by Will Hill
Kate took a deep breath. She had escorted her father in the van that had returned him to Berwick station, where his strange, awful odyssey with Albert Harker had begun what seemed like such a long time ago, but could go no further. Holmwood had given Pete and Greg permission to return home, in the knowledge that they would spend the rest of their lives under surveillance, but she could not take the chance that anyone she had grown up with might see her; Lindisfarne was a tiny community, and her appearance would raise questions that she didn’t want her father to have to try and answer.
“I don’t know,” she said, honestly. “I hope so. There are things happening, things that I can’t tell you about. But when they’re over, if we’re all still here, then I hope so.”
Pete nodded. He was clearly reluctant to get in his car and drive home; for all his annoyance with her, it was obvious that he did not want to be parted from her again.
“I have to go, Dad,” she said. Her voice sounded strangled and her chest was tight; if she didn’t go quickly, she wasn’t sure she would be able to do so. “Are you going to be all right?”
Pete smiled. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
Kate walked forward and threw her arms round her dad. He crushed her tightly against him, dipping his face down to her ear.
“I’m proud of you, Kate,” he whispered. “I love you so much.”
She felt tears spill from the corners of her eyes and a huge lump rise in her throat. “Thanks, Dad,” she managed, the words mangled and crushed. “I love you too.”
Pete Randall released his grip and stepped back. He looked at his daughter for a long moment, then opened the car door and climbed into the driver’s seat. She stepped back as the engine rumbled into life, and watched as he pulled slowly away. As he reached the exit to the car park, she saw him twist in his seat and look at her. She raised her hand and saw him wave back. Then there was a rattle of gravel, and her father was gone.
She walked unsteadily back to the van that was idling behind her. She pulled open the passenger door, climbed in, and fastened her seat belt.
“Where to, sir?” asked the driver.
“Home,” said Kate.
Less than a hundred miles to the south, a similar exchange was taking place.
Matt Browning was standing in the kitchen of the house he had grown up in, drinking the first cup of tea he could ever remember his father having made him. He was still in mild shock; he would not have claimed with any great conviction that his father knew where the kettle was, or how it worked. The house was spotlessly clean and tidy, which had been another surprise; he had expected the rubbish to have reached the windows in the time since he and his mother had been gone.
He had gone up to his room while his father made the tea and been struck by a feeling of nostalgia so huge it was almost physical. The room, in which he had spent so much of his life hiding away from the outside world, looked so small. His bed was made, and his shelves of books and comics were as he had left them, but they felt as though they belonged to someone else; he no longer recognised the inhabitant of this room.
“You want another?” asked Greg Browning. He nodded at the mug in his son’s hand.
“No, thanks, Dad,” said Matt. “I’d better get going.”
His dad’s face fell briefly, but he rallied quickly. “Of course,” he said. “I understand. You’ve got work to do.”
Matt nodded.
“I wish I understood it,” said his dad, smiling gently. “But that’s nothing new, is it? I never understood most of the stuff you were doing. You were cleverer than me by the time you were about five.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
Greg frowned. “Don’t apologise, Matt. Don’t you ever apologise for who you are. I’m the one who should be sorry. I should have tried harder when you were little, been more interested. It was hard for me, son. We never liked the same things and I didn’t try hard enough to understand you. I was intimidated, to be honest with you, and I can admit that now. But it’s no excuse. And I was always proud of you, whether you believe that or not. I was always telling people about my son the genius.”
Matt blushed. He didn’t know what his dad wanted him to say. Was he asking him to forgive him, to tell him it was all right? He’d happily do so if he thought it would help, but when he looked at his father, he was far from convinced that it would.
“Now look at you,” continued Greg. “Working for the government, trying to save the world. I wish I could tell people that.”
The colour drained from Matt’s face, and his dad smiled again. “Don’t worry, son,” he said. “Your mother, no one else. I understand.”
He nodded. “Are you going to ring her?”
“Yeah,” replied his dad. “As soon as you go. Part of me wants to ring her now, let you talk to her, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea. To be honest, I don’t know if she’d take my call.”
“I’m sorry,” said Matt, again. “I didn’t mean to mess everything up.”
“I know you didn’t,” replied Greg. “To be honest, things weren’t great before you went. They hadn’t been for years. You leaving for the second time was just the final straw.”
“Do you think she’ll come back?” asked Matt.
His father shrugged. “I don’t know, son. I don’t think so, to tell the truth. But it’ll be better once she knows you’re safe. It might make things easier.”
“Do you miss them?” asked Matt, gently.
“Course I do,” replied his dad. “I miss you too. To be honest, I’m not sure what I’m going to do now. Since your mum left, I’ve thought about nothing apart from trying to get back at the people I thought had taken you away from us, and I didn’t care what happened to me in the process.”
“You could go to Sheffield,” suggested Matt. “Get a job up there. Be nearer to Mum and Laura.”
“Maybe,” said Greg. “You giving me advice now?”
Matt smiled. “Looks like it.”
