The Cross

by Scott G. Mariani

  She doubled back to the bookstore window and stood there with her nose to the glass staring at Knightly’s face on the poster for a long time. She nodded to herself. In its own perverse, bizarre way, it seemed to make absolute sense.

  She was still thinking about it on the long walk all the way back to the Park and Ride car park. And as she curled up, spent and cold and weak, to sleep on the back seat of her little Fiat, she knew what it was she had to do when morning came. She was going to contact this Errol Knightly. And then she was going to go and talk to him about catching vampires.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘Can I have a word?’ Carter asked as Joel wandered into St Aldates police station just before eleven the following morning. Joel was too dulled from hunger to ask what it was about, but he nonetheless noticed the stern note of authority in his friend’s voice.

  Once in the privacy of his office, Carter shut the door, turned to him and shook his head. ‘Maybe I wasn’t clear, but I thought you were back on the job now.’

  ‘I am,’ Joel said weakly.

  ‘So where’ve you been the last thirty-six hours?’

  Joel sat heavily in a chair. What could he tell him? That after a despairing night curled up on the floor of an empty London apartment he’d paced the streets of the city for endless hours, trying to ignore the terrible hunger pains that were getting worse by the hour? Could he tell him about the homeless man down by the Thames embankment that he’d stalked? How he’d very nearly given in to the almost overwhelming urge to attack him and drink his blood? That if it wasn’t for the fact he knew it was futile, all he wanted to do was put a shotgun to his own forehead?

  ‘I was chasing up a potential lead for the Stone case,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Turned out to be nothing.’

  ‘Pull it together, Joel, you don’t look good.’ Carter glanced at his watch and winced. ‘Fuck. Listen, I need a progress report from you but you’ll have to fill me in on the way. We had a right nasty murder up in North Oxford last night.’

  Carter was acting testy and distracted as the car took them across the city and listened to Joel’s weary report on just how little progress was being made on the Stone/Lonsdale case. It didn’t take long to bring Carter up to date, and by the time they’d reached the crime scene in Frenchay Road and waded through the cordons of police tape, Joel had pretty much run dry of things to say. Carter wasn’t happy. Following him inside the house, where the forensics team led by Jack Brier were still combing for evidence, Joel’s nostrils twitched at the scent that hung in the air. Blood had been spilled here. A lot of blood.

  ‘Should have seen this place yesterday,’ Jack Brier said cheerfully. ‘I’ve seen some butcher’s yards in my time, but this was something else.’

  Joel was already visualising it with a clarity that took his breath away. He could see blood pooled lusciously across the floor, almost taste the glistening red rivulets that trickled down the walls. He could hear the big round fat red velvety drips of it sploshing down from the mantelpiece. For a moment he was swimming through an ocean of it, warm and smooth as melted chocolate, laughing deliriously as he gulped down swallow after swallow . . .

  ‘. . . Matt Dempsey,’ Carter’s voice said, breaking in on his daydream, and Joel realised he’d been talking to him. ‘History guy, American, museum curator. Looks like an aggravated burglary, but we’re still not sure what’s been taken, if anything. Some dusty old relic that’s probably worth a couple of bob on eBay or down the local flea market. Dempsey’s daughter was here when it happened. Poor kid saw everything. She’s in the JR being treated for shock. Williams and Keenan have been to talk to her.’

  Even in his dulled state of mind, Joel remembered all too well his past encounters with Inspector Murdo Williams. ‘Williams hasn’t been put on this, has he? The guy’s a total spoon.’

  ‘You think I should have given it to you?’ Carter said.

  Joel ignored the dig. ‘Any idea who did it?’

  ‘How’re we doing on those DNA results, Jack?’ Carter boomed.

  ‘Have something for you tickety-boo,’ Brier called back jovially from across the room.

  ‘Better have,’ Carter said. ‘Though from the daughter’s description of the guy and what the bastard did here,’ he said in a lower tone, turning to Joel, ‘we all know who the money’s on. The fucking bastard vampire.’

  Joel’s eyes opened wide. ‘The what?’

