The Cross vf-2

by Scott G. Mariani

  And then the horrible face split apart.

  From between the fleshy folds of the parted mandibles snaked a tentacle-like tongue, grey and glistening. Its tip peeled open to reveal a set of sharp fangs. Sticky threads of ooze stretched and snapped as the fangs gaped wide open. The tentacle coiled back, gathering itself to strike — and then lashed out with blinding speed straight at Lillith’s face.

  Zachary grabbed the guard leader off his feet and thrust him in front of her as the tentacle struck. The fangs sank deep into the guard’s chest and there was a crackling and splintering of bone. A scream filled the chamber as his heart and lungs and part of his spine were ripped out of his body. The tentacle hurled the guard’s organs away and fired a powerful jet of black oily liquid that spattered over his face and into his screaming mouth. Instantly, he slumped to the floor, paralysed by the vampire nerve toxin stored in glands at the base of the Ubervampyr tongue.

  The tentacle flailed towards Zachary as he backed away. Lillith reached into the front of her jumpsuit and pulled out the concealed ice dagger she’d cut from the ceiling of their chamber earlier. The blade was as hard and sharp as glass. Faster than Tarcz-koi could withdraw it, she slashed the knife at his tongue. Dark blood and venom spattered. The severed tentacle-tip fell writhing to the floor, the fangs snapping wildly. The Ubervampyr recoiled with a wail of agony and fury and his tongue slithered back inside his mandibles.

  ‘Get them!’ he shrieked to the guards, pointing his claw at Lillith and Zachary.

  The pair were already sprinting for the door. Zachary broke the neck of a guard who tried to block his way — it couldn’t kill him, but it would slow him down — and grabbed his halberd, swinging it at another guard and slicing his head clean off. Then, with a blow that shattered the steel blade and shaft, Zachary used the weapon to crash open the door of the chamber. He and Lillith ran out into the maze of ice passages.

  ‘This way!’ she yelled, tugging his sleeve.

  The screams of the enraged Tarcz-koi echoed up the corridor as they ran. Zachary glanced back and saw the guards giving chase. He dipped his hand inside his jacket and came out with a disc of ice with glass-sharp teeth like a circular saw blade’s. He spun it towards the guards. One managed to duck the flying disc, but two behind him weren’t so fast and their heads hit the floor before their running legs crumpled and collapsed under them.

  ‘Told you they were up to something,’ Zachary said to Lillith as they ran. ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘They’re going to murder Gabriel,’ Lillith gasped. ‘They’re sending Ash after him with the cross.’ She’d barely spoken before a jet of black venom spattered against a pillar just inches away. She jumped back with a cry of fear and saw the blobs of thick liquid clinging to the leather sleeve of her jumpsuit.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Zachary yelled. ‘It’ll paralyse your ass.’ Lillith scraped her arm hard against the ice wall and glanced behind them to see five more Ubervampyr bounding after them, moving horribly fast on their muscular legs, surrounded by sprinting guards with weapons raised. There was no time to be frightened. The two vampires ran faster than they’d ever run before, tearing down ice passages that they no longer recognised.

  Suddenly, a fork up ahead.

  ‘Which way?’ Lillith gasped.

  ‘No idea,’ Zachary said. They took the left turn, dashing past entrances that could fly open at any moment and release hordes of pursuers to block them off. The twisting passage suddenly opened and they emerged into a huge, high, echoing space.

  Then skidded to a halt as they caught sight of the ring of tall Ubervampyr figures that surrounded them.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Zachary grabbed Lillith’s arm and was about to push in front of her to protect her from the flying venom, when he realised.

  ‘They’re statues,’ Lillith said, staring at the terrifyingly realistic ice sculptures. And she remembered now — she’d seen them before.

  ‘What is this place?’ Zachary muttered, looking around him. ‘Looks like some kind of a garden.’

  Lillith suddenly knew just where she was.’It is a garden.

  ‘ Craning her neck upwards, she spotted the window of Gabriel’s chamber, from which the two of them had looked out. Fifty yards away beyond the ring of statues was the giant, tower-like shape of the astronomical telescope that Gabriel had pointed out to her — and above it, dizzyingly high up in the domed roof above the subterranean garden, the Ecliptic Portal.

