That’s when I made a mistake—I glanced down at the bag in my hands.
“You still have it here with you?” Sloane rasped, his eyes glinting hungrily in the streetlights. “Give it to me, now.”
I didn’t know what to do. I’d seen that people would die if Edward Sloane got his hands on the artifact, but Paula, within her twisted interpretation, was just trying to do her job, and she didn’t deserve to die either. Hell, no one deserves to die—I certainly wasn’t qualified to decide who should die and who should live; I just knew that there was someone alive in front of me now, and I wanted to keep her that way. “If I give you the Sigilum, how do I know that you’ll let her go?” I asked.
There was a sound like a hammer hitting a side of beef; Paula’s legs buckled, and she fell to the ground shrieking in agony.
Shit.
Chapter 19
2200–2230, Tuesday, June 21, 2016
I stood, frozen in horror for five heartbeats, which was enough time for Sloane to fling his empty crossbow at me. The contraption tumbled end over end and glanced off the side of my face, pain snapped me out of my state of shock, and I fell to one knee and rolled—dazedly leaving the Sigilum on the ground. Sloane slithered between Paula’s prostrate form and Mia, who was sprinting forward to help the gasping agent, and snagged the bag containing the artifact.
“No!” I screamed and extended my arm, knowing that I’d find a pistol there. Swaying, I squeezed the trigger half a dozen times in just a few seconds. Sloane weaved from side to side, legs taking long, powerful strides. I staggered to my feet, blood trickling down my face, and raised the gun again—then a vise-like hand fell on my wrist and shoved it upward.
“You mewling, stupid sack of shit. You can’t see them, but you’re pointing that gun at a mother and child,” said a deep, familiar voice.
“Cooper! Let go of me and stop him!” I yelled.
“With all the blood in the air and Ms. Noel so close, I’m doing everything in my power to stop myself from pouncing on you and sucking the life from your worthless veins. Plus there’s a hole the size of your fist in my back,” the vampire growled.
My concentration was broken by that little morsel of information, the pistol evaporated, and I staggered. The payback for using my powers had come quickly, and I would have fallen if Cooper hadn’t been holding me up. I heard Mia in the background calling for an ambulance, but my eyelids were sliding shut. Then the vampire’s open palm slapped my face, making me bite my tongue and curse like a witch on a gibbet—but it also shocked me awake.
“Ms. Noel, get over here,” the vampire commanded. The air thrummed with power, and Mia stiffened. She walked robotically over to us and stared vacantly. The sensation of barely leashed energy, like the feeling of a deep bass system shaking my guts, ended; Mia’s eyes focused. “You two fools both need to understand the enormity of the cock-up that Shit-for-Brains Adler has perpetrated. To understand this properly, the story starts in 1973…”
I was a thirty-two-year-old sergeant in the Metropolitan police, toiling in a section of the force that I still can’t name but that was charged with the investigation of things that shouldn’t be and never officially were. We worked with all of the supernatural players in London, but we were small fry. The technological advances of the last 150 years had decisively given humanity the edge against the things that went bump in the night, and the commissioner had noticed the decline in our activity. Our superintendent, a crusty old imperial relic named Inglewood, was convinced that the only way for the section to avoid the budgetary ax was to take a big scalp, to wipe out some well-known, persistent threat. That’s why he sought out the monster hunter, Edward Sloane.
Sloane, much grayer and stooped than now, was well known in supernatural circles as a top-class monster hunter, and the authority in dispatching the superintendent’s chosen prey: vampires. Superintendent Inglewood knew that there weren’t more than half a dozen master vampires in the British Isles, and he knew that each remaining master was immensely powerful, and immensely discreet—in other words; not a big threat to the general public. But in his mind, they made a perfect target: well known, isolated, few enough in numbers that we could get them all in one coordinated raid.
For three weeks, Sloane drilled us day and night in the methods of vampire slaying; UV spotlights, stake-and-maul teams, garlic oil sprayers, and flamethrowers. Sloane also insisted that we finish each practice by having all fifty-odd members of the section put a drop of blood into a vial that he provided. He claimed it was part of a charm that would protect us from a vampire’s mind control.
