that Valentin thought might be what passed for his brother laughing.
“You call this living?” Valeri asked. “Surrounded by lackeys and boot-lickers, in this castle of decadence?”
“Yes,” replied Valentin, and for the first time he failed to keep the steel from his tone. “I do. I also remember the size of your domestic staff in Wallachia, Valeri. There were times when I believe it numbered in the hundreds.”
Valeri stiffened.
“I was a different man in those days,” he replied.
You were actually a man, thought Valentin. That was certainly different.
Valentin got up from behind his desk and walked back to the window that overlooked the park. He motioned for Valeri to join him, and after a long pause, with a look of great reluctance on his lined face, the elder Rusmanov did so. Valeri stood beside his younger brother, and looked out at the towering lights of Manhattan.
“Have you ever been to New York before?” asked Valentin.
“Never,” replied Valeri, grimacing. “Until fifteen minutes ago I had never set foot in this sordid place, and I would have preferred for that to remain the case.”
“Of course you would. Yours are the dark open spaces, the wilderness of our youth. You are a creature of tradition, Valeri. I don’t criticise you for it; I’m merely stating the facts. But mine? Mine are the bright lights, the crowded streets, the noise and the bustle and the life of the city. An American writer once wrote that, ‘One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.’ Well, I’ve been here for more than a century.”
“Why are you telling me this, Valentin?”
The younger vampire sighed, and regarded his brother with a pitying look.
“You always were so literal. Never mind. I assume you have come with word from your master?”
“Our master,” said Valeri, his voice like ice.
“Of course. Our master. I apologise.”
But Valentin didn’t look sorry, not in the slightest. A half-smile played across his lips, causing anger to surge through his older brother. Valeri pushed it down as far as he was able, and focused on the order he had been given.
“He calls you home, Valentin. Your life belongs to him, as it always has, and he calls you home.”
Valentin bared his teeth.
“My life is my own,” he hissed. “Do you hear me?”
Red spilled into the corners of Valeri’s eyes. He took his hands from where they had been crossed behind his back, and let them dangle loosely at his sides.
“I disagree,” he said. “As I am confident our master will too.”
The two brothers stared at each other, violence pregnant in the still air of the study. Then Valeri smiled broadly, raising his hands in mock placation.
“Enough, brother,” he said. “I have no time for posturing, or children’s games. I must leave, with or without you. Will you refuse the call of our master, to whom you owe this gilded cage you call a life? Or will you honour him, as you swore you always would, and do your duty now he has returned to us?”
Valentin looked at his brother, and favoured him with a smile of his own.
“Of course I will,” he replied. “I will need two days to set my affairs in order, then I’ll return home like the dutiful lapdog.”
“Your affairs are trivia,” replied Valeri. “You are to accompany me tonight.”
“In which case, I would remind you of two things,” said Valentin, his smile still in place. “Firstly, that you are a guest in my home. And secondly, that I have not been afraid of you for more than five hundred years now.”
Valeri took half a step forward, a dangerous look on his face.
“Is that a fact, brother?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper.
“It is,” replied Valentin. “A fact that leaves you with two options. You can allow me to conclude my trivia as I see fit, after which I will return home, as I promised. Or you can try to remove me from this house by force, which will result in one of us explaining to your master why we have destroyed the other. So what’s it going to be, brother?”
90 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
8
THE BIG LEAGUES
Jamie swung his legs out from under his bedding and sat on the edge of his mattress, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms.
He had headed straight to his quarters after leaving the detention level, his mind full of relief and his heart heavy with guilt. He always felt bad after seeing his mother; the sight of her in her cell was painful, and filled him with feelings of impotence. But his visits were the only things that she looked forward to, and he would not dream of denying her them. When Alexandru had taken her, he had feared, in his darkest moments, that he was never going to see her again, never going to get the chance to make it up to her, to make amends for being such a bad son. He was not going to fall back into his old pattern of complacency, of taking her for granted, even if the sight of her in her cell made his heart ache and his skin tingle with helpless anger.
She needs me. That’s all that matters. And I’m not going to let her down.
The electric clock on his bedside table read 8:55. Jamie hauled himself to his feet and raised his arms above his head, feeling the muscles creak and tremble as they stretched. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but thoughts of his mother refused to leave him. He grabbed his towel, walked to the shower block at the centre of Level B and climbed into one of the stalls, hoping that the relentless drumming of the water would empty his mind, giving him a few minutes of peace.
Dried and dressed, Jamie sat down at his desk and attempted to review the minutes of the first Zero Hour Task Force meeting. He read the dry, colourless text of the report from start to finish, but realised he was looking at the shapes of the letters rather than taking any sense from the words, and pushed the folder aside. He looked at his watch, and saw that it was time to make his way to the Ops Room.
The prospect filled him with little excitement; the pride he had felt when Admiral Seward summoned him to his office and told him that he was being appointed to the Department’s most highly classified Task Force had been short-lived. The Director had immediately made it clear to him that he was only being involved because of his first-hand experience with Alexandru Rusmanov, and that he would be largely expected to speak when he was spoken to. Seward had also warned him that his presence on the Task Force was likely to be unpopular with the more experienced Operators, and this had proven to be an understatement.
Jamie was the second person to arrive for the meeting.
Major Paul Turner glanced up at him as he stepped through the door, then returned his attention to a sheaf of papers splayed across the table before him. Jamie considered saying hello, then decided against it. The Security Officer, who had succeeded the late Thomas Morris in the post, had been among the small group of Operators who had arrived on Lindisfarne after Jamie had destroyed Alexandru Rusmanov. Although they had been too late to help, to prevent the loss of Frankenstein or the turning of his mother, Jamie would always be grateful that they had tried. The reason he held his tongue was very simple: Paul Turner scared the hell out of him.
There never seemed to be anything behind the Major’s eyes, no emotion, or empathy. Since Lindisfarne, Jamie had been astonished to learn that Turner was married to Caroline Seward, a union that made him Admiral Seward’s brother-in-law. They had a son called Shaun, who was himself a Blacklight Operator, and this Jamie found almost impossible to believe; Turner appeared to him more like a robot than a loving husband and a father.
I can’t picture him having dinner with his wife and asking her about her day, or taking his son aside and giving him advice, he thought. I just can’t see it.
Jamie took the seat opposite Turner, and silently waited for the rest of the Zero Hour Task Force to arrive. Less than a minute later the door to the Ops Room opened, and Operators began to file in and sit down.
Henry Seward took the seat at the head of the table, the Director of Department 19 nodding briefly in Jamie’s direction as he did so, then leaning over and engaging in conversation with Paul Turner at a volume too low for Jamie to hear.
Two Operators that Jamie had met for the first time at the previous meeting, men in their early thirties who represented the Science and Intelligence Divisions of Blacklight, walked through the door, deep in conversation, and sat down across from him. Neither so much as glanced in his direction; both had made it abundantly clear that they opposed his presence on the Task Force, and had clearly not changed their minds since the first meeting. Jamie was trying to make sure that the anger he could feel bubbling up in his chest didn’t show on his face, when the door opened again, and Jack Williams walked in.
Jamie smiled gratefully at the sight of his friend, who strode across the room and flopped down in the seat beside him.
“All right?” whispered Jack.
“All right,” replied Jamie. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” smiled Jack. “Yourself?”
“Fine,” replied Jamie, feeling his mood lift.
Jack Williams was a descendant of the founders of Blacklight, just like Jamie, and although he was eight years older and had been an Operator for almost four years, he had become one of Jamie’s closest friends in the Department. He was widely regarded as the finest young Operator in the Department and a man destined for great things, a viewpoint reinforced by his membership of the Zero Hour Task Force, but he also had an uncanny ability to make Jamie laugh, to make him feel like there could still be light in the middle of all the darkness that surrounded them.
Jack’s father was Robert Williams, a veteran Operator who had served Blacklight since the 1970s, and the grandson-in-law of Quincey Harker, the greatest legend of the Department, whose tenure as Director had transformed the organisation into the hi-tech, highly classified unit it was today. Jack’s younger brother Patrick was also an Operator, but where Jack was loud and confident, the life of the party and the biggest personality in any room, Patrick was quiet and appeared to be almost pathologically shy.
Jamie had spent a lot of time with the two brothers in the officers’ mess, and the differences between them were like night and day. What was even more striking, though, was the fierce love that so clearly existed between them, the loyalty that was utterly beyond question, to which Jamie, an only child, responded with deep admiration, and more than a little jealousy.
Jamie was about to tell Jack that he still appeared to be the unpopular kid in the room when the door opened for the final time, and the last two members of the Zero Hour Task Force arrived.
Colonel Cal Holmwood, Blacklight’s Deputy Director and one of its most senior and decorated Operators, was the man who had piloted the Mina II, the supersonic Department 19 jet, to Lindisfarne on the night that Frankenstein had been lost, dragged over the steep cliffs by a werewolf whose intention had been to kill Jamie. He had flown survivors back to the Loop after that terrible night was over, and now entered the Ops Room deep in conversation with the man who fascinated Jamie more than any other in the entire Department.
Professor Richard Talbot, the director of the Lazarus Project, was remarkably tall and thin, like a giant stick insect wrapped in a spotless white lab coat. He was in his sixties, his face lined and weathered, his bald head perfectly round, flanked by two strips of grey hair that rested above his ears. The Professor was smiling gently at whatever Cal Holmwood was saying to him; then, as they made their way to opposite sides of the long table, he locked eyes with Jamie, smiling broadly at him. Jamie smiled back, involuntarily; the Professor made him feel something close to star-struck, even though they had only spoken to each other once, as the first meeting of the Zero Hour Task Force had come to its conclusion.
The Lazarus Project was an enigma, even within an organisation as secretive as Department 19.
It had only been officially mentioned once, during Admiral Seward’s speech about Dracula; its purpose was unknown, and its laboratories, located on Level F of the Loop, were off-limits to all but the tiny number of senior Operators who possessed the necessary clearance. The Project’s staff were rarely seen; their quarters were inside the security perimeter, and they made only occasional appearances in the dining hall or the mess. Nobody even knew how many of them there were. Doctors, scientists, administrative staff: all were hidden away behind an Iron Curtain of secrecy.
So when Professor Talbot had strolled into the inaugural Zero Hour meeting and introduced himself to the rest of the group, there had been a sudden sense of excitement in the room. Talbot was a mystery, whose work was classified far beyond Top Secret, yet the man himself was utterly disarming, friendly and charming to a fault. After the meeting ended, he had fallen into stride beside Jamie as they walked to the lift at the end of the Level 0 corridor.
“Mr Carpenter,” he said, his voice deep and warm. “I read the Lindisfarne report. I’m very sorry.”
Jamie looked up at him, completely thrown by the fact that this man was talking to him, this man who answered only to Admiral Seward himself.
“Thanks,” he managed. “It was a bad night.”
Understatement of the bloody year.
“I can’t imagine,” Talbot replied. “But you should take heart from what you did. The destruction of Alexandru will save hundreds of lives. I’m sure that doesn’t feel like any consolation at the moment, but hopefully in time you’ll be able to understand that you did something remarkable. And if there’s anything I can do to help, please do let me know.”
“I will,” Jamie replied, his voice thick with confusion. “Thank you.”
Talbot smiled, then accelerated away down the corridor, leaving Jamie standing as still as a statue, his face wearing the look of someone who is not completely sure that what has just happened to them was actually real.
Since that one brief conversation, Jamie had been fascinated by Professor Talbot; so much so that Larissa, the only person to whom he had described the conversation, had started to use a different word.
Obsessed, thought Jamie. She says I’m obsessed with him.
He could understand why she might think so. In the week that had passed since the first Zero Hour meeting, Jamie had asked almost every Operator he had spoken to what they knew about Professor Talbot and the Lazarus Project. The answers he had received had ranged from incredulous demands that he not ask such questions, to wild theories about what was taking place in the Project’s sealed laboratories on Level F.
“They’re cloning Operators,” one earnest civilian contractor had insisted. “They’re going to bring back Van Helsing, and Quincey Harker, and all the others. They’re going to declare war on the vamps.”
Jamie had scoffed, but continued to ask the question, undeterred. Some Operators claimed that it was a weapons project, devising new ways of destroying vampires, while one member of the Science Division swore blind that the Lazarus Project was building a microwave emitter tuned to an electromagnetic frequency that only existed inside the brains of vampires. When it was complete, the scientist promised, all that would be required was the push of a single button, and every vampire in the world would be destroyed, instantly. Jamie asked tens of men and women, and got tens of different replies, leading him to the only conclusion that could be rationally drawn.
Nobody has a clue what they’re doing down there. Not a clue.
“Zero Hour Task Force convened, January 19th,” said Admiral Seward. His personal secretary, a small, plump man named Marlow, had positioned himself a deferential distance behind the Director and now began to take minutes, his chubby fingers flying silently across the keys of a portable console. “Second meeting. All members present.”
The Director looked at the seven men gathered round the table. “Gentlemen,” he continued. “Operational data since the last meeting is as follows. Vampire activity remains heightened, but stable, as do sightings and incidents involving the public that require our involvement. Patrol logs indicate that incidents of the graffiti that was discussed last week continue to occur, in increasing numbers.”
Seward nodded to Marlow, who punched a series of keys on his console. The huge high-definition screen that covered the entire wall behind the Director powered up. A series of photographs filled the frame; the same two words, in tens of different colours and handwritings, printed and sprayed on walls and roads and bridges.
HE RISES
Jamie felt a chill run through him as he looked at the photos. The two words represented the Department’s greatest fear, the moment the Task Force had been created to prevent.
Zero Hour.
The vampires knew what was coming, just as surely as Blacklight did; the graffiti was proof of that. But more than that, it seemed to be directly addressed to them, left at the scenes of crimes that only they would be called to.
It seemed to be a challenge.
No, that’s not it, thought Jamie. They’re not challenging us. They’re mocking us. They don’t think we can stop Dracula from rising. And they might well be right.
“What are our vamp contacts saying?” asked Cal Holmwood.
“Nothing,” replied Paul Turner. “Less than that in fact. Most of them have disappeared, and the ones that haven’t won’t talk. They know what’s coming.”
“We should stake them all,” said the Operator from the Intelligence Division. “What use are they if they won’t talk?”
“Absolutely none, Mr Brennan,” agreed Turner. “But still more than they would be dead. Circumstances change.”
“I don’t get it,” pressed Brennan. “If Dracula rises, if it’s as bad as everyone thinks, they’re going to lose everything too. Why don’t they help us stop it?”
“Because they don’t think we can,” replied Turner, evenly. “Stop it, I mean. And whatever may happen if Dracula rises, the one thing they can be sure of is that helping us is not going to make them popular.”
Operator Brennan stared at Turner with a look that suggested he had more he wanted to say, but he held his tongue.
“Fine,” said Admiral Seward. “Paul, keep at them, but I don’t think you’ll have much luck, as you said. I spoke to the SPC this morning and they assured me they’re doing all they can, so let’s—”
“All they can?” said Jamie, without thinking. “Apart from not losing the remains in the first place, you mean?”
Seven pairs of eyes swung in his direction, and Jamie swallowed hard.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just frustrating. Nobody knew they had them, so there was nothing we could do to make sure they were safe.”
“I knew the SPC had the remains,” said Seward, coolly. “As did the other Directors. What would you have had us do?”
Jamie looked at the Director for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Seward’s face softened. “I don’t like it any more than you, Lieutenant Carpenter. Clearly, there are lessons to be learnt from what has happened, for all of us. But we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, to the best of our abilities. So, on that note, and because I’d like to keep this meeting as short as humanly possible, if there is nothing—”
“I don’t like it either,” interrupted Operator Brennan, scowling at Jamie. “I don’t like any part of this. And I still don’t see why some kid who isn’t even old enough to wear the uniform gets a say in this just because his surname is Carpenter.”
Jamie felt his face flush with anger. He opened his mouth to reply, saw Seward do the same and was surprised when someone beat them both to it.
“Mr Brennan,” said Professor Talbot. “Have you ever seen a Priority Level 1 vampire?”
“What does that have to—”
“This young man,” continued Talbot, glancing at Jamie, “has not only seen one, but faced it down and destroyed it. Compared to every vampire you have ever seen, Operator Brennan, Alexandru Rusmanov might as well have been a different species; a natural disaster made flesh, like a hurricane, and Mr Carpenter destroyed him. He is the only living soul to have destroyed a Priority 1. That’s why he’s here. Because what Alexandru was to normal vampires, so Dracula will be to Alexandru if he is allowed to rise, and I for one will want Mr Carpenter on our side if that happens. Is that clear enough for you?”
Jamie looked at Professor Talbot, stunned. He had not expected his defence to come from the most unknown quantity in the Department.
Sometimes I forget about Alexandru. He had my mum, so for me it was simple. I forget how big a deal it is to everyone else.
“There you have it,” said Admiral Seward. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Anyone else have any more questions they want to ask, or speeches they’d like to make? No? Well, thank heaven for small mercies.”
He stood up from the table, and the rest of the group followed his lead.
“I would remind you, one more time,” said the Director. “Everything that has been said here is only for the ears of the men in this room. Any violation of this very simple instruction will be considered a court-martial offence. I ask you all not to force me to make good on that promise. Dismissed.”
9
NO STONE UNTURNED
STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE
Matt Browning shoved his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. He had been in front of his computer for more than thirty of the last forty-eight hours, and his eyes were killing him.
He walked out of his bedroom, stuck his head into his little sister’s room, waited until he heard the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, then made his way downstairs to the kitchen. As he passed the door to the front room, he heard his father swear at the television, berating an offside decision he had clearly not agreed with. At the table in the small dining room that was attached by French doors to the back of the living room, he could hear his mother on the phone to her sister, talking with quiet animation about a minor celebrity who had left her equally minor celebrity fiancé at the altar. It was evidently quite the scandal.
In the kitchen, Matt poured himself a glass of water and leant against one of the counters. He doubted that anyone in the world knew as much about vampires as he had learnt in the two months since he had been returned home.
Matt knew, as he sat in the back of the car with the blacked-out windows that was taking him home, that the first few moments of his return were going to be crucial. If he was going to be believed, if his parents were going to accept, as the doctor at the base had, that he could remember nothing of what had happened to him, then he was going to have to play his hand perfectly.
The doctor was so pleased with his recovery from the coma that his apparent amnesia had been almost an afterthought. Tests were carried out, a great number of them, but Matt realised quickly that the doctor had been convinced that he would emerge from his coma with significant brain damage, and that lent him the courage to lie with conviction. He picked a point four days before the incident in his parents’ garden, and stuck resolutely to his claim that he could remember nothing since then. He feigned frustration, and concern for the state of his memory; he summoned tears of apparent confusion and fear, while the doctor had held his hand and told him it was all going to be all right.
There was one brief, terrifying moment when the nurse suggested a polygraph test to assess whether there might be recoverable memories, to check whether, in effect, Matt was lying without meaning to. But the doctor rounded angrily on her, and told her that the boy had been through enough. The nurse, chastened, apologised for the suggestion, and Matt breathed a little easier.
He stood on the doorstep of his parents’ small house for several minutes, the letter he had been told to give them in his hand, as he prepared himself to give his performance. Then he rang the doorbell, and waited until his father answered. In the end, very little was required of him; he had barely begun a stuttering, rambling apology when his father interrupted it by wrapping him into a crushing bear hug and dragging him inside the house.
Greg Browning carried him into the kitchen, set him down, then flopped into one of the battered plastic chairs. His eyes were bulging and he was clutching at his chest, and for one terrible moment Matt was sure his father was having a heart attack. Then a great sob burst from Greg Browning’s mouth, and the tension in his body evaporated as he began to cry. He grabbed for the phone, tears pouring down his cheeks, his gaze fixed on Matt as he found the handset and dialled a number with trembling fingers; it was as though he feared that if he averted his eyes for even a second, his son might disappear again. Then a voice answered the phone, and Greg’s face had crumpled into a blubbery mess of tears and snot as he told his wife that their son had come home.
Matt’s mother arrived the following morning, on the first train west. Matt assumed, although he didn’t say anything out loud, that she and his father had been fighting, and his mum had gone to visit Matt’s aunt in Sheffield. She carried his sister through the front door, yelling Matt’s name until she saw him, and fell silent. The look on her face was indescribable, to Matt at least; the sight of it had brought instant tears to his eyes. Then his mum started to cry as well. She put his sister carefully down on the sofa, then wrapped her arms round him so tightly that he wondered whether she was ever planning to let him go.
That evening, the three of them sat in their front room, and had the only conversation they would ever have about the night he had been lost. Sticking to his story was easy; his parents were so overcome with relief that he had been returned to them that they never even entertained the thought that he might know more than he was saying. When they were finished talking, Matt’s dad silently handed him the letter he had brought home with him.
“You should see this,” he said.
Matt took it from his father, unfolded it and read it.
Mr and Mrs Browning,
The incident in which your son sustained injury remains a matter of the highest national security. You are hereby instructed not to discuss the incident with any other party; doing so will be considered an act of treason, and appropriate action will be taken. Acceptance of this letter constitutes acceptance of this instruction.
Your son has received all appropriate medical care, and his recuperation is progressing well. If he develops further medical problems, you should inform medical personnel that he suffered a myocardial infarction due to sudden rapid blood loss. You should not discuss with anyone the circumstances surrounding his injury.
Matt handed the letter back to his father, and told them he was going to bed. And the very next morning, his parents began the long process of trying to forget that any of it had ever happened.
He didn’t even blame them, not really; the girl, the helicopter and the men in the black uniforms holding guns did not fit into the small lives his parents had carved out for themselves in their quiet corner of the world. He supposed they had known, in some abstract way, that there were things out there beyond the end of their suburban street that were wild, and dangerous, that might defy explanation, but they had been perfectly happy for such things to stay where they were. Football, and reality TV, and lager, and celebrity magazines – these were things they could understand, could hold on to and relate to. Not girls who healed before their eyes, then tore their son’s throat out on their back lawn, before soldiers told them it had never happened, the implicit threat obvious to all.
The darkness the world contained had been thrust upon them; they had not looked for it. And now that the darkness had receded, now that their son had been returned to them and they had been able to largely rebuild the lives they had been living before, they were gradually allowing themselves to believe it had never happened at all. He understood their position, and didn’t judge it. It was fine for them.
It was not fine for him.
Matt’s brain swooped and swirled round new ideas, gravitating hungrily towards anything he didn’t know; it was an all-consuming thirst for knowledge, for all knowledge, from how his mother’s Dyson worked to what would happen if you were able to stand on the event horizon of a black hole. In his mind, there was no distinction between the two; knowledge was knowledge, every bit of it as valuable and satisfying as the next.
To call him intelligent would be insufficient; Matt Browning was possessed of an intellect so powerful it would technically be classified as genius. He was as skilled at hiding this intelligence from his family as he was from the bullies at school, who he knew would target him even more viciously if he revealed how much cleverer he was than all of them. He yearned for a time, which he fervently believed would one day come, when he would no longer need to hide who he was, when his intellect would be admired rather than reviled.
Without his parents’ knowledge, he had submitted an application to Cambridge the previous autumn, and received an unconditional offer to attend after a phone interview he had also kept secret. He was due to begin his studies in less than a year, and it had become the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that kept him getting out of bed every morning. Until the girl landed in their garden, and he woke up in a hospital bed, with his throat bandaged and his head full of vampires.
He was now consumed by a burning need to understand what had happened to him. It felt like his entire view of the universe had suddenly been revealed to be a peephole in a hotel room door, a door that had suddenly been flung open in front of him, making him realise how tiny his understanding had been, how small his world really was.
From an encyclopaedia page he learnt about the origins of vampire mythology, learnt the cultural and social theories that had been applied to the idea of such a creature in the centuries since Bram Stoker had crystallised the legends and folk tales of eastern Europe. He read scientific theories, proto-feminist theories, theories of vampires as a metaphor for AIDS, deconstructionist theories, Freudian and Jungian theories, and an American professor’s theory that vampires represented the nascent anti-Semitism in the western world.
He read Dracula, marvelling at its epistolary structure even as the story thrilled him; he held his breath as Van Helsing staked poor doomed Lucy Westenra, as Renfield’s madness offered clues to the Count’s whereabouts. He felt his heartrate surge as the heroes chased Dracula into the Transylvanian mountains, felt triumph as the evil monster was stabbed through his undead heart, and a terrible sense of loss as Quincey Morris made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his friends.
He read what felt like hundreds of adolescent vampire websites, where teenage girls called themselves Raven and Bloodwynd and wrote excruciatingly lustful prose about pale, mysterious, uniformly beautiful boys who could make them live forever with a single kiss from their wine-red lips.
He read blogs by people who genuinely believed they were vampires, people who claimed to drink blood and eat no food, who claimed to be able to influence people and animals to do their bidding, and even on occasion claimed the ability to turn into a bat or a wolf. These had piqued his interest for a short while, until it became clear that in almost every case the author was either desperately lonely or mentally ill, in some cases obviously quite severely.
He read dozens of websites created by people who believed vampires were real, believed it with such longing and such desperate hope that he found their sites almost painful to read. He scoured page after page of alleged sightings, of shadows in graveyards and alleyways, of people who appeared to be casting no reflection in a shop window at night, of neat pairs of circular puncture wounds, of strange men and women with pale skin who appeared to float above the ground.
He read, and read, and read, and he found nothing that in any way resembled what had happened in his garden, or the place he had spent a month of his life.
Matt finished his water and placed the glass on the draining board. He was physically exhausted but, as usual, his brain would not stop whirring. He was sure that somewhere out there was what he was looking for, something that would reinforce what he had been through; he just had to find it. He would get some sleep, and start again in the morning.
He walked back up the stairs and into his bedroom. His computer monitor glowed in the dark, and he was about to reach over and turn it off when he saw an instant messenger box in the bottom right corner of the screen. He clicked on it, watched it expand into the middle of the monitor and read the contents.
Matt’s heart leapt in his chest. He quickly clicked REPLY, but whoever had sent the message was no longer online. He clicked the link in the subject line, and his browser filled the screen, loading a white page with four lines of text and a grey box with a SUBMIT button next to it. He read the text, trembling slightly with excitement.
ATTENTION: If you have arrived at this page in error, please click BACK on your browser immediately. If you have been directed to this page, do NOT submit your password. Leave this page immediately, enter the URL into an IP masking service and then enter your password.
Matt could hardly contain himself.
This was the most promising lead he had found in almost two solid months of searching, a page that told you to hide your whereabouts before entering it, that insisted you leave if you had not been invited.
Why would they want us to hide our IP addresses, unless they’ve got information they don’t want anyone to be able to trace?
Matt closed the window, then opened a new one and typed in the URL of a site that allowed you to browse the internet under a fake IP address; he had used it in the past to watch TV shows that were restricted to the US, and within a minute he was safely behind a dummy IP that would make him appear to be a user from Charlotte, North Carolina. He pasted the link from the message into the browser and hit ENTER. The same white page with the warnings and the empty white box appeared; this time he entered the string of letters and numbers that had been sent to him, clicked SUBMIT and waited. The page loaded, and Matt audibly gasped in the darkness of his bedroom.
The site that opened up in front of his eyes had no title, had wasted no time on fancy designs or technology, but its purpose was immediately obvious; it was a site devoted to the belief that vampires were real, and at large in Britain. At the top of the page was a greeting, and a warning.
Welcome. If you are here, it is where you are meant to be.
We recommend that you vary the IP masking service you use, and delete your browser’s history and cache each time you visit us. It is no exaggeration to say that they are watching – it is up to you to minimise how brightly you appear on their radar. Click here to learn more about Echelon, and how you can work around it.
Matt was about to click on the link, when he noticed the headline in the site’s main panel, and a chill ran through his body. Below the greeting was a menu, simple black text on a white background, like the rest of the page.
HISTORY SIGHTINGS COVER-UPS THE MEN IN
BLACK ETYMOLOGY PROTECTION
Beneath the menu were a headline, a short article and the top few centimetres of a photograph.
MEN IN BLACK CAPTURED ON FILM?
Is this the first real photographic evidence of the existence of the men in black? It was sent to us by an anonymous source, on the same date we received a number of reports of vampire activity in north-west London. Note the purple visors, and the unmarked uniforms and vehicle.
Matt scrolled quickly down to look at the entire photo. What he saw made him feel like crying.
The photo was blurry; it looked like it had been taken with a long lens by someone in a hurry, someone who didn’t want to be seen with a camera in their hand. It showed a nondescript suburban street at night, the rows of houses almost identical to one another, the cars parked in front of them Japanese and German, the gardens neatly tended. It had been raining when the photo was taken; water was running along the kerbs and rushing into a drain opening.
In the middle of the frame was a black van, parked in front of a driveway and directly under a streetlight, its rear doors open. Matt squinted at the photo and saw that the article’s author was correct; he could not see a licence plate above the vehicle’s rear bumper. Beside the open doors were three figures, and it was the sight of two of them that had sent a great wave of relief pouring through him.
They’re real. It was real. It all really happened.
Two of the figures were dressed all in black, a matt material that didn’t reflect the amber glow of the streetlight. They were wearing black shapes on their heads, and both had an unmistakable blob of purple where their faces should have been.
Visors. Purple visors.
The two black shapes were pushing the third, a scrawny figure wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, into the open doors of the van. The third figure didn’t seem to be struggling; Matt looked closer, then drew in a sharp breath. The black figure nearest the camera had something in its right hand, a dark oblong that was pressed between the shoulder blades of the person being loaded into the van. He scrolled down, but there were no more pictures. Matt let go of his mouse, sat back in his chair and put his hands over his face.
It had really happened. People knew.
The photo on his computer monitor was blurry evidence that he hadn’t lost his mind, that it hadn’t all been some vivid coma dream. No matter what his parents were allowing themselves to believe, he knew now that he was right.
It was real. Which meant the boy who had spoken to him after he woke from his coma was real. And now he had found the first step on the path to a wider world.
Matt clicked on SIGHTINGS, and began to read. The experiences, page after page of them, bore such similarity to his own that he almost began to feel annoyed that so many other people had grasped at the edges of this strange world; it seemed to render his own experience less unique. He chastised himself for such petulance, and read on.
The details of the accounts were different, as were the locations; they came from as far afield as Dover and Aberdeen, and almost every part of the British Isles in between. There were reports from several European countries, of similar figures operating in Romania, France, Germany and Hungary. But in all cases the key points remained constant: figures dressed all in black, their faces covered by purple visors, unmarked black vans, helicopters where no helicopter should ever be seen. And they all ended in the same way, with a warning to tell no one what they had seen. Matt shivered at the memory of the last thing the men in black had said to his father, as his own blood pumped out across his chest.
This never happened. Do you understand?
He understood all right. But he no longer cared. Because it had happened, and he was damned if he was going to pretend otherwise. He scrolled back up to the greeting at the top of the page and clicked the link in the final sentence. A new page opened, a short paragraph followed by an incredibly long list of words.
THE ECHELON MONITORING SYSTEM
The British government, along with every other government in the world, monitors electronic communication between its citizens. This is NOT speculation, or paranoia; this is standard military and security service procedure. Emails and mobile phone calls are run through powerful computers and scanned for words that feature on a flagged list, a list that is updated on a daily basis as new threats emerge. Below is the most recent list of Echelon flagged words that we have. Be aware that just because you do not see a word on this list does not mean it has not been flagged. For safety, only communicate sensitive information in person or via landline telephones. And be aware that even those methods are far from secure if the government decides to take an interest in you. Keep your ears open.
Matt scanned the list quickly. Most of the words on it were what he would have expected, overtly provocative phrases like bomb, plot, cell, jihad, terror, martyr, suicide, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda. But interspersed among the obvious words were several that seemed out of place, unless you had seen the things that Matt had seen: purple, black, visor, uniform, teeth, flying, bite, throat, blood…
Vampire.
The word was there, in black and white. Matt said it out loud, letting it roll off his tongue, as he had in the quiet of the infirmary when the doctor had left him alone.
“Vampire. Vampire.”
A grin spread across his face; the tiredness that had been threatening to overwhelm him only five minutes earlier was gone. He felt energised, like he had put his finger against a live wire. His skin was prickly, and his brain was fizzing with new questions and ideas.
One idea in particular.
He settled into his chair to read the rest of the site, knowing deep down that he had already decided what he was going to do.
10
SLEEPLESS NIGHT
SOUTH OF GUDENDORF, LOWER SAXONY, GERMANY ELEVEN WEEKS EARLIER
Greta Schuler tiptoed down the staircase of her family’s farmhouse, taking care to avoid the third-to-last step, the one that always creaked. Her sleep had been fitful, full of bad dreams, and for an unsteady, wavering moment she had been unsure whether the noise she had heard had been real or imagined. But then it had come again, a deep rumble from the direction of the north field, and she sat upright in her bed, drawing the covers round her.
It was cold in her bedroom; she could see her breath in the air. She waited for the noise to come again, and when it didn’t, she climbed out of bed, crossed the cold wood of her bedroom floor in her bare feet, pulled on her boots and her thick woollen coat and set out to investigate. For a second or two, she considered waking her parents, but decided against it; days on the farm were long and tiring, and they needed their rest. And besides, Greta was almost twelve years old, and a country girl; she had run off countless stray dogs and foxes, and even the occasional wolf.
At the foot of the stairs she eased her father’s shotgun out of the umbrella stand that stood beside the heavy front door, took the battered black torch down from the shelf on the wall, then gripped the brass door handle and slowly, centimetre by centimetre, pulled it towards her. The door creaked once, ominously loudly, then settled, and slid open. A blast of cold air whistled through the gap between the door and its frame and Greta shivered, her skin breaking out in gooseflesh. She pulled her coat tighter round herself, and slipped out into the night.
On the doorstep she broke open her father’s gun and checked that it was loaded. She saw the bronze discs and red tubes of the cartridges lying in place, snapped the gun shut and looked around the wide farmyard that lay before the house. Snow covered every centimetre of the ground, shining silver beneath the light of the full moon that hung in the night sky above her head, light that illuminated a long streak of something dark. It ran across the yard, from the thick woods bordering the gravel track that led to the main road, to the wooden gate of the north field that stood beside the farmhouse. Greta stared at it, feeling fear crawl momentarily into her stomach before she pushed it away, then flicked on the torch and stepped forward.
She gasped as the beam fell across the streak. In the yellow light of the torch, it glistened a dark, shiny red. She could see steam rising from it, tendrils of pale mist spiralling up into the night sky, and she knew immediately what she was looking at.
Blood. A lot of blood. Freshly spilled too.
Fear rose through her, and this time she was unable to make it retreat. But she did not go back inside to wake her parents, even though she knew she should. She was her father’s daughter, stubborn and fiercely independent; she would not ask for help unless it was absolutely necessary, and she would rather die than admit there was anything that frightened her. So she stepped away from the door, her boots crunching the thick snow beneath her feet, and headed towards the north field.
As she approached it, the torch beam wavering unsteadily before her, she saw that the heavy wooden gate was standing open; the snow at its base was swirled into drifts and ridges, and smeared thickly with blood. The smell of the steaming liquid hit her nose as she leant in to look at the gatepost, and she retched. The heavy chain that was slung round the post every night by the last farmhand to leave was lying in the snow, its links bent and twisted open. As Greta shone the torch into the field, her heart beating rapidly beneath her narrow chest, she forced herself not to think about how much strength it would have taken to bend steel as though it was cardboard.
Her torch beam picked out a large shape on the far side of the field. She stepped through the gate, taking care not to stand in the cooling red liquid, and headed towards it. She was halfway across the field before her torch cast enough light for her to realise what she was looking at.
The cattle that grazed the north field were huddled together in its furthest corner, packed tightly together like sardines. Greta, who had been around livestock since she was old enough to stand, had never seen anything like it before. The animals were shifting constantly in the cold night air, taking half-steps backwards and forwards, their heads up, their eyes wide discs of white. As she approached, the herd let out a long, deep rumble of noise, and she stopped.
They’re warning me not to come any closer. Something has scared them half to death.
Greta turned away from the frightened cattle and followed her own footsteps back to the gate. She looked along the long smear of blood, to where it disappeared into the pitch-black of the woods. She was shaking now, partly from the cold, partly from fear, and she followed the trail of gore with short, hesitant steps. When she was three metres away from the treeline, her bravery failed her, and she stood, rooted to the spot, staring into the woods.
Then a growl, so deep and low that Greta felt it vibrate through the bones in her legs, sounded from somewhere in front of her, and her breath froze in her lungs. The shotgun fell softly to the snow at her feet, as she heard something move through the trees. Then two yellow eyes appeared in the darkness, floating high above her head, at least two metres from the ground. Slowly, they moved towards her, and a shape emerged from between the trees.
Standing in front of Greta was the biggest wolf she had ever seen.
It squatted in the darkness, its enormous head peering down at her, its mouth and snout soaked with crimson, its thick neck attached to a body the size of her father’s Land Rover. Its fur was greyish-green, and its flanks and back were horribly misshapen; ridges of bone rose and fell beneath the creature’s skin, its legs were crooked and bent, and a vast patchwork of scar tissue criss-crossed the animal’s hide, jagged white lines shining out from the fur in the light of the full moon. Behind the wolf’s bloodstained head something glistened, and Greta saw two angular shapes emerging from the skin, shining in the night air.
Metal, she thought, her mind reeling. It’s got metal sticking out of its neck.
The growl came again, accompanied by a blast of warm air and the coppery scent of blood. She gagged, staring helplessly up at the wolf, which was regarding her with a look that was fearsome, but also appeared curiously sad; the corners of its wide yellow eyes were turned down, its lips drawn back against its razor-sharp teeth in what looked like a grimace of pain.
You can’t outrun it. You can’t fight it. Your only chance is to make it realise you’re not a threat.
Greta took a deep breath, and looked into the wolf’s eyes.
“Hello,” she said, her voice trembling. “My name’s Greta.”
The wolf recoiled instantly, as though it had been stung by a hornet. It took half a step backwards, then threw back its head and let loose a deafening howl, an ear-splitting cry of misery and pain. Behind Greta, the light in her parents’ bedroom came on, and the sound of heavy boots on wooden stairs echoed across the farmyard. But Greta neither saw nor heard; she was staring, transfixed, at the monstrous creature in front of her. As the howl died away, the wolf opened its mouth again, and made a sound that Greta recognised. Her eyes widened, and she took an involuntary step towards the wolf, her arms rising before her in placation.
The roar of a shotgun thundered through the night air, and the snow at the wolf’s feet exploded. Greta shrieked as the wolf bolted into the woods, so quickly that she could have believed it had never been there at all. Then she saw the thick streak of blood where it had been standing, and realisation flooded through her. She heard shouted voices and running footsteps behind her, before her eyes rolled in her head and she crumpled towards the ground. Arriving at a flat sprint, Peter Schuler threw his shotgun aside, slid across the snow, shoved his hands under her back as she fell and wrapped his daughter in his arms.
