The Cross

by Scott G. Mariani

  Joel didn’t need the shop lights to see his target with incredible clarity. She was short and plump, dark-haired, in her late forties or so. Under her raincoat she was wearing a nurse’s uniform; he guessed she must be picking up some provisions on her way home after a late shift at some local hospital.

  Joel could smell her blood. Hot and thick and dark, pulsing through her veins. The intensity of his senses was frightening.

  Though not as frightening as the thing that was happening inside his mouth. His teeth didn’t feel right. He ground them together, pressed his thumb-tips against his canines and gasped in shock at how elongated and sharp they suddenly felt. Something was taking control of him.

  The woman kept walking across the car park. A few more steps and she’d have reached her Peugeot.

  Joel opened his door with a trembling hand and stepped out. In the cold night air the scent of her blood was even thicker and more intoxicating.

  He shuddered.

  Fight it. Fight it.

  He could smell something else, too. The pungent odour of the packet of raw meat in the woman’s shopping basket.

  She turned to stare at him, curiosity turning quickly to alarm as he stumbled up to her in the darkness.

  ‘Please,’ he said, aware that she couldn’t understand him. ‘I don’t want to hurt you . . . I just need . . .’ Then, with a speed and strength that astonished him even more than it did the frightened woman, he shot out his arm and tore the shopping basket from her hand. Its contents spilled out: two plastic milk containers, a block of processed cheese, a box of eggs that cracked and broke on the concrete; and a plastic-wrapped oblong package that Joel stared at for a split second before scooping up off the ground.

  The woman screamed at him in Romanian as he turned and ran back to the truck. Its engine roared into life and he took off out of the car park.

  A couple of miles down the road, Joel couldn’t stand it any more. Pulling over to the side, he ripped open the package on his lap. The sharp tang of animal offal made his nostrils flare. Raw livers. He sank his teeth into them and felt the dead flesh rip. Cold, congealed blood and watery fluid ran across his tongue and down his throat, spilled down his chin onto his trousers. He bit deeper, devouring the meat with a ferocious passion that his sense of disgust couldn’t deter.

  Before he knew it, he’d wolfed down the entire contents of the pack. He let the empty polystyrene tray fall to his feet, coughing and spluttering through the awful cold, congealed blood that coated the inside of his mouth. An intense surge of self-loathing made him want to put his head through the windscreen. He pounded the steering wheel and moaned and cursed until he’d exhausted himself; then, finally settling down, he numbly put the truck back into gear and drove on.

  Hours passed, and Joel was frantic with worry about running out of night by the time he found the stream of lorries heading for the seaport. He followed the heavy freight vehicles through tall gates. Nobody stopped him.

  He abandoned the pickup truck in a dark corner of the docks, between two enormous steel containers. His agility, as he sneaked through the shadows, stunned him. He was like a cat, rapidly learning to make use of his new powers of stealth and physical poise. The raw livers seemed to have given him enough energy to keep moving for now, but the hunger still gnawed deep inside and some terrible instinct told him that he couldn’t survive on a diet of animal flesh.

  Fine. Then he’d starve. The other option was just too awful to contemplate.

  Joel ducked around the corner of a crumbling building and crouched behind a stationary fork-lift truck as he heard steps approaching. He saw a cigarette glow in the dark. The shapes of two men ambling through the dockyards, a hundred yards away. They were talking in low voices, sharing some anecdote that made one of them laugh. As they came nearer, Joel’s acute hearing picked up words of English, and he strained to listen to what they were saying. Once he’d caught enough to realise they were part of a British crew on board a freight vessel setting sail for the Port of Southampton that same night, he slipped out from his hiding place and followed them.

  The sailors never once sensed what was pacing along behind them. They cut a path between dockyard buildings, past mounds of scrap and stacks of crates, giant coils of chain and cabling. Finally, they emerged onto a quay and Joel caught sight of the vessel they were heading for.

  The container ship was a hulking black mass, the gently swelling tide slapping and sucking at her sides, rocking her almost imperceptibly on her moorings. Light streamed from an open hatch. The two sailors climbed up the gangway and disappeared inside.

