by Will Hill
Her eyes widened, and her cheeks coloured a red that was visible even through the scarlet glow radiating from her eyes. “I don’t … I refuse to …”
“There is no sense denying that which is obvious,” said Valentin. “It was clear from the way you said his name. So my brother sent the nine of you here to stand guard, in case I made an appearance. Then what? You are expected to kill me?”
“Correct,” said Genevieve, her voice low and thick. “You must pay for your treachery.”
“And what then?” asked Valentin. “What promises did he make, if you were successful in destroying me? I imagine you were assured a place in his bed, but I fail to see what could have motivated the rest of you to accept such an assignment. Money, perhaps? Power? Fear?”
More growls rose from the cluster of vampires, although they were less full-throated than before, and Valentin believed he could hear uncertainty in at least one or two of them. Genevieve, who was clearly their leader, whether self-elected or otherwise, seemed to sense it too.
“He mocks us!” she shrieked. “He belittles our faith in our master!”
“You are wrong,” said Valentin, his voice low and gentle. “I am not mocking you. I am trying to help you. If you attack me, you will all die. And, whether you want to believe it or not, Valeri is fully aware of that outcome. You are not his favourites, his advance guard, or his trusted lieutenants. You are cannon fodder, nothing more. But if you tell me where he is, I will spare you, as it is clear that you have been misled.”
“We will tell you nothing,” said Genevieve.
“Last chance,” said Valentin, certain that it would not be taken. The woman was obviously devoted to his older brother; her fervour was going to carry the rest of the vampires with her, to their doom.
“For you,” snarled Genevieve, and leapt forward, her eyes blazing, her face twisted with hate.
Valentin moved with a speed that defied reality and met her in mid-air. His hand shot out and crunched through her sternum as though it was made of balsa wood. A shocked grunt burst from Genevieve’s mouth as his fingers found her heart and tore it from her chest; her eyes widened momentarily, before she exploded in a thunderclap of crimson blood that soaked Valentin from head to toe. He landed gracefully on the wooden floor, threw the remains of the heart aside, and barrelled into the remaining vampires like a tornado descending on an unsuspecting town.
Two of them, a man and a woman in their twenties, instantly tried to run, their nerve clearly having failed them, but Valentin caught them before they reached the corridor and drove their skulls together with a sickening crunch. They fell to the ground, their heads grotesquely misshapen, their eyes rolling wildly.
He turned back towards the remainder of the terrified, panicking vampires, and found a punch heading towards him; it would have decapitated any normal human being, but to Valentin it appeared to be moving at a snail’s pace. He slid to his left, gripped the elbow of the swinging arm, and pulled it out at the shoulder. The former owner of the arm, a hugely obese vampire in his fifties, stared dumbly at the disembodied limb for a second, as blood spurted from his shoulder. Then he threw back his head and screamed, a guttural howl of agony.
Valentin changed his grip on the severed arm, took hold of it by the wrist, and swung it like a baseball bat. The ragged stump connected solidly with the vampire’s chin, sending him flying across the hall and into the wood-panelled wall head first. He slid to the ground, his eyes rolling, his limbs jerking and spasming. Valentin was already moving, throwing the arm aside and sweeping towards the four remaining vampires, who were now wearing expressions of dreadful despair.
I warned them, thought Valentin. I gave them all the chance to walk away unharmed. This is their choice.
Two of the vampires swung punches, but they might as well have been trying to connect with a column of smoke; by the time the intended blows reached their target, Valentin was simply no longer there. There was just enough time for surprise to register on their furrowing brows before Valentin pulled out their throats with two casual swings of his arms. Twin geysers of blood gushed into the air as the vampires sank to their knees, their eyes full of terrible confusion.
Valentin ignored the overpowering aroma of freshly spilled blood, and faced the last two vampires: a woman who looked barely old enough to vote, and a man who would have appeared far more at home behind a desk in an accountancy firm. They seemed frozen where they stood, but when he took a step towards them, the girl grabbed the man, flung him towards Valentin, and bolted for the front door.