In the kitchen at the rear of the farmhouse, Greta’s father sat at the battered wooden table that dominated the room. He was sipping a mug of thick black coffee that his wife had made him once she had finished putting their daughter back to bed. She was now watching him silently, leaning against the stove beneath the window, her expression unreadable.
Standing around the kitchen, equally silent, were three of the Schuler farmhands, whom Peter had roused from sleep when he returned to the house. They had come uncomplainingly, and were leaning against the walls, sipping coffees of their own, shotguns broken over their forearms, watching their employer struggling to control his temper.
Peter Schuler was full of a fury beyond anything he had ever known.
He was trying to rationalise the events of the night. Peter had spent his entire life on the farm he now owned, had worked it for his father until Hans Schuler had succumbed to the cancer that had eaten him away before his son’s eyes, had married his wife and raised his daughter there. As a result, he believed he understood animals, both domestic and wild, as well as anyone, and better than most. And he knew that was all the wolf was; a wild animal that had wandered into the Schulers’ territory, incapable of malice, or viciousness. But it had been standing over his daughter, his maddening, arrogant, beautiful daughter, standing over her with its teeth bared, its shadow swallowing her, and he had never wanted to kill another living thing as much as he did right now.
The wolf had scared Greta terribly. He had been carrying her back to the house, shouting for his wife to bring blankets as he did so, when she had suddenly stiffened in his arms, then screamed so loudly that he almost dropped her. When the scream had died away, she began to sob against his shoulder, her small body trembling. She was still shaking as his wife tucked her blankets tightly back round her, mumbling nonsense about the wolf being made of metal, insisting that it had spoken to her, that it had said “Help me” as she stood beneath its blood-soaked muzzle, waiting for it to tear her throat out.
“What do you want to do, boss?” It was Franck who asked, the farm’s head wrangler, a soft-spoken bear of a man. He was looking steadily at Greta’s father, waiting to be told what to do.
“Get your coats,” Peter replied, and a minute later the four men were marching across the farmyard, their guns slung over their shoulders.
Peter led them to the spot at the edge of the woods where the wolf had loomed over Greta, then took a deep breath and followed the trail of blood into the trees. Lars and Sebastian, brothers who had worked the Schuler farm since they were fourteen, walked steadily behind him, with Franck bringing up the rear.
The snow crunched beneath their heavy boots as they tracked the wolf through the forest. The animal was not hard to follow; it had left a trail of paw prints the size of dinner plates, and a long corridor of flattened bushes and broken branches that stood out in the yellow light of the men’s torches. Eventually, the forest widened into a clearing, and the men’s eyes widened as they entered it. The small, circular gap in the trees looked like the inside of an abattoir.
In the middle, strewn across the snowy forest floor, were the last identifiable remains of one of Peter Schuler’s cattle. A horn lay in a puddle of blood and offal, a hoof and a thick piece of the animal’s hide thrown to one side. Blood covered the ground, studded with steaming chunks of meat, through which the wolf had tracked its giant paws. The four men standing at the edge of the trees were hard country men, but the violence that had taken place in the clearing shook them to their cores.
“Shoot on sight,” said Peter Schuler, softly. The men swung their shotguns from their shoulders, racked them with trembling hands, then followed the enormous footprints deeper into the darkness of the forest.
An hour later, with dawn creeping above the horizon to the east, four shivering men emerged from the trees at the edge of the road that led south to Bremen. The tracks had continued in a straight line, until they finally stopped a metre in front of where the men were standing. They disappeared in a wide circle of disturbed snow that looked as though a group of men had been wrestling in it. The snow, and the frozen earth beneath it, had been churned and tossed and thrown in every direction. On the other side of the circle a new set of tracks led away from the circle, parallel to the road. The men stepped carefully round the disturbance, and looked down at the new trail.
“My God,” whispered Lars, and crossed himself.
Stretching away before them was a series of enormous human footprints.
“I don’t understand,” said Sebastian. “I don’t—”
“Quiet,” hissed Peter. “The Langers’ farm is just over that rise. Let’s move.”
The four men marched quickly alongside the footprints. After five minutes or so, the grey roof of the farmhouse where Kurt Langer, Peter Schuler’s oldest friend, lived with his family appeared above the top of the slope they were climbing, and Peter accelerated, urging his men to keep up with him.
I hope we’re not too late. Please don’t let us be too late.
They hurried over the rise, and Peter’s heart sank. Even from thirty metres away he could see the footprints leading through the front gate on to the Langers’ property, towards the farmhouse where the family would normally now be waking up. He shouted for his men to follow him, and took off running down the slope, skidding and sliding as his boots fought for purchase through the thick snow. He grabbed the gatepost, steadied himself and then paused, examining the ground.
There were two sets of footprints, running parallel to each other, in opposite directions. One led into the Langers’ yard, and the second, the heavy treads of winter boots, led back towards the road.
Too late, too late, too late.
Peter shoved the gate wide and lurched into the yard, heading towards the front door of the house, his shotgun at his shoulder. He was about to yell for the Langers, horribly sure that he would receive no reply, when he stopped again.
To his left, running between a low branch of the oak tree that stood at the edge of the farmyard and a brass hook inserted into the wall of the house, was a thick nylon washing line. Fluttering from it in the bright morning air were a number of heavy garments: plaid shirts, long johns, thermal socks and undershirts. But half the line was empty, and beneath it, scattered on the snowy ground, were a handful of wooden pegs. The first row of footprints ran beneath the line, then to the back step of the house. The second started there, a row of boot prints leading back towards the road.
A hand fell on Peter Schuler’s shoulder, and he jumped. But it was only Franck, his big, gentle face staring at Peter’s, his gun lowered at his side.
“You need to see this, boss,” said the head wrangler, jerking a thumb towards the road.
The four men gathered at the edge of the tarmac, looking down at their feet. The last of the prints were etched neatly into the snow, alongside the tracks of a set of heavy-duty winter tyres.
A truck. Four-wheel drive. Probably a pick-up, like the one in the barn at home.
The tracks formed a shallow semi-circle where the driver had brought his vehicle to a halt at the side of the road, before accelerating back on to the highway. There were no more footprints, in any direction.
“I’ll ring Karl,” said Lars. “He can bring the truck up here. We can follow it.”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he replied. “It’s gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone. Ring Karl, and tell him to come and pick us up. I’ll call Kurt later and tell him what happened. Let’s go home.”
An hour to the south, a battered red pick-up truck chugged steadily along the motorway. The driver, a round, red-faced man in a heavy woollen jacket and an ancient deerstalker hat, watched the road ahead of him, a short cigar clamped between his teeth. On the passenger seat beside him sat a plastic flask of coffee laced with cherry brandy, from which he was taking regular sips.
Behind him, in the truck’s flatbed, shivering beneath the pile of animal hides that the driver was taking south to market, his sleeping face a mask of contorted misery and confusion, lay Frankenstein’s monster.
11
THE BARE BONES
Jamie was about to open the door to his quarters when he felt the console on his belt beep three times, signalling a message that had been unread for more than thirty minutes.
His mind was reeling with everything he had just seen, everything he had just been told, and he was struggling to understand the implications of it.
I can’t believe I got to see that, he thought. I can’t believe Talbot let me. It’s amazing.
Jamie had turned off the beeper during the Zero Hour Task Force meeting, left it off during the unbelievable, mind-bending twenty minutes that followed it, twenty minutes that he knew he could never tell anyone about, not even Larissa, and had only just switched it back on. He pulled it free of its loop, swearing loudly in the empty corridor, and read the short line of text that had appeared on the screen.
G-17/OP_EXT_L2/LIVE_BRIEFING/BR2/1130
The Department 19 shorthand had become second nature.
The first set of letters and numbers was the designation of his squad, G-17, and the second told him that they had been given an external operation with a Level 2 priority. The third was self-explanatory, that there would be a live briefing rather than data supplied to them once they were already on the move, the fourth was the location of the briefing, in this case Briefing Room 2, and the final set of numbers were the time that the briefing would begin. Jamie checked his watch, and saw that it was 11:28. He swore, then ran back down the corridor towards the silver doors of the Level B lift.
On Level 0 he piled out of the lift and ran along the corridor that served as the level’s central thoroughfare. On one side, accessible by the heavy yellow and black striped doors that stood at regular intervals, was the huge hangar that served as the embarkation point for all Blacklight operations. On the opposite side of the corridor, filling the other half of the huge circular level, were the suites of offices and rooms that comprised the Department’s Communications and Surveillance Divisions.
The Ops Room, where Jamie had just been, sat in the middle of the corridor, and therefore at the centre of Level 0. Beyond it, along a series of semi-circular corridors, like the layers of an onion, stood offices, server farms and inventories, accessible by security-coded doors set into the long wall.
Jamie pressed his ID against the sensor beside one of the doors marked BRIEFING ROOMS, pulled it open and raced down the corridor. He skidded to a halt outside the door to Briefing Room 2 and walked through it, as calmly as he was able.
The room was a curved box, much like a classroom. At one end, to the right as Jamie entered, beneath a high-definition screen that filled most of the wall, stood a lectern, from where the briefings were given. Jamie looked immediately in its direction, and felt his heart sink.
Standing behind the lectern was Major Paul Turner.
Great, thought Jamie. That’s just great. He knows I was in the Zero Hour meeting, and he knows I can’t say so in front of the rest of them. Then a smile threatened to rise on his face. He doesn’t know where I went afterwards, though.
“Good of you to join us, Mr Carpenter,” said Turner, staring at him. “I hope we haven’t interrupted whatever you were doing. I’ve no doubt it was extremely important.”
You’ve no idea, thought Jamie. No idea at all.
There was a giggle from his left, and he felt his face flush with heat. He turned to see who had laughed; it had not been Kate or Larissa, and they were the only other people he was expecting to see in the room. But he immediately saw that he had assumed wrongly; five faces were staring at him, not two.
Sitting at one desk were Kate and Larissa, the former regarding him with a stern look, the latter with a mischievous little smile. Two desks away, a distance that was clearly deliberate, sat three more Operators, two of whom Jamie recognised immediately; the third was a girl in her early twenties whom he had heard a lot about, but had never met. She was smiling widely at him; it had clearly been her who had laughed.
The three Operators made up Operational Squad F-7, commanded by Lieutenant Jack Williams. Jamie’s friend smiled at him from across the room, and Jamie returned it with an uncertain one of his own.
What the hell are you three doing here? he wondered.
Sitting beside Jack, Shaun Turner’s face regarded Jamie with wide grey eyes that were as expressionless as his father’s. He was tall, taller than Jamie or Jack, and broad, the naturally powerful figure of a rugby player. He sat easily in his chair, waiting for Jamie to say something.
The girl, who Jamie knew from Jack’s fervent, fluttery descriptions was called Angela Darcy, was still smiling at him, and as he looked at her, actually looked at her, he was struck by how remarkably attractive she was. Her blonde hair was darker than Kate’s, almost a golden colour, and her face was sharp and angular, drawn in straight lines by a hugely talented artist. He knew from Jack that she had been an SIS agent, recruited out of Oxford in her first year, and had served with distinction in some of the most unstable and dangerous backwaters of the globe. She apparently spoke at least six languages, and was an expert in the art of wetwork – assassinations and state-sanctioned murders carried out at such close range that it was impossible to avoid being covered with the blood of the target.
Jamie was pretty sure that Jack was at least a little bit in love with her; he was absolutely sure that he was scared of her. But her smile was wide, and friendly, and Jamie was glad it was her laughter that had made him blush; he was sure that her smile would have had the same effect, and would have been a lot more difficult to explain to Larissa.
Behind him, someone cleared their throat, and he realised he hadn’t answered Major Turner. He looked back to the front of the room, and saw the former SAS officer staring at him with an unnervingly patient expression.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he lied. “Something came up on the lower levels. It won’t happen again, sir.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” replied Turner. “But I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. Sit down, Carpenter.”
Jamie walked sheepishly over to the table where Larissa and Kate were sitting, pulled a chair out and flopped into it between them. As Paul Turner set the pages of his briefing on the lectern, Jamie cast a glance at Angela, who favoured him with a sympathetic smile. He smiled back, then returned his attention to the front of the room, his blood boiling at the unfairness of it all.
“Operators,” said Major Turner. “This is OPERATION: PROMISED LAND, a two-squad reconnaissance and elimination mission. It’s relatively straightforward, but please try and concentrate. I’d rather not have to keep stopping to answer stupid questions. Clear? Good.”
Turner pressed a button on the portable console in his hand, and the wall screen above his head burst into life. It showed a satellite image of a large container ship; the tiny swells of white water at her aft showed the Operators that the ship was in motion.
“This,” continued Turner, “is the Aristeia. She’s a Panamax-class freighter, two hundred and twenty-eight metres long, thirty-two metres wide, able to carry three thousand standard freight containers. She’s Greek-built, flying the Bahamian flag.”
“If she can carry three thousand containers,” said Angela, “why does it look like she’s carrying about fifty?”
Turner favoured her with what passed for a smile, and tapped his console. The image magnified until the ship filled the screen.
“You’re correct,” he said. “She’s carrying sixty-eight containers on a deck built for forty-four times that many. She departed from Shanghai eighteen days ago; those containers would need to be filled with diamonds to cover the cost of the fuel it’s taken to get her where she is now.”
“Where’s that?” asked Larissa.
“About eighty miles off the north-east coast,” replied Turner. “Her heading puts her destination as the entrance to the River Tyne, where she’ll arrive in roughly seven hours.”
“What does this have to do with us?” asked Shaun Turner.
“There has been only a single radio contact with the Aristeia since she left port,” replied Major Turner. “When she passed through the Suez Canal. Before and since, nothing. She spent the last week making her way through the Mediterranean, and all attempts to contact her, by the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese, have failed.”
“Pirates?” asked Kate.
Angela snorted, and Larissa fired a stare full of razor blades in her direction.
“No,” replied Major Turner. “Or at least, we don’t think so. There’s never been an instance of a pirated vessel being taken voluntarily through the Med, or through the Canal. If she’d been boarded, we’d expect the pirates to have taken her to the coast of Somalia, where they could moor her and make their demands. This ship had to go through Somali waters to get to Suez.”
“Terrorists?” suggested Jack Williams. “Could it be carrying a bomb?”
“Satellite spectro-analysis says not. Also, why would you use a ship like this to make an attack? They’d know we could sink her in the middle of the ocean. Cargo freighters are not renowned for their manoeuvrability.”
“So what is it then?” asked Jamie, sharply. He was getting bored with playing guessing games.
Paul Turner gave him a look full of warning, then continued.
“The Surveillance Division monitored the attempts to contact her, and when she entered UK waters, we put a satellite over her. Here’s the infrared.”
The image on the screen blurred out, then sharpened into a bright rainbow of colours. The frigid water surrounding the ship was a blue so dark it was almost black, the hull and deck of the Aristeia a pale shade of aquamarine. A thick bloom of red glowed at the rear of the ship, where the huge diesel engines were producing the power that pushed the enormous freighter through the water. The rectangular containers on the ship’s cargo deck glowed a pale orange, and were studded with small blobs of yellow which, the watching Operators realised, were moving around inside the boxes.
“Jesus,” said Jack Williams. “There must be two hundred people in those containers.”
“Two hundred and twenty-seven,” confirmed Major Turner. “Look at the bridge.”
The huge crescent-shaped bridge, which towered almost four storeys above the surface of the deck, was pale yellow. The heat was emanating from seven points of light that were almost white, such was the heat they were giving out.
“Vamps,” said Shaun Turner, matter-of-factly. “Seven vamps, and two hundred humans. What the hell is this ship?”
“It’s not a ship,” said Angela. “It’s a prison. A floating prison.”
“What do you mean?” asked Larissa, frowning. “What are they being imprisoned for?”
“So they can be delivered to whoever paid for them,” said Angela. “I’ve seen it before, but never on this scale. It’s like the snakehead gangs bringing workers out of the Far East. They get them as far as the Med, then use trucks the rest of the way. Someone is waiting for this ship in the north, I can guarantee you. Someone waiting for the cargo they ordered.”
Larissa looked at Paul Turner, who nodded.
“Operator Darcy is correct,” he said. “Our understanding is that the men and women on this ship are to be delivered into vampire hands as soon as the ship docks. What is planned for them after that, we don’t know. But given that the oldest vampire in the world, who is currently unaccounted for, is most likely in a condition that requires a regular supply of blood, we thought it might be worth looking into. Don’t you agree?”
“You think those people are being shipped to wherever Valeri and Dracula are hiding?” asked Kate.
“We think it’s possible.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked Jamie, his voice firm.
Larissa looked over at him, saw the set of his jaw, the calm in his blue eyes, and felt her stomach flip. She was incredibly proud of him, and as attracted to him in that moment as she had ever been. A low growl emerged from her throat, barely audible to anyone except Jamie, who was sitting beside her. He turned to her, and a flicker of red spilled into the corners of her eyes, so quickly that only he could have possibly seen it. He grinned; he knew very well what it meant.
Maybe we won’t have to leave right away, he thought, hopefully. Maybe we’ll get to wait until after dark.
The thought of the long hours of remaining daylight, and what they might contain, widened his grin. He dragged his gaze away from Larissa, and tried to focus once more on Paul Turner’s briefing.
“You leave immediately,” said the Major, and Jamie’s heart sank. “We surveyed the area, and the only place anyone could illegally dock a ship that size is the old Swan Hunter shipyard at Wallsend. We’re having the surrounding yards closed as we speak, and the coastguard has been given orders to allow the ship to enter the river. I want you to take up surveillance positions before nightfall, then intercept the ship when it docks. The first priority is to find out where these people were being taken, and why. The second is the captives themselves. The new SOP does not apply on this operation. Is that understood?”
We don’t have to capture the vamps, realised Jamie, and felt a savage wave of pleasure flood through him. We can destroy them.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, and a second later Jack Williams said the same.
“Good,” said Major Turner. “Now. There are more than two hundred men and women on that ship, all of whom are going to be weak, and probably terrified. So you’re going to need to manage the situation; if they panic, which they probably will, if they start running across your lines of fire, make them get down. The collateral loss limit for this mission is nine. Is that clear?”
“It’s not clear to me,” said Jamie, although he had a horrible idea that it was.
I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I really do.
“It means we don’t want to see more than nine civilians die on this Operation. That’s the acceptable level of loss.”
“My squad doesn’t deal in acceptable losses,” said Jack Williams, his voice low and steady.
“Mine neither,” said Jamie, instantly.
“Really?” asked Major Turner, his expression glacial. “Because I do. And so does Admiral Seward. And for this mission, yours is nine. Understood?”
“I don’t think—”
“Shut up!” shouted Major Turner, and the room immediately fell silent. He glared round at each of the six men and women in turn. “This is a Level 2 mission that Intelligence suggests may be directly related to this Department’s highest priority. You don’t like talking about collateral losses, fine, but you will bear them in mind when you’re out in the field. Because they can be the difference between a medal and six months on the inactive roster, especially on a mission like this, a mission that I expect you to be able to accomplish, even with only two squads.”
“Why are you sending two squads?” asked Shaun Turner, mildly. “We normally work alone. Sir.”
The young Operator’s words dripped with insolence, but his father favoured him with a look full of such icy threat that he quickly dropped his gaze. Unseen by anyone else in the room, Kate’s cheeks flushed momentarily as she watched Shaun buckle under his father’s stare.
“If it was possible to do so,” said Major Turner, “we’d be sending four squads on this operation. If I had three at my disposal, I’d be sending three. But I don’t; I have two. You two. So that’s why you’re both going. Because we’re down to the bare bones here.”
“Seven vamps, though?” said Jack Williams. “It doesn’t need six of us to handle seven of them.”
“I don’t care if it’s one newly-turned vampire in the middle of an open field, Lieutenant Williams. You have your orders, you have your briefing, the surveillance data has been transferred to your consoles and your transport, and I am deeply bored of talking to all of you. Dismissed.”
For a moment, no one moved, then Turner walked swiftly round the podium and took two long strides into the middle of the room.
“I said, dismissed,” he said, and this time they all moved, quickly.
Six and a half hours later Operational Squads F-7 and G-17 huddled together in the shadow of a grey factory building on the banks of the River Tyne.
The towering cranes that had once been such a feature of the skyline of this part of the world were gone, dismantled and sold to an Indian shipyard two years earlier. The huge yard, where thousands of men had laboured to build the legendary RMS Mauretania in the first years of the twentieth century, where their grandsons had built the Royal Navy’s flagship, HMS Ark Royal, seven decades later, was silent. The floating dock, with its four wide berths, sat open to the lapping water of the Tyne; it was already becoming overgrown, and was slowly filling up with discarded bottles and cans, left by the teenagers who prowled its wide-open space after dark.
The factories that had once manufactured engine parts and hull panels were empty, their heavy machines sold to shipyards around the world that were still enjoying better times. They were coated in graffiti, and beginning to rust at their corners. The roads that ran between them, which had once hummed with the accumulated sound of thousands of men’s voices when the evening whistle blew, were covered in a spider’s web of cracks and holes; tangles of weeds emerged from these gaps, as though the earth was already beginning to reclaim land that had once been home to the very best of human ingenuity and innovation.
A thick fog was rolling down the Tyne from the North Sea; as Jamie looked out across the desolate, creaking yard, he could not see the far bank of the river. The grey tendrils were drifting up to the edges of the concrete dock below them, but were not, as yet, cresting them and moving on to the land.
“This is going to be no fun at all if that fog breaks over the dock,” he said. “Seven vamps may as well be seventy if we can’t see them.”
Jack Williams nodded. The six Operators had finished their reconnaissance of the old shipyard, and concluded it was sufficiently isolated for their purposes. It was far from secure, however; there was a main thoroughfare, Hadrian Road, less than two hundred metres to the north, and the fences that surrounded the yard were in significant disrepair. There was no time to plug the holes and tighten the net round the yard; instead, the plan was to never allow the vampires to get more than a few metres from their ship.
“I’ll take Kate and Larissa down there,” Jamie continued, pointing to a series of rusting metal containers that stood at the edge of the concrete dock, fifteen metres from the river’s edge. “Jack, why don’t you take your squad over there, behind that wall? That way they’ll have to come between us, and we can ambush them from both sides. OK?”
He turned away, ready to jog towards the position he had just described, when Larissa grabbed his arm, and he turned back. The three members of Squad F-7 were not moving, and Jack Williams was staring at him with a look of enormous apology on his open, friendly face.
“What’s the problem?” asked Jamie.
“I take my orders from Jack,” said Shaun Turner, a belligerent look on his face. “Not from you. Nothing personal.”
Temper flared in Jamie’s chest.
It bloody well sounds like it’s something personal, he thought. Does he just naturally hate me, like his dad does?
“Really?” asked Kate, her voice fierce. “You really think now is the time for this petty crap?”
Shaun’s face flushed, but he didn’t look away.
“Jack outranks Jamie,” said Angela, who had the decency to sound embarrassed as she spoke. “In terms of experience. We think he should take point.”
Larissa snarled, and her eyes flickered red. “This is complete bull—”
“Angela’s right,” interrupted Jamie. “Tell us what you want us to do, Jack.”
Larissa looked at him, her face pained on his behalf, but he shot her a tiny smile, pleading with her not to make a big deal out of what was happening. She returned it, and his heart swelled with fierce affection for the vampire girl.
Jack Williams gave him a brief glance, full of gratitude. “Positions as Jamie described,” he said. “Remember that we need at least one vamp alive for questioning. At least one. The new SOP doesn’t apply, which I’m sure we’re all very happy about, but let’s not get carried away. Dead vampires aren’t going to tell us where Dracula is. Let’s move.”
The six dark figures were crouched, ready to scuttle-run to their posts, when the air around them changed; it seemed thicker, as though something huge was altering the pressure. At the same moment, the six Operators realised they could hear something too: a steady thud-thud-thud, and the low rush of breaking water. They looked up the river, into the thick, swirling fog, as the vast, curved prow of the Aristeia burst into view, blinding them with its running lights, its enormous control tower looming far above them. The huge ship was slowing rapidly, slicing through the river parallel to the long concrete dock.
“Move! Now!” hissed Jack, and the six Operators scattered, hunkering low to the ground as they sprinted to the positions that Jamie had suggested. Then Larissa’s head was up, turned to the north, her supernatural hearing picking something up in the dark, sodden night air.
“What is it?” asked Jamie. He was standing with his back to the corner of the container nearest the dock, peering out at the incoming ship. Its size was boggling his mind; the deck was a football-field long, the hull a daunting, vertical wall of steel, the control tower the size of a large office building. It approached with eerie quiet; he could hear no voices, no sounds of any activity on the decks, or below them, just the steady thud of the engines.
“Trucks,” replied Larissa, then turned to look at him. “Three trucks inside the gate, heading this way.”
“Any idea what’s inside them?” asked Jamie.
Larissa nodded.
“Vampires,” she replied. “Lots and lots of vampires.”
12
INSIDE THE VOID
JEREMY’S 24HR TRANSPORT CAFÉ, NORTH OF KÖLN, GERMANY SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER
Frankenstein was jolted awake as the truck shuddered to a halt. He opened his eyes, and looked over at Andreas, the skinny, speed-addicted kid who had given him a lift out of Dortmund as the sun set on the previous day.
“This is as far as I go,” said Andreas. He twitched constantly, gnawing at his fingernails until they bled, but he had shared a flask of soup and some black bread with Frankenstein when they had stopped for petrol, and for that, as well as the lift, the monster was grateful.
“That’s fine,” said Frankenstein. “Thanks for bringing me this far.”
He unwrapped a grey-green hand from the moth-eaten blanket the kind lady at the homeless shelter had given him, and extended it towards Andreas, who shook it. Then he wrapped the blanket tightly round himself, grabbed the plastic bag that contained everything he owned and stepped out into the freezing night.
Frankenstein had woken up four weeks earlier, in the bowels of a fishing boat, without the slightest idea of who he was. When the ship’s captain, a weathered, salt-encrusted old man called Jens, had asked him his name, he had not been able to answer. Subsequent questions – where he lived, his family and friends, and how he had come to be floating adrift in the North Sea with the little finger of his left hand missing and a wound to his neck that should have killed him – were met with the same response: a panicked look of utter confusion. He had lain on the floor of the cabin, as he was too tall to fit into any of the bunks, and tried to remember something, anything, a place he had been, a conversation he had had, a person he had met, but there was a yawning void in the centre of his mind where his memory should have been.
He was weak from the hypothermia that had nearly killed him, that would have killed him had the crew of the Furchtlos not found him tangled in their nets as they drew in the first catch of their trip. The net, studded with orange buoys at regular intervals, had kept him afloat, and was the reason he had not drowned. His Department 19 uniform, made of heat-regulating material that acted in the same way as a wetsuit, was the reason he had not succumbed to the punishing cold of the water; without it the fishermen would have hauled in a corpse with their catch.
By talking with the crew as they ate their vast meals of meat and potatoes, he discovered that he spoke German, English, French and Russian, although he had no memory of having been to the countries where he was told these languages had come from. He talked for a long time with Hans, the boat’s first mate, a veteran of more than forty years’ fishing, and as he listened to the old man’s stories, of places he had been and women he had known, of the adventures of the man’s youth, occasionally Frankenstein had felt something tighten in his mind, as though he had almost been able to feel the edge of something solid, before it slipped away through his fingers.
The crew had sent him on his way when they reached port, with a jumper and a pair of overalls that were far too small for his giant frame. But he appreciated the men’s kindness, and their lack of suspicion; he was half-expecting to see the police and the coastguard waiting for him when the ship steamed into Cuxhaven harbour. But the only people on the dock to greet the boat were the crew’s wives and girlfriends, relieved to see their men home safely once more. The crew, who were fishermen born and raised, and had seen a lifetime of strange things at sea, had clearly decided that the huge grey-green man, whom they had hauled from the water as though he was nothing more than a grossly swollen cod, was none of their business.
Frankenstein had walked off the dock with no idea where he was, beyond the rudimentary picture of European geography that Hans had described to him, and no idea where he might go to begin the process of attempting to piece together who he was.
He was completely lost.
As night fell, and the cold wind drew in around him, carrying heavy flakes of snow with it, he had found a group of homeless men and women beneath a bridge on the outskirts of Cuxhaven. They had not welcomed him, nor offered to share their small amount of food, but they had not driven him away either, and had eventually allowed him to huddle round their brazier, and keep the worst of the cold from his bones. The following day he had headed south, away from the sea; he reached the tiny farming hamlet of Gudendorf as night fell, and the full moon rose above him, sickly yellow and swollen in the clear sky.
Suddenly a bolt of agony had burst through his body, driving him to his knees. It felt as though his skin was on fire, as though his bones had been replaced by molten metal, and he screamed up at the moon, as his body began to break. With sickening, agonising crunches, his bones snapped and reset in new shapes. Blood boiled in his veins as thick grey hair sprouted from his skin before his eyes, which had turned a deep, gleaming yellow. His face stretched and lengthened, his teeth bursting from his gums and sharpening into razors, as he fell on to all fours, no longer able to scream; what came from his gaping mouth was a deafening, high-pitched howl.
As the moon shimmered above him and the transformation neared completion, he began to run, shambling forward on four unsteady, newborn legs, then faster and faster, as the last vestiges of his rational self succumbed to the animal that roared in his blood, until he was racing through the dense, snowy forest, towards a distant light and a plume of grey chimney smoke, towards the thick smell of animal fear that drifted through the frozen trees.
The following morning, for the second time in barely a week, Frankenstein had woken up in a strange place, with no memory of how he had arrived there, or what he had done; compounding the strangeness this time was the fact that he was naked, and lying beside a main road.
Mercifully, the road was deserted, as dawn was barely scratching the sky in the east. But even as he looked around in an attempt to get his bearings, the cold of the German winter bit at his naked skin, and he knew he needed to find shelter, quickly. The patch of ground where he had woken up was a circle of damp green grass, the snow thawed away, as though he had been emitting tremendous heat while he slept. He was coated in something sticky, and when he rubbed his hands across his face, they came away streaked with red.
Frankenstein reeled, but then the wind blew hard across him again, and he tried to put the red substance from his mind and concentrate on staying alive. He began to stagger alongside the road, his breath clouding in front of him, towards a gentle slope in the terrain, above which smoke was rising in lazy loops.
Beyond the rise lay a farmhouse, facing away from the road and out over frozen fields and the forest beyond. Frankenstein tried to open the small gate, but his fingers were so cold that they refused to grip; he half-climbed, half-fell over it, his body screaming in pain as he landed in the hard, freezing snow. He staggered towards the house, prepared to risk the likely wrath of whoever it belonged to, knowing that he had to get out of the cold, had to or else he would surely die, when he saw a long washing line strung between the house and a tree that rose from the middle of the garden’s small lawn. He made for it, his feet numb and his grey-green skin now a virulent shade of purple, and hauled clothes down from the line, scattering the pegs on the ground.
Once he was dressed, Frankenstein thumbed a lift in the back of a pick-up truck, burying himself deep beneath a pile of sheepskins, which had carried him as far south as Dortmund. He had spent nearly two weeks in a homeless shelter on Kleppingstraße, only being forced to leave when a kind, nervous woman named Magda had started to take a little too much of a friendly interest in him.
Frankenstein still didn’t know who he was, but he knew that nothing good would have come from encouraging her affection. And so he had left, in the middle of the night, and resumed his journey, following the cargo routes through Germany, looking for something, anything, that might unlock his memory.
Frankenstein watched as Andreas slowly wheeled his truck round, and headed out on to the northbound lane of the road. Behind him were row after row of articulated lorries; huge rigs, eighteen and twenty-two wheeled, their trailers towering above him in the darkness of the parking area. When Andreas’s pick-up had been absorbed into the stream of red lights on the motorway, he made his way through the labyrinth of vehicles towards the diner that lay beyond the filling station.
Jeremy’s was a no-frills kind of place; a simple, greasy, one-storey building, in which Jeremy and his wife Marta sold heaped platefuls of cheap, starchy food to the endless stream of lorry drivers making their way south, to Paris, to Bordeaux, to Spain and Portugal beyond. Most were wired on coffee or amphetamines, and wanted nothing more than something hot to line their stomachs; it was these low expectations that Jeremy and Marta were experts in accommodating.
Frankenstein was not interested in the food, or even the temporary respite from the cold that sitting in one of the café’s linoleum booths would provide. He was only interested in finding a way of continuing his journey, of continuing south. He had no money to offer any of the drivers, and no goods to barter: no drugs, or alcohol, or pornography. There was always a chance that he might find a driver who craved human companionship, who was quietly going crazy at the isolation of being on the road, of the disembodied voices that floated into his cab via CB radio. But it was unlikely; the men who lived this nomadic life did so largely because they wanted as little to do with other human beings as possible.
“Are you a thief?”
The voice was soft, and lilted sweetly on the night air. It seemed to contain no accusation, only curiosity. Frankenstein turned to see the owner of it standing in the shadows between two of the enormous lorries.
It was a little girl, a tiny thing of no more than eight. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, thick, sensible work boots and was holding a small model of a truck in her hand; she was every inch a driver’s daughter. She was frowning at him, staring up at his huge frame, her forehead furrowed.
“I’m not a thief,” Frankenstein replied, lowering his voice. “Are you?”
The little girl smiled, involuntarily, at such a naughty idea, then remembered herself, and frowned again.
“Of course I’m not,” she said, firmly. “This is my daddy’s lorry.” She reached out and touched the wheel of the truck she was standing beside; it was taller than her.
“Where is your daddy?” asked Frankenstein. “You shouldn’t be out here on your own. It’s cold.”
The little girl pointed to Jeremy’s transport café.
“Daddy’s playing cards,” she said. “The clock said he had to stop driving, but he’s not tired.”
“Does he know you’re out here on your own?”
“No,” she replied, proudly. “I sneaked out. No one saw me.”
“You shouldn’t do that. It’s dangerous.”
“Why?” she asked. “Aren’t I safe with you?”
Frankenstein looked down at the tiny figure beside the wheel.
“You’re safe,” he said. “But we should still get you back to your daddy. Come on.”
He held out a huge, mottled hand, and the little girl skipped forward and took it. She smiled up at him as he began to lead her towards the café.
“What’s your name?” she asked, as he stopped at the edge of the parking area, checking that nothing was about to pull up to the fuel pumps.
“Klaus,” he said, leading her forward across the brightly lit forecourt.
“That’s a nice name.”
“Thank you.”
“My daddy’s name is Michael.”
“What about yours? What’s your name?”
“My name is Lene. Lene Neumann.”
“That’s a pretty name,” said Frankenstein.
“You’re nice,” replied Lene, smiling up at the monster that was holding her hand. “I like you. Are you going south? I bet my daddy will give you a lift with us.”
Frankenstein was about to reply when an almighty crash rang out above the noise of the idling engines. He looked at the truck stop, and saw a commotion in the small diner, before the screen door slammed open, banging with a noise like a gunshot against its metal frame.
A man was silhouetted against the fluorescent lighting of the transport café. He was short, and heavy-set, with a baseball cap perched on the top of his round head.
“Lene!” the man bellowed. “Lene! Where are you, sweetheart? Lene!”
The man leapt down from the doorway, and ran across the forecourt in their direction. He would see them as soon as he reached the shade of the fuel station’s canopy. Behind him, a cluster of men and women followed him out of the diner, all calling Lene’s name.
“That’s my daddy!” exclaimed Lene. “He’s looking for me! I bet we can go when he finds us!”
A sinking feeling settled into Frankenstein’s chest, and as he looked down at the little girl’s hand wrapped tightly in his own, everything seemed to slow down. He saw the rotund figure of Lene’s dad pass under the canopy and out of the blinding spotlights that illuminated the entrance and exit ramps. The man’s face was ghostly pale, his eyes wide, his mouth a trembling O of panic. The men who were following him across the forecourt were all drivers, some of them carrying wrenches and crowbars. Frankenstein looked again at his hand, and Lene’s hand, and realised what was going to happen, realised it was too late to do anything about it.
“Daddy!” cried Lene, and the group of running men bore to their left, adjusting their course towards the sound of the little girl’s voice, like a flock of birds in flight. Lene’s father skidded to a halt in front of them, and took in the scene he found before him.
“Lene,” he said, gasping for breath. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“Don’t be silly, Daddy,” his daughter smiled. “This is my friend, Klaus.”
The rest of the men drew up behind Lene’s father, weapons in their hands and looks of anger on their faces.
“He’s your friend?” asked Michael Neumann. “That’s nice, sweetheart. But you come over here next to me now, all right? Come on.”
Frankenstein let go of Lene’s hand; she ran happily over to her father, and hugged his leg. Her father stroked her hair, his gaze never leaving Frankenstein, his eyes like burning coals.
“You shouldn’t sneak off like that,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “How many times have I told you? It scares me when I don’t know where you are. You don’t want to scare me, do you?”
Lene looked up at her father, an expression of terrible worry on her small face.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I won’t do it again, I promise.”
“It’s all right,” he replied, still staring at Frankenstein. “I want you to go with Angela and wait inside, OK? Daddy will be there in a minute, and then we can go. All right?”
Lene nodded. A teenage girl wearing a white waitress uniform stepped forward, looking at the monster with obvious disgust, and took Lene’s hand. The little girl waved at Frankenstein as she was led away. He raised his hand to wave back.
When the door of the diner clanged shut a second time, the group of lorry drivers stepped slowly towards Frankenstein, who found himself backing away down the narrow space between two rigs.
“What were you doing with my little girl, mister?” asked Michael Neumann, his voice trembling with anger. “What the hell do you think you were doing?”
Frankenstein knew that nothing he could say would change what was about to happen, but he tried anyway.
“I was bringing her back to you,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “She was hiding from you, and I told her it wasn’t safe. I was bringing her back.”
“He’s lying, Michael,” said one of the other drivers, a huge man in a leather jacket that was creaking at the seams. “I’d bet my last cent on it. He knows he’s caught.”
“I’m telling the truth,” said Frankenstein. “She told me you were playing cards and she sneaked out. She saw me next to your truck and asked me if I was a thief. I’m not lying.”
“What were you going to do to my daughter?” asked Lene’s father, his voice little more than a whisper. “What were you going to do if we hadn’t stopped you?”
You didn’t stop me, thought Frankenstein, anger spilling through him. If I was the kind of person you think I am, I’d be twenty miles down the road with your daughter and you’d never see her again. Because you were playing cards instead of watching her. Because you—
The thought was driven from his mind as a crowbar crashed down on the back of his neck, sending him to his knees. One of the drivers had crept round the back of the rig that Frankenstein had been retreating along; now he stood over the fallen giant with the bar in his hand, bellowing.
