The Cross vf-2

by Scott G. Mariani

  ‘Got it,’ Joel said, memorising their names and faces more quickly than he’d have imagined possible. When the murmurs of ‘Afternoon, sir’ had died away, Joel pointed at DC Cushley. She was about thirty, blond-haired, the most alert-looking of the team with quick blue eyes. ‘Cushley, tell me what we’ve got on Stone.’

  Outwardly, he projected an impression of calm efficiency, focused on the job and completely in his element; exactly the same Joel Solomon that those who knew him would have remembered from all the previous times they’d worked together. But it was an impression he was having to fight to keep up. The humans’ voices were beginning to echo in his ears, blurring into one, and the room swirled around him as his incredibly keen sense of smell threatened to take over completely. The scent of their warm blood, pulsing tantalisingly through veins and arteries … gallons of it, lakes of it and all within such easy grasp, there for the taking … it was intoxicating. He wanted to gasp. He wanted to run out of the room. But he fought it, maintaining his expression of thoughtful concentration and trying not to let his eyes linger on Cushley’s throat as she spoke.

  ‘Good deal less than we ought to, sir,’ Cushley said. ‘It’s like no Gabriel Stone ever existed. No birth records, no National Insurance number, nothing. No vehicles registered to him either. The plates on the McLaren F1 taken from Crowmoor Hall turned out to be false. And we can’t trace where it was bought.’

  Joel had already checked them before his trip to Romania. ‘Any luck digging up the property deeds?’

  Cushley shook her head. ‘Our guy seems pretty adept at not leaving a paper trail. Crowmoor Hall’s bills were always paid in cash, we think by Stone’s employee, Seymour Finch.’

  ‘Now resident in the police morgue,’ Carter said. ‘Anyone been down there lately and seen the size of his hands, by the way? Buggering things are enormous. Hardly human, even.’

  ‘Another blank there,’ Cushley said. ‘Finch is as much of a mystery as his former boss. Forensic analysis of the bullet dug out of him shows up an unusual rifling pattern, suggesting it was fired from an old wartime Webley.45 revolver. No sign of the weapon so far.’

  That’s because I disposed of it so carefully, Joel thought. ‘Okay, let’s move on. What about the Jeremy Lonsdale connection? Anyone?’

  ‘Lonsdale hasn’t surfaced yet, Inspector,’ volunteered the tall, greying CID detective called Hardstaff. ‘I’ve been working on tracking the movements of his private jet, and we have a record of a flight from Surrey to Brussels five days ago. That’s the last we have on it. After that, it just disappears, along with the pilot and crew.’

  Brussels? Joel wondered.

  ‘Who the hell flew it out of there?’ Carter demanded. ‘I thought we were working on that.’

  ‘We are. There’s nothing,’ Hardstaff said. ‘Nobody knows where it went.’

  ‘Inspector, there’s one other thing,’ said Myles, a female DS Joel had worked with on a drugs case a few months before. ‘The day after Lonsdale’s plane landed in Belgium, there was a major incident at a conference venue outside Brussels. The anti-terrorist boys are going through the place as we speak. Right now, there’s no obvious connection to our case, but we’re following up every lead we can.’

  ‘Good. What about Lonsdale’s homes?’

  ‘Country pile just outside Guildford, pad in Kensington and a villa in Tuscany,’ said Braddock, sliding on a pair of glasses and checking a file. ‘We’ve talked to all his domestic staff … let me see … a Mr and Mrs Hopley are the live-in housekeepers at his estate, The Ridings. Officers visited them at the same time as Italian police sent people out to his Tuscan place. Nobody’s heard a peep; same goes for his office personnel in Whitehall. The only thing they all say is that he didn’t seem to be himself over the last little while. As if he’d been worried about something — he never said what. He’d been taking days off work, missing appointments, going off places without telling anyone. All very out of character, seemingly. But nobody’s heard from him, and we’ve checked all the phone records and emails. Zilch to go on there.’

  ‘You ask me, sir, a crashed jet’s going to turn up somewhere and none of this will be connected to the Stone case at all,’ said Sneddon, short and round with a mottled complexion that spoke of imminent heart failure. ‘I think we’re chasing down a blind alley. So Lonsdale has a few dodgy friends. You show me a politician who doesn’t.’

