by Will Hill
Blood was running freely down his chest, where Lord Dante had sliced away the shirt he had been wearing. The vampire king’s touch on his skin had been gentle, almost comforting, until he had drawn the scalpel down the centre of his mottled grey-green torso, cutting him open from chest to stomach button. His flesh had slid apart like butter, and blood had welled instantly in a straight, neat line.
The cut wasn’t deep, the pain manageable, but Frankenstein knew it was only the beginning. Lord Dante quickly drew the blade across his skin again, eight short horizontal lines crossing the long vertical one. It was a neat pattern, one that immediately began to bleed, and it made Frankenstein grit his teeth.
Lord Dante looked at him enquiringly, as if wondering when he was going to stop pretending that what was happening didn’t hurt, but Frankenstein simply stared back at him, his jaw clenched. The vampire king nodded slightly, as though in admiration, then shoved the scalpel into the monster’s stomach and twisted it.
The pain that flared from Frankenstein’s midsection was huge and hot, and he screamed, a vast roar of damnation.
Too late, he thought, resignation spreading through him. Too late. I’m going to die in this theatre, with this void inside my head.
But then his body began to tremble, and savage elation burst through him. Pain exploded through every particle of his being, but he welcomed it, drawing back his lips into a snarling grin that made Lord Dante widen his eyes with surprise. As he felt himself begin to slip, as he felt the change begin, at last, to overwhelm him, the last thing he saw before his eyes turned yellow and everything faded to black and white, were five dark figures emerging into the rear of the theatre.
Jamie slipped silently through the door at the rear of the lobby. He found himself in sudden darkness, and stepped to the right as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The rest of his team filed in and took positions beside him, their backs against a curving, red velvet wall.
They were standing at the back of a theatre with its house lights lowered, and Jamie’s eyes were immediately drawn to the dark red glow emanating from the sixty or so seats that faced the stage.
Vampires, he realised. Lots and lots of vampires.
Then he followed their gaze, and forgot all about the creatures in the audience.
In the middle of the stage, bound to a thick wooden pole, was Frankenstein’s monster. His head was back, the tendons in his neck standing out, his teeth clenched against whatever had caused him to issue the deafening scream. There was a dark figure leaning in close to the monster’s chest, but Jamie barely saw him; his mind was temporarily overwhelmed.
He’s alive. I didn’t want to let myself believe it. But he’s really alive.
The figure on the stage stepped aside and Jamie felt a surge of almost uncontrollable rage burst through him as he saw the tattered remains of his friend’s chest. Blood was running from what looked like a hundred cuts, pooling at his waist and dripping steadily to the wooden floor. He felt words starting to form in his throat; he didn’t know what they were going to be, he only knew that he was going to scream them as loudly as his vocal cords would allow, and used every ounce of his strength to push them back down.
Giving yourself away won’t help him, he told himself. You need a distraction.
Jamie felt something press against his gloved hand, and looked round. Jack Williams was holding an ultraviolet light grenade, and was nodding pointedly at the aisle that ran the length of the theatre; it began less than two metres from where Jamie was standing. Jamie grinned behind his visor, then nodded.
Jack stepped silently round Jamie, and slid sideways along the wall until he was facing down the aisle. The matt-black of his uniform made him invisible in the shadows, and the material that clung to his body prevented any scent escaping that might have attracted the attention of the vampire audience. It didn’t matter, though, as none of the vampires were looking anywhere other than at the stage; they were absolutely focused on the bleeding, howling monster.
Jack twisted the grenade open, crouched and rolled it slowly down the aisle, a remote trigger resting in his hand.
“This is it,” whispered Jamie over the comms link in his helmet. “Ready One when Jack pulls the trigger.”
He heard the faintest rustling as his team unsheathed their T-Bones and MP5s. Jamie left his where they were; he was watching Jack.
The grenade rolled silently down the aisle, between the throngs of watching vampires. As it reached the halfway point, a woman in a dark green dress turned to look at it, a curious expression on her face. She opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment, Jack Williams pressed his trigger, and before she got the chance her mouth was full of flames.
