Back on the surface the gates were hit hard, ruptured, thrown open. The night came pouring in.
Luca took the motionless escalator in three mighty leaps and was gunning across the platform at an impossible speed. Another monstrous leap sent him into the darkness of the tunnel, racing along the tracks. He was less than a quarter of a mile from safety and had never run so fast. He was in pain. Real pain. Quite different from the thirst-cramps that would wake him every night. His lungs were splitting, frail as lace. The muscles in his legs were tightening, burning in a way they never had before. Luca never let up. In fact, he found a little more go when he heard—from somewhere above and behind him—the soulless echo of the creatures tearing through the station. They made chaos sound like a lullaby. He could imagine them, snapping at each other for wing-space, moving through the halls and stairwells with the force of a flash flood. There wouldn’t be much left of the station by the time they had passed through. Ticket booths would lie in ruins, kiosks would be uprooted like weeds, rails and turnstiles would be twisted, glass everywhere, broken tiles, shattered placards, dust hanging like rain clouds. Even the air would be ruined, stained with their sweat, choked with their smell. There would be many questions asked tomorrow, but very few of them, Luca knew, would ever be answered.
Pain: his legs screaming. Pain: shallow, gasping breaths. Pain: his immortal heart threatening to die like a diseased man. The sound of his footfalls echoed through the tunnel. His shrill breathing was like a child’s first violin lesson. Two hundred yards from safety and he could hear his pursuers flocking onto the platform. One-fifty—they entered the tunnel in a brown fluid stream. One hundred—he could feel their foul breath on the back of his neck.
He wasn’t going to make it. There was no way. The Vagabond had been right; if you see them, God help you, it was game over.
In the cacophony of the chase Luca didn’t hear the train coming. He would have been more alert to the possibility if the station was open, but trains rarely ran at this hour. This, however, was a maintenance run; the train speeding toward Luca and the army of creatures snapping at his heels had just been repaired and was being tested prior to reintroduction. It was travelling close to eighty miles per hour and the first Luca knew of it was the penetrative glare of its headlights. There was a moment’s paralysis—just a heartbeat, it was all he could spare—before he threw himself at the tunnel wall and clung there, spider-like. He didn’t stop moving even as the train buffeted and squealed beside him, but crawled along the wall with impossible motion, his prehensile hands seeking purchase. He dared a glance back when he heard the shriek of the train’s brakes. Sparks flew like bullets and metal crumpled as its speeding front end collided with the creatures that were too slow to move. The sound of the impact was massive, drowning Luca’s howl of triumph. He remained fixed to the wall, his long black jacket rippling like a flag as the train shuddered to a stop. The scale of the disaster was enormous. The front car had been concertinaed to two-thirds its original length and the creatures were in disarray, howling in circles and tending to their wounded. The driver of the train had been killed instantly. They took to his remains in a flurry of retribution. They even swallowed his soul.
Luca laughed, exhilarated and aghast. He crawled along the tunnel wall, leaving the chaos behind, and soon came to his home. His sanctuary. His slipped into the darkness and fell to his knees, and then crawled with melodramatic slowness to his bed. His neighbors shifted in silent protest. The rats—some of them were as large as cats— smelled the blood that still covered him and inched closer. Luca hissed and they backed away, fur bristling.
He closed his eyes and let the pain slip from his body.
“Too close,” he whispered. He could hear the cockroaches scurrying up the walls and across the ceiling. He could feel the rats’ eyes all over his body, eager to sample the blood—the girl’s blood—that painted his body. And who could blame them? He thought of her as his heart slowed and the warm waters of safety cleansed him. Her demure smile. The breeze of her scent. The cinnamon in her hair. The taste of her tongue in his mouth, just before he swallowed it. He remembered how he had left her, twitching and colored red, with that single yellow feather glimmering in her hair. What had her name been? He tried to remember, but it had slipped his mind. There’d been so many girls, so many names. By tomorrow he would have forgotten what she looked like. She would be joined to the long, faceless ribbon tethered to his history. Luca knew little of this ribbon, other than that it flowed behind him, and that it was beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her memory, not sure whether he was sorry for forgetting her name, or for what he had done to her. He wondered how long it would take for her body to be discovered. Not long; the humidity in Hong Kong at this time of year was intense, and in the confines of that apartment building the smell of rotting flesh would spread like a flame. Twenty-four hours. Maybe forty-eight. However long, he had outstayed his welcome. There was a trail of destruction. There would be witnesses, too many questions. His low profile had been blown. It was time to move on.
