by Will Hill
Fresh blood poured from her nose, and she had been driven back by the blur of Dracula’s sword. She was dodging the heavy swings, darting to her left and right, but there was clear concern on her face; if a single hack or slash connected, the damage would be catastrophic.
Hold on, thought Valentin. I’m coming.
He thundered across the bare field and slammed into Dracula’s lower back with the force of a runaway train. The first vampire howled and sank to his knees, the cords in his neck standing out as his head was thrown back. Valentin spun gracefully over him, and landed neatly beside Larissa.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she growled. “Let’s put him out of his misery.”
Valentin nodded, and looked at Dracula. The first vampire had regained his feet, and was staring at them with a hatred that burned like molten lava. Pain was etched on his face, in the hunch of his shoulders, and Valentin suddenly understood that his former master had realised the truth.
He’s going to die, he thought. Right now, in this place. And he knows it.
Dracula raised his sword.
“To the last,” he spat. “I grapple with thee.”
Valentin leapt forward, ready to pull the beating heart from the ancient monster’s chest and show it to him before he died. Larissa leapt too, her arms outstretched, her face a savage mask of pleasure. One of Valeri’s followers threw himself in front of Dracula, his hands raised, perhaps hoping to make some final sacrifice to a master to whom he meant less than nothing. Valentin sped round him as though he wasn’t there, his attention fixed solely on Dracula.
Then Larissa cried out, and he turned back.
The vampire follower had thrust out a hand as she flew past him, and one of his razor-sharp fingernails had sliced a neat, straight line across the vampire girl’s throat. She tumbled from the air, and as Valentin watched, the cut opened up like a widely smiling mouth, blood erupting from it in a high-pressure jet. His eyes widened and he changed course, rotating his body, his feet touching the ground briefly, as he prepared to fly to her assistance.
Then there was movement behind him; a rush of air, a glint of metal. A millisecond later Valentin felt pain, then knew no more.
Larissa cried out as the fingernail slid through her skin.
Her balance was fatally compromised, and she crashed to the ground as blood spurted out of her neck, bright scarlet and steaming hot. She clamped a gloved hand over the wound, felt the heat in her eyes boil up to a temperature that was almost unbearable, and was about to reach for the vampire who had done this to her when she saw Dracula move.
Valentin had arrested his advance and was clearly about to throw himself in her direction when Dracula’s sword rose up between his legs and cut him in half.
The huge blade exited the top of Valentin’s head with a noise like shattering glass, trailing a shocking quantity of blood behind it. The exertion of the blow clearly took it out of Dracula, who staggered backwards, his sword dragging along the ground as though it was suddenly too heavy to lift, but Larissa barely noticed. Her crimson eyes were fixed entirely on Valentin.
The youngest Rusmanov swayed for a long, terrible moment, then collapsed to the ground in two pieces; the huge sword had split him from groin to skull. Steaming organs spilled out of his body, writhing gently in the cold air, as more blood than Larissa had ever seen gushed out on to the ground. One of Valentin’s eyes winked grotesquely as his fingers drummed involuntarily against his legs.
Everyone stopped.
Dracula had sunk down to one knee, his face etched with agony, as the four remaining members of Valeri’s army stared at Valentin, their faces fixed with expressions of horror.
Larissa forced herself to move, to ignore the panic bubbling up inside her. She staggered to her feet, blood pumping out between her gloved fingers, and, with her free hand tore off the head of the vampire who had injured her. His attention was focused on Valentin’s gruesome remains, and she was on him before he even knew she had moved. His head came loose with an awful pop; she threw it aside and buried her face in the stump of his neck, and drank as quickly as she could. She felt the skin beneath her fingers knit back together as she circled away from the remaining vampires, suddenly aware that she was outnumbered.
She was on her own.
Dracula got back to his feet and smiled at her. “A battle has many movements,” he said. “Many changes of momentum. But all that matters is who stands at the end. And you and I still stand.”
