The Cross

Chapter Two

Prague

Alex Bishop stood alone at the railing of the bridge, the wind in her hair. Beyond the river and all around her, the city lights were fading with the coming of the dawn. The rising sun glittered off cathedral domes and glassy high-rise towers and cast a diffused golden streak across the water. She could feel its warmth on her face. If it hadn’t been for the last remaining Solazal photosensitivity neutraliser pill that she’d managed to retrieve from the castle before her escape from Romania, she’d hardly have been standing here to welcome the sunrise. As for any other vampire, it would have been a straight choice between frazzle and hide. Nobody ever voluntarily opted for the former.

She sighed to herself as she gazed out across the cityscape. So much had happened in the last few days that even her ultra-sharp vampire mind was reeling from it. None of it was good. All through the night she’d been making her way as best she could from the snowy wilds of Romania. A stolen farm truck had got her as far as a desolate country railway station, where she’d hitched a ride on a freight carriage. Now here she was in Prague, not quite halfway to where she wanted to be and hoping that her call to Utz McCarthy was going to pay off.

She didn’t have to wait much longer before a black BMW SUV peeled off from the growing traffic over the bridge and pulled up a few yards from where she was standing. She stepped away from the railing to meet it. The driver was alone. His door opened. He climbed out and walked towards her, grey-haired, tall and lean, not quite smiling, not quite frowning, wearing a long raincoat that billowed in the wind.

At only eighty or so years of age Utz McCarthy was much younger than Alex, but he looked much older: compared to the twenty-nine years she’d spent as a human, he’d survived for over half a century before an unexpected encounter with a vampire had set him on a whole new course. Nowadays, he was a minor sectional official running the small and somewhat dingy Prague offices of the same organisation Alex belonged to: the global Vampire Federation. Part of Utz’s job was facilitating the movements of VIA agents like Alex.

The last time they’d met face to face had been eighteen months earlier, when Harry Rumble, Alex’s boss at the Vampire Intelligence Agency Headquarters in London, had sent her out this way on a mission to check out reports of rogue vampire activity in the Czech city of Brno. As it had turned out, it had been a false alarm. No Federation regs were being contravened, the local vampires were behaving themselves and not turning unauthorised victims; no arrests or Nosferol terminations had been necessary and all had been well.

Alex’s job wasn’t always so easy.

Utz looked distraught. ‘Jesus, Alex, are you okay?’ he blurted out. ‘I can’t believe what I’ve been hearing. An attack on the Federation grand assembly? A fucking helicopter gunship, taking out the whole conference centre? Tell me it’s not true.’

‘I was there,’ Alex said coolly. ‘It’s true.’

‘But how could this happen?’

‘It happened because we broke one of the cardinal rules of warfare,’ Alex said. ‘Never underestimate your enemy. When a rogue vampire like Gabriel Stone decides to mount a rebellion against an enemy he perceives as a threat to everything he believes in, he does it on a major scale. It’s a long story, Utz. The bottom line is that virtually the whole of the Federation top brass has been wiped out. Thanks to Stone’s rebels and the moles he had working for him inside VIA, we just became a leaderless army.’

Utz gaped at her, visibly weakening at the knees. ‘All of them? The Supremos?’

She nodded. ‘Goldmund, Korentayer, Hassan, Borowczyk, Mushkavanhu. Not to mention our illustrious former Federation second-in-command, the late and much-lamented Gaston Lerouge. Stone executed them all. With a guillotine.’ She gave a dry smile. ‘Some style, that Gabriel. You’ve got to hand it to him.’

‘What about the Vampress?’ Utz croaked. He was referring to Supremo Olympia Angelopolis, the grand Matriarch of the whole Federation. ‘Surely not her as well?’

Alex shrugged. ‘She might have got out. Things were kind of chaotic.’ She didn’t pretend to care any more than she did about Olympia’s fate.

‘This is unreal. You’ve got to be kidding me about this.’

She looked at him. ‘You should know by now that I’m a very humourless person and I don’t dick about making jokes. Especially when I’ve been shot at with Nosferol bullets, kidnapped and incarcerated in a damp cell in some middle-of-nowhere castle in Romania and then almost guillotined myself.’

And left behind the only man I’ve given a shit about in a hundred and thirteen years, she wanted to add. Left him to fend for himself in the wilderness, more alone and more terrified than he could ever have imagined. Making that stark, brutal choice had ripped her guts out: either let Joel die in her arms of the terrible wounds he’d suffered in the battle with Stone’s gang, or help him to survive, the only way she knew how.

Turning him had seemed the only option.