The UV grenade burst into life without the slightest noise; one second there was only the darkened throng of vampires, the next the theatre was full of blinding purple light. A millisecond later the screaming began.
Jamie, whose attention had returned to the stage, saw something strange in the split second before the grenade pulsed into life. He saw what was left of Frankenstein’s shirt ripple, as though something was running under the grey-green skin beneath it. Then the grenade exploded, and all he saw was fire.
There was a sudden, enormous bloom of heat, as half the vampires in the audience burst into flames. They leapt into the air, screaming, beating at their clothes and skin, trying to extinguish the purple fire. On the stage, Lord Dante recoiled in horror, more at the usurping of his moment of triumph than out of any genuine concern for his burning guests.
The vampires at the edges of the crowd, who had been shielded from the ultraviolet light by their wives and husbands, their friends and lovers, jumped up from their seats, their eyes blazing red, searching for the source of the carnage.
Screams filled the theatre, as the most badly burned vampires fell from the air and crashed down on to the seats. Jamie pulled the T-Bone from his belt, set it against his shoulder, sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. His stake rocketed across the auditorium, smashing clean through the chest of a vampire in a dark grey suit, who was desperately attempting to beat out the flames that were consuming a vampire woman in a cocktail dress. He was driven backwards half a step, then burst like a balloon, coating the burning woman in gore.
The stake whistled back into the barrel of Jamie’s weapon, as he heard a series of loud bangs from his right and left. Stakes flew through the air, their metal wires trailing behind them, and four more vampires erupted in columns of steaming blood. Finally, eventually, the vampires at the edges of the crowd, the ones whose burns were minimal, followed the flight of the weapons, and saw the five figures lurking in the shadows.
There was a deafening howl of rage from one of them, who pointed with a skeletal finger. The vampires who were still able to stand, perhaps thirty of them, turned en masse, and regarded the dark shapes. Then, with a chorus of snarls and howls, they leapt towards the intruders.
Frankenstein’s body shook as though an electric current was being passed through it.
He could see the flames that were sweeping through the theatre, the burning seats, the screaming, roasting vampires, but what was far, far worse, was that he could smell them. His nostrils flared as the scents, complicated, swirling things, almost physical objects, floated through the air; he could smell fear, and pain, and the anger of the panicking vampires, could smell charring bones and cooking flesh, could smell, with enormous satisfaction, the fury rising from Lord Dante, who was staring out over his audience with a look of helpless rage on his face. Then the change began in earnest, and all he was aware of was his own agony.
His legs snapped back on themselves, the bones splintering and knitting back together in a completely different shape. He felt thick hair burst from every pore on his body, felt his arms crack, bend and eventually break. The pain was so huge he couldn’t even scream; he had known what was coming, had been through it twice before, but there was simply no way to prepare for the feeling of your body being broken and rebuilt
.
Frankenstein felt the ropes that had bound him tightly to the post give way as his limbs changed shape beneath them, and then his mind, what little of it remained in his possession, slipped away, as the animal overcame him.
“Spread!” yelled Jamie, as the vampires came for him and his team. “Move!”
He threw himself to the ground, beneath the flying lunge of a vampire who had to have been in at least his sixties. The man crashed into the wall where Jamie had been standing against it, and crumpled to the floor. Jamie leapt forward, as quick as a striking cobra, and buried his stake in the vampire’s chest.
He didn’t wait for the explosion of blood that he knew would follow; he was moving before it came, crouched low, running along the wall towards the corner of the stage. He threw one backward glance as he did so, and felt a surge of pride as he saw his team fan out through the theatre, Claire and Dominique heading to the right, Jack and Angela moving down the aisle, into the heart of the vampire audience.
