‘So, I’ve just got to live with this?’ Banes said. ‘I don’t have any purpose in Rebirth, and you know it. You brought me in because you’re lonely, and Cecilia just wants to use me to get to you. What happens when this game of yours doesn’t work out? What happens the next time you have a fight, and she wants to send a message? You’re expecting me just to put up with being tortured whenever?!’
‘For now,’ Tycho said. ‘We’ve all had worse, Banes.’
‘That doesn’t mean it hurts any less.’
‘Please, Banes,’ Tycho said, ‘keep your head down. Keep on working, and behave like none of this happened. It won’t be for long, but I need you to cooperate with me.’
‘This is bullshit, Tycho,’ Banes said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tycho said, his voice hollow, ‘but you really have no choice. Cecilia won’t let you leave now, and if you try, she will drag your execution out as much as she can, to make it as painful as possible for the both of us. You’re a pawn in this, Banes.’
‘Fuck…’ Banes groaned and leaned back in his seat, wincing at the pain that shot through his arm. He turned to look at Tycho; up close, he looked even more exhausted than before. His eyes were ringed with heavy, dark circles. The tiredness reached his eyes, and instead of the icy, stern, decisive gaze he was accustomed to seeing in Tycho’s eyes, he saw that they were being drained. ‘You’re the one responsible for this.’
‘I know,’ Tycho said, bringing his hand up to Banes, for a second Banes thought that he might stroke his hair or carcass his cheek, but the hand fell on his shoulder leaving a light, lingering touch. ‘Take a few days off while your arm heals, then come back to Rebirth and work. With any luck, Cecilia and I will reach an agreement, and she won’t have to use you as my whipping boy.’
‘Thanks, Tycho,’ Banes muttered, opening the car door, ‘I appreciate it.’
‘And Banes?’ Tycho said. ‘You do have a purpose in Rebirth.’
‘I’m sure I do,’ he said.
Chapter Fourteen
Not To Be Cynical
‘This is something I need to be a part of?’ Cain asked, sitting awkwardly on an ottoman in the Stones’ living room as he ate a shortbread biscuit Poppy had put out for them.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Mitch said.
‘So do you really think Rebirth will come after us?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Poppy said. ‘Rebirth are far more powerful than we ever imagined, and we alone cannot stop them anymore.’
‘It was a mistake letting Intuneric go,’ Leah said, not looking up from her laptop screen. ‘We could have used him.’
‘We couldn’t physically force him into Rebirth,’ Khalida shot back, ‘that blackmail could only go so far.’
‘Besides,’ Mitch said, ‘it’s safer this way. If Rebirth ever got to Banes, then I doubt he would have held off on telling them about us. That being said; for all we know, he could still be working with them.’
‘You should have killed him, Khalida,’ Poppy said. ‘Or, Mitch should kill him, since you’re too close to him now.’
‘No,’ Khalida said, ‘that wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Wouldn’t it?’ Poppy asked. ‘That was our original plan.’
‘I don’t think that he’s the worst vampire we’ll come across,’ Khalida said.
‘Him simply not being the worst doesn’t make him a good vampire,’ Mitch said. ‘He’s still killed people, Khalida.’
‘And he’ll kill again,’ Poppy said.
‘Banes isn’t the enemy here,’ Khalida said, looking into Poppy’s eyes. ‘He’s been persecuted himself, both by vampires and humans. I think for Banes, we can…turn the other way.’
‘Sweet fucking Jesus, you’re defending him,’ Mitch muttered.
‘He’s not important anymore,’ Khalida said. ‘He’s just one guy.’
‘Khalida knew him best out of all of you,’ Cain said, ‘you should trust her judgement.’
Poppy sighed and brushed at her braids. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘he’s cut loose. We have other concerns to be getting on with.’
‘Like how Rebirth could kill us?’ Cain asked.
‘We do need an escape plan,’ Poppy said. ‘It’s something Mitch and I have been discussing, something that we all need to be ready for when we need to leave at very little notice and go into hiding. I think it would be naïve to assume that there is no need to make such preparations.’
‘My father owned a chain of caravan parks and holiday centres which I have a free lifetime access to,’ Mitch said, ‘we could use them and my mother’s family cottage in Snowdonia. Rebirth might be expecting us to use them, but I don’t think that they could target all the sites at once.’
