The Cross vf-2

by Scott G. Mariani

  Another subject of discussion that evening, over mugs of Horlicks before bed, had been the unexpected delivery earlier in the day. The Fed-Ex drivers who’d unloaded the three large boxes had almost broken the hydraulic lift of their truck with the weight of them.

  The typed instructions attached to the delivery note had been strict and clear: the items were to be stored in the mansion’s basement under lock and key, and on no account was anyone except Mr Lonsdale to open them or tamper with them in any way.

  Two of the boxes were about the same size, about six feet long. The third was closer to seven, much wider, and weighed almost twice as much. Getting them down into the basement had been a grunting, straining, gut-busting endeavour. In the end, they’d had to lower them in with ropes via the disused Victorian-era coal chute, and when it was done, Geoffrey was talking about suing Fed-Ex for the pain in his back.

  Tucked up in bed sometime after midnight, Sharon rolled over and nudged her husband on the shoulder. ‘Psst. Psst. Are you awake?’

  ‘No,’ he grunted in the dark.

  ‘I can’t sleep. I was thinking—’

  Geoffrey propped himself up against the pillow and rubbed his eyes. ‘What is it now?’ he moaned. ‘Christ, my back.’

  ‘Maybe we should tell the police. About that delivery. I mean, maybe it could, you know, help them find Mr Lonsdale, maybe.’

  Geoffrey was wide awake now. ‘It’s just something he must have ordered before he went off,’ he said irritably. ‘You saw the instructions. He won’t be very happy when he comes back and finds that we’ve opened his private mail.’

  ‘Those things aren’t just any old mail. And he’s not coming back, and you know it.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t say that.’

  A silence; then Sharon said, ‘Those boxes could be coffins, you know.’

  Geoffrey reached out and clicked on the bedside light, turned to stare at his wife in bewilderment. ‘Coffins! What the hell makes you think they’re coffins?’

  She shrugged. ‘Something creepy about them, if you ask me. Why, what do you think’s in them?’

  ‘Crates of wine, perhaps, or antique furniture. Or artwork? Mr Lonsdale collects artwork, as you know.’

  ‘Too heavy for artwork. And if it was wine the boxes would be marked “fragile”. No markings on them at all. Don’t you find that a bit odd?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sharon, and I don’t care. Can we please get back to sleep now? Honestly.’ Geoffrey turned the light back out and buried his head in his pillow.

  For the next few minutes, the only sound in the dark bedroom was the gentle rasp of Geoffrey’s snores. Sharon felt herself getting drowsy. Maybe Geoffrey was right, was her last thought as sleep came down like a curtain.

  Then, in their kennel outside, Castor and Pollux suddenly began to bark furiously.

  Sharon sat bolt upright in the bed. ‘Geoffrey!’ she whispered. ‘Listen!’

  ‘For God’s sake, it’s probably just a fox,’ he muttered.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the chorus of barking ended in a high-pitched whimper. Sharon tore the covers off her and scurried to the window. She could see nothing outside. ‘Someone must be out there.’

  Geoffrey nodded, suddenly alert and panic-stricken. ‘I’ll get the shotgun.’ There had been burglaries in the area recently, and he’d taken to keeping the old side-by-side behind the door. Sharon clung to his arm as they crept downstairs and ventured out into the cold night air.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Geoffrey yelled in a quavering voice, sighting the shotgun down his torch beam as he swept it left and right at the barns, the gazebo, the helicopter hangar. No reply. A lowlying freezing mist drifted around the house, making them shiver.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Geoffrey repeated. ‘Whoever you are, I have a gun.’

  As they passed the kennels, the torch beam landed on the cowering shapes of Castor and Pollux. The two dogs were pressed against the wire mesh as far away from the house as they could get, their tails between their legs, quivering and whining with subdued fear.

  ‘Look at them, Geoffrey. What the—’

  ‘Never mind the dogs. Look at this,’ Geoffrey whispered hoarsely, shining the torch on the coal shute trapdoor that led down to the cellar. It was open. The concrete cellar floor was covered with scattered pieces of ripped cardboard and splintered wood. All three crates had been smashed apart.

  ‘Someone’s broken into them,’ Sharon gasped, gripping her husband’s arm. ‘Oh my God. We have to call the police.’

