Gazing numbly out of the window at the dark sky, Joel could see his own pale, bruised, haunted-looking reflection staring back at him. He was oblivious of the other passengers and ignored the small girl who kept pointing at him and asking her mother what had happened to that man’s face. He barely acknowledged the cheerful stewardess who came by offering food and drink. Didn’t even feel the pain from the split in his lip or the purple swelling around his left cheekbone. Anyone watching him would have been unable to detect the smallest flicker of expression on his face as he sat there immobile, almost catatonic. But inside he was screaming in turmoil as he contemplated the task that faced him now. Peaks and troughs of conflicting emotion flooded over him like the temperature extremes of a violent fever – elated and thrilling to the drumbeat of war one instant, crippled by terror the next and wanting to run and run and keep running and never look back.
But he knew it was no longer his decision to make. He was the bearer of the cross, and there was only one road he could travel. Come what may, he was far beyond recall.
The shakes didn’t begin for real until after landing, when he tried to insert the key of his rental Ford Mondeo into the ignition and found his hand trembling so badly it took him three attempts to start the engine. He leaned back against the head restraint. Closed his eyes and took three deep breaths.
All right, Solomon. Here we go. This is it.
The night was starless and oppressive as he drove. He stopped at a motorway services to buy a plastic torch and a bar of chocolate that he didn’t have the stomach to eat. All through his journey, he tried to force his mind to stay blank. And failed.
Then, on the stroke of eleven p.m., his headlights swept across the tall iron gates of Crowmoor Hall. He put the car in neutral, letting it idle as he reached over to his left and rested his trembling hand on the metal box on the passenger seat next to him. He flipped the catches and opened the lid. The cross gleamed dully under the soft glow of the instrument lights. He lifted it carefully out from the foam padding and held it tight in both fists.
This is the end for you bastards, he thought. And it wouldn’t stop here. He was going to dedicate himself, the way his grandfather had: as long as it took, to take down as many of these monsters as he could. The politician, Jeremy Lonsdale – was he also one of them? Then his time was coming, too.
And then there was Alex.
He sat staring at the cross, visualising her face. Dangerous thoughts drifted through his mind. He shook them away. He needed to be strong, and stay strong.
The wind was rising, coming in gusts that shook the car and plastered falling leaves onto the windscreen. Crowmoor Hall’s gates lay open in the darkness. He swallowed hard. Throwing open the car door, he stepped out into the chilly night with the cross in his right hand and his new torch in his left. He muttered the first prayer he’d said in many years, and set out up the crunching gravel drive. Every step that he took towards that place sapped his courage a little more and made him grip the cross more tightly.
As he approached, he could see that the house was completely in darkness. The front door was swinging in the wind and flurries of dead leaves were blowing across the mosaic floor of the entrance hall. Joel walked into the house and shone the trembling torch beam around him.
‘Stone!’ he yelled, but it came out as a dry croak. He wet his lips and called out again, and his voice echoed.
He stood and listened a long time to the sounds of the house. A branch was tapping against a window somewhere. The wind whistled around his feet, leaves scraped across the floor. Sounds of emptiness.
Across the hall was a door. It was the same one through which Seymour Finch had led him and Dec to show them the ‘ballroom’ that had turned out to be a conference room. Joel turned the handle and the door creaked open. He shone the torch inside. The room was just as he remembered it, except for the bare space on the wall where the portrait of Gabriel Stone had hung previously. At the far end of the room, the tapestry still covered what Dec had claimed was the hidden doorway leading down to the crypt.
Joel walked the length of the room and tentatively switched on a side lamp. With some reluctance he laid down the cross and the torch, then grabbed one corner of the tapestry with both hands and gave it a violent tug. Something ripped. Wooden rings clattered to the floor, and the tapestry crumpled from its mountings and fell in a dusty heap at his feet. He kicked it aside.
