‘You eat humans,’ she shot back.
Banes shrugged. ‘Yeah, you have a point there. But I’m direct about it. I need to eat, so I eat. I need to survive, so I survive. It’s nothing personal; it’s just that I’ve been around for far too long to begin to be considerate now. Hey,’ he said, seeing ire built up in her eyes, ‘at least you’re direct as well. You see something you don’t like, and you try to fix it. You’re trying to make your world a better place to live in, and I respect that. You could have just stood back and thought to yourself, “oh, that’s terrible,” and moved on with your life, but instead you acted.’
‘Surprisingly, Banes, your respect means very little to me.’
‘I know,’ Banes said, taking a drink, ‘but the point of the matter is this; we’re both fucked by this.’
‘So?’ she asked. ‘Any ideas on how to unfuck this?’
‘Run,’ he said.
‘Seriously?’
‘Am I being. Sweetheart, there are only really two types of people in this world; the quick, and the dead. If you’re on a ship during a storm, you don’t survive by challenging the storm to a fight, you just go with it until the storm passes. Which, of course, might not happen in your lifetime, but everything passes in the end.’
‘But these are vampires,’ she said, ‘who want to create a vampire state, which might outlast you.’
‘Then I’ll ride it out,’ he said. ‘Or do you really think that me, you, and your presumably assorted team of hunters, can bring down Rebirth?’
‘We’ve got to try, at least,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘Sweetheart, you might not understand this, but for you, everything will be over in what…sixty years, anyway? If that? I’ve been alive for centuries, and I want to keep staying alive as long as possible. Or, at least, I don’t want to die on this planet. If I die, it’ll be somewhere with another sky above my head, and another earth under my feet. I want die off this planet and live impossibly. So, I’m not sorry if I don’t want to risk it on something as stupid as trying to stop Rebirth.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ she muttered. ‘So, are you going to reply to Tycho?’
‘I don’t want to,’ he said.
‘I’m pretty sure that you don’t actually have a choice in the matter,’ she said, leaning back in her seat. ‘You’re going to join Rebirth as my spy.’
He laughed. ‘You’re joking. There’s no goddamn way I’m joining.’
‘I’m not going to, as you phrased it, ‘sleepwalk’ into this, Banes,’ she said.
‘You’re not,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told you what you need to do, and that’s run away.’
‘And go where exactly?’ she said. ‘My entire life is here. I have family, a boyfriend, a job, a house. I can’t just leave.’
‘Yeah, you’ve got a point,’ Banes said. ‘And I’m guessing that you and your family won’t be anyone Rebirth will be feeding on anyway, you could just roll with it. I mean, it really won’t be too different to how things are now.’
‘I can’t just sit back and watch that unfold knowing what’s going on,’ she said.
‘Yes, you can, everyone does it all the time,’ Banes said.
‘No-one I can respect,’ she said.
‘Well, I’m cutting my bets and moving on again,’ he said. ‘I reckon I can make it out of the country before your blackmail reaches its targets and once I’m gone from here I don’t think the Americans will find me again for a long, long time.’
‘So, the American hunters don’t scare you anymore?’ she asked, cocking her head slightly to the side.
‘If you run fast enough then no-one can catch you,’ he said. ‘I can spend a decade or so out of the way. You can come with me if you want, I can run pretty far and you’re going to want to get the hell of the dodge. Tycho’s doing something very stupid and it’s going to blow up outside of Britain and it’s going to get messy.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘Oh God, you don’t know shit, do you? There are other vampire organisations around the world who will become involved in this, if they aren’t already. Well, two, there are two who are going to get involved. The Shield of Scarlet, and the Blood Thieves – do you know who they are?’
The hunter shook her head. ‘Nope.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ he said. ‘They’re the largest and most powerful vampire organisations in the world. The Shield controls most of mainland Europe; they started in France and spread out from there, headed by a woman from Paris called Cleo Loi-Sanglant. She’s several thousand years old, roots back in Ancient Egypt, and is advised by her grandmother, who’s just about the oldest vampire still alive. They believe that vampires should live alongside humans in secret, with minimal interference from each other, and keep order among the vampire population and get rid of any bothering humans. They’re…fairly tame.
