“I tried calling my estate agent today, but he was in no condition to be useful,” Julian said. “I may have overdone the nightmares.”
“Huh?”
Julian shrugged. “Why do you ask?”
“There’s a recent vacancy at the place I rent,” Rob said. “Nothing too flash, but decent enough by London standards and fairly handy for work.”
“I may as well have a look. What happened to your last flatmate?”
The beers had gone down smoothly. He was operating on only a few hours of sleep after a very active night and the caffeine in his bloodstream was fizzling out. On top of that, Julian had turned out to be a good listener. While they were between pubs, Rob had started telling stories of the stupid things he’d got up to on his gap year travels. Julian hadn’t seemed fazed by any of it.
So he didn’t think before he spoke.
“I ate him,” Rob said.
“Did he do anything to deserve that?”
“He tried to feed on me,” Rob said. “Got himself turned into a vampire and fancied draining me dry.”
“Poetic, I suppose.”
Dread rippled through Rob as his brain caught up with his mouth, but following that was disbelief, because Julian had acted as if he’d said Kevin had moved to Bristol.
“I’d already had a hell of a night by that stage,” Rob said, unable to help himself. Julian must have heard him, surely. “A cult tried to sacrifice me to some giant floating eye thing.”
“Off-putting,” Julian said.
“You either didn’t hear me right or you don’t believe me.”
“Vampire flatmate and sacrificial cult,” Julian said.
Rob tried again. “I don’t reckon most people would be so ready to take that at face value. I did say earlier that I lie, right?”
“Last night, a haunted house tried to scare me into committing suicide,” Julian said.
Rob thought about that. “Fair enough then.”
Julian frowned at him and Rob felt himself being weighed up. “We live in the same world, you and I. You didn’t realise that?”
“We do? You mean –” He glanced around to see who might overhear.
“I know you have a time of it around the full moon.”
“You’re a – a …” Rob waggled a hand at himself.
“My talents lie in other areas.”
“Oh. Right.” He took a swig of his beer and let his mouth cover for his shell-shocked brain. “So that’s not a problem in a prospective flatmate then? Pretty sure the place I’m living is ghost free, if that helps.”
A weird gleam lit Julian’s eyes. “You’re almost certainly right about that.”
Everything had a glassy sheen to it by the time they left the pub. Rob could feel the cold night air on his skin and it made him feel like running, just for the thrill of it. The crap day had moulted off him. He had just told someone what he really was and that person wasn’t trying to set an angry mob on him.
“That first place we were at,” he said as they made their way towards a Tube station, “it’s not so bad on a Friday night. Get some band in that’s doing the local circuit and they don’t usually stink. Not as good as some of the stuff back up in Manchester, but not bad.”
“There’s a clubbing scene up there, isn’t there?” Julian pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His satchel hung from his shoulder and banged against his back with each quick step.
“You’ve never been? Yeah, there’s a scene up there. I’m out of the loop down here, but I could track down one or two people to ask if you’re ever up for it.”
“Did you mean to turn us into this alley?” Julian asked.
“It’s a shortcut. Also a pit stop if need be, so don’t walk too close to the walls. Don’t worry, I’ve cut through here a few times and never been mugged.”
“I don’t think those guys are muggers.”
Two men were coming towards them, both wearing long, black leather coats that flapped in the air rushing through the alley. Rob looked over his shoulder and saw a third one back towards the street, a silhouette against the streetlights.
He hadn’t smelled them coming. The alley did stink badly and he’d drunk a lot of beer in the last few hours and anyway, he still wore his iron chain and one of the things it did was dull his senses. He felt stupid anyway.
“Rob Cromwell?”
The speaker’s eyes were bright in the thin light of the alleyway and his smile said he was about to start a fight he knew he could win. His hair was gelled up into one of those little peaks that Rob thought looked like the comb of a rooster.
“I was kind of hoping I’d get a night that didn’t end in a whole lot of violence for a change,” Rob said. He was peripherally aware that Julian had set his back against the alley wall and had his hands out of his pockets. He looked less uncomfortable than before, an observation Rob didn’t have time to be puzzled by.
“What’s this about then?” Rob asked.
“We’re looking for someone,” the speaker said. “Kevin Whitaker.”
Rob squinted. “You aren’t vampires too, are you?” A ripple of irritation crossed the speaker’s chiselled features. “Oh, great. Let me just have a minute here, yeah?”
He released the iron chain around his wrist with a quick twist and shoved it in a pocket. The speaker’s face warped into a mask of shock and rage as Rob’s scent changed. He hissed, baring fangs and elongated nails, and threw himself forward.
Rob didn’t have time to even get his jacket off.
The fury inside him was already off its leash with the iron chain gone. He let it rush up inside him and a wave of agony tore through his body. Every bone snapped and reshaped itself. Every muscle knotted and bulged. His shirt and jacket shredded as he erupted up out of them and his shoes burst at the seams.
He no longer wore his human shape. He was a towering monster halfway between human and wolf.
