by Will Hill
“You did it,” whispered Matt, fiercely. “You and Larissa and the rest of them. You bloody did it.”
Jamie gently extricated himself from his friend’s grip. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to see you too.”
“It is good,” said Matt. “It really, really is. I’m so pleased you’re OK. I heard … well, I know a lot of people … aren’t.”
Jamie grimaced, and nodded.
“Welcome back, Jamie,” said Natalia. “You have done so well.”
His smile returned; it was small, and it was bittersweet, but it was genuine.
“Thank you, Natalia,” he said. “Have either of you seen Larissa?”
Matt frowned. “Isn’t she with the rest of you?”
Jamie shook his head. “She flew back on her own yesterday.”
“I haven’t seen her,” said Matt, and turned to Natalia. “Have you?”
The Russian girl shook her head. “But I am sure it is OK,” she said. “I am sure she is fine.”
Jamie nodded, but he didn’t remotely share Natalia’s certainty; he was sure he knew why Larissa had come back, and what she would likely already have done.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “How’s Kate? Is there any news?”
Matt frowned. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
Jamie’s heart lurched. “Tell me what?” he asked. “Is she dead? Don’t lie to me, Matt. Tell me the truth.”
Matt shook his head, and smiled. “She’s not dead, Jamie,” he said. “She’s awake.”
Jamie stepped out of the airlock on Level H and walked quickly along the cellblock, his footsteps echoing, his heart heavy in his chest.
For several long minutes after leaving Matt and Natalia in the hangar, he had stood outside the Level 0 lift, unable to decide what he should do. The news that Kate was awake was wonderful, almost wonderful enough to pierce the grief that had settled over him so completely that he had already begun to wonder whether it was a permanent fixture, and a huge part of him had wanted to go straight to her room at the back of the Lazarus Project lab and hug her and tell her how glad he was that she was OK. But he was not quite able to convince himself that she should be his priority at this particular moment in time.
Despite everything that had happened since her unexpected return, not least her blunt, crushing admission that she had not come back for him, it had still taken all of Jamie’s strength not to go and find Larissa. He had never doubted that her oft-stated desire not to be a vampire had been genuine, but if he was right about why she had come back on her own from France at the earliest possible opportunity, then it was one of the many things he was now realising he had not taken as seriously as he should have. Before she left, it would never have occurred to him to be anywhere other than at her side if, as he suspected, she was in the infirmary, but things were different now.
It’s none of your business, a voice in his head had whispered. You’re just assuming that she’ll want to see you. What if you’re wrong?
Jamie had listened to the voice, and made his decision. Both Larissa and Kate could wait; there was one person in the Loop who he knew, with absolute certainty, wanted to see him more than anybody else in the world.
He stepped out in front of the purple wall of his mother’s cell. With her supernatural senses now a thing of the past, she was as unaware of her surroundings as any other human; as a result, the expression on her face when she looked round was a perfect mask of shock.
“Hello, Mum,” he said.
She got slowly to her feet, a hand pressed over her mouth, her eyes wide and instantly full of tears.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I’m OK, Mum. Honestly.”
She walked across the cell and stepped through the ultraviolet barrier into the corridor. Jamie stared at her, a lump rising in his throat, his mind blanked by exhaustion.
His mother reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder, as though she didn’t trust her own eyes, and was checking to see whether he was genuinely real.
“Say something, Mum,” he managed. “Please say something.”
She didn’t. Instead, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms round him as she began to cry, great sobs of relief that reverberated through him as he held her.
Larissa shut the door of her quarters behind her, unzipped her uniform, and let it fall to the floor. She had hated having to put it back on when the doctor had told her she was being discharged from the infirmary, but she had hated the idea of walking through the Loop wearing only a hospital gown even more.
She opened the bag that she had twice carried across the Atlantic Ocean and pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She put them on, slid her feet into shoes that felt like velvet compared to the standard-issue Blacklight boots, tied her hair back in a loose knot, and examined herself in the mirror above her desk. She didn’t think she looked any different, a prospect that had entered her mind as the doctor brought the plastic bag of bright blue liquid; she had momentarily wondered whether the five years in which she had aged almost imperceptibly slowly would suddenly present themselves in her face, changing the reflection she was used to seeing. But she looked the same, at least as far as she could tell.
How she felt was something else entirely.
The last eighteen hours had been a blur; she had drifted in and out of consciousness as the cure worked its way through her system, her thoughts scattered and insubstantial, until she had sunk down into unconsciousness so deep and absolute that not even dreams could penetrate it. Now, eight hours after she had woken up a fundamentally different person, what she mostly felt was weak.
Some of it, she knew, was the aftermath of the cure’s radical transformation of her body, but most of it was simply the weakness that came with once again being human; she had forgotten how many aches and pains you just got used to, how easily tired you were, how dangerously vulnerable to heat and cold and hunger. Her life had changed beyond all measure since she had last experienced such things – she had been a teenager with horizons that stretched no further than the small town she had been born and raised in – and the feeling was unsettling, to say the least; her adult self had never really encountered anything like it.