“He’s down, boys!” the man roared. “Let’s show him what we do to his kind!”
The men surged forward, their weapons raised, Michael Neumann in the lead. Rage exploded through Frankenstein; he erupted to his feet, his enormous frame jet black in the shadows between the trucks, and grabbed one of the drivers by the neck. The man’s roar died as his throat was constricted by the monster’s huge hand, and then he was jerked off his feet and into the air, as Frankenstein threw him against the side of one of the trailers with all his might. The man crashed into the thin metal, leaving a huge dent, then slid to the ground, blood spraying from his head.
The rest of the men skidded to a halt, their eyes wide. This was not how it was meant to go; they were supposed to teach the stranger a lesson, and leave him on the ground while they went back inside and finished their game.
“Come on!” shouted Michael, his voice faltering. He ran forward, a torque wrench raised, but then the enormous shadow of Frankenstein engulfed him, and he stopped. He stared up into the terrifying face of the monster, and his courage deserted him, along with the men who had accompanied him; they fled back towards the café, shouting for someone to call the police as they did so.
Frankenstein reached out and took the wrench from the man’s hand. Lene’s father offered no resistance; he was transfixed by the sight of the giant man standing over him.
Frankenstein lowered his head until it was level with the man’s. Breath rushed out of his mouth and nostrils in huge white clouds, and blood trickled over his shoulder from where the crowbar had split the skin of his neck.
“Next time,” he said, his voice like ice, “pay more attention to your daughter than to your cards. Do you hear me?”
Michael Neumann nodded, shaking.
“Good,” said Frankenstein, and dropped the wrench. It clattered to the ground at Michael’s feet, beside the unconscious shape of the man who had been thrown against the trailer. Michael turned and ran, without looking back.
Frankenstein prowled the edge of the parking area, looking for a way out.
His heart was pounding, his stomach churning at the memory of the sound the man had made when he crashed into the side of the truck, and at the ease with which he had inflicted the violence. He had just attacked, on instinct, without thinking.
It had felt so normal.
Once their fear subsides, they will call the authorities, he thought. And it won’t matter that they attacked an innocent man; when they see me, it won’t matter at all.
He reached the end of one of the long lines of trucks, and suddenly found himself bathed in light. The last rig on the stand, an enormous thirty-wheeler, was covered in hundreds of bulbs of different colours, like a vast Christmas tree laid upon fifteen pairs of wheels. Frankenstein looked up at the cab, and something opened up in his mind.
Above the wide windscreen was a dot matrix display, like the ones that displayed the destinations on the fronts of buses. This one displayed only a single word.
PARIS
A nauseating tangle of memories burst through the monster’s head, images and voices, feelings and places he couldn’t identify. But he understood that the word was familiar, the first thing he had found that was.
Movement in the cab caught his eye, and he ducked low beside the truck’s wide radiator as the driver settled himself behind his steering wheel. A moment later Frankenstein’s whole body vibrated as the huge diesel engine roared into life.
Now. You need to move now.
Still crouching, he ran around to the side of the rig. There was no time to break into the trailer; the truck would be moving before he could even get the locks open. He ran past the huge tyres of the cab until he reached the trailer’s frame. Beneath the container, lying on steel cross members, were three large storage pods, most likely for spare parts and tools. The space between them was a coffin-shaped gap, below the trailer’s container and a metre and a half above the tarmac of the road.
With no time left, Frankenstein dived into the gap, landing hard on the cross members, which were arranged in an X shape. He hauled himself into the space, and found that the bars were close enough together to support his weight. He wedged himself hard against the round edge of one of the storage pods and braced his legs against a second. Diesel fumes filled his nostrils as the driver put the truck into gear and resumed his journey south, to Paris.
13
HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE
“Incoming,” said Jamie. He spoke into the microphone built into the side of his helmet, which linked him to the other five Operators on the Operational frequency. “Heads up, Jack.”
“How do you know?” asked Jack, his voice sounding directly in Jamie’s ear.
“Larissa,” replied Jamie. It was all that needed to be said; the vampire girl’s senses were hundreds of times more sensitive than those of a normal human, and she had heard the trucks entering the shipyard long before the rest of the squad would have been able to.
Jack swore. “How long?” he asked.
“Less than a minute,” answered Larissa. “Three trucks, I don’t know how many vampires. At least ten.”
“Ready One,” said Jack. “Nobody moves until I give the go, clear?”
Squad G-17 immediately lowered their visors, pulling their T-Bones from their holsters. Ready One was the code for imminent contact with the supernatural; it meant that the use of force was authorised.
Four heavy thuds sounded from the edge of the dock, and Jamie craned round the corner of the container to see what had made them. Thick ropes were lying on the ground, thrown from the deck of the towering freighter. He looked up at the high steel wall, and saw a flash of movement through the fog, a dark shape disappearing into the gloom. Then the rumble of engines began to shake the ground beneath their feet, and three black trucks appeared from the north.
They drove in single file, approaching slowly along the crumbling central road of the shipyard. The Operators, concealed in the deep shadows cast by the containers and the high concrete wall, watched them as they passed. Their paint was peeling, and the trucks were coated in dirt and dust. But the engines purred as they made their way towards the ship, and Jamie saw that the tyres were new, the walls black, the manufacturer’s logos still bright white. He could not see anyone inside the vehicles; the windows were smeared with grime, and the cabs were high above his low vantage point, making the angle impossible.
He watched the trucks pull to a halt in a line near the edge of the dock, then waited, his breath held tight in his lungs, as the door of the first cab creaked open, and a figure emerged.
The fog drifted lazily round its feet as it made its way to the back of the truck, and began to unlock the rear doors. Behind Jamie, somewhere back towards the main road, something clattered; an animal most likely, skittering across the concrete. The figure’s head instantly flashed round, and Jamie saw the glowing red coals of its eyes.
For a long moment all was still, then the vampire, a man who looked to be in his late thirties so far as Jamie could tell in the gathering darkness, turned back to his task. Seconds later the lock was undone and cast aside, and doors were pulled open, exposing a square of jet black emptiness. Then movement filled the space, as a crowd of vampires piled out of the truck and on to the dock.
They gathered at the back of the vehicle, laughing and shouting, shoving each other with playful familiarity as the vampires who had driven the other two trucks joined them. Several lit cigarettes, and then they got down to business; eight of them went to the ropes, tied them on to huge metal mooring hooks, and began to pull the freighter tight alongside the dock, a display of casually superhuman strength. From somewhere on the hull there came a shout of greeting, which was returned by the vampires as they hauled at the thick lines.
Two of the vampires went to the other trucks and opened their rear doors, so all three vehicles sat open to the night. The first vampire who had emerged oversaw the activity, a cigarette clamped between his teeth; those without specific jobs milled around at the edge of the river, waiting for the ship to be pulled into position.
“I count fourteen,” whispered Jack Williams.
“Me too,” replied Jamie. “Plus seven on the boat. Twenty-one of them.”
“Hold positions,” said Jack. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”
From somewhere up on the high deck there came the sound of a metal door creaking open. Seconds later the seven vampires that they had seen as blobs of bright white heat on the infrared satellite image appeared at the railing at the edge of the deck, and began to shout greetings and insults at the vampires waiting below, their eyes glowing red as they traded friendly barbs and jibes with their welcoming party. This continued for a couple of minutes until the vampire who had opened up the first truck, who was clearly in charge of things, lit another cigarette and told them all to shut up. With a few snarls and hisses, the vampires did as they were told.
“Let’s get this done!” the foreman shouted. “There’ll be time enough for jokes later. Open up the containers; let’s have a look at what you brought us.”
The vampires on the ship disappeared from the railing and got to work, assisted by a number of the greeting party who flew up on to the deck to lend a hand. Another vampire flew easily up on to the freighter, and hauled down a long folding gangway, which met the concrete surface of the dock with an almighty clang of metal and settled beside the row of trucks.
As the doors to the containers screeched open, terrible sounds began to fill the air. There were cries of fear and misery, screams of pain and terror, and a relentless chorus of sobbing, pleading human voices, many of them speaking languages which were alien to the ears of the listening Operators. Then, through the mist, a small figure appeared at the top of the gangway, silhouetted against the grey canvas of the thickening fog. It took a nervous, shaky step on to the metal walkway, then another, and another. Then it passed through the beam of one of the freighter’s huge running lights, and Kate gasped.
Bathed in the bright white beam stood an Asian girl who could have been no more than five or six years old. Her tiny face was pale, her eyes narrowed against the light. She wore a dress printed with a pattern of flowers that had once been white, but was now the deep grey of dust and dirt. In her small hand she clutched a filthy doll that was missing one of its arms and both of its legs. She took a hesitant step forward on bare, filthy feet, then another, then stumbled backwards, grabbing desperately for the gangway’s metal rail. She sat down hard on the metal panel, looked around with awful confusion on her small face and began to cry.
A second silhouette appeared at the top of the gangway, running down towards the girl. In the light, the shape became a tiny Asian woman, as pale and filthy as the girl, who dropped to her knees beside the sobbing child and began to shush her gently.
On the concrete dock, one of the vampires began to laugh, and suddenly Jamie was full of an anger so intense he had only ever felt anything like it once before in his life, when he saw the terrified face of his mother standing beside Alexandru Rusmanov in the monastery on Lindisfarne.
“Let’s get them,” he growled.
“Negative,” replied Jack Williams, instantly. “Not until everyone clears the ship.”
Jamie gritted his teeth, and forced himself not to reply. Larissa’s hand rested momentarily on his arm, a show of support invisible to everyone else, and he felt his rage subside, just a fraction. He refocused his attention on the freighter, where a steady stream of men and women, emaciated, filthy, with looks of blank terror on their faces, were now making their way down the gangway.
The woman and the little girl had reached the bottom, where they stepped nervously off on to the concrete of the dock. Immediately, one of the vampires grabbed for the girl, who cried out with fear, pressing herself against the woman. There was more laughter, and more boiling, acidic anger spilled into the pit of Jamie’s stomach.
“Let them be,” said the vampire foreman. “Makes no difference if they want to stay together. They’re all going to the same place. Start loading them up.”
The vampire who had grabbed for the girl hissed, but did as he was told. He reached out, and grabbed the woman by her shoulder, sinking his nails into her flesh as he did so. The woman gritted her teeth, but did not cry out; instead, she fixed the vampire with a long look of utter contempt.
Good for you, thought Jamie. Just keep it together for a few more minutes.
The men and women, a dirty, shambling mass of damaged humanity, reached the bottom of the gangway, and began to spill out across the dock. The vampires moved beside them, funnelling the ragged group towards the waiting trucks; the prisoners, weakened and disoriented by their time in the containers, went unprotestingly.
“This is stupid,” breathed Kate. “It’s much easier with them still on the boat. Down here they’re just going to get in the way.”
“Hold your positions,” insisted Jack.
“She’s right,” said Angela. “We need to go now.”
“Angela, I’m warning—”
“Warn me later,” interrupted Angela, and moved.
Angela Darcy slid silently out from behind the wall that was sheltering Squad F-7 from view and brought her T-Bone to her shoulder as though it was the most natural thing in the world. There was a fluidity to the way she moved that was almost feline, and Jamie watched her from the other side of the dock with a feeling that made him almost guilty.
She sighted the vampire who had laughed at the little girl, who was now ordering the woman holding her to climb into the back of the nearest truck. The woman was refusing, shaking her head left and right, spitting torrents of what Jamie thought might be Mandarin. The vampire stared back at her with a lazy smile on his face, the face of someone who is eager to commit violence, and knows his chance is about to arrive.
Angela squeezed the T-Bone’s trigger, and then a loud bang and a rush of escaping gas sounded through the quiet evening air. The smiling vampire was beginning to turn his head towards the source of the noise when the T-Bone’s metal stake smashed into his chest, punching a hole the size of a grapefruit clean through him. His eyes widened, before he exploded in a steaming gout of blood, splashing the back of the truck and the woman and the girl standing beside it.
The freshly spilled blood hit the noses of the other vampires instantly, and their eyes darkened red. The Chinese woman, her face coated with blood, was staring at the space where the vampire had been standing, her eyes wide. The little girl pulled a strand of something red and wet from her hair, held it up before her face and started to scream. In an instant, the rest of the vampires appeared around her, snarling and hissing. The ones who had been unloading the containers on the freighter’s deck swooped down from the air and landed softly beside their colleagues. The foreman muscled his way through the crowd and grabbed the woman by her arm.
“What did you do?” he demanded. “What did you—”
His question was cut off as the stake from Jamie’s T-Bone tore through his throat, spraying his blood across the rest of the vampires, who recoiled, howling with alarm. Jamie hadn’t missed; the foreman’s heart was blocked by the throng of vampires. But he was confident that the rest of them would be a lot easier to deal with if their leader was unable to speak.
“Goddamnit, you two,” snarled Jack Williams. “We are go, repeat, we are go.”
The Operators broke cover and advanced from both sides towards the vampires, who immediately panicked. The foreman, who had sunk to his knees as blood gushed from his throat, was waving his hands and gurgling incomprehensibly, but the rest of the vampires ignored him. Instead, they hurled themselves at the approaching figures.
Kate dropped immediately to one knee, pulled her MP5 submachine gun from her belt and strafed the onrushing vampires at knee height, exactly as she had been trained to do. Bullets ripped through their legs, tearing flesh and shattering bone, and three of them crashed to the ground, screaming in pain.
Three more leapt into the air, where Larissa met them, her eyes red as lava, her teeth bared in a savage grin. She tore into them three metres above the ground, sending sprays of blood arcing high into the night sky, then landed as gracefully as a cat. The three vampires tumbled to the ground behind her, their blood pumping out across the concrete.
Across the dock, Shaun Turner drew his ultraviolet torch from his belt and raked its beam across the vampires who were streaming towards his squad. As the purple light touched their bare skin, five of the vampires burst into flames and immediately abandoned their attack, racing instead towards the cold water of the river.
They didn’t make it.
Angela detached herself from her squad and sprinted after them, firing her MP5 from her shoulder as she ran. Bullets thudded into the backs and legs of the burning vampires, and they crumpled to the ground, screaming and writhing in pain. They tried to crawl towards the water’s edge, but Angela kept firing, her shots calm and precise, and the vampires eventually slumped to a halt, their bodies billowing with purple fire and the revolting smell of cooking meat.
Shaun Turner watched her for a split second, a huge grin on his face, then he and Jack Williams threw themselves at the four vampires who were still coming. They attacked with deadly precision, and teamwork that bordered on instinct; the vampires, who wore looks of desperation on their faces, desperation born of the realisation that they were outmatched, fought with a panic bordering on mania. They leapt and clawed and bit and spat as Jack and Shaun slid through them like knives through butter; the flashing claws and snapping jaws touched nothing but thin air.
Shaun pulled the metal stake from his belt, ducked neatly beneath the flailing swing of one of the vampires, a man in a Sunderland football shirt who looked to be about thirty, with a shaved head and arms covered in blotchy blue tattoos, then drove the stake upwards with vicious accuracy. The metal point crunched through the vampire’s breastbone, soaking Shaun’s arm with pumping blood, until it pierced the wildly beating heart and the vampire burst like a balloon, his insides splashing across Shaun’s visor and helmet.
He wiped them clear, in time to see Jack Williams sling his arm round another of the vampires, and drive his stake through the creature’s back. It exploded into putrid liquid, and Jack staggered backwards as the thing he had been holding tightly in his grip ceased to exist.
Behind him, a vampire snarled with anticipation, and reached for Jack’s shoulders, its fangs gleaming in the reflected light from the ship. Shaun, whose brain was capable of an icy precision that was at least the equal of his father’s, didn’t hesitate; he drew the Glock 17 from his belt and fired from the hip, like a gunslinger in an old Western. The bullets tore away the vampire’s head above his eyebrows, and the vampire went down to the cold concrete, his eyes rolling, his hands grabbing reflexively at nothing as his brain lay in pieces on the dock. Jack regained his balance, spun round and buried his stake in the chest of the twitching vampire, then leapt clear as it exploded.
Shaun watched his squad leader with a look of great pride on his face; he and Jack had been through so many fights together, so many battles in dark corners of the world, and there was no one Shaun would rather have at his side. Then he felt the movement of air at his back, and realised that something was behind him.
He lunged forward, away from it, turning as he did so, and saw the contorted, hate-filled face of a vampire barely an arm’s length away from him. It was a man in his fifties, wearing a dark blue suit and tie, and Shaun had time to crazily think how much he looked like the housemaster he had so hated during his time at boarding school. The vampire was reaching for him, its hand centimetres from his chest, its eyes blazing red, its fangs huge and sharp as razors. Shaun started to swing the Glock up from his side, knowing it was going to be too late to stop the vampire reaching him.
“Down!”
It was Angela’s voice, cool and calm through his earpiece. As he heard the word, he also heard a loud bang he knew as well as any sound on earth. He threw his legs out from beneath him, and let himself fall to the concrete of the dock.
Confusion passed briefly across the face of the vampire, as he looked at what appeared to be a bizarre act of surrender. Then the stake from Angela’s T-Bone blew clean through his chest, directly above where Shaun Turner was lying, and the vampire exploded in an expanding column of blood, the majority of which came crashing down on Shaun. The T-Bone’s stake whirred back into its barrel, as Angela appeared above him. She pushed her visor up, and gave him a mischievous smile.
“Naughty boy,” she said, reaching down and hauling him to his feet. “Keep an eye on your six, Shaun. You can’t always rely on me to bail you out.”
“Piss off,” he said, mildly, then smiled at his teammate.
Jack Williams arrived beside them, his eyes wide with the thrill of the fight.
“I staked the ones you torched,” he said. “Let’s help Jamie’s team.”
Angela looked across the dock, towards Squad G-17.
“I think they’re doing fine,” she said, the smile widening on her face.
Kate ran forward, drawing the stake from her belt as she did so. Jamie ran with her, his MP5 in one hand, his stake in the other. They reached the trio of wailing vampires that Kate had blown the legs out from under, and staked them without a second glance. Then they were moving again, in the direction of Larissa.
Three more vampires fell out of the sky, blood pouring from wounds that looked like the work of a wild animal, and Kate skidded to a halt.
“Go on!” she shouted. “I’ll clear up!”
Jamie nodded, sprinting after Larissa, who had dropped back to the ground and taken cover behind the nearest truck. Behind him, he heard three gargled screams and three thuds of changing air pressure, as Kate staked what was left of the vampires who had met Larissa in the air. A second later she was at their side, panting, her uniform splashed with blood.
“How many left?” asked Jamie.
Larissa lifted her visor back and sniffed the air. Her eyes were blazing red, the colour of boiling blood, and her fangs were gleaming white triangles beneath her upper lip.
“Five,” she answered. “The one you T-Boned is still alive, but only just. The other four are between the trucks. The scents are too close together – I can’t separate them.”
Don’t worry, thought Jamie. Four frightened vampires. Easy.
A noise began to swell from the direction of the freighter, and Jamie peered round the corner of the truck. The woman who had been the second to leave the ship was standing at the bottom of the gangway, surrounded by a small group of emaciated men and women; she was still holding the little girl with one arm, but with the second she was waving frantically up at the deck of the freighter. As Jamie watched, an elderly woman nervously poked her head above the railing at the top of the gangway, then slowly started down it. Behind her, a crowd of men and women followed, the metal creaking beneath them as they made their way towards dry land.
Movement blurred in the corner of Jamie’s eye, and he pulled back round the corner next to Kate and Larissa.
“At least one is on the other side of this truck,” he whispered, his voice inaudible to anyone but them, the noise cancelled by the dampening contours of his helmet. “Kate, work your way round the other end. Larissa, go over the top. We’ll corner him.”
The two girls nodded. Kate moved away silently down the length of the truck, as Larissa floated easily up into the air. Jamie took a deep breath, and stepped round the corner. The vampire who was standing between the two trucks looked almost pitifully frightened; he was twitching and turning in circles, nostrils flared, trying to look in every direction at once. Then Kate appeared beyond him, and the vampire saw her. He hissed, a low, terrified noise, and turned to run, only to find Jamie barring his escape route. He screeched, a look of pure dread on his middle-aged face, and turned his head to the sky, to the one way he might escape the fate that had befallen his colleagues.
“Hi,” said Larissa, sweetly. She was sitting on the edge of the truck’s roof, staring down at the vampire with her red eyes glowing.
The vampire let out a howl of despair, and ran towards Kate. Then the stakes from two T-Bones pulped his chest, and he exploded in a shower of blood. Larissa floated down, then suddenly accelerated past Jamie, a low snarl of pleasure emanating from her throat. One of the three remaining vampires, his instinct for self-preservation overwhelmed by the torrent of fresh blood that had been spilled on the other side of the truck, was careering round the corner, a look of primal hunger on his face.
Larissa shot past him like a bullet, without even slowing, and tore his head from his shoulders without so much as a grunt of effort. The headless body took a couple of faltering steps, then fell face down in front of Jamie, who staked it, a grimace of disgust on his face. The head burst in Larissa’s hand like a water balloon, and she let out a yelp of annoyance.
“Give me a chance to drop the head next time,” she said. “I nearly made it through this mission without getting any blood on me.” She laughed, and Jamie felt his stomach flip.
Sometimes the awesome power that coursed through his girlfriend – is that what she is now? My girlfriend? – scared him more than he would ever have admitted to her, and made her take pleasure in things that even he, as battle-scarred as he was, found appalling. He knew it wasn’t really her, it was the vampire side of her; surrounded by blood, in a fight for her life, it took her over completely. But when it was over, she would be Larissa again, he knew.
Or at least, he hoped he knew.
Behind him, he heard the snarl of a vampire, but he didn’t even hurry to turn around. He trusted Kate completely; by the time he was facing her, the vampire was already staggering back against the side of the truck, a gaping hole in its chest. Kate turned her back as it burst, splashing blood and viscera against the backplate of her body armour.
Three down. One to go.
Squad G-17 regrouped at the front of the second truck, and walked slowly towards the third. They were careful, but not overly so; a single vampire was no match for them, and they knew it. As if on cue, the final vampire burst out from where he had been cowering as his friends died around him, took a single look at the three approaching figures, turned tail and ran for his life.
He made it ten metres before he collided with the mass of men and women emerging from the freighter’s gangway.
The first blow was struck by a tall Asian man with a metal fire extinguisher in his hand, crushing the vampire’s skull almost flat on one side. Blood pistoned into the air, and the vampire fell to the floor, his mouth working uselessly as he tried to form words, perhaps trying to beg them not to do it, to plead for mercy.
There was no mercy.
When it was over, the prisoners slumped to the ground, their heads in their hands, their arms wrapped round loved ones. Almost all of them were weeping, their narrow chests heaving up and down. The woman holding the little girl did not sit down, however; she had taken no part in the destruction of the vampire, but nor had she made any attempt to stop it. She looked at the six dark figures, their purple visors hiding their faces from view, and said two halting, uncertain words.
“Thank. You.”
“You’re welcome,” replied Jack Williams, and pointed at the ground. “Stay here. Help coming. Stay here.”
The woman nodded, then lowered herself to the ground, keeping the little girl carefully cradled against her.
Jack led the combined team away, and gathered them into a circle.
“Good work,” he said, raising his visor. “Damn good work today. That was as clean as I’ve ever seen it done, and we got the leader alive. Great work, truly.” He smiled around at the five Operators, who raised their own visors and grinned back at him, grinned at the pleasure of a job done well as the adrenaline began to leave their systems. “Alert the Northumbrian Police; tell them they’ve got two hundred refugees on the banks of the Tyne. Then let’s take our survivor home and find out what he knows,” Jack continued. “Shaun, radio the chopper.”
Shaun Turner nodded, and pulled the radio from his belt. As they made their way back towards the truck, he coded in and told their pilot that they were ready for extraction. A deep noise instantly rumbled through the night as the helicopter that had brought them north lumbered into the air less than a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of Hadrian Road.
At the rear of the truck they found the vampire foreman.
He was slumped on his knees, his head lowered against his chest, in the middle of an enormous pool of blood. He was pale, and his skin was flickering as his veins pushed what blood remained in his body desperately round his system, trying to keep it operational. He was breathing, incredibly slowly, as they approached him.
“He’s on the brink,” said Larissa. “He’ll be dormant by the time we get him back to the Loop. He’s lost too much blood.”
“Then they can revive him in the lab,” said Jack. “Makes transporting him easier.”
Shaun Turner stepped forward, and hunkered down in front of the vampire.
“Where were you taking all those people?” he asked.
There was the tiniest movement in the vampire’s shoulders, suggesting he understood he was being spoken to, but no response. Shaun reached out to lift the injured vampire’s head up, and Kate was suddenly overcome with panic. She stepped forward, saying Shaun’s name, as his gloved fingers touched the vampire’s chin. He paused as she arrived at his side, shooting a look of annoyance in her direction as she reached out to pull his hand away. Then the vampire’s head reared up, his eyes glowing a dull red, and he lunged forward with the last of his strength, like a dying dog.
His mouth closed on Kate’s arm.
The fangs slid into her flesh, and she watched with what was almost amazed detachment as the vampire shook his head, once, and tore a ragged chunk of flesh out of her arm. He spat it out on the concrete, and collapsed backwards, his eyes rolling back in his head.
14
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT
PARIS, FRANCE FOUR WEEKS EARLIER
Frankenstein sat on a bench outside Notre Dame de Paris, watching the worshippers file out of evening mass. It was Christmas Eve, and the ancient cathedral had been nearly full to capacity.
He had taken to coming here at the same time every evening, as the last of the sunlight played across the ancient ramparts and gargoyles far above his head. There were usually crowds of tourists gazing up at the huge stone building, cameras slung round their necks and guidebooks in their hands as teenage kids glided around and between them on skateboards and bikes, but the plaza had been largely deserted while the service was taking place. The cold and the festive season had seen most of the tourists leave the city, and most Parisians stay inside.
Those whose faith had compelled them out into the freezing night had flocked into the comparative warmth of the cathedral as the bells rang for the Christmas mass at six o’clock. Frankenstein had stood among them on several occasions as the grand organ boomed and wailed, as the choir harmonised, as the incense smoked and fumed, and the bishop conducted his service from before the ancient altar.
Today, he had chosen to stay outside.
He found watching the faces of the men and women who departed from the cathedral after the mass as illuminating as the service itself; the blank disinterest of those for whom the ritual was nothing more than a chore, a habit they weren’t quite able to break, against the beatific rapture of the faithful, full to the brim with God’s blessings and trembling at the almighty power of their Lord.
The depths of their feelings fascinated him. Because he, after almost three weeks in the city whose name had sparked his only flash of recognition since beginning his shallow, empty second life, felt nothing.
He felt nothing at all.
Frankenstein had arrived in Paris with his entire body a ball of flaming agony. After a day and a half pressed tightly into the bowels of the truck, he had managed to hobble away unseen when the driver brought his rig to a halt outside the Marché d’Intérêt National, the vast food market in the southern suburb of Rungis. Frankenstein had asked a man working in a mobile café for directions to the centre of the city, and began walking north. As he made his way towards the middle of Paris, a creeping sense of disappointment had settled on him.
He recognised absolutely nothing.
Not a single building, or landmark, not a street sign or the name of a restaurant; nothing triggered a rush of memory like the one he had experienced at the transport café in Germany. He saw nothing that made him feel like he had ever been to this place before.
He reached the river, the wide, winding expanse of water at the heart of the city, and felt nothing. He was waiting for an epiphany, for the locks in his head to grind into action and release, spilling his memory back into his possession.
But it never came.
For almost three weeks now, he had wandered the Parisian streets. He was as confused and disoriented as ever, more so perhaps, having been given what had felt like the first clue to unlocking his identity, only to be denied further progress. The stares of the tourists and the people going about their lives made him uncomfortable, and he began to spend his days in the dark corners of the museums and churches that littered the city, hidden away from prying eyes.
At night, he walked the streets of Pigalle and the Marais, keeping to the shadows. He watched the laughing groups of men and women as they spilled from the bars and cafés, the drug dealers and the sex workers, as they conducted their transactions in the narrow alleyways and dark street corners.
Frankenstein had no idea what he was going to do with the new life he had been given, and was aware of a growing sense, deep in his bones, that he did not want to continue with it at all. Several times he had stood on one of the bridges, staring down at the dark, freezing water of the Seine, wondering how it would feel to pitch himself over the railing; a moment of panic perhaps, a second or two of falling, then icy oblivion, washing down his throat and filling his lungs.
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Will Hill
Blockbusting sequel to DEPARTMENT 19, the biggest boy teen launch of 2011 – with over 25,000 copies sold in hardback and a devoted legion of Facebook fans.Amazing author Will Hill will be out on the road again in April to promote THE RISING, as well as maintaining a constant presence on Twitter.91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR.THAT'S 91 DAYS TO RUN.91 DAYS TO HIDE.OR 91 DAYS TO PRAY FOR DEPARTMENT 19 TO SAVE YOU…After the terrifying attack on Lindisfarne at the end of the first book, Jamie, Larissa and Kate are recovering at Department 19 headquarters, waiting for news of Dracula’s stolen ashes.They won’t be waiting for long.Vampire forces are gathering. Old enemies are getting too close. And Dracula… is rising.
DEDICATION
For Charlie and Nick, the best partners in crime I could have asked for
EPIGRAPH
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
How much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Victor Frankenstein
Contents
COVER (#ulink_2c02ceea-9e15-515b-afa5-c4712b84e29a)
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
MEMORANDUM
12 WEEKS AFTER LINDISFARNE
91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
1
ON PATROL
2
TRIANGLES HAVE SHARP EDGES
3
THE ART OF COMING CLEAN
4
GROWING PAINS
5
REBIRTH
6
CARPENTER AND SON
7
VALENTIN RECEIVES A VISITOR
90 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
8
THE BIG LEAGUES
9
NO STONE UNTURNED
10
SLEEPLESS NIGHT
11
THE BARE BONES
12
INSIDE THE VOID
13
HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE
14
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT
15
ALL FALL DOWN
16
ALWAYS AND FOREVER
89 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
17
FAMILY TIES
18
KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
19
AT THE CROSSROADS AT MIDNIGHT
20
MASTER AND COMMANDER
21
HEROES’ RETURN
22
TINFOIL HATS
88 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
23
THE INTERROGATION OF VALENTIN RUSMANOV
24
THE FOURTH MUSKETEER
25
THE ILLUMINATED CITY, PART I
26
FULL DISCLOSURE
27
THE ILLUMINATED CITY, PART II
28
THINK BUT THIS AND ALL IS MENDED
87 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
29
IN CONVERSATION WITH A MONSTER
30
THERE IS NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS FOR REVENGE
31
ECHOES OF THE PAST
32
THE DEPTHS OF KNOWLEDGE
33
IN THE COURT OF THE VAMPIRE KING
34
HOW TO STEAL FIRE FROM THE GODS
35
HOPE IS A DANGEROUS THING
36
VISION QUEST, PART I
37
FROM PILLAR TO POST
38
VISION QUEST, PART II
39
BACK FROM THE DEAD
40
VISION QUEST, PART III
41
AND A TORCH TO LIGHT THE WAY
42
VISION QUEST, PART IV
43
THE TIES THAT BIND
44
BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN
45
CURTAIN CALL
46
THE TWIST OF THE KNIFE
47
NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE
48
SOME WOUNDS NEVER HEAL
49
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
50
REDUCED TO ASH
86 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
51
A COUNCIL OF WAR
52
ONLY FORWARD
FIRST EPILOGUE: IN THE FLESH
SECOND EPILOGUE: THREE FATHERS
85 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
MEMORANDUM
12 WEEKS AFTER LINDISFARNE
91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
1
ON PATROL
THE PILGRIM HOSPITAL BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE
Sergeant Ted Pearson of the Lincolnshire Police stamped his cold feet on the pavement, and checked his watch again. His partner, Constable Dave Fleming, watched him, a nervous look on his face.
Half ten, thought the Sergeant, with a grimace. I should be at home with my feet up. Sharon’s making lasagne tonight, and it’s never as good warmed through.
The 999 call had been made from the hospital’s reception desk at 9.50pm. Sergeant Pearson and his partner had been finishing up the paperwork on an illegal immigration case they were working on one of the farms near Louth, both men looking forward to getting the forms filed and heading home, when they had been told the call was theirs. Grumbling, they had climbed into their car and driven the short distance from the police station to the hospital, blue lights spinning above them, their siren blaring through the freezing January night.
They had reached the hospital in a little over three minutes, and were questioning the nurse who had made the call, a young Nigerian woman with wide, frightened eyes, when Sergeant Pearson’s radio buzzed into life. The message it conveyed was short and to the point.
“Secure access to potential crime scene. Do not investigate, or talk to potential witnesses. Stand guard until relieved.”
Pearson had sworn loudly down his receiver, but the voice on the other end, a voice he didn’t recognise but which was definitely not the usual dispatcher, was already gone. So he had done as he was told: instructed Constable Fleming to cease his questioning of the nurse, and informed all staff that access to the hospital’s blood bank was forbidden without direct permission from him. Then he and his partner had taken up positions outside the side entrance to the hospital, shivering in the cold, waiting to be relieved. By who, or what, they didn’t know.
“What’s going on, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, after fifteen minutes had passed. “Why are we standing out here like security guards?”
“We’re doing what we were told to do,” replied Sergeant Pearson.
Fleming nodded, unconvinced. He looked round at the dimly lit road; it was a narrow alley between the hospital and a red-brick factory that was falling rapidly into disrepair. On the wall opposite, in black paint that had dripped all the way to the ground, someone had sprayed two words.
HE RISES
“What’s that mean, Sarge?” asked Constable Fleming, pointing at the graffiti.
“Shut up, Dave,” replied his partner, giving the words a cursory glance. “No more questions, all right?”
The young man was going to make a fine copper, Pearson had no doubt about that, but his enthusiasm, and his relentless inquisitiveness, had a tendency to give the Sergeant a headache. The uncomfortable truth was that Pearson didn’t know what was going on, or why they were guarding the hospital door, or what the graffiti meant. But he was not going to admit that to Fleming, who had been on the force for less than six months. He stamped his feet again, and as he did so, he heard the rumble of an engine approaching in the distance.
Thirty seconds later a black van pulled to a halt in front of the two policemen.
The windows of the vehicle were as dark as the panels of its body, and it sat low to the ground on heavy-duty, run-flat tyres. The noise of its engine was incredibly loud, a deep roar that Pearson and Fleming felt through their boots. For almost thirty seconds, nothing happened; the van stood motionless before them, squat and strangely threatening under the fluorescent light emanating from the hospital’s side entrance behind them. Then, with a loud hiss, the vehicle’s rear door slid open, and three figures emerged.
Fleming stared at them as they approached, his eyes wide. Pearson, who had seen things over the course of his career that the younger man would not have believed, was more adept at hiding his emotions than his partner, and managed to keep his confusion, and rising unease, from his face.
The three figures that stopped in front of them were dressed head to toe in black: their boots, their gloves, their uniforms, belts and military-style webbing. All black. The only splash of colour was the bright purple of the flat visors that covered their faces, visors attached to sleek black helmets that looked like nothing the policemen had seen before. There was not a millimetre of exposed skin to be seen; the newcomers could easily have been robots, such was the anonymity of their appearance. On their belts, two black guns hung in holsters alongside a long cylinder with a handle and a trigger on one side. It was obviously a weapon, but it was not one that either of the policemen recognised.
The tallest of the figures stopped in front of Sergeant Pearson, the shiny material of its visor centimetres away from his face. When the figure spoke, the voice was male, but it had a flat, digital quality that Pearson knew from his time on the Met with SO15 meant the person behind the visor was speaking through several levels of filter, to avoid the possibility of voiceprint identification.
“Have you signed the Official Secrets Act?” the black figure asked, turning its visor-clad face sharply between the two policemen, who nodded, too intimidated to speak. “Good. Then you never saw us, and this never happened.”
“On whose authority?” managed Pearson, his voice shaking heavily.
“The Chief of the General Staff,” replied the figure, then leant forward until its visor was a millimetre from the Sergeant’s nose. “And mine. Understood?”
Pearson nodded again, and the figure drew back. Then it stepped past him and strode into the hospital. The other two dark shapes followed.
“The blood bank is—” began Constable Fleming.
“We know the way,” said the third of the figures in a digitally altered female voice.
Then they were gone.
The two policemen looked at one another. Sergeant Pearson was visibly shaking, and Constable Fleming reached a hand towards his partner’s shoulder. The older man waved it away, but he didn’t look annoyed; he looked old, and frightened.
“Who were they, Sarge?” asked Fleming, his voice unsteady.
“I don’t know, Dave,” replied Pearson. “And I don’t want to know.”
The three black-clad figures strode through the bright corridors of the hospital.
The tall one, the one who had spoken to Sergeant Pearson, led the way. Behind, shorter and slimmer than the leader, came the second of the trio, who appeared to glide across the linoleum floor. The third, shorter again, brought up the rear, its purple visor sweeping slowly left and right for any sign of trouble, or witnesses to their presence. As they passed the double doors that led to the hospital’s operating theatre, the tall figure at the front motioned for them to stop, and pulled a radio from his belt. He keyed in a series of numbers and letters, then activated the handset’s wireless connection to his helmet’s comms network. After a pause of several seconds, he spoke.
“Operational Squad G-17 in position. Alpha reporting in.”
“Beta reporting in,” the second figure said, in a metallic female voice.
“Gamma reporting in,” said the final squad member.
Alpha listened as a voice spoke on the other end of the line, and then replaced the radio on his belt.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the squad moved on into the hospital. After only a matter of seconds, Gamma spoke.
“So who made the 999 call?”
“The nurse at reception,” answered Alpha. “One of the night porters saw a man leading a young girl into the blood bank, said the man had red eyes. He told the nurse he thought it was probably a junkie.”
Beta laughed. “He’s probably right. But not the kind he’s thinking.”
The three shadowy shapes pushed open a door marked RESTRICTED, and moved on.
“Fifth call in three nights,” said Gamma. “Is Seward punishing us for something?”
“It’s not just us,” answered Alpha. “It’s everyone. Every squad is flat out.”
“I know,” replied Beta. “And we know why, don’t we? It’s because of…”
“Don’t,” said Gamma, quickly. “Don’t talk about him. Not now, OK?”
A small noise emerged from behind Beta’s helmet, a noise that could easily have been a laugh, but she let the subject drop.
“You were pretty hard on the police,” said Gamma. “The old Sergeant looked terrified.”
“Good,” replied Alpha. “The more he pretends that tonight never happened, the safer he’ll be. Now no more talk.”
They had reached the hospital’s blood bank, the door of which was standing open. Alpha stepped slowly into the dark room, and flicked the light switch on the wall.