The last three vampire acolytes stared at her, their eyes glowing, the terror that had so openly gripped them as she and Valentin descended from the night sky replaced by anger, now that the odds were again in their favour. She met their master’s gaze, then glanced down at where the pieces of Valentin lay steaming and trembling.
And realised something.
He didn’t explode. Why didn’t he explode like all the others? Like his brother?
Larissa circled slowly to her left, keeping her eyes fixed on Dracula and his followers, then glanced downwards again, and saw it. In the left half of Valentin’s rapidly draining chest cavity, in a soup of blood and bile, lay his motionless heart.
Still intact.
“Shall we finish this?” asked Dracula. “Or has your appetite for the fight diminished now you stand alone?”
Larissa growled. She took a step forward, bringing her feet next to Valentin’s remains, and stared at the first vampire. His pale face was full of pain and exhaustion, and she wondered, for a fleeting moment, whether she could take him on her own, whether she could bring an end to the horror, right there and then.
It’s possible, she thought. Not likely, not likely at all, but possible.
She took another step, and felt her foot slide through something wet. Revulsion shuddered through her; it cleared her mind, pushed back her vampire side, and the right thing to do, the only thing, was suddenly clear. Blacklight had already taken losses she doubted it could withstand; if she died now, if she tried to kill Dracula and failed, then Valentin would be destroyed as well, and two of the only reasons to believe they might get another chance to end the first vampire would be gone.
But what if you don’t fail? hissed her retreating vampire self. You can end this now.
Larissa growled. “Your day will come,” she said, looking directly into the first vampire’s eyes. “And I will be there when it does. You can count on that.”
“I shall be looking forward to it,” said Dracula, and smiled.
“I wouldn’t be,” said Larissa. “If I were you.”
Then she moved, fast enough to make one of Valeri’s vampires gasp out loud. Without taking her eyes from Dracula’s, she reached down, scooped up the limp, sodden halves of Valentin Rusmanov, and disappeared into the sky.
Jamie opened his eyes as the helicopter touched down outside the Loop’s hangar, and rubbed them roughly with the palms of his hands.
He had slept through most of his second journey back from Château Dauncy; not through choice, but from complete exhaustion. After Henry Seward’s intervention on the battlefield, he had done as Paul Turner ordered and searched the wide gravel courtyard for injured survivors. At the base of the high northern wall, one of the three that were still standing more or less intact, he had found an Operator he recognised, but whose name he didn’t know; one of the hundreds of semi-familiar men and women that passed him in the grey corridors of the Loop. The man’s barely conscious face was pale, sweat stood out on his forehead and upper lip, and his mouth was twisted with a tight grimace of pain. The cause of his expression was horribly apparent: his stomach had been opened from belt to sternum, and his gloved hands were the only things keeping his guts inside his body.
Jamie scooped him up as gently as he was able, and flew him back to the Loop as fast as his supernatural muscles would carry him, his heart racing with concern for Larissa. He was sure that Valentin would look after her, but he had no idea whether that would be enough, for either
of them. Dracula had unquestionably been on the ropes, beginning to wear down before their eyes, but chasing after him was nonetheless remarkably dangerous, even for two vampires as powerful as Valentin and his girlfriend.
Somewhere over the English Channel, the Operator began to scream. The high-pitched shrieks of pain hurt Jamie’s ears, and continued all the way to the Loop, where he delivered the stricken man into the care of two of the Department’s doctors.
As they rushed the Operator away on a stretcher, Jamie threw himself back into the air, pushing his tired body as hard as he dared towards the devastated château. When he arrived, the courtyard was quiet and almost empty. The remainder of the injured survivors were on their way to the Loop in one of the transport helicopters, accompanied by the Tiger gunships that had been summoned from Toulouse-Blagnac to escort them. That left two intact helicopters sitting on the gravel, into one of which the bodies of the dead were being loaded.