‘We’ve also been withdrawing cash to use,’ Poppy said, ‘not enough to be noticed, but we have two thousand pounds ready to use. We’ve also been stockpiling petrol for the car. Leah, you know someone who can make us fake identities, right?’
Leah shrugged. ‘Yeah, what do you need?’
‘Passports and driving licences for all of us,’ Poppy said. ‘I’m sorry Cain, but you are a part of this now.’
‘Don’t you guys have families?’ he asked. ‘Khalida, what about your mums’?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, turning to Poppy. ‘What about them?’
‘I thought you were an orphan,’ Leah said.
‘I am,’ Khalida said. ‘But I was adopted by my cousin and her wife who raised me. Do you think Rebirth will come after them?’
‘What do they do?’ Poppy asked. ‘Their careers and lives? Are they respectable?’
‘I guess so,’ Khalida said. ‘My cousin is a physics lecturer and her wife is part of a company which manufactures equipment for laboratories, they’re active Labour Party members and they like gardening.’
‘In that case, I don’t think they’ll be targeted by Rebirth,’ Poppy said. ‘From what we were able to tell from May’s computer, Rebirth seem to be very selective about who they target. I highly doubt that they’ll go after them.’
‘And you?’ Khalida asked, ‘what about your family?’
‘I’m not on speaking terms with them,’ Poppy said, ‘and haven’t been for several years.’
‘My mum passed away a few years ago,’ Mitch said. ‘And my dad and I don’t talk, so really there’s just my aunts in Aberystwyth, and cousins and half-siblings I don’t speak to.’
‘My mum died ages ago, then my dad committed suicide soon after,’ Leah said. ‘It sounds really fucked up,’ she said as Cain gasped, ‘but it he didn’t want to outlive me, which he would have.’
‘So aside from Khalida, none of us really have families then?’ Cain said.
‘I guess not,’ Poppy said. ‘Why, are you have orphan too?’
Cain nodded and took a sip of tea, ‘my parents died in a house fire when I was sixteen.’
‘Christ,’ Mitch said. ‘We’re a sad fucking lot, aren’t we?’
‘So we’re going to have to go on the run?’ Cain said.
‘Unless you want Rebirth to kill you, yeah,’ Poppy said.
‘But what about our jobs?’ he asked. ‘I can’t just not show up to work, nor can Khalida, or you,’ he said. ‘We’ll all get fired.’
‘Or,’ Poppy said with an overstretched patience, ‘you could go to work and get killed.’
Cain paled and took a drink of tea, ‘this is just a lot to take in.’
‘I’m sorry, Cain,’ Khalida said.
‘It’s a shame we couldn’t get into Faizan’s computer though,’ Poppy said, leaning back on the sofa, ‘that could have cleared a few more things up for us.’
‘I’m working on it,’ Leah said. ‘Though it’s not my fault, the program was interrupted. It didn’t finish its run, and the files corrupted.’
‘Did Intuneric fuck up?’ Mitch asked.
‘Leah shrugged. ‘This is the same guy who doesn’t use a fucking proxy even though his life literally depends on it; I couldn’t rule it off as an accident.
’
Poppy sighed and stretched her legs out under her desk. ‘And you can’t access Faizan’s computer, can you?’
Leah shook her head. ‘I can’t. The program just copied the files over, and there’s no way that I can remotely hack into their servers. Trust me, I’ve tried.’
‘We have Rebirth’s financial data,’ Poppy said. ‘That’s strong enough evidence in it’s own.’
‘Are you going to release it to the public?’ Cain asked.
Poppy nodded, ‘yep. I have some journalist contacts who I trust - one, I’m already in contact with. Paula Stockport; she’s a freelance now, but she covered the Alpha Dakota scandal for the BBC. We used to share a house together when we were students.’
‘I probably have a few contacts too,’ Leah said. ‘Nothing as impressive as that, but enough to get the ball rolling.’
‘But that’ll be enough,’ Khalida said. ‘Their finances are a smoking gun; it shows that Rebirth have been murdering people to keep them quiet and have links to those in the establishment.’