The vampire hit him in the chest and they went down onto the pavement. Rob saw a hand raised above him, talons ready to tear his flesh. He slammed the vampire with both hands, sending him flying through the air.
There was a brilliant flash of blue light and a sound like thunder, close enough to rattle Rob’s teeth. When his vision returned he saw the other vampire who’d come down the alley was on fire, screaming and writhing and burning fast. He flew up the wall like a cinder caught in an updraft.
Rob surged to his feet. He let out a thick, coarse snarl at the vampire who’d attacked him, down the alley where Rob’s shove had thrown him, still shaking off the blow. Rob dropped onto all fours. He propelled himself forward in a great leap that took him all the way to his foe. They crashed to the ground with Rob on top and the killing lust ignited inside him. Rage swallowed all thought, all control. He tore into the vampire with his claws and ignored the feeble scratches he got in return. He ripped his enemy’s throat out with his teeth.
His muzzle drenched in vampire blood, Rob raised his head to the night sky and howled.
See me here! See my kill!
He spun around, looking for another. Glowing ash rained down where the second vampire had been and the third one, the one who had come up behind them, was held against the wall by an iron drainpipe that had wrapped itself around him like a snake.
Trapped! That one couldn’t run, couldn’t struggle. He needed his prey to fight.
Julian stood in the middle of the alley with his feet planted firmly apart. Blue sparks danced between his fingers. He looked straight at Rob and it was a flat, cold look, the look of one total stranger to another.
A thought pierced the blinding rage. Waiting to see if I’m going to try and kill him.
“Rob?” Julian’s voice was a knife’s edge. “You with us?”
He took a deep breath, then another. “With you.” His voice was more a snarl than words. He used what Grant had taught him to claw his way back to being human.
That was when all the alcohol made its
comeback.
He raised a clawed hand to the side of his head. “Ah, not feeling so good. Need a minute here.”
The blue sparks faded from Julian’s hands. “Rob?”
Rob put both hands against the wall, leaned forward and was powerfully, noisily sick.
When the heaving stopped, he spat a few times before finally wiping his bloody muzzle and standing fairly upright.
“Feeling better?” Julian asked.
“Yeah, sorry about that.” His voice was a hoarse growl and his head felt light. “I didn’t know beer and vampires don’t mix.”
He lumbered back down the alley and looked at the iron pipe twisted around the vampire. “You do this?”
Julian nodded.
Their prisoner pulled against the pipe. He was a vampire, Rob could see that, but the pipe held him fast despite his supernatural strength. He’d never seen anything like it. The vampire hadn’t either, judging by the terror-smell rolling off him.
“Now,” Julian said to their prisoner, “because of you I just watched a werewolf throw up. I wouldn’t like you much anyway, because you and your friends meant us harm, but this has only worsened my opinion of you. I have questions and I’m feeling good about asking them the hard way. How about you?”
Chapter 5 – The Hargraves, Tuesday
The alarm was still flashing on the aetheric scope’s console when Evelyn Hargrave performed her first checks of the day. It had detected a single ping of contact in central London last night, a single trace of a particular girl.
She had not been looking forward to the day that alert was triggered.
According to the logs, there hadn’t been another contact since. She moved to the flesh-weaver console and saw that her father was due to emerge from his session any minute.
A few of the consoles and readouts were still early Cold War era mechanical levers and gauges, but the flesh-weaving tubes were controlled by a sophisticated modern computer, running programs created by her father’s considerable intellect. It was not the most important system in the facility, but it had received more attention and upgrades than any of the other secondary systems, even the defences.
Evelyn watched the status indicators change as the bone welders withdrew and as the tissue needles tied off their work before folding away. Water sluiced off the left-over body fluids and the nerve parasite released its grasp on her father’s spinal cord. She picked up her report, left the control room and entered the facility’s main sarcophagus chamber, deep beneath London’s Trafalgar Square.
The room was an austere and mathematically precise octagonal space that stretched five floors up and two floors down. At the focus of the chamber, supported by dozens of struts, clamps and cables, stood a black metal sarcophagus large enough for someone twice the size of a human being.
Even at the edge of the room, Evelyn always felt too close to the sarcophagus. The dead presence inside it crawled into her eyes and ears like worms. The power of it rippled in her blood. It made the green crystal in her witch’s ring hum in helpless sympathy.
On top of the sarcophagus was an array of psychic control mechanisms forged out of materials that did not occur naturally on Earth. The control crystals were fed ghost electricity from the spectral capacitors in the bronze lions on the surface. More energy flowed up from the generators on the levels below, was directed through the sarcophagus where it was modulated by the control crystals and then sent out to relays on the wall that routed it up to the four plinths in Trafalgar Square.
From there it spread out across London like a web. It touched down on all the city’s old plague pits and cemeteries, holding at bay a spell that would lay waste to the city if it ever escaped its shackles.
The facility was cold. Evelyn felt it even though she had undergone nearly as many decades of flesh-weaving as her father, and the gradual deadening of the nerves in her skin was almost as far along.
Beyond the sarcophagus chamber, the facility was composed of a series of tunnels walled with plates of battleship iron. Torrents of power raced along conduits behind the walls, to the different systems in the facility and to the heavy defences.
