by Andy Maslen
It is my fervent wish, dearest Ariane, that by the time you return from Manhattan, it will be to a cleansed city. These have happened so rarely in our history that it will be the occasion for a celebration that will make the feast Sergei and Yulia prepared look like a light snack! I spent some time in the library last night after they had gone to bed. Do you know the last time cutters declared a city cleansed? 1621. Venice. Before that it was Constantinople in 1499. And before that, Baghdad in 1156. Will London join that illustrious list? I pray that it will.
I pray, also, for your success in New York.
Love and strength,
Lily
61
Caroline Harker’s Journal, 3rd June 2011
Preparations are well underway for the banquet. From Frederick’s cousin, we have learned of the timings for the evening. Sunset on the 5th falls at 8.23 p.m. That is when the guests are scheduled to arrive. The drinks service starts then. We, that is to say, Ariane, Con and I, will enter the hotel with the other waiting staff at 8.00 p.m. Con will work with Frederick’s cousin to set up the bomb inside the centrepiece. I can’t wait to see what they contrive, since it must be big enough to conceal a device the size of a beer barrel.
The caterers have been told to be gone by 9.30 p.m. That is when the lamia’s own people will take over the kitchen to begin preparing whatever ghastly “meal” those things intend to fill their bellies with. Ariane and I will find somewhere to hide. She will have the number of the disposable phone programmed into her own; I will have it, too, as a backup. I can’t imagine anything worse than our not being able to detonate the bomb because of a flat phone battery.
When we judge the lamia to be sated and least likely to be leaving their tables, Con will dial the number and boom! Two hundred dead vampires. The rest of our team will be outside the hotel: there is a back entrance to the kitchen: we’ll unlock the door and let them in. Then, together we check the ballroom and finish off any lamia who have escaped the blast. My only regret, if it can be called that, is that I won’t be able to finish off Peta Velds myself. After what she did to David, I would have enjoyed watching the look on her face as she realised what was about to happen to her.
62
Email From Ariane Van Helsing to Lily Bax, 3rd June 2011
From: Ariane Van Helsing
To: Lily Bax
Subject: RE: Russia victorious
Dear Lily,
Perhaps I should leave you to manage alone more often! Your success against the lamia with Sergei and Yulia fills me with optimism. I have recently dared to let myself wonder – hope, even – that we may one day achieve our historic goal: to rid the world of the lamia.
Frederick’s fixer is an amusing man with Irish ancestry named Con McKay. Yesterday, I helped him assemble the bomb with which we hope to eradicate every single lamia in New York. If we succeed, that will be two cleansed cities in one year. You may be sure, the feasting will be prolonged.
Con has a workshop that would make you apply for a transfer the moment you stepped across the threshold. Lathes, presses, bench drills, a welding rig and something he called a 3D printer. These are very rare apparently, even in industry, though he says within five years they will be within reach of ordinary people. But the cutters here have backers with deep pockets. And they have provided this machine. He can use it to manufacturer weapons, components, even specialised ammunition. All out of either plastic or metal powders. He showed me crossbow bolts, a plastic single-shot pistol undetectable by X-ray scanners, paper-thin armour strong enough to defeat knife thrusts. What he will do with it all if we are successful, I don’t know. But I get ahead of myself. It’s just, oh, Lily, they are so optimistic here, and their enthusiasm is infectious.
Con began by taking the C4 explosive he and Caroline brought back from the Emergency Services Unit and moulding it around a steel core. This assembly he slotted into a plastic cylinder that he produced using the 3D printer. Stage 1 complete.
Then we wrapped the cylinder with three-inch nails, 10,000 of them. They came stuck to paper bands, which made the task of attaching them to the cylinder rather easier than it would have been otherwise. At this point, the whole assembly had a distinctly Mediaeval appearance. I suspect Great-great-grandfather Abraham would have recognised it, at least in its essentials: a glinting steel tower – all sharp points and dully gleaming grey metal – the approximate size and shape of a milk churn. Con wrapped the tower in several metres of clear food wrap so that it resembled a giant cocoon. And believe me, when the monstrous butterfly inside hatches out, the lamia will truly be witnesses to the transforming power of fire and steel. Stage 2 also complete.