The two men fell silent for a long moment. Matt was aware that he should go, should head back to the Loop and to his desk at the Lazarus Project. They were busier than ever, as a result of what was now referred to as the Browning Theory; the revelation that the vampire virus continued to evolve with its host, was able to confer greater power on new victims the longer it had been allowed to grow, had implications for both their primary analysis and the wider security of the entire Department.
But he was surprised to find that he didn’t want to leave. While he would not have gone so far as to claim that his dad was a changed man, the anger and frustration that had boiled endlessly inside him appeared to be gone, at least temporarily. Matt wondered whether the loss of his family had been the equivalent of what addicts referred to as reaching rock bottom, if his dad had finally been forced to turn his anger on himself, rather than blaming the disappointing world around him.
“You sure you don’t want another tea?” asked Greg. “One for the road?”
Matt looked at his dad. “Sure,” he said. “Tea would be great.”
His dad nodded, a broad grin breaking across his face. He flicked on the kettle and began to rummage through the cupboards. After a second or two, Matt went to help him.
EPILOGUE:
TWO PRISONERS
Henry Seward spat a thick wad of blood on to the floor between his feet and frowned; there was something white lying in the middle of the crimson puddle. He reached out with a hand that trembled visibly in the soft candlelight of his room, picked it up, and held it up in front of his face.
It was a tooth.
Seward’s stomach lurched. He ran his tongue quickly along the rows of his teeth and found the gap; it was on the upper right, about halfway along. He pressed his tongue into the empty space, grimacing as the tip probed the soft hollow of his gum. He gagged, and looked at the tooth again. It appeared to be whole; the roots that had once nestled safely inside his jaw, thick and pale yellow, were intact.
It fell out, he realised. It’
s not broken. It fell out.
He was sitting on the floor of the small, elegant room that served as his cell, his knees raised, his arms folded across them. Through a window on the opposite wall, the first fingers of dawn were creeping over the horizon to the east, staining the sky purple. Seward still did not know exactly where he was; Dracula had told him they were in France, but that was the limit of the information the old vampire was prepared to reveal. On the clearest, darkest nights, Seward believed he could see the distant glow of electric lights, but what and where they were was a mystery.
There had been no torture since the night he had leapt from the chateau’s balcony. Valeri’s rage had been awesome and terrifying, and for the first time since he had been taken from the Loop, Seward had genuinely believed that his life was about to end. Dracula’s servant had attacked him with a cold, vicious precision, drawing screams from him that had come to sound like animal howls. The following morning, when he had been deposited back into his room, bleeding and sobbing and barely breathing, two vampires had come and tended his wounds with far greater care than usual. Since then, he had been left largely alone; fed and watered in his room and provided with fresh dressings and powerful, numbing painkillers by vampires who were more polite and less hateful than usual.
Seward knew that these new modes of behaviour were not motivated by generosity or kindness; they were the result of Valeri’s instinct for self-preservation. He had heard Dracula order his associate not to kill him, and he believed that Valeri had come far closer to doing so than he had intended. Consequently, he was being coaxed back to something approximating health, to ensure that the elder Rusmanov did not incur his master’s displeasure.
Seward remained proud of himself for what he had done on the balcony. He didn’t know how far he had set Dracula’s recovery back, if at all, but it had felt so good to see the uncertainty on the old monster’s face as his strength began to fail him; it had almost been worth the dark agonies that had followed it. He still didn’t know what the vampire had meant when he claimed, over dinner, that he was everywhere, but in all honesty, he didn’t really care. It was unlikely to be something he could do anything about from inside the tall stone walls of his prison, and was therefore not worth fixating on. He had faith in Cal Holmwood and the men and women of Blacklight, and he was sure they could deal with whatever was thrown at them. His one regret was his firm belief that he was not going to be there to see his friends wipe the smile off the faces of Dracula and Valeri.
He coughed again, his chest heaving, and spat out a smaller lump of congealing blood. He shook almost incessantly, one of his ears rang, and he was in constant pain, but he forced a smile, his bared teeth smeared red.
One of my friends is going to stab your heart out of your chest, you old bastard, he thought. And, wherever I am, I’ll be laughing my head off when they do. You can count on that.
Several hundred miles to the north, Julian Carpenter sat up as his cell door unlocked with a muffled series of clunks and thuds.
He had been lying on his bed, trying, and failing, to get some sleep. The flight back from Nevada had been short, but remarkably uncomfortable; the physical pain in his wrists had been bad, as had the sense of claustrophobia that came with the hood he had been forced to wear, but the humiliation of being taken back to Britain like a common criminal had been worse. He had been loaded on to the plane in the dark, warned not to say anything to anyone, sealed inside a soundproof cell that he couldn’t even see, then walked off at the Loop with Operators holding his arms. He had been on the verge of despair until he had heard Cal Holmwood’s voice welcome him back; the familiar, friendly tone had been enough to allow him to keep his composure as he was taken down to the cell he was now sitting in.
