Rob made a rattling sound in his throat as he caught himself. The man in the pale suit stared up at him, as impassive as someone waiting for a printer to finish spitting out a ninety page document.
Julian brushed against him. Rob glanced around and saw they were surrounded. The man in the pale suit had two friends. If you looked hard, you could see their suits weren’t quite the same colour.
“We need you to come with us,” the first man said.
“Sorry,” Rob said. “I know we were getting a bit loud there. It’s been a long weekend, that’s all. We’ll just head home quietly.”
“Mr Cromwell,” said the first man, “Mr Blackwood, we need you to come with us.”
“Grey men,” Julian muttered.
If it was an insult, the men in the pale suits made no reaction. No reaction at all.
Rob felt like he had in the middle of the maze, back to back with Julian, surrounded by guys with machine guns. He didn’t smell gun oil. He didn’t think they were armed. The threat they carried was of reams of paperwork and an adversarial bureaucracy.
“We going peacefully?” Rob asked.
“Best if we do, I think,” Julian replied. From his scent, his anger had not so much blown out as settled into a bed of red coals.
The first man stepped to the side and held out his arm. As soon as Rob had taken a hesitant step, he set off ahead.
Rob figured there was nothing for it but to follow.
They hadn’t gone far before the man in the pale suit opened a door. It was one of the anonymous doors all over the airport, the ones passengers never saw beyond. When Rob stepped through he felt like he’d left the airport entirely. The familiar painted walls and illuminated yellow signs were gone. He had entered a place of bare concrete lit by naked bulbs, with clusters of pipes and cables running along the ceiling. The scents of travellers vanished. The twisting, turning corridors down which they were taken smelled unused, forgotten.
After several junctions, the first of the men in the pale suits opened an unmarked door, identical to many of those they’d passed. He ushered them through and closed the door after them. He and his two nameless companions remained outside.
It took Rob, with all his heightened senses, a good five seconds to realise they weren’t alone.
The room was a concrete cube that smelled like it had never been used for anything. A fluorescent lighting strip trilled softly on the ceiling. A black CCTV camera watched from one corner, its little red eye lit and unblinking. A cheap plastic table had been placed in the centre of the room and it was only when Rob counted the three chairs, two on one side and one on the other, that he spotted the man in the third seat.
He was like the ones who had led them to the room, unnervingly forgettable. His hands were folded on a brown file placed in front of him on the table. He did not wear a wedding ring, though Rob found it easy to believe he had a pleasantly boring marriage.
The man lifted his hand towards the two chairs opposite him. “Please be seated, gentlemen.”
“What’s this about?” Rob asked as he sat down. “Who are you?”
“My name is Burke,” the man said. His voice was slightly nasal, slightly irritating to listen to. His accent was private school bland.
Rob couldn’t get a handle on him and it was getting on his nerves. “First name or last name?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Julian said. His face was set in sullen lines. His hands on his thighs were fists.
“No it doesn’t,” Burke said with a brief smile. He opened the file on the table. “I’m given to understand, Mr Cromwell, that you may not be familiar with some of the details of how British society works.”
Burke fanned out the photos and forms the folder contained. Rob’s uneasiness wound up a notch when he saw a photo of the house in Australia where he’d lived after first being turned. There was another photo of the apartment where he’d stayed before moving to Hawthorn House. What had to be a satellite photo of land divided into green parcels had one area circled. Rob didn’t know what it meant and guessed it was linked to Julian.
“I work for the British government,” Burke said. “We observe.”
“Observe what?” Rob asked.
“You,” Burke said. He turned his gaze to Julian. “And you. And all of you.”
“Grey men,” Julian murmured again. There was no mistaking the contempt in his tone this time.
Julian was getting wound up again, like he had in the maze in Iceland. Rob tried to head off an explosion. “I didn’t know you guys knew about us. I thought it was all under wraps.”
