Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “He laughed,” replied Seward, and Jamie’s face fell. “Or at least,” continued the Director, “he did until I showed him Mr Browning’s file. Then he stopped. The first thing he actually said was, ‘The only member of my team with a higher IQ than this boy is me.’”

  “That’s great,” said Jamie. “Isn’t it?”

  “Professor Talbot certainly seems to think so,” replied Admiral Seward. “He’s agreed to take Matt into the Lazarus Project, on a trial basis. The security risk is minimal, because as I’m sure you know, whether this works out or not, Mr Browning isn’t going home again. We can’t take that chance. So we might as well see if he can make himself useful.”

  The implication of the Director’s words hung in the air; Jamie wanted, needed to believe that Admiral Seward was referring to incarceration.

  The alternative was too horrible to consider.

  He was suddenly overcome with a sickly wave of guilt as he realised that, compared to his three friends, he was actually remarkably lucky; he still had his mother, even if she now lived in a cell two hundred metres below ground. Kate, Larissa, and now Matt, had lost everyone important to them.

  “He’ll be brilliant, sir,” said Jamie. “Talbot’s lucky to have him.”

  “Let’s hope he proves you right,” said Admiral Seward. “I’ve sent his temporary commission and his release forms down to the dormitory for him to sign; Talbot wants him to start work immediately. I put him on Level B, in the quarters next to yours; I assume you have no objection to that?”

  “No, sir,” said Jamie, gratefully. “Thank you, sir.”

  “All right then,” replied the Director, nodding sharply. “Once you’ve jumped through Valentin’s hoops, perhaps you could show Matt to his room? I imagine he’ll still be asleep.”

  “Definitely, sir,” said Jamie.

  “Good,” said Seward. “In which case, you’re due in containment in a few minutes. We’ll be watching you from the Ops Room; just keep calm, and try and give him whatever it is he wants. You’ll do fine, Jamie; I have faith in you. Dismissed.”

  Jamie headed back to the lift with Admiral Seward’s words ringing in his ears.

  I have faith in you.

  The Director had said the five words casually, without drawing attention to them; it was as though he believed they shouldn’t even need saying.

  I have faith in you.

  Jamie chewed them over as he waited for the lift to arrive. The only person who had ever said anything similar to him was Larissa, as they stood in the darkness of the Lindisfarne woods with an innocent man’s body at their feet; she had told him that she wouldn’t let him give up. The words had heartened him, filled him with the strength to keep going, and Admiral Seward’s words had done the same; he stepped into the lift as its doors slid open, and pressed the button that would take him down to Valentin Rusmanov.

  On Level H, he found Paul Turner waiting for him. The Security Officer nodded curtly at him as he approached.

  “You know I can’t come in there with you,” he said. It was a statement, rather than a question. “We’ve moved your mother to a temporary location. Valentin’s butler too. It’s just going to be the two of you. Are you ready for this?”

  “I am,” said Jamie, and realised that he was.

  “OK then,” said Turner, with the tiniest approximation of a smile. “You’ll do fine.”

  The Security Officer stood aside. Jamie walked into the gleaming double airlock door that controlled access to the cellblock. He stood in the narrow space as the door behind him closed, shut his eyes as the rushing gas of the spectroscope billowed around him, then walked calmly out of the second door. As he walked down the long, wide corridor, he was incredibly aware of his heart beating in his chest; he tried to control it, tried to force it to slow down, aware that it would sound like the thumping of a bass drum to Valentin as he approached.

  Jamie stepped out in front of the wide ultraviolet wall, and looked into the cell. Valentin Rusmanov was waiting for him in the same chair he had sat in the previous morning, a wide, welcoming smile on his face. The vampire’s shirt collar was open, as was the jacket of his grey suit.

  “Mr Carpenter,” he exclaimed. “A very good morning to you. I had begun to suspect you weren’t coming.”

  Jamie looked at his watch to see that it was seven minutes past eight.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had a meeting that overran.”