  Cautiously, glancing left and right, Joel followed. Nobody saw him as he slipped on board and started looking for a place to hide.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Siberia

  The thousand-year-old ice cavern had a domed ceiling higher than that of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Like the glittering white pillars that stretched up to it from the mirror-smooth floor, it was adorned with ornate carvings depicting venerated mythic scenes from the ancient Über culture. Solemnly gathered at one side of the great Hall of Judgement were the Council members for the prosecution; on the other side were the representatives for the defence, far fewer in number. Seated high above them, his ceremonial robes draped majestically across the wings of his gleaming ice throne and surveying the assembly with a cold eye, was the venerable Elder Xakaveôk, the Grand Judge. To his left, still unconscious on his stone slab that was now encased within a cage of razor-sharp icicles, lay the accused, Gabriel Stone.

  Master Tarcz-kôi, the speaker for the prosecution, was in mid flow and the great hall resonated to the rasp of his voice as he hurled charges against the humanoid vampire whose presence in their midst was so distasteful to many of the assembly.

  ‘The traitorous tendencies of the accused are established fact, and have been for an age,’ he insisted yet again. ‘Long has he harboured an unhealthy interest in the vile culture of the humans; long has he immersed himself in the study of their degenerate history, their primitive and unspeakable so-called art and music. Are we to permit him to continually dishonour us in this way?’

  Master Xenrai-Ÿazh got to his feet and raised a claw for permission to address the court. ‘With respect to Master Tarcz-kôi, as the accused is one of our most valued envoys, sent into the human world to carry out tasks at our behest, I regard it as only correct that he be granted a degree of freedom in order to integrate into their society. May I remind my learned friend that this is why we created these creatures in the first place? While we ourselves could neither adapt to, nor exist in, the human world, Gabriel and his kind have made it possible for our culture to thrive, albeit in attenuated form, at the heart of human civilisation these many centuries past. To this end, the accused is no mere student of their history. Has he not personally lived it?’

  ‘No matter,’ Tarcz-kôi said with a dismissive wave. ‘He cannot be trusted.’

  Master Xenrai shook his head. ‘I would suggest that my learned friend’s antagonism towards the accused appears more a matter of subjective bias than of reasoned debate. Our Hall of Judgement is no arena for illogical opinion-mongering.’

  ‘Do not attempt to cloud this discussion,’ Tarcz-kôi insisted angrily, his ears angling back and specks of foam appearing at the corners of his mandibles. ‘The charge remains one of the utmost severity. Why did he keep the rediscovery of the Zcrokczak a secret from us? We maintain that he intended to use this fearful weapon against this citadel. Against us. We, who nurtured him, who gave him his powers and his immortality. We misguidedly entrusted him with the task of aiding our plans, beginning with the overthrow of the scourge of the Federation. He has failed us, and in doing so has provided ample evidence that our faith in his ability was grievously misplaced. Of course, if the Council had listened to me . . .’ he added archly, pausing to cast a long, sweeping, severe glare at the rest of the assembly before going on. Drawing himself up to his full height, he pointed a claw at the accused in his ice
cage. ‘The gathering for the prosecution therefore calls for immediate sanctions against this traitor. I call for an immediate execution.’

  ‘Whatever’s happening in there, it isn’t good,’ Lillith said to Zachary in a low voice. The blades of the vampire guards were still pointed at their throats.

  ‘Guys,’ Zachary rumbled at the guards. ‘How about you lower those things before someone gets hurt? ’Cause it ain’t gonna be me.’ When the guards’ faces remained blank, he said to Lillith, ‘I don’t think these assholes understand what we’re saying.’

  ‘Either that, or they’re well trained.’

  Zachary smiled. ‘Say, you remember that time, way back, in . . . where was it again?’

  ‘It was in Istanbul,’ Lillith said. She’d been thinking the same thing.

  ‘Worked then,’ Zachary said. ‘Those were humans.’

  ‘Still.’

  She nodded. ‘On three, then. One . . . two . . .’