“Of course it is,” Burke said. “And we do our part to ensure it remains that way, filling in the cracks where the efforts of the Shadow Council fail. Which brings me to my point, really.”
He lifted another photo from the file. It was blurry, a smear of white skin, long dark hair and flashing blue eyes.
“Do you recognise her?” Burke asked. When Rob shook his head, Burke tutted. “Vampires. So difficult to photograph. This is Lady Christina Denton. She has been newly elevated to the vampire court. She’s one of those agitating for action against the Shadow Council.”
And then Rob did remember her from Bromley-by-Bow. “I think she threw me at Alice one time. So? Aren’t the vampires always after the Council?”
“It’s their nature,” Burke said. “For once, they sense true weakness. We believe they will act.”
Rob glanced at Julian. “Is he right?”
“What does this have to do with us?” Julian asked. His jaw muscles clenched as though he were grinding his teeth.
Burke folded his hands together. “My branch of the government, you see Mr Cromwell, exists to ensure your world doesn’t endanger ours. By unwritten agreement with the Shadow Council, we merely observe. We take no direct action, as long as the measures of the Council are adequate in maintaining control.”
Rob got a bad feeling he knew where Burke was going.
“But they aren’t doing a good job of it lately, are they?” Burke asked.
“Hey, the world hasn’t ended,” Rob said.
“No thanks to the Council or its agents,” Burke said. “We have been watching. We have noticed.” His chair creaked as he shifted his weight. “We are concerned.”
Rob wished he could get some hint from Julian on how to play this. “You guys must talk to each other, right?”
“Recent changes in Council membership have made that problematic,” Burke said.
“What do you want?” Julian asked. His knuckles were white.
“Containment,” Burke said. “We want everything to stay under the radar, just as it has for more than a century. We do not want our world to discover yours, not when the Council is about to lose control of it to monsters who hunt humans as food. We do not want our world to discover yours has, on an alarmingly regular basis, almost ended both our worlds.”
Julian’s cheeks were turning red. “That’s not our job.”
“You are, of late, the only ones who appear to have the capacity to carry out the task,” Burke said.
Julian shook his head.
“I reckon maybe you think there’s more to us than there is,” Rob said. “We kind of just stumbled into all that stuff and then got really lucky.”
Burke unfolded a neat little smile. “I suggest you apply that luck more broadly, Mr Cromwell. Assert control, gentlemen. Maintain order. If the British government has to step in to stabilise the situation we are, I am sorry to say, neither subtle nor discriminatory about such things.”
Rob saw it in a flash. Horrified, he said, “Like the Covenant? You’d let the Covenant into the country?”
“We use any blunt instruments we have at our disposal,” Burke replied.
Rob sat back, stunned. He’d pictured being hunted plenty of times since being bitten, but he’d always imagined angry mobs with shotguns and silver bullets. He’d never considered an organised, orchestrated, government-sanctioned purge.
He shivered.
The door opened. One of the men in pale suits stepped inside and waited, silent.
“Don’t let me keep you, gentlemen,” Burke said. He swept the photos and papers up and closed the brown file.
As he and Julian lined up in Passport Control, back in the bright public level of the airport, Rob’s head was still spinning.
“What do we do?” he asked after they’d both had their passports processed. Rob had never felt so uncomfortable under government scrutiny before. He’d felt the itch of CCTV cameras on the back of his neck.
“Nothing,” Julian said. “It’s not our problem.”
Rob stopped in the hallway on the way to baggage claim. “What, because you’re human?” For once, he paid no attention to the people who might overhear. “You don’t have to worry about the Covenant.”
Julian stopped too. “Of course I do. You think they see a difference? There are people whose job it is to handle this stuff. You and I are overqualified and underpaid customer service executives.”
“You know what? That’s bullshit. What did we just go to Iceland for?”
“That was” – Julian made a flicking away gesture with one hand – “unfinished business.”