  “No doubt you were being briefed thoroughly on the dangers of being alone with me,” smiled Valentin. “By Admiral Seward, I would guess? He seems rather fond of you.”

  “I’m here now,” said Jamie, determined not to let the vampire dictate the conversation. “Alone, as you requested. May I come in?”

  Valentin nodded at the empty chair in which Paul Turner had sat.

  “Please,” he replied. “Mi casa es su casa. Make yourself at home.”

  Jamie took an involuntary deep breath, which he hoped Valentin didn’t notice, then stepped through the ultraviolet wall. He felt his skin tingle momentarily, then walked steadily across the room and sat down in the chair.

  Less than two metres away, smiling gently, sat one of the most powerful beings in the world.

  “So,” said Valentin, crossing one leg over the other. “What shall we talk about?”

  “You wanted this meeting,” said Jamie. “Why don’t you tell me why?”

  The vampire’s grin widened, and Jamie thought he saw the tiniest flash of red in the corner of its eyes; it had been so fleeting that he couldn’t be sure, but he felt a chill run up his spine nonetheless.

  “There is so much for us to discuss, Jamie – may I call you Jamie? Or do you prefer Mr Carpenter?”

  “Jamie is fine.”

  “Lovely,” said Valentin. “Jamie it is then. The first thing I would like to ask you about is exactly how you were able to kill my brother. Does that seem like a fair place to start the conversation?”

  Jamie’s stomach revolved as a thick wave of unease crashed through him. This, he knew, was the topic that was most likely to place him in danger; unlike the other members of the Zero Hour Task Force, he didn’t believe that Valentin meant him any harm, at least not consciously. But the subject of Alexandru, more specifically of Alexandru’s death, seemed to Jamie the likeliest trigger, if there was to be one.

  “I told you,” he replied. “In the van. Two days ago.”

  “Details, Jamie,” exclaimed Valentin, sitting suddenly forward in his chair and smiling at the teenager. “The devil is in the detail. Tell me again, without tailoring the story to your audience.”

  Jamie hesitated.

  Tell the truth, he thought. He’ll know if you’re lying.

  “I pulled a seven-metre-tall cross down on the back of his head,” said Jamie. “It weighed about two tons, they told me afterwards. It smashed his body to pieces, and I put a stake through his heart. That’s it.”

  “What did he do when it hit him?” asked Valentin, softly. “Did he scream? Did he try to get out of the way? My brother was very fast, if nothing else.”

  “He didn’t see it coming,” said Jamie. “It was behind him, and he was watching me. He thought I’d aimed at him and missed, so he was smiling at me. But I hadn’t; I’d aimed for the cross.”

  “Go on,” said Valentin, his voice low and hungry. “Tell me.”

  “At the last second, just before it hit him, the shadow of the cross fell across him, and he frowned. I can remember it really clearly; it was just a normal frown, like when you see something unusual. He didn’t even try to move, and a second later it landed on him.”

  Valentin leant back in his chair, and raised his eyebrows, a clear sign for Jamie to continue.

  “It broke him,” said Jamie, simply. “There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t believe he could still be alive, but he was. I went and knelt down next to him, while the rest of my team attacked his followers, and he was staring at me. He only had one eye, but it was looking right at me,
and he was trying to speak.”

  “What was he trying to say?” asked Valentin. “Could you understand him?”

  “He told me I was too late,” replied Jamie. “Then he said ‘He Rises’, and told me that everyone I loved was going to die. And that’s when I staked him.”

  Valentin looked at him, and Jamie saw open admiration on his face.

  Perhaps I’m not going to die down here, he thought.

  “How did you know it would work?” asked the vampire. “The cross, I mean. How did you know my brother wouldn’t simply move out of the way?”

  “I didn’t,” said Jamie, honestly. “But I knew I couldn’t fight him, and I knew that he knew it too. So I thought that if it looked like I had failed, then he’d be too pleased with himself to notice what I’d really done.”

  “That’s a very large wager. You quite literally gambled your life on it.”