As he ran, Jamie pulled his MP5 from his belt, and flicked the safety off. When he reached the corner of the theatre, from where he knew he could not be ambushed from the rear, he dropped to one knee and aimed into the burning hell of the theatre. Angela and Jack had cut a swathe through the flaming, screaming vampires, staking them as they moved forward; blood boomed into the air in a series of thunderclaps left in the wake of the two Operators.
Five or six vampires had floated up to the highest point of the ceiling, either to avoid the carnage beneath them or to get a better vantage point from which to attack. Jamie didn’t wait to find out which; he pointed his MP5 into the group of dark, floating figures, and pulled the trigger. The submachine gun was deafeningly loud in the small theatre, and Jamie saw a number of vampires howl, and cover their ears.
Must be so painful with their super-hearing, he thought, and smiled grimly behind his visor. Good.
The stream of bullets tore through the floating vampires, and they tumbled back down to the seats like falling leaves. A fresh bout of screaming erupted, before Angela and Jack were on top of them, their stakes flashing up and down in the purple light of the fire.
Jamie felt motion to his right, and spun round; a door was opening, a door that he had not noticed as he made his way along the curved wall. He fumbled for his T-Bone, and had it to his shoulder just before a vampire in a spotless tuxedo emerged, his red eyes blazing. Jamie pulled the trigger; the shot was high, as he had been forced to rush, but it made no difference. The stake tore the vampire’s head clean away from his shoulders, and carried it on its flight.
The headless torso staggered, its hands groping at its neck, before Jamie’s weapon reached the end of its wire, and began to rewind. The stake jerked to a halt, and the head was thrown clear; as it bounced and rolled away into the shadows, Jamie saw a look of outrage on what remained of its face. He ran forward, plunged his stake into the headless body’s heart, and returned to his position.
He watched Claire and Dominique T-Bone two vampires that were attempting to flank them, watched Angela fire her Glock 17 empty, the bullets thudding unerringly into the heads of a dozen smouldering vampires, and then he saw movement in the corner of his eye, and turned to look up at the stage.
What he saw stopped his heart cold.
Oh God, no, he thought. Oh Jesus, no. Why didn’t I think of this? Why didn’t I realise?
On the stage, the vampire who had been torturing Frankenstein was standing motionless with his back to Jamie. Beyond him, where Jamie’s friend had been bound to the post, was something from the deepest circles of hell, a mewling, howling monstrosity.
Frankenstein’s face was still recognisable, atop the grey body of a swollen, grotesquely misshapen wolf. Its legs kicked savagely against the post that it was still loosely tied to, and as Jamie watched, the heavy wood shattered under the impact. The wolf fell forward, landing heavily on three of its legs; it shook the fourth one until the last of the ropes that had held it were gone, and stood shakily on all fours. Jamie saw the last of his friend’s humanity ebb away, saw his face twist and lengthen, saw the jaw break and reset in less than a second. Then Frankenstein was gone, and the enormous wolf that had replaced him threw back its giant head and howled.
The noise was otherworldly, so huge and so full of dancing, running misery that every living thing in the theatre stopped and turned towards the stage. Angela Darcy, ever the professional, took the chance to survey the situation.
“Fourteen vamps still alive, Jamie,” she said.
“We’ve got a bigger problem,” replied Jamie, his voice low and full of shock. “Much, much bigger.”
“Why didn’t we see this coming?” asked Jack Williams. “Why didn’t Intelligence flag this up?”
“There was no time for an Intelligence evaluation,” said Jamie, distantly. “I was told to get wheels up ASAP. I never thought… I never…”
“What do we do about it?” demanded Angela. “We can worry about who should have seen it coming later. Bringing him home just got a hell of a lot more difficult.”
The wolf was peering around the theatre, its breath blasting out of its nostrils, its tongue hanging from its vast mouth; it appeared to be trying to make sense of its surroundings. The huge head swung slowly to the left, and then to the right, where its yellow eyes landed on the vampire who had been torturing it. With a deafening snarl, it hurled itself towards him.
Lord Dante flung himself up and back, evading the crunching jaws by mere millimetres.
This can’t be happening, he thought. This is not fair.
