I reached behind my head and yanked one free, then I pulled the back out, flipped up the sights, and flicked off the safety. I sighted on the center Range Rover and squeezed the rubber-coated trigger. The HEAT rocket shot from the tube with a sudden 'whoosh' and accelerated towards the target on a narrow tail of smoke. The sharp explosion shattered the night; lighting up the sky even through my tightly closed eyes and when I opened them an evil grin crossed my face. The center Range Rover had been swatted backwards by about twenty feet and now lay on its roof, a burning, twisted wreck. The force of the explosion had slammed the Range Rovers on either side outwards. I now had enough room to drive a bus through, never mind the bike. On the northbound lane the coppers were cowering from the rain of burning shrapnel. They'd joined up expecting to do nothing more strenuous than kick people when they were down. Facing a maniac with anti-tank weaponry hadn't been in the job description. The closest Range Rover was on its side, the one in the center lane had a burning wheel halfway through the passenger side window and the third was sitting on a pair of flat tires.
The vehicles from the previous attempt at a roadblock were coming into view behind me so I tossed the empty launcher over my shoulder, kicked the bike into gear, and accelerated through the newly opened gap. Some of the cops on the other side had recovered enough to squeeze off a few shots but I was already a dwindling speck, and it wasn't long before I was off the A1 altogether.
CHAPTER
23
The incessant noise roused me to brief consciousness. I opened my eyes and managed to look around. I was in an enclosed, dark space that smelled bad. Maybe inside a truck. The vibration might be an engine, but it sounded odd. And I was in a cage. A big cage with a thick wooden floor and roof and strong looking metal bars. I barely had enough room to lay flat and the cage was small enough that if I got to my hands and knees my back would be brushing the top.
Just the effort of keeping my head up exhausted me and my chin hit the floor with a thump.
CHAPTER
24
Oh, how I love vampiric ego.
Havelock Manor had been rebuilt and was now occupied again. Vampire guards patrolled the grounds and there were even some vamps on the roof. Someone was learning from their mistakes. Not that I cared. I'd hidden my bike a little way back from the tree line and skirted the road to the wall. It took me only a few seconds to pull myself up and over into the darkness. I pulled out my MP7 and spent a few seconds pulling out the front grip and stock before attaching the suppressor to the barrel. I slipped through the cover provided by the same fir trees I'd used last time. Déjà vu all over again, as the old joke goes.
The patrols were regular—big mistake—and most of the guards looked bored—bigger mistake. I suppose the explosion on the motorway hadn't shaken their world yet.
As I said, I love vampiric ego.
I let the patrol get out of the way and then shinned up the drainpipe to the balcony. I wasn't going to the roof this time. I crouched in the shadows and checked around the large glass balcony doors, looking for alarm wires.
After allowing the next set of guards to amble past I used a slim piece of metal to lift the latch on the doors. With a barely audible click the door came open in my hand and I was inside.
The room was an opulent bedroom, obviously belonging to the mistress of the manor. Large expensive furniture was scattered about and the bed looked like it could happily sleep six. Although, judging by the large, heavily veined dildo on the bedside table, the vampire that slept here slept alone. Next to the rubber penis was a paperback novel, face up and open. I picked it up and smiled briefly at the cover. It was Defend Our Island. Pagan and his vampire sex. Figures. A bookshelf on the wall held the complete collection, all well read, all battered, all with their spines broken. Defend Our Island was open to Pagan's first sex scene with Colette the vampire. I put the book back how it had been and prowled the rest of the room.
Framed on the wall was a picture that made my jaw drop. It was the original artwork for the cover of Blood In The UK—the first Pagan movie. A muscle-bound lunkhead who was supposed to be me was standing against a backdrop of the Houses of Parliament, FAL held at port arms, legs apart, a grim look on his face.
This was starting to get creepy.
I took off my backpack and dropped it by a chair before sitting down. I was in deep shadow, with a good view of the door. It took me about five seconds to collapse the MP7 and fit a suppressor to the SIG. With the two silenced weapons in my lap I settled down to wait.
I went over the information that the stricken vamp had eventually given up.
There was, apparently, two new Private Members' Bills coming up before the House of Commons. The first was a law that would repeal the Emergency Separation Act of 2008, the act which specifically severed all political ties with the European Union. In effect it would bring us back under the authority of the EU, especially its laws and courts. Hunting vampires would become illegal. The second would grant full citizenship rights to vampires. It was disguised as an equality law, granting rights to vampires, werewolves, or other “as yet undiscovered so-called 'undead'”. The fact that werewolves aren't even 'so-called' undead was conveniently ignored.
According to the dead vamp, if I kept my nose clean and did not oppose whichever of these two bills passed, Marie would be released unharmed.
It was, of course, pure bullshit. It sounded like a scheme made up by someone who didn't really understand British Parliamentary procedures.