  Geoffrey stared at the debris a moment longer. ‘Wait a minute. It looks like … no, it can’t be.’

  ‘Can’t be what?’ she asked him in terror.

  ‘Those crates haven’t been broken into. They’ve been broken out of. They’re burst open from the inside.’

  The two of them hurried breathlessly back to the coach-house to dial 999. As they did so, a figure stepped out of the mist.

  Sharon let out a shriek. It was the figure of a man — tall and dark, in a long leather coat that hung elegantly from his slim body. Even in their shaking panic, the couple could see that this was no ordinary intruder. There was something distinguished, somehow almost princely, in his bearing as he stepped towards them. The leather coat was unbuttoned despite the cold, his white silk shirt casually open at the neck. ‘Good evening,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Who are you?’ Geoffrey demanded.

  The intruder just kept smiling. Out of the freezing fog behind him appeared two more figures. The woman had the wild black hair of a gypsy and was clad in tight, gleaming red leather. The other was the towering shape of the biggest, broadest man Lonsdale’s caretakers had ever seen. The three figures advanced, all smiling and exchanging knowing glances.

  ‘Don’t come another step,’ Geoffrey quavered, brandishing the shotgun. ‘Stay back, I tell you. This gun is loaded. I’ll shoot. Sharon, run inside and call the police, quick.’

  ‘There’s really no need for violence,’ said the elegant man in the long coat.

  ‘I mean it,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not another step. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I will, if you make me.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’ The man came on another step, still smiling.

  Geoffrey Hopley made a terrorised gurgling sound from his throat, gripped the twelve-bore tightly and closed his eyes and jerked the trigger. The crash of the gunshot shattered the night and the darkness was lit up by its white muzzle flash as he discharged one barrel straight into the man’s chest at close range.

  Then he opened his eyes, ears ringing from the shot, and his knees almost buckled under him as he saw the man still standing there.

  The man tutted, fingered the tattered, bloodied hole in his silk shirt, and shook his head disapprovingly at Geoffrey. ‘I had always found the English to be such a hospitable and welcoming people,’ he said sadly. ‘How things change.’

  Geoffrey was about to fire off the second cartridge when the enormous black man stepped forward, snatched the gun from his hands and bent its barrels into a U-shape as easily as if it had been a stick of liquorice.

  Sharon had begun to gibber.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ said the wearer of the ruined silk shirt. ‘My name is Stone. Gabriel Stone.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Southampton

  Tommy led Joel back to a sooty red-brick building in a narrow little empty street some way from the docks. At the bottom of a flight of steps, he clinked open a triple-padlocked door and ushered Joel inside. The place was a basement, windowless and bare brick but clean and well maintained, filled with organised clutter. Glancing around him, Joel took another swig from his bottle. Despite his disgust at the thought of it, he could feel his strength growing with every sip. It was all he could do to resist gulping the whole lot down.

  ‘Unless ye’re planning on starting to juice properly for yerself, I’d be sparing with that,’ Tommy warned. ‘Here, take a seat.’

  Joel sat on the chai
r Tommy pulled out for him. Hating himself for the lust he felt for the stuff, he slipped the blood bottle back into his pocket and resolved to leave it there for a long time.

  ‘What do you do?’ Joel asked. Vampire small-talk. It felt absurd, surreal.

  ‘Buy and sell stuff,’ Tommy replied. ‘Bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’

  ‘So … how long have you been …?’

  ‘A vampire?’ Tommy chuckled. ‘Don’t be coy, laddie. Eternity’s a long time to spend ducking and diving from the truth. A long, long time, is the answer to yer question.’

  ‘How did you become one?’

  Tommy slumped on a worn armchair and kicked his boots out in front of him. ‘Now, see, that’s not something ye should ask too freely, son. Some vampires find it rude. But I dinnae mind telling ye. Ever heard o’ the Baobhan sith?’

  ‘The white women of the Highlands,’ Joel said, and Tommy seemed taken aback. ‘I read about them somewhere,’ Joel explained. He was being deliberately vague, because the place he’d read about them was in his vampire hunter grandfather’s diary.

  If he could see me now, Joel thought. He’d have been so proud to see his grandson become the thing they both hated most in all the world.

