‘There are no tunnel systems under Venice. The city is built at sea level. No, the cross is under us, but we’re going to have to dive for it.’
‘You’re not being serious, are you? How can you know this?’
‘Joel,’ she said earnestly. ‘You came to me, remember? You said you wanted my help.’ She had to make an effort to speak clearly. The terrible sensation inside her felt like it could rip her apart. In fact, she knew exactly what it was capable of doing to her, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought.
Joel didn’t argue. Outside, dark canal water slapping at the church foundations gave off a faint smell of human waste, and he remembered what she’d said about the city’s lack of a sewerage system. He didn’t want to think about what he might be swallowing if he took a swim in there.
Alex looked pale and weak. She didn’t step near the water’s edge, but shrugged off her backpack and laid it on the ground while she backed away to steady herself against a stone pillar.
‘I’m staying up here,’ she said. ‘I’m not feeling so great.’
‘We need to get you to a doctor or something,’ he protested. ‘You’re obviously not well. We can come back here tomorrow.’
‘Please, Joel. Let’s get it done.’ She took a torch from her backpack and tossed it over to him.
He sighed, stepped to the edge and looked down at the brackish water slurping against the algae-streaked brickwork three feet below him. He kicked off his shoes, filled his lungs, and jumped.
Chapter Sixty-Two
The shock of the icy water was stunning. The pressure roared in his ears. He could see the church’s craggy foundations through the swirling murk. He was too worried about getting poisoned or hypothermic to be angry that he was probably getting soaked for nothing.
All the stonework was crumbling. He’d once read that Venice was a sinking city, disappearing a few more inches into the sea every year. By the time he was an old man, many of its walkways and buildings would be under water forever. That was, if he ever got to become an old man…
The decaying foundations disappeared downwards out of sight in the gloom.
Kicking with his legs, he shone the torch and ran his free hand along the slippery stone.
He could see nothing that could give him access under the church. He’d been down for more than twenty seconds already. He was on the verge of giving up when, through the murk, he spotted a fissure in the stone. It was almost completely covered with algae. He kicked his legs and dived a little deeper to examine it.
Scraping away the slime, he found that it was big enough for a man to slip inside. Forty seconds under. He could still make it. He squeezed his body through the gap, shining the torch ahead of him. All he could see were the floating particles of dirt he’d dislodged as he forced his way in. He kicked out to press deeper into the fissure. It widened a little, and now he was a long way in. He kicked again.
But his foot wouldn’t move. It was trapped. He was stuck here, deep inside the crack in the church’s foundations. Horror lanced through him, and a stream of bubbles involuntarily burst from his mouth. He struggled to release himself, losing more precious air with the effort. He kicked with all his might, almost dropping the torch in the process — and suddenly he was free again.
But now he had only seconds before his lungs reached bursting point. He wasn’t sure whether he had enough air to get back to the surface. Thrashing wildly about in panic, he lost his bearings. He didn’t know which way was up and which was down any more. His fingers raked the slimy stone. His heart was pounding.
Then his head was bursting clear of the surface and a long gasp exploded from his lungs. But when he blinked the filthy water from his eyes and shone the torch beam around him, he saw that the surface he’d found wasn’t the one he’d just dived into. He was inside an underwater cave, a craggy ceiling of wet stone just a few inches above his head. By his reckoning, he must be right beneath the church. At one time there might have been room in here for a man to clamber almost clear of the water, but with the progressive sinking of the city there was only enough space for his head and shoulders.
Something was sticking out of a crack in the cave wall. An old bit of sacking, rotted with age. Bracing his legs for support, he reached out and grasped it, and found that the decayed cloth was wrapped around something hard and cold that had been wedged into the crumbling foundations. He gave it a tug and a wiggle, and it came out with a shower of stones. With his heart in his mouth he tore the layers of sacking away.
He let out a whoop when the gleaming Celtic cross fell into his hand.
It was about fifteen inches long, with rune-like markings and strange designs sculpted into the outer ring that connected the crosspiece to the shaft. It was made of some type of stone that he’d never seen before — quartz-like, denser than granite, creamy white in colour with flecks of black and vivid green. He clutched it to his chest and closed his eyes. He’d found it.
He couldn’t wait to show Alex. He stuck the precious relic in his belt, took a deep breath of the cave’s stale air, and swam his way back out of the cave. Seconds later he broke the surface and clambered up onto dry land, too excited to feel the numbing cold.
‘Alex! Look!’
No reply. She was nowhere to be seen. Glancing around, he saw that she’d unzipped her backpack while he’d been underwater. It lay empty on the pavement near the water’s edge, and beside it was the mysterious object she’d been toting around with her. He crouched down to examine it. An oblong steel case, the kind photographers used to protect their fragile equipment. The latches were undone and the lid was open, showing the foam padding inside. As well as something unusual. The case was thickly lined with a dark material that he realised with bemusement was lead.
That explained the weight of the thing. But why had she brought this with her?
‘Alex?’ he called again.
‘I’m here,’ she replied. She was twenty yards away, hanging warily back behind another pillar.