‘Not to be that guy,’ Cain said, ‘but do you really think that the British public will believe this? I mean…it’s vampires.’
‘I know,’ Poppy said, ‘which is why it’s not going to be the full truth. We leave out the vampire part; instead, we reveal that a large outsider group has made its way into the government, to the point where they have sway in affecting and directing policies and law, with the backing of powerful financiers and a small paramilitary faction.’
‘Not to be cynical,’ Cain said, ‘but even if that’s believed, how will that change anything? We’ve had major leaks before, and barely anything happened.’
‘The final straw,’ Poppy said. ‘The spark in the tinderbox.’
‘Yeah, and I thought that would happen when they privatised the NHS,’ Khalida said.
‘So did I,’ Poppy said. ‘If nothing changes from this, then perhaps the country isn’t worth saving in the first place. I came into this to hunt vampires. This should help us in hunting the vampires.’
‘It could start a revolution,’ Leah muttered.
Poppy shrugged. ‘Then, that will be the side-effect of the hunt.’
‘Okay,’ Cain sighed, ‘things are quickly spiralling, here.’
‘You two are public sector,’ Mitch said. ‘You might be starving by the time the next election comes around. People already are. If this is what it takes, then so be it.’
‘Have you had any luck in finding any Old Hunters?’ Khalida asked.
‘Tracking down any remnants of a secretive order of the Catholic Church, which apparently ceased to exist more than a century ago, hasn’t been easy,’ Poppy said.
‘But,’ Mitch said, ‘it’s not been an entirely fruitless search. The Blood Coup was pretty well covered up. Not entirely, but it was minimised to a small, ultimately irrelevant, half-baked conspiracy. No mention of the Catholic Church, no complete list of the perpetrators, no mention of a pregnant woman being among them; barely anything about it, but the timings match up, and the lack of information made me suspicious.’
‘And the Old Hunters themselves?’ Khalida asked.
‘Not a goddamn clue,’ Mitch said, ‘but I stumbled across a case from Ireland from the Sixties. A priest stabbed a man to death in Dublin with a wooden stake. He was caught, jailed, and excommunicated, but he’s still alive. It’s took a lot of fucking effort, but I managed to get in contact with his next-of-kin, a great-nephew, and it took a lot of persuading for him to agree for us to meet the priest.’
‘We don’t actually believe that he is an Old Hunter himself,’ Poppy said, ‘but we think that he knew of them. So, we’re going to Ireland to meet him.’
‘And did you hear back from the Shield of Scarlet?’ Khalida asked.
‘I did,’ Leah said, her eyes on the screen. ‘Took a while to reach them, but I got an audience. Going to show them this. I’ll be off to Paris in two days’ time.’
‘Let’s hope that they decide to take action,’ Khalida said.
‘But won’t that be another group of vampires coming into the UK?’ Cain asked.
‘My dad used to talk about them,’ Leah said. ‘He only knew them as the French vampires, though; never gave the impression that they were especially sinister.’
‘That doesn’t fill me with hope,’ Mitch said.
‘Look,’ Khalida said, ‘we can’t end this by ourselves, and we can’t control the outcome of what we decide to do anymore, either. I think the Shield is our best option; from what Banes has told me, they seem to hold serious weight against Rebirth.’
‘Let’s hope they’ll be convinced to take action against them then,’ Cain said.
‘And that it won’t escalate into a full-blown vampire war,’ Mitch muttered.
‘Did you find anything else out about Bexhill?’ Khalida asked.
‘Not a thing,’ Poppy said. ‘The most interesting thing that happened there this year is that they found an unexploded war bomb in a building site. Otherwise, it’s just events like a local man being arrested, some drugs being found, a school raising some money. Mitch and I even went down to visit last weekend, just to have a look, and there was nothing there.’
‘I’ve been looking as well, Khalida,’ Leah said, looking up from her screen. ‘Nothing. We even went back decades, but didn’t find a thing.’
‘There’s the possibility that we’re looking into something inconsequential,’ Mitch said. ‘We’re still looking, but honestly, we’re more concerned with Rebirth’s finances and weapons.’
‘So, if they come for us, what’s the plan?’ Khalida asked, taking a drink.