  “Not really,” replied Jamie, shrugging his shoulders. “I was dead either way, or worse, and so were my mother and my friends. I had nothing to lose by then.”

  Valentin leant back in his chair, and drew a beautiful silver cigarette holder from inside his suit jacket. He plucked a dark red cigarette from beneath a band of white silk, placed it in his mouth and lit it. Pungent, aromatic tobacco smoke wafted into the air, laced with a metallic undercurrent that Jamie recognised instantly.

  “That’s Bliss, isn’t it?” he said.

  Valentin nodded, cocking his head to one side.

  “You’re familiar with it?” the vampire asked.

  “I am,” said Jamie, his hand instinctively touching the patch of scar tissue on his neck, the result of a chemical burn he had received in the laboratory where the majority of the British supply of the vampire drug was produced.

  “Have you ever tried it?” asked Valentin, offering the case towards Jamie. “I’m told it is quite agreeable to humans.”

  “No thank you,” said Jamie, politely. “I’m fine.”

  Valentin nodded, then took a deep drag on the cigarette. His eyes glowed involuntarily red, and he threw back his head, the muscles on his neck standing out. When the rush of the heroin and the human blood had passed, he slowly returned his gaze to Jamie, the red light dwindling in his eyes as he did so.

  “My brother was a monster,” he said, slowly. “I have come to believe that he always was, since we were children, and probably since birth. He felt nothing for anyone other than himself, with the possible exception of Ilyana, his wife. The world is a better place without him in it; he was cruel, and pitiless, and arrogant. It pleases me that the last of those ended up as the reason for his downfall.”

  Jamie didn’t reply; he had no idea what to say to such an admission.

  “I thank you for being honest,” continued Valentin. “I would have known if you weren’t of course, but I’m sure it made you nervous to tell me about murdering a member of my family.”

  He grinned, and Jamie fought the urge to grin right back.

  Don’t do anything to provoke him. Don’t trust anything he says. View everything as a potential trap.

  “It wasn’t top of my list of potential topics,” he replied.

  Valentin’s grin widened even further, until it looked as though his face was going to split in half. “And what was?” he asked. “What would you like to talk about?”

  “My grandfather,” said Jamie. “I know almost nothing about him. It’s crazy to me that you knew him; he died before I was born.”

  “Didn’t your father ever speak of him?”

  “Not really,” said Jamie. “He told me he flew in the war, and that was about it. Dad never really talked much about him, or any of his family. I only realised why once I was here.”

  “And the monster?” asked Valentin. “He was closer to your grandfather than anyone. He told you nothing?”

  “He told me that my grandfather saved him,” replied Jamie, feeling a twinge of pain in his chest as he thought about Frankenstein. “He told me that he was the reason he swore to protect my family, because of something that happened in New York a long time ago. He promised he was going to tell me everything, but he never got the chance.”

  “You miss him, don’t you?” asked Valentin, softly. “The monster. I can hear it in your voice.”

  Jamie nodded. “I do,” he said. “I miss him, and I feel guilty every day. He wouldn’t be dead if I had trusted him.”

  “How so?”

  “I let Thomas Morris manipulate me,” replied Jamie, feeling his face heat up with shame. “He told me that Frankenstein was there the night my father died, that he was one of the men sent to bring him in. I asked him if it was true, and he admitted it. So I told him to stay away from me, and I went to Lindisfarne with Morris. Right into the trap he’d set for me.”

  “But the monster followed you regardless?”

  “He had suspected Tom Morris,” said Jamie. “He followed us, and he arrived in time to help. But when we thought it was all over, a werewolf that was loyal to Alexandru attacked me, and Frankenstein stepped in between us. They went over the cliffs together.”

  “That doesn’t sound like it was your fault,” said Valentin. “Not to me at least.”

  “If I had trusted him, he would have been with us on Lindisfarne. Morris wouldn’t have been able to do what he did.”

  “Why not? My brother was more powerful than a hundred Frankensteins combined. Do you really think his being there would have made any difference?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie, miserably.

