by Andy Maslen
“Time to go,” Lily said. And she pushed me to open the door. As we’d agreed, I acted scared and cringed as I stumbled upright outside the car. It was bitterly cold, and all I could hear was the slap of waves against the wooden pilings holding up the jetty that protruded from the bank into the river. That, and the hissing susurrus of the lamia’s unearthly voices.
The target turned to me and as the others made to follow her, she waved them back. I could hear sounds coming from her mouth but they weren’t English or any European language I’d ever heard before.
When the target was separated from the band of lamia, Lily threw off her cloak and swung her crossbow up.
“Stop there!” she cried, levelling the point of the quarrel at the target’s chest.
“Yes. Demon. Stop there,” Ariane shouted, emerging from the shadows of the shipping containers in a line with David, Shimon and Jim flanking her.
The target whirled round to assess this new threat and that’s when Lily fired her crossbow. The quarrel hissed across the gap between her and the target but it just bounced off her and clattered harmlessly to the ground. The other lamia were clearly waiting to be told what to do because they stood still, just watching. The target turned back to Lily with a smile – just a normal one, thank God – across her face. She said nothing, but lifted the hem of her top. I was taken aback; I thought maybe she was going to flash us or something, but instead of a bra she revealed a glittery silver vest. Chain mail! I’d thought she was moving awkwardly when she got out of the car.
She put her head on one side and pouted. A mock-sad face that looked all the more horrible because we knew she’d outwitted us.
“What’s the matter, Ariane? You use medieval weapons: it seemed appropriate to counter them with medieval protection.”
Then she straightened up to her full height and pointed at me and Lily with one hand, from whose fingers, long, bloody talons had emerged, and Ariane and the men with the other.
“Kill them all!”
Then there was no more time for thinking.
The lamia surrounding the target ran at us. Their movements were disorientating: scuttling, slithering, springing. As if they had copied every predator that had ever killed another animal.
Instinctively, I raised my crossbow and fired at the closest creature, a female. I only grazed her shoulder, but of course it was enough. She skidded to a halt, screeched once and began that horrible quaking and shivering before she exploded in a welter of blood and tissue. Around me the others were fighting off lamia, whose clawing hands and dangling jaws were within inches of their skin.
Jim and Shimon had been busy with protection for us too: it wasn’t just the target who’d hit on the idea of chainmail. From a shark-hunting website, Jim had ordered long gauntlets and other items of lightweight but virtually indestructible chain mail. Each of us wore a mail neckpiece that would protect the blood vessels and skin of our throats. Our wrists were also protected with the same material. It wasn’t perfect – no armour ever can be. Even those old knights could be killed with a thrust to the groin or the armpit. But it was effective, and it gave us added confidence as we fought with the lamia.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Shimon shoot a lamia at close range, just as it was rearing back to strike at Ariane. She was pulling her sword from the belly of a female.
Next to me, I saw Lily decapitate a male as it sprang at her. Head and body burst separately and the noise of the splashing was audible above the clamour of the fight. We were fighting in a lake of blood, but there still seemed to be overwhelming numbers of lamia ranged against us.
Then Jim bellowed our codeword.
“Deck!”
We had rehearsed in Bloomsbury in the old ballroom, which Jim had kitted out like a mini-gym, with thick foam mats covering the old sprung wooden floor. On his command we had to go limp, instantly and let ourselves drop, no matter what we were doing or what position we were holding. He had us walking, pretending to be on the phone; sitting at tables; wrestling each other; standing on one leg; all kinds of weird and everyday activities. And every time he yelled “Deck!” we had to let ourselves fall like stones dropped from a building.
So it was this time.
We all collapsed in perfect synchrony as if a puppeteer had wearied of our antics and cut the strings. Well, not all.
Shimon and Jim remained upright. Each of them held one of the big black guns out in front of him, hands clasped as if in prayer.