  The yells and footsteps of their pursuers weren’t far behind.

  ‘We can get out that way,’ Lillith said excitedly. ‘It’s a window to the outside. There’s a mechanism somewhere that can open the hatches. Look.’ An ice gangway spiralled around the base of the enormous telescope. Midway up its height was what looked like an observation platform, and attached to a strange and complex arrangement of mechanical arms was a huge lever. ‘Come on!’ she shouted to Zachary, leading him towards it.

  But as the Portal came into view, her face fell in despair.

  They were too late. The Portal’s dull mirrors were lighten ing with the glow of the rising sun.

  ‘We’re trapped!’ she screamed.

  A whooshing pike-blade tore through Zachary’s shoulder and crashed into a pillar with a shower of splinters. He swore and clutched at the wound, turning to see the guards that were pouring into the garden, cutting off their exit. Five, six Ubervampyr were bounding along behind them. Their cries echoed up to the vast ceiling.

  Lillith knew how it felt to face certain destruction. She’d felt it that day on the castle battlements in Romania when it had seemed all was lost for her and Gabriel — and she could taste the same grim certainty now. They weren’t getting out of here. She swallowed hard.

  Zachary’s eyes suddenly brightened. ‘What are you doing?’ Lillith said as he dug something out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand. ‘What are these?’ she asked, staring at the little white pill.

  ‘Federation shit,’ Zachary said. ‘Solazal. Had them all along.’

  ‘Do they work?’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ he said, and tossed one in his mouth. Lillith hesitated, then did the same.

  By this time the guards and their Masters were past the ring of statues and rapidly approaching. Another flying spear crashed against the base of the telescope.

  ‘Let’s move!’ Zachary yelled, hauling Lillith up the ice gangway towards the observation platform. Lillith screamed as a jet of venom splashed off the hand rail right next to her. Zachary reached the lever and gripped it with both hands. ‘I sure hope that Solazal stuff works fast, ‘cause here goes.’

  He gave the lever a yank.

  It didn’t budge.

  The Ubervampyr and their guards had reached the bottom of the gangway. The tall creatures parted their mandibles. The extended tongues came slithering out, fangs bared, poised to squirt the paralysing venom. They were well within range now.

  Zachary threw all his weight and muscle against the lever. His face contorted with the strain, teeth clenched, tendons sticking out from his neck.

  And the lever rotated on its axis with a grinding clunk that echoed all the way up to the Ecliptic Portal.

  The hatches began to slide open.

  And then something happened that hadn’t happened for more centuries than Lillith and Zachary could remember. Standing there on the observation platform, they were suddenly drenched in the golden rays of the early morning sunlight.

  The shouts of rage from down below turned instantly to screams and then were silenced. Hit by the rays of light, the vampire guards disintegrated in flames. A terrified Ubervampyr burst alight and became a cloud of cinders before it could scurry into shadow.

  Lillith screwed her eyes shut in terror and clung tightly to Zachary as the silent scream filled every cell of her being. This was it. The horrific nightmare end that all vampires dreaded.

  But it wasn’t. Nothing happened. Lillith opened her eyes and held her trembling hands
up in front of them. The sunlight shone brightly on her skin, and yet she wasn’t on fire. She wasn’t peeling or blackening or turning to cinders that floated away on the air.

  ‘Looks like we’re still here,’ Zachary grinned.

  It took less than a minute for the two vampires to swarm up the towering shape of the telescope, feeling the sunlight on them more intensely with every yard they climbed. From the rim of its giant ice lens to the edge of the hatch was a long leap. Lillith went first, then Zachary, and suddenly they were standing on the surface looking down at the burning remains of their enemies far below.

  All around them was the vast white desert — flat snow-covered tundra to the south, craggy mountain ranges to the north.

  ‘I never thought I could experience this again,’ Lillith said, closing her eyes for a second and feeling the long-forgotten glow of the sun’s warmth on her cheeks. It was an incredible sensation. ‘But don’t tell Gabriel I ever said that,’ she added in a warning tone. ‘And for the love of blood, whatever you do, don’t ever mention to him we took those pills.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Zachary said, ‘I’d be in a lot more trouble than you would. Say, how long you reckon the effects last?’