Private Members' Bills rarely even made it to the floor of the Commons for debate, and even if the bills made it that far there is almost no chance they would be voted through to the House of Lords. And even if they made it that far, the Lords would never pass either bill. That much was well-known. And even if the the bills did have a chance to pass, what could I have done about them? What was I being warned away from doing? What behavior was Marie's kidnapping supposed to prevent? Nothing. Nothing at all. So what was the real purpose of all of this?
Two hours had passed, by the clock on the wall, by the time I heard footsteps in the corridor. The door handle turned and Lady Lucia stepped into the room. She was wearing a black ball gown with red decoration that left her shoulders and arms bare. Her long, dark hair was loose around her shoulders and, apart from a touch of lipstick, she was wearing no makeup.
She seemed irritated about something. She tugged at the laces that held the bodice of her dress closed and loosened them. The dress slithered to the floor with an expensive silken noise. Underneath she was wearing a pair of loose red silk shorts and nothing else. If you're not expecting anyone to get a look under the dress you might as well be comfortable rather than sexy, I thought.
“You might want to put some more clothes on,” I said quietly.
She turned towards me, her face registering shock, her hands clapping over her naked breasts.
“Jack?” she said. “Is that you?”
I nodded.
“When I phoned you and said you should come to see me I had thought that you might let me know you were on your way up,” she said tartly.
“You didn't know I was coming?” I asked.
“How would I? And how did you get here?”
“Well, apparently your communications network is as shit as your security force.”
“That was you? What am I saying? Of course it was you. Only you would use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut that was already open! The officers weren't there to stop you. They were an escort!”
While she was talking she had first dropped her hands to her sides, then put them behind her back.
“Put some clothes on,” I said quietly.
She drew her shoulders back, putting herself on display.
“You sure, Jack?”
I picked up the SIG and, holding my hand in my lap, pointed it at her—a very phallic display, my mind supplied sarcastically.
“Taking the opportunity to shove your tits in my face is a poor reason to die,” I said c
oldly.
Her hands crept back up to cover her breasts.
“Sorry, Jack,” she said with, in my opinion, zero sincerity. “I didn't think. You're not in the mood.”
“I'm never in that kind of mood,” I said.
I stood up and Lucia took a step back, one hand going to her mouth. Lucia, I realized, was afraid of me. No, not just afraid, she was terrified and, seeing as she couldn't control me with her mind she was trying to control me with her body.
“My mate,” I said, biting off each word, “was kidnapped by a bunch of suckheads. I am not in the fucking mood to play games. Put some fucking clothes on.”
She nodded and hurried over to a giant walk-in closet, where she grabbed a short, dark blue silk robe and wrapped it around herself.
“You know, Jack,” she said as she tied the belt, “I don't think there's more than a handful of people in the world that would dare talk to me like that?”
“I don't care,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, pouting slightly.
“You said you had information about the vamps who took Marie.”
It was not a question.
“Why yes, I do,” she replied.
CHAPTER
25
I was woken by a bump. The cage was being carried. Loaded from one vehicle into another.
“Be careful!” yelled someone.
I didn't hear a reply.
CHAPTER
26
She walked around the bed and opened a drawer on the bedside table. There was a tiny gasp and a clatter as she swept the dildo and book into the drawer before slamming it shut. She was actually blushing as she turned around. In her hand was a manilla folder.
“Over here,” she said, walking to a desk.
She snapped on a desk lamp and opened the folder. Inside was a thick sheaf of documents. The uppermost was a full-face picture of the vamp I'd tortured.
“This is Abraham Bollen,” she said. “He does not owe allegiance to me. Neither do these three.”
She spread out three more pictures.
“Their bodies were found a few miles from here earlier. Apparently your werewolf put up quite a fight when they took her.”
“Marie,” I said. “Her name is Marie.”
“Sorry,” she said, topping the previous insincerity by at least an order of magnitude.
“So who do these vamps work for?”
“These, and these four,” she said, spreading out more pictures, “work for this man.”
“Vampire,” I corrected as she pulled out another picture.
“Vampire, then,” she said.
The picture was of a vampire who had been middle aged when he was turned, a sharp face with intelligent eyes and a thin mouth.
“This is Tony Pollard—not the name he was born with, I assure you—who owes allegiance to one Huang Jin-Wa.”
She put another picture down on the desk. It was of a man who, but for his business suit, looked like a samurai warrior.
“Huang is over two thousand years old and has survived so long by not taking chances. There's no way he's behind this. Whatever was done was done without his knowledge. He would never risk going up against you. Never.”
“So who? And why?”
CHAPTER
27
I struggled back to the light. Something was forcing me upwards. It was Jack. Jack's voice. Some lecture about... about being captured.
I tried to focus my thoughts, fighting with the fog.
“Escape,” said a fragment of Jack inside my head.
I concentrated.
"Escape is easiest." he said.
I fought the drugs, clinging to the memory like it would save my life.
“Escape is easiest just after capture,” said my memory of Jack. “The longer you are in enemy hands, the more you are passed along the chain, the better prepared they are to hold you.”
I couldn't remember why we'd been given Jack's lecture on escape and evasion, but I could see what he'd been saying was true. Originally I'd been in the back of a van secured with easily broken ties. Now I was in a cage. Presumably, when we got where we were going, I'd be locked up in a cell.