‘The Blood Thieves, however, are not. They’re lead by a vampire called Yin Luan. He’s relatively young; rumour has it that he rose to the top by killing his superiors. They started in China and now have control over most of East Asia, but unlike the Shield, who spread diplomatically and interworked smaller clans into their system, the Blood Thieves invaded. With them, it’s obey, or be destroyed. The Blood Thieves are more involved in human affairs, just a lot more behind the scenes. Just carefully enough so that they have a slight bend in the law to pass by. These are not people to fuck about with.’
‘But why would they want to become involved in this?’
‘Because they’re already doing their own thing,’ Banes said. ‘Rebirth will be a threat to their power and existence; not even the Blood Thieves have a systematic way of killing and eating humans. Tycho’s end goal is for vampires to one day be able to live in the open. Both the Blood Thieves and the Shield thrive in the shadows.’
‘So, the Shield of Scarlet work diplomatically,’ the hunter said. ‘Is there any way we could get in contact with them? Do you think that they know about Rebirth?’
Banes shrugged, ‘I’d be surprised if they didn’t know already but they won’t talk to a human and I’m not asking.’
‘So your brilliant solution to all of this is just leave?’ she said.
‘Hey, if it works then it’s not stupid,’ he said.
‘It is stupid,’ she said. ‘Banes, if Tycho or Cecilia Marr found out that you were working with a hunter, what do you think their reaction would be?’
Banes took a long drink, a shuddering uneasy sensation sweeping from his stomach to the soles of his feet.
‘Tycho?’ he said. ‘Hard to say. It’s Cecilia who I’m worried about, since I don’t know a goddamn thing about her, but I don’t care to find out. Why? What are you doing?’
‘I’ve been recording our meetings,’ she said, opening her handbag to show him a voice recorder. ‘Meetings of you explicitly using a human hunter to do your dirty work for them in return for you spying. Things I can’t imagine that anyone at Rebirth, or indeed the rest of your friends would be happy with.’
The glass of his cup cracked beneath his skin.
‘We will have a new deal,’ she said, ‘that, in addition to me hunting whatever vampires you throw at me, you will spy on Rebirth for me, otherwise I will release all of the recordings. Rebirth have the majority of vampires in the country on their side; it shouldn’t take them too long to find everything. That on top of the American hunters, I can’t imagine you’d be alive for much longer.’
‘Jesus Christ, get fucked!’ The glass shattered in his hand. The hunter remained sat down, her eyes narrowing. From her jacket pocket, she was clutching a brightly coloured water pistol, aimed at him. ‘I am not doing this. Giving you the names of vampires I wanted dead anyway was fine, this is ridiculous. Look, sweetheart, you know that deep down in your heart, this ultimately isn’t going to change anything. So what if Tycho and Cecilia Marr want to eat people en masse – that’s what the whole world is doing in one way or another. Everything is just going to get extr
emely messy for us in the meantime.’
‘You don’t have a community,’ she said. ‘You don’t have any bonds, any connection to other people. You seem to actively shun being a part of something so this isn’t I expect you to understand. And I can’t just sit back and watch this happen.
He took a long drink of paint thinner, ‘you’re going to get us both killed here.’
‘So,’ she said, ‘the Old Hunters, can they help?’
Banes scoffed, ‘they’re gone,’ he said. ‘Clue’s in the name, sweetheart. They were the Old Hunters. The ones who took down the Blood Coup were the very, and I mean very, last of their order.’
She sighed, ‘great.’
A silence stretched out between them.
‘I’m throwing you under the fucking bus if they catch us,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t expect anything less.’
