by Will Hill
Kate nodded. She didn’t know how to respond; delight at having avoided being turned into a vampire, although perfectly reasonable, seemed unkind given that she was talking to one, a vampire who also happened to be her best friend.
“You’re allowed to be relieved about that,” said Larissa, as though reading her mind. “I won’t be offended.”
Kate grinned. Then Larissa reached out, curled her fingers round her hand and squeezed it tight.
“I have to tell you something,” said Larissa, her voice suddenly low. “I know this isn’t the best time, but I should have told you ages ago, and I didn’t, and now I just have to or I’m going to burst.”
Finally, thought Kate. Finally, it comes out.
“It’s OK,” she said, trying to keep her voice as neutral as possible. “You can tell me, whatever it is.”
“It’s about Jamie,” Larissa said, her face pale, her throat working as though she was physically struggling to get the words out. “About Jamie and me.”
“What about you and Jamie?”
“We’ve been seeing each other,” said Larissa, and an expression of misery and shame burst across her face. “For the last two months.”
Kate felt sadistic pleasure spill through her.
At last, she thought. Now I get to tell you exactly what I think about this; about all the lies, and all the secrets.
“I know,” she began. “I’ve known since the very beginning. How stupid do you—” Then she stopped, and stared in horror at her friend.
Larissa was crying.
The vampire girl’s head was lowered, and her chest was heaving up and down. As Kate watched, tears began to run down her cheeks and patter softly to the floor.
The anger she had been holding deep within herself for months was instantly gone. She no longer had any desire to tell Larissa off; all she cared about, she realised, was that her best friend was crying, and needed her.
“Hey,” said Kate. “It’s OK. Don’t cry, it’s OK, honestly it is.”
Larissa lifted her head, and glowing red eyes stared straight into Kate.
“It’s not OK,” she said, fiercely. “None of it’s OK. It’s all going bad.”
Kate looked at her, but said nothing; it was obvious that there was more Larissa wanted to get off her chest.
“It’s not fair for me to want to talk to you about this,” she continued. “I know it isn’t, not after we kept such a big secret from you. Or thought we had at least. But I’ve got no one else to talk to, and you’re my best friend, and I just…”
She broke off, turning her face to the ceiling, staring at the flat white plaster above her. Her tears reflected the burning crimson of her eyes; they looked like little drops of fire as they rolled down her cheeks.
“You can talk to me,” said Kate, gently. “You can tell me anything. You know that.”
Larissa returned her gaze to her friend, and forced a tiny smile.
“I feel like I’m losing him,” she said, eventually. “To this place, to this awful uniform.” She pulled at the black material covering her legs, and snarled at the very feel of it against her skin. “To the way people like that nasty slut Angela Darcy look at him because of what his surname is and what he did to Alexandru, to a bunch of old men who died a century ago. I can’t compete with that; I can’t compete with something that everyone in this building tells him is his destiny.”
“Have you talked to him?” asked Kate. “Does he know you feel like this?”
“Of course not,” said Larissa. “He’d tell me he’s just doing his job, trying to be the best Operator he can be. And maybe that’s all it is. Maybe this is all just in my head. But I don’t think so. If I asked him to choose between me and this place, I don’t think he’d even hesitate.”
“He’s not doing it maliciously,” said Kate, carefully. “You have to believe that. He’s never belonged anywhere in his life. Here he has his mum, and you, and me, and people respect him. Admire him even. You have to see what that must be like for him.”
“I do,” sighed Larissa, and her eyes momentarily reverted to their usual beautiful dark brown. “But he’s starting to enjoy it, Kate; he likes being at the middle of everything, likes being a descendant of the founders. And that’s not him. The old him, I mean.”
Kate resisted the urge to ask Larissa what she expected; she had only known Jamie for three months, both of them had. The intensity of their experience often made it feel longer, sometimes made it feel like a lifetime, but it wasn’t. It was hardly any time at all.
“Then you have to talk to him,” Kate said, firmly. “You don’t have to make it a fight. But you have to make him see that how he’s behaving is hurting you.”
“I know,” said Larissa, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “You’re right. Oh God, I’m sorry, Kate, this is so bloody teenage of me.”
“It’s OK,” smiled Kate. “You don’t have to be superhuman all the time. It’s all right.”
“There’s something else,” said Larissa. “I think he knows about you and Shaun. He hinted at it last night, before we got into a fight. I think he saw something in the chopper on the way back.”
“Did you tell him he was right?” asked Kate.
“No,” said Larissa, but her face twisted into a momentary grimace. The heavy weight of all the secrets and lies was beginning to take its toll on them all. “You asked me not to tell him, so I haven’t. But I think he knows.”
Kate sighed. “I suppose he was always going to find out eventually,” she said. “I would have liked to have been the one to tell him, but what’s done is done. I’ll talk to him next time I see him, try to make him understand. But you need to go and talk to him now, before this turns into something serious. Right?”
Larissa nodded, but there was no conviction in her face. She looked miserable, and completely exhausted.
“I’ll go and find him,” she said. “Fingers crossed for me, OK?”
