The Cross

by Scott G. Mariani

  ‘Mr—?’

  ‘Renfield,’ he repeated. ‘Barry Renfield, Northwood Estate Management. As you know, my company represents the owners of the building.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘I’d prefer to speak to Mr Kelby,’ Ash said, noticing the way she kept glancing at his neck. She was flushing a little, pupils dilating. He smiled inwardly. You want to drink my blood, bitch? You have no idea what’s coming to you.

  ‘Mr Kelby is in a meeting right now,’ she told him curtly. ‘I can’t find any record of an appointment.’

  ‘I have a card.’ He showed it to her, and she frowned at it. ‘It is rather important,’ he said. ‘There’s been an issue with the rent payments.’ The irritation in his voice was genuine. Doing all this talking was making his mouth sore.

  ‘Nobody notified us about this,’ she said. With a sigh, she went back to her desk and pressed a button. ‘This is Miss Queck. I have a gentleman here to see Mr Kelby. It seems important,’ she added, glancing frostily up at Ash.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Queck,’ Ash said with a smile as they waited. He pointed to his case. ‘May I?’ She narrowed her eyes as he laid it down flat on her desk and turned the little wheels of the combination locks. The number was 666. He smiled and flipped open the catches, but left the lid shut. Queck was staring at him.

  A moment later, the massive security door whooshed open and a tall, dark-haired man stepped out to greet Ash. ‘I’m Cornelius Kelby,’ he said, looking a little perplexed. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Nope,’ Ash said. ‘And nobody can help you either.’

  Then he reached casually out and opened the lid of the case.

  Twenty miles away to the south-west, Gabriel Stone was pacing up and down the length of The Ridings’ wine cellar as Lillith lounged nearby in an antique velvet chair, sipping absently on a cup of blood and leafing through a fashion magazine.

  She looked up and tutted irritably. ‘Gabriel, you’re making me all dizzy with your pacing.’

  ‘Hmm?’ he said, snapping out of his reverie.

  ‘Relax, brother. You’re wearing a trench in the middle of the floor.’

  ‘Did Elspeth, Rolando and Petroc depart as I instructed?’

  ‘The minute the sun went down,’ Lillith said, and took another long, lazy swig. ‘All taken care of. Though,’ she added, ‘I don’t think Rolando’s much of a pilot.’

  ‘I believe I showed him all he needed to know in order to operate the machine,’ Gabriel said testily. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked, only now noticing the cup in her hand.

  She clicked her tongue. ‘Oh, Gabriel. From one of the humans we put in the basement, silly. Remember? It was your idea.’

  ‘Lillith, those are not for helping yourself to whenever the whim takes you. How is one properly supposed to organise a celebration party if you persist in—’

  ‘All right, all right, I’m sorry. It was just a little nip. I couldn’t resist. Anyway, who’s counting? One here, one there. There’ll be plenty to go around. Zachary brought home another one last night. Some local girl, I think – on her way home from a discotheque, or whatever they call them nowadays.’

  ‘I see. Splendid, splendid,’ Gabriel muttered distractedly, his mind already moving on as he started pacing again, feeling for the phone in the pocket of the cream silk waistcoat he was wearing loose over his white shirt. Under normal circumstances, he disliked telephones and preferred to have as little to do with them as possible – but he kept toying with it, willing it to ring with the news he was expecting.

  ‘It’s not often I see you in such a taking,’ Lillith said. ‘Look at you. Grinning to yourself like a boy.’

  ‘If all goes according to plan,’ he told her, ‘this should prove to be a historic day. Marking the destruction of the Federation, once and for all. Heralding the dawning of a new era for our kind. The age of the vampire is about to be reborn.’

  ‘About time, too,’ Lillith said, and returned to her magazine.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  VIA Headquarters, London

  Not even Ash had been prepared for what had happened when he opened the lid of the attaché case and revealed the cross nestling there against the rich red velvet.