  ‘No idea. Give me another one, just in case.’ As she munched it and felt the strange fizzle on her tongue, she shielded her eyes from the sunlight and gauged their bearings.

  ‘Now let’s go and find that aeroplane,’ she said. ‘And pray that the humans are still there waiting for us.’

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  It had taken far longer to get out of Britain than either Alex or Joel would have liked, but there was a price to pay for doing these things semi-legitimately. No matter how flagrantly Alex flouted the speed limits, the stop-offs at Wallingford, Oxford and Bedford to collect passports and personal effects had eaten a big chunk out of the day and it wasn’t until two in the afternoon that the Jaguar was finally stowed on board the cross-Channel ferry en route for Calais.

  ‘Alone at last,’ Alex said to Joel as she joined him at the rail, looking out across the grey sea and the disappearing cliffs of Dover. ‘Are you talking to me now?’

  ‘Of course I’m talking to you,’ he said glumly.

  ‘I’m glad, Joel.’

  He sighed. ‘I really did miss you, you know. I’m not just saying that.’

  ‘I came looking for you,’ he said, staring down at the white foam that streamed alongside the hull of the boat. ‘At your place in Canary Wharf.’

  ‘I moved.’

  ‘I gathered.’

  ‘And if I hadn’t?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’d have done,’ he said. ‘I thought I did, at the time, but now …’ He looked at her and saw she was smiling.

  ‘And I meant it when I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’d never willingly do that.’

  ‘I know,’ he sighed. She touched his hand. He gave her fingers a squeeze.

  ‘Look at those two,’ she laughed, pointing towards the porthole behind them, through which a sharp vampire eye could make out the figures of Dec and Chloe sitting together at the bar in the ferry’s main lounge. ‘They seem to be getting on well.’

  ‘They have a lot in common,’ Joel said. ‘They’ve both lost someone thanks to a vampire. Thanks to things like us,’ he added darkly.

  ‘You can say “people like us”, you know,’ she said.

  He looked at her. ‘I thought we’d stopped being “people”. Isn’t that the whole idea?’

  ‘Technically, yes. But I know I’d rather think of myself as a person than a thing, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’m sure your victims would be delighted to know that,’ he said.

  Her eyes scanned his face with concern. ‘You’re pale, Joel.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ he lied.

  ‘You’re not feeding, are you?’

  ‘You saw me feeding last night.’

  She shook her head. ‘I saw you licking a puddle of dead man’s blood off the floor, is what I saw. I’m talking about taking live blood straight from the vein. There’s a difference. Do you know what’ll happen to you if you don’t start learning to feed properly, the vampire way? And it will, if you don’t get the proper nutrition.’

  ‘I have a pretty good idea what’ll happen,’ he said miserably. She was right about the nutrition part — drinking the corpse’s blood hadn’t sustained him half as well as he’d hoped and already he could feel the first hunger pains returning.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to let it,’ she said. ‘I saved you so that I could have you near me, not to sit back and watch you wither into a wraith. That’s worse than being dead.’

  He almost smiled. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m touched.’

  From the Pas de Calais they headed south-west down the autoroute, skirting the Belgian border. Alex was reminded of the Brussels Headquarters, and wondered whether Olympia Angelopolis had survived the London attack. As they drove on, the sky turned a solid grey and a heavy drumming sleet set in that didn’t relent until they’d crossed half of France. They were still two hundred miles from the Swiss border when Alex had to pull over at a roadside fuel station. The Jaguar’s tank was getting down towards the red line; and the car wasn’t the only thing that needed replenishing.

  The humans got out of the car and stretched their legs while Alex attended to the petrol pump. Dec borrowed a handful of euro coins that Joel had found in his jacket pocket — left over from his Venice trip with Alex — and, using a mixture of pidgin French and hand signals, somehow managed to communicate to the woman in the filling station shop that he wanted to buy chocolate bars and cans of Coke for himself and Chloe.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any of this,’ he said tentatively to Joel as he tore the wrapper off his chocolate.