And now what? She knew he’d make it out of there. Of all the things vampires could do, survival was what they did best. He’d have sought out a dark place by now, to hole up in for the day. Come sundown, he’d begin his new existence – one he’d never forgive her for having inflicted on him. And then, sooner or later, more likely sooner, he’d come looking for her. The indelible connection between vampire and victim would lead him to her. When that day came, she’d have to account for what she’d done to him.

Alex quickly pressed that thought to the back of her mind. ‘Got any Solazal?’ she asked Utz. If she wanted to move around safely in daylight, she’d need more than just the twelve hours’ worth of protection that one salvaged pill could offer.

Utz was still stunned from the news, leaning heavily on the bonnet of the car for support. He shook his head. ‘Just what I need for myself,’ he said distractedly. ‘There’s a shortage.’

Alex was well aware of that. Gabriel Stone’s doing. In a lightning raid in Italy, his heavily-armed assault team had blown up the pharmaceutical plant where the Federation produced its special drugs. With a blast of high explosive, Stone’s Traditionalist uprising had sent the vampire world halfway back to the sacred old ways of ducking and dodging the sun. It was anyone’s guess how long it would be before Solazal production went back to normal. As for Nosferol, the lethal anti-vampire poison that Federation agents used to destroy rogue members of their kind, the attack on the pharmaceutical plant had reduced stocks almost to zero.

‘Have you reported back to Rumble yet?’ Utz said, gathering himself.

‘Rumble was with me in Romania, Utz. He isn’t coming back. A certain vamp called Lillith was a little too handy with a bloody great sabre.’ Poor Harry, Alex thought. He hadn’t been all bad, even for a suit.

‘How the hell did you get out of it?’ Utz said.

‘It was thanks to a human,’ Alex replied after a beat.

‘A what?’

‘His name’s Joel Solomon. He’s a cop. Or was. If he hadn’t turned up when he had, I’d have ended up as just another severed head in a basket. He got shot to pieces, but not before he’d managed to take out Stone’s guards and most of his crew. As for Stone himself—’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happened to him.’

‘A human did all this?’

‘He had a little help. From the cross.’

Utz’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Come on. You don’t mean—’

‘That’s right, Utz. The cross, the one nobody at VIA wanted to believe me about. The cross of Ardaich. Yes, it exists, and yes, it does what all the legends say it does.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘You’d better.’

‘Where is this thing now?’

She shrugged. ‘Last time I saw it, it was flying over the battlements of Stone’s castle. Something like a thousand-foot drop. Nothing but rocks below.’

‘So it got smashed, right?’

‘Probably.’

‘What does that mean, “probably”?’

‘It means I didn’t actually see it get smashed, okay? Hard to believe anything could have survived that fall. That’s the best I can tell you.’

‘So it’s gone . . . and we’re safe. We are safe now, aren’t we?’

‘No more questions, all right?’ she told him. ‘I’m tired and I need a feed and I called you because I thought you could help me.’

‘What are we going to do?’

Alex stared at him for a second. Then, quicker than he could react, she’d grabbed the pistol she’d known was in a shoulder holster under his jacket, flipped off the safety and aimed it square between Utz’s eyeballs. It was a 9mm Beretta, not the big-bore stuff she personally favoured, but it would do the job. ‘Utz, when I tell you something like “no more questions”, I do mean it.’

‘Hey. Watch out. That thing’s loaded with Nosferol tips.’ She smiled. ‘Of course it is. Standard field agent issue. All right, Utz, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going back to base, to find out if there are any pieces left to pick up. If there aren’t, it means Stone’s beaten us. End of the line for the Federation, every vampire for herself from now on.’

‘What about me?’ Utz said in a small voice, squinting at the muzzle of the pistol.

Alex smiled sweetly. ‘You’re a VIA station chief, aren’t you? Stealing hick farm trucks and stowing away on freight trains in the middle of the night isn’t my style. While there’s still some operational funds left in the coffers, you’re going to get me on a nice, comfortable Federation jet to London with enough red juice on board to satisfy Count Dracula.’

Chapter Three

Dec Maddon swallowed hard and took another trembling, tiptoeing step down the darkened corridor. The big silver crucifix tightly clenched in his right hand glimmered dully in the near total blackness. The rasp of his breathing filled his ears. The frantic drumming of his heart made his throat flutter. He knew he was lost. Nobody would ever find him here.

Nobody except . . . them.

Something brushed his face, making him flinch violently and almost cry out in fear before he realised it was the silky touch of cobwebs hanging from the low ceiling. He clawed them away and moved on. Ahead of him, a solid rectangular patch of darkness stood out against the shadows. A doorway.