  For one moment of horrified utter disbelief, Queck and Kelby had stood there with their mouths hanging open, frozen like two rabbits caught in the beam of a hunter’s lamp.

  There had been no blinding flash of light, no cataclysmic explosion. The cross simply lay there inert in its soft bedding. But whatever power it contained was now suddenly released from inside the lead casing and radiated outwards with an invisible force that felt to Ash like a giant pulse of electrical energy. It hit the two speechless vampires and blew them apart, disintegrating and obliterating them before his eyes.

  And through the open metal door from which Kelby had emerged, all Ash could hear now was a chaos of shrieking and screaming as the power of the cross made itself felt throughout the building. He grabbed it from the case and held it tight in his fist, the cold milky smooth stone suddenly filled with a crackling, thrumming energy that seemed to burn in his right hand. With the left, he reached back inside the attaché case, and from one of its zippered compartments he took the miniature digital camcorder Gabriel Stone had given him and switched it on.

  With the cross raised high and the camcorder at chest height, Ash strode through the steel doorway and into the VIA office space – and the wholesale devastation began for real. If there had been anything left of them, he would have been scrambling over the bodies of the fallen in piles waist-high. All that remained instead was fine grey dust that lay strewn across the floor, over desks and computer terminals, and a few burnt tatters of clothing that floated gently through the air like cinders.

  Now he could understand the significance of this thing, and the reason his new patrons had gone to such lengths to make sure that they acquired it. Very little had ever surprised him in his life, even less impressed him – but the sensation of omnipotence that coursed through his veins as he marched through the building, effortlessly destroying everything in his path, made him laugh out loud with sheer joy.

  Beyond the range of the cross’s power, dozens of screaming vampires were fleeing in desperation. A squat male in a grey suit was clawing frantically at a window catch, trying to open it and launch himself out, when Ash strode up within range of him and he burst apart with a scream that barely had time to make it out of his lips. Two others who were obviously guards of some kind were vaporised before the one with the pistol could draw it from its holster and the other could shoulder his semi-automatic shotgun. Their firearms clattered to the floor amid a cloud of dust.

  Ash paused briefly to thrust the cross into his belt and pick up the fallen shotgun. Its short barrel was shrouded with a fat tubular silencer. Useful. He checked the breech, then pressed briskly on with his clear-out of the building.

  Doors that weren’t locked, he crashed open with a kick. Those that were, he blasted one-handed off their hinges with the shotgun. There was no need to use the gun on his quarry. Anything in his path that tried to crawl away into hiding was annihilated simply by his presence.

  He had the whole layout of the upper two floors of the building clearly pictured in his mind from the diagram he’d been shown at The Ridings. As he reached the far side of the fourth floor, he swiftly made his way to the lift that led upwards to the fifth – home to the offices and conference rooms where, as Gabriel Stone had told him, the treacherous Federation intelligence chiefs planned and monitored their nefarious operation to degrade and oppress the vampire race.

  Personally, Ash didn’t give a shit about the politics. He was here for one thing only, and he set about his purpose the way a shark went after its prey. He stepped into the lift and pressed the button for the upper floor.

  The top floor of the building was filled with a mayhem of screaming and panic as VIA personnel stampeded away from the source of the terrible power they could feel steadily ap
proaching. There was no way out, nowhere to run.

  Not without the proper authority. Behind locked doorways marked ‘AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY’, in the section of the VIA top floor to which few vampires had ever been allowed access, Olympia Angelopolis gathered up her trailing robes and fled wildly down the neon-lit corridor. The sensation that filled her body was horrific, making her gibber with terror. ‘Out of my way!’ she screamed at one of her bodyguards as he burst out of a doorway to her left and tried clumsily to shield her. Pressing both hands against his chest, she sent him crashing violently backwards against the wall and leaped over him. Before he was able to scramble back on his feet, his whole body spasmed into a massive convulsion and he let out a roar of agony.

  The cross bearer was getting closer with every passing second.