  Joel gazed at it and shook his head. ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Can’t you — you know, eat? Regular food, like?’

  ‘I can eat it, but it doesn’t do me any good.’

  ‘What does it feel like?’ Dec said. ‘Being, you know …’

  ‘Look, Dec,’ Joel snapped, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ The thought of food, of feeding, was making his whole body cramp. Sorry that he’d spoken sharply to the kid, he said, ‘All right, if you want to know, it feels terrible. It’s not the best thing that ever happened to me. Let’s just say I haven’t come to terms with it yet. And I don’t know that I ever will.’

  ‘You wouldn’t ever think about biting one of us, would you?’ Dec said with a touch of nervousness.

  Joel didn’t reply.

  ‘I’ll take that as a no, then?’

  ‘Where’s she disappeared to?’ Chloe said, looking around for Alex. Quarter of an hour had passed since she’d gone to pay for the fuel, and there was no sign of her anywhere. It was another ten minutes before she came back, looking just a little flushed.

  ‘Where were you?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘Answering the call of nature,’ Alex said, putting something away in the small pouch she wore on her belt. Joel had seen Vambloc before, but Chloe was understandably ignorant of the ways of a modern-day vampire. ‘Vampires use the bathroom?’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the bathroom,’ Alex told her. Catching Chloe’s look, she added, ‘Listen, if I’m travelling with humans I’ll understand if they need to stop off to go to a restaurant twice a day. You got a plate of something on the ferry, now it’s my turn. You get my meaning?’

  ‘You’re sick.’

  ‘We’re vampires. Get used to it. Or get walking.’ Alex turned to Joel. ‘Are you all right?’

  He said nothing. He was too busy staring at the tiny drop of fresh blood that was lodged in the corner of her lip. Realising, she dabbed it with her finger and offered it towards his mouth. When he turned his head away, she sighed and got into the car.

  ‘Let’s go. We still have a lot of miles to cover.’

  *

  The journey continued. By late afternoon they’d left the motorway for w
inding country roads that carried them onto higher ground, where the sleet had given way to snow and the red glint of the setting sun trickled down the white-capped mountains. They saw little other traffic. Dec was glued to the window, filling his eyes with the scenery before it faded into darkness.

  The last glow was sinking below the horizon when they passed an unmanned border control and Alex said, ‘Welcome to Switzerland.’

  ‘Why are we stopping?’ Joel asked her.

  ‘To get our bearings,’ she said, braking carefully on the slippery road and pulling the Jag over to the white verge. With the motor idling softly and the windscreen wipers batting away the snowflakes, she reached into the pouch behind her seat and pulled out a tiny notebook computer.

  ‘Senior field agent privilege,’ she said to Joel. ‘This gives me mobile wi-fi access to the whole VIA database. I can pull up anything I like on any Federation subject in the world, from anywhere in the world. Specifically’ — tapping keys — ‘every single registered address for any given member. And they make them register them all, believe me, even if it’s just a holiday home.’

  ‘Sounds more like a dictatorship than a Federation to me,’ Joel said.

  ‘The thought’s occurred to me more than once,’ she replied with a sour smile. ‘But right now, I’m not sorry. Being the pawn of a dictatorial regime can sometimes have its advantages.’ When the search box she’d been waiting for popped up on the little screen, she typed in the name Baxter Burnett. In an instant, his whole profile had come up.

  Joel’s eyes opened wide. ‘The actor?’

  ‘I told you Jeremy Lonsdale wasn’t the only VIP Gabriel Stone hooked up with,’ Alex said.

  ‘You never told me it was Baxter Burnett the movie star.’

  ‘Who?’ Dec asked, his face appearing in the gap between the front seats and peering at the laptop screen glowing in the darkness. ‘Fuck me, that’s Baxter Burnett! He was in that fillum The Rat Pus, so he was.’

  ‘It was The Raptus,’ Alex said. ‘And you shouldn’t really be seeing this.’ Not that it really mattered any more, she thought, not if the Federation was history, and maybe it was this time.