‘What’re you doing hiding behind there?’ he asked, puzzled. His extremities were beginning to tremble with cold now. ‘I found the cross, Alex. I found it!’
‘Put it in the case,’ she called over to him. Her voice sounded terribly weak, as if she was having to make an extreme effort to push the words out.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I’m not well, Joel. Put the cross in the case, okay? It’s radioactive,’ she added desperately in a rasping croak. ‘I was going to tell you. It’s not safe to handle.’
He frowned. ‘Why the hell would it be radioactive? It’s only a bit of old stone.’ He took a step towards her, waving the cross in the air. ‘Look.’
‘Don’t come near me!’ she screamed. The exertion caused her to collapse to her knees, clutching her sides with a moan. Under the glow of a streetlamp, he could see from the pallor of her face and the dark rings that had suddenly appeared around her eyes that there really was something terribly, shockingly wrong with her.
He was about to say something when the wind was knocked out of him by a heavy impact that came out of nowhere. It sent him tumbling to the ground, still clutching the cross. He twisted up to see a big guy in a black bomber jacket and beanie hat moving in to stamp on his ribs. Joel rolled out of the way of the kick, but suddenly another man came running out of the shadows and booted him in the stomach. Joel doubled up in pain. He lashed out with the cross, felt it connect with bone, and heard a yell of pain. He staggered to his feet, only to be sent crashing back down on the hard ground by a punch to the face.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Joel’s attackers circled him. Four of them, all dressed in similar black clothes and wearing the cold, impassive expressions of hired thugs. The one who’d kicked him held something in his hand. Even before the long tongue of steel flicked out, Joel knew it was a switchblade. And something told him this was no ordinary mugging.
‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them said. ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’<
br />
‘Think again. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Fine. Then we’ll do it the hard way,’ the guy said. The circle closed in towards Joel. Four to one.
‘Put it in the case!’ Alex screamed from behind the column. Her voice broke up into a racking cough.
Joel ignored her. He swung the cross at his attackers. It was all he had to defend himself with, and he wasn’t about to toss it away.
But the four guys weren’t that easily put off. They all rushed him at once. He clubbed one of them, aiming for the side of the head, but the blow was deflected. One grabbed his wrist, another caught him with a hard punch to the jaw. Stars exploded in his eyes. He felt the cross fly from his hand. It turned a somersault in mid-air and landed in the steel case. The force of its landing caused the lid to slam shut.
By then Joel was down on the ground and curled up in a ball to protect himself from the kicks and punches raining down on him. He was too preoccupied with trying to escape being beaten to death to notice Alex get to her feet in the background. The pallor in her face had vanished abruptly and the sharpness in her eye was back as she came striding fast towards Joel’s attackers. Two broke away from the fight when they saw her coming, leaving their friends to take care of Joel while they dealt with this crazy woman who seemed to think she could take them on. They had their orders, in any case. She wasn’t supposed to leave here alive.
‘Leave him alone,’ she said as she walked up to them. ‘One warning is all you get. Then you die.’
One of the men laughed. ‘Listen to her. She’s fucking nuts.’ His friend reached inside his jacket and his hand came out with a.45 automatic.
The first man stopped laughing. ‘Thought we were meant to use the 9-mils they gave us.’
‘Fuck that,’ said the guy with the gun. ‘What for? You know me. I’m a big-bore kind of guy.’ He aimed the pistol at Alex and squeezed the trigger…Twice, three times, four times. The heavy-calibre slugs took Alex in the chest and she went straight down on her back and lay still. The sound of the gunshots reverberated across the canal.
‘There. Who needs poxy 9-mils anyway?’ the guy said, putting away his smoking pistol.
Joel’s cry of rage when he saw Alex go down was cut short by another kick to his stomach. In his fury he grabbed his attacker’s leg and sent the guy tumbling backwards. He leapt to his feet in horror.
Just in time to see Alex get up again.
Faster than the eye could follow, her hand shot out and her fist closed on the wrist of the guy who’d shot her. One wrench, and his arm was broken. Compound fracture, the bone jutting out of the ripped flesh and tearing through his jacket sleeve.
Another wrench, and she’d ripped his arm away completely at the shoulder, like a large joint of meat in her fist. His empty sleeve dangled at his side as his knees buckled and he collapsed in instant shock.
Alex swung the severed arm like a club at the one who’d laughed. The wet end caught him in the side of the head with a showering spatter of blood and battered him to the ground. She stepped over to him and drove her heel through his face, before turning back to his friend, who was gibbering and shaking violently in a pool of his own blood. Alex bent calmly over him, seized his head between her hands and twisted it until there was a splintering crack like a branch snapping. Straightening up, she shunted the body into the canal with her foot. Where the four shots had punched through her coat, the edges of the bullet holes were still smoking.
Joel saw it all, but the remaining two thugs had their backs to Alex and were too intent on him to have noticed anything. She walked swiftly up behind them and, before they had time to react, she reached out her arms, jerked them off their feet and cracked their heads together with bone-shattering power. They hit the ground, dead.
And there was silence. Carnage littered the canal-side. The pools of blood quickly spread to the edge and began trickling into the water.