  ‘Three.’ Zachary’s massive arm shot out and his fist closed on the tip of the sword blade nearest him. Before the surprised guard could do anything about it, he’d used the leverage to swing the blade up in the air and push back hard to spin the guard round on his feet while arcing the weapon over the top of his head. Lillith did the same, and their mirror-image movements synchronised perfectly. Up and over; then step in fast and bring the blades round on themselves in a scissoring action that slammed the guards violently to gether, twisted their sword hilts out of their hands and forced them hard against the ice wall with the sharp steel edges against their throats.

  ‘Still works pretty good,’ Zachary said. ‘Now let’s go get Gabriel.’

  Lillith’s guard yelped in fright at she pressed the sword blade just hard enough into his neck to split the skin and let out a stream of dark vampire blood. ‘One more sound and I’ll take off your head,’ she said in the old Über language. When he looked even more frightened, she smiled. ‘Understood that all right, didn’t you? The Hall of Judgement. Lead the way.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Zachary said as they ran through the underground passages, prodding the vampire guards ahead of them with the points of their own swords. ‘Look at this place. How long have these things been down here?’

  ‘Since long before our time,’ Lillith said. Her guard was slacking his pace. She jabbed the sword into him. ‘Move.’

  As far as the eye could see and beyond, great tunnels and smooth-walled caves had been carved out of solid ice and rock. As they rounded a corner and emerged onto a high galleried walkway, they looked down and saw a vast space stretching out below them, larger than a human cathedral. From its ceiling, not smoothly arched like that of the tunnels, hung clusters of huge icicles. Hundreds, thousands of them, like great gleaming stalactites. Long glassy tubes, many of them filled with a bright red substance that seemed to ooze and pulse down their twisting lengths, connected the tips of the icicles to rows of carved-ice vats that were mounted on platforms the length of the chamber. The tubes were constantly drip-filling the vats with blood that they were somehow carrying away from the icicles.

  On the ground, scores of workers, no taller than children and draped from head to toe in rough hooded habits like those of medieval monks, were attending to the fuller vats by siphoning the blood into smaller ice containers, loading them onto trolleys and transporting them back and forth, back and forth. As the vampires watched from above, one of the small figures paused to peer up at them, drawing back its hood for an instant: a glimpse of its shrivelled, wizened features, lidless eyes and brutish jaw, and then it pulled down the hood and carried on about its tasks.

  ‘Those little critters are even uglier than the uglies,’ Zachary rumbled.

  Lillith was about to move on when a movement from one of the giant icicles caught her eye. Something inside – they were hollow, she now realised. Whatever it was that wriggled and squirmed sluggishly, trapped behind the thick, semi-opaque conical ice walls, was hard to make out. Then the distinct shape of a human hand appeared, pressed flat against the inside of one of the icicles, and she finally understood their purpose.

  ‘Storage,’ she said to Zachary. ‘Humans on ice. They keep them here, and they harvest them.’

  Zachary stared. ‘Even we’re not that mean.’

  ‘Keep moving,’ Lillith said, prodding her guard onwards. The first shrill cry of alarm came from a passage to the side as they ran by. It quickly raised more.

  ‘Shit,’ Lillith said. ‘Quickly.’ They pressed on, herding their captives ahead of them at a sprint that few humans could have kept pace with. But in seconds, they were being pursued by a crowd of vampire guards led by two fast-moving Übervampyr in plain robes. The ice-light glittered off drawn blades.

  ‘Faster,’ Lillith yelled. The two guards in front of them were stumbling in their panic, slowing them down, and the crowd was gaining on them.

  ‘Keep going,’ Zachary yelled. He turned and launched his powerful body upwards in a tremendous leap, lashing out with his sword at the tunnel ceiling. The ice was as hard as concrete, and Zachary’s blade impacted against it with such force that the steel shattered.

  A huge blue fissure appeared with a rippling, grinding crack. The ice ceiling gave way in an avalanche of crystalline boulders that filled the tunnel and blocked their pursuers’ path. Zachary let out a whoop, threw away his broken sword and ran after Lillith.

  The vampire guards stopped within sight of a grand sculpted entrance flanked by grotesque Übervampyr statues.

  ‘The Hall of Judgement,’ Lillith said.

