The Devil’s Architect: Book Two of the Dark Horizon Trilogy

by Duncan Simpson

  ‘Are you sure?’ he breathed,

  ‘Never been so sure.’

  With eyes alive with desire, Alina began to kiss Blake’s fingertips, one after the other, gently moaning with pleasure as she did so.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said.

  Moments later they were climbing the stairs and were soon in Blake’s bedroom. Wrapping his arms tightly around her waist, he lifted her high off her feet and carried her to the bed. Alina laughed in small breathless gasps as she landed on the covers. Blake began shedding his clothes, his trousers hitting the ground in a jingle of coins. After stepping out of them, he moved to the edge of the bed.

  ‘Vincent, your back!’ exclaimed Alina, noticing his scars from the arson attack.

  ‘Shhhhhh,’ he said, moving closer to her on the bed.

  His hand stroked the inside of her perfectly smooth leg and continued upwards. Her body shuddered at the progress of his fingernail. A gasp escaped from Alina’s throat, and she pulled him up onto her. Blake’s body pressed into hers. Their hips started to move in unison. Gnawing at her bottom lip, she turned Blake over onto his back. She was soon astride him, shaking her hair free, her dressing gown gaping open at the front. Blake pulled at the gown’s cord, and Alina shook it from her shoulders to fully expose her naked body.

  Then he saw it, and his world suddenly stopped turning. To one side of her navel was the nicotine patch he had spotted before. It was hanging loose from her skin due to the action of the hot bath water. Dangling by just a corner, the disfigured flesh underneath the patch was now exposed. A cut had been made into Alina’s white skin and formed the entrance to a kind of pocket on the surface of her stomach. Standing proud from under the skin was a circular object the size of a coin.

  He almost choked at the sight. Fear spiked through him, his heart leaping into his throat. His legs kicked against the covers as he tried to pull himself out from underneath her. Twisting his body, he yanked himself free and fell to the floor with a thud. He scrambled back on his hands against the wall. Alina didn’t move and sat ramrod straight astride the bed. He edged forward to catch sight of her face.

  Suddenly she looked at him with a wild stare. He gasped with shock at the tight murderous expression on her face. Her teeth were bared and her eyes flashed with pure hatred. In a rush of movement, her hand shot out to the bedside lamp next to the bed. With a jolt, she ripped the plug out of its wall socket and rounded on Blake. Her movements were fast, almost a blur. Painted fingernails flashed across Blake’s vision, and then the hardwood base of the lamp smashed into the side of his head, sending him reeling and the light shade spinning off into the air. A rush of pain roared across his head. He steadied himself against the wall, his face darkening. She came at him and jabbed the end of the light into his face. A jagged glass edge, the shattered remnants of the light bulb, shot past his right eye.

  ‘Eve can’t blink, Eve can’t blink,’ she taunted, spitting the words at him. Her voice was changed, deep and rasping. She stabbed at his face again, her eyes blazing. Pivoting on his heels, Blake pulled his head first this way and then that, his cheek missing the serrated edge of the bulb by millimetres.

  Lightning quick, Blake’s hand grabbed at her wrist and disabled the weapon. He pivoted on his feet and then, like a hammer thrower unleashing a projectile out into space, launched her against the bedroom wall. Her body smashed into the bedside table, sending it and its contents shooting out across the floor. Within the blink of an eye, Alina was back on her feet, her eyes filled with fury. Blake readied himself for another onslaught, but this time the offensive didn’t come.

  Breathing hard, Blake scowled at Alina, but she was no longer looking in his direction. She was rooted to the spot, her eyes fixed in a terrified expression towards something on the floor. Blake followed Alina’s line of sight down to the carpet and the small lump of London Stone that he had placed inside his bedside table after the bombing at Cannon Street. It was as if she were impaled by its very presence. Blake edged forward, his eyes never leaving Alina’s brooding stare. Squatting down, he picked up the stone.