Chapter Seven
The Grime Of London
The streets around him were deserted, as he walked by rows of shuttered-up windows belonging to the massive, identical, white rows of townhouses in Belgravia. The snow had melted, giving way to endless deep puddles and everything seemed to grow louder against the water. Around him, Banes could hear the amplified noise of London; the constant hum of traffic, helicopters and sirens, but none of that approached these streets. Cars lined the streets, though there was no traffic on the roads, and no-one around.
He arrived at the house he had been told to go to. From the outside, it looked no different to the rest of the street. Banes knocked and pushed through the door, stepping into a large hallway. It was clearly a show house, with a slightly overbearing fragrance of flower perfume hanging in the air, although all of the flowers, which sat in vases on every other available flat surface, were made of plastic.
He opened the door to the living room, where a dozen or so vampires sat on a cluster of blue and white sofas and chairs. Banes knew that everyone was given staggered arrival times, and that he was the last person to join. His eyes scanned over the faces, feeling a flare of nervousness shoot through him as he tried to recognise them.
One of the Benkowski clan was here; Banes was fairly sure that she was Drey Benkowski, the firstborn granddaughter of the clan’s matriarch. Drey smiled in his direction as he sat down on the last remaining ottoman, curling the end of her long golden blonde plait. She had a wholesome, plump attractiveness to her, though Banes knew it was best to stay away from her on pain of being cut off from her family’s butcher’s.
His eyes passed to Nox Sanguinis, who he had had a brief relationship with a few years ago, who winked at him. Nox had cut his long, silvery white hair short, though he still had the springy cowlick at the front, which Banes had loved to play with when they were together. Besides him was his cousin, Mal Balewa who, like Banes, had heterochromia eyes, though hers were bright blue and hazel brown, and a bob of black hair. He recognised only one more person in passing, a woman with orange eyes named Rose Bolton. The rest were strangers to him. He caught the eye of a young man in an overly large hoodie, who looked barely out of his teens, with his black hair in a ponytail, his arms crossed, and a disquieting energy in his shadowed, crimson eyes. He looked away. The only person not sitting down was a muscular woman leaning against the wall with a bored air around her, who Banes could tell was Rebirth staff.
A tense silence stretched out in the room.
There was the creak of a door opening, and everyone turned to the entrance as a pair of heels clipped along the hallway and a woman entered the room. Instantly, Banes could smell smoke and rubble in the air, hear the shriek of air raid sirens, the thundering anti-aircraft missiles, and radios and bass bands, and taste charred flesh, earth, and tea. She had strong, wiry limbs, an hourglass figure, and classically strong good looks. There was a hint of a smile brushing around her full lips, and a teasing, satisfied look in her bright lime green eyes, which seemed to catch the light and glow. Her thick, golden hair had been curled, and hung to her shoulders with a green ribbon in it that matched her eyes perfectly. Her clothes were dated; a short-sleeved green woollen dress, the exact same colour of the ribbon, which fell to her knees and pinched at her waist, and somewhat bulky, black laced shoes. He thought if he touched Cecilia’s skin then his hand would come away burnt.
‘Are we all here?’ she asked, as she strolled to the front of the room. Her voice had a plummy, Queen’s English catch to it. She looked over to the woman stood against the wall, who nodded. ‘Excellent,’ she said.
‘Greetings, all. I am Cecilia Marr, the co-commander of Rebirth, along with our founder, Tycho Feigrey. You all have been personally invited into Rebirth by our leadership. As such, we believe that you are all distinguished from the rest of our recruits, in that we are aware of your specialised skill sets, with which you can use to benefit and be rewarded by Rebirth for doing so. As such, your training will differ slightly from the bulk of our recruits. You will be placed in an intensive two-week training course, so that you will all be given at least a basic understanding of the many different skills required for Rebirth, after which you will be given your designated roles in Rebirth.
‘And we need experienced, skilled vampires as never before. Our culture has been broken by hunters and human myth. I am sure that many of you have been attacked by humans before, that you may still have scars left by them,’ she said as her eyes shifted around the group. Banes felt the burn marks on his shoulder flare as Cecilia’s gaze flickered over them. ‘That you were driven from your rightful place. You have seen and suffered through their needless violence and fear. My parents were killed by humans, and I was raised among them. I understand first-hand humanity’s stupidity and waste.