  More guards were emerging from doorways along the corridor, glancing about them in helpless, panic-stricken confusion. ‘Stand your ground!’ Olympia screeched at them, pointing back in the direction of the energy source. ‘Your duty is to protect your Supremo!’

  The guards shakily drew their weapons as Olympia stumbled away from them, almost tripping over her robes in her desperation to escape. She savagely ripped away the trailing material and ran on, crashing through another doorway that said ‘NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY’.

  The place she was heading for was one of the VIA London Headquarters’ most closely-guarded secrets, known only to the highest Federation elite. Leading from a secure doorway on the top floor all the way to ground level by means of the building’s air-conditioning shafts, the escape hatch had been built in 1985 – the same year that the newly-formed agency had taken over the lease of the building. Great pains had been taken to keep it hidden from the owners and the legal firm downstairs. Its sole purpose: to protect its VIVs in the event of exactly this kind of contingency. The Federation rulers had never ruled out the possibility of an organised attack – though they hadn’t anticipated one of such extreme lethal brutality. They’d been caught off guard, and all Olympia could think about as she raced towards the secret doorway was reaching the safety of her Federation main headquarters haven in Brussels. She had to get back there. She must survive, at all cost.

  Her vision was punctured by the muffled report of a silenced shotgun and the crash of a door bursting open, followed immediately afterwards by the screams of her bodyguards echoing through the passageways. The Supremo was almost there now. The doorway just a few yards ahead was marked with the same fanged skull-and-crossbones symbols as the labels on Nosferol containers . . . but then the sound of lurching footsteps and a deep groan behind her made her spin round with a gasp.

  It was one of the bodyguards. Half his body was blown away, the rest pitifully melted and blackened, one arm gone, a withered leg trailing behind him. ‘He’s coming!’ he rasped through the unrecognisable ruin of his face, then collapsed at her feet.

  Olympia felt the approaching energy of the cross wash over her and buckled up in pain. With a wail of effort she staggered the last couple of steps to the door and stumbled against it, reaching frantically to clap her splayed palm to the scanner panel on the wall. Her mind swam in a haze of rising darkness as the device seemed to take forever to scan and analyse the data. The agony was intensifying. Olympia screamed.

  The cross was getting closer.

  All Ash found at the foot of the locked door was a charred mess of vampire remains and some tatters of clothing. He poked about in the cinders with the shotgun muzzle, then raised the gun up and blasted a round of 00-buck into the electronic lock. Nothing. The door held. He shrugged, turned and started retracing his steps back through the corridors of the top floor.

  Nothing stirred in what, just minutes earlier, had been the centre of VIA operations. All that remained of the destroyed vampires was a fine, chalky dust that billowed up in clouds at Ash’s passing, hung drifting on the air and then slowly settled in his wake. The cross had cooled to the touch and now it was just an ordinary, inanimate lump of stone.

  Ash turned off the camcorder. It had witnessed all there was to see. He rode the lift back down to the deserted fourth floor and returned to the security ante-room, where he dumped the shotgun on Queck’s desk and replaced the cross and the camcorder inside the attaché case, shut the catches and rolled the combination locks.

  On his way out of the Schuessler & Schuessler building, just another legal eagle on his way home after a long day at the office, Ash took out his phone.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said quietly, walking back towards the BMW.

  Gabriel Stone sounded pleased. ‘Excellent. Proceed without delay to phase two, while the enemy is still off guard. The aircraft is waiting. Make haste.’

  ‘Brussels,’ Ash muttered to himself as he revved the BMW and went skidding out of the car park. He wondered what it was like in Brussels.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Bal Mawr Manor

  ‘Spectro-what?’ Dec interrupted.

  Returning to the library to talk, the three of them had found the grandiose room empty – Knightly had disappeared somewhere to sulk, or to call his agent. The tall bay windows were growing steadily darker as the last rays of the sun sank into the sea. Slumped in one of the deep armchairs, Joel had closed his eyes as he listened to Chloe’s account, but he’d been attentive to every word. So had Dec, perched on the arm of another chair with one foot hopping nervously, knitting his brows in concentration.