A few people were weirded out by that, but Sloane kept insisting that as long as we followed his preparations, we’d easily wipe out the vampires—and he refused to reveal the locations of our targets until the night before we were due to strike.
I was just a grunt, but I’d seen enough to be able to tell that something wasn’t right. Sloane was too eager, too invested, and too secretive. I’d worked with the Sons of Perseus on a few cases in the past; they’d helped me with a ghost in Greenwich and a beast-man in Barnet, so I trusted them. When I called my contact and voiced my concerns, I was assigned a man who I’d met before: Auditor John Brown.
John was the most forgettable-looking young man that I’d ever met, but his mind was anything but ordinary. It took him minutes to come to the conclusion that we’d be walking into a bloodbath—pardon the pun. He met with Sloane and Superintendent Inglewood and tried to convince my boss that the attempt was too dangerous, that there was no way Sloane’s potion could protect us from the powerful master vampires, but the monster hunter refused to admit the dangers. My superiors found out that I was behind it, and I was left to clean the section toilets, literally, on the night of the raid. Watching my colleagues, my friends, pulling on their stab-proof vests, strapping on their tanks of jellied gasoline, or hefting mallets and stakes while I stayed behind, scrubbing shit with a toothbrush, is a memory that is indelibly burned into my mind.
It was about three in the morning when I was awoken out of thrashing nightmares by a pounding on the door of my flat. My wife and kids were scared, and when I saw John Brown at the door, I was terrified. His hair was flying in all directions, his face was pale, and he was covered from head to toe in congealed blood. “They’re dead. They’re all dead. But they’ll be coming back. He’s got a plan for them, I don’t know what it is, but it’ll be something terrible. I need your help to save them.” I brought him into the kitchen, and as my Laurie made him a cup of tea and kept the kids in bed, he explained to me what he’d pieced together of Sloane’s plan. Sloane had tricked us. The blood had been part of a complex thaumaturgic ritual, most of which Sloane had carried out in secret.
Brown told me that the ritual had had two effects: first, it had opened their minds to Sloane’s suggestions. Second, it had rendered their blood lethal to…my kind. Therefore, when my colleagues had blundered in, under Sloane’s direction, to take out their individual targets, they had been like lambs led to the slaughter. But the victorious master vampires had been poisoned by my colleagues’ blood. Sloane and his people had then swooped in and butchered the poisoned masters in turn. John arrived just in time to witness the last master vampire, a creature nearly four hundred years old, being staked and beheaded.
“Why?” I asked.
“To feed,” John replied. “Edward Sloane is the world’s greatest monster hunter because he can feed on the extradimensional energy of some other attuned. This nullifies their abilities and heals him. He went into that evening looking like a man in his seventies, and he came out looking young enough to be his own grandson. Nevertheless, the new Chapter Master of the Sons considers Edward Sloane a hero. The Sons had tried to eradicate the scourge of vampirism from Britain for over a thousand years, and Sloane cut them down in one night.”
“What’ll happen to my friends?” I asked of the auditor, an avalanche of survivor’s guilt burying the horror of the situation under a veneer of self-loa
thing.
“They should be quietly buried, just like the story of their sacrifice, and then the Sons should dig them up and put stakes through their hearts before they can come back. It usually takes a few days for enough antientropic extradimensional energy to permeate their bodies to the point that reanimation occurs. However, Sloane claimed that he’d dispose of the bodies, and the Chapter Master turned them over to him. But I think he has…eldritch, wicked plans for them. And there is nothing that I can do.” I emitted a groan that slid into a sob. “Unless…” Brown added.
“Yes?” I said.
“Unless you were willing to make a sacrifice. You were part of Edward Sloane’s ritual. If you were willing to participate, then I could twist the curse. I could stop your friends from coming back as the undead. Instead, they’d be held in suspension. A kind of sleep. Perhaps, in time, I could even find a way to cleanse the taint,” Brown said, a gleam of excitement in his eyes. I wish now that I’d noticed how similar that gleam was to Sloane’s usual expression.