Joel stood, swaying on his feet, blood running down his face, gaping down at the two corpses lying in front of him with their skulls virtually fused together. In that instant he was transported back eighteen years. He was a child again, cowering behind the banisters of his grandfather’s cottage, just a few feet from the bodies of his parents who had been murdered in just the same way.
Her strength. The speed. No human could move that way, kill with that kind of ease. Especially not after taking four bullets to the chest.
Alex finally broke the silence. ‘We need to get away from here.’ She stepped over the dead men and grasped Joel’s arm. He jerked away from her, still winded from the punches and kicks he’d taken. But it wasn’t the beating he’d taken that was making it hard to stay on his feet.
He knew now. He understood.
The way she’d dropped her cup that time at his mention of the cross. The way she’d seemed transfixed by his bleeding hand when he’d gashed himself on the broken table. This woman he’d trusted. This woman that he’d made love with.
‘You’re one…one of them. You’re a vampire.’
‘Listen to me, Joel. It’s not what you think. Not exactly.’
He raised his hands to his face, pinched the flesh of his cheeks. Wake up, Joel.
‘Tell me this isn’t happening,’ he muttered. ‘Tell me it isn’t true.’
‘Joel—’
‘Don’t come near me!’ He backed away from her. She took a step towards him, reaching out her hand towards him, and they circled one another on the bloody pavement.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘There are things you need to understand.’
‘Like how you manage to walk in daylight? Pass yourself off as a human?’
‘Things aren’t the way they used to be.’
‘I don’t care. You bite people and suck their blood.’
‘I don’t kill to do it. It’s different now.’
‘Vampires are the good guys now, is that it?’
‘Not all. Just my side.’
‘You’re a curse.’
‘I’m not your enemy, Joel. Gabriel Stone is. Yours, and mine. And he’s the worst enemy you can imagine. If you’d let me explain what’s happening—’
Joel felt his foot nudge something solid. He took his eyes off her just long enough to see that it was the lead-lined steel case. He made a lunge for it, grabbed it with both hands and wrenched it off the ground. He saw her pupils dilate as he clutched it to his chest.
‘What does it do to you?’
‘Joel—’
‘Answer me or I’ll open this lid and find out for myself.’
She sighed. ‘Your grandfather was right. The cross has the power to destroy us.’
‘Why this one? Why just this one cross?’
‘I can’t say. Nobody knows.’
‘You lied to me. All that bullshit about your sister. You used me. Then what –
once I’d helped you to find the cross, were you going to kill me, too? Was that the plan, Alex?’
‘No, Joel.’
‘There’s something you don’t know about me. I told you I believed in vampires –
but I didn’t tell you that I’d killed one once. It was a long time ago, but I can do it again. And believe me, if I could kill my own grandfather, I’m pretty sure I can kill you.’
‘One hour,’ she said. ‘That’s all the time I need to explain it all to you. Then you’ll understand why we need you, why it’s important that you work together with us.’
He frowned. ‘Us? You mean vampires?’
‘There’s a whole world you don’t know about, that no human knows about. I work for the Vampire Federation, and we’re under attack from an uprising led by Gabriel Stone and his people.’
‘Do you think I care about your politics? You’re a vampire, Alex.’
‘You will care, because it’s bad news for humans if Stone succeeds. You and I need to get this case back to London, and we’ll destroy Stone together.’
Joel shook his head violently. ‘Go,’ he yelled. ‘Get out of here. This is y
our one chance to get away from me. If I see you again, Alex, you’re just another vampire. God help me, I’ll finish you along with the rest.’
‘Give me the case, Joel. Don’t mess about.’
‘Come a step closer, I open the lid. I swear.’
‘You’d do that to me?’ she said softly. ‘After what happened between us?’
‘What happened between us was an obscenity,’ he heard himself say.
Police sirens cut through the night air, still far off but growing steadily louder.
Joel glanced across the canal and saw lights flashing in the mist. The bow wave of the approaching police launch was white against the dark water.
He turned back to Alex. She was gone.
He clutched the case tightly to his chest and began to run.
Chapter Sixty-Four
If there were any vampires on the evening flight home from Venice, they had no idea what the quiet passenger in the damp, rumpled clothes sitting alone near the back of the plane was carrying in the small metal case that seemed to be his only luggage.
Gazing numbly out of the window at the dark sky, Joel could see his own pale, bruised, haunted-looking reflection staring back at him. He was oblivious of the other passengers and ignored the small girl who kept pointing at him and asking her mother what had happened to that man’s face. He barely acknowledged the cheerful stewardess who came by offering food and drink. Didn’t even feel the pain from the split in his lip or the purple swelling around his left cheekbone. Anyone watching him would have been unable to detect the smallest flicker of expression on his face as he sat there immobile, almost catatonic. But inside he was screaming in turmoil as he contemplated the task that faced him now. Peaks and troughs of conflicting emotion flooded over him like the temperature extremes of a violent fever — elated and thrilling to the drumbeat of war one instant, crippled by terror the next and wanting to run and run and keep running and never look back.
But he knew it was no longer his decision to make. He was the bearer of the cross, and there was only one road he could travel. Come what may, he was far beyond recall.
Uprising vf-1 Page 25