  ‘Keep it away from me,’ growled Alina through unblinking eyes.

  Blake took a step closer with the stone and she recoiled into the corner of the room.

  ‘What, you mean this old rock?’ said Blake.

  Pushing forward against her thrashing hands, he drove the stone into her forehead. A gut-wrenching scream erupted out of her. As she shook violently, a strange sulphurous odour seemed to exude from her body. Suddenly, she went limp and fell to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  After a second of stillness, Alina’s eyes blinked open. With her senses slowly returning, she stared up at Blake. She raised herself onto her elbow and wiped away the sweaty hair hanging in her eyes. Her face was drawn and pale. As she pushed her back against the wall, Blake rubbed the side of his head. The force of Alina’s blow with the lamp had been incredible, almost lifting him clean off his feet. Hard to believe, looking at the frail, trembling body in front of him.

  He knelt beside her and mustered the courage to ask.

  ‘You okay?’

  She nodded numbly back to him.

  He reached for the abandoned dressing gown on the bed and wrapped it around her.

  With the thump of his heart finally slowing in his chest, Blake sat next to her, his back propped up against the wall. He glanced down at the cut in the skin of Alina’s stomach.

  ‘Who the hell did that to you?’ he asked, through pained eyes.

  Drawing her knees up to her chest, her mouth began to tremble.

  ‘A man came to the shelter,’ she said, swallowing a lump in her throat.

  ‘Shelter?’

  ‘I told you, before I came here. I stayed at the Servant Church of London.’

  Blake felt himself turn cold. ‘What man?’

  ‘I was in the church gardens when a man attacked me from behind. I was drugged and he put this in me,’ Alina pointed to the object under her skin. ‘I had never seen him before.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the police, or take it out?’

  ‘He said he would kill me. I believed him. He was pure evil, as bad as they come.’ He heard the terror in her voice. ‘His eyes were so black, like poison.’

  ‘You’re safe now,’ said Blake, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Safe,’ she said, hugging her knees. ‘You have no idea.’

  Blake put his arm around her shaking shoulder.

  ‘You shouted something at me.’ he said. ‘“Eve can’t blink.” Do you know what it means?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alina, shaking her head. ‘When the darkness comes, it takes control, choking off my senses.’ Tears were welling up in her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Vincent.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Sometimes I hear a voice shouting in my head “Eve Can’t Blink, Eve Can’t Blink” when it sees you. It’s almost like it’s taunting your name.’

  Blake’s eyes widened. Moments later he was on his feet bounding down the stairs, clearing three steps at a time. Sliding into the living room on his bare feet, he searched for Rosalind’s note and the lines of Mary’s blood writing that he had written on its reverse side. His eyes fixed on the last line he had written, as he patted down the table top searching for a pen. He quickly found one, and after clicking off the top with his teeth, he wrote his name underneath it.

  EVE CAN’T BLINK

  VINCENT BLAKE

  With his heart pounding like a steam train, he ticked off the letters one at a time. They matched exactly.

  Chapter 50

  Blake placed his travel mug into the Alfa Romeo’s dashboard cup holder and watched a plume of condensation materialise inside the windscreen. He turned the ignition key and the engine coughed into life. Adeptly, he shoehorned his car out of its parking space and into the side street.

  Leaning over to Alina, he repositioned the blanket that had slipped from her lap.

  ‘You okay?’ he said.

&
nbsp; Alina nodded her assent and strained a smile.

  ‘The hospital is only ten minutes away. Best get checked out,’ he said reassuringly.

  As Blake indicated to turn into Clerkenwell Road, a red off-road motorcycle fired up its engine and emerged out of the shadows behind them. As the world whipped by the window outside, his mind returned to the bizarre fact that Mary had written an anagram of his name in blood long before their paths had actually crossed. Every time he thought about it, he felt ripples of unease sweeping down him, like spiders running down his back. Somehow he was connected to all of this; he just didn’t know how. Tomorrow night would be the last blood moon of the tetrad. Someone out there would be on the hunt again for another victim. He had to nail them.