Valentin took a millisecond to admire the purity of her survival instinct, then reached out and caught the thrown vampire by the hair. The man wore a beatific look on his face, as though he had concluded that what was happening to him simply could not be real. The expression didn’t change, even when Valentin gripped his neck with his free hand and tore his head off with a sound like an opening zip and a high-pressure jet of blood. Valentin spun fluidly, and threw the head with all his supernatural strength. It struck the fleeing vampire girl in the lower back, and Valentin heard the distinctive crack as her spine broke. The girl’s limbs went instantly limp, her legs tangled beneath her, and she crashed to the ground, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.
Valentin did a slow turn, surveying the carnage. The entire altercation had lasted no more than fifteen seconds, and he had not come close to being injured himself, but he felt no satisfaction as he looked around at the devastated vampires; they had been put in harm’s way by his brother, in blissful ignorance of the true danger they might face. All he felt was pity, and the ever-present anger towards Valeri, a ceaseless rage that churned slowly in the pit of his stomach.
The ancient vampire walked across the entrance hall and tore out one of the ornamental balusters that held up the banisters of the wide staircase; it came free easily, a heavy piece of wood with a sharp, jagged end. Moving quickly, Valentin plunged it in and out of the chests of the ruined vampires; they burst in a series of crimson splashes, coating the wooden floor and walls of the hall red. When it was done, he dropped the baluster and turned to face the vampire whose legs he had broken, whose scream of pain had drawn his friends to the killing floor. The man stared up at him with abject terror, his eyes wide and full of tears.
“Please …” he whispered. “Please … don’t …”
Valentin walked across the hall, his shoes leaving deep tracks in the pooling blood, then crouched down and stared into the stricken vampire’s eyes. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jackson,” managed the vampire. “My legs … Oh God … it hurts …”
“They’ll heal,” said Valentin.
Jackson grimaced. “My … friends …”
“Dead,” said Valentin. “As I warned them they would be. You heard me warn them, didn’t you, Mr Jackson?”
The vampire nodded his head, ever so slowly. “My … legs …” he repeated. “Broken …”
Valentin narrowed his eyes. “How long have you been a vampire, Mr Jackson?”
“Six … months.”
“My word. You are little more than an infant. Your legs can be healed, Mr Jackson, with enough blood. They’re badly broken, I’m sorry to say, so you may need rather a lot, but luckily for you there’s plenty of it around. I would suggest you move quickly, though, before it begins to dry.”
“I can’t …” said Jackson. “My … friends …”
“Your friends are all dead,” said Valentin, sharply. “Would you care to join them?”
“No …” said Jackson, the tears spilling from his eyes and running down his cheeks. “Please don’t …”
“Then tell me where my brother is.”
“I don’t know,” sobbed Jackson. “You have to believe me. Genevieve knew … but she never … I never …”
Valentin narrowed his eyes, then glanced over at the splash of blood that was all that remained of the woman who had attacked him. Anger surged through him, alongside a thick wave of frustration; so
mewhere in the rapidly spreading puddle of blood had been the information he needed, and now it was gone.
Stupid, he told himself. Reckless and stupid. That was a child’s error.
He swallowed down the bitter cocktail of emotions, and turned his attention back to the crying vampire.
“I’m not going to kill you, Mr Jackson,” he said, and smiled. “Congratulations.”
Jackson frowned through his tears. “Why not?” he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper.
“Because you’re going to help me,” said Valentin. “I don’t think you’ll go to Valeri, not in light of your failure to kill me. But I’m sure you will not be able to resist telling the exciting tale of how you faced Valentin Rusmanov and survived, and I have no doubt that it will eventually reach my brother’s ears, which is why you get to live. I want him to know that I am looking for him. I want him to know that I am coming.”
Jackson began to cry harder than ever. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you …”
“You’re welcome,” said Valentin, his face twisting with contempt. “Although permit me to give you two pieces of advice. Firstly, make better choices regarding the company you keep. And secondly, the next time you face death, try to do so with more dignity than you have shown today.”