“You are so full of shit. You’re just going to pick and choose when to save lives? Is that what you’re going to do?”
The fluorescent light strips flickered above them. A single blue spark shot between Julian’s fingers. “Where was the Shield Foundation or the Council or someone else? I feel like I’ve had a fist in a boxing glove pounding on the back of my head all day. You can still only see out of one eye. How is that right?”
“You know what? Astra’s right,” Rob said.
Julian held out his arms. “Please, tell me how the person stupid enough to not realise they’re about to devastate the world, please tell me how they’re right.”
“You keep all this shit secret,” Rob said. “You could have gone to them and told them.”
“They can’t be–”
Rob jabbed him in the chest with a finger, knocking him back a step. The lights flickered again. “You keep more secrets than you need to. That place? That grave? It was about me. I had fucking visions there, that’s how much that place was about me. And you didn’t tell me jack shit about it. You never tell me anything about what I am and what it means.”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” Julian snapped. “It’s your life, Rob, you decide what to make of it. My whole life was mapped out for me before I was even born. I had to leave the entire world to get away from it. So forgive me if I thought you deserved a chance to figure it out for yourself.”
“That’s crap.” Rob felt his jaw shift. “At least you know what your options are. Did it ever occur to you that I might want the chance to say no for myself?”
The lights blinked and stuttered. Rob’s hands began to shake. He and Julian stood nose to nose, glaring at each other.
“Robert Cromwell. Julian Blackwood.”
They turned their heads towards the voice.
Wearing a smart Crombie coat, Alistair Sacker, stolid as a bulldog, stood in the centre of a phalanx of other men in suits and ties. Warlock rings gleamed on their fingers. Rob looked the other way. More warlocks had formed up behind them.
Alistair’s eyes gleamed beneath beetling brows. “By the authority of the Shield Foundation, I place you under arrest.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Rob said.
Rob heard an electric crackle from Julian’s hands. He grabbed him fast, held his arms down. All around them, the warlocks of the Shield Foundation raised their rings. Rob heard a crystalline tone from each.
“Go ahead,” Alistair said, grinning beneath his moustache. “Resist arrest.”
Rob felt the monster rush up inside him until it was right under his skin. He took a breath.
Chapter 23 – Rob and Julian
They were held in a windowless room.
Julian’s seat was a hard wooden bench at one side of the room. He sat with his arms folded tight across his chest and his satchel against his hip. Dark wooden panels reached two thirds up the walls, their borders carved into the semblance of sea creatures, their lines made stark by the light of the single naked bulb that hung from the ceiling.
He still had a pounding headache. All he wanted was to go home, take a lot of painkillers and sleep until midday the next day.
He hadn’t thought Alistair Sacker hated him enough to work on a Sunday. He hoped the arrest at Heathrow had cost him a lot in overtime pay.
Rob was on another bench across the room. He’d pulled the bandage off his head. His eye was half-closed beneath angry red marks. They hadn’t spoken since they’d been put in the room together.
When the door opened, Julian was neither surprised nor relieved to see his Uncle Trajan step in.
Trajan’s dark, grey-flecked hair was swept back, his chiselled features angular and stern. On the middle finger of his right hand, Julian could see his black warlock ring. It was sibling to Julian’s, the one Alice wore on a chain around her neck.
Julian set his jaw and glared.
He was surprised when Evelyn Hargrave entered the room after him, dressed in a matching jacket and trousers the colour of aluminium. He had never seen her in anything but her lab coat. She had not come as a friend, he suspected.
Rob had risen to his feet. “What’s happening?”
“A tribunal has been called,” Trajan said. “You’re to stand and account for yourselves.”
“What does that mean?” Rob asked.
“A trial,” Evelyn said. “The Council will hear the cases for and against you, judge your guilt or innocence and hand down a sentence.”
“I’ve had to recuse myself, of course,” Trajan said to Julian.
“How did this even happen?” Julian asked. “We were cleared of all charges.”