Nothing happened.
He pulled a torch from his belt, and shone it up at the light fitting. The bulb was smashed, leaving a ring of jagged glass surrounding the filament. A slow sweep of the torch revealed carnage; the metal shelves of the blood bank had been ransacked. Blood and shattered plastic dotted the surfaces, and pooled and piled up on the floor.
“Don’t come any closer.”
The voice came from the corner of the room, and Alpha instantly swung his torch towards it. Two more shafts of white light joined its beam, as Beta and Gamma stepped into the room and followed their squad leader’s example.
The beams illuminated the trembling figure of a middle-aged man, crouching in the corner of the room. At his feet lay a sports bag full of plastic sachets of blood. In his arms was a girl, no more than six years old, with an expression of pure terror on her face. The man had a razor-sharp fingernail to her throat, and was looking at the three black figures with an expression of desperate panic.
Alpha reached up, turned a dial on the side of his helmet and watched his view of the room change. The helmet contained a cryocooled infrared detector, which showed the heat variance of every object within the visor’s field of vision. The cold walls and floor of the blood bank were a wash of pale greens and blues, while the little girl was darker, studded with patches of yellow and orange. The man bloomed bright red and purple like a roman candle, distorting Alpha’s vision.
“I’ll kill her if you come any closer,” the man said, shifting nervously against the wall. He tightened his grip on the girl’s throat, and she moaned.
Alpha twisted the visor’s setting back to normal.
“Stay calm,” he said, evenly. “Just let the girl go, and we can talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about!” yelled the man, and jerked the girl off her feet. She cried out, her eyes wide with terror, and Alpha took a half-step forward.
“Let the girl go,” he repeated.
“This isn’t right,” said Beta, in a low voice.
Alpha flicked his head towards her.
“Don’t make a move without my go,” he warned.
Beta snorted with laughter. “Please,” she said, then pulled a short black tube from her waist, pointed it into the corner of the room and pressed a button.
A thick beam of ultraviolet light burst across the blood bank. It hit the man’s arm and the girl’s face dead on, and both instantly erupted into flames. Screams and the nauseating smell of burning skin filled the air, as Gamma gasped behind her visor.
The little girl wrenched herself free of the arm that had been holding her, beating furiously at her face until the flames were extinguished. She dropped to her knees, tore open one of the plastic pouches of blood, then drank hungrily, slurping the crimson liquid into her mouth.
The man watched her, a helpless look on his face, then suddenly seemed to notice that his arm was burning. He began to leap around the corner of the room, beating at the limb with his good hand. When the flames were out, he pulled a blood bag from one of the shelves, and devoured its contents. As Squad G-17 watched, the girl’s face and the man’s arm began to heal before their eyes, the muscle and tissue regrowing, the skin turning pink and knitting back together. When the injuries were healed, so completely that there was no evidence that they had been there at all, a process that took only a matter of seconds, the girl looked up at the man, and wailed.
“Daddy!” she cried, her mouth a wide oval of disappointment. “You said this would work! You promised!”
The man looked down at her with an expression of great sadness.
“I’m sorry, love,” he replied. “I thought it would.” He looked over at the three dark figures, which hadn’t moved. “How did you know she was turned? The poor thing sat in a bath of ice for an hour so she wouldn’t look hot to those helmets of yours. Her teeth only just stopped chattering.”
Beta reached up and lifted her helmet from her head. The face beneath it was a teenage girl’s: beautiful, pale and narrow, framed by dark hair that brushed her neck. She wore a wide smile, and her eyes glowed red under the bright lights of the blood bank.
“I can smell her,” Larissa Kinley replied.
The little girl hissed, her eyes flooding the same red as Larissa’s.
“So it’s true,” said her father. “Department 19 has a pet traitor. How can you hunt your own people? Don’t you have any shame?”
Larissa took half a step towards him, her smile fading.
“You are not my people,” she said, in a voice like ice. Alpha gently laid a hand on her arm, and she stepped back, without taking her eyes from the man in the corner of the room.
Gamma removed her helmet, and shook her head. Short blonde hair flew back and forth above a pretty, heart-shaped face, from which blue eyes stared out above a mouth that was set in a firm line.
“Was it you two who hit Lincoln General last month?” asked Kate Randall.
The man nodded, his eyes still nervously fixed on Larissa.
“And Nottingham Trent the month before that?”
He shook his head.
“Are you lying to me?” Kate asked.
“Why would I lie?” the man replied. He appeared to be on the verge of tears. “You’re going to stake us both anyway, so what would be the point?”
“That’s right,” said Larissa, a wicked smile on her face.
The little girl began to cry. The man placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered soothingly to her.
Alpha looked over at Larissa, who rolled her eyes. Then he reached up, and removed his helmet.
The boy beneath it was no more than sixteen or seventeen, but his face looked older, as though he had seen, and most likely done, things that had taken their toll. A jagged patch of pink scar tissue peeped above the collar of his uniform and climbed across the right side of his neck, stopping before it reached his jaw. His face was handsome, and possessed of a stillness more befitting an older man. His blue eyes were piercing, but he trained them tenderly on Larissa.
“Nobody is staking anyone tonight,” said Jamie Carpenter. “You know the new SOP. Pass me two restrainers, Kate. Lazarus can have these two. I don’t think they’re dangerous.”
The man began to cry along with his daughter.
“We were hungry,” he said. “I’m sorry. My name is Patrick Connors, and this is my daughter, Maggie. We were just so hungry. We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
“It’s all right,” Jamie replied, taking the two restrainers from Kate’s hands and tossing them to the man and his daughter. “Put these on, under your armpits. Pull them tight.”
The restrainers were thick belts that looped over the shoulders and crossed in the middle; where they met was an explosive charge that sat over the heart of the person wearing it. Patrick and Maggie shrugged the belts over their shoulders, and tightened them as they had been told. When they were securely in place, Jamie pulled a black tube from his belt with a small dial on one side and a red trigger on the other; he twisted the dial two notches clockwise, and red lights on the explosive charges flickered into life.
Jamie looked at his squad.
“Larissa, you’re going to lead us out of here,” he said. “Sir, you’re going to follow her, then Kate, then you, little one, and I’ll go last. We walk straight out the way we came, we don’t stop, and we don’t talk to anyone. Oh – and normal eyes, please.”
He grinned as Larissa and Maggie’s eyes reverted to their usual colours. Larissa led them out of the blood bank, and strode along the corridor towards the exit, and the waiting van. The rest of Squad G-17 and their prisoners followed in the order that Jamie had instructed, and less than a minute later they marched past Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming, who averted their eyes as they passed, and slid the van’s rear door shut behind them.
The inside of the vehicle was silver metal and black plastic; four seats ran along each side of the wide space, between which were fixed a series of moulded stands, with half a dozen unusual spaces in them. A wide LCD screen lay flush against the ceiling, and a series of slots in the floor lay before each seat. Jamie told the man and his daughter to take the two seats closest to the front and strap themselves in. They did so silently; when they were in position, Kate pressed a button set into the wall. A barrier of ultraviolet light appeared from a wide bulb in the floor, cutting them off from the three black-clad teenagers, and both Patrick and Maggie cried out.
“Don’t worry,” said Jamie. “You’re perfectly safe.”
He began to unclip the weapons and devices from his belt, and slide them into the slots on the stand beside one of the seats. The brand-new T-21 pneumatic launcher, the Glock 17, the Heckler & Koch MP5, the torch and the short beam gun that Larissa had used inside the blood bank – all were placed into purpose-built compartments and clicked into place. The detonator he kept in his hand, resting it on his knee as he took his seat and announced that they were ready to go. Instantly, the powerful engine of the vehicle, which was in reality less a van and more a combination of a mobile command centre and an armoured personnel carrier, surged into life, and sped them away from the hospital, leaving Sergeant Pearson and Constable Fleming shivering on the pavement.
“What do we do—”
“Nothing,” interrupted Pearson, before his partner had a chance to finish his question. “We do nothing, and we say nothing, because nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Clear?”
Fleming looked at the older man for a long moment, taking in the pale colour of his face, the lines of worry around his eyes and the firm set of his jaw.
“Crystal, sir,” he replied. “Let’s go home.”
An hour later the black van sped through deepening forest, heading towards a place that didn’t exist. Its official designation was Classified Military Installation 303-F, but it had long been referred to by the men and women who knew of its existence by a simpler, shorter name.
“Welcome to the Loop,” said Jamie, as the van drew to a halt. Patrick Connors and his daughter regarded him with polite incomprehension, and said nothing.
Outside the van there was a low rumble, a metallic sound like a gate being rolled back. Then they were moving again, creeping slowly forward.
“Place your vehicle in neutral.”
The voice was artificial, and it appeared to be coming from all sides at once. The driver of the van, an invisible figure to the men and women in the rear of the vehicle, did as he was ordered. A conveyor belt whirred into life beneath the van, and moved it forward, until the artificial voice spoke again.
“Please state the names and designations of all passengers.”
“Carpenter, Jamie. NS303, 67-J.”
“Kinley, Larissa. NS303, 77-J.”
“Randall, Kate. NS303, 78-J.”
There was a long pause.
“Supernatural life forms have been detected on board this vehicle,” said the voice. “Please state clearance code.”
“Lazarus 914-73,” said Jamie, quickly.
Another pause.
“Clearance granted,” announced the artificial voice. “Proceed.”
The van began to roll forward again, picking up speed. Less than two minutes later it stopped, and Jamie stood up from his seat and slid the rear door open. Kate pressed a button in the wall and the ultraviolet barrier imprisoning Patrick and Maggie disappeared.
“This way,” said Jamie, motioning towards the open door. The man led his daughter slowly down the steps, into a world he had heard rumours about, but could never have possibly imagined.
To the back of the van, an enormous semi-circular hangar stood open to the night sky. The huge space was mostly empty; a line of black SUVs and vans were parked along one wall, and a small number of black-clad figures moved across the tarmac floor. Standing before them, patient looks on their faces, were a man in the same black uniform that Jamie and his squad were wearing and a young Asian man in a white lab coat.
Patrick looked around, and gasped. He had a moment to take in the enormity, and the incredible strangeness, of what he was seeing: the vast curved fence beyond the runway, the labyrinth of red lasers, the ultraviolet no-man’s-land, and the vast holographic canopy of trees that hung across the sky above his head. Then there was a hand on his lower back, and he was being ushered forward, towards the waiting men. His daughter grabbed for his hand, and he gripped it, firmly, as Jamie stepped round him and handed his detonator to the man in the white coat, who thanked him, then addressed the two disoriented, frightened vampires.
“Sir,” he said, his voice low and gentle. “My name is Dr Yen. Please will you follow me?”
Patrick glanced at Jamie, fear blooming on his face.
“It’s OK,” said Jamie. “You’ll be safe with him.”
Patrick glanced down at Maggie, and found her looking back up at him with a determined expression on her face. She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“We will,” he replied, as steadily as he was able. “We’ll follow you.”
The doctor nodded, then turned and walked briskly across the hangar. After a moment’s pause, the man and his daughter followed him across the cavernous room, and through a wide set of double doors.
Jamie watched them go, then smiled at Larissa and Kate. Behind them, an Operator from the Security Division climbed into the van and began unloading their equipment from the moulded stands. It would be checked, cleaned and returned to their quarters within an hour, as it always was. Jamie nodded to the Operator, before turning to the Duty Officer who had been waiting to greet them.
“Cold out here tonight,” he said, watching his breath cloud in front of his face.
“Yes, sir. Bloody cold, sir.”
“How’s my mother?”
“She’s fine, sir,” replied the young Operator. “Asking for you.”
Jamie nodded, and started to walk into the hangar. He was suddenly exhausted, and his small quarters on Level B were calling to him.
“Admiral Seward requested a debrief, sir,” called the Operator, before he had got more than a couple of steps. He sounded apologetic, and Jamie sighed.
“Personally?”
“Personally, sir.”
Jamie swore. “Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said, then marched towards one of the doors at the rear of the hangar, Larissa and Kate following closely behind him.
The three members of Squad G-17 slumped against the walls of the lift as it descended into the lower levels of the Loop.
On Level B, Jamie said goodnight to the two girls, and almost ran to the shower block marked MEN that stood halfway down the corridor. He stood in the shower for a long time, his head under the searing water, trying to prevent the aches and pains that were the accumulation of active service as a Department 19 Operator from returning with a vengeance, as they usually did once the adrenaline of a mission had worn off.
Eventually, with great reluctance, he twisted the shower off, and dressed in a T-shirt and combat trousers. He could almost feel his narrow bunk beneath him, could perfectly visualise the moment when his head would touch the pillow and his eyes would close. He picked up his uniform, opened the door to the corridor and stopped. Larissa was standing in the doorway, her eyes red, her hair wet, her body wrapped in a green towel, a wicked smile on her face.
“Where’s Kate?” asked Jamie.
“Gone to her quarters,” replied Larissa. “She said to tell you she’ll see you in the morning.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but Larissa closed it with her own, her lips on his, and Jamie discovered that he wasn’t nearly as tired as he had thought.
2
TRIANGLES HAVE SHARP EDGES
ONE HOUR LATER
Larissa Kinley flexed a muscle that the vast majority of the population didn’t possess, and felt her fangs slide silently down from her gums, fitting perfectly over her incisors, the white points emerging below her upper lip. She ran her tongue across the tips of her fangs, pressing until the slightest increase in pressure would have broken the skin, her eyes never leaving her reflection in the mirror in her quarters.
She hated her fangs with every fibre of her being.
They disgusted her, filled her with a revulsion she could not fully articulate to anyone, not even Jamie. She knew he would listen to her, sympathise with her, and at least try to say all the right things. But the simple fact was that he didn’t know what it felt like to be a vampire, and how it felt was impossible to explain.
She would have torn the fangs from her mouth with a pair of pliers if she didn’t know full well that they would regrow the next time she fed; she would have smashed them out with the butt of her Glock pistol, filed them down to nothing with sandpaper, or simply pulled them out with her bare hands, if she had believed that anything would have rid her of them.
But she knew nothing would. Her fangs were part of her, and there was nothing she could do about them.
I’m stuck with them. I’m going to be looking at them forever.
Anger trickled through Larissa’s body, and her eyes began to turn red. She leant in close to the mirror, and watched as crimson spilled slowly in from the corners, obscuring the natural dark brown. The dark red swirled and pulsed, until it filled her eyes to their edges. The black holes of her pupils expanded until she thought she would fall into them, and she took a step backwards, away from herself. A low snarl burst from her throat, and she reared back, her muscles vibrating with fury.
Larissa swung her fist into the mirror, faster than the human eye could have followed, and the polished glass exploded, sending razor-sharp slivers flying through the air. Two shards dug into the pale skin of her neck; she barely noticed them until blood began to flow, and the scent filled her nostrils. She withdrew her trembling hand from the remains of the mirror, and stared at the blood pouring out of the holes in her knuckles. She pulled the glass out of her neck, savouring the pain, and wiped the blood away. Then, with guilt and sorrow in her heart, Larissa shoved her hand into her mouth, and hungrily sucked away the running blood, her head swimming with primal pleasure and self-loathing.
The cuts healed almost immediately, and she let the hand fall to her side. Staring into the mirror, she waited until the crimson in her eyes began to recede, then let the towel she was wearing fall to the floor. Her body had been changed by the endless hours of training since she had instantly accepted Major Paul Turner’s offer for her to join Department 19, grown leaner and more toned. But the thick bands of muscle that had emerged on the bodies of Kate and Jamie were nowhere to be seen; the vast majority of her strength and speed and stamina now came from somewhere else.
Larissa walked across her small quarters to the locker at the end of her bed, pulled a vest and a pair of shorts out of the drawers, dressed quickly and stepped easily into the air. She folded her legs beneath her and floated, two metres above the floor, in outright defiance of the laws of nature; there, she closed her eyes, and focused on remaining completely still.
Her powers were developing with a speed that frightened her.
The acceleration of her abilities was a result, partly, of simple ageing – but more down to the fact that she was using them every day. She could now stay in the air almost indefinitely, and fly huge distances without tiring. The truth was, she didn’t even know how far; it had been a long time since she had attempted a flight that had turned out to be beyond her. And she was strong now too; so strong that the possibility of accidentally hurting someone she cared about was never far from her mind. She opened her eyes, slowly, and looked at the series of dents in the wall beside her door. They were the results of arguments with Jamie, of missions that had gone wrong, of petty fights with Kate, and of the days when simply being herself was too much for her.
All the punches had been pulled. The only time she had lashed out at the wall with all her strength she had smashed a hole clean through the thick concrete, setting off an alarm that woke everyone in the Loop. The following morning, she had been forced to explain herself to Admiral Seward, who had gently informed her that the combination of teenage petulance and superhuman strength was a dangerous one.
Larissa closed her eyes again, and let her mind wander. As it so often did, it made its way back to the months that had followed her turning at the hands of Grey, the oldest British vampire, a man who had committed himself publicly to peace while he fed on teenage girls in private. She had eventually confronted him in Valhalla, the vampire commune he had founded, and from which he had been expelled for what he had done to her, but his banishment had brought her little peace; it had made nothing better.
The almost two years she had spent with Alexandru Rusmanov were her deepest secret, the one thing she refused to discuss with anyone, even Jamie. He had asked her about it for the first time during the bedlam that followed the attack on Lindisfarne, when the two of them were tentatively getting to know each other, were, in essence, meeting each other properly for the first time. The persona she had presented to him during her time as a prisoner of Department 19 had not been far removed from her real self; she had played up certain aspects of her character and played down others as she fought desperately for the chance to survive the madness that was taking place around her. But it was still a persona, an act, one she dropped as soon as Marie Carpenter was rescued and she came to realise that her life was no longer in danger. Jamie had phrased his question innocuously, but there had been a tightness to his voice, a sliver of excitement, that let Larissa know how much he wanted to hear about her past.
She wanted to tell him too.
The attraction between them was tangible, and she knew with absolute certainty that their time spent as merely friends was going to be extremely brief. But more than that, she trusted him; the thought of having someone who she could tell her story to, who would not judge her for the things she had done, would not think less of her or turn their back on her, someone who might help her carry the weight that hung so heavily around her neck, was the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world.
And for that reason, she told him not to ask her about it again. She could not face the possibility of being wrong about him, of being let down and disappointed again. Instead, she clung to the hope that he would ignore her instruction, and ask her again one day; when he did, she would be ready to tell him.
But she wasn’t. Not the second time he asked her, or the third, or the fourth, and eventually he got the message and stopped persevering. Each time, she had tried to tell him, tried to will herself to open this last door to him, and to hell with what lay behind it. But she couldn’t. Her panic at the thought of driving him away before they had even had the chance to become something more than friends had been replaced by an overwhelming terror at the thought of losing him now that they had. She understood now that the chance had passed, that she should have told him at the beginning, and that she was now trapped. The memories of those two terrible years ate away at her, poisoning her sleep and her dreams, and she had rejected the chance to let someone help her, someone who wanted so badly to do so.
He saw me when his dad was killed, she thought, as she floated in the cool air of her quarters. And he knows I was sent by Alexandru to kill him the night his mother was kidnapped. He knows both those things and he’s still with me. Why can’t I tell him the rest?
But she knew the answer to her own question.
Because it’s worse. Oh God, it’s so much worse. Because I don’t know if he or Kate could ever look at me the same way again. And because they’re all I’ve got.
In the quiet of her quarters, her hair almost brushing the ceiling as she floated, Larissa fought back the rage that suddenly spilled through her, making her muscles vibrate and her fangs burst involuntarily into her mouth. She growled, a low rumble full of imminent violence, as she tried to control herself, tried not to swoop down and add a new dent to the collection by the door.
Calm, she shouted at herself. Be calm. Without Alexandru you wouldn’t be here, would never have met Jamie, or Kate, never had the chance to make amends for what you did. Calm down, you stupid girl.
She felt her fangs retract, and she slowly unclenched her fists. It was a source of constant amusement to Larissa, who possessed a jet black sense of humour, that she had come to fall for a boy she would never even have met had she not been the obedient servant of the monster that had tried to destroy his family. But there had been no way for her to know that as she flew with Alexandru and his followers towards the house that the unsuspecting Jamie Carpenter shared with his mother and the ghost of his father.
No way for her to know that her new life, her real life, had been about to begin.
Kate Randall closed her laptop, sat back in her chair and stared at the wall above the small desk in her quarters. She had showered and changed into a T-shirt and shorts, and her blonde hair was wet; she could feel water dripping down her neck and across her shoulders.
It was her turn to write Squad G-17’s post-operation report, but she found herself unable to concentrate on it. She was tired, but that was not unusual; endless interrupted sleep patterns came with the territory of being a Department 19 Operator. What was distracting her, and preventing her from focusing on the report, was something that had become an almost constant source of annoyance to Kate.
Jamie and Larissa.
Kate had known about their relationship, or whatever they called it when they were alone, since the very beginning. The two things that annoyed her, that sometimes made her so frustrated that she wanted to scream “I KNOW!” in both their faces, was the fact that they seemed to genuinely believe she was unaware, and that they felt the need to keep it from her at all.
The former was an insult to her intelligence, and she hated being thought of as stupid almost as much as she hated being patronised. The latter was even worse; she knew, with absolute certainty, that they both believed she had a crush on Jamie.
Kate was a girl with a highly developed sense of self-awareness, and would have admitted, had anyone asked her, that there had been a tiny period of time during which she had possibly, just possibly, thought about Jamie in that way.
During the madness of Lindisfarne and the days that followed it, days in which the shape and course of her life had been altered forever, when she had been faced with decisions that she would spend the rest of her days second-guessing, he had been there, by her side, helping her through it. He had rescued her on Lindisfarne, as the bodies of her friends and neighbours lay discarded on the streets she had grown up in, and saved her life, all their lives, by destroying Alexandru Rusmanov. Then, when it was over, she had seen him with Frankenstein, and with his mum, and for a few short moments, she thought that she had maybe been a little bit in love with him.
Maybe.
But the feeling had passed, and passed quickly; partly because it was obvious to her from the moment they woke up at the Loop on the morning after Lindisfarne that he had fallen for Larissa, and that Larissa felt the same way about him, but also because in the cold light of day, away from the blood and the screams and the horror of the night before, the aura that had glowed around him as he stepped forward to face Alexandru was gone. She loved Jamie; in the months since her home had been attacked he had become one of the two closest friends she had ever had, and she would have done anything for him.
But she was not in love with him.
That was what hurt her most about the deception that he and Larissa were perpetrating; she was genuinely, unreservedly happy for them both. She had waited and waited for them to tell her, convincing herself they were looking for the right moment, until she had been forced into the bitter realisation that there wasn’t going to be a right moment. They weren’t waiting for anything; they had decided to keep her in the dark.
Well, to hell with that, she thought. Tomorrow I’ll tell them I know. No more of this.
After all, it wasn’t as if Kate had been without problems of her own to deal with in the aftermath of Lindisfarne; real problems, unlike the adolescent nonsense occupying her two supposedly best friends.
After they had arrived at the Loop, after the wonderful, heart-stopping moment when the news had been passed to her that her father was among the survivors who had made it to the mainland in John Tremain’s fishing boat, Kate had been escorted down to the secure dormitory on Level B and crashed into a deep, dreamless sleep. She had slept until a female Operator, in the same black uniform that Jamie and his colleagues had been wearing when they arrived on Lindisfarne, shook her awake six hours later and told her that she needed to get dressed and follow her up to the Loop’s Ops Room.
She had done so without complaint, still half-asleep, rubbing her eyes as they made their way into a lift and up to Level 0. The Operator had pushed open the Ops Room door, and held it wide; Kate walked through it, and looked around the large circular room.
There was only one other person in there, a strikingly handsome Latino man in his mid-forties, wearing the now familiar all-black uniform, and sitting casually on the desk at the front of the room.
“Miss Randall?” he asked. His expression was entirely neutral; there was no malice there, no threat, but no warmth either, and for a second, the strangeness of the situation she had found herself in sank into her, and she felt a sharp rush of fear as she nodded.
What if they’re going to lock me up for what I saw? What if I’m never going to get out of here? What will happen to my dad?
“My name is Major Christian Gonzalez,” the man said. “I’m the Interim Security Officer at this facility. Please, take a seat.”
Kate did as she was told, crossing the wide room and sitting in one of the plastic chairs that were ranged round a grid of long tables. She turned it so she was facing Major Gonzalez.
“Did you sleep well? Is there anything you need?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good. Now, Kate – do you mind me calling you Kate?”
She shook her head again, and his lips curled at the edges.
“Thank you,” he said. “So, Kate. We have a problem, you and I. We need to work out what we’re going to do about it.”
“What problem?” she asked, her voice low and nervous.
“That you were never supposed to see the things you’ve seen. The creatures that attacked your home last night, the men who rescued you; as far as the general public is concerned, none of them exist. Neither does the building you’re standing in now. And that’s the way we need it to stay.”
Fear pulsed up Kate’s spine.
They’re going to lock me up. I’m never going to be allowed to go home.
Major Gonzalez saw the look on the teenage girl’s face and smiled.
“We’re not going to hurt you, Kate,” he said, his voice kind. “We’re the good guys. But we do need to protect the security of what we do, and that means you have a decision to make. A big one.”
“What do you mean?” Kate managed. “What decision?”
Major Gonzalez picked a small sheaf of paper from the desk he was sitting on, and showed it to Kate.
“This is the preliminary report into the events of last night,” he said. “It is based on statements from eyewitnesses, including senior members of this organisation. It describes the circumstances leading to the destruction of one of the most powerful vampires in the world at the hands of a teenage boy with nothing more than the most basic training, and the actions of the men and women that helped him. It mentions you, several times. It says that you exhibited remarkable bravery and resolve in leading Mr Carpenter and his colleagues to the monastery where Alexandru Rusmanov had made his base, and that you continued to demonstrate those qualities when confronted with a hall full of hungry vampires, led by one of the most evil creatures ever to walk the earth. It claims you destroyed one of the vampires yourself. Is that true?”
The memory of the previous night burst unbidden into Kate’s mind. She remembered the screams and the crunch of weapons as the small group of men and the vampire girl fought valiantly against monsters that outnumbered them five to one, remembered the spray of blood and the tearing of flesh and bone, remembered with shuddering revulsion the vampire who had held her, and the sensation of his sharpened fingernail tracing a line across her neck. Then she remembered the primal roar that had echoed through her head as she sank her teeth into his arm and tore at it like a mad dog, the warmth of his blood coating her from head to toe after she plunged a metal stake into his heart, and the subsequent sense of overpowering elation that had shaken her to her core.
“That’s true,” she said, quietly. “I destroyed one of them.”
Christian Gonzalez smiled at her again, and this time the smile was wide, and dizzyingly beautiful. She felt his approval wash over her, and thought she might blush.
“Well done,” he said. “Very well done indeed. That you survived as long as you did on an island overrun by vampires, that you were then able to play the part you did in their defeat, is why you now have a decision to make. The first option is as follows: you can return home, with a cover story explaining your whereabouts for the last twenty-four hours, and never tell anyone about the things you saw. You’ll have to sign the Official Secrets Act, you’ll be monitored to make sure you comply with it, and if you don’t, you will be discredited so that no one believes you, to the extent that the likely result will be a period of evaluation in a secure psychiatric hospital. But you’ll be able to resume your life as it was before the events of last night, and you’ll be reunited with your father.”
Tears welled in the corners of Kate’s eyes as she thought about her father, her brilliant, loyal dad, who must be going through hell with his daughter missing and his home recovering from a massacre.
“I should be clear,” continued Major Gonzalez. “This is an offer that is made extremely rarely. Under normal circumstances, once a civilian is exposed to the existence of the supernatural, as you were last night, continuing a normal life ceases to be an option. There are obvious risks in allowing that information to be taken out into the world, and those risks are normally considered sufficient to see the civilian in question placed in classified custody. I’m not trying to scare you, or threaten you, I promise. I’m merely letting you know how this usually works.”
Kate felt both scared and threatened, but she tried not to let it show.
“What’s the second option?” she asked, her voice packed with as much bravery as she could muster.
The smile returned to Christian Gonzalez’s face.
“The other option is that you stay here and help us save the world,” he said. “You become an Operator in this organisation, and you help us stop what happened to Lindisfarne from happening anywhere else.”
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch is that the life you led until yesterday will be over. You will never be able to tell anyone who you are, who you work for, or what you do, and you will never be able to contact anyone from your former life. Including your father.”
Kate felt faint.
The idea that she would never see her dad again was so abhorrent to her that she thought she was going to throw up at the mere thought of it. But what the handsome Major was offering her was a way out of the life that had been stretching inevitably out before her on Lindisfarne: she would inherit her father’s boat, carry on fishing the same small stretch of water for the next forty years, maybe find a local boy to marry, have a kid or two, and live and die on the island where she had been born.
Kate knew she could never have left her father alone, could never have moved to the mainland and abandoned him to an empty house full of the memories of his family. She had come to terms with her lot a long time ago, but now this man was offering her a way to change it all, to do something that mattered, something that would be exciting, and dangerous, where there were no limits to the places she might go and the people and monsters she might meet. But even for all that, there was a price that would be too high for her to pay.
“What will you tell my dad?” she asked, carefully. “I can’t let him think anything happened to me. I need him to know I’m OK.”
“He’ll be told that you are the primary material witness to a major terrorist incident, and that you are being voluntarily detained for questioning. In a few months’ time, when all this has died down, he’ll be asked to sign the Official Secrets Act and told that you have been recruited into the Security Services. He’ll be extremely proud of you, I promise.” This time Major Gonzalez grinned, and Kate blushed, despite herself.
“How long do I have to make the decision?” she asked.
“About an hour,” replied the Major. She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. “I’m sorry, I know this must seem very unfair. But I’m afraid there are time factors at work here that controlling the public story depends on. If you decide to go, we need to get you home while there is still confusion on Lindisfarne.”
“And if I decide to stay?”
“Then we need to get started,” he said.
In the end, she had only made Major Gonzalez wait for ten minutes before she told him she would take the second option. He congratulated her, before escorting her along a curving grey corridor to one of the Briefing Rooms where she was reacquainted with Jamie Carpenter and the vampire girl, Larissa Kinley. And even then, as she looked back on the most important day of her life, she had noticed the small glances and half-smiles that passed between the two of them.
Tomorrow, she thought again. I’ll tell them tomorrow.
There was a knock on the door of her quarters, and she padded softly across the cold floor to answer it, smiling as she did so, knowing there was only one person who would be visiting her at this hour. Shaun Turner was standing in the corridor outside, his face breaking into a smile as she opened the door to him. Then he was pushing her backwards, his hands on her waist, his lips on hers, and a thought flashed through her head as they sank on to her narrow bunk.
At least I’m actually good at keeping secrets. Well, from one of them, at least.
Jamie stood outside the door to Admiral Henry Seward’s quarters on Level A, pushing his hair back from his forehead and tucking his T-shirt into his combat trousers. When he was as presentable as he was likely to get, he knocked on the door.
“Come,” called a muffled voice. Jamie pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside.
The Director of Department 19 was sitting behind his desk. Admiral Seward put the papers he had been working on atop the towering pile of his inbox, and regarded Jamie with a warm smile which the teenager returned.
They had become close in recent months, these two men; united in grief by the loss of Frankenstein, whom Seward missed almost as much as Jamie, and drawn together by the Director’s terrible sense of guilt over the death of Julian Carpenter. Jamie had never blamed Henry Seward for the loss of his father; for that, there was a jet black corner in the darkest, angriest depths of his soul set aside especially for the traitor Thomas Morris, who had died before Jamie got the chance to make him pay for what he had done. But the Admiral’s guilt was real, even if it was misplaced, and it had allowed Jamie the chance to get to know the man his father had really been.
They had spent many evenings in this room, the Director telling tales of Julian Carpenter, Jamie drinking them in hungrily, then passing them on to his mother, often after heavy editing for violence. It had made the Carpenters feel like a family again, had rebuilt the bonds between that had been eroded in the years after Julian had died, when neither mother nor son had known how to fill the void that had been left in the middle of their lives.
Now look at us, thought Jamie, and stifled a grin. I hunt and destroy vampires for a living, she IS a vampire and lives in a cell hundreds of metres below the earth, yet we’ve never got on better.
“Something funny, Jamie?” asked Seward.
He had clearly not stifled the grin as well as he thought, and drew himself up to attention.
“No, sir,” he replied.
Seward smiled at him.
“At ease,” he said. Jamie relaxed into an easy stance, his hands loosely together behind his back. “Give me your report.”
“Nothing notable, sir. Father and daughter vamps robbing a blood bank.”
“Were you able to capture them?”
“Yes, sir. I handed them over to Dr Yen, sir.”
The Director nodded. “Well done. Lazarus needs all the warm vamps it can get its hands on.”
“So I hear, sir.”
“Any signs?”
“Yes, sir. On the wall outside the hospital. The same two words.”
Admiral Seward swore, scribbling a quick note on a piece of paper.
“Sir,” Jamie continued. “Why does the Lazarus Project need so many captive vamps? What are they doing down there?”
The Director put down the pen he had been writing his note with, and looked at the young Operator. “The Lazarus Project is classified, Jamie,” he replied. “You understand what classified means, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me remind you, just in case you’ve forgotten. It means that everyone who needs to know what the Lazarus Project is doing already knows what the Lazarus Project is doing. Is that clear, Operator?”
“It is, sir.”
“Good. There’s a Zero Hour Task Force briefing scheduled for 1100 tomorrow. Mandatory attendance.”
“New information, sir?” asked Jamie, hopefully.
Admiral Seward shook his head. “Just routine, Jamie. Dismissed.”
Jamie nodded, and left the Director’s study. As he walked towards the lift that would finally, mercifully, deliver him to his bed, his mind drifted back to the speech Admiral Seward had given a month earlier, that had brought to light the existence of the Lazarus Project, that had birthed the Zero Hour Task Force, that had altered how every Operator in the Department went about their job.
The speech that had changed everything.
3
THE ART OF COMING CLEAN
TWENTY-NINE DAYS EARLIER
“Do you know what this is about?” asked Larissa.
She and Jamie were walking along the main Level B corridor towards one of the lifts standing near its centre. Larissa had a towel slung round her shoulders, and was dressed in a dark green vest and a pair of shorts. Jamie guessed she had been with Terry in the Playground, the wide, sweat-soaked space in the bowels of the Loop where the veteran Blacklight instructor ruled with an iron fist, and she looked deeply unimpressed about being interrupted.
“I’ve no idea,” replied Jamie, glancing over at her. “I got the same message as you.” He had been asleep when his console had blared into life, and was almost as grumpy as Larissa.
“All right,” she said. “Don’t bite my head off.”
“Sorry,” he replied, casting her a weary smile which she returned.
The two teenagers were tired, more tired than they could ever remember having been in their lives before Department 19. You never really got used to it, not completely, although they had both become skilled at not letting it interfere with either their performance as Operators, or the tiny sliver of each day that could charitably be called their social lives. But there was something looming on the horizon that was fuelling their bad moods, something that all the T-Bones and ultraviolet light in the world couldn’t stop.
In five days’ time, it would be Christmas.
Even inside the Loop, surrounded by men and women utterly committed to the secret mission they had undertaken, it was impossible to avoid the festive season. The Operators who had families, who lived off-base as Jamie’s father had once done, filled the officers’ mess with tales of trees and decorations, of presents that had been bought or still needed buying, while the younger men and women who lived in quarters at the Loop juggled days off and swapped shifts in the hope of seeing their loved ones at some point over the holiday. For Jamie and Larissa, it was nothing more than a continual reminder of the differences between them and everyone else, even Kate.
The two teenagers were unique, in that Blacklight’s Intelligence Division had taken them off the grid; they no longer existed in the outside world, on paper or in the eyes of the law. Although she didn’t know it, had Larissa’s mother walked into any governmental office and attempted to prove that she had ever had a daughter, it would have been impossible for her to do so; there were no longer any official records of her child having been born, or having lived, and her copy of Larissa’s birth certificate would have been dismissed as a forgery.
It was the same situation for Jamie; in his case because he was now the son of a creature that did not officially exist, in Larissa’s because she was a creature that did not officially exist. Kate still had a presence in the world; she was officially listed as missing after the Lindisfarne attack, and her father knew that she was still alive, even though he was sworn to secrecy on the subject.
Jamie and Larissa were voluntary prisoners inside Department 19, unable to live anywhere else, because they did not exist anywhere else. Jamie had asked Admiral Seward about it once, asked him what would happen if the time came that he wanted to get married and have a family, have some semblance of a normal life. Seward had told him that it might, might, be possible to reintroduce him into the world under an assumed identity. As far as Jamie was concerned, he had not sounded very confident about it.
Jamie would readily concede, however, that it was far harder for Larissa than for him. All that remained of his family lived in a cell in the base of the Loop, and there had been a small Christmas tree standing in Marie Carpenter’s cell for over a week. Larissa’s family, and in particular her little brother, were still out there, living their lives without her, making preparations for what had always been her favourite time of the year. They had talked about it several times, both of them trying hard not to make the other feel worse, but it had been clear to them both that they were united in a single wish: for Christmas to be over as soon as possible, so their lives could get back to what they had come to consider normal.
They reached the lift and pressed the button marked 0. The message that had appeared on their consoles had been sent to every single Operator, both the active and inactive lists, summoning them all to a briefing in the Ops Room. Admiral Seward had debriefed Jamie less than three hours earlier, after Squad G-17 had returned from a routine call on a housing estate south of Birmingham, and the Director had not mentioned anything about an imminent meeting. Seward had been so phenomenally busy in the weeks since Lindisfarne that Jamie was not surprised, although he was, privately, slightly hurt; he liked to believe that he had the Director’s ear in a way that the vast majority of rookie Operators did not.
Jamie and Larissa emerged on to Level 0 and made their way to the Ops Room. The wide, oval room was already almost full, and they found standing room against the curved wall at the back of the sea of black-clad figures. Jamie caught Kate’s eye as they made their way through the throng, and he nodded at her. She smiled back at them from her seat near the far wall, before returning her attention to the platform at the front of the room, beneath the giant wall screen that was currently lying dormant.
Admiral Seward was standing on the platform, talking in a low voice to Cal Holmwood, the Deputy Director. The expressions on the two men’s faces were sombre, and Jamie felt a pang of nervousness rise into his chest. Everything had been so chaotic since Lindisfarne, as the Department attempted to adjust to the revelations that had been uncovered by the successful rescue of Jamie’s mother: the unmasking of Thomas Morris as the traitor to the Department, the destruction of Alexandru Rusmanov and the tragic loss of Colonel Frankenstein, which Jamie could still barely bring himself to think about.