‘But the human dominance of this world has run its length. This is the era which will mark the beginning of our victory. We are there already, in the shadows and corners of their establishments, slowly guiding the world to where we need it to be. What we want is quite simple; we at Rebirth want a society with nature restored to how it should be, with us as the top apex, and humans as prey. We will eat well. We will live well, no longer threatened by hunters and famine.
‘This is a society which will also benefit humans as well. For most of them, we will only bring positives; a greater strength and stability for this country, a country which will grow unwavering under our leadership and guidance. We will simply be filling our role in nature of culling the herd of weakness and disease. Our prey will not be the type of human who the world cares about. Our prey will be those who contribute nothing, humans who have no value, humans who are placeless, humans who are doing nothing with their lives expect being a drain on the resources of others. Humans already understand that on some level, sacrifice is needed in order to preserve their way of live, and as long as that sacrifice is not seen, they do not care.
‘This is what Rebirth will achieve; a world where most will feel no struggles, no hardships, since we will be in control. You joined Rebirth. You are part of us now, part of this great movement. What we need from you now is for you to strive, to achieve, and to bring to vampires the greatness that we were born to seize.
‘In this room,’ she said, her eyes flickering around each of them in turn, ‘we have anti-hunters, and researchers, and analysers, and warriors, and specialists. People who will build Rebirth.
‘In forty-eight hours’ time, you will be taken from London to the training base, to spend an extensive two weeks. You will not need to take anything with you, since everything will be provided for you, and what you do bring with you, such as your mobile devices, will be seized upon your arrival for security reasons. It’s important for you to get to know one another; you will be spending a lot of time together, and though you are entering different sectors of Rebirth, these contacts you will make together as Class Forty-Four will be important. We have become fragmented from each other. It’s important now that we unite. We can triumph over humans, but we cannot do this alone. I hope that this has given you a deeper understanding of what is expected of yo
u for Rebirth to succeed.’
Her eyes scanned over the room, her body seemed to grow larger as they looked at her.
‘Does anyone have any questions?’
‘Yeah,’ Nox said. ‘How quickly after the training will we begin to properly work for Rebirth?’
‘Almost immediately,’ Cecilia said. ‘You will be given a twenty-four-hour resting period, then afterwards, you will begin your work at Rebirth.’
‘Sounds good,’ Nox said, with a grin.
‘Any more questions?’ Cecilia asked. ‘No? Then you can see yourselves out. I look forward to working with you.’
As they stood up to leave, Banes could feel Cecilia’s eyes settle on him. He looked up. She smiled at him, and he saw a glint of her fangs as she lowered her eyes. He sighed as he stepped out into the empty street, breathing in the cool, night air.
A cluster of them were lingering, and Banes found himself standing next to Nox, while a few took off sharply without saying a word.
‘So much for unity,’ Nox muttered, as two walked blankly past them. Banes watched the guy in the hoodie ignore all of them and stalk off. Drey alone gave him a friendly wave and set off.
‘Do you know any of them?’ Banes asked.
‘A few,’ Nox said, kicking the ground. ‘Obviously I knew Mal, but none of the rest are people I’d ever considered friends. Anyway, didn’t think you’d still be around, Intuneric,’ he said, with a grin. ‘Always surprised that you’d made it through to the Eighties unscathed.’
‘Yeah, this is why I prefer hanging out with humans,’ he said, running his hand through his hair. ‘They don’t say stupid shit like that.’
‘Humans say stupid shit all the time,’ Nox said.
‘True, but they don’t constantly express surprise that I’m still alive,’ Banes said. ‘Besides, you’re one to talk.’
Nox shrugged as he fished around in his pocket for a cigarette. ‘True. Heard you’ve not been back in London long. Soho’s pretty much dead. The Admiral in Peckham is still going if you’re interested.’
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