“Crispin Chalk has accused you of murdering the Whitlocks, to clear a bounty they placed on your head,” Trajan said. “Antiere Edwardes and Isabella voted to bring the matter to trial before the Council.”
Julian shook his head and sat back.
“That’s bullshit,” Rob said. “Crispin is the one who killed the Whitlocks. Or helped, anyway.”
“Can you prove it?” Evelyn asked.
“I don’t know. I guess not. But if you can find a woman named Astra, if she’s back from Iceland, or her sister Zoe, they might be able to tell you what happened. What was that bastard’s name who took my eye out? Tom something?”
“Calder,” Julian said. “You won’t find them, not with the power they have at their disposal. They won’t want to be called as witnesses and put beneath a truth spell.”
Rob swore under his breath and dropped back onto his bench.
“The charge is violation of sections of the treaty specific to murder,” Trajan said. “You’ve certainly been in a few fights since your return. Unless you have an alibi that isn’t each other, the charge will be all too easy for a tribunal to believe.”
“When is this happening?” Julian asked.
Trajan allowed the full depth of his regret to show. “In about twenty minutes. I’ve spoken to your father. The family advocate is on his way and will be here in time.”
“We’re obstacles,” Julian murmured. “Even if they can’t put us away, they can keep us occupied. Maybe that’s all they need.”
“Need for what?” Trajan asked. He sat on the bench beside Julian. “We can’t help you if you don’t tell us what’s happening.”
Julian remembered the ancient, rusty voice of the Lord of Chains. He remembered the eyes of the thing in the sarcophagus below Trafalgar Square, the gaze clawing at the bonds of Julian’s sanity.
The power that burned the world twice.
Across the room, Rob nodded.
To Evelyn he said, “What reason do you think we would have for going to Iceland? And more importantly, what reason do you think Crispin’s friend Astra would have for going there, if they were responsible fo
r the death of the Whitlocks?”
Evelyn with her lightning mind, she caught it first. “I need to go.” She opened the door and ran.
Trajan sat back, his face drawing into lines of fear.
Julian slid down the wall to a sitting position. He clutched his right forearm with his left hand and murmured words of magic. Already the bleeding had stopped, though his coat sleeve was dark and wet.
The Captain dropped into the courtyard from a floor above. He landed lightly, barely bending his knees. Like everyone and everything in that place, including Julian, he had two shadows. To the soldier crouching on the mossy cobblestones a short distance from Julian he said, “What happened?”
The soldier jerked his head towards Julian. “He hesitated.”
The Captain came to stand over Julian. He moved with the deadly grace of his kind, smooth and never more than a blink from lethal violence. His armour was dark metal. The face framed by the black helm was mostly human in shape at the moment, though the Captain’s chin was spattered with blood. His eyes were bright and blue and angry.
“Get up,” he said.
Julian pushed himself slowly to his feet. He did not look up at the Captain. His gaze wandered to the smoking corpse near the other soldier. The corpse’s necrotised flesh was rapidly turning to ash.
“When an enemy strikes at you, strike back,” the Captain said. “Do not hesitate. Hesitate and you die.”
The Captain lifted a bare hand, mostly human in shape, towards the smouldering corpse. “That goes double for when it is one of our kind. Sever the head. Stab the heart. Burn the body. Always be sure.”
“I understand,” Julian said.
The Captain’s voice did not soften – they did not have softness in them, these monsters. And the scent of Julian’s blood in the air was a danger to them both. “What happened?” the Captain asked. “This isn’t your first campaign.”
Julian kept his gaze clear of the smouldering corpse. “She reminded me of someone, that’s all. It won’t happen again.”
The Captain nodded as though the matter were settled. He stepped back and took on a more formal tone. “We have prisoners.” Behind him, the other soldier rose to his feet. Julian saw his teeth shift. “We thirst. Knight-Lieutenant Blackwood, do we have your permission to feed?”
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