Did I really just say that?
“Not anymore,” Herb said sourly. He threw a bundle of material at Dan. “Some fresh clothes. We are leaving soon, so get ready.”
We? Dan thought ominously as he examined the clothes. A heavy sweater and jeans. He looked up at Herb.
“Leave to go where?”
“I live on a…compound of sorts. Thanks to my father’s obsession, it’s probably the safest place we can go until we figure out our next step.”
There it was again. We.
Our.
“Safest?”
“Steel shutters, thick walls. UV lights in the grounds. When the place is on lockdown, it’s practically a fortress. And if there is any information in the texts about people who are able to resist vampires, that’s where we’ll find it. In my father’s library. Best thing we can do is get there fast, and seal ourselves in before we run out of daylight. Hope you’re not afraid of flying.”
“Flying?”
Dan’s mouth asked that last one on autopilot, and he rebuked himself bitterly. He sounded pathetic, timidly batting Herb’s words back as feeble questions. He began to shake his head firmly. The conversation was heading down a path that could only lead to a very bad place. He had to get a grip on it, fast.
“Yeah,” Herb said. “Trawler’s too slow. As soon as we’re close enough, we’ll take the chopper—”
“There is no we,” Dan interrupted, surprising himself with the authority in his tone. “I’m going home, and then probably to prison, unless you people plan to kill me. Whatever it is you want to do, I want no part of it.”
Herb looked surprised, as though he hadn’t even considered what Dan might want.
“Yeah,” Dan continued, “I was listening in the container. Vampires rising, ancient oaths, Hell on earth and human sacrifice. Insane; every last bit of it. I don’t know who or what you think I am, but I assure you, I’m not it. I just want to go home.”
Herb blinked.
“You can’t go home,” he said softly. “Don’t you get it? You’re special. Important. You killed two vampires. You don’t just do that and go home. Home no longer exists for you. How could it?”
Dan clenched his fists in frustration.
“I got lucky, don’t you get it? Those things weren’t expecting me to attack them and they hesitated. That’s all there was to it.”
“Except that they don’t hesitate,” Herb snapped, “and in records stretching back thousands of years, nobody has ever got lucky; not once. So what’s special about you, huh?”
“The only thing that was special about me had her fucking head torn off right in front of my face. If I’m special, how come I couldn’t stop that?”
Herb shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever your life was before—it’s over now. The others will come for you, and one way or another, they’ll find you. You’re too important.”
“Others?”
Another pathetic question.
Dammit!
Herb stared at him thoughtfully for a moment before responding.
“This is a lot bigger than my family. There are nests across the world, families just like mine. Our ancestors realised the value of cooperation a long time ago. The Order is the product of that realisation. They—we—have people everywhere. Resources you can’t begin to understand, and when they find out about the Oceanus, they’ll be coming. Going home and pretending this isn’t happening is not an option.”
Dan stared at him dubiously. “So it’s a global conspiracy, then? A vast secret which hundreds of people are keeping? Or is it thousands?”
He made no effort to conceal the disbelief in his tone. Dan had spent two years locked in his apartment, and that equalled plenty of time spent on the internet. The web was full of conspiracy theories; it was almost impossible to avoid them. He didn’t necessarily disbelieve them all, but still, he had serious doubts that a secret such as the one Herb described could be kept for so long, by so many people. It just wasn’t possible. Maybe it had been centuries earlier, but now, when information was so freely available?
Herb caught the sarcasm. “You think being tasked with killing thousands of people doesn’t offer opportunities? Families like mine have been around for centuries, benefitting from their relationship with the vampires. People keep secrets for two reasons. One: keeping the secret is advantageous to them personally. Two: they fear the consequences if their silence is not maintained. If both of those statements are true, who wouldn’t hold their tongue?”
Herb shrugged, as if there was nothing more to say on the matter.
Dan shook his head. “What possible benefit could there be to what you people do?”
“Money. Power. You know how many politicians were given complementary tickets for the Oceanus? How many heads of corporations? Celebrities? Even a member of the royal family. If you want to murder someone important, what better way than to put them at the scene of some tragic disaster? Then they are just another poor victim of circumstance.”
Dan rubbed at his forehead.
“I’m not following.”
“This is how things have always been done,” Herb said with an impatient sigh. “You know all those wacko theories about the people lurking in the shadows, controlling the world?”
“Sure,” Dan said wryly. “The Illuminati.”
Herb snorted. “Call it whatever you want. Whatever label you come up with will be about as accurate as the word vampire. We refer to ourselves as the Order precisely because the word is meaningless. Virtually every family within the Order has accrued wealth and influence you can’t imagine. Old money. Power handed down for generations. When the vampires rise, the families under their control rise right along with them. My father called it a truce; our family’s tragic duty. I call it an alliance, and I want no fucking part of it.”
Herb took a deep breath and paused, apparently aware that he was beginning to rant.
“But we haven’t got time for this, not now. I have to get you somewhere safe before it gets dark.”