Finally, we filled 36 plastic bottles (they had once held Poland Spring mineral water) with salcie usturoi. Together, we taped the bottles around the outside of the assembly in four rings of nine.
When the bomb was finished, Con stood back from his workbench, the better, I think, to admire his creation. It now had the dimensions of a barrel.
“That’ll do the bastards, don’t you think?” he asked me, that wicked twinkle back in the corner of his eye.
“It will. But tell me,” I asked him, “how you intend to smuggle such a device into the hotel?”
“You like flowers, Ariane?” he asked me, grinning.
I shrugged. As you know, I have little time for fripperies, and flowers rank very close to the top in that category of entertainments.
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, the lamia do. Hearst has ordered ten thousand dollars’ worth of floral arrangements from the caterers. Everything red or as close to black as possible, naturally. I’m thinking the centerpiece might deliver more bang for his buck than he was expecting.”
I asked him how he would detonate the bomb. He told me he intends to use an electronic detonator triggered by a simple disposable phone. He, Caroline and I will be inside dressed as waiting staff, though we will keep to the kitchen. Once the lamia are seated and, I regret to say, sated from their meal, he will set off the bomb. Despite the considerable amount of destructive power of the C4, he assures me that provided we are behind a wall, neither the explosion itself, nor the shrapnel, will harm us. I have to trust him on this. He showed me some video footage on the internet of C4 explosions of varying sizes in an attempt to reassure me, but I think I shall find a back stairway and suggest we all hide there. Anyway, once the bomb detonates, the rest of Frederick’s team will enter the hotel and join us. Any security the lamia are using will be drawn inwards away from the doors.
So, my dearest Lily, in a few days, God willing, I should be able to return to England with the news every cutter wishes for from the deepest and most sacred part of their soul: the creation of a cleansed city.
Take care,
Your friend,
Ariane
63
Peta’s Speech for Welcome Banquet. Draft dated 4th June 2011
My dear Morgan, honoured guests, family members both old and new, thank you. As you may know, my work in England to find a cure for our aversion to sunlight received a devastating setback recently.
Aided by the fiancée of the scientist I hired – and subsequently killed – the London cutters blew up my facility, killed my head of security and destroyed every last shred of work that we had completed. They won that particular battle, but we will remind them of something my ancestor knew only too well.
[pause for emphasis]
Wars matter, battles don’t.
I am here in New York with my General Counsel, J.S. Le Fanu. Many of you will know Sheridan. He was instrumental in identifying and recruiting David Harker and with his help I am sure we can find a suitable replacement.
But enough of setbacks. We have weathered storms before and look at us now. Look at our wealth. Look at our power. Those pathetic beings beyond these four walls think they reign supreme over God’s earth. But are we not also created in His image? Perhaps, far from resting, He was busy on the seventh day improving on his first attempt.
Let me set out a vision for you. A few years from now, our scientific researches will bear fruit. We will have discovered a cure for the chromosomal disorder that renders us unable to tolerate sunlight. We shall mass produce it and distribute it worldwide to every member of every family. Then – oh, my brothers and sisters – then what sport we will make with the humans. Our hunting time will double overnight. Free to move among them at our leisure, we shall grow to dominate them in a way our ancestors could only dream of. And this will bring problems.
[pause for emphasis]
Yes, problems. How will we husband our cattle? We cannot afford to eat all of them! We shall need to set up breeding programmes. Build farms. Mechanise. Industrialise! Perhaps we will get the humans to help us. After all, they have proved adept at turning the Earth into a giant food-processing factory to feed their incessant cravings for meat. Perhaps we will merely steal a leaf from their book. I look to the future, and I think to myself, I’m lovin’ it!
[pause for laughter]
All that lies ahead of us. There will be hard work and no doubt sacrifices along the way. But for now, we celebrate.
I would like to thank Morgan for extending such a warm welcome to me and Sheridan as we regroup and re-equip ourselves. And to all of you, my extended family. So, a toast.
To the O-One.
To our eventual victory.