She forced half a smile, and Kate returned it with a fierce grin, full of love.
“Always,” she replied.
Jamie Carpenter closed the door to his quarters, turned right down the corridor and saw Larissa making her way down the corridor towards him.
He felt his heart sink instantly; she was moving quickly, floating a few centimetres above the ground, which was never a good sign. Larissa kept her vampire abilities as hidden as possible when she was inside the Loop; there were still plenty of Operators who thought it was a betrayal of everything Blacklight stood for to let a vampire wear the uniform, no matter what she had done to help them on Lindisfarne. Flying along the corridor like she was meant one of two things: she was either nervous, or she was angry. And Jamie had a feeling that whichever it was, it was unlikely to be good for him.
Larissa floated to a halt in front of him.
“I’m sorry for how I behaved,” she said. “But I think we need to talk. Don’t you?”
Jamie nodded, then unlocked his door and held it open. She floated inside, and sat on the edge of his narrow bed. Jamie closed the door, and turned towards her; she was sitting in a weirdly formal way, her back straight, her knees together, her hands at her sides.
She looks like she’s here for an interview, he thought, feeling a flutter of panic in his chest. Jesus, this might be worse than I thought.
“Everything all right?” he asked, forcing lightness into his voice.
Larissa didn’t reply. The expression on her face was blank, and for some reason this worried Jamie more than anything else. The vampire girl had many qualities, but being hard to read was not one of them; she wore her emotions on her sleeve, and on her face. It was normally obvious what she was thinking, or feeling; it was something Jamie relied on enormously.
“OK,” he said, and walked across his quarters. He pulled his chair out from beneath his desk, spun it to face her and sat down. “I’m going to take that as a ‘no’ then.”
Then Larissa told him something that punched every molecule of ai
r from his lungs.
“I told Kate about us,” she said. Her tone was neutral, almost pleasant, but it froze him to his chair.
“What?” Jamie managed. “You did what?”
“I told Kate about me and you,” she replied. “I didn’t want to lie to her any more. We should have told her the truth from the start.”
Be calm be calm be calm be calm.
“You didn’t want to lie to her any more?” asked Jamie, each syllable as heavy as the beating of a drum. “So you thought the best thing to do was to tell her we’ve been lying to her? For two months? Without even telling me you were going to do it? That’s what you thought was the right thing to do?”
He was shouting now, as the enormity of what she had done began to register; he could hear his voice rising with each word.
Kate will never forgive me for this. Never. Larissa will get a free pass because she’s the one who told, but me? Not a chance.
“Yes,” Larissa replied. “I couldn’t do it any more. It was wrong, Jamie, you know it was wrong.”
For a brief moment, when she said his name, Larissa’s face softened, and if Jamie had been watching, he would have seen the desperation and misery on her pale, beautiful face. But he wasn’t; rage, now rampaging unchecked through his mind, blinded him to what was really in front of him.
“Of course it was wrong!” he yelled. “Just like it was wrong of you to let me think you could help me find my mother! She could have died while we wasted time on your stupid wild goose chase, but did I ever hold it against you? No, I didn’t. I forgave you, and we moved on. And this is how you repay me, by going behind my back and sabotaging my friendship with Kate? For what?”
Sitting on the bed, her expression unchanging, Larissa felt like Jamie had stabbed her in the heart.
His words cut her more deeply than he could imagine. What Jamie said was true; she had led them into the wilds of northern Scotland, claiming to be able to uncover the location of Alexandru Rusmanov, and therefore the location of Marie Carpenter. Jamie had been desperate to believe her, and she had used that, used the way he looked at her, to get what she wanted, which was revenge on the man who had condemned her to life as a vampire.
It had been a cruel, heartless thing to do, but it had been her only option; Jamie still didn’t understand how scared she had been in her cell on the detention level, how desperate. She had been sure she was about to be destroyed every time she heard footsteps echo down the long corridor, sure that an Operator in a black uniform was going to appear with a T-Bone in his hands and execute her where she stood.
“I’m sorry,” she managed, her voice little more than a whisper.
This had all gone so badly wrong.
She had wanted to come clean about Kate and move on to her and Jamie; she had never meant to make him this angry, never thought that telling what she had done would push him to a place where he would bring up Marie. Now she was defenceless; there was no way for her to atone for what she had done, and they both knew it.
The pain in Larissa’s voice pulled Jamie back from the brink, from the point where his temper would overwhelm him completely and he might easily say things that could never be taken back. He took a deep breath, and looked at Larissa.
“Kate’s keeping secrets too,” he said. “It wasn’t just us. There’s something going on between her and Shaun Turner, I’d swear to it.”
Larissa looked at him, her eyes wide, and Jamie realised what she was going to say a millisecond before she said it.
Oh no.
“I know,” said Larissa.
The fight flooded out of Jamie, and he slumped in his chair.
“What do you mean, you know?” he asked, although he already knew the answer.
“She told me,” Larissa replied. “About a month ago. Not long after it started.”
Lies, thought Jamie. So many lies. So many secrets. I don’t know which way to turn any more.
“Did she tell you not to tell me?” he asked.