He reached out to push it open, his left hand a pale, ghostly thing in the darkness. The door creaked slowly open. Dec gripped the crucifix for all he was worth, took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway into the space beyond.

Immediately, and with a spike of shock, he knew he’d been here before. The stone pillars of the ancient cellar were dimly lit by the flickering orange flame of a wall-mounted torch. He took a trembling step across the uneven flagstones. Then another. He gulped. His mouth was dry. He thought of the terrible scenes he’d witnessed the last time he’d been here – down here in the crypt beneath the vampire lair of Crowmoor Hall. He’d always known there were more of them, lurking down there, waiting for their moment to strike again.

His blood congealed in his veins as a sound echoed softly in the darkness. He froze, afraid to breathe.

Then he heard the sound again. A low cackle from the shadows.

And a dark shape detached itself from the pillar just steps away, and came towards him. As it stepped into the glow of the firelight, he saw it clearly. The hands reaching out for him. The predatory glint in the thing’s eyes. The white fangs in its gaping mouth.

Dec stumbled back, raising the crucifix. ‘Get back, vampire!’ His yell came out as a choked whimper, barely audible.

The thing kept on coming. Dec screamed as he felt its hands clutching his arm.

It was shaking him.

Saying his name.

‘Dec. Dec. Wake up.’

Dec snapped his eyes open with a gasp and jerked bolt upright in the bed, staring wild-eyed at the person standing over him. But it wasn’t a vampire. It was his ma, still gently holding on to his arm. And he wasn’t in the crypt at Crowmoor Hall, but at home in his bedroom in the suburban safety of Lavender Close, Wallingford.

‘You were having a bad dream, son,’ his ma said.

‘Jesus,’ Dec said, rubbing his eyes. He smiled weakly. ‘I’m all right.’

‘Oh, Dec, you didn’t sleep in your clothes,’ his ma groaned. ‘Again? Is this what you are now, a slob?’

Dec glanced down at himself, and saw he had, shoes and all. He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Ma.’

‘I brought you some tea.’ His ma motioned at the steaming drink she’d set down on his bedside table. She’d made it in his favourite mug, the Spiderman one.

Dec reached over and picked it up gratefully. ‘Thanks, Ma.’ He slurped at the steaming hot tea, the vividness of the nightmare still lingering in his mind. Glancing at his watch, he saw it was after eight.

‘I see you’ve taken to wearing your cross again,’ his ma said approvingly, pointing at the little gold crucifix that hung on a chain from his neck. She’d bought it for his confirmation, but it had lain forgotten in a drawer until very recently. Dec touched it and nodded as he slurped more tea.

His ma walked over to the window and jerked open the curtains, letting in the grey morning light. She peered out across Lavender Close, then tutted irritably. ‘Look at that. They’re back again.’

‘Who’s back again? Not the police, is it?’

She shook her head. ‘Them bloody reporters. For next door.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘They should leave folks alone, so they should. As if those poor Hawthornes haven’t suffered enough.’

Dec made no reply. The nightmare of his dreams was gone now. Only the nightmare that was reality remained.

His ma turned away from the window and headed for the door. ‘So are you getting up or are you going to lie there all day?’ she said on her way out of the room. ‘Your da needs you at the garage.’ Dec’s da was the boss of Maddon Auto Services in Wallingford, where Dec did a few hours’ spanner-wielding each week.

‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ Dec groaned, wincing at the idea of having to go into work today. When he heard his mother’s footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs, he fought the covers off him with his fists and feet, clambered out of bed and went to the window. The sight of the TV van and the reporter’s car in the street outside, both parked outside the gate of Number 16 next door, filled him with anger.

Fuckers, he thought once more. For two days these pieces of shit had been flapping down on Lavender Close like flocks of vultures, picking at the dead.

Or, in this case, picking at what might have happened to the dead.

Dec could hear his ma and da talking downstairs. Like everyone else on the planet, it seemed they couldn’t get their fill of yakking on about Kate Hawthorne. He cupped his ears and tried not to listen as the voices of his parents drifted up the stairs. It was unbearable. Please, stop.