And to blood.
64
Caroline Harker’s Journal, 5th June 2011
Ariane and I changed into our waitresses’ outfits together, in her room. Ariane invited me to join her and I was a little surprised since, so far, she has always struck me as a very private person. When I was staying at the cutter house in Bloomsbury, I don’t think I ever saw her in anything except her day clothes, unlike Lily who would frequently wander about in her pyjamas until noon or later. As we undressed, I understood. I had my back to her, as my own shyness about my body makes me uncomfortable. When I used to row at Cambridge, the other girls would tease me about it. I had just taken off my jeans when Ariane spoke.
“Caroline, turn around.”
For a fleeting moment, I had the bizarre thought that she was going to ask me to embrace her. But no. I turned to face her. She was only wearing her knickers and bra. My eyes were immediately drawn to her chest. Four ugly, parallel scars stretched right the way across from just below her right shoulder to the soft flesh above her left hip. Without asking, I knew what they were.
“A lamia did this to me when I was sixteen,” she said, in a soft voice. She traced her fingertips over the shiny white lines scraped across her otherwise flawless pale skin. “I was standing shoulder to shoulder with my father. There were three of them and two of us. It should have been an easy fight for us. But I was inexperienced. One of the lamia laid open my father’s cheek. His shout of pain distracted me and I turned to see what had happened. I dropped my guard and in that moment one of the other lamia clawed me, right through my clothes.”
The scars disappeared beneath the bra cup and reappeared on her ribcage, beneath the band. I tried to imagine the agony, the fear, that the sixteen-year-old Ariane must have felt.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“I screamed. My father spun round to help me and in that split-second, the creature that had slashed his face sprang onto his back and bit him. He killed it as he fell. In my fear and rage I swung my sword at the other two lamia and killed them both with a single blow. But my poor father was dying. The blood was gushing out of his neck. You know what that looks like, Caroline. And you know what our law requires the survivor to do.”
I could only nod, spellbound at her story, yet also horrified at what I knew had to be its end. I asked the inevitable question, anyway.
“What did you do?”
Ariane sighed. She shrugged her shoulders and it was at once the most heartbreaking and the most eloquent expression of grief and despair I have ever seen.
“What I had to.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded so inadequate, however much I had tried to communicate my feelings for her and for the poor bereaved girl she became at that moment.
“We will be heavily outnumbered in there tonight,” she said. “I do not want to lose you as I lost my father. As I lost Tomas. As I lost Shimon and Jim. We will wear the chain mail as we did before. They have an even stronger and lighter version here.”
She pointed to her bed where a pile of silvery metal mesh lay, its folds glinting in the light. We sorted the garments out, each taking a collar, a chest piece, two wristlets and what I suppose I should call a pair of drawers each – something akin to cycling shorts, only a little looser. Black tights and long-sleeved lycra vests protected our bare skin from the metal links, and by the time we were dressed, in black trousers, baggy white shirts and red ties, I would defy anyone to notice that we were wearing the extra protection. They were not even too heavy, although for once I was glad of my muscular shoulders.
Ariane, Con and I entered Mallory’s through the rear entrance at 8.00 p.m. with the rest of the drinks waiters and waitresses. We had been expecting security and were thus unarmed. This turned out to be a strategic miscalculation: no bruisers dressed in black bomber jackets were there to welcome us. But then, as Ariane said, who in their right mind would try to attack a banquet attended by 200 vampires? It would be a suicide mission. Sometimes her gallows humour can be a little too close to the truth. We each brought a small daysack with us, similar to those our colleagues were carrying. But where theirs probably contained their iPhones, makeup bags, and maybe a spare blouse or shirt, ours were packed with flasks of salcie usturoi.
We entered in the kitchen, a modest-sized space filled with stainless steel cabinets, grills and ovens, fridges, freezers and all the paraphernalia you would expect in a professional kitchen. Con nodded once at Ariane, then again at me, and wandered off to a far corner. They had checked and rechecked their phones and had agreed a set of signals to use should one of them discover a problem with their device.