Larissa nodded.
“And that was fine with you?” he said. “You were happy to just go along with that?”
“I wasn’t happy,” she spat, and her eyes suddenly blazed red. “I wasn’t happy at that any more than I was when we decided to lie to her. I’m not happy about any of this.”
“But you did it,” said Jamie. “Whether you were happy about it or not, you still did it.”
“You’re right,” she replied. “I did it. Just like I lied to her for months so you could be sure that you wouldn’t upset poor, fragile little Kate. It doesn’t matter how that made me feel, that you were happy to keep whatever the hell this thing between you and me is a secret. It doesn’t matter that it made me feel like you were ashamed of me. As long as Kate was happy and your conscience was clear, then who gave a damn about me, right?”
Jamie opened his mouth, but no words came out. He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she was being unfair, to him and to Kate, but he couldn’t do it.
Because he knew, deep down, she was right.
He was about to say that to her, about to apologise for everything, when the consoles on both their belts buzzed into life.
He swore, and grabbed the device from its loop. Larissa made no move towards hers; instead, she stared at him, incredulity on her face. Jamie hit ACCEPT on his console, and a message glowed on the narrow screen.
G-17/OP_EXT_L2/LIVE_BRIEFING/HA/IM
Briefing in the hangar immediately. Brilliant. Great timing.
Jamie stood up out of his chair, and waited for Larissa to do the same. She didn’t move; she merely stared up at him, her face so pale it was almost translucent.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Are you serious?” she asked, her voice so small it almost broke his heart.
“We can finish this later,” he said. “I know you said we need to talk and I agree with you, more than ever now. I don’t like this any more than you. But we’ve got a job to do. So we have to go.”
She stood up from his bed, slowly, and looked at him, her eyes full of sadness and loss. Then she walked across the room, opened the door and disappeared along the corridor without another word. Jamie stood still for a long moment, trying to process what he was feeling, and was surprised at the conclusion he reached; the feeling, even though he knew it couldn’t be true, that he was never going to see her again.
18
KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
“To the ends of the earth,” said Dracula. “That’s what you once told me. To the ends of the earth. Yet when my blood was spilled by the American and his friends, you were nowhere to be seen, and I lay below the ground for more than a century before you revived me. I would hear your explanation for these crimes, Valeri, and I would hear it now.”
Valeri hesitated. The subject of his master’s defeat at the hands of Van Helsing and his friends was not taboo, but Valeri sought to avoid it where possible, for a simple reason.
He had never forgiven himself for failing his master.
When Dracula’s throat had been laid open to the cold Transylvanian air, Valeri had been in Moscow with Ana. Relations between Dracula and himself had been sour for many months, ever since Vlad had informed the three Rusmanov brothers that he intended to leave eastern Europe for London, where he hoped his boredom might be alleviated and where he believed he might, after centuries alone, consider taking a third wife.
Valeri, who believed in tradition, in the old darkness of the forests and savage emptiness of the plains, thought it obscene. He considered it a profound betrayal of Sofia, his master’s beautiful, fiercely loyal first wife, of whom Valeri had been extremely fond. Sofia had thrown herself from the highest peak of Poenari Castle in 1458, believing the Turks were approaching; she had chosen to die rather than be enslaved by them.
When his master had remarried in 1461, it had been an act of naked politics; Ilona Szilágyi was the cousin of King Matthias of Hungary, who at the time was holding Vlad prisoner in the city of Buda. But this
idea of embarking upon a life of modernity in London, of seeking a third marriage based on companionship rather than expediency, had struck Valeri as almost blasphemous. He had moderated his response when his master had explained his intentions, although he had made it clear that he did not approve.
Dracula, in an unusual display of self-restraint, had dismissed his oldest friend without reprimand, and the following morning Valeri and his wife had set out for Moscow, where they would summer with a small group of aristocratic acolytes who regarded Valeri as something close to godlike. He had still been there, enjoying the myriad pleasures of the Moscow night, when word had reached him of the death of his master.
Valeri had immediately made plans to return, and sent word to his brothers. Valentin was indulging himself, as always, somewhere in southern France, but promised to depart immediately. Alexandru, as was often the case, had been impossible to find; the darkest, deepest corners of the world were the natural home of the middle Rusmanov brother, and that was doubtless where he was, immersing himself in the very worst of humanity as his master’s life ebbed away on the Borgo Pass.
Valeri and Valentin had stood beneath Castle Dracula, staring out across the Transylvanian mountains, and drunk a toast to the memory of their fallen lord. The details of his death were inconclusive; the gypsies who had been with him at the last knew little beyond the nationalities of the men who had killed him: an American, whom they were eager to repeatedly point out they had killed while trying to defend Dracula’s coffin, and four Englishmen.
The motive for the murder, beyond the mere fact that their master had been a vampire, was unknown. In the shadow of the towering stone building, the two brothers had sworn to continue upholding the rule that Dracula had made clear to them on the day of their turning: that they would create no new vampires, that their gift was to be kept between the three brothers and their wives. They parted on good terms, pledging to remain in contact with one another.
They saw each other only three times in the following century.