The story had spread like bubonic plague through Wallingford and might have reached the outer galaxies by now, for all Dec knew. The news of the inexplicable, shockingly sudden demise of the teenager Kate Hawthorne from 16 Lavender Close had been awful enough; but the disappearance of her body, without a trace, from the hospital mortuary just hours after her death, had violently shaken the whole community. The speculation of the town gossips was savage and quick to venture where the media didn’t dare: much more appealing than a gross administrative error was the popular theory that some deranged individual might have removed Kate’s body from the morgue and was keeping it at an unknown location for his own indescribable necrophilic purposes. So many people had got carried away with that notion that the strange, somehow associated death of Bill Andrews, the Hawthornes’ family doctor, had been largely glossed over to make room for it. Andrews had been found slumped on the cold tiles of the morgue floor, near to Kate’s empty slab. Something had stopped the doctor’s heart where he’d stood. A chance cardiac arrest? The shock at finding the dead girl gone? Or something else? Nobody knew.

Nobody but Dec.

Dec knew the truth of what had happened to Kate, and he was pretty sure it explained what had caused her doctor to drop dead of fright. It had almost done the same to him, when he’d met her walking in the grounds of the crumbling Oxfordshire mansion to which she’d been drawn from the morgue. It wasn’t every day the dead girl from next door tried to seduce you in a see-through dress.

But his terrible knowledge was something Dec would admit to no one. Not to the reporters who’d come beating on the Maddons’ front door after they’d found out that Dec and Kate had gone out together, albeit briefly, days before her death. Not to his parents, who’d ferociously warded the press hounds away from their son. And certainly not to the baffled cops who’d come to poke around and find out what Dec knew about her disappearance. Last time he’d tried telling the police about the vampires that were running amok in the Oxfordshire countryside, he’d been ridiculed and almost ended up in jail for his trouble.

In fact, Dec could barely even admit the truth to himself. And there was just one living soul in the world he could openly share it with: Detective Inspector Joel Solomon. Joel had been the only one who’d taken Dec seriously when he’d claimed to have witnessed a vampire ritual killing at Crowmoor Hall near Henley that terrible night. The only person who would have gone back there to investigate with him, when anyone else would have thought it was crazy.

And Joel was the only other person in the world who knew just why Kate Hawthorne had died so suddenly, and then apparently vanished. It had been Joel who had ended Kate’s suffering, armed with the strange stone cross he’d refused to tell Dec too much about. A scene Dec wouldn’t forget. It didn’t matter that it had happened only two days ago. It wouldn’t fade. Even if he lived to be a thousand and one it would stay burned into his mind, like a brand.

Joel hadn’t just freed the girl – he’d saved Dec from the same fate after she’d enticed him with some power that had seemed almost hypnotic. Rendered him helpless with those sweet, sweet, terrible kisses. Dec felt the marks on his neck. They were healing well, but still painful to the touch and he’d taken to wearing a roll-neck jumper to hide them. If Joel hadn’t stopped Kate when he had . . . Dec shuddered. He wondered where Joel was now. The last Dec had seen of him, he’d been heading for Romania to track the monsters who’d done this to Kate. There’d been no contact from him since. Dec had no idea where Joel was, or even if he was still alive.

Dec glanced back at his rumpled bed, and for a second all he wanted in the world was to clamber back into it, yank the covers right over him and stay in that little cocoon for the rest of his life.

He bit his lip. He wouldn’t make the world any less insane by vegetating in his bed. But no way was he going into work, either. Feeling like he’d gone several rounds in one of the bare-knuckle boxing matches his da had told him about from his merchant navy days, he shuffled to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth and beat his hair into some kind of order; then he sneaked down the stairs.

But it wasn’t easy to sneak past old man Maddon.

‘I need you today,’ his da called from the kitchen doorway.

‘I’m sick,’ Dec said. Out of habit, he’d gone to grab the key to his old VW Golf from the stand in the hall when he remembered it was still in the repair shop after he’d crashed the damn thing getting away from Crowmoor Hall that night. He grabbed the key to his ma’s Renault instead, knowing she wasn’t working today. ‘Got to go out,’ he yelled as he ran to the front door.

‘Thought you were sick, you wee skitter,’ his da growled after him. But Dec was already out of the door and running to the yellow Clio. Before the reporters could collar him, he’d skidded down the drive, pulled a screeching K-turn in the street and gone speeding out of Lavender Close.

Roaring past the Hawthornes’ house, Dec saw that the curtains were pulled tightly shut and felt a stab of desperate pity for Kate’s folks – even if her mother hated him and looked down on his family. He’d have liked to have been able to tell the Hawthornes the truth, to offer them the sense of closure of at least knowing that their daughter was safe and in a better place now.