With no one left to carry back to the Loop, Jamie joined the men and women who had chosen to stay and carry out this most miserable of tasks. He was not remotely surprised to see Angela Darcy and Lizzy Ellison among their number; he was certain that Paul Turner would have been there too, had he not been needed back at the headquarters of the Department he was now in charge of.
Or is he? Jamie wondered. Maybe Henry Seward is still Director? I don’t know how that works.
As the helicopter rumbled north-west, the news had come through the speakers in Jamie’s helmet that Larissa had arrived safely at the Loop, and he had lowered his head and silently wept.
The scale of what had happened in the grounds of the château was so huge that he was struggling not to let it overwhelm him.
Cal Holmwood was dead.
Patrick Williams was dead.
Operators who had fought with everything they had were dead.
Valeri Rusmanov was dead.
And Dracula had survived.
As the tears rolled down his cheeks, fully aware that the other Operators sitting in the helicopter’s hold were doing him the courtesy of pretending not to notice them, Jamie tried to find a way to convince himself that so much death had been worth it.
The roar of the helicopter’s engine began to subside as Angela Darcy slid open its long door. He stood up and made his way across to it; Angela gave him a small smile as he approached her, which he returned as he leapt down on to the tarmac. His feet had barely touched the ground when Larissa thundered into him, almost sending him flying; only her arms, which were crushing him against her, kept him upright. For a long moment, he merely hung in her grip, unable to persuade his aching limbs to do anything. Then, slowly, he wrapped his arms round her waist and buried his face against her neck. When he finally drew away, noticing with a pang of teenage shame the wet patches his tears had left on her uniform, the helicopter was empty, and they were alone in the landing area.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice low and thick. “With Dracula.”
Larissa shook her head. “Later,” she said.
“Valentin?”
She nodded. “He’s here,” she said. “He’s going to be all right.”
Jamie grimaced, and felt tears appear in the corners of his eyes again. “Cal,” he said. “And Jack’s brother. So many people.”
“I know,” said Larissa.
There was nothing else to say; it was all too big, too raw, too hard to be solved or improved by words. Jamie knew better than anyone that time was the only thing that would heal the Department’s broken heart.
Larissa put her arm round his shoulders as they walked slowly into the hangar. The floor was smeared with blood and covered in torn strips of gauze and bandaging, and the double doors at the rear were wedged open with a pair of black helmets, presumably because the flow of stretchers had been so heavy. Jamie walked through them, not sure of where they should go now, or what they should do, and saw Matt Browning and Kate Randall hurrying along the corridor towards them. He carefully removed Larissa’s arm from around his shoulders, and smiled as his friends started to run, their boots thudding on the grey floor.
They crashed into him, shouting and yelling and asking a hundred questions at once, and despite it all, despite the pain in his chest and the tiredness in his limbs, he started to laugh. Larissa joined in, throwing her arms round them all and holding them tightly.
“It’s so good to see you,” said Matt, his eyes wet with tears. “Larissa told us you were OK, that you’d made it out, but until I saw for myself …”
“You got Valeri, Jamie,” said Kate, her eyes wide. “I can’t believe it. You got him.”
“We got him,” said Jamie. “Me and Valentin. Then him and Larissa chased after Dracula. Can you believe that? They chased him, on their own.”
Kate nodded. “She told us. It’s unbelievable.”
“It isn’t,” said Jamie, and gave his girlfriend a long look. “I saw it with my own eyes. Turner tried to stop her until Henry Seward overruled him. But she was going anyway.”
Larissa blushed, her cheeks turning a beautiful pale pink, and smiled at him.
“We saw Admiral Seward,” said Matt. “We came up to help when everyone started arriving. I never really thought I’d see him again.”
“Neither did I,” said Jamie. “I don’t think anyone did.”