  ‘Not the kind you were so obsessed with lately,’ Carter said. ‘This loony just thinks he’s a vampire. Even filed his teeth to look like fangs.’ He shook his head quizzically at Joel’s expression. ‘Headline news, St Elowen massacre, jail-breaks, maniac sword killer on the loose, nationwide manhunt – none of that ringing any bells? Guess you haven’t been watching the telly.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  Joel shrugged.

  Carter put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t ask, but you really do look like shit. Maybe you should go home. What’s that bottle you keep fiddling with?’

  Joel hadn’t even been aware he’d been clutching it. It was completely empty now. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, tucking it back in his pocket.

  ‘Jesus, that looked like fucking blood all crusted around the neck of it,’ Carter said with a grimace.

  ‘It’s a sports drink,’ Joel said. ‘High protein stuff. Keeps me energised.’

  ‘Well it ain’t working, mate.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Joel protested.

  ‘Got to be frank, Joel. I wouldn’t have stuck my neck out for the old man to bring you back on the job if I’d thought you weren’t up to it.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Joel said.

  Carter wasn’t any more convinced than Joel was himself about that. ‘All right, listen. Go home. Take the rest of the day off. I’ll cover for you when I get back to the nick. But tomorrow I want you back at work looking and acting like the Joel Solomon I used to know before you started getting all weird on me. Got it?’

  The driver of the unmarked police car seemed a little bemused when Joel got him to drop him off at a little butcher’s shop on Walton Road, half a mile from his flat. Black pudding was made of blood, Joel figured, so maybe it would help the hunger. He was chewing on a mouthful of it as he walked the rest of the way home. He didn’t feel any better yet.

  Halfway up the street, his phone rang. He swallowed down the revolting mouthful, answered the phone and heard an excited voice that he recognised immediately. ‘Dec?’

  ‘Joel! I’ve been shitting meself worrying about you. Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m back,’ was all Joel could reply.

  ‘Did you get them? The vampires?’

  ‘I got some.’

  ‘What about that Stone?’

  ‘I got shot before I could get him. I think he might have escaped.’

  ‘You got shot? Jesus.’

  ‘Just winged me,’ Joel said. ‘Nothing major.’

  ‘Listen, Joel, this is frigging amazing and you’re never going to believe me, but I’ve got some news,’ Dec gabbled. ‘I’m teamed up with this guy, a vampire hunter. A proper pro, he is. You should see this place. I told him all about you, about the cross and stuff. You should come out here and join up with us.’

  Joel groaned inwardly. He’d told the kid to stay away from all this. ‘What vampire hunter?’

  ‘Errol Knightly’s his name. Written a book about them, too. The stuff he says in it, Joel, blow your mind. I can’t put the frigging thing down, so I can’t. It’s called—’

  Joel had already pulled out his police-issue BlackBerry, tossed the remains of the black pudding in the nearest litter bin, and was running an online search. ‘Got it. They Lurk Amongst Us,’ he finished for Dec, scrolling quickly through the site as he walked.

  ‘That’s it. That’s the one.’

  ‘Come on, Dec. Open your eyes. You don’t really think this guy Knightly—’

  But Dec was too carr
ied away to listen. ‘If we could team up, with you and the cross and all, and then start recruiting more guys, we could have a whole frigging vampire hunter army. Just think, Joel. The Federation might even get to hear about us, and want to join forces, like. That’d be just so cool. Think how many of the fuckers we could put away. And Errol said that—’

  Joel was just about to interrupt him by saying, ‘I don’t have the cross any more, and I don’t know where it is’ when something else he’d caught from Dec’s high-speed babble made him stop. ‘Hold on. Backtrack. What did you just say about the Federation? What Federation?’

  ‘Errol’s got this video footage from Romania. There’s this group called the Federation that go round destroying vampires with some kind of special gun. They have these agents, highly trained. Errol reckons it’s a black ops branch of the CIA, or MI5, you know, like Spooks? Or maybe it’s some kind of military special forces team that nobody’s ever heard of. I told you this was frigging amazing, didn’t I?’

  As Dec was babbling on, Joel had found the TV interview on Knightly’s website. ‘You’ve actually seen this footage?’