Dan spread his arms wide and gestured at the hull of the trawler.
“Seems like I’m safe right here, if what you say is true.”
“Here’s fine,” Herb said with a grin, “though you might not think so when you start to get hungry. Besides, search and rescue will be headed in our direction soon enough, along with just about every news outlet on the planet, and I doubt even the Order has enough influence to cover up what they’re gonna find. The Oceanus was probably declared missing hours ago. We were supposed to draw the authorities in the wrong direction once it was done,” he shrugged, “but the days of the Rennick family keeping secrets are over.”
Dan shook his head wearily. Herb had sounded crazy in the container, but now that he was out and apparently running the show, he sounded even crazier.
He thought about replying that he needed his medication; that he had a condition, dammit; that he had to go home and seal himself up in the only place he felt safe before he hurt himself or anybody else, but he clamped his lips shut. There was nothing to gain from going through it now, when he was trapped at sea.
Play along, he thought. Just until you get your feet on dry land.
And then, run.
“Follow me,” Herb said, and he turned, striding away from the freezer hold, leaving the door open.
Dan watched him go, and slipped on the sweater and a one-size-too-big pair of jeans, Herb’s words running through his mind like a fever.
Afraid of flying, he thought, and his face twisted into a rueful grimace. He was supposed to be afraid of just about everything, but now the fear that had been a constant in his life ever since the knife attack felt…unstable somehow, like the fury that had descended on him aboard the Oceanus had unbalanced it. He still felt a flicker of the old anxiety: apprehension at being trapped on the boat with a group of strangers who were apparently insane, but there was something else, too, right down there in that broken core. Something new.
It felt terrifyingly like anticipation; a thread of something like eagerness that ran through his nerves.
He knew then what the loose sensation in his head was. Something had changed, and he had woken up different in some way he couldn’t yet fathom; altered irrevocably.
As he started after Herb, he couldn’t help but wonder if different meant better.
Or worse.
*
Jeremy watched Dan Bellamy follow Herb up onto the deck, and when both men were out of sight, he stepped into the freezer hold, easing the sliding door shut and wincing as the rusting metal runners squealed softly.
He’d always felt a connection with Herb. His father had never forgiven the kid for killing his mother as he entered the world, and the wrong side of Charles Rennick was a bad place to be for anybody, let alone a young child. Herb grew to be an isolated character at the compound, tolerated by his brothers and despised by his father; unable to form any sort of friendship with the initiates of the Order who worshipped his blood like it ran through a king’s veins.
But the boy was reckless. Charles had been right about that, though even he might have been surprised to learn just how right. Charles’ primary concern had been that Herb would run; that without him the EMP device would not get built and the operation would be a failure before the Oceanus even entered international waters. That was supposed to be the worst-case scenario, not that Herb would return to the Sea Shanty with no vampires and a bullet with his father’s name etched on it.
The operation had been a complete disaster, and now Herb seemed intent on making the situation worse.
Jeremy had hated lying to him.
He crossed the hold, kneeling at a low ventilation grate, and prised it open.
Reaching inside, he pulled out the satellite phone that he had hidden immediately following Charles’ execution. Thanks to Herb’s insistence on placing Bellamy in the hold and locking the door, Jeremy hadn’t been able to retrieve the phone for several frustrating hours.
So much time already wasted.
He paused for a moment, listening carefully to make sure there were no footsteps headed in his direction. After a few seconds, he switched the phone on and punched a number into the keypad.
The compound needed to be warned, but not just about the possibility that the nest in southern England might rise in a matter of hours. They also needed to be warned that Herb had taken charge; that he needed to be controlled before he threw a light on the Order for the whole world to see.
The phone rang.
And rang.
Jeremy frowned.
Hung up.
Dialled again.
Still no answer.
It could mean only one thing. There was no way a ringing phone at the compound would go unanswered, not on this of all days. Not unless they couldn’t answer.
The vampires had risen already. Jeremy knew it was the truth as soon as the thought occurred; felt it squirming in his gut like a tapeworm.
How could that be possible? How could the vampires know that their kin had died? The creatures had psychic abilities far beyond Jeremy’s understanding, but could they really communicate with each other over such vast distances?
Jeremy terminated the call again, and for a few moments, he just stood there, staring at the wall and seeing a dark future written in the dull, dented metal.
There was nothing else for it. Herb wanted to rally humanity to fight the monsters, but there was no way his story would be believed. Not until the vampires rose and splattered the truth across the TV news. By then, it would be too late.
He gritted his teeth. It was daylight back in the UK now. If the vampires had surfaced in the night, they would surely have retreated underground until nightfall. Just a matter of hours. Everything was moving too fast, and Herb was dangerously volatile. Matters had to be taken out of his hands.
He dropped his gaze to the keypad once more, punching in a different number. This time, the phone rang just once before a voice answered in a rich American accent.
“Yes?”
Sorry, Herb.
“I need to speak to Jennifer Craven,” Jeremy said.