‘Sure, Dec, that’ll work,’ he muttered to himself as he drove. He could just imagine the scene: the distraught parents looking up red-eyed as the grungy teenager from next door strode into their sitting room and announced: ‘It’s okay, Mrs Hawthorne. Kate was in trouble there for a while, because a vampire called Gabriel Stone made her into his wee playmate. But then a pal of mine, Joel, set her free with this strange-looking cross that has the power to destroy vampires on sight. She’ll be all right now, so she will.’

He sighed. Next thing, it would be the men in white coats coming to catch him with a big butterfly net and drag him off to a padded cell.

Dec headed aimlessly towards the centre of Wallingford. All around him were people going to their work, ferrying their kids to school, doing their shopping. Normal folks going about their normal lives, unaware of the things that were out there, lurking in the shadows by day, stalking their victims by night. Who would be next in line? It could be anybody, anywhere. Dec shuddered. It could be his own family – his ma, his da, Cormac. It could be anyone he knew. And these things would never stop.

‘What are you gonna do?’ He slammed the steering wheel with his fist. ‘Gotta do something.’ And then it came to him in a flash. He was going to devote his life to destroying these monsters. He was going to make it his mission.

Dec Maddon, vampire hunter. Mallet in hand, silver stakes and crosses glinting against the lining of his long black leather coat. Walking into a party, seeing the heads turning; being asked ‘What line of work are you in, Dec?’; their faces as he coolly handed out his business card. He’d have an office, too. Like the ones in the old detective movies, with his name painted on the window. A busy phone on the desk. A wall safe filled with the tools of his trade.

‘You big friggin’ eejit. Dream on.’ What was he going to do, turn up at the local college of further education to find out about NVQs in Vampire Hunting?

But he had to do something. Joel had, by going off to Romania armed with the cross to hunt down Gabriel Stone. Now it was Dec’s turn to do what he could.

Five minutes later, Dec was pulling up in the car park outside Wallingford’s public library and hammering up the stairs to the computer room. The rows of PCs looked antiquated and worn-out, but anything was preferable to using the laptop he shared with his elder brother. Cormac was uncomfortably expert at checking up on anything and everything Dec had been looking at online – and Dec could do without his sibling’s considered opinions right now.

A couple of pretty girls looked up as Dec walked in. He brushed self-importantly past them. Dec Maddon, Vampire Hunter. There was a terminal free in the back row, and he was thankful that it was right at the far end of the room where nobody could peer over his shoulder. He perched on the edge of the plastic seat, nudged the mouse on its pad and the screen flashed into life. Dec glanced left and right, then self-consciously keyed in the words ‘proffesional vampire hunter’.

Did you mean: professional vampire hunter? the computer prompted him.

‘All right, all right. Smart arse.’ Dec clicked impatiently. The machine’s outdated innards churned for a second, and then spat up a lot more stuff than Dec had been expecting. Scrolling through, he quickly realised that, unless he was going to check out a bunch of pulp novels or the old Hammer movie Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter as reliable sources of erudite information on the pursuit of his future career, there was little of use to him here.

‘Shite,’ he said, and moved on.

‘A vampire hunter or slayer is a character in folklore and works of fiction, such as books, films and video games, who specialises in finding and destroying vampire and sometimes other supernatural creatures . . .’ Wikipedia informed him.

‘This isn’t a frigging video game. This is real, for fuck’s sake,’ Dec said a little too loudly. The two girls across the room looked up from their computer terminals and he heard a giggle. He flushed and clicked again. Next up came ‘Semi-professional or professional vampire hunters played some part in the vampire beliefs of the Balkans, especially in Bulgarian, Serbian and Romany folk beliefs . . .’

‘Pish,’ Dec said. Ancient folklore was one thing, but didn’t anybody actually believe in this stuff any more?

‘Crap.’ Click, scroll.

‘More crap.’ Click.

Then Dec stopped and stared at the screen. ‘Hmm,’ he said.

THEY LURK AMONGST US.

Dec’s eyes ran quickly across the couple of lines of text below the header: ‘Errol Knightly is a professional paranormal investigator, historical scholar and vampire hunter based in west Wales. His new book, They Lurk Amongst Us, has shot up the bestseller charts and is being hailed as . . .’

Two thumbnail images were displayed alongside the header. One showed the glossy cover of Knightly’s chunky hardback. The other showed the author as a slightly beefy guy with ruddy cheeks and thick sandy hair down past his ears, somewhat younger than Dec’s da – maybe in his late thirties or early forties. He had a look of earnestness. A look that said ‘You can trust me’.

‘Hmm,’ Dec said again. He rolled the mouse over the pad, landed the cursor on the web URL, www.theylurkamongstus. com, and clicked to enter the site.