  ‘It’s awesome!’ Dec burst out. ‘Errol’s just about to upload it to the site, any time now. There’s this woman agent who works for the Federation. She’s a stunner, so she is, with this great big frigging hand cannon that must be one of their secret weapons. She’s not scared or anything. She’s cool. You see her shoot this vampire, and he just frigging explodes, man—’

  Joel was gripping the phone so tightly that the plastic casing was beginning to crack. ‘Are you at Knightly’s place right now? Give me the address. I’m on my way.’

  Chapter Forty

  London

  VIA personnel needed only a brief glimpse of the look of thunder on Alex’s face to know to get out of her way as she marched towards her office. She hadn’t been back to HQ since Baxter Burnett had given her the slip and promptly vanished. Working from the hotel room that was her base until she could find another suitable apartment to rent, she’d spent countless hours on the phone, using up every trick and every contact she could think of to find out where he’d gone. Nothing. There was no point in just scouring the streets. He was gone, and now the only option left open to her was to admit failure. There would be no way to make this look good on the official report she’d now have to write up.

  Alex reached her office door, wrenched it open sullenly, slammed it shut behind her and was about to hang up her coat and bag when she stopped in her tracks.

  Cecil Gibson was lounging behind the desk with his feet up on a stack of her paperwork. His close-set eyes seemed to glitter as he saw her walk in.

  ‘You’re in my chair, Gibson,’ she said.

  Gibson clicked his tongue disapprovingly. ‘I know that fool Harry Rumble cut you an awful lot of slack, but let me tell you this, honey bunny. Your days of insubordination are over. You answer to me now.’

  ‘All right, then get the fuck out of my chair, sir. That do you? I’m busy.’

  But far from flying into the indignant rage she’d secretly wanted to provoke, Gibson just smiled knowingly. Something was up.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me,’ she said suspiciously. ‘I have work to do.’

  He shook his head. ‘You don’t have time for that right now. You need to be getting ready.’

  Hmm. Something definitely was up. ‘Ready for what?’ she asked.

  ‘Ready for your visitors,’ Gibson said. ‘You’re in the deepest shit imaginable, Bishop. They’ve been waiting for you upstairs.’

  ‘Who’s been waiting for me upstairs?’

  ‘You’ll see.’ Gibson glanced at his watch. Right on cue, there was a loud hammering on the door, and Gibson sprang out from behind the desk to answer it.

  The little stoat must have called upstairs the second Queck admitted her through security, Alex thought. Her mind raced to understand what this was about. If it was some kind of disciplinary hearing, it could surely only be about one thing. Could the VIA top brass already know about Baxter Burnett going rogue on her? Had his little escapade outside the school made it onto YouTube already? She could see the headlines: ‘BAD BOY BURNETT ON RAMPAGE!’ ‘MOVIE STAR IN CHILD ATTACK HORROR!’

  Gibson flung open the door with a dramatic flourish that looked like he’d been practising it in the mirror. Alex blinked as her visitors came striding into the office. Leading the way, nose in the air and robes trailing behind her, was Supremo Olympia Angelopolis. At her side strutted the figure of her PA, Ivo Donskoi: grizzled hair cropped military-style, small, narrow-chested, dark suit, a laptop under his arm. Four F.A.N.G. guards marched in behind them, shut the door and stood either side of it with their high-capacity assault weapons cocked and locked.

  Alex was speechless. Gibson just had time to throw her a quick smirk before he went scurrying towards the Vampress. ‘Ma’am, it’s a great honour to welcome you in person to our—’

  ‘Quiet,’ Olympia commanded with a snap of her fingers. ‘I haven’t cancelled some very important meetings and come all this way to bandy words on ceremony. Ivo, if you please.’

  Without a word, Ivo Donskoi shoved the paperwork on Alex’s desk to one side, set the laptop down on the desk and flipped it open. As the screen flashed into life, Alex found herself staring at the garish graphics of a website she’d never seen before.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ the Vampress demanded. ‘No, I didn’t think you did.’

  ‘“They Lurk Amongst Us”?’ Alex said, peering at the screen. ‘Errol Knightly – bestselling author, vampire hunter. Uh-huh. Right.’ She looked up at the Supremo. ‘Come on. We’ve seen these types plenty of times before. It’s obvious this guy’s just a showman.’