  ‘So basically,’ Carter said, shifting his weight uncomfortably on the desk to face Joel, ‘we have bugger all with knobs on. But hopefully, now that you’re here, we can crack on and make some badly-needed progress. The old man’s baying for blood.’

  Joel stared at him. Don’t say that word, Sam. Just don’t say it to me again.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Blackheath prison

  Solitary confinement block

  Just under two yards wide and three yards long, the cold concrete floor of the cell was awash with sweat and the bare block walls echoed with the snorts and grunts as the prisoner called Ash pumped out his eightieth press-up in the dim light, wearing only his prison-issue boxer shorts. The muscles of his triceps and forearms were tighter and harder than steel cables. The points of his sharpened teeth ground against each other with the effort, while his eyes remained blank, unfocused.

  He had no way to measure time, except for the routine of his meals and his daily muck-out. He knew that it was night. And he knew — had known for the last several minutes — that something unusual was happening inside the prison.

  He knew it by the muffled noises he could faintly make out, coming from beyond the thick walls and steel door of his cell. Noises that, as they seemed to grow closer and louder and more intense with every passing moment, sounded like all hell breaking loose.

  Ash paused for the merest fraction of a beat as another terrible muted wailing scream, followed by another resounding crash, sounded from somewhere in the bowels of the prison. The corner of his mouth gave a twitch, and he went on pumping out more press-ups. Let them riot. Let war wage outside, let the whole world blast itself apart in a rain of hellfire and destruction. None of it was of any concern to him. When it was over, and he walked out of here into the ruins of a devastated planet, nothing would have changed for him. He would remain Ash. Doing what he did. And nobody would ever be able to stop him.

  His muscles pumped faster, pain screaming through him, sweat running off his back and down his arms to his clenched fists and the pool on the concrete floor. He reached a hundred and kept on going. He was a human piston. No, not human. Other. Better. He was—

  The door of his cell suddenly buckled with a shriek of rending metal. Not much could startle Ash, but as the door was ripped away from its hinges and slammed down on the cell floor, he had to stop what he was doing and look around.

  Framed in the rectangle of smoky, flickering white-orange light where the door had been stood three figures. The man on the left was so massive that he seemed to fill the corridor. A curved Arab scimitar was thrust crossways through his belt. He was clutching something in his fist that Ash couldn’t make out. The figure on the right was lithe and curvaceous — the shape of a woman, her one-piece outfit tight and smooth, the light shining through her wild hair and glittering off the steel scabbard that dangled from her waist.

  The figure in the middle was that of another man, not enormous or musclebound like his male companion, and he had no weapon. Ash’s concept of elegance was considerably limited, but that would have been the word he’d have used to describe the way the man held himself. There was something about him — something about all three of them, in fact — some strange and mesmerising energy that Ash had never sensed before.

  Ash slowly got to his feet, not taking his wary gaze from the three figures. The sweat was already cooling on his skin as cold air streamed in from the corridor. His nostrils flared at the smell of smoke. From somewhere outside his cell he could hear the soft crackle of fire.

  It was the elegant figure in the middle
who spoke first. ‘You would be the man named Ash?’

  Ash said nothing. He nodded once, imperceptibly.

  ‘My name is Stone. Gabriel Stone. These are my associates, Lillith and Zachary. We have come for you.’

  Ash remained silent; he cocked his head a little to the side, watching them intently.

  ‘There will be time for explanations later,’ Gabriel told him. ‘Zachary, escort our friend from his chamber.’

  Zachary ducked his head to clear the cell doorway. Stepping inside, he tossed away the thing he’d been clutching in his fist. Ash looked down at it. A human arm, ripped off at the elbow. Still wearing the shirt sleeve of the man it had been torn from. The sleeve was the colour of a prison guard’s uniform.

  Two vertical frown lines appeared on Ash’s brow.