  ‘Spectroscope,’ Chloe repeated. ‘This lab guy I was telling you about, Fred Lancaster – he used it to test what the cross was made of, and it turned out that it was some kind of rock that didn’t come from here. Not from this planet, I mean.’ Going back through it all had freshened the grief and she had to dab her eyes every so often with a tissue as she talked. ‘So, he and Dad got excited that they’d found something really amazing. It was Fred Lancaster’s idea to call the local press about it. That’s how it got in the news.’

  The tears began to roll more freely as she described what had happened next. ‘And it was really all my fault,’ she sniffed.

  ‘I wish I’d never brought that thing back. How was I supposed to know? How could I?’ A sob burst from her throat. She covered her face with her hands.

  While she broke off for a moment to collect herself and blow her nose, Dec got up and reached out an uncertain hand to touch her shoulder. ‘You couldn’t have known, Chloe,’ he muttered softly. ‘You can’t blame yourself, so you can’t.’

  The memory of the murder scene was fresh in Joel’s mind, but he chose not to mention it to Chloe – just as he preferred to keep to himself that his opinion of Thames Valley Police Inspector Murdo Williams, heading up the hunt for Matt Dempsey’s killer, was even lower than hers. With a guy like ‘Murder’ Williams in charge, she was pretty much on her own.

  ‘What is this thing?’ Chloe asked Joel when she was able to talk again. ‘This cross of – what did you call it?’

  ‘Ardaich,’ Joel said. ‘It’s called the cross of Ardaich. My grandfather spent years of his life hunting for it. He left a notebook when he . . . when he died. In it were a set of clues that helped me find the cross, in Venice. It had been hidden there, for centuries maybe, underneath an old church.’

  ‘So your grandfather was a vampire hunter?’

  Joel nodded. ‘He wanted to destroy them all. It was his life’s work.’

  ‘And this cross of Ardaich. You’re saying it’s like some kind of ultra-special weapon against them?’

  Even in the gloom of the darkened library, Joel’s acute vision could read the hard look of disbelief in her eyes. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he said seriously. ‘I don’t know why. But it seems to have some incredible power over . . . over them.’ He’d almost said ‘over us’. ‘It’s existed in their folklore for – well, I don’t know for how long. They’re very afraid of it. Even to go near it is lethal to them.’

  ‘Vampires have folklore?’ Chloe shook her head, then was silent for a few moments. ‘Okay, let’s imagine fo
r a moment that this isn’t just totally insane, but what you’re telling me is actually true. It still doesn’t make sense that some deranged psychopath who believes he’s a vampire would want to steal this famous cross that apparently all vampires know is so harmful. It’d be like . . .’ she searched for the right analogy ‘. . . like Superman looking for a lump of Kryptonite, even though he knew it could kill him. Or am I missing something?’

  ‘It’s a good question,’ Joel said. ‘I can’t tell you the answer.’

  A long silence fell over the three of them, so that the only sound in the room was the crash of the distant surf. Dec was watching Chloe with a look of deep concern as Joel sat very still and his mind raced to figure out the puzzle. He needed to know more about this Ash. Fishing out his police BlackBerry, in seconds he was looking up online news items about the killer. The whole internet seemed to be on fire with the story.

  It was as he was speed-scanning a BBC article about the jailbreak that Joel drew in a sharp breath. ‘I think I might have something here,’ he said. Inwardly, he was cursing himself for not having noticed it before.

  There had been no survivors among the prison staff, but prisoners who witnessed the massacre had given descriptions of the gang of three who had, incredibly, managed to break into one of the country’s most secure prisons, spring an inmate from his solitary confinement cell and walk out free. One of the gang had been a woman. Dark and sexy, clad in red. Another a huge black guy.

  Joel didn’t need to read any more to know who the third one had been.

  Thinking furiously, he remembered what Tommy had told him back in Southampton: how millions of people out there would do just about anything for the rewards of eternal life and unlimited power. Rewards that only a vampire could give them.