His handcuffs had been removed and he had taken off his hood as soon as the door was closed behind him. The cell was slightly larger than the one he had spent the last three months in, but was just as sparsely furnished: bed, toilet, sink, chair. He was exhausted, but sleep would not come, for a single reason that pressed against the inside of his skull; somewhere, perhaps no more than a few hundred metres away from where he lay, were his wife and son.
The cell door opened and Cal Holmwood stepped through it. He nodded, and Julian gave him a thin smile in return; it was all he could manage under the circumstances.
“Julian,” said the Blacklight Interim Director. “How are you?”
“What do you want me to tell you, Cal?” he replied.
Holmwood shrugged, and sat down in the plastic chair. Julian pushed himself across his bed and leant his back against the wall.
“I am sorry about this,” said Holmwood. “I hate seeing you in here. I know it’s not fair.”
“There’s an easy solution, Cal,” he replied. “If you hate it so much.”
“No,” said Holmwood. “There isn’t.”
Julian felt his insides turn to water. “What’s going on?” he said. “Tell me.”
“Nobody can know you aren’t dead, Julian,” said Holmwood. “It causes too many problems. At least for the moment.”
“Nobody?” asked Julian, quietly. “Including—”
“Including Marie and Jamie,” said Cal. “I’m sorry, Julian. You died a suspected traitor and I can’t afford to have all of that dragged back up. Not now. Thomas Morris admitted framing you, but faking your own death looks suspicious, Julian, you have to see that. There will need to be an enquiry, testimonies, interviews and investigations. And I cannot authorise that use of time and manpower. Not with everything else that’s happening.”
Julian felt numb. This was the possibility that Bob Allen had warned him about, had tried to prepare him for, but hearing the words emerge from Cal’s mouth still felt like a punch to the gut.
“You’re telling me I’m not allowed to see my family,” he said, slowly. “Am I hearing you right? I want to be very clear on this.”
“That’s right,” replied Holmwood. “As I said, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Is that meant to be a joke?”
“It’s meant to—”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” interrupted Julian. “Not then, and not since. I faked my death because I could see how well someone had framed me and I couldn’t let Marie and Jamie pay for the things I’d supposedly done to this Department. In the years since then, I told nobody who I was. I told nobody anything about us, or the vamps, or anything else that’s classified. I only broke cover when I believed my son was in danger, and since then I’ve been sitting in prison cells. So explain to me how your being sorry is supposed to mean anything to me?”
Holmwood said nothing.
“They’re my family, Cal,” said Julian, his voice on the verge of breaking. “My wife. My son. Please don’t do this to me.”
Holmwood looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot and the bags beneath them were dark and heavy. “It’s done,” he said, softly. “I’m sorry. But the decision is made.”
Julian felt cold creep through him. It felt as though something inside him had died as his friend spoke, some essential part of himself. “So what now?” he said. “I stay here and hope you change your mind?”
“It’s up to you,” said Holmwood, sitting up in his chair. “You can stay here, in this cell. You’ll be safe, and looked after, and I’ll see about getting you some things to make it a little more bearable, some furniture, some entertainment. But nobody apart from me will know who you are, and you’ll be forbidden from talking to anyone else.”
“Or?” asked Julian.
“You can leave,” said Holmwood. “We’ll give you a new name, and a new life. But you can never come back. You can never attempt to contact anyone from this Department or any of our counterparts around the world. You’ll be under surveillance for the rest of your life and the slightest transgression will see you arrested. But you can have a life. We owe you that much.”
“Without my family?” asked Julian.
Holmwood nodded. “Yes. Without them.”
“What kind of life would that be, Cal?”
“One that’s better than you can have locked inside this room,” said Holmwood. “One where you can go outside, see the sun, choose what you want to eat. Take it or leave it.”
“Take it or leave it?” asked Julian. His mind seemed to be slowing down, as though the enormity of what his friend was telling him was cutting power to his vital systems. The cell seemed to be becoming even greyer, clouding at the edges of his vision and shrinking in on him, reducing his perspective to a dark tunnel.
“I’m afraid so,” said Holmwood. He stood up from his chair, made his way across to the door, and banged on it three times. “I’ll give you some time to think about it. And like I said, I really am—”
“Just get out, Cal,” said Julian, and lay back on his bed.
The door unlocked and swung open. Holmwood looked at him for a long moment, then turned and walked out of the cell, slamming the door behind him.
Julian stared up at the ceiling, his friend’s words pounding through his head.
Take it or leave it.
Take it.
Or leave it.
46 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My agent Charlie Campbell and UK editor Nick Lake, without whom these books wouldn’t exist.
My lovely US editor Laura Arnold, for her endless transatlantic enthusiasm.
Everyone at HarperCollins and Razorbill, for everything they do.
My wonderful publishers around the world, for spreading the word in so many languages.
Sarah, for putting up with me.
My friends and family, for their understanding and encouragement.
And most importantly, everyone who has spent their time and money on these books. It never ceases to amaze me, and I will never take your support for granted. Thank you.
Will Hill
London, February 2013