“Seward looks serious,” said Larissa, as though she could read Jamie’s mind. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” replied Jamie, softly, as Cal Holmwood stepped down from the platform and took a seat in the front row. “Looks like we’re about to find out.”
Admiral Seward stepped up to the lectern that stood in the middle of the platform, and gripped its edges with his hands. He looked out over the massed ranks of Operators, his expression unreadable. Then he cleared his throat, and began to speak.
“Operators of Department 19,” he began. “The time has come to put our cards on the table. Some of what I’m about to say is going to be hard for you to hear, but I believe it’s necessary that you hear it. I know many of you have had questions regarding the events of October 26th, questions that many of you have brought to me in person. I’m sorry that until now I have been unable to provide you with answers. There have been investigations and inquiries under way, and the full picture has only become clear extremely recently. That picture is what I’m here to describe to you today.”
Seward glanced around at his audience, and appeared to find what he was looking for on the faces of his colleagues. He nodded briefly, before carrying on.
“I’m sure the majority of you are familiar with the events that took place on Lindisfarne during the night in question; for those of you who are not, I have declassified report 6723/F, which provides a comprehensive account. What very few of you know is that despite the fact that the mission on Lindisfarne led to the destruction of Alexandru Rusmanov, to the uncovering of the treachery of Thomas Morris and to the loss of Colonel Frankenstein, the crucial event of that night took place more than two thousand miles away, at the SPC base in Polyarny.”
Standing at the back of the room, Jamie bristled.
And we rescued my mother. But I guess that doesn’t deserve a mention.
“On the lower levels of the SPC base,” continued Seward, taking a deep breath, “there is a vault numbered 31. Until the 26th of October it contained the most highly classified artefact held by any of the supernatural Departments of the world. It contained the remains of Vlad Tepes, the man who became known as Count Dracula.”
The room exploded.
Half the seated Operators leapt to their feet en masse, and the air was suddenly filled with hundreds of voices, many of them shouting and yelling. Admiral Seward raised his hands in a placatory gesture, then bellowed for quiet. The noise subsided, leaving behind it an uneasy, almost hostile atmosphere. The standing Operators retook their seats, but did so slowly, the looks on their faces shot through with fear and confusion, and more than a little anger.
“I know this must come as a shock,” said Seward. “The fact of the matter is that the confrontation with Count Dracula in 1892, the confrontation that led directly to the foundation of this Department, did not end with his destruction. This is a matter of open public record, since the account in Stoker’s novel is accurate. Any one of you could have corroborated his account with the documents in the archive, but it appears that none of you felt inclined to do so.
“Dracula was dangerously weak after his journey across Europe, and the knives wielded by Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris spilled the last of his blood, causing his body to collapse. They, along with John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Abraham Van Helsing, believed him dead; they were the first men ever to challenge, let alone defeat, a vampire, and they had no reason not to. The realisation that Dracula had been rendered dormant rather than destroyed outright wasn’t made until several years later, when Professor Van Helsing was able to begin his study of the supernatural and discovered that a vampire could be brought back to life by introducing a sufficient quantity of blood to the dormant remains.
“When Professor Van Helsing realised the implication of this work, he returned to Transylvania with an envoy of the Russian Tsar, to recover the remains and see them properly secured. The envoy betrayed him, however, and the remains were taken to Moscow. They remained in Russian hands ever since, until the 26th of October, when they were taken from the SPC base by Valeri Rusmanov.”
Seward paused, clearly bracing himself for a second eruption, but none came. A deep shock appeared to have settled over the men and women of Department 19; what they were being told raised a prospect almost too terrifying to contemplate.
“An investigation into the theft by the Intelligence Division has returned some preliminary conclusions. Firstly, it appears that Valeri had been searching for his master’s remains since the early twentieth century, since very shortly after they disappeared into Russia. Secondly, it is clear that he was able to locate and extract them using information provided to him by Thomas Morris, whose treachery appears not to have been limited to assisting Alexandru Rusmanov in settling their mutual grudge against the Carpenter family.”
Jamie felt his face redden as a number of Operators turned slowly in his direction. He stared up at the lectern, refusing to meet their eyes, and silently urged Admiral Seward to carry on.
“The whereabouts of Valeri Rusmanov,” said the Director, “are presently unknown. Surveillance of all Valeri’s known properties and associates has yielded negative results. Interrogation of well-connected vampires has proved equally fruitless. Simply put, we have no idea where he is. In addition, we have—”
“He’s going to try to bring him back, isn’t he?” interrupted an Operator, whose name Jamie didn’t know. “Valeri, I mean. He’s going to try to bring Dracula back.”
“Operator Carlisle,” replied Seward, a grave expression on his face, “I am sorry to say that the Intelligence Division reports an overwhelming probability that he has already done so.”
This time the eruption was punctuated by a series of what seemed to Jamie’s ears to be horribly close to screams. He felt a tight ball of panic close round his heart; he had never seen such a reaction to anything from the men and women of Blacklight, men and women whom he had come to believe could not be shaken by anything, and who were certainly never scared. But the fear in the Ops Room was now palpable, thick and cloying. What the Director was announcing, in his calm, straightforward manner, was something that no one in the room had ever considered, let alone made any preparation for.
It was quite literally the worst thing he could be telling them.
“Enough!” shouted Admiral Seward. “Don’t you think I know how serious this is? I’m telling you because I believe that all of you have the right to know what we are facing. Don’t make me regret that decision!”
There was a gradual shuffling of feet, an embarrassed dropping of eyes and voices, and an extremely uneasy calm settled precariously over the Ops Room. Most of the Operators remained on their feet, and when Seward realised that they had no intention of sitting back down, he carried on.
“Although there is a tiny chance that Valeri has either chosen not to resurrect his master or has failed in attempting to do so, the official position of the Department from this point forward is that Dracula is once more alive on this planet. We have no way of knowing precisely how long this has been the case, but since the resurrection process requires little more than a sufficiently large quantity of fresh blood in which to immerse the remains, we are assuming that it took place within twenty-four hours of the theft of the ashes, some time on or around the 27th of October.”
“Why haven’t we seen him?” asked Operator Carlisle, his voice trembling. “Why hasn’t he come in here and killed us all?”
“He’ll be weak,” Jamie heard himself say, and blinked as the entire room turned to look at him. “After the resurrection. He’ll be weak.”
“That’s correct, Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Seward, and the sea of heads swung back to face the lectern.
“Professor Van Helsing wrote at length about the recovery time of resurrected vampires, in the aftermath of the loss of the remains to the Russians. The Science Division has expanded upon this research in recent days, and has come up with some rough conclusions. There are several factors that affect the recovery time of a vampire, principally the creature’s age before it was rendered dormant, and the period of time since it was reduced to ash. It’s far from an exact science, but we have been able to create a workable timeline, leading towards a point that has been given the code name Zero Hour, the point at which we believe a properly tended Dracula will regain his full strength. That point, Operators, lies one hundred and twenty days from now, on the 19th of April.”
“Christ,” growled Jacob Scott. The grizzled Australian Colonel had not risen from his seat in the second row during any of the outbursts that had taken place around him, and even now his face wore an expression containing significantly more determination than fear. “Four months. If we don’t get him in the next four months, we won’t get him at all. That’s the deal, right?”
Admiral Seward nodded. “That’s our hypothesis, Jacob. Dracula restored to full strength presents a threat that none of our strategic simulations can accurately model. He is the first vampire who ever lived, the oldest and most powerful; we simply cannot predict what will happen if he is allowed to rise. So our strategy from this point onwards is to make sure that doesn’t happen. We have four months to find Valeri and Dracula, and to destroy them both. After that, it may not be possible to do so. As a result, I have three further announcements to make.” A series of dazed-sounding groans emerged from the black-clad ranks, but Seward ignored them.
“Firstly, I will be creating and chairing a task force with the specific remit of devising and deploying the Department’s strategy where Dracula and Valeri are concerned. Those of you who are selected for this group will be notified in due course. Secondly, I’m announcing the formation of a classified sub-department of the Science Division, code-named the Lazarus Project. Access to all information relating to this sub-department will be restricted on a strictly need-to-know basis, but it relates to the third thing I want to make you aware of. Until further notice the Standard Operating Procedure will no longer be to destroy vampires: it will be to contain them wherever possible, return them to the Loop and submit them into the custody of the Lazarus Project.”
There was a half-hearted outburst of objection from the dazed ranks of the Operators, but Seward had reached the end of his patience.
“Shut up!” he bellowed. “Any Operator who feels unable to implement this new procedure, or who feels unable to handle the situation that I have just outlined, should feel absolutely free to place themselves on the inactive roster. The rest of you I will expect to carry out your responsibilities to the same standards as always. If you have questions, come and see me or ask your senior commander. In the meantime, you are all dismissed.”
Seward stepped down from the platform and strode out of the Ops Room, closely followed by Cal Holmwood and Paul Turner. The reeling Operators began to talk among themselves, their voices low, their eyes wide. Larissa looked at Jamie, and gave her head a tiny shake.
“Holy shit,” she said, quietly.
“That’s a bit of an understatement,” replied Jamie.
4
GROWING PAINS
CHÂTEAU DAUNCY AQUITAINE, SOUTH-WESTERN FRANCE
On a chaise longue the colour of blood, in Valeri Rusmanov’s study overlooking the vast Landes Forest, lay the first vampire ever to walk the earth.
Three months after his resurrection, Count Dracula was finally beginning to look like himself; like the man he had briefly been, like the vampire who had lived for more than four hundred years before he had been condemned to a limbo that had lasted for more than a century. A mane of black hair spilled across the vampire’s shoulders, swept back from a forehead that was high and wide. Thick, unruly black eyebrows perched above pale blue eyes which flanked a nose that was sharp and narrow, like the blade of a scalpel. A black moustache covered the entirety of his upper lip, framing a mouth that was thin and cruel. The Count was dressed in a plain black robe, and he stared at the door of the study, waiting for Valeri to return with his supper.
He was weak. Maddeningly, pitifully weak.
Each intake of fresh blood, which Valeri dutifully brought him every evening, saw a tiny fraction of his power return, but he was still little more than a shadow of his former self. For several weeks after his resurrection, he had been unable to move, his body soft and malleable, as though made of wet clay, waiting to be fired. In time it had hardened into solid flesh and dense bone, but the terrible power he had once wielded, power that could lay waste to cities and obliterate men and women with little more than a glance, was still only a memory.
In time, I will be all that I was. In time. And then this world will pay.
But for the time being, the Lord of Darkness, the Impaler, the Cruel Prince, who had been feared from sea to sea by his own people and his enemies alike, was as weak as a sickly child.
Dracula lifted his head, grunting at the effort it took, and stared out of the window of his most loyal subject’s study, past the manicured grounds of the chateau to the dark expanse of the pine forest beyond. His mind throbbed with two ancient, primitive desires: for food, and for revenge on the men who had stolen a century of his life from him, the men who had reduced him to this pathetic state.
After the resurrection, as the ancient vampire began the slow, painful process of recovery, Valeri had started to carefully recount what had happened while Dracula had been lying dormant. The story of the twentieth century, in which humankind had advanced far beyond the imagination of even the most optimistic Victorian futurist, was long, confusing and, as far as Dracula was concerned, almost fatally tedious. It was not in his nature, the nature of either the man he had been or the monster he had become, to spend his time considering the achievements of others; his world view was fundamentally extremely simple.
As far as he was concerned, the rest of the world existed only for his use, and by his permission, and this new world that Valeri was describing to him would be no different.
He didn’t care about the growth of the cities, about the technological developments that Valeri described to him in infuriatingly simple terms, as though teaching a lesson to an infant. Aeroplanes, cars, space travel, television, telephones, the internet – none of these innovations interested him in the slightest. He saw no reason to doubt that his place in the new world being described to him would be whatever he decided he wanted it to be, providing that one thing had remained constant over the decades that had passed without him.
“Do… they… still… bleed?” Dracula had eventually interrupted, his voice barely audible to anyone without Valeri’s superhuman hearing.
“Yes, master,” replied Valeri. “The humans still bleed.”
“Then… I… would… hear… no… more.”
The study door opened, and Valeri entered, dragging the unconscious figure of a teenage girl behind him. Her head was starred with blood and the heels of her bare feet scraped noisily across the wooden floorboards as Valeri approached his master. The scent of the blood seeping from the girl’s head filled Dracula’s nostrils, and his pale blue eyes coloured a terrible dark red, the colour of madness, a colour that no sane person could have looked upon for more than a second or two.
“An offering for you, master,” whispered Valeri, bowing deeply.
“Thank you, Valeri,” replied Count Dracula, his voice like the scratch of a pencil on a sheet of paper.
Valeri lowered the girl towards his master, then slit her throat with one of his fingernails. As the blood began to flow, Dracula clamped his mouth over the wound, sucking hungrily, like a baby at its mother’s breast. Valeri held the girl in place, but turned his head away; it would not be appropriate for him to watch his master feed in such a way. Instead, he let his gaze wander around the study, a room he had not set foot in for almost fifty years until the day after his master had been reborn.
Château Dauncy had been the favourite place of his wife, Ana, her favourite place in the whole world. It had been the only thing, apart from Valeri himself, capable of soothing the madness that roared inside her. When she died, when she was taken from him, he had ordered the old building shuttered and boarded up, hoping to trap the worst of his grief inside the ancient walls. It was painful for him to be inside those walls now, far more painful than he had expected, but it was necessary; it was the one property he owned that no one else was aware of, the one place he was confident would not be under surveillance by Blacklight or one of its accursed counterparts. It was the place he could return his master to health, without interruption.
The girl’s blood gushed into Dracula’s mouth, and he instantly felt strength flood through him. He knew it wouldn’t last, but he also knew that each passing day, each mouthful of warm, running blood, brought him closer to himself, and to his revenge.
Taking advantage of the temporary rush of power, he spoke to Valeri, his voice booming through the study, rich and deep and momentarily full of the authority that had once commanded armies, and sent thousands to their deaths.
“Where is your brother?” he asked. “Why is Valentin not here, assisting you? I would not have you shoulder this burden alone, old friend.”
“Valentin is in America, master,” replied Valeri, a grimace of distaste flickering across his face as he spoke his brother’s name. “We do not concern ourselves with each other.”
Dracula’s face twisted into a snarl, and for a moment, Valeri was afraid. The resurrection of his master had been the result of a quest that had taken him more than a hundred years to complete, a quest he had remained doggedly loyal to even as Alexandru had descended into madness and Valentin had turned his back on his family, sinking happily into his life of shameful indulgence in New York. Now that the quest was over and his master had been returned to life, Valeri’s position as Dracula’s favourite would forever be secure; he would follow his master once more, obediently, gladly and proudly. But in the century that had passed, as Dracula lay dormant deep below the Russian snow, Valeri had forgotten what it was to be afraid. He was reminded now, and he shivered in the cool air of his study.
“Go to him,” said Dracula, the snarl vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. “Tell him that his master orders him home. Tell him there is work to be done.”
“Of course, master,” replied Valeri. “I will leave at once.”
Dracula grunted with satisfaction.
“Good,” he said, and fixed his eyes upon his subject. “You have always served me with distinction, Valeri. You have never sought to question me. When this world is mine, when I have piled high the bodies of the pathetic creatures that inhabit it and set them alight, when once again my enemies stare out at nothing from the highest poles, the place at my right hand will be yours, as it was before.”
“You honour me, master.”
“Leave me,” replied Dracula, waving a hand towards Valeri, who did as he was ordered, backing quietly out of the study and leaving the Count alone.
Dracula watched him go, then rolled back on to the chaise longue and stared at the ornate, painted ceiling above him. Already he could feel his strength ebbing away, but he refused to let it anger him. Three months had passed since he had woken in the pulsing gore of the pit beneath the Rusmanov chapel, naked and screaming, his body little more than coloured blubber, held together only by the strength of his own will. He had not known himself as he was birthed violently back into the world, had not known himself until Valeri had knelt at the edge of the pit and said a single word.
Master. When he called me master, I knew who I was.
His journey from that blood-soaked beginning had been long, and hard, but it was getting easier, with each passing day. He knew that he could be patient, for a short while at least. And he knew that he could bear whatever pain might come his way. As agonising as his recovery had been so far, it did not even bear comparison to the night his second life had begun, more than five hundred years ago.
5
REBIRTH
TELEORMAN FOREST, NEAR BUCHAREST, WALLACHIA 12TH DECEMBER 1476
Vlad Tepes fled through the darkening forest, the din of the battle and the screams of his men fading behind him. He had torn his royal armour from his body and cast it aside, but he could still hear the shouts and running footsteps of his pursuers, getting closer with every minute that passed.
Five Turkish soldiers at least; maybe six, maybe more. The Prince of Wallachia knew better than anyone the horrors that would await him in the Turkish camp if he was caught, and he redoubled his efforts, the soft forest floor thudding beneath his feet.
I’ll die before I let them take me, he thought. I will bow to no one.
The army that had advanced across his lands had outnumbered his own forces by five to one. Less than a year earlier, Stephen Bathory, the Prince of Transylvania, had helped Vlad to reclaim his throne; they had marched together into Wallachia, their forces combined, and Basarab, the foolish, cowardly old man who had succeeded Vlad’s brother Radu as ruler, had fled without a fight.
But Stephen had refused to stay and help consolidate Vlad’s third reign, and his departure – betrayal, it was a betrayal – had left him vulnerable. He had received word within months that a Turkish army was moving north, and when it had been clear that no help was forthcoming, he had ridden out to meet it on the plains beside Bucharest, accompanied by his elite Moldavian guards and a little over four thousand men.
They fought like they were forty thousand. Fought and died, as men should.
Blood ran down Vlad’s arm from the sword blow that had knocked him from his horse, but he felt no pain. Instead, an ethereal calm had settled over him, bestowing upon him the clarity of a man who is running for his life. Somewhere behind him, either fleeing the battlefield or lying dead upon its blood-soaked earth, were his Generals, the brothers Rusmanov. When it had become clear that the battle was lost, that his brief third reign as the ruler of Wallachia was over, Vlad had fled, without a backward glance. He felt a momentary pang of guilt, but pushed it quickly aside.
I never promised them immortality. They followed me with their eyes open, and took their share of the spoils of victory gladly.
The sun had slipped below the horizon to the west, and darkness was gathering around Vlad as he ran. At the foot of an enormous white oak tree, he stopped and caught his breath, listening intently for the sounds of his pursuers.
The forest was silent.
Not the slightest noise could be heard, in any direction, and Vlad’s savage pleasure at the thought of having lost the Turkish soldiers was replaced with a sudden uneasiness. The trunk of the oak in front of him looked ancient, gnarled and twisted beyond anything he had seen before, and he had hunted and ridden these woods a thousand times since moving his summer palace to the small town of Bucharest. Vlad looked around the small clearing in which he was standing and saw that all the trees were the same, towering structures of mangled wood, their bark splintered and grey. At the base of the enormous trunks sprouted plants that Vlad didn’t recognise, sprays of black flowers and barbed, midnight-blue vines.
What is this place? I have never been here before.
This is the deep, whispered a voice, and Vlad whirled round, reaching instinctively for his sword. But the short blade was long gone, left in the gut of a Turkish soldier who had tried to prevent his escape.
Your sword will not help you here, whispered the same voice. It was light, almost jovial, and seemed to be coming from inside his head, from all sides, and from nowhere.
“Who speaks to me?” bellowed Vlad, striding into the centre of the clearing. “Show yourself!”
There was no answer.
The silence in the forest was absolute as the last of the light faded away. Vlad Tepes felt fear crawl into his stomach, as he looked around the clearing, searching for the way he had come.
There was no sign of it.
He was lost.
There were no broken branches, no flattened patches of grass, nothing to indicate that a man had passed this way within the last hundred years. Vlad stared into the darkness, trying to calm his racing heart. He was trying to decide which direction to set out in when he heard a sound, the first sound, apart from the grotesque, light-hearted voice, that he had heard since he had entered this place.
The noise was a scratching, creeping sound, and it ran up Vlad’s spine like ice. It was the sound of something crawling through the ancient trees, something slow, and old, and patient. Vlad spun round, his fists clenched, searching for the source of the noise in the spaces between the trees and the dark undergrowth. Then he realised what was happening, and terror gripped at his heart.
The trees themselves were moving.
Slowly, two of the ancient white oaks curved out and down, crossing at head height to form a circular passage that led further into – the deep, it’s the deep – the dark forest.
Come to me, whispered the voice. Come to me.
Vlad stared incredulously at the opening before him. This could not be real, he thought; surely his mind had broken at the loss of the battle, the deaths of his Generals and his men, and this was nothing more than the vision of a lunatic?
Do not be foolish, hissed the voice, and Vlad cried out. The lightness of tone was gone; the voice sounded like death, old and deep and dark. Come to me, while I still invite you. There is nowhere else for you to go.
Vlad looked around the clearing, and saw that the voice spoke the truth. The trees on all sides had closed together, forming an impenetrable wooden wall that surrounded him completely.
He was trapped.
Sickly sweet bile churned in his stomach, as he realised he had no choice. Forcing his legs to move, Vlad walked slowly forward, his entire body trembling, and entered the circular opening. The darkness that engulfed him was total; it was the very absence of light. He heard the trees begin to move again, closing the entrance behind him, and took a tentative step forward.
There was nothing beneath his foot.
Vlad overbalanced, his arms grabbing at nothing, then pitched forward, screaming as he did so, and fell into the deep.
He awoke an unknowable amount of time later.
There was grass beneath his back, and as his eyes struggled open, he saw the night sky above him. Constellations of stars spun and swirled, impossibly low, patterns of light that he had never seen before. A group of pale red stars gathered into the shape of a bull’s head, then disappeared as a cluster of iridescent green lights drew the image of a vast, coiled snake across the black sky.
The images turned Vlad’s stomach, and he looked away. He pushed himself up so he was sitting on the grass, fighting to remember where he was, and what had happened to him.
The grass he was sitting on was a green so dark it was almost black, even beneath the spiralling, shifting kaleidoscope of light overhead. It grew in a circle, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Around its edge, statues of ancient grey stone stood watchfully, without the smallest of gaps between them. The carved figures were grotesque: men and women in contortions of agony, animals in the throes of violence and death, demonic creatures, horned and spiked and scaled, with expressions of lustful pleasure on their faces. Above the statues there appeared to be nothing but the inky-black sky. There was no doorway, or passage, that would explain how he had come to this awful place.
I fell. I think I fell.
Then memory exploded through Vlad’s head, and he cried out as he remembered: the battle, the forest, the ancient moving trees, and the awful, unnatural voice that had spoken to him. He forced himself to his feet, and found himself looking at the only thing in the circle beside himself.
It was an altar.
A large rectangular block, crudely carved from pale grey stone and standing at the edge of the grass, beneath a pair of intertwined statues depicting such violence that Vlad, a man who had visited tortures on his enemies that had been whispered throughout the entire European continent, could not look at them. The stone was carved with letters of a language that he didn’t recognise, and the top was stained dark brown with long-spilled blood.
Fury overwhelmed Vlad, and he ran forward. He beat his hands on the surface of the altar, screaming and bellowing at the alien sky above his head. This was not where he was supposed to have ended his days, alone and scared in this place of old horror; he had commanded armies, lain waste to cities and entire countries, walked with kings and emperors. He raged at the darkness that surrounded him, swearing death to whatever had brought him here, cursing his enemies, promising revenge on everyone who had ever wronged him, offering his soul for the chance to see his betrayers cold in the ground.
Nothing happened.
Above him, the stars spun, blooming into life and winking out, as though millions of years were passing in mere seconds. The statues around him stood silent and impassive, staring down at him with empty eyes. The altar remained nothing more than a lump of stone.
Vlad slumped against it, the fire gone from him as quickly as it had arrived.
Why am I here? If not for some devilment, then why? Perhaps I am mad.
You are not mad, whispered the voice he had heard in the clearing. But you are stupid.
Vlad looked around, but still nothing moved inside the silent circle of statues. The voice was cruel, and mocking, and he tried to think what it could mean, why it was questioning his intelligence. His gaze landed on the brown stains atop the altar, and clarity burst through him. He dug the fingers of his right hand into the wound on his arm, tearing the flesh open. Vlad grunted in pain as blood began to run thickly down his arm, coating his hand; he lifted it high above his head, and paused.
If I am not mad, then only damnation awaits me here.
You were damned long ago, hissed the voice, and Vlad knew in his heart that it was right. He flicked his hand, and dark red droplets of his blood pattered across the surface of the altar.
Instantly, the air was full of energy; it crackled round Vlad’s head, lifting his long black hair from his shoulders. He watched the hairs on the backs of his arms stand up, and felt thick, greasy power in his teeth and bones. The statues began to move, rumbling to life on their pedestals, inflicting their tortures on one another in slow, gruesome thrusts, a writhing wall of agonised, abused stone. Before him, the altar began to run with a black liquid that appeared to be bubbling up from the microscopic holes in the stone itself, a thick oil that seemed to absorb light. When the entire surface of the altar was covered, a mouth, impossibly wide, and full of teeth the size and shape of daggers, opened in the liquid, and appeared to smile at him.
“What are you?” asked Vlad, his voice trembling.
You could not hope to understand, replied the mouth. It was the same voice he had been hearing since he had run blindly into what it had referred to as the deep, but now it was smooth, almost friendly. And it does not matter. What matters is that I know what you are.
“What am I?”
A monster. The mouth curled into a wide, awful grin. Capable of cruelty that impresses even one like me. A carrion bird. A parasite. A—
“Enough,” said Vlad, as forcefully as he was able.
The mouth on the altar grinned even wider.
And brave, up to a point. Often to the point of foolishness. Or danger.
“Why did you bring me here?” demanded Vlad.
You brought yourself. Your rage cried out across the deep. I merely lit the way.
“Why?” asked Vlad. “Why, for God’s sake? What do you want from me?”
I want to offer you something. In return for something you haven’t used for a long time.
“What are you talking about?”
Your soul, said the mouth, and bared its teeth. I want your soul. It will amuse me for millennia. And I will pay you handsomely for it.
Vlad stared at the slick surface of the altar. The mouth was still smiling, and he felt his stomach churn.
“What would you offer me?” he asked. “What price could be enough for what you ask?”
I can give you revenge, on everyone who has ever wronged you, or failed you. I can give you life everlasting, that you might hunt your enemies to the end of their days, without ageing, without dying. I can give you the power to lay your world in ruins. All this, I can give you.
“I sense deception,” said Vlad. “Such an offer is surely too good to be true.”
You are correct, replied the mouth. There can be no light without dark, no reward without punishment. But I deceive you not. You had not asked to hear the terms.
“I ask to hear them now.”
Very well. You will never see the sun again; to look upon it will mean your end. You will not take food, or drink, as humans do; only the lifeblood of other creatures will sustain you. You will be safe from mortal hands, and mortal weapons, and you may share your new life with others, as you see fit. But when your time on this plane comes to an end, your soul will belong to me, and Hell will await you. For all eternity.
“I accept.”
The words were out before he even realised he was going to say them. The abomination’s offer would condemn him to a life lived in the shadows, in the presence of death, and blood, but for Vlad this would not feel unfamiliar, and the alternative was not worthy of consideration. The life he had lived was over, he knew it all too well; the Turks would hunt him to the ends of the earth, and he would stand tall in the darkness rather than run and hide in the light.
I never doubted that you would, said the voice. But I wasn’t finished. The grin widened until it began to spill from the edges of the altar, running in thick black trails towards the dark grass.
“What do you mean?” cried Vlad. “What trickery is this?”
No trickery at all. You accepted my offer, without hearing the last of its terms.
“Tell me what you are holding back! Tell me at once!”
The mouth set into a hard, straight line, and when it spoke again, its voice was the sound of freezing blood, of pain and hopelessness.
You have nothing left to barter with. I suggest you refrain from issuing demands.
Vlad began to tremble, with rage and the terrible, creeping feeling that he had been outsmarted. Fear was again spilling into his stomach and up his spine, and he regarded the altar with horror.
“I apologise,” he forced himself to say. “I humbly ask to know the final term of the covenant.”
That’s better, said the mouth, its smile returning. The final term is this: the first blood you take is the sole key to your undoing. Your first victim will carry the only means of ending your second life.
“What kind of deception is this?” cried Vlad. “You promised me everlasting life!”
I promised you nothing. I told you that I could give you everlasting life; whether you achieve it is entirely up to you. If you were incapable of dying, then how would the contract ever be fulfilled? But I have given you more than any human who went before you, and I would see you more grateful for my generosity.
“What gift is this that I receive in return for my soul, full of conditions and caveats?”
I promised no gift, replied the mouth. I offered nothing more than the covenant that has now been agreed.
“Then I withdraw my acceptance!”
Too late, said the mouth, grinning widely. Then it moved, bursting forward from the altar and enveloping Vlad completely in black fluid that felt as cold and wrong as the end of the world. He screamed soundlessly, over and over, but the liquid held him tight, until it was over, and it withdrew.
He fell to his knees, a desiccated thing; his eyes had tumbled in on themselves, blinding him, and his skin was as dry and leathery as parchment. He was not breathing, but he was still alive, still able to feel the indescribable pain of what had been done to him. When he felt that he could bear the agony no longer, when he thought he must die or be driven mad by the pain, the black liquid moved again, coating him for a second time.
But instead of showing mercy, and ending his torment, as Vlad prayed it would, it sank into him, disappearing into his pores, and a sensation of power beyond anything he had ever felt surged through him. His eyes spun back into place, as his skin smoothed and coloured and his heart began to beat anew, and he rose to his feet on legs that felt as strong as tree trunks, clenching fists that felt as though they could shatter mountains. A primal roar burst from his throat, and then he was falling, towards the midnight grass, through it, into blackness, back into the deep.
When he came to, he was lying on the floor of the Teleorman Forest. He opened his eyes and recognised instantly the white oaks that rose above him towards the night sky, the smell of the grass beneath his body and the cold breeze that whispered across his face. For a long, disorienting second, he wondered whether he had dreamt what had occurred, whether his mind, ravaged by exhaustion and the horror of his army’s defeat, had rebelled against him, conjuring impossible terrors from the depths of his nightmares. But then he got slowly to his feet, felt power bubbling beneath his skin, and remembered the deal he had made with the terrible grinning mouth.
It seems you kept your word, devil. And I will do everything in my power not to keep mine.
He grinned in the darkness, and felt something shift in his mouth; new teeth slid down from inside his gums, fitting perfectly over his incisors. The tips of these new teeth were razor-sharp, and they cut through his lower lip as though it was tissue paper. Blood spilled into his mouth and he fell to his knees in the throes of an ecstasy beyond anything he had ever imagined, pleasure so overwhelming that he had no option but to close his eyes and wait for it to pass.
When it eventually did, he rose again, and looked at the patch of forest where he had awoken. In a wide circle around him, partially hidden by overgrown bushes and wild undergrowth, were pieces of stone that looked as though they had once been the bases of statues, and a small mound of rocks that might once have been part of something large and rectangular. But the stones were buried in the earth, covered in moss and dirt, and looked as though they had been undisturbed for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years.
This is the place I went to. But it’s old now. Where I went it was new.
He left the stone ruins behind, and began to walk in the direction of the distant battlefield. The occasional scream still floated through the night air, and in the distance he could see a dull orange glow emanating from the fires he knew the Turks would have built to burn the bodies of the dead. Although he did not know what he was going to do when he reached the site of the battle, he knew he no longer feared the invaders and their weapons, and he was determined that he would discover the fates of his Generals, the three brothers whose loyalty he had rewarded by leaving them behind. As the forest began to thin around him, he heard voices in the darkness, and headed silently towards them.
In a clearing, gathered round a roaring fire, was an encampment of villagers from the plains beyond the forest, who had fled their homes as the Turkish armies approached. There were perhaps fifteen families: men, women and children, warming themselves near the heat of the fire, nursing infants, boiling water in metal cauldrons, holding spitted meat over flames. A number of the women were singing an old working song, and it was their voices that Vlad had heard, the ancient melody carrying sweetly on the cold air. He circled the encampment, slipping silently through the trees, looking for an opportunity. He was hungry, and the smell of the roasting meat was invading his nostrils and making him salivate.
“Stand where you are, sir.”
Vlad turned slowly in the direction of the voice, and found himself face to face with a middle-aged man, standing in the shadow of one of the towering oaks. The man was dressed in the sturdy clothing of a farmer, and was holding a bow and arrow at his shoulder, the metal tip of the bolt aiming steadily at Vlad’s chest. He raised his hands in placation, and took a small step towards the farmer, who backed away immediately.
“No closer,” he said. “And speak, so I would know if you are friend or foe.”
“I’m neither,” replied Vlad, a smile creeping across his face. “I’m something else.”
The man lowered his bow by a couple of degrees.
“You are not Turkish,” he said. “Are you Wallachian? Answer.”
“I was,” replied Vlad. Then the hunger hit him like a bolt of lightning, and he folded to his knees, his head wrenched back in agony.
The hunger roared through Vlad Tepes like a hurricane, opening a huge abyss in his chest and stomach, a clutching pit of emptiness. He grabbed at his breast, tearing at his own skin with his fingernails, trying to pull himself open, trying to find a way to fill the gaping hole that had appeared at the centre of his being. His head thundered with agony, as though drills were being applied to his temples, and his limbs were suddenly as heavy as lead.
The farmer threw aside his bow, and ran to the stricken man. He knelt down and pulled at the stranger’s shoulders; the head came up easily, inches from his own. The farmer looked at the vision of horror before him, the glowing red eyes that stood out in the middle of the twisted face, the gleaming white fangs that extended below the upper lip, and drew in breath to scream. Then the stranger plunged his teeth into his neck, and the scream died in his throat.
Vlad lunged on instinct alone; the pain of the hunger had driven rational thought from his head. His new fangs slid through the farmer’s skin, piercing the jugular vein, sending blood gushing into his mouth and down his throat. And instantly, the pain and the hunger were gone, replaced by a feeling that was almost godlike. He swallowed the blood that sprayed from the man’s torn throat, until he was sated, and withdrew his fangs.
The two figures fell to the cold ground.
Vlad’s chest was thumping up and down, alive with power; the farmer’s was barely moving, as blood seeped steadily out of the ragged hole in his neck. The former Prince of Wallachia leapt to his feet, and found himself floating several inches above the ground. He spun slowly in the air, then laughed, a terrible cackle that echoed between the silent trees and floated across the fire at the centre of the encampment, drawing frowns from the men gathered round it. Several of their wives crossed themselves, and the infants among the group began to cry.
The laughter faded as Vlad resumed his course back towards the battlefield, floating slowly and effortlessly between the trees and over the undergrowth, spinning and swooping in the air, like a child who had been given a marvellous new toy. Where he had been, there was nothing but a patch of spilled blood, and the dark shape of the farmer on the ground, his body cooling as his life ebbed away.
6
CARPENTER AND SON
Jamie walked along the corridor of the Loop’s detention level, feeling as conflicted as he always did when he was about to see his mother.
Hers was the only occupied cell; the others had been emptied three weeks earlier, their inhabitants placed in restraining belts and taken into the depths of the Blacklight base to be handed over to the Lazarus Project. The ultraviolet barriers that filled the open front walls of the cells shimmered in the quiet air, the vampires they had contained long gone.
Marie Carpenter was in the last cell on the left, the same cell that Larissa had occupied for the three chaotic days after Jamie’s mother had been kidnapped by Alexandru Rusmanov, until her heroics on Lindisfarne had seen her released from custody and offered the chance to join the Department.
Jamie made his way down the corridor, aware that his mother’s superhuman senses would have alerted her to his presence as soon as he stepped through the airlock door and into the containment block, equally aware that she would pretend to be surprised to see him. His mother hated nothing more than drawing attention to the fact that she had been turned into a vampire. He reached the last strip of concrete wall before his mother’s cell, stopped and took a deep breath. Then he stepped out in front of the ultraviolet barrier.
Jamie’s first instinct, as always, was to laugh; his mother’s cell was like something out of a home interiors catalogue.
Because she had voluntarily gone into Blacklight custody, and because she was the mother of an Operator, she had been allowed to request items that were not available to any other vampire that had been brought on to the block, and she had made the most of it. In the middle of her cell was the oval rug that had lain in the living room of their old house in Brenchley, and sitting on top of it was the coffee table which Jamie’s father had rested his feet on every evening after he got home from work. The chest of drawers from Marie’s old bedroom stood against one wall, topped with a cluster of photos of her son and her late husband. The battered leather sofa that had dominated their old living room filled most of the rear wall of the cell, and her bed was covered in the lilac sheets and duvet cover that she had slept in for as long as Jamie could remember.
His mother had politely, but very determinedly, imported her old life into this concrete cube deep below the earth. The Christmas tree that had sat on the coffee table, its multicoloured lights twinkling beneath the fluorescent strips in the ceiling, was gone, much to Jamie’s relief.
“Hey, Mum,” he said, stepping into the cell. “How’s it going?”
Marie Carpenter was sitting on the sofa, her nose buried in a paperback book. She looked up, the predictable frown of fake surprise creasing her features, then broke into a huge smile and leapt to her feet. She stepped forward to meet him, and mother and son hugged in the middle of the square room.
“Hello, love,” she said, squeezing him tightly. “Are you all right? Have you been out today?”
Despite the uniform he wore and the things he had done, Jamie was still a teenage boy, and never more so than in the presence of his mother. He blushed immediately at the enthusiasm of her embrace, while at the same time a broad grin emerged on his face. This was why he had walked voluntarily into the darkest depths of horror, why he had stood in the middle of an ancient building full of the dead and faced down the most dangerous monster in the world; so that he might be able to hug his mother again, and feel the love that radiated out of her when she was with him, a love that he had only realised he needed when it was taken away.
“I’m all right, Mum,” he replied. “Yourself?”
Marie gave him a final squeeze before releasing her grip, and stepping back to look at her son. She cast her eyes quickly up and down him, taking in the black uniform with a look of immense pride on her face, before she reached the pink patch of scar tissue on his neck, and a grimace flickered across her face.
“I’m fine,” she replied. Her gaze lingered on his neck for a moment, as it always did, before she forced her eyes away and broke into a smile. “How’s Kate?”
Jamie’s own smile faded.
His relationship with his mother had improved immeasurably since they had returned from Lindisfarne. The truth about Julian Carpenter, about the man he had really been and the circumstances surrounding his death, had liberated them; the dark mess of grief and betrayal that had crippled them both in the aftermath of his death, that Jamie had been unable to stop himself from taking out on his mother, had cleared, leaving them free to rebuild. They both still missed him, in their different ways, and Jamie had come to terms with the fact that he probably always would. But the grief now seemed manageable. What had been a yawning, unfillable chasm was now merely a hole, deep, and slippery at the edges, but that he could now avoid falling into, most of the time at least. Sadly, it was no longer the only one; there was now a hole of almost equal size with Frankenstein’s name above it.