  The traffic in front slowed and Blake eased on the brakes. As they crawled forward, he saw the obstruction. Substantial roadworks were going on ahead for the laying of fibre optic cables. Parallel lines of large concrete blocks were positioned either side of the road to protect deep trenches running parallel to the pavements. A bright yellow digger was parked close by, abandoned for the night. The two wide lanes of traffic travelling east along Clerkenwell Road were being funnelled into narrower lanes a little further ahead. Just beyond the roadworks, traffic lights regulated the flow of vehicles approaching the busy junction with Farringdon Street heading south towards the river.

  Craning his head, Blake saw the traffic lights thirty feet ahead change to green. Seconds later, he was idling forward, edging his car alongside the wall of concrete blocks on the passenger side. He eased the car to a halt. As he did so, in his wing mirror he noticed a red off-road motorbike weaving through the stationary traffic behind them. Soon the bike disappeared behind a blacked-out people carrier that had just drifted up alongside his car. Blake kept an anxious look out for the safety of his wing mirror, as the people carrier was coming precariously close. Blake’s precious Alfa Romeo was hemmed in tight, with the concrete blocks on the left and the people carrier crowding in from the right.

  The lights turned green, and the vehicle in front crept forward again. Blake guided the gear stick into first and let out the clutch. The Alfa inched forward, its progress closely paralleled by the people carrier. Just as Blake’s car reached the lights, they turned red. Blake let out a groan and watched the traffic whizz by in both directions along Farringdon Street.

  From the other side of the people carrier came the loud snarl of a revving engine. The red motorcycle shot out from the right-hand side and screeched to a halt directly in front of Blake’s Alfa, hugging its bumper. Almost casually the rider kicked out the bike’s stand, dismounted and searched for something in the motorcycle’s rear pannier bag. Blake squinted to get sight of the rider’s face, but the tinted visor of the helmet betrayed nothing of their features underneath. The rider launched himself onto the bonnet of the Alfa and scrambled to stand up, heavy motorcycle boots pummelling large dents into the metal. Blake’s body stiffened with alarm.

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted to Alina, whose senses were reactivated by the threatening figure standing bolt upright on the car’s bonnet holding a spray can. She fumbled for the door handle, found it and pushed. It opened several inches then crunched into the concrete block beyond the door. She couldn’t get out. Panic took hold of her. Just at that moment, it started getting darker. The rider’s outline through the windscreen soon disappeared under an opaque slick of black paint. With several long reaches of the rider’s arm, the entire surface area of the windscreen was quickly sprayed black. Instinctively Blake grabbed at the wiper controls, but the rapid sweep of the wiper blades did nothing to clear the slick. With the concrete barrier to his left, the people carrier boxing them in on their right, and a line of queuing traffic behind them, they were trapped.

  Blake caught a movement off to his right side. He whipped his head around in time to see the heavily tinted passenger side window of the people carrier slide open just feet away from them. What he saw inside sent confusion and panic lancing through his brain. The face of a man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap stared back at him through the open window of the people carrier, his hand brandishing a Glock 17 pistol complete with sound suppressor. Slowly he raised the weapon towards Blake, his face alight with a murderous grin.

  ‘It’s a kill squad!’ Blake shouted.

  He jerked his head back just as the driver’s window shattered into a thousand fragments. A bullet blazed past his cheek. He twisted around in his seat, glancing across to Alina as another bullet pinged off the dashboard, spiderwebbing the windscreen. Blake snatched the steel mug he had brought along for the ride and launched it ferociously at the gunman, like a backhand tennis smash. The projectile slammed into the shooter’s face in an explosion of hot liquid, sending his sunglasses spinning into the air.