“We need weapons,” Ariane whispered. I looked around. Chefs have their own knives, I knew that. But surely a professional kitchen would maintain a set of its own, as well? This one did. Oh, how we smiled when we saw them. Perhaps Ariane would have preferred her usual weapon, but her sword was secure at the cutter house. Frederick had promised her he would bring it for the final cleanup. As it was, I pointed at the magnetic rack.
“Take your pick,” I said, with what I hoped was a suitably battle-ready smile.
What a choice! Boning knives with finely curved blades. Long cook’s knives almost a foot from butt to point. Santokus with scalloped edges. Twelve-inch butcher’s knives with curved blades like miniature scimitars. Heavy cleavers with solid rectangular blades that would snap bones as if they were breadsticks.
Ariane took one of the butcher knives and hefted it. She turned it in the hard light bouncing off the stainless steel worktop and nodded, grimly. I reached for a cleaver. It felt good in my hand; it had a real heft to it. I swung and I immediately realised the problem. It had such momentum I would leave myself wide open to a counterattack. I stuck it back on the rack with a snap from the magnets and pulled down a chef’s knife with an eight-inch blade. Still a powerful weapon, and more than enough to send a lamia on its way, but far lighter and more manoeuvrable.
As the others busied themselves talking to the drinks guy – “mixologist”, he corrected me when I asked if he was the barman – Ariane and I took our knives to a sink in the corner, away from the hubbub, and liberally anointed them with the garlic and willow oil. The catering company had issued each of us with a black apron and the pockets across the front were capacious enough for us to secrete our blades. They wouldn’t fool a zealous airport security agent, or even, to be honest, a half-asleep one, but as I already said, the lamia had clearly not felt the need for such precautions.
My pulse was racing, and I had to pause to take a few long, slow breaths to try to calm myself. I had the fizz
of excitement in my stomach I get when I’m about to enter the High Court, but it didn’t bother me. I was there to exact retribution on Peta Velds for David’s death. I felt, the only word, righteous. The lamia were due to start arriving at 8.30 p.m. It was now 8.15 p.m. Ariane and I left the kitchen. We wanted to assess the field of battle.
The ballroom was huge. Its architect had managed to find a way to support the vast space with virtually no pillars; just one, admittedly thick, marble column in each corner of the room. Going for an overblown gothic look, and showing a distinct lack of imagination, the designer had employed a limited palette of black and shades of red, with silver and gold much in evidence. He or she had even thought to stand a suit of armour at the foot of the stairs. The windows were shrouded in deep-plum velvet curtains that puddled against the floor as if bleeding onto the polished parquet blocks. Red candles in tall, floor-standing silver candlesticks flickered and danced, throwing shadows onto the walls. Gilt-framed mirrors reflected the candle flames over and over again so that the whole room appeared to be dancing with thousands of points of yellow light. The circular tables, each surrounded by ten gilt-framed, red-cushioned chairs, were dressed with red cloths. In the middle of each, a tall, black vase stood. The vases contained a dozen or more arum lilies, their conical spathes such a dark purple as to be almost black.
Then I saw the centrepiece Con had devised to conceal the bomb. It stood on the ground in the very centre of the room. The container – for vase is surely the wrong word – was a huge, red ceramic sphere almost a metre in diameter. Erupting from the opening at the top were flowers of such strangeness that for a moment I wondered whether they were plastic, the creations of a floral artist driven mad by reading too much H.P Lovecraft. The centre of the arrangement consisted of three tall green stems, each well over seven foot and as thick as my wrist, surmounted by foot-long scarlet blossoms like spiked zeppelins. Spiraling outwards from this unholy trio were dozens of orchids of a vivid, acid green, spotted with what appeared to be beads of blood. But it was the third tier of blooms that drew me in, pulling me close enough to smell and touch them. Honestly? They looked like bats. Outspread “wings” of a blackish-purple to left and right, a “head” that even appeared to possess tiny white teeth, and dozens of white and purple streamers that dangled below each surreal flower. The perfume of these exotics – honey, cloves, and the sweet, cloying smell of decay – was so heady I felt my head swim. Ariane pulled me back with an urgent hiss.