  Zachary towered over him by a good four inches, and where Ash’s muscles were tight and sleek like a leopard’s, the huge man was built more like a Kodiak bear. Gripping him by the shoulder, Zachary propelled him towards the door. Ash disliked anyone touching him, but his protest was quickly cut short as he took in the scene of carnage and destruction outside his cell. The twisted, broken, slashed and dismembered corpses of eight prison guards littered the floor. The familiar stink of death mingled with the acrid smell of smoke. He could hear the groans of the dying echoing down the corridor. Flames and black smoke surged from an electrical box that trailed sword-slashed wires. The security cameras lining the corridor were dead, sightless.

  ‘What, you think we were gonna dig a tunnel into your cell, asshole?’ Zachary said. ‘Like a bunch of motherfucking rats? No way. We came straight in the front door.’

  ‘Golden Boy better be worth the trouble,’ Lillith said as they headed back through the maze of corridors, Gabriel silently leading the way, Zachary bringing up the rear steering the human ahead of him. She held up her sword hand. ‘Look at this. I broke a damned nail.’

  As they pressed on, they could feel the walls shaking with the roar and the stamping of the thousands of prisoners teeming behind locked doors, clamouring wildly to get out. Ash had stopped trying to shake off the big man’s grip. All he could do was stare as they kept moving. The last time he’d seen these corridors, the way had been barred by thick metal doors that took a ring of keys to pass through. Now, the way was open and the doors hung twisted and limp on their hinges. Every few yards they stepped over another pool of blood, another dead guard. Rounding a corner, they came across one who was still alive and dragging himself pitifully along the floor by a mutilated hand. Lillith tutted, drew her sabre and buried its blade deep into the man’s back. She dabbed a fingertip against the bloody steel and licked it. ‘Want some?’ she asked teasingly, turning to Ash. ‘I mean, you do imbibe, don’t you?’

  ‘Save it for later, sister,’ Gabriel snapped at her.

  ‘Who are you people?’ Ash said.

  ‘It speaks,’ Lillith said. ‘Well, that’s something.’

  As they passed through a smashed doorway, the narrow block-built corridor opened up into a high, open space that blazed with bright neon light. Metal walkways and stairways lined the walls. The roar of the prisoners echoed deafeningly from three tiered rows of communal cells, a waving, yearning forest of arms stretching outward through the bars. When they saw the group approaching and the bewildered-looking Ash with them, the prisoners erupted into a wild cheer.

  ‘We ought to let them all out,’ Lillith shouted over the din, amping up the already enormous volume of noise with a flourish of her bloody sabre and a beaming smile to her audience. ‘A mass breakout of thieves and murderers. Something to spice this dreary old island up a lit—’

  Her words and the cheering of the prisoners were drowned out by the sudden blaring whoop of a siren.

  ‘Shit,’ Zachary mouthed, and he drew the scimitar out of his belt, still keeping a tight grip on Ash. Gabriel looked across to see a barred door flying open and nine prison guards swarming through towards them. It seemed that the survivors of the vampires’ inward journey through Blackheath had regrouped and broken out their anti-riot equipment. Their terrified faces peered over the tops of their shields. Four of the nine men were clutching rubber bullet guns. Without waiting for a command, one let off his weapon with a booming thump.

  The heavy cylindrical composite-plastic missile crossed the distance between the guards and the vampires at several hundred feet per second. Just a blur to the human eye, but to a vampire’s senses it might as well have been a gently-thrown beach ball. Lillith slashed out with her sabre and cut the rubber bullet in half before it could reach its target.

  The other three panicking guards let rip with their weapons in quick succession. Zachary easily deflected the second bullet with the blade of his scimitar, sending it bouncing away harmlessly across the floor. Gabriel reached out and simply snatched the third and fourth out of the air with his hands, like catching apples falling from a tree. He tossed them over his shoulders, clicked his fingers and said, ‘Kill them.’

  Lillith and Zachary charged. The fight was brief, bloody and brutally uneven. The roar of the prisoners rose to a frenzied howl as the two vampires’ blades chopped and hacked. An ear flew. A hand. Lillith decapitated one guard with a single stroke. Zachary sliced another almost in half from shoulder to hip. In moments, nine men had been reduced to a pile of body parts lying scattered in a huge pool of blood.