Just as he’d done the last time, he examined the wall. Up close in the light of the lamp, he thought he could make out a hairline crack extending all the way from the floor to above his head. He used the Mondeo’s ignition key to pick a hole in the rich, velvety fleur-de-lys wallpaper. After a few minutes of frantic scraping, he’d uncovered the clear outline of a doorway in the plasterwork behind.
He shoved, hard, and then shoved again. Nothing moved. Nearby stood an elegant antique table on brass castors. He yanked it towards him, put his weight behind it and rammed against the wall with all his strength. The crashing thud seemed to echo all through the house. He froze, listening intently, but heard only the soft moan of the wind.
Dec had been right. About this and about everything else. There was something behind this wall and Joel was damned if he wasn’t going to find out what. This could be where the vampires were hiding, for all he knew cowering in fear, sensing the presence of the cross nearby, weak and vulnerable. This could be his moment to strike.
But it was going to take more than a flimsy table to ram through the solid wall. It had barely left a mark. Joel snatched up the cross and ran back the way he’d come, out into the windy night. There had to be a tool shed somewhere in a place like this. Maybe there’d be a sledge or lump hammer, a wrecking bar. He’d dig his way through with a damn screwdriver if he had to.
His heart was fluttering wildly as he ran through the grounds. Every rustling bush signalled a sudden attack; every creaking branch was a clawed hand reaching out to grip hold of him; and in every shadow lurked a waiting vampire.
At the rear of the house he found a range of outbuildings. A well equipped tool shed contained everything he could have wished for – but next to that was something even better. Yellow paintwork glittered in his torch beam. He peered inside the cab of the JCB and saw with a rush of triumph that the key was in the ignition. The first and last time he’d driven one of these things had been years ago, helping Sam Carter prepare the groundwork for the extension on his house. But a mechanical digger had all kinds of other uses too.
Joel leapt into the operator’s seat, fired up the engine and the headlights. With the cross clamped between his thighs, he drove the machine out across the yard. Its caterpillar tracks ground and crunched on the gravel as he rounded the corner of the house. He took a long sweeping turn at the front entrance, so he could approach head on. Ten yards from the doorway, he gunned the throttle and the diesel roared as the machine scuttled up the steps and smashed into the ornate stonework. Bricks and plaster and chunks of rendering rained on the roof of the cab. With a terrible scraping screech of rending metal, Joel forced the JCB into the entrance hall. He didn’t slow down for the conference room door either. The machine lumbered through like a tank, wrecking everything in its path. The engine was on peak revs by the time it reached the far wall. Joel held it steady on a collision course with the hidden doorway. A second before impact, he leapt out of the cab, hit the rug and rolled clear.
The digger rammed into the wall with a crash that shook the house and brought a large section of decorative coving and ceiling down on top of it. Joel sprang to his feet and ran over to the half-buried machine. He shone the torch through the clouds of masonry dust and saw the battered front of the digger embedded in a great jagged hole. Attached to the remnants of the hidden doorway was a smashed hydraulic arm and an electronic control unit that must have been activated by a remote or a switch somewhere in the house. Beyond it, Joel’s torch beam swept into pure darkness.
It was a secret corridor.
His terror a
s powerfully intensified as his resolve, Joel clambered over the dusty caterpillar tracks and started making his way through the passage, holding the cross out in front of him as he went.
He found himself in a maze of corridors and stairways that seemed to go on for miles. Just when he thought he was lost, the torch picked out something on the floor. A drop of dried blood. Then another. He followed the trail down and down.
All the way down to the crypt.
Chapter Sixty-Five
‘Where are you?’ said Rumble’s voice on the phone.
‘Still in Italy,’ Alex said. ‘I’m on a train heading for Bologna. Flying back to London from there.’
Her carriage was empty apart from her, a couple of backpackers and a businessman who’d fallen asleep behind his laptop. Quarter to one in the morning, and the train was speeding through the night, chattering softly on its rails. In the distance were the scattered lights of a village.
‘Bologna?’