Valentin stood up and strode across the entrance hall. As he gripped the front door handle for what he dearly hoped was the final time, a heavy thud and a shriek of pain sounded behind him. He glanced back over his shoulder, and allowed himself a brief smile at what he saw.
Jackson had tipped himself on to his front, and was lapping up the blood of his friends like a dog, his face a mask of shame and humiliation. Valentin watched him for several long seconds, then stepped out into the rain, pulling the dacha’s door shut behind him.
“Goddamnit!” shouted Matt Browning, then instantly blushed a deep red as the rest of the Lazarus Project turned to look at him.
“Are you OK?” asked Natalia Lenski from the desk beside his, her voice low.
“Yeah,” said Matt, and sighed deeply. “Sorry, everyone.”
His colleagues gave him a series of shrugs and shaken heads that made it clear he shouldn’t worry about it. He smiled, and turned to face Natalia as the low hum that usually filled the lab returned to its normal volume.
“It’s the sample we took from Larissa,” he said. “It has parts of the same evolved structure that we’ve seen in Valentin and Dracula, but I can’t make them coalesce. There’s something happening there, something that predisposes her to greater strength and speed than normal vamps, but I can’t figure it out.”
“You cannot expect to figure out the processes of an alien DNA structure using incomplete evidence and such a small sample size,” said Natalia, smiling gently. “I think you are too hard on yourself.”
The colour in Matt’s face, which had been starting to recede, flared deep pink. “Thanks,” he said. “I know you’re right, it’s just—”
“It’s just that you want to prove the theory that Mr Holmwood gave your name to,” finished Natalia. “I understand. But you should not worry. The theory is correct, in every case we have analysed. Why it is correct can wait.”
Matt stared at his colleague.
My friend, he reminded himself. She’s my friend. Or maybe …
He didn’t allow himself to finish the thought; it was too full of possibilities, both good and bad. Instead, he focused on what Natalia had said; he knew, deep down, that she was right.
Matt was more proud of the Browning Theory than he had been of anything in his entire life. He hadn’t named it, and had been crippled with embarrassment when Cal Holmwood had done so, at least at first. Now, although he would never have admitted it to anyone, he liked the sound of it. It was incomplete, as his current frustrations attested; the precise scientific reasons for why it worked were still unknown, and that fact, he knew, would frustrate him terribly until they became clear. But the central tenet of the theory was uncontested; that there was a proportional relationship between the age of a vampire and the subsequent power of the people they turned. Human beings turned by older vampires were likely to become more powerful, and see their supernatural abilities increase at a far faster rate.
What they did know was that something happened within the contagious vampire virus, inside the revolutionary DNA that coated their fangs; it clearly evolved as its vampire host aged, becoming more potent, making it able to pass on greater power when it was introduced into a new human system.
It shouldn’t work; there was nothing in the history of biology that was even remotely similar. Evolution within a species took place when two sets of DNA were combined during conception, creating mutations in the pattern from which the offspring was grown. There were no records of any other DNA strand evolving independently, and no other example of a virus that could not only change the DNA of the host it infected, but also essentially reboot the host’s system, making physical changes take instant effect.
Vampirism, and the transformation it induced, was unique in the entire natural world.
There had long been an assumption that age was related to power; it was why the Rusmanov brothers, and Grey and other old vampires, were so disproportionately strong, having acquired strength and experience over the long years of their lives. But the Browning Theory explained why Larissa Kinley, Marie Carpenter, and the escapees from Broadmoor Hospital were so far ahead of most vampires that Blacklight encountered: because Grey, Alexandru Rusmanov, and Dracula – by proxy – had turned them.
The connection now seemed obvious, but it had taken Matt to realise it first, then prove it. The Browning Theory had deepened Blacklight’s understanding of vampires, including the ones that were currently arrayed against them, had allowed the Department’s Operators to be appropriately careful as they hunted down the Broadmoor victims, unquestionably saving lives, and, even more recently, had given birth to a project so highly classified that only Cal Holmwood, Professor Karlsson, and Matt himself were even aware of its existence.