7
Jennifer Craven terminated the unexpected call and felt a thrill coursing through her body like nothing she had experienced in sixteen long years; not since she first peered into a hole in the ground in northern Kentucky and saw the truth staring back at her.
The British man on the other end of the line had sounded scared, as well he might, but more importantly, what he had told her confirmed as fact something that she had long suspected: none of the other families that the Order comprised really did have any idea that the vampires could be killed, or that there might once have existed humans who were able to resist their will.
Jeremy Pruitt had sounded shocked and uncertain as he informed her that the Rennick nest in England had demanded sacrifice, and that the sacrifice had failed in the most spectacular way possible. The discovery that the buried gods were mortal had come as a monumental surprise to the English; that much was clear from the man’s tone.
Jennifer had fabricated a little surprise of her own for his benefit.
Unlike the Rennicks, the Craven family had nurtured suspicions about the vampires that stretched back centuries, ever since one of Jennifer’s distant ancestors had discovered a clay tablet buried in northern Africa. That tablet, which appeared to depict a human striking down a vampire beneath a word which translated roughly into English as hermetic, was assumed for a long time by her forebears to be simply a product of hope; just some poor barely-evolved bastard doodling a daydream before the monsters took him. Yet, when Jennifer’s own father had the tablet carbon dated back in the eighties, the scientist he had persuaded to carry out the test reported that the clay had definitely been buried at around 5,000 B.C.
Such a discovery would have made the scientific community at large take a keen interest in the tablet, had the scientist who collected the data been permitted to live long enough to share it. The earliest known etchings on clay were dated at around 3,000 B.C., and current academic thinking on the first human civilizations would have been turned on its head in an instant by the discovery that recorded history was at least two thousand years wide of the mark.
More importantly, as far as the Craven family was concerned, that carbon dating test had confirmed that the tablet was the earliest known written record of the vampires by a distance. No part of the Order claimed to possess any artefact more than five thousand years old, though of course they would keep such a discovery to themselves. After all, there was a slim chance that any object which was that old might even contain something close to the truth.
The word hermetic didn’t appear anywhere else in the known texts, and its meaning remained shrouded in mystery. No matter how thoroughly the Craven family searched for anything that might corroborate the story the clay tablet wanted to tell, nothing had ever been discovered.
Until a Princeton professor made an ill-advised phonecall from Kentucky, and Jennifer Craven herself saw the bones.
It was all the confirmation that she required.
Vampires could be struck down by humans, just as that ancient tablet had suggested, and for some reason, some ancient civilization had buried a man who actually did just that right alongside his monstrous victim. Perhaps the man had died of injuries sustained in the battle with the vampire, and the burial had been a celebration; perhaps that ancient people had wanted to warn future generations of something, who knew.
Who cared?
For a man to kill a vampire with a hatchet could only mean one thing: the vampires had not been able to control him in the way they did everyone else. He was the Hermetic. The word literally meant ‘sealed off,’ and that’s exactly what the ancient vampire slayer must have been: his mind sealed away from the vampires’ grasp; untouchable.
The trouble was that there had been no record of any such person having existed in the past seven thousand years. Maybe the hatchet-man
was part of a race that had long since died out, his genes containing some treasure that extinction had buried, never to be found again.
Finding out whether that was true or not would have been all but impossible, given that the only way to know whether a person could resist the psychic assault of a vampire was to put them in front of one.
Jennifer had long ago filed away her curiosity about the possibility that Hermetics might actually have existed, because there was another, more pressing problem.
She was barren. The sole remaining Craven. A long time ago, she had attempted to conceive with several of the men at the ranch, but her efforts were for nothing. Finally, a doctor revealed the terrible truth: she would never have children. Her name would die with her, and some other bloodline would take control of the Order in America.
Unable to further her line, Jennifer’s thoughts turned to her legacy. The legacy of the entire Craven family; a crushing burden on her shoulders. Despite being only thirty-eight, she thought about her remaining years constantly; how to imprint her name onto the Order so that it would never fade from history.
The rest of the Order was so focused on the past that it rarely thought to look to its future. But Jennifer did, and she saw trouble on the horizon, approaching like twister season.
As far as she was aware, there hadn’t been a vampire rising anywhere in the world for more than a century, and in that time, the world had changed greatly.
Way back in 1999, Jennifer’s father had seen the future, and he predicted that it was a cellphone in every pocket and a camera on every street corner. He hadn’t lived to see just how right he had been. By 2015, there was a camera in every pocket, and the world had become obsessed with filming itself and sharing the result indiscriminately.
The days of keeping the existence of vampires a secret were coming to an end, one way or another. Unless the next rising took place in some extremely remote part of the world, the chances of any one family successfully covering it up were very slim.
The last recorded rising had taken place in rural Russia, consuming an entire village; leaving a ghost town. If something like that happened in the modern era of always on and rolling news, the truth would travel around the world like wildfire. If it happened in a densely-populated area like northern Europe or parts of Asia, the next rising would probably be streaming live on Youtube within minutes.
The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River Page 32