So I had until the end of this journey before escape became more difficult than it was right now.
I slowly started taking deep breaths, trying to remain as quiet as possible. I was concentrating on my nose and ears. My nose was telling me that I was in a truck with three vamps and a human. My ears were telling me that only the human was awake. He was paging through a newspaper. I cautiously opened my eyes, fighting against the weariness that seemed to weigh me down.
Whatever had been in those darts was wearing off fairly quickly but I still felt woozy.
To my left was two pairs of legs. The vamp with the older voice who had been there the first time I awoke was near my feet. The second pair of legs was a female vampire's. To my right was a pair of legs it took me a moment to identify. They belonged to the vamp whose leg I'd broken. He must have gotten some blood from somewhere.
It took me a further few minutes to figure out where the fourth pair of legs was. The human was sitting on the bench to my right, with his feet up on the cage.
All the thinking was helping to clear my head. I started to tense and release muscles. My legs, my arms, my shoulders, my back, working around my body, trying to get blood pumping, trying to clear the drugs out of my system as fast as possible. I had no way to know if it was working, but it made me feel better to at least try.
CHAPTER
28
Lucia was pacing around the room, deep in thought.
"This could be a plot to discredit me," she said finally. "That this could happen—that the Pagan could be baited in this way—in my territory without my knowledge makes me look weak."
"Yes, let's concentrate on what this means for you, shall we?" I said, with sarcasm that could have cut concrete.
"If we know the why, we know the whom, Jack," she said patiently. "It wasn't Huang, we know that for sure."
"No, we don't. You think that, you don't know."
"Yes, I do. Huang's here, right now, in the ballroom downstairs. When he saw Bollen was involved he was livid with rage. One of his minions had betrayed him by moving against another Lord without his permission. That is a killing transgression. One or the other of them has to die."
"You told him that I killed this Bollen character?"
"I had no choice. Bollen was his. Your performance made a lot of my people nervous, Jack."
"That was the point," I replied, staring at the wall and thinking.
"Many of my people already believe you are the Devil incarnate. As humans tell ghost stories to scare each other, we tell tales of the Pagan. You can kill vampires with your bare hands and suck out our souls with a single glance."
She shook her head and smiled faintly.
"Huang even asked me when he got here if it was true you'd eaten the Heart of Dracula."
"Is he still here? I need to speak with him."
"Jack, Huang's not... your usual kind of vampire. He's very old, and very powerful. He has an odd sense of honor. He may help you just because it was Bollen, or he may consider the debt settled and refuse to even talk to you."
"Try," I said in a voice that brooked no argument.
"As you wish," she said, beating her own record for insincerity.
As she spoke on the telephone I unscrewed the suppressor from my MP7 and holstered the weapon. I kept the SIG out, though.
"He's coming up," said Lucia, replacing the handset on the cradle.
I looked her up and down. The robe didn't even cover the bottom of her shorts and the dress was still lying on the floor by the bed.
"You want to put more clothes on?" I asked pointedly.
"Jack, you're not worried he'll think we've been making love up here, are you?"
"What worries me is that's what you seem to want him to think," I replied.
"No, Jack," she said with a sigh, looking so
genuinely glum that she actually looked human for a moment. "That's what I wish had happened."
I felt my face harden.
"But don't worry," she went on. "He'd be able to smell sex, so he won't think for a second that anything untoward has been happening."
CHAPTER
29
I was feeling better and better by the second but, eventually, my time ran out.
The human folded his paper and sat up. I could hear the thump as his feet hit the floor of the truck. I immediately stopped moving and closed my eyes. I could still hear him lean down.
"What are you doing, human?"
"I think the drugs are wearing off, Master."
"Then administer another dose. We're close now, but it wouldn't do to have her wake before we arrive."
"Yes, Master."
I react without thinking. I rise to my forepaws and knees, willing my body to move. My knees hit my chest as I place my paws on the floor and I stand up, straining with every muscle against the roof of the cage.
Someone yells. I take no notice.
The cage groans and cracks open in a shower of wood and metal and I roar my triumph. The human dies, his blood warm on my hands. The female vampire brings up the dart gun and I break her neck. The young male vamp sits there, blinking stupidly. I grab him by the chest and slam him into the wall. The older male vamp is scrabbling for the gun. I wrap a paw around his neck and, using every ounce of strength in my body, hurl him against the rolltop doors. The doors break and the vamp tumbles out, slamming into a car that had been following the truck. The car veers off of the road and disappears with a crash and tinkle of broken glass.
Brakes slam on, sending me tumbling towards the front of the truck. I struggle upright and leap for the gaping doorway, digging my claws in and flipping myself onto the roof. As the truck stops a door opens. I drop onto the roof of the cab and grab the human by the back of his jacket. The door on the other side opens and another human steps out, so I hit him with the only thing I have close at paw—the other human. The two collapse in a heap.
Renegade (Ministry of Paranormal Research & Defence) Page 8