  Blake’s throat clamped tight as he recognised the face of the man who was trying to kill them. A dark port-wine stain ran along the top of the gunman’s cheekbone; it was Angelo Ricard’s security manager.

  Alina’s face was filled with sheer terror. ‘He works for the man who cut me at the shelter,’ she shrieked back, cowering in her seat.

  After wiping his scalded face with the back of his jacket, the gunman levelled his Glock again towards his targets. His finger tightened on the trigger and a muffled crack sounded as the gun recoiled against his hand.

  Alina slumped in her seat. For a millisecond, Blake felt immobilised, unable to process the cascade of sensory information overflowing in his brain. His eyes filled with shock as he saw the single smoking bullet hole in the centre of Alina’s forehead. Another bullet droned a millimetre past Blake’s ear, the round ricocheting off the steering wheel, shattering the passenger window and slamming into the concrete block beyond. He was a sitting duck.

  His brain rammed itself into gear, then his hand did the same with the Alfa Romeo. His jaw tightened and his foot dropped hard onto the accelerator pedal. The engine screamed and the car bolted forwards like a whipped stallion, sending the motorcycle rider bouncing off the bonnet.

  The motorcycle was bulldozered forward past the traffic lights into the lines of oncoming traffic speeding along Farringdon Street. Blake couldn’t see a thing. He was hurtling forward, but with no forward vision. Tyres screeched and smoke bellowed as car and motorbike slewed across the busy road.

  He heard car horns and then a colossal force impacted the side of the car, sending it spinning. Blake’s insides lurched forwards. With all his might, he gripped onto the steering wheel. The blur of a fast-approaching car entered his vision out of the shattered remains of the passenger window. He braced himself for another heavy collision. But this time the oncoming vehicle just glanced off the front of the Alfa and was lost behind the paint sprayed windscreen.

  Finally, the Alfa came to rest in a cloud of steam. With the breath slapped out of his body, Blake took on ragged gulps of air, accompanied by the repetitive swish of the windscreen wiper blades and the sound of blaring horns outside the car. His hand fumbled for the seatbelt release and then the car door lever. Wrenching himself free, he kicked open the door and staggered out of the car.

  He stood and steadied himself on the side of his smashed Alfa Romeo. Farringdon Street looked like the aftermath of a motorway pile up. Bits of motor vehicles and shattered glass littered the road. A trail of cars cut a jagged line into the distance. The force of the collision had thrown Blake’s Alfa onto the opposite pavement.

  With adrenaline still boiling inside him, Blake looked back to the far side of the road. His eyes locked onto the people carrier. As he focused in, he could see that its doors were open and its occupants had fled.

  He staggered across the road, weaving an irregular path between the stationary jam of vehicles towards the people carrier. Cautiously he peered into the open front passenger door. In the foot well, surrounded by spent bullet cases, was a wooden box. It took a moment for Blake to remember where he had seen it before. Then it came to him. He bent down and picked it up. Directly above the box’
s brass lock was a triangular dent in the wood. He recalled the box falling from Angelo Ricard’s hands and hitting the edge of his desk. Blake felt the growing thud of his pulse in his neck. He stared at the box for a moment and then flicked the lock open. Slowly he lifted the lid as anger knotted his insides. The box contained a red felt insert and cut into it were the perfect silhouettes of a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol and a tubular sound suppressor. His fingers slackened their grip and the box fell onto the passenger seat.

  Blake stood up and punched his fist down onto the roof of the people carrier. Quickly finding his mobile in his pocket, he dialled a number. As the phone rang, he tried to blink away the vision of Alina’s slumped body in the passenger seat of his Alfa Romeo.

  After an age, Milton answered the phone.

  ‘The Hawksmoor killer,’ said Blake, emotion welling up from his chest.

  ‘Vincent, is that you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Vincent?’

  ‘It’s Angelo Ricard,’ he said finally.

  Part IV

  Revelation 2:17

  Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.

  Chapter 51