The vampire king swooped up to the ceiling of his theatre, desperately trying to think of a way to salvage the situation or, if that proved impossible, to guarantee that he made it out of the building with his life. The wolf was back on its feet below him, howling up at him, but he knew he was beyond its reach. He looked down at the five black-clad figures as they began to move again, plunging their stakes into the burning bodies of his audience.
You’ll pay for this, whoever you are, he thought. You will rue the day you crossed Lord Dante, the vampire king of Paris.
Jamie backed away from the wolf, his heart screaming with pain as he saw what had become of his friend. It was almost too much for him to bear. He had no idea what to do now; in none of the scenarios he had run in his head on the flight across the Channel had he even allowed for the possibility that was now unfolding before him.
He was furious with himself for not having made the connection; he had seen the rising full moon from the helicopter as they made their way to Paris, and he had seen Alexandru’s werewolf close its mouth over Frankenstein’s hand before the two of them fell over the cliffs. He had replayed that memory, one of the most painful he possessed, a thousand times since it had happened, but his focus had always been on the terrible final moment when his friend disappeared from view; the injury done to him before he fell had seemed irrelevant, in light of what had followed. Now his mind was racing as he tried to think of a way, any way, that he could still save his friend.
He circled round to the back of the theatre, away from the wolf, which was staring up at the vampire floating high above, its jaws hanging open, its yellow eyes narrow.
“Regroup!” he shouted, and watched as his team peeled away from the remaining vampires and backed quickly towards him. They met at the top of the aisle; below them the theatre burned, the purple ultraviolet flames that had burst from the vampires’ bodies now replaced with flickering yellow and orange as the seats and the carpets were engulfed.
The remaining vampires, twelve by Jamie’s count, not including the one floating above them, were huddled together in the middle of the theatre. They looked lost, and disoriented, as though they were unable to believe what was happening. One woman was holding the charred body of a man in her arms, and appeared to be whispering softly to it, her face close to the smouldering ruin.
“Let’s end this,” said Jamie, softly, and led his team down the aisle.
Des
troying the last twelve vampires was the work of less than a minute; none of them put up any resistance at all, and the looks on their faces, as they stared around at the rivers of spilled blood, at the roaring flames that licked round their ankles, suggested that many considered their destruction to be a kindness.
“You devils!” bellowed the vampire who was floating near the ceiling. “How dare you? Don’t you know who I am?”
Angela drew her T-Bone to her shoulder and fired. She was so quick that Jamie gasped, but the floating vampire knocked the projectile aside with a derisory sneer.
“I am Lord Dante!” it screamed. “The vampire king of Paris. This is my home!”
At the sound of the vampire’s voice, the enormous wolf howled anew, shaking the theatre. Then the howl was cut short, replaced by a low, guttural growl. Jamie turned to see what had prompted it, and saw a lone vampire had floated up on to the stage and was slowly approaching the wolf, his hands out before him in a gesture of placation.
“What the hell is this?” asked Dominique.
“I’ve no idea,” replied Jamie.
The vampire stopped a couple of metres away from the wolf, which had lowered its head towards the ground, its weight back on its rear legs. It was still growling, and from this side view Jamie saw with horror the metal bolts sticking out of the thick grey fur at its neck.
“Henry,” said the vampire, slowly. “That’s your name. Henry. Don’t you recognise me? It’s me, Latour. What has become of—”
He got no further.
At the mention of the vampire’s name, the wolf’s growl exploded into a snarl of rage. In one huge, lightning-fast step it closed the distance between them, and clamped its huge jaws round the vampire’s head, cutting off his words. The vampire began to scream from inside the giant maw, his fists thumping uselessly against the wolf’s snout. Then, with a terrible crunching sound that would haunt Jamie for the rest of his life, the wolf closed its jaws. Blood squirted out between its yellow teeth and splattered to the floor, before the wolf tore Latour’s head from his body with a shake of its giant snout that seemed almost casual, and swallowed it whole.