It had been slow going at first, the thaw between Jamie and Marie. There were new complications, not least of which was the condition that required Marie to spend her days and nights in the depths of the Loop behind an ultraviolet wall. There was much to say, and over the first couple of weeks, as both of them adjusted to their new lives, it was all eventually said.
Jamie apologised for how he had behaved since his dad had died, cutting off his mother’s attempts to tell him he didn’t need to, plunging ahead until it was all out of him. Marie had listened, tears running down her face, until he was done, then offered an apology of her own, for failing to cope with the death of her husband, for failing to realise that her son still needed her. By the time she was finished, they were both in tears, tears that turned out to be as cathartic as they were painful. There was only one remaining aspect of their rebuilt relationship that caused Jamie to worry.
Marie Carpenter absolutely adored Kate.
And hated Larissa.
He understood why; it was Kate who had put her arm round Marie after the hunger had hit her in the aftermath of Lindisfarne, Kate who had escorted her on to the rescue helicopter, talking to her in the gentle, friendly way that came so naturally to her. Larissa, on the other hand, was a vampire, and as far as Marie was concerned, vampires were all monsters, despite Jamie’s protestations to the contrary.
He knew he was wasting his time; Marie had been kidnapped and tormented by the very worst the vampire world had to offer, and was appalled by the change that had been inflicted on her. But he tried anyway, because he knew that eventually the time would come when he would want to tell his mother about what was happening between him and Larissa, and he didn’t want her first reaction to be revulsion.
“She’s fine, Mum,” he said. “She said to say hello.”
Larissa is fine too. More than fine, actually.
“She’s a good girl,” said Marie, firmly. “I knew it from the moment I met her.”
Jamie didn’t say anything. Instead, he wandered across the cell, and looked at the photos his mother had arranged on top of the chest of drawers. A small picture in a silver frame caught his eye, and he leant in for a closer look.
His mum, heavily pregnant with him, was leaning back on the bonnet of the dark blue BMW he remembered from when he was very young, a wide smile on her face. The sun was shining from outside the frame, illuminating a bright green row of trees beyond the car, casting the dark silhouette of his dad across the bottom of the photo. The shadow’s hand was raised to its face, holding the camera that had recorded the moment.
She looks so happy, Jamie thought, then straightened up and turned back to his mum, as he realised she had said something he hadn’t heard.
“What was that, Mum?” he asked, and she rolled her eyes.
“I was saying that Henry came down to see me today,” she said. “Did he tell you?”
“Henry?” replied Jamie. “Who’s Henry?”
“Henry Seward,” answered Marie, the look on her face suggesting that it should have been obvious.
“Admiral Seward?” asked Jamie, incredulous. “My commanding officer? Is that who you mean?”
“Of course that’s who I mean, Jamie,” replied Marie. A look of concern had emerged on her face. “Is something wrong?”
No, nothing wrong. Definitely nothing weird about my boss hanging out with my mum in her cell. Not at all.
“I suppose not,” said Jamie. “What did he want?”
“He didn’t want anything. He just came down to say hello. He normally pops down about once a week.”
“Once a week? Like, every week?”
“I’ve upset you,” said Marie, a look of slight panic on her face. The possibility of her son stopping coming to see her was never far from her mind, and was the thing she was most afraid of. “Can we talk about something else?”
Jamie was still attempting to stretch his head round the concept of his mother and Admiral Seward socialising, but he let it go when he heard the nervousness in his mother’s voice. He took a deep breath.
“Of course we can, Mum,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”
Marie smiled a broad smile of relief, and floated over on to her bed, apparently so relieved she had avoided a fight with her son that she didn’t even realise she was using her vampire abilities in front of him.
“Tell me where you went this evening,” she said, settling down on the lilac bedding. “I worry about you, out there with all those monsters. Tell me what you were doing.”
Jamie crossed to the rear of the cell, flopped down on to the battered sofa and began to tell his mother about his day.
7
VALENTIN RECEIVES A VISITOR
CENTRAL PARK WEST AND WEST EIGHTY-FIFTH STREET NEW YORK, USA
Valentin Rusmanov stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his study, on the top floor of the Upper West Side mansion he had lived in since its completion in 1895. His ownership of the grand, stately building was, like most aspects of his life, a closely guarded secret.
Throughout the twentieth century, his long existence had required him to take certain steps to avoid attention, including the formation of a number of shell companies to administer his assets. His name appeared nowhere on any document relating to the building and, from the outside, it seemed little different to the other grand apartment buildings that faced Central Park from the west.
It was most similar in design to the Dakota, thirteen blocks to the south, but whereas that famous landmark had been originally designed as sixty-five individual residences, Valentin’s building was a single, almost obscenely spacious residence, arranged over seven vast floors, the majority of which were filled with the accumulated spoils of more than four centuries of wealth and influence. The seventh floor contained the suite of rooms in which Valentin slept, to which entrance was expressly forbidden without invitation. The study he was now standing in occupied the north-east corner of the seventh floor, from which the view of the park was nothing short of spectacular.
Valentin looked down at the wide-open space, an oasis of dark corners and shadows amid the blinding lights of Manhattan. The last of the joggers were making their way to the exits, leaving behind them the teenage couples, junkies, muggers and homeless men and women that made up the park’s nocturnal population. He watched them, observing their small lives from high above without objection or condemnation. He had never felt disgust, or anger, when he looked at ordinary humans; he had always left such sentiments to his brothers, and to his former master.
Valentin’s nose twitched, and a second later his face curdled into a grimace of disgust. He turned away from the window, flew swiftly across his study and landed gracefully in the blue leather armchair that sat behind his wide, dark wood desk. He leant back in the chair, staring expectantly at the door on the other side of the room. A moment later there was a polite knock, and the door slid open just wide enough for Valentin’s butler, a skeletal figure in exquisite evening wear, to slip through the gap and into the study.
Lamberton had entered service in the vampire’s house in 1901 and immediately demonstrated both impeccable professional ability, and an admirable willingness to ignore the horrors that routinely took place beneath his master’s roof; he had served Valentin for forty years as a human, and almost seventy more as a vampire.
His turning had been Lamberton’s idea; although Valentin had promised the butler that no harm would come to him while in his employ, a promise the ancient vampire had kept with great dedication, Lamberton had eventually been forced to confront his master with the problem of his advancing years.
After discussing the matter over half a case of 1921 Château Latour, Valentin had reluctantly agreed that no other solution seemed acceptable and, after checking for a final time whether the butler was sure, had bitten Lamberton’s throat with the tenderness of a lover, allowing the barest minimum of blood to escape. He had then flown out into the New York night and found a young nurse from Oklahoma who was about to ship out to the battlefields of Europe. He had brought her home and given her to Lamberton, when the turn was complete and the hunger gripped him for the first time. Once the girl was spent, the butler thanked his master, and returned immediately to his duties, duties he had continued to discharge admirably ever since.
Lamberton was now standing silently by the study door, waiting to be acknowledged before he spoke. When Valentin nodded in his direction, he spoke five words that his master had hoped never to hear.
“Your brother is here, sir.”
Valentin swore in Wallachian, his eyes flashing momentarily red. Then he regarded Lamberton, and sighed deeply.
“Show him in,” he said.
The door was flung wide, and Valeri Rusmanov strode into the study, as Lamberton exited silently. The oldest of the three Rusmanov brothers was wearing simple clothing: a black tunic, heavy woollen trousers and leather boots, and his grey greatcoat. He stopped halfway across the room, and looked around, taking in the opulence of his surroundings with obvious distaste.
Ridiculous old fool, thought Valentin, from behind his desk. He thinks he’s still a general, commanding troops on a battlefield. Pathetic.
Valentin opened a beautifully carved wooden box and withdrew a red cigarette from the velvet-lined interior. The cigarette contained Turkish tobacco laced liberally with Bliss, the heady mixture of heroin and blood to which he had become mildly addicted over the last three decades. He applied the flame from a wooden match to the tip of the cigarette, then leant back in his chair as Valeri, who had still not spoken since entering the study, paused in front of a shelf containing a glass tank in which three basketballs were floating in a clear solution.
“What do you call this?” asked Valeri, his tone gruff and unfriendly.
“I don’t call it anything,” replied Valentin, forcing himself to remain polite. “The artist called it Three Ball 50/50 Tank. It’s Jeff Koons.”
“And this is art, is it?”
“I would say so.”
Valeri turned away from the shelf, waving a hand dismissively at its contents. He crossed the study in three long strides and stood before Valentin’s desk, his nose wrinkling at the smell of the smoke from the cigarette in his brother’s hand.
“Is that Bliss?” he asked, spitting out the last word.
“Why, yes it is,” replied Valentin, opening the box again. “Would you care for one?”
Valeri stared coldly at him.
“Do you have no shame whatsoever?” he asked.
Valentin smiled, drew deeply on his cigarette and exhaled. The smoke floated up into the air in a thick cloud, enveloping Valeri’s head as it dispersed.
“Apparently not,” he said, lightly.
The two brothers faced each other for a long moment, until eventually Valeri spoke again.
“Our brother is dead,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice.
“I know,” replied Valentin. “He has been dead for more than three months.”
“You don’t seem upset by the news.”
“Are you?”
Valeri drew himself up, and glared at his brother.
“Alexandru and I differed on a great number of matters,” he said, slowly. “But he was still blood, still our blood. And now he’s gone.”
“That’s right, he’s gone. But we’re still here. Isn’t life marvellous?”
Valeri grunted, a deep, throaty sound that Valentin thought might be what passed for his brother laughing.
“You call this living?” Valeri asked. “Surrounded by lackeys and boot-lickers, in this castle of decadence?”
“Yes,” replied Valentin, and for the first time he failed to keep the steel from his tone. “I do. I also remember the size of your domestic staff in Wallachia, Valeri. There were times when I believe it numbered in the hundreds.”
Valeri stiffened.
“I was a different man in those days,” he replied.
You were actually a man, thought Valentin. That was certainly different.
Valentin got up from behind his desk and walked back to the window that overlooked the park. He motioned for Valeri to join him, and after a long pause, with a look of great reluctance on his lined face, the elder Rusmanov did so. Valeri stood beside his younger brother, and looked out at the towering lights of Manhattan.
“Have you ever been to New York before?” asked Valentin.
“Never,” replied Valeri, grimacing. “Until fifteen minutes ago I had never set foot in this sordid place, and I would have preferred for that to remain the case.”
“Of course you would. Yours are the dark open spaces, the wilderness of our youth. You are a creature of tradition, Valeri. I don’t criticise you for it; I’m merely stating the facts. But mine? Mine are the bright lights, the crowded streets, the noise and the bustle and the life of the city. An American writer once wrote that, ‘One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.’ Well, I’ve been here for more than a century.”
“Why are you telling me this, Valentin?”
The younger vampire sighed, and regarded his brother with a pitying look.
“You always were so literal. Never mind. I assume you have come with word from your master?”
“Our master,” said Valeri, his voice like ice.
“Of course. Our master. I apologise.”
But Valentin didn’t look sorry, not in the slightest. A half-smile played across his lips, causing anger to surge through his older brother. Valeri pushed it down as far as he was able, and focused on the order he had been given.
“He calls you home, Valentin. Your life belongs to him, as it always has, and he calls you home.”
Valentin bared his teeth.
“My life is my own,” he hissed. “Do you hear me?”
Red spilled into the corners of Valeri’s eyes. He took his hands from where they had been crossed behind his back, and let them dangle loosely at his sides.
“I disagree,” he said. “As I am confident our master will too.”
The two brothers stared at each other, violence pregnant in the still air of the study. Then Valeri smiled broadly, raising his hands in mock placation.
“Enough, brother,” he said. “I have no time for posturing, or children’s games. I must leave, with or without you. Will you refuse the call of our master, to whom you owe this gilded cage you call a life? Or will you honour him, as you swore you always would, and do your duty now he has returned to us?”
Valentin looked at his brother, and favoured him with a smile of his own.
“Of course I will,” he replied. “I will need two days to set my affairs in order, then I’ll return home like the dutiful lapdog.”
“Your affairs are trivia,” replied Valeri. “You are to accompany me tonight.”
“In which case, I would remind you of two things,” said Valentin, his smile still in place. “Firstly, that you are a guest in my home. And secondly, that I have not been afraid of you for more than five hundred years now.”
Valeri took half a step forward, a dangerous look on his face.
“Is that a fact, brother?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper.
“It is,” replied Valentin. “A fact that leaves you with two options. You can allow me to conclude my trivia as I see fit, after which I will return home, as I promised. Or you can try to remove me from this house by force, which will result in one of us explaining to your master why we have destroyed the other. So what’s it going to be, brother?”
90 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
8
THE BIG LEAGUES
Jamie swung his legs out from under his bedding and sat on the edge of his mattress, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms.
He had headed straight to his quarters after leaving the detention level, his mind full of relief and his heart heavy with guilt. He always felt bad after seeing his mother; the sight of her in her cell was painful, and filled him with feelings of impotence. But his visits were the only things that she looked forward to, and he would not dream of denying her them. When Alexandru had taken her, he had feared, in his darkest moments, that he was never going to see her again, never going to get the chance to make it up to her, to make amends for being such a bad son. He was not going to fall back into his old pattern of complacency, of taking her for granted, even if the sight of her in her cell made his heart ache and his skin tingle with helpless anger.
She needs me. That’s all that matters. And I’m not going to let her down.
The electric clock on his bedside table read 8:55. Jamie hauled himself to his feet and raised his arms above his head, feeling the muscles creak and tremble as they stretched. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but thoughts of his mother refused to leave him. He grabbed his towel, walked to the shower block at the centre of Level B and climbed into one of the stalls, hoping that the relentless drumming of the water would empty his mind, giving him a few minutes of peace.
Dried and dressed, Jamie sat down at his desk and attempted to review the minutes of the first Zero Hour Task Force meeting. He read the dry, colourless text of the report from start to finish, but realised he was looking at the shapes of the letters rather than taking any sense from the words, and pushed the folder aside. He looked at his watch, and saw that it was time to make his way to the Ops Room.
The prospect filled him with little excitement; the pride he had felt when Admiral Seward summoned him to his office and told him that he was being appointed to the Department’s most highly classified Task Force had been short-lived. The Director had immediately made it clear to him that he was only being involved because of his first-hand experience with Alexandru Rusmanov, and that he would be largely expected to speak when he was spoken to. Seward had also warned him that his presence on the Task Force was likely to be unpopular with the more experienced Operators, and this had proven to be an understatement.
Jamie was the second person to arrive for the meeting.
Major Paul Turner glanced up at him as he stepped through the door, then returned his attention to a sheaf of papers splayed across the table before him. Jamie considered saying hello, then decided against it. The Security Officer, who had succeeded the late Thomas Morris in the post, had been among the small group of Operators who had arrived on Lindisfarne after Jamie had destroyed Alexandru Rusmanov. Although they had been too late to help, to prevent the loss of Frankenstein or the turning of his mother, Jamie would always be grateful that they had tried. The reason he held his tongue was very simple: Paul Turner scared the hell out of him.
There never seemed to be anything behind the Major’s eyes, no emotion, or empathy. Since Lindisfarne, Jamie had been astonished to learn that Turner was married to Caroline Seward, a union that made him Admiral Seward’s brother-in-law. They had a son called Shaun, who was himself a Blacklight Operator, and this Jamie found almost impossible to believe; Turner appeared to him more like a robot than a loving husband and a father.
I can’t picture him having dinner with his wife and asking her about her day, or taking his son aside and giving him advice, he thought. I just can’t see it.
Jamie took the seat opposite Turner, and silently waited for the rest of the Zero Hour Task Force to arrive. Less than a minute later the door to the Ops Room opened, and Operators began to file in and sit down.
Henry Seward took the seat at the head of the table, the Director of Department 19 nodding briefly in Jamie’s direction as he did so, then leaning over and engaging in conversation with Paul Turner at a volume too low for Jamie to hear.
Two Operators that Jamie had met for the first time at the previous meeting, men in their early thirties who represented the Science and Intelligence Divisions of Blacklight, walked through the door, deep in conversation, and sat down across from him. Neither so much as glanced in his direction; both had made it abundantly clear that they opposed his presence on the Task Force, and had clearly not changed their minds since the first meeting. Jamie was trying to make sure that the anger he could feel bubbling up in his chest didn’t show on his face, when the door opened again, and Jack Williams walked in.
Jamie smiled gratefully at the sight of his friend, who strode across the room and flopped down in the seat beside him.
“All right?” whispered Jack.
“All right,” replied Jamie. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” smiled Jack. “Yourself?”
“Fine,” replied Jamie, feeling his mood lift.
Jack Williams was a descendant of the founders of Blacklight, just like Jamie, and although he was eight years older and had been an Operator for almost four years, he had become one of Jamie’s closest friends in the Department. He was widely regarded as the finest young Operator in the Department and a man destined for great things, a viewpoint reinforced by his membership of the Zero Hour Task Force, but he also had an uncanny ability to make Jamie laugh, to make him feel like there could still be light in the middle of all the darkness that surrounded them.
Jack’s father was Robert Williams, a veteran Operator who had served Blacklight since the 1970s, and the grandson-in-law of Quincey Harker, the greatest legend of the Department, whose tenure as Director had transformed the organisation into the hi-tech, highly classified unit it was today. Jack’s younger brother Patrick was also an Operator, but where Jack was loud and confident, the life of the party and the biggest personality in any room, Patrick was quiet and appeared to be almost pathologically shy.
Jamie had spent a lot of time with the two brothers in the officers’ mess, and the differences between them were like night and day. What was even more striking, though, was the fierce love that so clearly existed between them, the loyalty that was utterly beyond question, to which Jamie, an only child, responded with deep admiration, and more than a little jealousy.
Jamie was about to tell Jack that he still appeared to be the unpopular kid in the room when the door opened for the final time, and the last two members of the Zero Hour Task Force arrived.
Colonel Cal Holmwood, Blacklight’s Deputy Director and one of its most senior and decorated Operators, was the man who had piloted the Mina II, the supersonic Department 19 jet, to Lindisfarne on the night that Frankenstein had been lost, dragged over the steep cliffs by a werewolf whose intention had been to kill Jamie. He had flown survivors back to the Loop after that terrible night was over, and now entered the Ops Room deep in conversation with the man who fascinated Jamie more than any other in the entire Department.
Professor Richard Talbot, the director of the Lazarus Project, was remarkably tall and thin, like a giant stick insect wrapped in a spotless white lab coat. He was in his sixties, his face lined and weathered, his bald head perfectly round, flanked by two strips of grey hair that rested above his ears. The Professor was smiling gently at whatever Cal Holmwood was saying to him; then, as they made their way to opposite sides of the long table, he locked eyes with Jamie, smiling broadly at him. Jamie smiled back, involuntarily; the Professor made him feel something close to star-struck, even though they had only spoken to each other once, as the first meeting of the Zero Hour Task Force had come to its conclusion.
The Lazarus Project was an enigma, even within an organisation as secretive as Department 19.
It had only been officially mentioned once, during Admiral Seward’s speech about Dracula; its purpose was unknown, and its laboratories, located on Level F of the Loop, were off-limits to all but the tiny number of senior Operators who possessed the necessary clearance. The Project’s staff were rarely seen; their quarters were inside the security perimeter, and they made only occasional appearances in the dining hall or the mess. Nobody even knew how many of them there were. Doctors, scientists, administrative staff: all were hidden away behind an Iron Curtain of secrecy.
So when Professor Talbot had strolled into the inaugural Zero Hour meeting and introduced himself to the rest of the group, there had been a sudden sense of excitement in the room. Talbot was a mystery, whose work was classified far beyond Top Secret, yet the man himself was utterly disarming, friendly and charming to a fault. After the meeting ended, he had fallen into stride beside Jamie as they walked to the lift at the end of the Level 0 corridor.
“Mr Carpenter,” he said, his voice deep and warm. “I read the Lindisfarne report. I’m very sorry.”
Jamie looked up at him, completely thrown by the fact that this man was talking to him, this man who answered only to Admiral Seward himself.
“Thanks,” he managed. “It was a bad night.”
Understatement of the bloody year.
“I can’t imagine,” Talbot replied. “But you should take heart from what you did. The destruction of Alexandru will save hundreds of lives. I’m sure that doesn’t feel like any consolation at the moment, but hopefully in time you’ll be able to understand that you did something remarkable. And if there’s anything I can do to help, please do let me know.”
“I will,” Jamie replied, his voice thick with confusion. “Thank you.”
Talbot smiled, then accelerated away down the corridor, leaving Jamie standing as still as a statue, his face wearing the look of someone who is not completely sure that what has just happened to them was actually real.
Since that one brief conversation, Jamie had been fascinated by Professor Talbot; so much so that Larissa, the only person to whom he had described the conversation, had started to use a different word.
Obsessed, thought Jamie. She says I’m obsessed with him.
He could understand why she might think so. In the week that had passed since the first Zero Hour meeting, Jamie had asked almost every Operator he had spoken to what they knew about Professor Talbot and the Lazarus Project. The answers he had received had ranged from incredulous demands that he not ask such questions, to wild theories about what was taking place in the Project’s sealed laboratories on Level F.
“They’re cloning Operators,” one earnest civilian contractor had insisted. “They’re going to bring back Van Helsing, and Quincey Harker, and all the others. They’re going to declare war on the vamps.”
Jamie had scoffed, but continued to ask the question, undeterred. Some Operators claimed that it was a weapons project, devising new ways of destroying vampires, while one member of the Science Division swore blind that the Lazarus Project was building a microwave emitter tuned to an electromagnetic frequency that only existed inside the brains of vampires. When it was complete, the scientist promised, all that would be required was the push of a single button, and every vampire in the world would be destroyed, instantly. Jamie asked tens of men and women, and got tens of different replies, leading him to the only conclusion that could be rationally drawn.
Nobody has a clue what they’re doing down there. Not a clue.
“Zero Hour Task Force convened, January 19th,” said Admiral Seward. His personal secretary, a small, plump man named Marlow, had positioned himself a deferential distance behind the Director and now began to take minutes, his chubby fingers flying silently across the keys of a portable console. “Second meeting. All members present.”
The Director looked at the seven men gathered round the table. “Gentlemen,” he continued. “Operational data since the last meeting is as follows. Vampire activity remains heightened, but stable, as do sightings and incidents involving the public that require our involvement. Patrol logs indicate that incidents of the graffiti that was discussed last week continue to occur, in increasing numbers.”
Seward nodded to Marlow, who punched a series of keys on his console. The huge high-definition screen that covered the entire wall behind the Director powered up. A series of photographs filled the frame; the same two words, in tens of different colours and handwritings, printed and sprayed on walls and roads and bridges.
HE RISES
Jamie felt a chill run through him as he looked at the photos. The two words represented the Department’s greatest fear, the moment the Task Force had been created to prevent.
Zero Hour.
The vampires knew what was coming, just as surely as Blacklight did; the graffiti was proof of that. But more than that, it seemed to be directly addressed to them, left at the scenes of crimes that only they would be called to.
It seemed to be a challenge.
No, that’s not it, thought Jamie. They’re not challenging us. They’re mocking us. They don’t think we can stop Dracula from rising. And they might well be right.
“What are our vamp contacts saying?” asked Cal Holmwood.
“Nothing,” replied Paul Turner. “Less than that in fact. Most of them have disappeared, and the ones that haven’t won’t talk. They know what’s coming.”
“We should stake them all,” said the Operator from the Intelligence Division. “What use are they if they won’t talk?”
“Absolutely none, Mr Brennan,” agreed Turner. “But still more than they would be dead. Circumstances change.”
“I don’t get it,” pressed Brennan. “If Dracula rises, if it’s as bad as everyone thinks, they’re going to lose everything too. Why don’t they help us stop it?”
“Because they don’t think we can,” replied Turner, evenly. “Stop it, I mean. And whatever may happen if Dracula rises, the one thing they can be sure of is that helping us is not going to make them popular.”
Operator Brennan stared at Turner with a look that suggested he had more he wanted to say, but he held his tongue.
“Fine,” said Admiral Seward. “Paul, keep at them, but I don’t think you’ll have much luck, as you said. I spoke to the SPC this morning and they assured me they’re doing all they can, so let’s—”
“All they can?” said Jamie, without thinking. “Apart from not losing the remains in the first place, you mean?”
Seven pairs of eyes swung in his direction, and Jamie swallowed hard.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just frustrating. Nobody knew they had them, so there was nothing we could do to make sure they were safe.”
“I knew the SPC had the remains,” said Seward, coolly. “As did the other Directors. What would you have had us do?”
Jamie looked at the Director for a long moment, then dropped his eyes. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Seward’s face softened. “I don’t like it any more than you, Lieutenant Carpenter. Clearly, there are lessons to be learnt from what has happened, for all of us. But we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, to the best of our abilities. So, on that note, and because I’d like to keep this meeting as short as humanly possible, if there is nothing—”
“I don’t like it either,” interrupted Operator Brennan, scowling at Jamie. “I don’t like any part of this. And I still don’t see why some kid who isn’t even old enough to wear the uniform gets a say in this just because his surname is Carpenter.”
Jamie felt his face flush with anger. He opened his mouth to reply, saw Seward do the same and was surprised when someone beat them both to it.
“Mr Brennan,” said Professor Talbot. “Have you ever seen a Priority Level 1 vampire?”
“What does that have to—”
“This young man,” continued Talbot, glancing at Jamie, “has not only seen one, but faced it down and destroyed it. Compared to every vampire you have ever seen, Operator Brennan, Alexandru Rusmanov might as well have been a different species; a natural disaster made flesh, like a hurricane, and Mr Carpenter destroyed him. He is the only living soul to have destroyed a Priority 1. That’s why he’s here. Because what Alexandru was to normal vampires, so Dracula will be to Alexandru if he is allowed to rise, and I for one will want Mr Carpenter on our side if that happens. Is that clear enough for you?”
Jamie looked at Professor Talbot, stunned. He had not expected his defence to come from the most unknown quantity in the Department.
Sometimes I forget about Alexandru. He had my mum, so for me it was simple. I forget how big a deal it is to everyone else.
“There you have it,” said Admiral Seward. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Anyone else have any more questions they want to ask, or speeches they’d like to make? No? Well, thank heaven for small mercies.”
He stood up from the table, and the rest of the group followed his lead.
“I would remind you, one more time,” said the Director. “Everything that has been said here is only for the ears of the men in this room. Any violation of this very simple instruction will be considered a court-martial offence. I ask you all not to force me to make good on that promise. Dismissed.”
9
NO STONE UNTURNED
STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE
Matt Browning shoved his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. He had been in front of his computer for more than thirty of the last forty-eight hours, and his eyes were killing him.
He walked out of his bedroom, stuck his head into his little sister’s room, waited until he heard the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, then made his way downstairs to the kitchen. As he passed the door to the front room, he heard his father swear at the television, berating an offside decision he had clearly not agreed with. At the table in the small dining room that was attached by French doors to the back of the living room, he could hear his mother on the phone to her sister, talking with quiet animation about a minor celebrity who had left her equally minor celebrity fiancé at the altar. It was evidently quite the scandal.
In the kitchen, Matt poured himself a glass of water and leant against one of the counters. He doubted that anyone in the world knew as much about vampires as he had learnt in the two months since he had been returned home.
Matt knew, as he sat in the back of the car with the blacked-out windows that was taking him home, that the first few moments of his return were going to be crucial. If he was going to be believed, if his parents were going to accept, as the doctor at the base had, that he could remember nothing of what had happened to him, then he was going to have to play his hand perfectly.
The doctor was so pleased with his recovery from the coma that his apparent amnesia had been almost an afterthought. Tests were carried out, a great number of them, but Matt realised quickly that the doctor had been convinced that he would emerge from his coma with significant brain damage, and that lent him the courage to lie with conviction. He picked a point four days before the incident in his parents’ garden, and stuck resolutely to his claim that he could remember nothing since then. He feigned frustration, and concern for the state of his memory; he summoned tears of apparent confusion and fear, while the doctor had held his hand and told him it was all going to be all right.
There was one brief, terrifying moment when the nurse suggested a polygraph test to assess whether there might be recoverable memories, to check whether, in effect, Matt was lying without meaning to. But the doctor rounded angrily on her, and told her that the boy had been through enough. The nurse, chastened, apologised for the suggestion, and Matt breathed a little easier.
He stood on the doorstep of his parents’ small house for several minutes, the letter he had been told to give them in his hand, as he prepared himself to give his performance. Then he rang the doorbell, and waited until his father answered. In the end, very little was required of him; he had barely begun a stuttering, rambling apology when his father interrupted it by wrapping him into a crushing bear hug and dragging him inside the house.
Greg Browning carried him into the kitchen, set him down, then flopped into one of the battered plastic chairs. His eyes were bulging and he was clutching at his chest, and for one terrible moment Matt was sure his father was having a heart attack. Then a great sob burst from Greg Browning’s mouth, and the tension in his body evaporated as he began to cry. He grabbed for the phone, tears pouring down his cheeks, his gaze fixed on Matt as he found the handset and dialled a number with trembling fingers; it was as though he feared that if he averted his eyes for even a second, his son might disappear again. Then a voice answered the phone, and Greg’s face had crumpled into a blubbery mess of tears and snot as he told his wife that their son had come home.
Matt’s mother arrived the following morning, on the first train west. Matt assumed, although he didn’t say anything out loud, that she and his father had been fighting, and his mum had gone to visit Matt’s aunt in Sheffield. She carried his sister through the front door, yelling Matt’s name until she saw him, and fell silent. The look on her face was indescribable, to Matt at least; the sight of it had brought instant tears to his eyes. Then his mum started to cry as well. She put his sister carefully down on the sofa, then wrapped her arms round him so tightly that he wondered whether she was ever planning to let him go.
That evening, the three of them sat in their front room, and had the only conversation they would ever have about the night he had been lost. Sticking to his story was easy; his parents were so overcome with relief that he had been returned to them that they never even entertained the thought that he might know more than he was saying. When they were finished talking, Matt’s dad silently handed him the letter he had brought home with him.
“You should see this,” he said.
Matt took it from his father, unfolded it and read it.
Mr and Mrs Browning,
The incident in which your son sustained injury remains a matter of the highest national security. You are hereby instructed not to discuss the incident with any other party; doing so will be considered an act of treason, and appropriate action will be taken. Acceptance of this letter constitutes acceptance of this instruction.
Your son has received all appropriate medical care, and his recuperation is progressing well. If he develops further medical problems, you should inform medical personnel that he suffered a myocardial infarction due to sudden rapid blood loss. You should not discuss with anyone the circumstances surrounding his injury.
Matt handed the letter back to his father, and told them he was going to bed. And the very next morning, his parents began the long process of trying to forget that any of it had ever happened.
He didn’t even blame them, not really; the girl, the helicopter and the men in the black uniforms holding guns did not fit into the small lives his parents had carved out for themselves in their quiet corner of the world. He supposed they had known, in some abstract way, that there were things out there beyond the end of their suburban street that were wild, and dangerous, that might defy explanation, but they had been perfectly happy for such things to stay where they were. Football, and reality TV, and lager, and celebrity magazines – these were things they could understand, could hold on to and relate to. Not girls who healed before their eyes, then tore their son’s throat out on their back lawn, before soldiers told them it had never happened, the implicit threat obvious to all.
The darkness the world contained had been thrust upon them; they had not looked for it. And now that the darkness had receded, now that their son had been returned to them and they had been able to largely rebuild the lives they had been living before, they were gradually allowing themselves to believe it had never happened at all. He understood their position, and didn’t judge it. It was fine for them.
It was not fine for him.
Matt’s brain swooped and swirled round new ideas, gravitating hungrily towards anything he didn’t know; it was an all-consuming thirst for knowledge, for all knowledge, from how his mother’s Dyson worked to what would happen if you were able to stand on the event horizon of a black hole. In his mind, there was no distinction between the two; knowledge was knowledge, every bit of it as valuable and satisfying as the next.
To call him intelligent would be insufficient; Matt Browning was possessed of an intellect so powerful it would technically be classified as genius. He was as skilled at hiding this intelligence from his family as he was from the bullies at school, who he knew would target him even more viciously if he revealed how much cleverer he was than all of them. He yearned for a time, which he fervently believed would one day come, when he would no longer need to hide who he was, when his intellect would be admired rather than reviled.
Without his parents’ knowledge, he had submitted an application to Cambridge the previous autumn, and received an unconditional offer to attend after a phone interview he had also kept secret. He was due to begin his studies in less than a year, and it had become the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that kept him getting out of bed every morning. Until the girl landed in their garden, and he woke up in a hospital bed, with his throat bandaged and his head full of vampires.
He was now consumed by a burning need to understand what had happened to him. It felt like his entire view of the universe had suddenly been revealed to be a peephole in a hotel room door, a door that had suddenly been flung open in front of him, making him realise how tiny his understanding had been, how small his world really was.
From an encyclopaedia page he learnt about the origins of vampire mythology, learnt the cultural and social theories that had been applied to the idea of such a creature in the centuries since Bram Stoker had crystallised the legends and folk tales of eastern Europe. He read scientific theories, proto-feminist theories, theories of vampires as a metaphor for AIDS, deconstructionist theories, Freudian and Jungian theories, and an American professor’s theory that vampires represented the nascent anti-Semitism in the western world.
He read Dracula, marvelling at its epistolary structure even as the story thrilled him; he held his breath as Van Helsing staked poor doomed Lucy Westenra, as Renfield’s madness offered clues to the Count’s whereabouts. He felt his heartrate surge as the heroes chased Dracula into the Transylvanian mountains, felt triumph as the evil monster was stabbed through his undead heart, and a terrible sense of loss as Quincey Morris made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his friends.
He read what felt like hundreds of adolescent vampire websites, where teenage girls called themselves Raven and Bloodwynd and wrote excruciatingly lustful prose about pale, mysterious, uniformly beautiful boys who could make them live forever with a single kiss from their wine-red lips.
He read blogs by people who genuinely believed they were vampires, people who claimed to drink blood and eat no food, who claimed to be able to influence people and animals to do their bidding, and even on occasion claimed the ability to turn into a bat or a wolf. These had piqued his interest for a short while, until it became clear that in almost every case the author was either desperately lonely or mentally ill, in some cases obviously quite severely.
He read dozens of websites created by people who believed vampires were real, believed it with such longing and such desperate hope that he found their sites almost painful to read. He scoured page after page of alleged sightings, of shadows in graveyards and alleyways, of people who appeared to be casting no reflection in a shop window at night, of neat pairs of circular puncture wounds, of strange men and women with pale skin who appeared to float above the ground.
He read, and read, and read, and he found nothing that in any way resembled what had happened in his garden, or the place he had spent a month of his life.
Matt finished his water and placed the glass on the draining board. He was physically exhausted but, as usual, his brain would not stop whirring. He was sure that somewhere out there was what he was looking for, something that would reinforce what he had been through; he just had to find it. He would get some sleep, and start again in the morning.
He walked back up the stairs and into his bedroom. His computer monitor glowed in the dark, and he was about to reach over and turn it off when he saw an instant messenger box in the bottom right corner of the screen. He clicked on it, watched it expand into the middle of the monitor and read the contents.
Matt’s heart leapt in his chest. He quickly clicked REPLY, but whoever had sent the message was no longer online. He clicked the link in the subject line, and his browser filled the screen, loading a white page with four lines of text and a grey box with a SUBMIT button next to it. He read the text, trembling slightly with excitement.
ATTENTION: If you have arrived at this page in error, please click BACK on your browser immediately. If you have been directed to this page, do NOT submit your password. Leave this page immediately, enter the URL into an IP masking service and then enter your password.
Matt could hardly contain himself.
This was the most promising lead he had found in almost two solid months of searching, a page that told you to hide your whereabouts before entering it, that insisted you leave if you had not been invited.
Why would they want us to hide our IP addresses, unless they’ve got information they don’t want anyone to be able to trace?
Matt closed the window, then opened a new one and typed in the URL of a site that allowed you to browse the internet under a fake IP address; he had used it in the past to watch TV shows that were restricted to the US, and within a minute he was safely behind a dummy IP that would make him appear to be a user from Charlotte, North Carolina. He pasted the link from the message into the browser and hit ENTER. The same white page with the warnings and the empty white box appeared; this time he entered the string of letters and numbers that had been sent to him, clicked SUBMIT and waited. The page loaded, and Matt audibly gasped in the darkness of his bedroom.
The site that opened up in front of his eyes had no title, had wasted no time on fancy designs or technology, but its purpose was immediately obvious; it was a site devoted to the belief that vampires were real, and at large in Britain. At the top of the page was a greeting, and a warning.
Welcome. If you are here, it is where you are meant to be.
We recommend that you vary the IP masking service you use, and delete your browser’s history and cache each time you visit us. It is no exaggeration to say that they are watching – it is up to you to minimise how brightly you appear on their radar. Click here to learn more about Echelon, and how you can work around it.
Matt was about to click on the link, when he noticed the headline in the site’s main panel, and a chill ran through his body. Below the greeting was a menu, simple black text on a white background, like the rest of the page.
HISTORY SIGHTINGS COVER-UPS THE MEN IN
BLACK ETYMOLOGY PROTECTION
Beneath the menu were a headline, a short article and the top few centimetres of a photograph.
MEN IN BLACK CAPTURED ON FILM?
Is this the first real photographic evidence of the existence of the men in black? It was sent to us by an anonymous source, on the same date we received a number of reports of vampire activity in north-west London. Note the purple visors, and the unmarked uniforms and vehicle.
Matt scrolled quickly down to look at the entire photo. What he saw made him feel like crying.
The photo was blurry; it looked like it had been taken with a long lens by someone in a hurry, someone who didn’t want to be seen with a camera in their hand. It showed a nondescript suburban street at night, the rows of houses almost identical to one another, the cars parked in front of them Japanese and German, the gardens neatly tended. It had been raining when the photo was taken; water was running along the kerbs and rushing into a drain opening.
In the middle of the frame was a black van, parked in front of a driveway and directly under a streetlight, its rear doors open. Matt squinted at the photo and saw that the article’s author was correct; he could not see a licence plate above the vehicle’s rear bumper. Beside the open doors were three figures, and it was the sight of two of them that had sent a great wave of relief pouring through him.
They’re real. It was real. It all really happened.
Two of the figures were dressed all in black, a matt material that didn’t reflect the amber glow of the streetlight. They were wearing black shapes on their heads, and both had an unmistakable blob of purple where their faces should have been.
Visors. Purple visors.