  ‘The white women, aye,’ Tommy said pensively. ‘Then ye’ll ken that they were a Celtic vampire warrior tribe back in what the humes call the Dark Ages. They were like Amazons, except with teeth. Their prey was young laddies, that they’d mesmerise with their beautiful singing. One of those young laddies was my only son, Stuart. It was in the year 1301, around the time Willie Wallace was stirring it up wi’ the English. Cold winter it was. One night Stuart was out with his bow, hunting in the forest. That’s when they took him. When I went off searching for him, they took me and all.’ Tommy sighed. ‘Long time ago.’

  Joel’s mind was boggling. Over seven hundred years that Tommy had been living this life. Or unlife, or whatever it was. ‘What happened to Stuart?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘Destroyed,’ Tommy muttered. ‘By the hunters.’

  ‘Vampire hunters?’

  ‘Aye. They caught him in the daytime. Put ma wee boy in a cage and dragged him oot intae the sun. Fuckers.’ Tommy spat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Joel heard himself say, and he frowned. He’d travelled home intent on destroying every vampire who crossed his path. Now here he was, sitting with one of them, drinking blood with him, genuinely grateful for what he’d done for him and sympathising with him for the loss of his vampire son.

  ‘Every one of us has a story tae tell,’ Tommy said. ‘So what’s yours?’

  ‘A woman did it to me. A woman I thought I loved. She kind of held back from me that she was a vampire.’

  Tommy nodded thoughtfully. ‘And ye resent her for it, don’t ye?’

  Joel said nothing.

  ‘Normal enough. Nothing tae be ashamed of. It happens tae all of us who’ve been forced to turn, against their will. But time passes, and a strange thing happens. Ye begin tae see the advantages. Then, when some more time passes, ye begin tae like it.’

  Joel had no answer to that. Another question was pressing on his mind. ‘This woman who turned me,’ he said. ‘She told me she worked for the Vampire Federation,’ he said. ‘Some kind of agent.’

  Tommy’s bushy eyebrows raised an inch. ‘An agent? She was taking one hell of a risk turning a human. Goes against Federation rules.’

  ‘We’re talking about a federation … of vampires?’ Joel said. ‘I want to know more about it. Tell me everything.’

  Tommy sighed. ‘It’s no’ the same world any more, laddie. The humes are a damn sight more organised and technologic ally advanced than they were back in my day. So, modern times, new ways. Back in ‘84, it was — that’s 1984 — when the Supremos first got together and announced that things had tae change if vampires wanted tae avoid getting noticed. Maybe they were right. Maybe we’d all have been exterminated now, otherwise. Who knows? Whatever the case, it caught on fast. Before we knew it, it’d become this huge big organisation, laying doon the way it was going tae be from now on. No more turning humes willy-nilly, for a start. Strictly forbidden, on pain of termination. Execution,’ he explained. ‘By Nosferol. Anti-vampire nerve toxin. Not nice.’

  ‘And they’ll do the same to the victims they’ve turned?’ Joel said, thinking of what Tommy had said earlier about illegals.

  ‘Unless the Feds decide tae enlist them, then aye, ‘fraid so. The way they see it, they’ve got tae keep the whole thing locked doon tight. Too many humes out there would love tae become like us, see. There’s a lot of money in it. There had tae be a disincentive.’

  ‘I can’t believe humans want to become vampires,’ Joel said, aghast.

  ‘Come on, laddie. Think of it. Eternal life, unlimited power.’

  ‘And all you have to do is drink people’s blood every night,’ Joel said bitterly.

  ‘Well, maybe there’s a lot of humes that wouldnae find that too high a price to pay, morally speaking. Not when ye weigh up the advantages. And thanks tae the Federation, even after they’re turned they can go on pretty much like before, making their money and swanking aboot in their fast cars. Except they never die.’

  ‘But the sunlight,’ Joel said, puzzled. ‘How can they go on like before, if—’

  ‘Like I said, laddie, times change. The Supremos declared that the more we integrated intae their society, the safer we’d be. Vambloc isnae the only wee pill they forced us tae use.’ He stood up and clumped over to a sideboard, yanked open a drawer and took out a little tube about the size of a packet of mints. He tossed it to Joel.

  ‘Solazal?’ Joel said, reading the label.