With a clear field of fire, they could discharge the weapons without worrying about hitting one of us. The noise was incredible. These weren’t the cracks and pops of TV or films. The guns seemed to explode each time they pulled the triggers. I covered my ears as they fired dozens of shots at the lamia.
Even though they scattered as soon as we fell, the lamia were defenceless against the guns and at least seven exploded in sprays of blood as bullets filled with salcie usturoi split apart inside them and released the poison into their bloodstream.
Shimon and Jim kept pulling the triggers until the guns were empty. Then they dropped them and grabbed crossbows, loaded again by those who’d been lying flat on the blood-soaked ground. Lily and I leapt to our feet and so did Ariane and David.
We looked around. There was no sign of the target or any of the other lamia. Once they’re dead you can’t really count them – there’s nothing left to count. But I thought I’d seen enough go down that we now outnumbered them.
“Spread out,” Jim said. “But stay with your partner.”
He and Shimon, Ariane and David, Lily and I split up and started a search around the containers for the target. We were sure she wouldn’t leave without trying to kill Ariane or me.
I was shivering. The night was cold, but I was wrapped up against the weather. This was an ancient, primal fear that was setting my muscles aquiver. Kill or be killed. Run or be eaten. For all our weaponry, for all our protection, I felt it, deep in my soul: these creatures were stronger than us. Faster than us. And far, far more dangerous than us. They’d evolved over hundred of thousands of years to do one thing: prey on humans. Why were we any different to all the countless millions of people they’d killed? Then Lily spoke, derailing my wandering train of thought.
“Up ahead, Caroline. Lamia.”
I looked. Two lamia were crawling up the side of a container. As they reached the top and righted themselves, standing erect to look around for us, Lily and I raised our crossbows, aimed and fired.
Up there, the bursting was spectacularly horrid. Bright scarlet sprays in the moonlight, like showers of rubies. And I remembered what made us different.
We heard rapid firing from the two Glock pistols. Jim and Shimon must have caught more lamia. As Lily reloaded, I turned to her.
“Why have you stuck with these ancient things for so long? Why not switch to modern weapons like Frederick Arnold and his chapter in new York?”
“It is Ariane, mainly. She says they are better for urban hunting. Less noisy, less likely to draw unwanted attention. The crossbow is silent. Can you imagine loosing off shots from one of those in Soho or Covent Garden?
She had a point. London still isn’t Manhattan, let alone Sao Paulo. Gunfire tends to make the news – or Twitter these days – almost as soon as it happens.
We carried on, emerging from between two containers onto a piece of scrubland that led directly down to the river. I gasped. It was a beautiful sight. Ahead of us, stretching from one bank to the other, was the Thames Barrier. Its seven piers gleamed in the moonlight: sentinels protecting London, their silver cowls like monks’ hoods drawn forward over their faces.
I’ve learned you should never let your guard down when there are lamia about. So it proved that night. As we stood, transfixed, a lamia leapt onto Lily’s back with a hideous screeching cry. She fell to the ground, trying to wrench it free, but it had dug its talons into her shoulders and hips and was clinging to her like some monstrous ape. This one had shed its clothing and those corded m
uscles gleamed in the moonlight as it tried to get those deadly fangs into Lily’s neck. Fortunately, the mail collar worked perfectly and I saw those glassy teeth break on the metal links with an audible snap. The lamia screeched in pain and sprang backwards, hand covering its distended mouth.
I raced in, drew my blade and slashed wildly at the lamia’s face. I caught it a glancing blow across the cheek, but glancing blows are enough to destroy them and the lamia knew it was dead even before it shuddered, wailed and split apart.
Lily was panting and fell to her hands and knees.
“Are you hurt, Lily?” I asked.
In the world of the cutters, that question means much, much more than, “Do I need to take you to A&E?” It demands absolute honesty and therefore absolute courage and devotion to the cutter tradition. If you answer truthfully, and admit to having been bitten, your interlocutor will kill you there and then. No more questions. She looked up at me and answered.