She rode a freight lift large enough for a London bus down six levels.
Her father was already out of the flesh-weaver tube in which he had spent the night and he buttoned up his shirt as Evelyn entered the room. She noted that he already had his rubber-soled shoes on, similar to the ones she herself wore. Safety always came first. The flesh-weaving tube closed and ratcheted down into the floor, into its nest of body-altering tools and the thick cables that brought power down from the main sarcophagus chamber.
“Good morning Father,” Evelyn said.
“Good morning, Evelyn,” Doctor Hargrave replied. “I trust the night was uneventful.”
He looked like a man in his late twenties. Like her, his face had lost much of its capacity for expression. His red hair, which she had inherited, had faded at the temples, but that was the only sign time still remembered him. She wondered if it would have been the same had they found a different way to extend their lives.
“All threshold systems are normal,” Evelyn said. “However, Alarm 41 was triggered at 20:22 hours.”
Doctor Hargrave picked up his warlock’s ring and slid it onto his right middle finger. The ring was like hers, with a green gemstone set in it. “Incident length?”
“A single ping of activity only on the aetheroscope,” Evelyn said. “Approximate location was central London near Leicester Square, but the incident was too brief to narrow down further.”
He buttoned up his coat. “Then we are due in containment.”
They rode the freight lift further down, following the facility’s primary power trunk deep below sea level. The energy in the trunk thrummed steadily against Evelyn’s mystic senses and the green gem of her witch’s ring. Controlled and channelled, it held less threat than the power coming directly off the sarcophagus.
“We will be responsible for at least one death if we do this,” Evelyn said.
Doctor Hargrave stood with his hands draped behind his back. “A bargain is a bargain, Evelyn. There was a cost attached to our victory. Now we pay it.”
“I doubt it will be only one death,” Evelyn said. “He’ll kill anyone who gets in his way.”
“As he himself said, discretion is essential to him.”
“That can mean killing anyone who knows he exists too,” Evelyn said.
“We’re safe enough.”
They reached the containment level, the place where they stored things that were too dangerous to leave loose, but that they either could not or would not destroy. The containment level was a hallway of the same large proportions as the lift and it was lined with dozens of doors, each far more secure than any bank vault.
“Father, our purpose is to save lives. This –”
Doctor Hargrave swung to face her. Though his face showed no change of expression, it was unlike him to interrupt her. “Have you forgotten why we needed the knowledge he offered? Have you forgotten who we faced?”
“No, but –”
He turned his back on her and marched down the corridor of doors. She followed, but when she saw which of the vault doors he stopped by, she knew the grilling wasn’t over.
Doctor Hargrave began the complicated process of releasing the physical and magical barriers that kept the door sealed. Evelyn watched in silence. When the locks released and the door swung open on soundless hinges, she followed him inside.
Lights flickered on within the vault. The room was large enough to hold a truck and even colder than the sarcophagus chamber far above, though the only effect that cold had on her was to turn her breath to mist. To her right were racks of unmarked coffins, two rows of three. To her left stood three more coffins, these ones upright. The upright ones sprouted thick bundles of power cables from their tops and had gauges set in their sides. The needles on each gauge pointed to zero.
Doctor Hargrave gestured to the unmarked coffins on t
heir racks. “Do you remember them?”
Evelyn kept her tone flat. “I remember.”
In the bottom row of coffins rested the remains of three warlocks, powerful men who had come to the world via a bridge across the black gulf between worlds. They had been stealing children, though for what purpose neither Evelyn nor her father had ever understood. Local authorities like the Shield Foundation had been unable to stop them. Only Evelyn and her father, with the power of their facility behind them, had been able to defeat the warlocks.
Autopsies had revealed that they were human, the descendants of an ancient, forgotten exodus. Evelyn and her father had frozen the bodies and assumed that was the end of it.
But twenty-six years later, three more warlocks had come across the dark void and this time they had come for Evelyn and her father.
“The same men,” Doctor Hargrave said. “The same three men. They were in new bodies, but they remembered us. They came for revenge.”
Their corpses lay in the top three coffins. Evelyn and her father had dissected them far more thoroughly.
“Enemies who don’t stay dead,” Doctor Hargrave said. “Who reincarnate when you kill them.” He put his hand on one of the three coffins standing on the left side of the room. “We needed Yadrim’s knowledge of how to manipulate time. We needed a way to defeat them without killing them.”
“I understand that Father, but –”
“The work we do here is too important,” he said. “We cannot have such powerful enemies arriving and trying to kill us every quarter century.”
“Yadrim isn’t human,” Evelyn said. “His conditions for taking a human life are not the same as ours.”
“Sometimes it is a simple matter of numbers.” He came to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Perhaps he will take one life. Perhaps he will take several. But here, now, the work we do ensures the survival of the millions above us in London and the millions more spread across Britain.”
“I’m familiar with the arithmetic,” she said. But they both knew he’d won the argument.
“Come,” he said. “We have a bargain to fulfil.”
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