There were also practical considerations that she had never really thought through; she had become accustomed to a freedom that was now gone, to the ability to live her life without any real limitations beyond the need to stay out of direct sunlight. Now, if she went back to Haven – when, she told herself, not if, when you go back – she would have to buy a flight to New York and sit in a plane for seven hours and wait in line at airport security and hire a car and drive up the Hudson River Valley and hope the traffic wasn’t too bad, rather than simply glide across the ocean and land on the veranda of the big house.
She could no longer fly.
She could be hurt.
She would grow old, and one day she would die.
But she would never again need to drink blood, she could walk freely in the sun, and she could create a life that would have meaning, real meaning.
She could be a human being again.
And that was all that mattered.
Almost, she told herself. Almost all that matters.
She picked her uniform up off the floor, pulled the console from its belt, and started typing a message on its screen.
The door to Larissa’s quarters swung open before Jamie had even finished knocking on it, and he smiled as soon as she appeared.
“So you did it then?” he said.
She nodded, and smiled back at him. “Did someone tell you or can you tell?”
“I can tell,” he said. “You smell different. Not worse or anything, just … different.”
“Different.”
He nodded. “Your message said you needed to see me. Can I come in?”
“Of course,” said Larissa, and stepped aside. “Sorry. I’m a bit out of it.”
“Understandable,” he said, and walked into her room. “Did you hear about Kate?”
“I did,” she said. “I tried to go and see her when they discharged me, but the doctor looking after her told me I have to go back in the morning.”
“That saves me a trip then,” he said. “I’ll go tomorrow. Does she know you’re back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“I guess you’ll find out tomorrow.”
Larissa nodded. “We can go together, if you want,” she said. “It might be better for Kate to have all her visitors at once.”
Jamie nodded. “Sounds good.”
“Have you seen your mum?”
“I was just there,” he said.
“How pleased was she to see you?” asked Larissa. “On a scale of one to ten?”
“About twenty-five,” said Jamie, and grinned. “I asked them to let her know I was all right before we left Carcassonne, and someone had told her, but I don’t think she believed them.”
“She probably needed to see you with her own eyes.”
Jamie nodded. “I guess so,” he said. “So what did you need to see me about?”
Larissa looked at him for a long moment, the expression he knew all too well on her face, the one that meant she had something serious to talk to him about. Then it disappeared, replaced by a smile so beautiful it momentarily took his breath away.
“It can wait,” she said. “You should go and get some sleep. We can talk after we see Kate.”
Jamie frowned, but nodded. “If you’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right,” he said. “Nine o’clock tomorrow?”
“Nine sounds good,” said Larissa. “See you in the morning.”
Kate Randall lay in her bed, watching the BBC news channel she had been glued to since she had woken up twenty-four hours earlier.
Details of what was already being referred to as ‘The Victory Over Dracula’ were still sketchy; most of what was being reported was anecdotal, second- and third-hand stories allegedly told by Operators who had taken part in the battle to residents of the displaced persons camp, which they had passed on to the reporters swarming in ever greater numbers outside the gates. There had been no official statement from any of the governments who had sent their supernatural Departments to Carcassonne, or from NATO, but there did seem to be a consensus of opinion on one thing, at least.
Dracula had been defeated, and humanity had won.
Kate had woken up the previous morning with a pounding headache and without the slightest clue where she was. She had looked around the sparse room, taking in the machinery beside her bed and the tubes and wires in her arms, and had locked eyes with one of the Loop’s medical staff, who had almost jumped out of his skin before rushing to her side and summoning an army of his colleagues. As he had examined her and asked her questions, what had happened to her had come flooding back: the hospital, her father, the smell of petrol, the gun trembling in Greg Browning’s hand.
“My dad …” she had said.
“He’s fine,” replied the doctor. “He’s recovering well. He’s going to be fine.”
Her waking up had clearly been a surprise to the Blacklight doctors; they had told her since that their intention had been to allow her body to recover enough strength for them to safely turn her, and let her new vampire side repair her injuries. For long hours, they examined printout after printout of test results, before concluding that what had happened was simple: while they waited, she had healed and woken up. Then most of the medical staff had left in a hurry, leaving just one doctor behind to monitor her, and she had asked where they were all going.
“They’re heading back this evening,” said the doctor. “We need to be ready.”
“Who’s heading back?”
“Everyone,” said the doctor, his eyes widening. “Oh God. Of course. You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
He had turned a monitor towards her, and tuned it to BBC News.
“It’s over,” said the doctor. “They did it. We won.”