I tried to ask a few questions, but John told me that the counterspell would only work if we did it before daybreak, so I shut my mouth, nodded, and hopped into a black cab with him. We drove into central London, where he ran into a flat in Pimlico and returned with a package under his arm—I know now that it was the Sigilum Dei Aemath. The cabbie then drove us to Highgate Cemetery. It’s a tourist attraction nowadays, but back then it was an overgrown wasteland, a vandal- and addict-infested chunk of wilderness overlooking central London from the north.
I had dealt with the supernatural before, but I was nervous as we set out into the shadowed graveyard, stones sticking out of the ground like shattered teeth poking through rotten gums. John, on the other hand, marched fearlessly through the blackness, confidently finding his way unerringly to a towering mausoleum in the West Cemetery. There was a lock on the door, but he waved at it, said a word that made my eyes water, and it popped open.
“Strip and lie on the floor,” John commanded. I complied.
“Use this knife to cut your hand,” John demanded. I complied.
“Put the blood in this vial,” John insisted. I complied—and damned myself. The auditor walked around me in a circle, drawing on the marble floor with a fat black marker. As he completed the circle, he finally explained what he was intending to do.
“Vampires aren’t created by any curse. Vampirism, like most supernatural phenomena, is caused by extradimensional contamination. At some point in the darkness after the fall of Rome, an alchemist was looking for the secret of eternal life—and he found it. The alchemist, his name lost in the mists of time, managed to create a potion that resonated with an antientropic dimension: a universe that tends toward order and permanence, the opposite of ours. As you might be able to guess, one of the key ingredients was blood. I collected some from one of the master vampire corpses earlier,” John explained, and held up the vial.
“I add your blood to the mixture, and it picks up the resonance. That then resonates thaumaturgically with the blood in your body—and voila, a new vampire,” John added, seemingly excited by what he was doing. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about, but I had a wife and kids. I knew I didn’t want to become any kind of monster. I tried to rise, but my limbs felt like lead, so next I tried to speak, but my tongue felt thick in my mouth, and I could only moan pitifully.
“I’m sorry, Gerald. It was the knife. I put a paralytic on the blade. I’m afraid that you won’t be going anywhere until I’m done with this. I should finish my explanation, though; a vampire made using this tincture will be a master vampire. As long as he takes blood, he’ll have a direct link to the antientropic realm. Anyone that he kills will become entangled as well and come back with a link to the antientropic realm through him, and so on and so forth. However, in this very, very special situation, your blood is already mingled with that of your colleagues due to Sloane’s ritual. Therefore, when I feed you this mixture, it will make you their master—I think,” he declaimed, pacing back and forth through the mausoleum. He then strode across to me and poured a vile vial of liquid down my throat.
“Of course, I’m not doing this to set you up as a new master vampire. I’ll be using the other item that I brought”—he showed me the Sigilum—“to control you. This item is said to allow mastery over any creature on earth as long as you have a sample of the target. With it, I will put you, and through you the rest of your colleagues, to sleep. This will give me time to research what I can do to free them,” he said. He might have continued pontificating, but it was about then that the pain began.
It started in my fingers and toes, like pins and needles, but it quickly built. Within a few heartbeats, my arms and legs felt like they were being scalded. Like the feeling you get when you open the oven and a big cloud of steam comes out and burns your hands, but all over, and it didn’t stop. Instead, the feeling crept across my skin and then started to sink in. My eyeballs felt like they were going to pop, and my teeth ached and burned from the inside like they would explode in their sockets. I didn’t actually feel my incisors elongate because by the time that happened, I was screaming and begging John to kill me. That’s what I remember most—begging a man that had betrayed my trust, a man that had ruined my life, a man that had stolen my family away. I would have done anything, promised anything to make the agony stop. Then, mercifully, I died.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stick. Unlike Lazarus or Jesus, it didn’t take me weeks or days to rise. Instead, I came back to consciousness after about three minutes. And I was thirsty. And strong. However, when I went after the auditor, he raised that damned Sigilum and, gloating, ordered me to sleep. To sleep I went. He was always good with the sleep spells; he used those on a lot of the prisoners.
