Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  “Thirty seconds,” said their driver. “Dead ahead.”

  “Ready One,” said Jamie. “Be prepared for whatever this is.”

  Ellison and Qiang nodded. This was the highest priority call they had taken in more than two months, and the air in the van’s hold was thick with anticipation.

  “Ten seconds,” said their driver.

  Jamie got to his feet, took hold of the door handle, and lowered his visor as calm flooded through him. Then the van screeched to a halt, its brakes squealing, and he flung the door open.

  “Go,” he bellowed.

  Jamie dived out of the vehicle, swooped up into the air, and surveyed the scene. He found himself looking at a patch of wasteland behind a ragged chain-link fence, squeezed in between two warehouse buildings, both of them boarded up and abandoned. Kneeling on the ground was a badly burnt figure, his head lowered, his hands hanging limply at his sides. Standing over him was a figure dressed in black with a wolf’s head painted on its chest in white; a second, identically dressed figure was standing off to the side. Both were staring at the Blacklight van with wide eyes.

  “Freeze!” yelled Jamie. “Weapons down, hands in the air!”

  Without a second’s hesitation, the two Night Stalkers moved. One sprinted for the shadows between the buildings as the other darted forward and slammed a stake into the kneeling figure’s chest. The vampire exploded with a wet thud, spraying blood and guts in a wide radius. Jamie screamed with fury, and hurtled towards the man as Ellison and Qiang burst through the torn fence, their weapons drawn.

  Jamie closed the distance between himself and the man – it was a man, he was sure of it, both of them were – at dizzying speed, his eyes roaring with red heat, his fangs filling his mouth, a deadly black bullet fired with unerring accuracy. But when he was still five metres away, the air was suddenly filled with flying lead.

  The man spun, pulling an MP5 from his belt, and emptied the submachine gun at Jamie; the speed of the movement took him by surprise, and he had no time to react before the bullets hammered into him. The body armour inside his uniform held, but the impacts were still agony; they drove him backwards through the air, his momentum arrested, his balance gone. The firing continued and Jamie screamed as at least two of the bullets slipped past his armour and pierced his body below the armpit. The scream was cut off, replaced by a rasping wheeze. Jamie tried to draw breath, but felt only the thinnest current of air flow down into his chest.

  Punctured lung, he thought. Oh Christ, that hurts.

  He crumpled to the ground, his back slamming against the hard concrete, and gritted his teeth as he tried to force himself back to his feet. Footsteps rattled around him, seemingly from all sides, until Ellison appeared in front of him and slid to her knees, her visor pushed up to reveal a face contorted with worry.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “Jamie? Are you—”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he growled, his eyes blazing. “Get after them. That’s an order.”

  Ellison stared at him for the briefest of moments, then leapt to her feet and raced away into the darkness, Qiang at her side. Jamie lay where he was, concentrating on taking only the shallowest of breaths. It was hard work, and it hurt, but oxygen was reaching his lungs; not as much as he needed, he was sure, but enough to keep him alive. He stared up at the night sky, furious with himself.

  Underestimated them, he thought. You had no idea what you were dealing with and you just charged in like a rookie. That guy was so fast, and so calm. He knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t remotely scared of me. Military, I’d bet my life on it. Military, or …

  A terrible thought leapt into Jamie’s mind, one so huge and awful that the fire in his eyes died instantly as what was left of his breath froze in his chest.

  No, he told himself. No way. It couldn’t be.

  He gritted his teeth again, forced the thought from his mind, and pushed himself up to a sitting position. Something moved inside him, sending fresh agony thundering through his body, and glowing light returned to his eyes as sweat broke out on his forehead. It felt like the Night Stalker’s bullets had broken at least two or three of his ribs as well as tearing a hole in his lung. He reached down with a trembling hand and twisted the comms dial on his belt.

  “Ellison?” he said. “Qiang? Report.”

  “Lost them,” said Ellison, instantly. “It’s a bloody rabbit warren back here. Qiang followed one over a fire escape and I chased the other into one of the buildings, but they’re gone, sir. No sign of them, and nothing on thermal.”

  Jamie swore heavily, then broke into a fit of coughing that ripped through his chest like he had swallowed a pack of razor blades. His mouth was suddenly full of liquid, and he spat it on to the ground beside him. The blood was shiny-black in the moonlight, and he felt his stomach lurch at the sight of it.

  “What should we do, sir?” asked Qiang.

  “Regroup,” said Jamie, his voice low and hoarse. “I need blood.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ellison.

  Jamie waited for his squad mates to return, trying to ignore the pain and resist a sudden, overwhelming desire to lie back down. His arms shook with the effort of holding himself up, but he was bleeding from somewhere internal, and he had no desire to choke on his own blood.

  His supernatural hearing picked up the sound of footsteps in the distance. Thirty seconds later Ellison and Qiang emerged from the shadows, their weapons in their gloved hands, their visors raised. Qiang peeled away and strode towards their van as Ellison approached Jamie, a deep frown on her face.

  “Jesus, Jamie,” she said, stopping in front of him. “You look like shit.”