Less than ten minutes later – the exact amount of time, she suspected, that it had taken for the medical staff to tell him she had woken up – the doctor had passed her a message from Paul Turner, welcoming her back to life and telling her that Jamie had survived the Battle of Carcassonne, and she had closed her eyes for a long time as tears of relief rolled down her face. When the lump in her throat had subsided, she had started to watch the news coverage, and had done little else since. Matt and Natalia had kept her company for a few hours, but although it had been lovely to see them, and to see their clear relief at her recovery, they knew little more than she did about what had happened in France; they were all in the dark together.
The door of her room opened, making her jump. She turned towards it, and felt her heart swell in her chest as she saw Jamie standing in the doorway. Then he stepped into the room, and she froze as she saw who was with him.
“Hey, Kate,” said Larissa, a fierce smile on her face.
For a long moment, she could form no words; she merely stared at her friend.
“Hey, Larissa,” she managed, eventually, her voice little more than a whisper.
“How are you feeling?” asked Jamie.
She stared at them for a long moment, then smiled. “Close the door and get in here,” she said. “I want to know absolutely everything.”
“Are you going to take the cure, Jamie?” asked Larissa.
Jamie grimaced. They were standing in the corridor outside the Lazarus Project, having finally managed to persuade Kate that there was no detail of what had taken place in Carcassonne that she did not now know about, and that she should take her doctor’s repeated advice and get some rest. It had taken a cast-iron promise that they would come back and see her that afternoon before she let them leave.
“Is this what you wanted to see me about yesterday?” he asked.
Larissa nodded.
“I’m not sure about the cure,” he said. “Not yet, at least. I don’t know.”
She nodded. “Fair enough. You need to do what you think is best.”
“I’m not ruling it out,” he said. “I just … don’t know.”
“I get it, Jamie. It’s OK.”
He stared at her. She looked the same as she always had, but, even without his supernatural senses, he would have known that something was different; it was in the way she carried herself, in the set of her shoulders and the straightness of her neck. It looked like a great weight had been removed from her.
His console beeped on his belt. He swore silently, marvelling at the little plastic rectangle’s almost unfailing lack of tact, and checked the screen.
“What is it?” asked Larissa.
“It’s Paul,” he said. “He wants to see me.”
She nodded again. “You should go.”
“Yeah,” he said, and narrowed his eyes. “Do you actually feel better, Larissa? You know, now that you’ve done it?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t feel better. But that’s sort of the point.”
He nodded.
She stepped forward and kissed his cheek, a chaste brush of her lips. “I hope you work it out,” she said. “Come and find me when you do.”
Three hundred miles away, Bob Allen stood on the tarmac at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport, watching his Department load itself back into the two huge cargo planes that had brought them from Nevada.
The clean-up at Carcassonne would likely continue for months, but he wasn’t sticking around for it; the French government was handling the aftermath of the battle, under the watchful eye of NATO, and Allen had been quite happy to be removed from command. He had handed over to General Ducroix of the French military and Central Director Vallens of the DGSI in the command centre the previous evening, and was confident the situation was in good hands.
He was just happy to be going home.
The huge hangars beside the runway were full of activity, as weapons and vehicles and equipment were broken down and packed and loaded. Hund
reds of Operators and support staff were milling around, clearly as eager as he was to be on their way. Allen watched them, a mixture of emotions filling him. He was proud of what they had done, immensely proud, but also profoundly sad; a heartbreaking number of good men and women were going back to America, back on to the planes in bags, including Danny Lawrence.
He believed – would always believe – in what they had achieved in Carcassonne, in the battle they had fought with such bravery and determination, but oh God, the cost had been so high.
So very, very high.
Paul Turner was in his usual position behind his desk when his intercom buzzed into life and the Security Operator outside his quarters informed him that Lieutenant Carpenter was there to see him.
“Send him in,” he said, and sat back in his chair.
In an act of almost unprecedented self-interest, the Blacklight Director had left the Loop less than ten minutes after the helicopters touched down from France the previous evening, and gone home.
A night’s sleep in his own bed, beside the woman he loved more than anything else in the world, had done him more good than he could possibly have imagined; he felt like a new man, as if his depleted batteries had somehow been fully charged, filling him with energy and banishing the exhaustion that had become his constant companion in recent months.
When his driver had picked him up two hours ago to bring him back to the Loop, he had promised Caroline that he would spend more nights at home in the coming weeks and months. The smile that had appeared on her face was worth every sacrifice that had been required of him.
He had returned to find a mountain of new paper on his desk. On the top was a letter bearing the legend OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, congratulating him on his Department’s efforts in Carcassonne and asking him to call Downing Street at his earliest convenience; the Prime Minister was apparently eager to hear his personal account of what had taken place. Turner had put the letter aside, and found similar notes of praise and thanks from the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Japan, the President of Russia and a huge number of other world leaders and dignitaries. He had leafed quickly through them, until he reached a report from the Surveillance Division, stamped with a reference number he recognised. He had read it, read it again, and immediately summoned Jamie Carpenter.