  “You said he died after the battle with my brother was over,” continued Valentin. “Defending you from a werewolf. How can you say that things wouldn’t have transpired exactly the same way, whether he had arrived on Lindisfarne with you and Mr Morris or an hour after you, as he did?”

  Jamie looked at Valentin, searching the old vampire’s face for amusement or enjoyment, looking for any sign that he was being toyed with. He saw nothing; the vampire’s face was open, full of what appeared to be honesty.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just know that it feels like my fault. It feels like he’s dead because of me.”

  “It sounds to me,” said Valentin, “that the reason he is dead is because he chose to put your life ahead of his own. You didn’t ask him to, nor did anyone else; he made that choice for himself. Who are you to take responsibility for it?”

  Jamie’s throat worked, but no sound came out. His mind was reeling; he had become so accustomed to the weight of his guilt that even the suggestion that he had been carrying it unnecessarily was almost impossible for him to comprehend.

  “It was his life, Jamie,” said Valentin. “He lived it as he chose, and it sounds like he ended it as he chose, a luxury not granted to many. I would be willing to wager that he wouldn’t want you to blame yourself for what he did. I’m sure that wherever he is now, he’s quite content.”

  30

  THERE IS NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS FOR REVENGE

  PARIS, FRANCE YESTERDAY

  Frankenstein lay on a sumptuously soft four-poster bed, staring at the gilded golden frame above him.

  He had been lying perfectly still for more than an hour; he was trying to wake up, to force the slippery dissolution that marks the collapse of a dream and the return of the real world. He was hoping, futilely, to be returned to a world where his memory was restored, where Latour’s insinuations would not haunt his every waking moment, where he would be a free man instead of a prisoner.

  He had no idea how many days it had been since the vampire had brought him home. More than one but less than ten was the best estimate he could make; the time ran like syrup, sticky and nauseating. He had been fed and watered, and wanted for nothing except the freedom to leave the grand apartment, with its high ceilings and towering windows, its salon and study and vast, elegant bedrooms.

  He had apparently been here before, had spent many voluntary nights in the bed on which he was now lying; Latour had expressed utter delight when he finally acc
epted that Frankenstein was genuinely unable to remember any aspect of his life, no matter how small or insignificant, and had taken sadistic pleasure in filling in as many of the gaps as he was able.

  For long hours, Latour had held forth with tales of horror and violence in which he and Frankenstein had been the starring participants; numbed by his captor’s stories, unable and simply unwilling to believe that he could have been capable of perpetrating a single one of the acts of savagery being described, Frankenstein had begged Latour for mercy. The vampire had immediately begun to beat him, chastising him with every blow for his weakness, exhorting him to wake up from his daze, to once again be the man that Latour had once considered his friend.

  By day Latour slept, but Frankenstein remained a prisoner. The vampire’s house was staffed by an army of servants, many of them human and perfectly capable of operating during the hours of daylight. They were unfailingly polite and attentive, but all were armed with heavy black pistols, and they never entered his room alone. There were always at least two of them, one of whom would approach the bed and enquire as to any needs Frankenstein may have, while the other would remain close to the door, ready to act if the prisoner showed any sign of attempting an escape. He hadn’t, and nor did he have any plans to do so, for one simple reason.

  He was absolutely terrified for his life.

  Frankenstein didn’t recognise the man that Latour kept assuring him he used to be, a creature of violence and temper, of awful appetites and disregard for the innocence of others, but he wished that man was here now; it did not sound as though he would have lain passively on his bed, waiting for whatever lay in store for him.

  A key turned in the lock, and the bedroom door opened. Latour stepped into the room, his narrow frame covered in an elegant tuxedo. The black was the colour of midnight, the white of the collars and the narrow vertical stripe of the exposed shirt were the colour of the full moon. He smiled at Frankenstein, then flew across the room at such speed that the prisoner’s teetering mind could only perceive it as teleportation; one moment Latour was standing in the open doorway, the next he was beside the bed.