  He forced a thin smile. “Lucky shot,” he grunted. “Got round the edge of my armour.”

  “Nothing lucky about it,” said Ellison. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think exactly the same thing I did when you saw that guy shoot.”

  Jamie nodded. “Military.”

  “Right,” said Ellison. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie. “But I think we can conclude that the lone vigilante theory is bullshit.”

  Qiang appeared beside Ellison, crouched down, and held out two plastic bottles of blood. Jamie took them, twisted the top off the first, and drank the contents in one go, his head twisted back, the muscles standing out in his neck, his eyes blooming red. Euphoria flooded through him as his body began to repair itself; the pain faded away, and he felt his punctured lung reinflate, filling him with energy. He put the empty bottle down, drained the second, and got to his feet, his body coursing with heat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “That was stupid. I let you both down.”

  Ellison rolled her eyes. “Drama queen,” she said, and smiled. Qiang gave one of his short grunts of laughter, then turned towards the black Transit parked by the kerb, his focus instantly returned to business.

  “We have their vehicle,” he said. “That is good.”

  Jamie nodded. “Have Security come out here and impound it. I doubt it’ll tell us much, but you never know.”

  Qiang nodded, and stepped back as he twisted his comms dial and established a connection to the Loop. A second later he was giving coordinates in his clear, steady voice. Jamie left him to it, and walked slowly towards the remains of the vampire the Night Stalkers had killed. He looked down at the bloody circle as Ellison joined him.

  “I wonder who this one was,” he said. “I wonder whether he did anything to deserve this.”

  “Does anyone deserve to be dragged out of their home and murdered in cold blood?” asked Ellison.

  “I’ve met one or two over the years,” said Jamie. “But not many. And this wasn’t murder. It was an execution. They were carrying out a sentence.”

  The two Operators stood in silence, staring at the smear of drying blood that had, until barely five minutes earlier, been a living, breathing human being. Whatever he had been, whatever he might one day have become, was go
ne, ended in misery and pain at the point of a stranger’s stake.

  A splash of colour caught Jamie’s eye and he dragged his gaze away from the remains. The red-brick side of the warehouse on the opposite side of the road, beyond the wire fence and the two parked vans, was covered in faded graffiti and peeling posters, but what had drawn his attention was fresh and bright at the edge of the yellow glow cast by the street light overhead. It was two familiar words painted in dripping fluorescent green, each letter more than a metre tall.

  Jamie grimaced. The words seemed to be everywhere these days, painted on walls and bridges and the shutters of abandoned shops, written in dozens of different colours by dozens of different hands; they were a constant mockery, a colourful reminder of the Department’s failure.

  Qiang appeared at his side. “Security are on their way,” he said. “Forty minutes. We are to stay until they arrive.”

  Jamie nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Qiang peered down at the bloody remains. “One less vampire,” he said. “Even if we did not destroy him ourselves. It is good.”

  Jamie smiled. “I used to know someone who would have disagreed with you,” he said.

  Ellison narrowed her eyes and shot him a look full of sympathy. “You still miss her, don’t you?” she said.

  Jamie nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I still miss her.”

  Larissa Kinley stared at the wide, slowly moving river, felt the night breeze gently tug at her hair, and allowed herself a rare moment of satisfaction.

  It was not an emotion she was particularly prone to, at least not since the night she had lost herself in Grey’s glowing crimson eyes and woken up changed forever. She had spent her years with Alexandru and his gaggle of violent sycophants, alternately disgusted with herself and genuinely terrified for her own life, and her time with Blacklight wracked with guilt as she again participated in something she could not justify.

  She would not dispute that she had done some good in her time as an Operator; she had helped destroy both Alexandru and Valeri Rusmanov, had saved the lives of dozens of innocent men and women, and had fought as hard as anybody to prevent a true monster from entering the world. But did that make up for the harm she had done? For the innocent vampires she had destroyed for no better reason than what they had been turned into, in a great many cases against their will? Jamie, Kate and the majority of her former colleagues clearly believed so, and she did not begrudge them that conclusion.

  Sadly, it had not been enough for her.

  But now, as she stood in the place she had created and looked out across a river on the other side of the world, she was almost content. A hundred metres out from the bank, one of the river cruise boats chugged slowly south towards the distant lights of New York. The captain sounded his horn, and the tourists on the upper deck waved enthusiastically in her direction; she returned the gesture, a broad smile on her face, and watched until the boat slipped round the bend in the river. When it was out of sight, Larissa turned and walked up the gentle slope; her stomach was rumbling, and she was suddenly keen to see how dinner was coming along.

  Spread out before her, extending for several hundred metres in either direction along the riverbank, was the property that Valentin had told her about on that awful night, now more than six months past, when she had stumbled into the cellblock on the verge of tears, desperate for a way out. It was a vast piece of land, running up from the river for almost a mile, so big that many locals believed there were several large estates behind the pale wooden gates that opened on to Highway 9.

  The houses that overlooked this section of the riverbank were grand, garish, multimillion-dollar mansions, the rural refuges of Manhattan bankers and actors and rock stars. But when Larissa had arrived on the piece of land that had become known to those who lived on it as Haven, the only standing structures had been a row of sheds and a large antebellum house, two neat storeys fronted with white pillars and a small veranda, surrounded by towering trees, at the centre of the estate.