  Olympia’s lips tightened. ‘And it seems you’ve become the star of his little show, my dear.’

  ‘You’re going to have to explain what this is about,’ Alex said.

  Donskoi cut in. ‘Ten days ago, your superior Harry Rumble sent you on a mission to investigate possible rogue vampire activity in our eastern Europe sector. Correct? We want to know what happened.’

  ‘It was in the Carpathian mountains,’ Alex said, even more baffled. ‘Out in the middle of nowhere. The VIA mainframe had flagged up a blog where some bunch of amateur wannabe vampire hunters were talking about going into this little rundown cottage in the woods where local rumour said there was a vampire. It was almost certainly going to be just another false alarm, but we decided to check it out. In the end, it turned out to be for real. It was one of the first signs that Gabriel Stone’s rebellion was about to kick off. I think the vampire was one of his Trad followers.’

  ‘And you dealt with the situation?’

  ‘Yes, I did. This was all in my report at the time. Why are we going back over it?’

  Olympia smiled. ‘Let’s go through it again.’

  Alex shrugged and went on. ‘Okay. The situation was messy. By the time I got there, the humans were already in trouble. Three of them, young guys in their twenties. The target took two of the humans down before I terminated him.’

  ‘And you followed the proper procedure?’

  ‘To the letter of the Fed regs. I injected the two dead humans with Nosferol to make sure they stayed that way, and gave the survivor a shot of Vambloc to kill his short-term memory. Then as an extra security measure I took out the whole place with an incendiary device. The report was logged with Harry Rumble and everything was gone through in the debriefing. I can’t understand what the problem is.’

  ‘Let me show you the problem, Agent Bishop,’ Donskoi said.

  Locked in an office in another part of the VIA Headquarters, someone was furtively taking out a very unauthorised mobile phone and dialling a number that nobody else within the organisation could ever know about.

  ‘It’s me,’ the vampire whispered urgently, glancing at the door furtively, fearful that someone outside could be listening. ‘Have you got it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gabriel Stone’s voice on the
other end of the line. He sounded tense. ‘We have it. The plan is in motion.’

  ‘There’s been an unexpected development,’ the vampire whispered. ‘Angelopolis is here. She flew in unannounced from Brussels yesterday. It was all kept hush-hush, but she’s in some kind of meeting with Bishop. The two of them are right here in the building.’

  ‘My man is on his way as we speak,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Tell him to get here fast. Angelopolis and Bishop – we can get them both if we hurry.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  Donskoi reached down to the laptop and clicked to another page of the same website: www.theylurkamongstus.com. In the centre of the screen, a video clip began to download.

  Alex’s gaze flicked sideways to the block of text that accompanied it.

  STOP PRESS! Latest news from the front lines in the war against the Undead. For all you people out there who know the truth, and for all you doubting cynics who are about to be silenced . . . Errol Knightly is proud to present a sneak preview of the most sensational video evidence ever seen that VAMPIRES EXIST. Warning: what you are about to see is real, and not suitable for viewers of a sensitive dis position. Of the group of vampire hunters who captured this incredible footage in Romania, only one escaped with his life. Our technicians are hard at work cleaning up the rest of the footage and we guarantee that when you see the complete video, there will be no more excuses, no more doubters

  . . . . YOU WILL BELIEVE.

  ‘What?’ Alex said. Nobody else spoke. She could feel their eyes on her as the video clip finished loading and the images began to play on the screen. Only then did she understand.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ she said.

  ‘You might say that,’ Gibson sneered.

  The picture was grainy and indistinct, but Alex recognised the setting immediately as the dank, stinking basement of the semi-derelict cottage deep in the Romanian countryside where her mission had taken her. The greenish-hued images unfolded, jerkily but unmistakably, to a muffled, distorted soundtrack of wild screaming. The first human going down, writhing in a dark pool on the cellar floor; a blurred flash of brick wall; a snatched glimpse of the red-smeared face of the vampire, opening his mouth – just for a split second, the money-shot glimpse of his fangs, gleaming white in the murky shadows of the basement – before he grabbed the second human and ripped his throat out.