  ‘Dinnae ask me how the fuckin’ stuff works. Some fancy chemistry bollocks. But it enables vampires tae walk aboot in daylight.’

  So that was how Alex had been able to fool him, Joel thought. ‘It really works?’ he asked in amazement.

  Tommy nodded. ‘Imagine the first poor fucker they tested it on, though, eh? Must’ve been shitting himself. Aye, it works, all right. Try one and see for yerself. Take the whole tube, if ye want. Take half a dozen — keep ye going for a while. I’ve got plenty. Hardly touch the stuff, except tae go shopping once in a while or visit the bank. Gives me heartburn, tell the truth.’

  Joel examined the tube carefully, studying the fine print on the label. It looked for all the world like a normal pharmaceutical product. ‘This is amazing. I can’t believe how organised these people are … I mean, vampires,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘It’s global, laddie. Offices in just aboot every major city. But Europe’s where it all started, back in ‘84. The main headquarters is in Brussels. The Supremos run the whole kit and caboodle from there. They make the rules, and VIA enforce them. That’s V–I - A; stands for Vampire Intelligence Agency. Investigative division and police force, all rolled intae one. Now, as far as I ken, VIA’s based up in London. Where exactly, I couldnae tell ye. Top drawer stuff. They wouldnae trust the rank and file vampires wi’ information like that.’

  ‘You don’t sound very fond of them,’ Joel said.

  ‘I willnae say too much,’ Tommy said. ‘Let’s just say there’s a lot of us who’d scrap the whole fucking bureaucratic shower o’ them if ye gave us half a chance. They force us tae register and use their bloody drugs, then they keep hiking the price on us.’ Tommy paused. ‘And there’s those that do more than just grumble about the Feds. There’re rebels. Rumour has it that some vampires started an uprising.’

  ‘Gabriel Stone,’ Joel said. ‘I think he’s one of them.’

  ‘You seem to ken more aboot it than me. Anyway, the Federation Gestapo have been around asking questions. Trying to find oot if I’ve been involved in any of it. Hassling me over why I hadn’t been getting more o’ their drugs. I’m not the only one who’s been questioned. But VIA’s job is tae keep these things quiet. They never tell us the truth.’

  ‘So are you one of the rebels?’ Joel asked.

  Tommy roared
with laughter. ‘Me? Forget it, pal — I keep well out of all that shite. I just want tae get on with things, nice and quiet in my own wee corner, like I’ve always done.’

  ‘I want to find the London headquarters,’ Joel said.

  ‘Why? Tae surrender yerself?’

  ‘I have some business with somebody there.’

  Tommy smiled, understanding. ‘Right, aye. The agent lassie who turned ye.’

  ‘Her name’s Alex Bishop. The last time I saw her was a few days ago in Romania. But I’m certain she’s come back to Britain, that she’s back in London. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.’

  Tommy nodded. ‘Vampires and the victims they turn have a kind o’ bond between them. Telepathic, or something, I suppose it is. Some have it stronger than others. Depends on the vampire that did the turning. See, we get more powerful as we get older.’

  Joel remembered how Kate Hawthorne, cornered in a flat in Wallingford before he’d destroyed her, had been able to guide him to Gabriel Stone’s castle in Romania. It had seemed bizarre at the time. Now he understood. ‘You think maybe I could use that bond to find her in London? How does it work? If I concentrate really hard, I might—’

  Tommy smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s no’ quite that simple, laddie. Besides, even if ye did find yer lassie and get tae the VIA Headquarters, from the rumours I’ve heard, ye wouldnae get past the front door before ye got zapped with Nosferol. Ye don’t want to find oot what it can do. Trust me on that.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Just after 4 a.m., and the black Rolls Royce Phantom was streaking through the lanes of rural Kent at over a hundred and twenty miles an hour. A relaxed Gabriel Stone was at the wheel, idly listening to a Mendelssohn string quartet as he hurtled the big car through the night. Beside him in the luxurious passenger seat, Lillith was pouring more of the 1993 Dom Perignon champagne into a crystal flute.

  Zachary lounged stretched out in the back, a bottle in one giant fist and a full glass in the other. ‘One thing you gotta say about Lonsdale — that human-ass motherfucker certainly liked to do things in style.’