Don’t even think about PROMETHEUS, he told himself. Not now.
“I need some fresh air,” said Matt. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Natalia frowned. “Now?”
“Yes,” he said, and got up from his chair. “Right now.”
The two teenagers walked across the long runway of the Loop and on to the wide fields beyond. They walked side by side, so close that their hands had brushed together on several occasions, causing a feverish debate to take place within Matt’s head.
Should I hold her hand? Am I supposed to hold her hand? Does she want me to hold her hand?
They carried on in silence, heading for the perimeter of the Loop. Beyond the inner fence, the laser grid twinkled red as wide beams of ultraviolet light filled the exclusion zone between the outer fence and the treeline. Matt stopped at the edge of the grass, feeling heat from the lasers on his face and electricity in his teeth.
“It is strange,” said Natalia. “From so close, it is difficult to tell whether this is meant to keep people out or in.”
A shiver raced up Matt’s spine as he stared out into the thick green and brown of the forest.
I know what you mean, he thought, as he turned to face Natalia.
The girl standing in front of him was a genius. There was nothing hyperbolic in such a description; she was an honest-to-goodness, curve-disrupting genius, with an IQ that had never been accurately measured.
She had been identified as a person of interest by the Russian Security Services when she was barely ten, and had been recruited into the SPC from the University of Leningrad when she was eighteen. Almost immediately, she had been sent to a foreign country, where she knew absolutely nobody, to work on the most important scientific project in the history of humanity. And the Lazarus Project was lucky to have her; she was staggeringly intelligent and highly capable, one of the very foremost minds of her generation.
She was also, Matt had concluded, the most beautiful thing he had e
ver seen.
Her face, slender and soft-featured and remarkably pale, still bore the last remnants of the injuries she had sustained when the bomb Lamberton had placed in Kate’s quarters had detonated right in front of her. The room’s heavy door had saved her life, shielding her from the worst of the blast, but she had broken a number of small bones, and been sliced to ribbons by flying wood and metal.
The sun slid behind a cloud, as though keen to afford them privacy. Natalia was looking at Matt with an expression that seemed to be mostly nervousness, but Matt could see affection too; he was certain that he could.
God, he hoped he could.
Stay calm, he told himself. Take it easy.
“Matt?” she asked, her voice low and soft. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” he said, and smiled. “I was just thinking how little I know about you. We sit two metres apart for sixteen hours every day, but all I really know is your name and where you went to university.”
“That is all you know?” she asked, her eyes fixed on his.
Matt felt heat rise into his face. “Tell me something,” he said, quickly. “Something I don’t know about you.”
She stared at him for a long moment full of crackling tension. “When the FSB came to take me from my home,” she said, eventually, “the men of my village thought I was a criminal. They did not understand me, and they did not like that I was cleverer than them. They thought I was some kind of … what is the word … something unnatural?”
“A freak,” said Matt, softly.
Natalia’s mouth curled into a small, sad smile. “Yes,” she said. “A freak. They thought I was a freak. The FSB came and they told my mother and father that I was valuable, that I should be making a contribution to my country. My mother did not want me to leave, and started to cry. My father asked how much money they were going to give him for me.”
“Jesus,” whispered Matt.
“One of the men was a Colonel named Gregorovich,” said Natalia. “When I was at university in Leningrad, it was him who stayed in touch with me, who made sure I was OK. He told my father that he did not deserve to have such a child, and that I would be better off away from them. My father got very angry, and tried to stop them from taking me, but one of the FSB men hit him in the stomach with his gun, and he fell to the floor. They took me out of the house, with my father on the ground and my mother screaming, and most of the village had gathered outside to watch. Some of them were shouting things, and one of them spat on me as I was taken to the car. Gregorovich took out his gun and shot the man in the chest, and left him bleeding in the road. I got into the car with them and we left. I have not seen my family since.”