  ‘More will be on their way,’ Gabriel said over the whoop of the alarm. ‘Let’s go.’

  Before squadrons of armed police and half the British Army could descend on the place, the vampires had retraced their bloody steps back through the rest of the prison and burst out into the misty night. Ash ran hard to keep up as they sprinted to the perimeter fence and climbed out through the hole that Zachary had slashed in the wire earlier.

  When Ash sucked in the cold night air, then laid eyes on the helicopter that was waiting for them on the tarmac beyond the fence, the rush of exhilaration at his new found freedom made him want to shout in triumph. Lillith chuckled at his expression. ‘Don’t count your chickens just yet, Golden Boy. You don’t know what’s in store.’

  Before the human could reply, Zachary had shoved him through a cargo hatch in the fuselage and slammed it shut. The three vampires piled into the cockpit. Gabriel calmly took the controls, and in seconds the rotors were building up speed.

  ‘Hey, Gabriel, have you got a licence to fly this thing?’ Lillith yelled over the screech of the turbine as the helicopter lifted off the ground, dipped its nose and accelerated aggressively skywards. Looking down, they could all see the ocean of flashing blue lights illuminating the North Yorkshire hills and hear the sirens as dozens of emergency response vehicles sped towards the prison. But by then, the chopper was already just a rapidly shrinking red twinkle among the stars.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Oxford

  Hours after the rest of the team, exhausted by a long, fruitless day of chasing up dead-end leads and blind alleys, had packed it in and gone home to their beds, Joel was still in the office. The last one to leave had been Cushley. Joel hadn’t been unaware of the way the female detective kept glancing at him across the office, the lowered eyelashes and the frequent darting of her fingers to touch her hair whenever they were talking alone. Even worse was the way she’d undone the top button of her blouse in the stifling heat of the room, making him blush and look away, stammering and blinking as terrible unwanted visions sprang out of his fevered imagination. It had been a huge relief when she’d finally left him alone and he no longer had to deal with the scent of her hot, fresh blood so close by, or the provocative pulse of her heartbeat pounding in his ears.

  It was after 1 a.m. by the time Joel eventually wrenched himself away from his desk and left the building, feeling bitterly frustrated at making so little progress after so many hours’ work and mentally drained by the effort to appear normal in front of his colleagues. Just another normal cop chasing after just another bunch of normal criminals.

  I
n truth, Joel hardly knew where to begin. His head was whirling with confusion as he walked home through the quiet night streets.

  He was desperately worried, too. The blood bottle Tommy had given him was emptying fast. The drop in its level seemed to be accelerating as he became more and more accustomed to the taste, no longer taking furtive little sips purely for the sake of survival, but beginning to crave great gulps of the stuff — all that remained in the bottle, and much more besides. The part of his mind that recoiled and protested in disgust at the idea seemed to be weakening by the minute, and it frightened him deeply that the old Joel, the human Joel, might be slipping away from him.

  Was it?

  Not yet, he reasoned with himself — or else he wouldn’t be frozen with terror and horror at the inevitable prospect of having to refill his precious bottle when the last drop was finally used up. No, the old Joel was still alive somewhere inside him, still clinging resiliently on. But for how much longer?

  With no need to sleep, he mooched restlessly about his flat. The more he worked himself up into a frenzy, the stronger the impulse became to grab the bottle from his pocket and feel the wonderful, dizzying, restorative energy of the blood feeding into his system. The constant internal struggle depressed him even more.

  But this was no time for weakness or self-pity. If he chose to starve himself of blood and face the horrible fate Tommy had described, then whatever time he had left had to be devoted to his quest. If his resolve weakened, and he damned himself forever by taking some poor innocent as a victim, he could at least commit himself for all eternity to hunting down and ridding the world of this scourge. He’d annihilate all of them.

  Joel thought of Tommy and felt a strange pang of guilt. Could he slaughter him so easily, just like that? Tommy, who’d given him sympathy and kindness when he’d been at his most vulnerable; Tommy, who attacked human beings and drank their blood. The moral compass was swinging all over the place. What was right? What was wrong?