“It scratched me. That’s all.” She pulled up her top to reveal four deep scratches on the soft patch of skin between her hipbone and her ribs. They were bleeding badly, but the lamia don’t transfer the parasites through their claws, only their teeth. Lily and I looked into each other’s eyes and we both let out a sigh: we’d been holding our breath. The wounds would need tending, but Lily could stand, and fight, again.
There were no more lamia visible out here on the riverbank, so we turned and headed back towards the fortress of shipping containers and the killing ground inside their walls.
Then there was a shout. It was the target. I’d recognise that haughty tone anywhere. But there was something else in her voice. An unmistakable note of triumph.
“Cutters! Come here. It is time to stop fighting.”
“Shit!” Lily said.
We ran towards the gap between two containers. Their corrugated steel walls seemed to close in on us as we turned sideways and squeezed ourselves out at the far end.
When we emerged, the sight I had been dreading ever since Ariane first told me about the target’s true nature revealed itself to me.
She – it – was standing with her back to a container, gripping my dear David around the neck and holding him close to her like a shield. Facing her at a distance of perhaps ten metres, were Ariane, Jim and Shimon. They had their weapons raised but looked unsure. There was no way they could take the target without killing or at least seriously wounding David. Lily and I raised our bows too, but more for show than with any serious intent to shoot.
Velds had even moved her head behind David’s so that for a moment it seemed as though he was the one speaking. Her voice was hypnotic.
“This ends now, cutter. You have pursued – and destroyed – my family and me for long enough. You have always presented us as vermin. As dirty things like rats or cockroaches, to be put down at will. But we are highly evolved creatures. We are Homo sapiens too. Our suffix, lamia? That makes us more evolved than you. Not less. More! How dare you treat us as something to be exterminated? Who gave you the right to decide that another species is to be annihilated? Your bleeding heart animal activists would be up in arms if we were dolphins or cheetahs. Why should the lamia be treated any differently?”
With that, she slid one long-taloned hand around David’s neck and dexterously undid the buckles on the two leather straps holding his mail collar in place. She dropped it to the hard ground where it chinked softly.
“Your rhetoric doesn’t interest me, filth,” Ariane said.
Velds laughed. “Well it should. Look behind you, cutter.”
We turned away from Velds and David but only in time to see two lamia holding long metal spikes rush at Jim and Shimon. They’d torn them from a security fence surrounding part of the old factory next door. We tried to aim and fire all at once, but it was already too late. As our quarrels flickered through the moonlight, the lamia plunged the triple-spiked lengths of steel into Jim and Shimon. Both men were impaled from behind and screamed as the wicked tips of the fenceposts emerged from their chests. None of us found our marks and we drew our blades now that our crossbows were useless. The two lamia bent to retrieve the Glocks and hurled them far into the middle of the Thames. Too far even to hear a splash. They chittered gleefully as they faced us again, mouths dropped open like trapdoors. With a battle cry spoken in what she calls “the old language”, Ariane sprang up on the two beasts, whirling her sword around in a complicated series of movements that seemed to disorientate the lamia. In a single, continuous, slashing circle, she fetched their heads from their shoulders. They were dead before the salcie usturoi blew up their blood cells and reduced them to black pools on the concrete.
It was now just Ariane, Lily and me facing Velds. Her fangs were fully erect, glistening as the moonlight caught them, pearls of saliva dripping in long strands from her lower lip.
I shouted at her. “You can’t turn David. He is pure. His blood is stronger than your power to change him. You bit him before and he is still human. We tested him.”
“Why do you think that?” she said.
“He told me. You bit him. But the parasites couldn’t survive. His white blood cells are too strong.”
David’s eyes were wide with terror. He hadn’t spoken at all since we’d found him in Velds’s grip and I think he was almost catatonic with fear.