When I next woke, I was in a cell. The same cell in which I spent the next forty-five years. I railed at John, but he was damnably patient, and when I finally shut up, he explained what had happened.
“Gerald. I want you to know that your sacrifice was not in vain. My team and I used your blood to track the bodies down. Sloane had no intention of destroying them. He was making preparations to send them to every corner of Britain. They’d have woken and spread like wildfire with no master to keep them under control. We think that Sloane’s plan was to demand a fortune to hunt them down, and he’d never have needed to worry about growing old again. Instead, we’ve chased him from the country, and as long as I live he’ll not set foot here again.”
“Good,” I growled. “And my friends?”
“Your colleagues are asleep and safely hidden. No one will find them as long as the Sigilum is undisturbed.”
“Okay, it’s done. Let me out to see my family,” I said.
Brown shook his head. “No, I think we both know that that isn’t going to happen. Not until I can figure out how to cure you. It wouldn’t be safe.”
To be fair, I would have torn his face off if I could have gotten out, but there were extradimensional wards built into the fabric of the room, and he had the mastery of me, even with the Sigilum hidden.
Cooper paused for a moment, and Mia spoke in a soft, sad voice: “But my father never found a cure. I remember him staying up late when I was a little girl, saying how he was looking for a way to help one of his friends with a ‘blood condition.’ I understand now.”
Cooper nodded and continued. “Yes. For the first few years, John would come visit me regularly, waking me for a short time, and he’d talk about his progress in trying to find a ‘cure.’ One terrible day, he came down to tell me that my wife and child were gone. Murdered. And I asked him to let me out to hunt down the murderer, but he refused, so I told him not to wake me up again until he had a cure. Finally, last year, over thirty years since I’d been imprisoned, he visited my cell, and something had changed. There had always been the fire of zealotry in his eyes, but now that had burned away any restraint that he’d ever possessed.
“‘I’m sorry for failing you, my friend,’ he said. My wh
ole life ruined, and he had the gall to call me ‘friend.’ ‘I go to complete my life’s work. I will not return. All of the other cells will open in twenty minutes. This one will open in thirty. I can trust you to keep the others from doing too much damage, can’t I? And look after my little bunny,’ he said, his voice almost pleading for a moment, and he turned and left. As he departed, I saw through his disguising illusions and realized he’d become a worse monster than I ever could have been.
“When the door opened, I was horrified to see what the rest of the…creatures imprisoned by the Sons had done. I didn’t owe John Brown anything, but I couldn’t let the public get hurt, so I did as he asked. I hunted down a lot of the worst monsters, and, when I couldn’t take them myself, I left hints for the teams searching for them. That’s how I found out about you, Mr. Adler.
“With most of the Escapees recaptured, I was getting ready to go hunting Edward Sloane. But then I heard that Sloane was back, and he was interested in you. The next thing I knew, the Sigilum was getting mentioned in certain circles. I had thought that with John dead it was hidden forever, but I was wrong. With me awake, the spell was already fraying.”
“Ahh…so that would explain the vampire dreams,” I interjected.
“I suppose so. And being a complete shithead, you ignored all of my warnings. You found the Sigilum, and you removed it, unraveling the spell. At midnight after the next sunset, my former colleagues will wake up, and they will be hungry. Unless you can find some way to fix your cock-up, to get the Sigilum back and recast the spell, then there will be fifty ravenous vampires bursting out of Highgate Cemetery in a little more than a day, and it will be your fault, you immense pillock.”
◆◆◆
Mia and I stared at the vampire in horror. What had I done? I froze for long seconds, while gibbering demons of self-recrimination cavorted through my skull. I’d thought that I could grab the Sigilum, use it to help my kid, and keep it away from Sloane, avoiding the vampire outbreak. Instead, moving the Sigilum had caused the vampires to wake up, and I’d managed to get Christian killed in the process. Oh, and Paula got hurt. Meh. I just kept getting people hurt. I’d thought that if I worked with Dana and Badger, I’d avoid my mistakes of the past—working with others would mean that they’d help me spot the pits before I blundered into them, so I wouldn’t get police killed or accidentally immolate an apartment full of partygoers.
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