There was a loud crackle from the speakers set at intervals along the corridor, followed by Paul Turner’s amplified voice. The Security Officer, or Interim Director, or whatever he now was, sounded more exhausted than Jamie had ever heard him, but his voice still contained its usual streak of steel.
“Attention everyone currently hearing my voice,” he said. “With the exception of medical personnel, please gather at once in the Ops Room on Level 0. Those of you who do not call the Loop home, please find a member of Blacklight to show you the way. Thank you.”
Jamie looked round at his friends. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go together.”
Nobody sat down in the Ops Room.
The chairs were still there, the plastic seats that had last been occupied as Cal Holmwood gave what would now stand as his final briefing, but they had been pushed to the sides of the room, leaving a wide space that was now full of men and women. Jamie noted the subtle differences in uniform that identified Operators from Russia, Germany, America and South Africa, saw the white coats of the Science Division, the pale, shocked faces of the Blacklight Operators who had manned the Loop while their friends and colleagues fought for their lives. Standing near the back, his face pale, his eyes clear, was Aleksandr Ovechkin, talking quietly to Bob Allen. The two Directors seemed to be struggling to stay upright; it looked like a strong gust of wind would have blown them over. Notably missing from the assembly, along with the men and women working furiously in the infirmary, was Frankenstein. The monster was still in his wolf form, and had been sealed into one of the maintenance hangars out by the runway; it had been deemed too dangerous to try and get him down to his usual cell on Level H.
The room fell silent as Paul Turner stepped through the door and made his way up to the lectern at the front. For a long moment, he didn’t speak, just looked out over the bloodied ranks of men and women who had fought and survived.
“Nothing I say,” he said, eventually, “will lessen the pain of this moment. Nothing will bring back those we have lost. Investigations are under way, reports are being prepared, and briefings will begin tomorrow. But for now I would ask nothing more from you than a minute’s silence.”
Turner typed briefly on the lectern’s terminal and the wall screen behind him bloomed into life. What it showed, in plain white letters on a black background, was a list of names, a list that was horribly long. He turned to face it, then lowered his head. As one, the crowd of men and women behind him did the same.
Jamie stared at the floor. He felt Larissa’s hand slowly move into his, and held it gratefully. The names made real the horror they had endured in the courtyard of Château Dauncy; by necessity, he had made hi
mself numb to the real cost of their actions. The operation, its priorities and its success, had been all he had allowed himself to think about. As people fell around him, Jamie had forced himself not to really see them.
Now he would.
He raised his head and looked at the names, feeling the truth of what each one truly meant. They represented parents who had lost their children, boys and girls who had lost fathers and mothers, brothers and friends who had left holes in the lives of their loved ones that nothing would ever fill.
He saw Cal Holmwood’s name halfway down the first column.
Patrick Williams was near the bottom of the second.
On the low stage at the front of the room, Paul Turner raised his head and turned back to the lectern, his face shockingly pale. He tapped the terminal a second time, then faced the screen as everyone in the Ops Room lifted their heads. Jamie could see tears on many of the faces, men and women holding each other up, arms round shoulders, hands clasped in hands.
The screen changed, the list of the dead replaced by a large digital clock. It read 00:00:00:53 and was counting steadily down.
Jamie watched, his hand still entwined with Larissa’s. Beside him, he heard Matt breathing deeply, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Kate’s face set in a tight expression of determination.
00:00:00:45
00:00:00:44
00:00:00:43
He glanced around the silent Ops Room. Every pair of eyes was fixed on the screen. He saw Jack Williams standing near the front, Angela Darcy and Dominique Saint-Jacques holding him up by his shoulders, and his heart went out to his friend.
00:00:00:31
00:00:00:30
00:00:00:29
Jamie looked up at Paul Turner, standing alone on the stage, and wondered how the man had even been able to step on to another battlefield, given what had happened to his son. In truth, he could not begin to imagine how the brilliant, glacial Major even managed to get out of bed every morning.