“Oh, I bit him all right, Caroline,” she said, smiling. I bit him as I fucked him. But not with these.” She ran her long tongue lasciviously over the shafts of the translucent teeth that hovered so close to my husband’s skin.
Before I could say, or think, anything, she reared back and plunged her teeth into his throat. He convulsed in her arms and I could see his throat working as she fed on him. I knew what was happening. In that instant, thousands of parasites were swarming down the hollow tubes inside her fangs and into David’s bloodstream. The frantic action of his stressed heart whirled them away into the major vessels and through his body, round his lungs where they would pick up vital oxygen and back into the chambers of his heart.
I gasped and sprang forward, dropping my crossbow.
Velds pulled away, and I yelled with rage and despair as blood jetted out of David’s torn arteries. She laughed at me. A grating, slimy, gurgling sound as his blood ran down her throat.
She hadn’t drained him. That would just have killed him and she was crueler than that. Like her hateful ancestor, Peta Velds delighted in causing pain, not merely ending life. She pushed him hard in the back and he staggered towards us, clutching his neck, where the blood, dark purple in the moonlight, ran and pulsed between his clamped fingers. I ran to him, cradling him in my arms while Lily and Ariane fired at Velds.
But it was too late. Her reflexes were lightning fast and she swatted the two crossbow bolts in midair as if they were slow-moving flies. She darted forward, making them flinch, but then sprang upwards 15 feet onto the roof of a shipping container. She looked down at us for a moment, eyes gleaming in triumph, then ran off into the darkness, her heels clanging on the tops of each new container she jumped to. Chasing her was pointless. Ariane knew it. We all knew it.
I looked down at David. He was gulping convulsively, and his muscles were twitching as the massive dose of adrenaline released in the fight pushed his body to run. But it wasn’t just adrenaline that was coursing through his system. The deadly spawn of Peta Velds were in there too, already wreaking havoc on David’s human DNA, beginning the inexorable process that would change him into a lamia.
He looked up into my eyes.
“Hospital, Caro. You have to get me to the hospital. A&E. It’s bad: look at all this blood. Why aren’t you moving?”
I just sat there, cradling his head on my lap. I was crying, and tears and mucus were running down the sides of my mouth. He was lost to me and though David didn’t know what was coming, I did.
“I’m sorry, David. I can’t take you. I love you, my darling. I love you.”
Lily squatted beside me and put her hand in mine.
; “Come, Caroline. Come with me to the car. You don’t need to see this.”
In a trance, I lowered David’s head to the ground. He looked up at me in disbelief.
“Where are you going, Caro?” he said. “You have to get me to hospital.”
I couldn’t look at him. I’d have wanted to stay.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ariane kneel down behind David and raise his head onto her lap, just as I had only a few moments earlier. He looked up at her with pleading eyes that failed to notice the curved dagger she drew from its sheath on her left hip.
She leaned her face down to his and smiled, sorrowfully.
“Sleep now, David. She cannot harm you anymore.”
I turned away and only heard the whisper of her blade as she put my David beyond the reach of Peta Velds for ever.
Lily supported me as I crumpled. I fell to my knees and howled like a wounded beast.
“Come,” she said. “We must leave this place.
She led me to the car and put me in the rear seat. Then she rejoined Ariane. I assume to put David’s body in the river where the turning tide would pull it out beyond the reach of humanity to find, let alone the lamia.
They came back. Lily drove us to Bloomsbury.
All the way there, we sat in silence. Only as we got out of the car in the underground carpark did Ariane turn to me and speak.
“We must stay strong. We must rebuild our chapter. We must search for the target once again.”
47
Hunt Book of Ariane Van Helsing, 8th January 2011
After I put David beyond harm’s way, we almost had to carry Caroline back to the car. To see a loved one snatched from you by a lamia is bad enough. To then see them destroyed by a cutter is worse. For me, sadly, it was not the first time. For her, tragically, it was. In any case, not all those who witness such an act survive with their minds intact. Caroline is different.