The two black shapes were pushing the third, a scrawny figure wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, into the open doors of the van. The third figure didn’t seem to be struggling; Matt looked closer, then drew in a sharp breath. The black figure nearest the camera had something in its right hand, a dark oblong that was pressed between the shoulder blades of the person being loaded into the van. He scrolled down, but there were no more pictures. Matt let go of his mouse, sat back in his chair and put his hands over his face.
It had really happened. People knew.
The photo on his computer monitor was blurry evidence that he hadn’t lost his mind, that it hadn’t all been some vivid coma dream. No matter what his parents were allowing themselves to believe, he knew now that he was right.
It was real. Which meant the boy who had spoken to him after he woke from his coma was real. And now he had found the first step on the path to a wider world.
Matt clicked on SIGHTINGS, and began to read. The experiences, page after page of them, bore such similarity to his own that he almost began to feel annoyed that so many other people had grasped at the edges of this strange world; it seemed to render his own experience less unique. He chastised himself for such petulance, and read on.
The details of the accounts were different, as were the locations; they came from as far afield as Dover and Aberdeen, and almost every part of the British Isles in between. There were reports from several European countries, of similar figures operating in Romania, France, Germany and Hungary. But in all cases the key points remained constant: figures dressed all in black, their faces covered by purple visors, unmarked black vans, helicopters where no helicopter should ever be seen. And they all ended in the same way, with a warning to tell no one what they had seen. Matt shivered at the memory of the last thing the men in black had said to his father, as his own blood pumped out across his chest.
This never happened. Do you understand?
He understood all right. But he no longer cared. Because it had happened, and he was damned if he was going to pretend otherwise. He scrolled back up to the greeting at the top of the page and clicked the link in the final sentence. A new page opened, a short paragraph followed by an incredibly long list of words.
THE ECHELON MONITORING SYSTEM
The British government, along with every other government in the world, monitors electronic communication between its citizens. This is NOT speculation, or paranoia; this is standard military and security service procedure. Emails and mobile phone calls are run through powerful computers and scanned for words that feature on a flagged list, a list that is updated on a daily basis as new threats emerge. Below is the most recent list of Echelon flagged words that we have. Be aware that just because you do not see a word on this list does not mean it has not been flagged. For safety, only communicate sensitive information in person or via landline telephones. And be aware that even those methods are far from secure if the government decides to take an interest in you. Keep your ears open.
Matt scanned the list quickly. Most of the words on it were what he would have expected, overtly provocative phrases like bomb, plot, cell, jihad, terror, martyr, suicide, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda. But interspersed among the obvious words were several that seemed out of place, unless you had seen the things that Matt had seen: purple, black, visor, uniform, teeth, flying, bite, throat, blood…
Vampire.
The word was there, in black and white. Matt said it out loud, letting it roll off his tongue, as he had in the quiet of the infirmary when the doctor had left him alone.
“Vampire. Vampire.”
A grin spread across his face; the tiredness that had been threatening to overwhelm him only five minutes earlier was gone. He felt energised, like he had put his finger against a live wire. His skin was prickly, and his brain was fizzing with new questions and ideas.
One idea in particular.
He settled into his chair to read the rest of the site, knowing deep down that he had already decided what he was going to do.
10
SLEEPLESS NIGHT
SOUTH OF GUDENDORF, LOWER SAXONY, GERMANY ELEVEN WEEKS EARLIER
Greta Schuler tiptoed down the staircase of her family’s farmhouse, taking care to avoid the third-to-last step, the one that always creaked. Her sleep had been fitful, full of bad dreams, and for an unsteady, wavering moment she had been unsure whether the noise she had heard had been real or imagined. But then it had come again, a deep rumble from the direction of the north field, and she sat upright in her bed, drawing the covers round her.
It was cold in her bedroom; she could see her breath in the air. She waited for the noise to come again, and when it didn’t, she climbed out of bed, crossed the cold wood of her bedroom floor in her bare feet, pulled on her boots and her thick woollen coat and set out to investigate. For a second or two, she considered waking her parents, but decided against it; days on the farm were long and tiring, and they needed their rest. And besides, Greta was almost twelve years old, and a country girl; she had run off countless stray dogs and foxes, and even the occasional wolf.
At the foot of the stairs she eased her father’s shotgun out of the umbrella stand that stood beside the heavy front door, took the battered black torch down from the shelf on the wall, then gripped the brass door handle and slowly, centimetre by centimetre, pulled it towards her. The door creaked once, ominously loudly, then settled, and slid open. A blast of cold air whistled through the gap between the door and its frame and Greta shivered, her skin breaking out in gooseflesh. She pulled her coat tighter round herself, and slipped out into the night.
On the doorstep she broke open her father’s gun and checked that it was loaded. She saw the bronze discs and red tubes of the cartridges lying in place, snapped the gun shut and looked around the wide farmyard that lay before the house. Snow covered every centimetre of the ground, shining silver beneath the light of the full moon that hung in the night sky above her head, light that illuminated a long streak of something dark. It ran across the yard, from the thick woods bordering the gravel track that led to the main road, to the wooden gate of the north field that stood beside the farmhouse. Greta stared at it, feeling fear crawl momentarily into her stomach before she pushed it away, then flicked on the torch and stepped forward.
She gasped as the beam fell across the streak. In the yellow light of the torch, it glistened a dark, shiny red. She could see steam rising from it, tendrils of pale mist spiralling up into the night sky, and she knew immediately what she was looking at.
Blood. A lot of blood. Freshly spilled too.
Fear rose through her, and this time she was unable to make it retreat. But she did not go back inside to wake her parents, even though she knew she should. She was her father’s daughter, stubborn and fiercely independent; she would not ask for help unless it was absolutely necessary, and she would rather die than admit there was anything that frightened her. So she stepped away from the door, her boots crunching the thick snow beneath her feet, and headed towards the north field.
As she approached it, the torch beam wavering unsteadily before her, she saw that the heavy wooden gate was standing open; the snow at its base was swirled into drifts and ridges, and smeared thickly with blood. The smell of the steaming liquid hit her nose as she leant in to look at the gatepost, and she retched. The heavy chain that was slung round the post every night by the last farmhand to leave was lying in the snow, its links bent and twisted open. As Greta shone the torch into the field, her heart beating rapidly beneath her narrow chest, she forced herself not to think about how much strength it would have taken to bend steel as though it was cardboard.
Her torch beam picked out a large shape on the far side of the field. She stepped through the gate, taking care not to stand in the cooling red liquid, and headed towards it. She was halfway across the field before her torch cast enough light for her to realise what she was looking at.
The cattle that grazed the north field were huddled together in its furthest corner, packed tightly together like sardines. Greta, who had been around livestock since she was old enough to stand, had never seen anything like it before. The animals were shifting constantly in the cold night air, taking half-steps backwards and forwards, their heads up, their eyes wide discs of white. As she approached, the herd let out a long, deep rumble of noise, and she stopped.
They’re warning me not to come any closer. Something has scared them half to death.
Greta turned away from the frightened cattle and followed her own footsteps back to the gate. She looked along the long smear of blood, to where it disappeared into the pitch-black of the woods. She was shaking now, partly from the cold, partly from fear, and she followed the trail of gore with short, hesitant steps. When she was three metres away from the treeline, her bravery failed her, and she stood, rooted to the spot, staring into the woods.
Then a growl, so deep and low that Greta felt it vibrate through the bones in her legs, sounded from somewhere in front of her, and her breath froze in her lungs. The shotgun fell softly to the snow at her feet, as she heard something move through the trees. Then two yellow eyes appeared in the darkness, floating high above her head, at least two metres from the ground. Slowly, they moved towards her, and a shape emerged from between the trees.
Standing in front of Greta was the biggest wolf she had ever seen.
It squatted in the darkness, its enormous head peering down at her, its mouth and snout soaked with crimson, its thick neck attached to a body the size of her father’s Land Rover. Its fur was greyish-green, and its flanks and back were horribly misshapen; ridges of bone rose and fell beneath the creature’s skin, its legs were crooked and bent, and a vast patchwork of scar tissue criss-crossed the animal’s hide, jagged white lines shining out from the fur in the light of the full moon. Behind the wolf’s bloodstained head something glistened, and Greta saw two angular shapes emerging from the skin, shining in the night air.
Metal, she thought, her mind reeling. It’s got metal sticking out of its neck.
The growl came again, accompanied by a blast of warm air and the coppery scent of blood. She gagged, staring helplessly up at the wolf, which was regarding her with a look that was fearsome, but also appeared curiously sad; the corners of its wide yellow eyes were turned down, its lips drawn back against its razor-sharp teeth in what looked like a grimace of pain.
You can’t outrun it. You can’t fight it. Your only chance is to make it realise you’re not a threat.
Greta took a deep breath, and looked into the wolf’s eyes.
“Hello,” she said, her voice trembling. “My name’s Greta.”
The wolf recoiled instantly, as though it had been stung by a hornet. It took half a step backwards, then threw back its head and let loose a deafening howl, an ear-splitting cry of misery and pain. Behind Greta, the light in her parents’ bedroom came on, and the sound of heavy boots on wooden stairs echoed across the farmyard. But Greta neither saw nor heard; she was staring, transfixed, at the monstrous creature in front of her. As the howl died away, the wolf opened its mouth again, and made a sound that Greta recognised. Her eyes widened, and she took an involuntary step towards the wolf, her arms rising before her in placation.
The roar of a shotgun thundered through the night air, and the snow at the wolf’s feet exploded. Greta shrieked as the wolf bolted into the woods, so quickly that she could have believed it had never been there at all. Then she saw the thick streak of blood where it had been standing, and realisation flooded through her. She heard shouted voices and running footsteps behind her, before her eyes rolled in her head and she crumpled towards the ground. Arriving at a flat sprint, Peter Schuler threw his shotgun aside, slid across the snow, shoved his hands under her back as she fell and wrapped his daughter in his arms.
In the kitchen at the rear of the farmhouse, Greta’s father sat at the battered wooden table that dominated the room. He was sipping a mug of thick black coffee that his wife had made him once she had finished putting their daughter back to bed. She was now watching him silently, leaning against the stove beneath the window, her expression unreadable.
Standing around the kitchen, equally silent, were three of the Schuler farmhands, whom Peter had roused from sleep when he returned to the house. They had come uncomplainingly, and were leaning against the walls, sipping coffees of their own, shotguns broken over their forearms, watching their employer struggling to control his temper.
Peter Schuler was full of a fury beyond anything he had ever known.
He was trying to rationalise the events of the night. Peter had spent his entire life on the farm he now owned, had worked it for his father until Hans Schuler had succumbed to the cancer that had eaten him away before his son’s eyes, had married his wife and raised his daughter there. As a result, he believed he understood animals, both domestic and wild, as well as anyone, and better than most. And he knew that was all the wolf was; a wild animal that had wandered into the Schulers’ territory, incapable of malice, or viciousness. But it had been standing over his daughter, his maddening, arrogant, beautiful daughter, standing over her with its teeth bared, its shadow swallowing her, and he had never wanted to kill another living thing as much as he did right now.
The wolf had scared Greta terribly. He had been carrying her back to the house, shouting for his wife to bring blankets as he did so, when she had suddenly stiffened in his arms, then screamed so loudly that he almost dropped her. When the scream had died away, she began to sob against his shoulder, her small body trembling. She was still shaking as his wife tucked her blankets tightly back round her, mumbling nonsense about the wolf being made of metal, insisting that it had spoken to her, that it had said “Help me” as she stood beneath its blood-soaked muzzle, waiting for it to tear her throat out.
“What do you want to do, boss?” It was Franck who asked, the farm’s head wrangler, a soft-spoken bear of a man. He was looking steadily at Greta’s father, waiting to be told what to do.
“Get your coats,” Peter replied, and a minute later the four men were marching across the farmyard, their guns slung over their shoulders.
Peter led them to the spot at the edge of the woods where the wolf had loomed over Greta, then took a deep breath and followed the trail of blood into the trees. Lars and Sebastian, brothers who had worked the Schuler farm since they were fourteen, walked steadily behind him, with Franck bringing up the rear.
The snow crunched beneath their heavy boots as they tracked the wolf through the forest. The animal was not hard to follow; it had left a trail of paw prints the size of dinner plates, and a long corridor of flattened bushes and broken branches that stood out in the yellow light of the men’s torches. Eventually, the forest widened into a clearing, and the men’s eyes widened as they entered it. The small, circular gap in the trees looked like the inside of an abattoir.
In the middle, strewn across the snowy forest floor, were the last identifiable remains of one of Peter Schuler’s cattle. A horn lay in a puddle of blood and offal, a hoof and a thick piece of the animal’s hide thrown to one side. Blood covered the ground, studded with steaming chunks of meat, through which the wolf had tracked its giant paws. The four men standing at the edge of the trees were hard country men, but the violence that had taken place in the clearing shook them to their cores.
“Shoot on sight,” said Peter Schuler, softly. The men swung their shotguns from their shoulders, racked them with trembling hands, then followed the enormous footprints deeper into the darkness of the forest.
An hour later, with dawn creeping above the horizon to the east, four shivering men emerged from the trees at the edge of the road that led south to Bremen. The tracks had continued in a straight line, until they finally stopped a metre in front of where the men were standing. They disappeared in a wide circle of disturbed snow that looked as though a group of men had been wrestling in it. The snow, and the frozen earth beneath it, had been churned and tossed and thrown in every direction. On the other side of the circle a new set of tracks led away from the circle, parallel to the road. The men stepped carefully round the disturbance, and looked down at the new trail.
“My God,” whispered Lars, and crossed himself.
Stretching away before them was a series of enormous human footprints.
“I don’t understand,” said Sebastian. “I don’t—”
“Quiet,” hissed Peter. “The Langers’ farm is just over that rise. Let’s move.”
The four men marched quickly alongside the footprints. After five minutes or so, the grey roof of the farmhouse where Kurt Langer, Peter Schuler’s oldest friend, lived with his family appeared above the top of the slope they were climbing, and Peter accelerated, urging his men to keep up with him.
I hope we’re not too late. Please don’t let us be too late.
They hurried over the rise, and Peter’s heart sank. Even from thirty metres away he could see the footprints leading through the front gate on to the Langers’ property, towards the farmhouse where the family would normally now be waking up. He shouted for his men to follow him, and took off running down the slope, skidding and sliding as his boots fought for purchase through the thick snow. He grabbed the gatepost, steadied himself and then paused, examining the ground.
There were two sets of footprints, running parallel to each other, in opposite directions. One led into the Langers’ yard, and the second, the heavy treads of winter boots, led back towards the road.
Too late, too late, too late.
Peter shoved the gate wide and lurched into the yard, heading towards the front door of the house, his shotgun at his shoulder. He was about to yell for the Langers, horribly sure that he would receive no reply, when he stopped again.
To his left, running between a low branch of the oak tree that stood at the edge of the farmyard and a brass hook inserted into the wall of the house, was a thick nylon washing line. Fluttering from it in the bright morning air were a number of heavy garments: plaid shirts, long johns, thermal socks and undershirts. But half the line was empty, and beneath it, scattered on the snowy ground, were a handful of wooden pegs. The first row of footprints ran beneath the line, then to the back step of the house. The second started there, a row of boot prints leading back towards the road.
A hand fell on Peter Schuler’s shoulder, and he jumped. But it was only Franck, his big, gentle face staring at Peter’s, his gun lowered at his side.
“You need to see this, boss,” said the head wrangler, jerking a thumb towards the road.
The four men gathered at the edge of the tarmac, looking down at their feet. The last of the prints were etched neatly into the snow, alongside the tracks of a set of heavy-duty winter tyres.
A truck. Four-wheel drive. Probably a pick-up, like the one in the barn at home.
The tracks formed a shallow semi-circle where the driver had brought his vehicle to a halt at the side of the road, before accelerating back on to the highway. There were no more footprints, in any direction.
“I’ll ring Karl,” said Lars. “He can bring the truck up here. We can follow it.”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he replied. “It’s gone. Whatever it was, it’s gone. Ring Karl, and tell him to come and pick us up. I’ll call Kurt later and tell him what happened. Let’s go home.”
An hour to the south, a battered red pick-up truck chugged steadily along the motorway. The driver, a round, red-faced man in a heavy woollen jacket and an ancient deerstalker hat, watched the road ahead of him, a short cigar clamped between his teeth. On the passenger seat beside him sat a plastic flask of coffee laced with cherry brandy, from which he was taking regular sips.
Behind him, in the truck’s flatbed, shivering beneath the pile of animal hides that the driver was taking south to market, his sleeping face a mask of contorted misery and confusion, lay Frankenstein’s monster.
11
THE BARE BONES
Jamie was about to open the door to his quarters when he felt the console on his belt beep three times, signalling a message that had been unread for more than thirty minutes.
His mind was reeling with everything he had just seen, everything he had just been told, and he was struggling to understand the implications of it.
I can’t believe I got to see that, he thought. I can’t believe Talbot let me. It’s amazing.
Jamie had turned off the beeper during the Zero Hour Task Force meeting, left it off during the unbelievable, mind-bending twenty minutes that followed it, twenty minutes that he knew he could never tell anyone about, not even Larissa, and had only just switched it back on. He pulled it free of its loop, swearing loudly in the empty corridor, and read the short line of text that had appeared on the screen.
G-17/OP_EXT_L2/LIVE_BRIEFING/BR2/1130
The Department 19 shorthand had become second nature.
The first set of letters and numbers was the designation of his squad, G-17, and the second told him that they had been given an external operation with a Level 2 priority. The third was self-explanatory, that there would be a live briefing rather than data supplied to them once they were already on the move, the fourth was the location of the briefing, in this case Briefing Room 2, and the final set of numbers were the time that the briefing would begin. Jamie checked his watch, and saw that it was 11:28. He swore, then ran back down the corridor towards the silver doors of the Level B lift.
On Level 0 he piled out of the lift and ran along the corridor that served as the level’s central thoroughfare. On one side, accessible by the heavy yellow and black striped doors that stood at regular intervals, was the huge hangar that served as the embarkation point for all Blacklight operations. On the opposite side of the corridor, filling the other half of the huge circular level, were the suites of offices and rooms that comprised the Department’s Communications and Surveillance Divisions.
The Ops Room, where Jamie had just been, sat in the middle of the corridor, and therefore at the centre of Level 0. Beyond it, along a series of semi-circular corridors, like the layers of an onion, stood offices, server farms and inventories, accessible by security-coded doors set into the long wall.
Jamie pressed his ID against the sensor beside one of the doors marked BRIEFING ROOMS, pulled it open and raced down the corridor. He skidded to a halt outside the door to Briefing Room 2 and walked through it, as calmly as he was able.
The room was a curved box, much like a classroom. At one end, to the right as Jamie entered, beneath a high-definition screen that filled most of the wall, stood a lectern, from where the briefings were given. Jamie looked immediately in its direction, and felt his heart sink.
Standing behind the lectern was Major Paul Turner.
Great, thought Jamie. That’s just great. He knows I was in the Zero Hour meeting, and he knows I can’t say so in front of the rest of them. Then a smile threatened to rise on his face. He doesn’t know where I went afterwards, though.
“Good of you to join us, Mr Carpenter,” said Turner, staring at him. “I hope we haven’t interrupted whatever you were doing. I’ve no doubt it was extremely important.”
You’ve no idea, thought Jamie. No idea at all.
There was a giggle from his left, and he felt his face flush with heat. He turned to see who had laughed; it had not been Kate or Larissa, and they were the only other people he was expecting to see in the room. But he immediately saw that he had assumed wrongly; five faces were staring at him, not two.
Sitting at one desk were Kate and Larissa, the former regarding him with a stern look, the latter with a mischievous little smile. Two desks away, a distance that was clearly deliberate, sat three more Operators, two of whom Jamie recognised immediately; the third was a girl in her early twenties whom he had heard a lot about, but had never met. She was smiling widely at him; it had clearly been her who had laughed.
The three Operators made up Operational Squad F-7, commanded by Lieutenant Jack Williams. Jamie’s friend smiled at him from across the room, and Jamie returned it with an uncertain one of his own.
What the hell are you three doing here? he wondered.
Sitting beside Jack, Shaun Turner’s face regarded Jamie with wide grey eyes that were as expressionless as his father’s. He was tall, taller than Jamie or Jack, and broad, the naturally powerful figure of a rugby player. He sat easily in his chair, waiting for Jamie to say something.
The girl, who Jamie knew from Jack’s fervent, fluttery descriptions was called Angela Darcy, was still smiling at him, and as he looked at her, actually looked at her, he was struck by how remarkably attractive she was. Her blonde hair was darker than Kate’s, almost a golden colour, and her face was sharp and angular, drawn in straight lines by a hugely talented artist. He knew from Jack that she had been an SIS agent, recruited out of Oxford in her first year, and had served with distinction in some of the most unstable and dangerous backwaters of the globe. She apparently spoke at least six languages, and was an expert in the art of wetwork – assassinations and state-sanctioned murders carried out at such close range that it was impossible to avoid being covered with the blood of the target.
Jamie was pretty sure that Jack was at least a little bit in love with her; he was absolutely sure that he was scared of her. But her smile was wide, and friendly, and Jamie was glad it was her laughter that had made him blush; he was sure that her smile would have had the same effect, and would have been a lot more difficult to explain to Larissa.
Behind him, someone cleared their throat, and he realised he hadn’t answered Major Turner. He looked back to the front of the room, and saw the former SAS officer staring at him with an unnervingly patient expression.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he lied. “Something came up on the lower levels. It won’t happen again, sir.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” replied Turner. “But I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. Sit down, Carpenter.”
Jamie walked sheepishly over to the table where Larissa and Kate were sitting, pulled a chair out and flopped into it between them. As Paul Turner set the pages of his briefing on the lectern, Jamie cast a glance at Angela, who favoured him with a sympathetic smile. He smiled back, then returned his attention to the front of the room, his blood boiling at the unfairness of it all.
“Operators,” said Major Turner. “This is OPERATION: PROMISED LAND, a two-squad reconnaissance and elimination mission. It’s relatively straightforward, but please try and concentrate. I’d rather not have to keep stopping to answer stupid questions. Clear? Good.”
Turner pressed a button on the portable console in his hand, and the wall screen above his head burst into life. It showed a satellite image of a large container ship; the tiny swells of white water at her aft showed the Operators that the ship was in motion.
“This,” continued Turner, “is the Aristeia. She’s a Panamax-class freighter, two hundred and twenty-eight metres long, thirty-two metres wide, able to carry three thousand standard freight containers. She’s Greek-built, flying the Bahamian flag.”
“If she can carry three thousand containers,” said Angela, “why does it look like she’s carrying about fifty?”
Turner favoured her with what passed for a smile, and tapped his console. The image magnified until the ship filled the screen.
“You’re correct,” he said. “She’s carrying sixty-eight containers on a deck built for forty-four times that many. She departed from Shanghai eighteen days ago; those containers would need to be filled with diamonds to cover the cost of the fuel it’s taken to get her where she is now.”
“Where’s that?” asked Larissa.
“About eighty miles off the north-east coast,” replied Turner. “Her heading puts her destination as the entrance to the River Tyne, where she’ll arrive in roughly seven hours.”
“What does this have to do with us?” asked Shaun Turner.
“There has been only a single radio contact with the Aristeia since she left port,” replied Major Turner. “When she passed through the Suez Canal. Before and since, nothing. She spent the last week making her way through the Mediterranean, and all attempts to contact her, by the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese, have failed.”
“Pirates?” asked Kate.
Angela snorted, and Larissa fired a stare full of razor blades in her direction.
“No,” replied Major Turner. “Or at least, we don’t think so. There’s never been an instance of a pirated vessel being taken voluntarily through the Med, or through the Canal. If she’d been boarded, we’d expect the pirates to have taken her to the coast of Somalia, where they could moor her and make their demands. This ship had to go through Somali waters to get to Suez.”
“Terrorists?” suggested Jack Williams. “Could it be carrying a bomb?”
“Satellite spectro-analysis says not. Also, why would you use a ship like this to make an attack? They’d know we could sink her in the middle of the ocean. Cargo freighters are not renowned for their manoeuvrability.”
“So what is it then?” asked Jamie, sharply. He was getting bored with playing guessing games.
Paul Turner gave him a look full of warning, then continued.
“The Surveillance Division monitored the attempts to contact her, and when she entered UK waters, we put a satellite over her. Here’s the infrared.”
The image on the screen blurred out, then sharpened into a bright rainbow of colours. The frigid water surrounding the ship was a blue so dark it was almost black, the hull and deck of the Aristeia a pale shade of aquamarine. A thick bloom of red glowed at the rear of the ship, where the huge diesel engines were producing the power that pushed the enormous freighter through the water. The rectangular containers on the ship’s cargo deck glowed a pale orange, and were studded with small blobs of yellow which, the watching Operators realised, were moving around inside the boxes.
“Jesus,” said Jack Williams. “There must be two hundred people in those containers.”
“Two hundred and twenty-seven,” confirmed Major Turner. “Look at the bridge.”
The huge crescent-shaped bridge, which towered almost four storeys above the surface of the deck, was pale yellow. The heat was emanating from seven points of light that were almost white, such was the heat they were giving out.
“Vamps,” said Shaun Turner, matter-of-factly. “Seven vamps, and two hundred humans. What the hell is this ship?”
“It’s not a ship,” said Angela. “It’s a prison. A floating prison.”
“What do you mean?” asked Larissa, frowning. “What are they being imprisoned for?”
“So they can be delivered to whoever paid for them,” said Angela. “I’ve seen it before, but never on this scale. It’s like the snakehead gangs bringing workers out of the Far East. They get them as far as the Med, then use trucks the rest of the way. Someone is waiting for this ship in the north, I can guarantee you. Someone waiting for the cargo they ordered.”
Larissa looked at Paul Turner, who nodded.
“Operator Darcy is correct,” he said. “Our understanding is that the men and women on this ship are to be delivered into vampire hands as soon as the ship docks. What is planned for them after that, we don’t know. But given that the oldest vampire in the world, who is currently unaccounted for, is most likely in a condition that requires a regular supply of blood, we thought it might be worth looking into. Don’t you agree?”
“You think those people are being shipped to wherever Valeri and Dracula are hiding?” asked Kate.
“We think it’s possible.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked Jamie, his voice firm.
Larissa looked over at him, saw the set of his jaw, the calm in his blue eyes, and felt her stomach flip. She was incredibly proud of him, and as attracted to him in that moment as she had ever been. A low growl emerged from her throat, barely audible to anyone except Jamie, who was sitting beside her. He turned to her, and a flicker of red spilled into the corners of her eyes, so quickly that only he could have possibly seen it. He grinned; he knew very well what it meant.
Maybe we won’t have to leave right away, he thought, hopefully. Maybe we’ll get to wait until after dark.
The thought of the long hours of remaining daylight, and what they might contain, widened his grin. He dragged his gaze away from Larissa, and tried to focus once more on Paul Turner’s briefing.
“You leave immediately,” said the Major, and Jamie’s heart sank. “We surveyed the area, and the only place anyone could illegally dock a ship that size is the old Swan Hunter shipyard at Wallsend. We’re having the surrounding yards closed as we speak, and the coastguard has been given orders to allow the ship to enter the river. I want you to take up surveillance positions before nightfall, then intercept the ship when it docks. The first priority is to find out where these people were being taken, and why. The second is the captives themselves. The new SOP does not apply on this operation. Is that understood?”
We don’t have to capture the vamps, realised Jamie, and felt a savage wave of pleasure flood through him. We can destroy them.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, and a second later Jack Williams said the same.
“Good,” said Major Turner. “Now. There are more than two hundred men and women on that ship, all of whom are going to be weak, and probably terrified. So you’re going to need to manage the situation; if they panic, which they probably will, if they start running across your lines of fire, make them get down. The collateral loss limit for this mission is nine. Is that clear?”
“It’s not clear to me,” said Jamie, although he had a horrible idea that it was.
I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I really do.
“It means we don’t want to see more than nine civilians die on this Operation. That’s the acceptable level of loss.”
“My squad doesn’t deal in acceptable losses,” said Jack Williams, his voice low and steady.
“Mine neither,” said Jamie, instantly.
“Really?” asked Major Turner, his expression glacial. “Because I do. And so does Admiral Seward. And for this mission, yours is nine. Understood?”
“I don’t think—”
“Shut up!” shouted Major Turner, and the room immediately fell silent. He glared round at each of the six men and women in turn. “This is a Level 2 mission that Intelligence suggests may be directly related to this Department’s highest priority. You don’t like talking about collateral losses, fine, but you will bear them in mind when you’re out in the field. Because they can be the difference between a medal and six months on the inactive roster, especially on a mission like this, a mission that I expect you to be able to accomplish, even with only two squads.”
“Why are you sending two squads?” asked Shaun Turner, mildly. “We normally work alone. Sir.”
The young Operator’s words dripped with insolence, but his father favoured him with a look full of such icy threat that he quickly dropped his gaze. Unseen by anyone else in the room, Kate’s cheeks flushed momentarily as she watched Shaun buckle under his father’s stare.
“If it was possible to do so,” said Major Turner, “we’d be sending four squads on this operation. If I had three at my disposal, I’d be sending three. But I don’t; I have two. You two. So that’s why you’re both going. Because we’re down to the bare bones here.”
“Seven vamps, though?” said Jack Williams. “It doesn’t need six of us to handle seven of them.”
“I don’t care if it’s one newly-turned vampire in the middle of an open field, Lieutenant Williams. You have your orders, you have your briefing, the surveillance data has been transferred to your consoles and your transport, and I am deeply bored of talking to all of you. Dismissed.”
For a moment, no one moved, then Turner walked swiftly round the podium and took two long strides into the middle of the room.
“I said, dismissed,” he said, and this time they all moved, quickly.
Six and a half hours later Operational Squads F-7 and G-17 huddled together in the shadow of a grey factory building on the banks of the River Tyne.
The towering cranes that had once been such a feature of the skyline of this part of the world were gone, dismantled and sold to an Indian shipyard two years earlier. The huge yard, where thousands of men had laboured to build the legendary RMS Mauretania in the first years of the twentieth century, where their grandsons had built the Royal Navy’s flagship, HMS Ark Royal, seven decades later, was silent. The floating dock, with its four wide berths, sat open to the lapping water of the Tyne; it was already becoming overgrown, and was slowly filling up with discarded bottles and cans, left by the teenagers who prowled its wide-open space after dark.
The factories that had once manufactured engine parts and hull panels were empty, their heavy machines sold to shipyards around the world that were still enjoying better times. They were coated in graffiti, and beginning to rust at their corners. The roads that ran between them, which had once hummed with the accumulated sound of thousands of men’s voices when the evening whistle blew, were covered in a spider’s web of cracks and holes; tangles of weeds emerged from these gaps, as though the earth was already beginning to reclaim land that had once been home to the very best of human ingenuity and innovation.
A thick fog was rolling down the Tyne from the North Sea; as Jamie looked out across the desolate, creaking yard, he could not see the far bank of the river. The grey tendrils were drifting up to the edges of the concrete dock below them, but were not, as yet, cresting them and moving on to the land.
“This is going to be no fun at all if that fog breaks over the dock,” he said. “Seven vamps may as well be seventy if we can’t see them.”
Jack Williams nodded. The six Operators had finished their reconnaissance of the old shipyard, and concluded it was sufficiently isolated for their purposes. It was far from secure, however; there was a main thoroughfare, Hadrian Road, less than two hundred metres to the north, and the fences that surrounded the yard were in significant disrepair. There was no time to plug the holes and tighten the net round the yard; instead, the plan was to never allow the vampires to get more than a few metres from their ship.
“I’ll take Kate and Larissa down there,” Jamie continued, pointing to a series of rusting metal containers that stood at the edge of the concrete dock, fifteen metres from the river’s edge. “Jack, why don’t you take your squad over there, behind that wall? That way they’ll have to come between us, and we can ambush them from both sides. OK?”
He turned away, ready to jog towards the position he had just described, when Larissa grabbed his arm, and he turned back. The three members of Squad F-7 were not moving, and Jack Williams was staring at him with a look of enormous apology on his open, friendly face.
“What’s the problem?” asked Jamie.
“I take my orders from Jack,” said Shaun Turner, a belligerent look on his face. “Not from you. Nothing personal.”
Temper flared in Jamie’s chest.
It bloody well sounds like it’s something personal, he thought. Does he just naturally hate me, like his dad does?
“Really?” asked Kate, her voice fierce. “You really think now is the time for this petty crap?”
Shaun’s face flushed, but he didn’t look away.
“Jack outranks Jamie,” said Angela, who had the decency to sound embarrassed as she spoke. “In terms of experience. We think he should take point.”
Larissa snarled, and her eyes flickered red. “This is complete bull—”
“Angela’s right,” interrupted Jamie. “Tell us what you want us to do, Jack.”
Larissa looked at him, her face pained on his behalf, but he shot her a tiny smile, pleading with her not to make a big deal out of what was happening. She returned it, and his heart swelled with fierce affection for the vampire girl.
Jack Williams gave him a brief glance, full of gratitude. “Positions as Jamie described,” he said. “Remember that we need at least one vamp alive for questioning. At least one. The new SOP doesn’t apply, which I’m sure we’re all very happy about, but let’s not get carried away. Dead vampires aren’t going to tell us where Dracula is. Let’s move.”
The six dark figures were crouched, ready to scuttle-run to their posts, when the air around them changed; it seemed thicker, as though something huge was altering the pressure. At the same moment, the six Operators realised they could hear something too: a steady thud-thud-thud, and the low rush of breaking water. They looked up the river, into the thick, swirling fog, as the vast, curved prow of the Aristeia burst into view, blinding them with its running lights, its enormous control tower looming far above them. The huge ship was slowing rapidly, slicing through the river parallel to the long concrete dock.
“Move! Now!” hissed Jack, and the six Operators scattered, hunkering low to the ground as they sprinted to the positions that Jamie had suggested. Then Larissa’s head was up, turned to the north, her supernatural hearing picking something up in the dark, sodden night air.
“What is it?” asked Jamie. He was standing with his back to the corner of the container nearest the dock, peering out at the incoming ship. Its size was boggling his mind; the deck was a football-field long, the hull a daunting, vertical wall of steel, the control tower the size of a large office building. It approached with eerie quiet; he could hear no voices, no sounds of any activity on the decks, or below them, just the steady thud of the engines.
“Trucks,” replied Larissa, then turned to look at him. “Three trucks inside the gate, heading this way.”
“Any idea what’s inside them?” asked Jamie.
Larissa nodded.
“Vampires,” she replied. “Lots and lots of vampires.”
12
INSIDE THE VOID
JEREMY’S 24HR TRANSPORT CAFÉ, NORTH OF KÖLN, GERMANY SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER
Frankenstein was jolted awake as the truck shuddered to a halt. He opened his eyes, and looked over at Andreas, the skinny, speed-addicted kid who had given him a lift out of Dortmund as the sun set on the previous day.
“This is as far as I go,” said Andreas. He twitched constantly, gnawing at his fingernails until they bled, but he had shared a flask of soup and some black bread with Frankenstein when they had stopped for petrol, and for that, as well as the lift, the monster was grateful.
“That’s fine,” said Frankenstein. “Thanks for bringing me this far.”
He unwrapped a grey-green hand from the moth-eaten blanket the kind lady at the homeless shelter had given him, and extended it towards Andreas, who shook it. Then he wrapped the blanket tightly round himself, grabbed the plastic bag that contained everything he owned and stepped out into the freezing night.
Frankenstein had woken up four weeks earlier, in the bowels of a fishing boat, without the slightest idea of who he was. When the ship’s captain, a weathered, salt-encrusted old man called Jens, had asked him his name, he had not been able to answer. Subsequent questions – where he lived, his family and friends, and how he had come to be floating adrift in the North Sea with the little finger of his left hand missing and a wound to his neck that should have killed him – were met with the same response: a panicked look of utter confusion. He had lain on the floor of the cabin, as he was too tall to fit into any of the bunks, and tried to remember something, anything, a place he had been, a conversation he had had, a person he had met, but there was a yawning void in the centre of his mind where his memory should have been.
He was weak from the hypothermia that had nearly killed him, that would have killed him had the crew of the Furchtlos not found him tangled in their nets as they drew in the first catch of their trip. The net, studded with orange buoys at regular intervals, had kept him afloat, and was the reason he had not drowned. His Department 19 uniform, made of heat-regulating material that acted in the same way as a wetsuit, was the reason he had not succumbed to the punishing cold of the water; without it the fishermen would have hauled in a corpse with their catch.
By talking with the crew as they ate their vast meals of meat and potatoes, he discovered that he spoke German, English, French and Russian, although he had no memory of having been to the countries where he was told these languages had come from. He talked for a long time with Hans, the boat’s first mate, a veteran of more than forty years’ fishing, and as he listened to the old man’s stories, of places he had been and women he had known, of the adventures of the man’s youth, occasionally Frankenstein had felt something tighten in his mind, as though he had almost been able to feel the edge of something solid, before it slipped away through his fingers.
The crew had sent him on his way when they reached port, with a jumper and a pair of overalls that were far too small for his giant frame. But he appreciated the men’s kindness, and their lack of suspicion; he was half-expecting to see the police and the coastguard waiting for him when the ship steamed into Cuxhaven harbour. But the only people on the dock to greet the boat were the crew’s wives and girlfriends, relieved to see their men home safely once more. The crew, who were fishermen born and raised, and had seen a lifetime of strange things at sea, had clearly decided that the huge grey-green man, whom they had hauled from the water as though he was nothing more than a grossly swollen cod, was none of their business.
Frankenstein had walked off the dock with no idea where he was, beyond the rudimentary picture of European geography that Hans had described to him, and no idea where he might go to begin the process of attempting to piece together who he was.
He was completely lost.
As night fell, and the cold wind drew in around him, carrying heavy flakes of snow with it, he had found a group of homeless men and women beneath a bridge on the outskirts of Cuxhaven. They had not welcomed him, nor offered to share their small amount of food, but they had not driven him away either, and had eventually allowed him to huddle round their brazier, and keep the worst of the cold from his bones. The following day he had headed south, away from the sea; he reached the tiny farming hamlet of Gudendorf as night fell, and the full moon rose above him, sickly yellow and swollen in the clear sky.
Suddenly a bolt of agony had burst through his body, driving him to his knees. It felt as though his skin was on fire, as though his bones had been replaced by molten metal, and he screamed up at the moon, as his body began to break. With sickening, agonising crunches, his bones snapped and reset in new shapes. Blood boiled in his veins as thick grey hair sprouted from his skin before his eyes, which had turned a deep, gleaming yellow. His face stretched and lengthened, his teeth bursting from his gums and sharpening into razors, as he fell on to all fours, no longer able to scream; what came from his gaping mouth was a deafening, high-pitched howl.