  More guards blocked the doorway. Seeing the intruders coming, they stepped forward and raised a warning hand, making the harsh rasping sounds of the old Über language. Zachary knocked one of them flying with a backhander that would have broken the neck of an ox. Lillith doubled up another with a kick to the stomach, then caught another in the face with the pommel of her sword as Zachary crashed open the tall ice doors to the Hall of Judgement.

  ‘What is this outrage?’ screeched the Judge, rising in his throne as Lillith and Zachary marched inside the echoing courtroom. He wagged his long clawed finger at the intruders. ‘Your kind have no place in the Hall of Judgement. Guards!’

  Lillith quickly laid down her sword and dropped to one knee in the aisle of the Hall. ‘Please forgive the manner of our entry,’ she said in the old language. ‘But since when was justice meted out without hearing the testimony of witnesses?’

  The prosecutor Tarcz-kôi snorted in disgust. ‘We have no truck with the ways of human law.’

  ‘I beg you, please listen to me before you pass judgement on my brother,’ Lillith said, getting to her feet. Zachary stood at her shoulder with his arms folded and his brows heavy, shooting warning glances in all directions.

  ‘He is a traitor,’ Tarcz-kôi said flatly. ‘Only a traitor would have kept secret from us the rediscovery of such a weapon of power.’

  Lillith took a deep breath and spoke loudly to the whole assembly. ‘If Gabriel’s only crime was to fail to tell you that our enemies had recovered the cross, it’s only because he didn’t want to cause alarm. He had his plan, and he believed in it. Now the cross is destroyed. We may not yet have won this war against the Federation, but the greatest risk to all of us has been averted. What we have now is an open road to victory. I beg this court to repay Gabriel’s loyalty to you by giving him a second chance. We won’t fail this time.’

  ‘Besides,’ Zachary said, ‘you fuckers harm Gabriel, there’s gonna be a lot of dead uglies in this place.’ One or two of the Übervampyr assembly frowned to hear his strange language, but to Lillith’s relief, none of them understood him.

  For a long moment, the Hall of Judgement was filled with murmurs and whispers. Master Xenrai nodded at Lillith and his features distorted into what she took to be a smile. The look on the face of the prosecutor was unmistakably one of hatred.

  The Judge tapped a claw against his throne to signal silence. ‘Enough. Let us cast the vote. All those in
favour of executing the vampire Gabriel Stone, known to us as Krajzok, stand and be counted.’

  Lillith and Zachary watched tensely as, one by one, many of the Übervampyr got to their feet. Lillith counted ten of them: half of the assembly. She trembled as an eleventh seemed about to rise as well, sealing Gabriel’s fate. Zachary put his big hand on her shoulder. ‘We won’t let them do this,’ he whispered in her ear.

  The eleventh juror hesitated, then relaxed back in his seat.

  The Judge tapped his claw again. ‘As we see, the Council is divided.’ Lillith searched his hideous face, but all she could see in his eyes was cold impassivity.

  ‘According to our ancient custom,’ the Judge went on, ‘the final decision is now mine to make.’

  A long silence in the hall. Zachary’s grip tightened on Lillith’s shoulder.

  ‘My decision is that Gabriel Stone be taken from this court to the Chamber of Whispers,’ the Judge said, ‘where justice will be carried out. This pronouncement is final, and the trial now ended. Take him away.’

  Instantly, four guards appeared from a side entrance, opened the cage that encased Gabriel and carried him out on his slab. The Council members all began filing towards the exit.

  Lillith turned to Master Xenrai in alarm, but couldn’t read his expression. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked desperately as he approached her and Zachary. ‘They’re going to execute him, aren’t they?’

  Almost tenderly, the Master laid his long hand on her arm. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘The Chamber of Whispers is our room of healing. The Judge’s pronouncement is that Gabriel be given the second chance that you desire. Congratulations. You have saved your brother.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  London

  Alex was at VIA Headquarters before nine the next morning, wading through the backlog that had amassed in her absence. In the wake of the heavy casualties inflicted by Gabriel Stone’s uprising, she now found that her workload had taken a sudden 300 per cent leap thanks to a mountain of ongoing investigation files inherited from deceased VIA agents. It looked like she was going to be tethered to the desk for a while.