‘We won’t know when Rebirth are coming,’ Poppy said. ‘Take standard precautions at home; set alarms, and sleep with weapons at hand. Keep everyone informed. If Rebirth comes for any of us, then there will be precious little time to react, but I hope that you manage to remember to tell us that they’re after us. We’ll meet at Mitch’s cottage in Wales; if you do not make it before twelve hours pass, we shall assume that you have either been killed or captured.’
‘Then what?’ Cain asked. ‘Will we just be fugitives?’
‘There’s a ferry from Holyhead to Dublin,’ Mitch said. ‘The new passports will get you across, you can start a new life after that.’
‘I like this life,’ Cain said, taking a gulp of tea as colour rose to his cheeks.
‘I know,’ Khalida said, placing her hand over his, ‘I’m sorry. But you know that half the kids you teach come from places and families Rebirth feeds off.’
‘I know,’ Cain said. ‘And I’m not happy about it. About any of it. But it seems…I don’t know…unlucky? Unlucky that we – that you – happened to stumble across all of this. That we have to be the ones to act. And I know that horrible events happen, but I just always hoped we would miss one of those periods of time.’
‘And the other option is what?’ Mitch said. ‘Wait for things to get worse and have someone else sort it out?’
‘No,’ Cain said, ‘I suppose I’m really just commenting on the unfairness of it. None of us asked for this, or wanted it to happen, and yet we’re the ones who have to fix it.’
‘And we will,’ Khalida said. ‘We’re going to keep fighting.’
‘And then one day we’ll stop?’ Cain said, looking at her. ‘The war will be over, we’ll win, and we can just go home together, right?’
‘Hopefully,’ Khalida said.
‘We’ll either live or die,’ Poppy said. ‘I intend to live, but there might not be a home to go back to. This could escalate into a war, we could lose everything.’
‘I know,’ Cain sighed, ‘but I don’t want that. I don’t want there to be a war and I don’t want Rebirth corrupting the government to eat people. I just want to have a home.’
‘One day,’ Khalida said, ‘but for now we’ve got to suspend any ideas we had for our lives until we’re finished with Rebirth. We’ve got to do this. Okay?’
Cain sighe
d again and sunk down in his seat, his lips tight, ‘okay.’
Chapter Fifteen
Likely Be Met With Hostility
The train shot through the French countryside, and Leah let her eyes become unfocused so that the view from her seat became a blurred stretch of green and yellow under a uniform grey sky. She had been to France a handful of times before; a school trip to Calais, where she and two dozen other fourteen-year-olds had been sprayed with icy sea foam from the deck of a rusting ferry. On another occasion, a blistering, hot summer cycling around the countryside with a group of hippies, then half a year in Paris with a guy she had been dating, which had ended with screaming matches every night.
As the odd village or town began to fold together, as the outskirts of Parisian suburbs built up around them, her stomach clenched; the train would be stopping in a matter of minutes now.
The world of vampires, full-blooded vampires, was a world her father had spoken about often, but rarely allowed her access to. She knew of things, but everything was in shadows. She knew that being a dhampir carried the same status as being a bastard.
She sighed and turned her attention to her reflection in the window; she had newly dyed her hair to erase the growing roots, and brushed it so that it softened her face. Her eyelashes had a faint touch of mascara to them, her lipstick was a natural shade of pink, and her blusher brought a suggestion of rosiness to her face. It gave her the look of an effortless perfection, which she loathed.
She brushed down the smart, black jacket she kept for job interviews as the train pulled into Paris Nord. She picked up her travel suitcase and stepped off onto the platform. A flood of familiar, train station smells greeted her after the enclosure of the train; petrol, blackened metal, hot, takeaway foods with the smell of warm bread rising above them all, dust, smoke, people…The sounds of hundreds of feet hitting the floor, suitcases being wheeled along, overhead announcements, piercing whistles, trains pulling away or entering the station. She knew that her senses were heightened compared to ordinary humans, yet her brain lacked the capacity to properly process them all as vampires did, so the result was jarring. Still, she preferred the continuous noise of cities, where after a few minutes she could tune the background sounds out, to the quiet of the country, where a sudden rustling of a hedge could make her jump.
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