As the moon shimmered above him and the transformation neared completion, he began to run, shambling forward on four unsteady, newborn legs, then faster and faster, as the last vestiges of his rational self succumbed to the animal that roared in his blood, until he was racing through the dense, snowy forest, towards a distant light and a plume of grey chimney smoke, towards the thick smell of animal fear that drifted through the frozen trees.
The following morning, for the second time in barely a week, Frankenstein had woken up in a strange place, with no memory of how he had arrived there, or what he had done; compounding the strangeness this time was the fact that he was naked, and lying beside a main road.
Mercifully, the road was deserted, as dawn was barely scratching the sky in the east. But even as he looked around in an attempt to get his bearings, the cold of the German winter bit at his naked skin, and he knew he needed to find shelter, quickly. The patch of ground where he had woken up was a circle of damp green grass, the snow thawed away, as though he had been emitting tremendous heat while he slept. He was coated in something sticky, and when he rubbed his hands across his face, they came away streaked with red.
Frankenstein reeled, but then the wind blew hard across him again, and he tried to put the red substance from his mind and concentrate on staying alive. He began to stagger alongside the road, his breath clouding in front of him, towards a gentle slope in the terrain, above which smoke was rising in lazy loops.
Beyond the rise lay a farmhouse, facing away from the road and out over frozen fields and the forest beyond. Frankenstein tried to open the small gate, but his fingers were so cold that they refused to grip; he half-climbed, half-fell over it, his body screaming in pain as he landed in the hard, freezing snow. He staggered towards the house, prepared to risk the likely wrath of whoever it belonged to, knowing that he had to get out of the cold, had to or else he would surely die, when he saw a long washing line strung between the house and a tree that rose from the middle of the garden’s small lawn. He made for it, his feet numb and his grey-green skin now a virulent shade of purple, and hauled clothes down from the line, scattering the pegs on the ground.
Once he was dressed, Frankenstein thumbed a lift in the back of a pick-up truck, burying himself deep beneath a pile of sheepskins, which had carried him as far south as Dortmund. He had spent nearly two weeks in a homeless shelter on Kleppingstraße, only being forced to leave when a kind, nervous woman named Magda had started to take a little too much of a friendly interest in him.
Frankenstein still didn’t know who he was, but he knew that nothing good would have come from encouraging her affection. And so he had left, in the middle of the night, and resumed his journey, following the cargo routes through Germany, looking for something, anything, that might unlock his memory.
Frankenstein watched as Andreas slowly wheeled his truck round, and headed out on to the northbound lane of the road. Behind him were row after row of articulated lorries; huge rigs, eighteen and twenty-two wheeled, their trailers towering above him in the darkness of the parking area. When Andreas’s pick-up had been absorbed into the stream of red lights on the motorway, he made his way through the labyrinth of vehicles towards the diner that lay beyond the filling station.
Jeremy’s was a no-frills kind of place; a simple, greasy, one-storey building, in which Jeremy and his wife Marta sold heaped platefuls of cheap, starchy food to the endless stream of lorry drivers making their way south, to Paris, to Bordeaux, to Spain and Portugal beyond. Most were wired on coffee or amphetamines, and wanted nothing more than something hot to line their stomachs; it was these low expectations that Jeremy and Marta were experts in accommodating.
Frankenstein was not interested in the food, or even the temporary respite from the cold that sitting in one of the café’s linoleum booths would provide. He was only interested in finding a way of continuing his journey, of continuing south. He had no money to offer any of the drivers, and no goods to barter: no drugs, or alcohol, or pornography. There was always a chance that he might find a driver who craved human companionship, who was quietly going crazy at the isolation of being on the road, of the disembodied voices that floated into his cab via CB radio. But it was unlikely; the men who lived this nomadic life did so largely because they wanted as little to do with other human beings as possible.
“Are you a thief?”
The voice was soft, and lilted sweetly on the night air. It seemed to contain no accusation, only curiosity. Frankenstein turned to see the owner of it standing in the shadows between two of the enormous lorries.
It was a little girl, a tiny thing of no more than eight. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, thick, sensible work boots and was holding a small model of a truck in her hand; she was every inch a driver’s daughter. She was frowning at him, staring up at his huge frame, her forehead furrowed.
“I’m not a thief,” Frankenstein replied, lowering his voice. “Are you?”
The little girl smiled, involuntarily, at such a naughty idea, then remembered herself, and frowned again.
“Of course I’m not,” she said, firmly. “This is my daddy’s lorry.” She reached out and touched the wheel of the truck she was standing beside; it was taller than her.
“Where is your daddy?” asked Frankenstein. “You shouldn’t be out here on your own. It’s cold.”
The little girl pointed to Jeremy’s transport café.
“Daddy’s playing cards,” she said. “The clock said he had to stop driving, but he’s not tired.”
“Does he know you’re out here on your own?”
“No,” she replied, proudly. “I sneaked out. No one saw me.”
“You shouldn’t do that. It’s dangerous.”
“Why?” she asked. “Aren’t I safe with you?”
Frankenstein looked down at the tiny figure beside the wheel.
“You’re safe,” he said. “But we should still get you back to your daddy. Come on.”
He held out a huge, mottled hand, and the little girl skipped forward and took it. She smiled up at him as he began to lead her towards the café.
“What’s your name?” she asked, as he stopped at the edge of the parking area, checking that nothing was about to pull up to the fuel pumps.
“Klaus,” he said, leading her forward across the brightly lit forecourt.
“That’s a nice name.”
“Thank you.”
“My daddy’s name is Michael.”
“What about yours? What’s your name?”
“My name is Lene. Lene Neumann.”
“That’s a pretty name,” said Frankenstein.
“You’re nice,” replied Lene, smiling up at the monster that was holding her hand. “I like you. Are you going south? I bet my daddy will give you a lift with us.”
Frankenstein was about to reply when an almighty crash rang out above the noise of the idling engines. He looked at the truck stop, and saw a commotion in the small diner, before the screen door slammed open, banging with a noise like a gunshot against its metal frame.
A man was silhouetted against the fluorescent lighting of the transport café. He was short, and heavy-set, with a baseball cap perched on the top of his round head.
“Lene!” the man bellowed. “Lene! Where are you, sweetheart? Lene!”
The man leapt down from the doorway, and ran across the forecourt in their direction. He would see them as soon as he reached the shade of the fuel station’s canopy. Behind him, a cluster of men and women followed him out of the diner, all calling Lene’s name.
“That’s my daddy!” exclaimed Lene. “He’s looking for me! I bet we can go when he finds us!”
A sinking feeling settled into Frankenstein’s chest, and as he looked down at the little girl’s hand wrapped tightly in his own, everything seemed to slow down. He saw the rotund figure of Lene’s dad pass under the canopy and out of the blinding spotlights that illuminated the entrance and exit ramps. The man’s face was ghostly pale, his eyes wide, his mouth a trembling O of panic. The men who were following him across the forecourt were all drivers, some of them carrying wrenches and crowbars. Frankenstein looked again at his hand, and Lene’s hand, and realised what was going to happen, realised it was too late to do anything about it.
“Daddy!” cried Lene, and the group of running men bore to their left, adjusting their course towards the sound of the little girl’s voice, like a flock of birds in flight. Lene’s father skidded to a halt in front of them, and took in the scene he found before him.
“Lene,” he said, gasping for breath. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“Don’t be silly, Daddy,” his daughter smiled. “This is my friend, Klaus.”
The rest of the men drew up behind Lene’s father, weapons in their hands and looks of anger on their faces.
“He’s your friend?” asked Michael Neumann. “That’s nice, sweetheart. But you come over here next to me now, all right? Come on.”
Frankenstein let go of Lene’s hand; she ran happily over to her father, and hugged his leg. Her father stroked her hair, his gaze never leaving Frankenstein, his eyes like burning coals.
“You shouldn’t sneak off like that,” he said, his voice low and soothing. “How many times have I told you? It scares me when I don’t know where you are. You don’t want to scare me, do you?”
Lene looked up at her father, an expression of terrible worry on her small face.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I won’t do it again, I promise.”
“It’s all right,” he replied, still staring at Frankenstein. “I want you to go with Angela and wait inside, OK? Daddy will be there in a minute, and then we can go. All right?”
Lene nodded. A teenage girl wearing a white waitress uniform stepped forward, looking at the monster with obvious disgust, and took Lene’s hand. The little girl waved at Frankenstein as she was led away. He raised his hand to wave back.
When the door of the diner clanged shut a second time, the group of lorry drivers stepped slowly towards Frankenstein, who found himself backing away down the narrow space between two rigs.
“What were you doing with my little girl, mister?” asked Michael Neumann, his voice trembling with anger. “What the hell do you think you were doing?”
Frankenstein knew that nothing he could say would change what was about to happen, but he tried anyway.
“I was bringing her back to you,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “She was hiding from you, and I told her it wasn’t safe. I was bringing her back.”
“He’s lying, Michael,” said one of the other drivers, a huge man in a leather jacket that was creaking at the seams. “I’d bet my last cent on it. He knows he’s caught.”
“I’m telling the truth,” said Frankenstein. “She told me you were playing cards and she sneaked out. She saw me next to your truck and asked me if I was a thief. I’m not lying.”
“What were you going to do to my daughter?” asked Lene’s father, his voice little more than a whisper. “What were you going to do if we hadn’t stopped you?”
You didn’t stop me, thought Frankenstein, anger spilling through him. If I was the kind of person you think I am, I’d be twenty miles down the road with your daughter and you’d never see her again. Because you were playing cards instead of watching her. Because you—
The thought was driven from his mind as a crowbar crashed down on the back of his neck, sending him to his knees. One of the drivers had crept round the back of the rig that Frankenstein had been retreating along; now he stood over the fallen giant with the bar in his hand, bellowing.
“He’s down, boys!” the man roared. “Let’s show him what we do to his kind!”
The men surged forward, their weapons raised, Michael Neumann in the lead. Rage exploded through Frankenstein; he erupted to his feet, his enormous frame jet black in the shadows between the trucks, and grabbed one of the drivers by the neck. The man’s roar died as his throat was constricted by the monster’s huge hand, and then he was jerked off his feet and into the air, as Frankenstein threw him against the side of one of the trailers with all his might. The man crashed into the thin metal, leaving a huge dent, then slid to the ground, blood spraying from his head.
The rest of the men skidded to a halt, their eyes wide. This was not how it was meant to go; they were supposed to teach the stranger a lesson, and leave him on the ground while they went back inside and finished their game.
“Come on!” shouted Michael, his voice faltering. He ran forward, a torque wrench raised, but then the enormous shadow of Frankenstein engulfed him, and he stopped. He stared up into the terrifying face of the monster, and his courage deserted him, along with the men who had accompanied him; they fled back towards the café, shouting for someone to call the police as they did so.
Frankenstein reached out and took the wrench from the man’s hand. Lene’s father offered no resistance; he was transfixed by the sight of the giant man standing over him.
Frankenstein lowered his head until it was level with the man’s. Breath rushed out of his mouth and nostrils in huge white clouds, and blood trickled over his shoulder from where the crowbar had split the skin of his neck.
“Next time,” he said, his voice like ice, “pay more attention to your daughter than to your cards. Do you hear me?”
Michael Neumann nodded, shaking.
“Good,” said Frankenstein, and dropped the wrench. It clattered to the ground at Michael’s feet, beside the unconscious shape of the man who had been thrown against the trailer. Michael turned and ran, without looking back.
Frankenstein prowled the edge of the parking area, looking for a way out.
His heart was pounding, his stomach churning at the memory of the sound the man had made when he crashed into the side of the truck, and at the ease with which he had inflicted the violence. He had just attacked, on instinct, without thinking.
It had felt so normal.
Once their fear subsides, they will call the authorities, he thought. And it won’t matter that they attacked an innocent man; when they see me, it won’t matter at all.
He reached the end of one of the long lines of trucks, and suddenly found himself bathed in light. The last rig on the stand, an enormous thirty-wheeler, was covered in hundreds of bulbs of different colours, like a vast Christmas tree laid upon fifteen pairs of wheels. Frankenstein looked up at the cab, and something opened up in his mind.
Above the wide windscreen was a dot matrix display, like the ones that displayed the destinations on the fronts of buses. This one displayed only a single word.
PARIS
A nauseating tangle of memories burst through the monster’s head, images and voices, feelings and places he couldn’t identify. But he understood that the word was familiar, the first thing he had found that was.
Movement in the cab caught his eye, and he ducked low beside the truck’s wide radiator as the driver settled himself behind his steering wheel. A moment later Frankenstein’s whole body vibrated as the huge diesel engine roared into life.
Now. You need to move now.
Still crouching, he ran around to the side of the rig. There was no time to break into the trailer; the truck would be moving before he could even get the locks open. He ran past the huge tyres of the cab until he reached the trailer’s frame. Beneath the container, lying on steel cross members, were three large storage pods, most likely for spare parts and tools. The space between them was a coffin-shaped gap, below the trailer’s container and a metre and a half above the tarmac of the road.
With no time left, Frankenstein dived into the gap, landing hard on the cross members, which were arranged in an X shape. He hauled himself into the space, and found that the bars were close enough together to support his weight. He wedged himself hard against the round edge of one of the storage pods and braced his legs against a second. Diesel fumes filled his nostrils as the driver put the truck into gear and resumed his journey south, to Paris.
13
HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE
“Incoming,” said Jamie. He spoke into the microphone built into the side of his helmet, which linked him to the other five Operators on the Operational frequency. “Heads up, Jack.”
“How do you know?” asked Jack, his voice sounding directly in Jamie’s ear.
“Larissa,” replied Jamie. It was all that needed to be said; the vampire girl’s senses were hundreds of times more sensitive than those of a normal human, and she had heard the trucks entering the shipyard long before the rest of the squad would have been able to.
Jack swore. “How long?” he asked.
“Less than a minute,” answered Larissa. “Three trucks, I don’t know how many vampires. At least ten.”
“Ready One,” said Jack. “Nobody moves until I give the go, clear?”
Squad G-17 immediately lowered their visors, pulling their T-Bones from their holsters. Ready One was the code for imminent contact with the supernatural; it meant that the use of force was authorised.
Four heavy thuds sounded from the edge of the dock, and Jamie craned round the corner of the container to see what had made them. Thick ropes were lying on the ground, thrown from the deck of the towering freighter. He looked up at the high steel wall, and saw a flash of movement through the fog, a dark shape disappearing into the gloom. Then the rumble of engines began to shake the ground beneath their feet, and three black trucks appeared from the north.
They drove in single file, approaching slowly along the crumbling central road of the shipyard. The Operators, concealed in the deep shadows cast by the containers and the high concrete wall, watched them as they passed. Their paint was peeling, and the trucks were coated in dirt and dust. But the engines purred as they made their way towards the ship, and Jamie saw that the tyres were new, the walls black, the manufacturer’s logos still bright white. He could not see anyone inside the vehicles; the windows were smeared with grime, and the cabs were high above his low vantage point, making the angle impossible.
He watched the trucks pull to a halt in a line near the edge of the dock, then waited, his breath held tight in his lungs, as the door of the first cab creaked open, and a figure emerged.
The fog drifted lazily round its feet as it made its way to the back of the truck, and began to unlock the rear doors. Behind Jamie, somewhere back towards the main road, something clattered; an animal most likely, skittering across the concrete. The figure’s head instantly flashed round, and Jamie saw the glowing red coals of its eyes.
For a long moment all was still, then the vampire, a man who looked to be in his late thirties so far as Jamie could tell in the gathering darkness, turned back to his task. Seconds later the lock was undone and cast aside, and doors were pulled open, exposing a square of jet black emptiness. Then movement filled the space, as a crowd of vampires piled out of the truck and on to the dock.
They gathered at the back of the vehicle, laughing and shouting, shoving each other with playful familiarity as the vampires who had driven the other two trucks joined them. Several lit cigarettes, and then they got down to business; eight of them went to the ropes, tied them on to huge metal mooring hooks, and began to pull the freighter tight alongside the dock, a display of casually superhuman strength. From somewhere on the hull there came a shout of greeting, which was returned by the vampires as they hauled at the thick lines.
Two of the vampires went to the other trucks and opened their rear doors, so all three vehicles sat open to the night. The first vampire who had emerged oversaw the activity, a cigarette clamped between his teeth; those without specific jobs milled around at the edge of the river, waiting for the ship to be pulled into position.
“I count fourteen,” whispered Jack Williams.
“Me too,” replied Jamie. “Plus seven on the boat. Twenty-one of them.”
“Hold positions,” said Jack. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”
From somewhere up on the high deck there came the sound of a metal door creaking open. Seconds later the seven vampires that they had seen as blobs of bright white heat on the infrared satellite image appeared at the railing at the edge of the deck, and began to shout greetings and insults at the vampires waiting below, their eyes glowing red as they traded friendly barbs and jibes with their welcoming party. This continued for a couple of minutes until the vampire who had opened up the first truck, who was clearly in charge of things, lit another cigarette and told them all to shut up. With a few snarls and hisses, the vampires did as they were told.
“Let’s get this done!” the foreman shouted. “There’ll be time enough for jokes later. Open up the containers; let’s have a look at what you brought us.”
The vampires on the ship disappeared from the railing and got to work, assisted by a number of the greeting party who flew up on to the deck to lend a hand. Another vampire flew easily up on to the freighter, and hauled down a long folding gangway, which met the concrete surface of the dock with an almighty clang of metal and settled beside the row of trucks.
As the doors to the containers screeched open, terrible sounds began to fill the air. There were cries of fear and misery, screams of pain and terror, and a relentless chorus of sobbing, pleading human voices, many of them speaking languages which were alien to the ears of the listening Operators. Then, through the mist, a small figure appeared at the top of the gangway, silhouetted against the grey canvas of the thickening fog. It took a nervous, shaky step on to the metal walkway, then another, and another. Then it passed through the beam of one of the freighter’s huge running lights, and Kate gasped.
Bathed in the bright white beam stood an Asian girl who could have been no more than five or six years old. Her tiny face was pale, her eyes narrowed against the light. She wore a dress printed with a pattern of flowers that had once been white, but was now the deep grey of dust and dirt. In her small hand she clutched a filthy doll that was missing one of its arms and both of its legs. She took a hesitant step forward on bare, filthy feet, then another, then stumbled backwards, grabbing desperately for the gangway’s metal rail. She sat down hard on the metal panel, looked around with awful confusion on her small face and began to cry.
A second silhouette appeared at the top of the gangway, running down towards the girl. In the light, the shape became a tiny Asian woman, as pale and filthy as the girl, who dropped to her knees beside the sobbing child and began to shush her gently.
On the concrete dock, one of the vampires began to laugh, and suddenly Jamie was full of an anger so intense he had only ever felt anything like it once before in his life, when he saw the terrified face of his mother standing beside Alexandru Rusmanov in the monastery on Lindisfarne.
“Let’s get them,” he growled.
“Negative,” replied Jack Williams, instantly. “Not until everyone clears the ship.”
Jamie gritted his teeth, and forced himself not to reply. Larissa’s hand rested momentarily on his arm, a show of support invisible to everyone else, and he felt his rage subside, just a fraction. He refocused his attention on the freighter, where a steady stream of men and women, emaciated, filthy, with looks of blank terror on their faces, were now making their way down the gangway.
The woman and the little girl had reached the bottom, where they stepped nervously off on to the concrete of the dock. Immediately, one of the vampires grabbed for the girl, who cried out with fear, pressing herself against the woman. There was more laughter, and more boiling, acidic anger spilled into the pit of Jamie’s stomach.
“Let them be,” said the vampire foreman. “Makes no difference if they want to stay together. They’re all going to the same place. Start loading them up.”
The vampire who had grabbed for the girl hissed, but did as he was told. He reached out, and grabbed the woman by her shoulder, sinking his nails into her flesh as he did so. The woman gritted her teeth, but did not cry out; instead, she fixed the vampire with a long look of utter contempt.
Good for you, thought Jamie. Just keep it together for a few more minutes.
The men and women, a dirty, shambling mass of damaged humanity, reached the bottom of the gangway, and began to spill out across the dock. The vampires moved beside them, funnelling the ragged group towards the waiting trucks; the prisoners, weakened and disoriented by their time in the containers, went unprotestingly.
“This is stupid,” breathed Kate. “It’s much easier with them still on the boat. Down here they’re just going to get in the way.”
“Hold your positions,” insisted Jack.
“She’s right,” said Angela. “We need to go now.”
“Angela, I’m warning—”
“Warn me later,” interrupted Angela, and moved.
Angela Darcy slid silently out from behind the wall that was sheltering Squad F-7 from view and brought her T-Bone to her shoulder as though it was the most natural thing in the world. There was a fluidity to the way she moved that was almost feline, and Jamie watched her from the other side of the dock with a feeling that made him almost guilty.
She sighted the vampire who had laughed at the little girl, who was now ordering the woman holding her to climb into the back of the nearest truck. The woman was refusing, shaking her head left and right, spitting torrents of what Jamie thought might be Mandarin. The vampire stared back at her with a lazy smile on his face, the face of someone who is eager to commit violence, and knows his chance is about to arrive.
Angela squeezed the T-Bone’s trigger, and then a loud bang and a rush of escaping gas sounded through the quiet evening air. The smiling vampire was beginning to turn his head towards the source of the noise when the T-Bone’s metal stake smashed into his chest, punching a hole the size of a grapefruit clean through him. His eyes widened, before he exploded in a steaming gout of blood, splashing the back of the truck and the woman and the girl standing beside it.
The freshly spilled blood hit the noses of the other vampires instantly, and their eyes darkened red. The Chinese woman, her face coated with blood, was staring at the space where the vampire had been standing, her eyes wide. The little girl pulled a strand of something red and wet from her hair, held it up before her face and started to scream. In an instant, the rest of the vampires appeared around her, snarling and hissing. The ones who had been unloading the containers on the freighter’s deck swooped down from the air and landed softly beside their colleagues. The foreman muscled his way through the crowd and grabbed the woman by her arm.
“What did you do?” he demanded. “What did you—”
His question was cut off as the stake from Jamie’s T-Bone tore through his throat, spraying his blood across the rest of the vampires, who recoiled, howling with alarm. Jamie hadn’t missed; the foreman’s heart was blocked by the throng of vampires. But he was confident that the rest of them would be a lot easier to deal with if their leader was unable to speak.
“Goddamnit, you two,” snarled Jack Williams. “We are go, repeat, we are go.”
The Operators broke cover and advanced from both sides towards the vampires, who immediately panicked. The foreman, who had sunk to his knees as blood gushed from his throat, was waving his hands and gurgling incomprehensibly, but the rest of the vampires ignored him. Instead, they hurled themselves at the approaching figures.
Kate dropped immediately to one knee, pulled her MP5 submachine gun from her belt and strafed the onrushing vampires at knee height, exactly as she had been trained to do. Bullets ripped through their legs, tearing flesh and shattering bone, and three of them crashed to the ground, screaming in pain.
Three more leapt into the air, where Larissa met them, her eyes red as lava, her teeth bared in a savage grin. She tore into them three metres above the ground, sending sprays of blood arcing high into the night sky, then landed as gracefully as a cat. The three vampires tumbled to the ground behind her, their blood pumping out across the concrete.
Across the dock, Shaun Turner drew his ultraviolet torch from his belt and raked its beam across the vampires who were streaming towards his squad. As the purple light touched their bare skin, five of the vampires burst into flames and immediately abandoned their attack, racing instead towards the cold water of the river.
They didn’t make it.
Angela detached herself from her squad and sprinted after them, firing her MP5 from her shoulder as she ran. Bullets thudded into the backs and legs of the burning vampires, and they crumpled to the ground, screaming and writhing in pain. They tried to crawl towards the water’s edge, but Angela kept firing, her shots calm and precise, and the vampires eventually slumped to a halt, their bodies billowing with purple fire and the revolting smell of cooking meat.
Shaun Turner watched her for a split second, a huge grin on his face, then he and Jack Williams threw themselves at the four vampires who were still coming. They attacked with deadly precision, and teamwork that bordered on instinct; the vampires, who wore looks of desperation on their faces, desperation born of the realisation that they were outmatched, fought with a panic bordering on mania. They leapt and clawed and bit and spat as Jack and Shaun slid through them like knives through butter; the flashing claws and snapping jaws touched nothing but thin air.
Shaun pulled the metal stake from his belt, ducked neatly beneath the flailing swing of one of the vampires, a man in a Sunderland football shirt who looked to be about thirty, with a shaved head and arms covered in blotchy blue tattoos, then drove the stake upwards with vicious accuracy. The metal point crunched through the vampire’s breastbone, soaking Shaun’s arm with pumping blood, until it pierced the wildly beating heart and the vampire burst like a balloon, his insides splashing across Shaun’s visor and helmet.
He wiped them clear, in time to see Jack Williams sling his arm round another of the vampires, and drive his stake through the creature’s back. It exploded into putrid liquid, and Jack staggered backwards as the thing he had been holding tightly in his grip ceased to exist.
Behind him, a vampire snarled with anticipation, and reached for Jack’s shoulders, its fangs gleaming in the reflected light from the ship. Shaun, whose brain was capable of an icy precision that was at least the equal of his father’s, didn’t hesitate; he drew the Glock 17 from his belt and fired from the hip, like a gunslinger in an old Western. The bullets tore away the vampire’s head above his eyebrows, and the vampire went down to the cold concrete, his eyes rolling, his hands grabbing reflexively at nothing as his brain lay in pieces on the dock. Jack regained his balance, spun round and buried his stake in the chest of the twitching vampire, then leapt clear as it exploded.
Shaun watched his squad leader with a look of great pride on his face; he and Jack had been through so many fights together, so many battles in dark corners of the world, and there was no one Shaun would rather have at his side. Then he felt the movement of air at his back, and realised that something was behind him.
He lunged forward, away from it, turning as he did so, and saw the contorted, hate-filled face of a vampire barely an arm’s length away from him. It was a man in his fifties, wearing a dark blue suit and tie, and Shaun had time to crazily think how much he looked like the housemaster he had so hated during his time at boarding school. The vampire was reaching for him, its hand centimetres from his chest, its eyes blazing red, its fangs huge and sharp as razors. Shaun started to swing the Glock up from his side, knowing it was going to be too late to stop the vampire reaching him.
“Down!”
It was Angela’s voice, cool and calm through his earpiece. As he heard the word, he also heard a loud bang he knew as well as any sound on earth. He threw his legs out from beneath him, and let himself fall to the concrete of the dock.
Confusion passed briefly across the face of the vampire, as he looked at what appeared to be a bizarre act of surrender. Then the stake from Angela’s T-Bone blew clean through his chest, directly above where Shaun Turner was lying, and the vampire exploded in an expanding column of blood, the majority of which came crashing down on Shaun. The T-Bone’s stake whirred back into its barrel, as Angela appeared above him. She pushed her visor up, and gave him a mischievous smile.
“Naughty boy,” she said, reaching down and hauling him to his feet. “Keep an eye on your six, Shaun. You can’t always rely on me to bail you out.”
“Piss off,” he said, mildly, then smiled at his teammate.
Jack Williams arrived beside them, his eyes wide with the thrill of the fight.
“I staked the ones you torched,” he said. “Let’s help Jamie’s team.”
Angela looked across the dock, towards Squad G-17.
“I think they’re doing fine,” she said, the smile widening on her face.
Kate ran forward, drawing the stake from her belt as she did so. Jamie ran with her, his MP5 in one hand, his stake in the other. They reached the trio of wailing vampires that Kate had blown the legs out from under, and staked them without a second glance. Then they were moving again, in the direction of Larissa.
Three more vampires fell out of the sky, blood pouring from wounds that looked like the work of a wild animal, and Kate skidded to a halt.
“Go on!” she shouted. “I’ll clear up!”
Jamie nodded, sprinting after Larissa, who had dropped back to the ground and taken cover behind the nearest truck. Behind him, he heard three gargled screams and three thuds of changing air pressure, as Kate staked what was left of the vampires who had met Larissa in the air. A second later she was at their side, panting, her uniform splashed with blood.
“How many left?” asked Jamie.
Larissa lifted her visor back and sniffed the air. Her eyes were blazing red, the colour of boiling blood, and her fangs were gleaming white triangles beneath her upper lip.
“Five,” she answered. “The one you T-Boned is still alive, but only just. The other four are between the trucks. The scents are too close together – I can’t separate them.”
Don’t worry, thought Jamie. Four frightened vampires. Easy.
A noise began to swell from the direction of the freighter, and Jamie peered round the corner of the truck. The woman who had been the second to leave the ship was standing at the bottom of the gangway, surrounded by a small group of emaciated men and women; she was still holding the little girl with one arm, but with the second she was waving frantically up at the deck of the freighter. As Jamie watched, an elderly woman nervously poked her head above the railing at the top of the gangway, then slowly started down it. Behind her, a crowd of men and women followed, the metal creaking beneath them as they made their way towards dry land.
Movement blurred in the corner of Jamie’s eye, and he pulled back round the corner next to Kate and Larissa.
“At least one is on the other side of this truck,” he whispered, his voice inaudible to anyone but them, the noise cancelled by the dampening contours of his helmet. “Kate, work your way round the other end. Larissa, go over the top. We’ll corner him.”
The two girls nodded. Kate moved away silently down the length of the truck, as Larissa floated easily up into the air. Jamie took a deep breath, and stepped round the corner. The vampire who was standing between the two trucks looked almost pitifully frightened; he was twitching and turning in circles, nostrils flared, trying to look in every direction at once. Then Kate appeared beyond him, and the vampire saw her. He hissed, a low, terrified noise, and turned to run, only to find Jamie barring his escape route. He screeched, a look of pure dread on his middle-aged face, and turned his head to the sky, to the one way he might escape the fate that had befallen his colleagues.
“Hi,” said Larissa, sweetly. She was sitting on the edge of the truck’s roof, staring down at the vampire with her red eyes glowing.
The vampire let out a howl of despair, and ran towards Kate. Then the stakes from two T-Bones pulped his chest, and he exploded in a shower of blood. Larissa floated down, then suddenly accelerated past Jamie, a low snarl of pleasure emanating from her throat. One of the three remaining vampires, his instinct for self-preservation overwhelmed by the torrent of fresh blood that had been spilled on the other side of the truck, was careering round the corner, a look of primal hunger on his face.
Larissa shot past him like a bullet, without even slowing, and tore his head from his shoulders without so much as a grunt of effort. The headless body took a couple of faltering steps, then fell face down in front of Jamie, who staked it, a grimace of disgust on his face. The head burst in Larissa’s hand like a water balloon, and she let out a yelp of annoyance.
“Give me a chance to drop the head next time,” she said. “I nearly made it through this mission without getting any blood on me.” She laughed, and Jamie felt his stomach flip.
Sometimes the awesome power that coursed through his girlfriend – is that what she is now? My girlfriend? – scared him more than he would ever have admitted to her, and made her take pleasure in things that even he, as battle-scarred as he was, found appalling. He knew it wasn’t really her, it was the vampire side of her; surrounded by blood, in a fight for her life, it took her over completely. But when it was over, she would be Larissa again, he knew.
Or at least, he hoped he knew.
Behind him, he heard the snarl of a vampire, but he didn’t even hurry to turn around. He trusted Kate completely; by the time he was facing her, the vampire was already staggering back against the side of the truck, a gaping hole in its chest. Kate turned her back as it burst, splashing blood and viscera against the backplate of her body armour.
Three down. One to go.
Squad G-17 regrouped at the front of the second truck, and walked slowly towards the third. They were careful, but not overly so; a single vampire was no match for them, and they knew it. As if on cue, the final vampire burst out from where he had been cowering as his friends died around him, took a single look at the three approaching figures, turned tail and ran for his life.
He made it ten metres before he collided with the mass of men and women emerging from the freighter’s gangway.
The first blow was struck by a tall Asian man with a metal fire extinguisher in his hand, crushing the vampire’s skull almost flat on one side. Blood pistoned into the air, and the vampire fell to the floor, his mouth working uselessly as he tried to form words, perhaps trying to beg them not to do it, to plead for mercy.
There was no mercy.
When it was over, the prisoners slumped to the ground, their heads in their hands, their arms wrapped round loved ones. Almost all of them were weeping, their narrow chests heaving up and down. The woman holding the little girl did not sit down, however; she had taken no part in the destruction of the vampire, but nor had she made any attempt to stop it. She looked at the six dark figures, their purple visors hiding their faces from view, and said two halting, uncertain words.
“Thank. You.”
“You’re welcome,” replied Jack Williams, and pointed at the ground. “Stay here. Help coming. Stay here.”
The woman nodded, then lowered herself to the ground, keeping the little girl carefully cradled against her.
Jack led the combined team away, and gathered them into a circle.
“Good work,” he said, raising his visor. “Damn good work today. That was as clean as I’ve ever seen it done, and we got the leader alive. Great work, truly.” He smiled around at the five Operators, who raised their own visors and grinned back at him, grinned at the pleasure of a job done well as the adrenaline began to leave their systems. “Alert the Northumbrian Police; tell them they’ve got two hundred refugees on the banks of the Tyne. Then let’s take our survivor home and find out what he knows,” Jack continued. “Shaun, radio the chopper.”
Shaun Turner nodded, and pulled the radio from his belt. As they made their way back towards the truck, he coded in and told their pilot that they were ready for extraction. A deep noise instantly rumbled through the night as the helicopter that had brought them north lumbered into the air less than a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of Hadrian Road.
At the rear of the truck they found the vampire foreman.
He was slumped on his knees, his head lowered against his chest, in the middle of an enormous pool of blood. He was pale, and his skin was flickering as his veins pushed what blood remained in his body desperately round his system, trying to keep it operational. He was breathing, incredibly slowly, as they approached him.
“He’s on the brink,” said Larissa. “He’ll be dormant by the time we get him back to the Loop. He’s lost too much blood.”
“Then they can revive him in the lab,” said Jack. “Makes transporting him easier.”
Shaun Turner stepped forward, and hunkered down in front of the vampire.
“Where were you taking all those people?” he asked.
There was the tiniest movement in the vampire’s shoulders, suggesting he understood he was being spoken to, but no response. Shaun reached out to lift the injured vampire’s head up, and Kate was suddenly overcome with panic. She stepped forward, saying Shaun’s name, as his gloved fingers touched the vampire’s chin. He paused as she arrived at his side, shooting a look of annoyance in her direction as she reached out to pull his hand away. Then the vampire’s head reared up, his eyes glowing a dull red, and he lunged forward with the last of his strength, like a dying dog.
His mouth closed on Kate’s arm.
The fangs slid into her flesh, and she watched with what was almost amazed detachment as the vampire shook his head, once, and tore a ragged chunk of flesh out of her arm. He spat it out on the concrete, and collapsed backwards, his eyes rolling back in his head.
14
SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT
PARIS, FRANCE FOUR WEEKS EARLIER
Frankenstein sat on a bench outside Notre Dame de Paris, watching the worshippers file out of evening mass. It was Christmas Eve, and the ancient cathedral had been nearly full to capacity.
He had taken to coming here at the same time every evening, as the last of the sunlight played across the ancient ramparts and gargoyles far above his head. There were usually crowds of tourists gazing up at the huge stone building, cameras slung round their necks and guidebooks in their hands as teenage kids glided around and between them on skateboards and bikes, but the plaza had been largely deserted while the service was taking place. The cold and the festive season had seen most of the tourists leave the city, and most Parisians stay inside.
Those whose faith had compelled them out into the freezing night had flocked into the comparative warmth of the cathedral as the bells rang for the Christmas mass at six o’clock. Frankenstein had stood among them on several occasions as the grand organ boomed and wailed, as the choir harmonised, as the incense smoked and fumed, and the bishop conducted his service from before the ancient altar.
Today, he had chosen to stay outside.
He found watching the faces of the men and women who departed from the cathedral after the mass as illuminating as the service itself; the blank disinterest of those for whom the ritual was nothing more than a chore, a habit they weren’t quite able to break, against the beatific rapture of the faithful, full to the brim with God’s blessings and trembling at the almighty power of their Lord.
The depths of their feelings fascinated him. Because he, after almost three weeks in the city whose name had sparked his only flash of recognition since beginning his shallow, empty second life, felt nothing.
He felt nothing at all.
Frankenstein had arrived in Paris with his entire body a ball of flaming agony. After a day and a half pressed tightly into the bowels of the truck, he had managed to hobble away unseen when the driver brought his rig to a halt outside the Marché d’Intérêt National, the vast food market in the southern suburb of Rungis. Frankenstein had asked a man working in a mobile café for directions to the centre of the city, and began walking north. As he made his way towards the middle of Paris, a creeping sense of disappointment had settled on him.
He recognised absolutely nothing.
Not a single building, or landmark, not a street sign or the name of a restaurant; nothing triggered a rush of memory like the one he had experienced at the transport café in Germany. He saw nothing that made him feel like he had ever been to this place before.
He reached the river, the wide, winding expanse of water at the heart of the city, and felt nothing. He was waiting for an epiphany, for the locks in his head to grind into action and release, spilling his memory back into his possession.
But it never came.
For almost three weeks now, he had wandered the Parisian streets. He was as confused and disoriented as ever, more so perhaps, having been given what had felt like the first clue to unlocking his identity, only to be denied further progress. The stares of the tourists and the people going about their lives made him uncomfortable, and he began to spend his days in the dark corners of the museums and churches that littered the city, hidden away from prying eyes.
At night, he walked the streets of Pigalle and the Marais, keeping to the shadows. He watched the laughing groups of men and women as they spilled from the bars and cafés, the drug dealers and the sex workers, as they conducted their transactions in the narrow alleyways and dark street corners.
Frankenstein had no idea what he was going to do with the new life he had been given, and was aware of a growing sense, deep in his bones, that he did not want to continue with it at all. Several times he had stood on one of the bridges, staring down at the dark, freezing water of the Seine, wondering how it would feel to pitch himself over the railing; a moment of panic perhaps, a second or two of falling, then icy oblivion, washing down his throat and filling his lungs.
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Will Hill
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детские приключения
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Blockbusting sequel to DEPARTMENT 19, the biggest boy teen launch of 2011 – with over 25,000 copies sold in hardback and a devoted legion of Facebook fans.Amazing author Will Hill will be out on the road again in April to promote THE RISING, as well as maintaining a constant presence on Twitter.91 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR.THAT′S 91 DAYS TO RUN.91 DAYS TO HIDE.OR 91 DAYS TO PRAY FOR DEPARTMENT 19 TO SAVE YOU…After the terrifying attack on Lindisfarne at the end of the first book, Jamie, Larissa and Kate are recovering at Department 19 headquarters, waiting for news of Dracula’s stolen ashes.They won’t be waiting for long.Vampire forces are gathering. Old enemies are getting too close. And Dracula… is rising.