  Now, it was also home to the row of wooden cabins that she was walking alongside as she climbed the slope. They were simple enough, their walls, floors and ceilings constructed of wood from the ash trees that filled the sprawling property, but they were comfortable, and they were warm, thanks to the stoves and metal chimneys that Callum had installed. Most had two occupants, although some had as many as five or even six, family units who had arrived together and refused to be separated. A handful had only one person living in them, which several of the community’s earliest residents had suggested was wasteful. Larissa had disagreed, saying that people who wanted to live on their own had every right to do so; they could always build more cabins, which was exactly what they had done.

  There were another dozen in the woods surrounding the huge lawn that stood in front of the main house, where the trees were younger and less densely packed together, and another row that followed the route of the felling that had been done, a neat, straight path that reached almost to the highway. All told, there were fifty-three finished cabins on the property, forty-nine of which were occupied, and another twenty under construction. Hidden away from prying eyes, it was rapidly becoming a small town, in much the same way that Valhalla, the commune from where Larissa had drawn inspiration, was a functioning village in the remote Scottish Highlands.

  There were now more than a hundred vampires living in Haven, men and women and children who had been on the run when word reached them of a place where they might be safe or who simply wanted no part of what was coming, had no interest in choosing a side when the only two on offer were Dracula or NS9 and Blacklight. For the first ten days after she arrived, Larissa had lived in the big house on her own, suffering loneliness so acute she had begun to wonder whether it might prove fatal, unsure how to go about realising the idea that she could see so clearly in her mind. In the end, she had come to the conclusion that there was no option other than to simply get on with it.

  On the eleventh day, she had flown into town, called the number Valentin had given her, and spoken to a man who seemed, superficially at least, to be some kind of financial advisor to the ancient vampire, although it had quickly become apparent that his remit extended far beyond matters of money. They had spoken for five minutes, in which the man never asked Larissa to identify herself or provide any proof that she was calling with Valentin’s permission; the mere mention of the vampire’s name had clearly been enough. The following day, workers reconnected the house’s gas, water and electricity, installed a new wireless network, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and mowed the wide lawn; Larissa had stood quietly to one side, too bemused to do anything but watch them work. Before they left, one of them handed her an envelope containing a credit card with her name embossed on the front, issued by a bank she had never heard of, and she had said a silent thank you to Valentin.

  The following night she had flown down to New York and spent three days searching the towering glass and steel city for vampires, pounding the streets, tracking them down one at a time by scents that only those of her kind could detect. She found them in bars, in subway stations, in houses and apartments, or simply walking the bright streets after dark. They were almost uniformly wary when she approached, and not a single one of those who had listened to her pitch had come with her there and then; in every case, she left them the location, told them they would be welcome, and moved on. Three days later she returned to Haven, and waited to see whether the stone she cast into the water had caused a ripple.

  The first vampire had shown up two days later, landing cautiously on the lawn with a bag over his shoulder and a suspicious look on his face; his name was Ryan and he later confessed to Larissa that he had wondered right up until the last minute if he was walking into a trap, whether she was part of some NS9 plot to trick vampires into handing themselves in to be destroyed. She had welcomed him, showed him to the spare bedroom in the big house, and the following morning, the two of them had got to work. They had felled two trees and were
about to start the process of sawing their trunks into boards when a second vampire had appeared, a woman from New Jersey called Kimberley who had heard about Haven from an ex-boyfriend of hers and had immediately packed a bag. She wanted no part of any war, and had no desire to spend her life running. A warm feeling had spread slowly through Larissa as Kimberley talked; the woman’s arrival was exactly what she had hoped would happen, that vampires would pass the word about Haven among themselves.

  Larissa walked towards the big house, remembering those early days of the community’s existence with great fondness. The vampires appeared in ones and twos at first, until, almost two weeks after she had been to New York, a group of five – three women, a man and a young boy – arrived from northern California. It had been a hectic time; for the first month, the house had been full to capacity and people had slept in tents on the lawn outside. But then the first cabins had been finished, and Haven had really started to take shape; there was now a network of well-worn paths cutting across the open expanses of grass and through the depths of the woods. Long canopies covered the winding tracks, and gazebos and awnings shaded the junctions from the sun’s rays, in a recreation of the system that had allowed Larissa to travel around Area 51 without bursting into flames.

  She reached the edge of the lawn and walked towards the house. In front of the old building, a fire had been lit in the stone pit that she and some of the earliest arrivals had dug and lined months before. Grills were positioned around the flames, groaning with meat and foil-wrapped potatoes and sweetcorn, and a plastic barrel of lamb’s blood had been placed on two piles of bricks. Two dozen or so vampires were sprawled on the grass around the fire, chatting and eating and drinking. She could see lights in many of the distant cabins, and knew that more of Haven’s residents would make their way over to the fire before long. Eating together in the evening had become a widely observed tradition, although it was by no means mandatory; nothing inside Haven was, other than obeying the two central rules upon which the community was founded.