He pondered his next port of call as he swayed into a bleak vampire sleep. It would have to be somewhere full of life. A vibrant city. Decadent. Drowning in recklessness and lust and soul. A place where the streets were teeming with the young and beautiful. Where they partied all night, and slept all day.
“Party all night,” Luca murmured. “Sleep all day.”
An oasis for his thirst.
What handsome young vampire would choose anywhere else?
6
Emergency lights flashed in the world above Luca. The police and fire department arrived on Cameron Road and were working to make sense of the inexplicable disaster at the MTR station. They had to parry delirious witnesses—came close to arresting some of them—babbling about gargoyles and monsters. Crazy. All of them. Probably drugged out of their minds on the dirty weed you could buy for ten dollars a pop from the candy boys on Nathan Road.
And in the world above them …
Shimmer.
They scowled, wailing their indignation, and they
sounded for all the world like a terrible wind, and looked like the darkest of storm clouds. The wounded trailed the main pack like the tail of a comet, and assuming this formidable shape they blazed across the troposphere at a speed that kept the earth between them and the sun. And they never forgot the face of the one that had gotten away from them, the honey-like smell of his fear, or his laughter echoing through the tunnel with the loose sound of something broken.
Wings working, they snapped and they cried. Shimmer: an oil slick in the sky.
7
British Airways flight 0026: Hong Kong to London. The vampire was flying First Class. This was a thirteen-hour redeye, which meant that with the eight-hour time difference he would touch down in Heathrow just before midnight. Delightful. Maybe he’d hit Soho for a bite to eat before retiring for the day. He knew a wonderful little crypt in Highgate (the tenants were very understanding; they never complained). From there it was on to Barcelona, where the Balearic Islands lay across the Mediterranean like an open throat.
Luca flipped out the TV screen and watched the news. The lead story raised a smile. Mindless vandals had broken into an MTR station in the heart of Kowloon. There were pictures of the walkways and the ticket area. It looked like a twister had torn through the place. The report was sketchy because the details were unclear. The British reporter on the scene intimated that the Hong Kong authorities were withholding important, perhaps even embarrassing, information. However, it was estimated that the vandals had caused damage in excess of twenty million Hong Kong dollars. Police were currently viewing closed circuit videotape and there was an urgent appeal for witnesses to step forward.
No mention of the bloodstained man seen running down Cameron Road just before the alarm was raised. No mention of the mile-long stream of winged creatures pouring from the sky and in through the MTR entrance, fighting for room like commuters at rus
h hour. No mention of a girl found murdered, partly eaten, in her eleventh-floor apartment.
“Everything is good,” Luca said, turning his attention to the stewardess as she proceeded through First Class with a tray of champagne. He studied her painted smile and the way she twisted at the waist. A blond kiss-curl had spilled onto her forehead, and between smiles she blew at it over her top lip, making it jump. There was a delicate flush at her throat, like a promise.
He caught her eye and she came to him, even though she had not served all the passengers in between. He imagined the way the insides of her legs would be rubbing together beneath her tight skirt. She leaned over him, not twisting at the waist but leaning. Offering. Luca inhaled the clean scent of a natural face wash. There was tea tree oil in her hair. Aniseed on her breath. He looked at her throat, magnified by his brilliant eyes. A gossamer sheen of sweat sparkled within the pores like morning dew. He wondered if the point of her throat, colored by that flush, would be sweeter.
The stewardess leaned closer still—so close that, when he exhaled, he could see the infinitesimal hairs on her throat move.
“Would you care for a drink, sir?” she asked, and Luca grinned.
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