‘It’s a long story, Harry.’ Since she’d boarded the train in Venice earlier that night, afraid to return to the hotel or fly straight back to London in case she bumped into Joel or found herself on the same plane as him, Alex had been putting a lot of thought into how she was going to explain herself to Rumble. It was hard to think straight with her head full of what had happened between her and Joel. She cursed herself for her weakness.
‘Save it for when I see you,’ Rumble said. ‘Is Solomon with you? Can you talk?’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m alone right now.’
‘You wouldn’t be coming back unless you’d found the cross,’ Rumble said. ‘Am I right?’ He sounded excited. That wasn’t going to last long, Alex thought.
‘Yeah, we found it. It was hidden under an old church. It had been there for centuries.’
‘The legends – they’re true?’
‘You wouldn’t want to get too close, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But the case – the lead lining – it worked? The way you thought it would?’
‘It worked fine.’
‘This is great. Congratulations, Alex. When you land, I want you to bring it straight here to VIA. Then we’ll figure out the next step.’
Alex gritted her teeth. She’d given him the good news. Now for the bit she was dreading.
‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Harry. The truth is, I don’t have it any longer.’
Rumble paused a beat, his excitement fading fast. ‘What the hell do you mean, you don’t have it?’
‘We were attacked.’
‘Stone’s people?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that they were humans. Nothing I could do, Harry. They took it.’
Rumble was silent for a beat as the news sank in. ‘You let a bunch of humans take the cross from you? How can that be?’
‘You had to be there, Harry. It just happened that way.’ Alex knew she was landing herself in a whole storm of trouble saying it, but it was a better option than telling Rumble the truth. If VIA got wind of the fact that Joel Solomon had the cross and meant to use it – not just against the Federation’s enemies but indiscriminately, against any vampire he could find – his death sentence was as good as written. And she knew all too well that she’d be the field agent chosen to hunt him down and kill him.
She’d bought some time with the lie. Now she had to find a way to find Joel and take the cross back from him. How to do that without either hurting him, or getting herself destroyed in the process, was something she’d have to figure out as she went along. All she knew was that the clock was ticking for her. If he started zapping vampires all over the place and the news got back to the Feds, she had a date with the termination chamber.
‘This is serious, Agent Bishop,’ Rumble said.
It was a bad sign when he called her that. ‘Tell me about it,’ she replied.
‘Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re not flying back to London tonight. I want you to get your arse over to Brussels for the FRC conference tomorrow afternoon, two thirty sharp.’ He paused. ‘And…Agent Bishop?’
She knew what was coming from the change in his tone.
‘You’d better start thinking about how you’re going to explain to the Ruling Council how, with all the other shit that’s hitting the fan, you allowed a weapon that’s been safely hidden away for centuries to fall into the hands of the enemy.’
Chapter Sixty-Six
Crowmoor Hall
Midnight
Joel walked on through the dark passage, down and down, deep underneath the mansion. With every step he tensed a little more and the struggle against his instinct to run away became more difficult.
Nobody attacked him. No vampire was lying in wait for him in the many shadows that he desperately swung the torch into, left, right, and left again. The light beam flashed against bare grey stone and thick matted cobwebs.
But something was here. As he walked on in dread, he was aware of a worsening smell. It quickly grew to an overpowering rancid stench that made it hard to breathe and his stomach flip. Then, shining the torch beam upwards, he let out an involuntary cry.
The corpse of what had once been a young woman dangled like a side of meat from a butcher’s hook in the vaulted ceiling. The white silk bridal dress she’d been wearing when she died hung from her in tatters and was caked in dried blood. Her neck had been slashed open to the bone and her chest was ripped apart to expose shattered ribs and internal organs. She’d died with a look of the worst terror Joel had ever seen on a victim’s face.
She hadn’t been hanging here long enough to smell like this. There was something else down here, too, and it couldn’t be far away. He swallowed back the rising nausea and played the light around him. A few feet away was a raised stone block circle in the floor, a yard or so in diameter, that looked like a well. Its mouth was covered with a thick round slab. As Joel shone the beam on it, he noticed finger marks in the dust around its edge. Someone had moved it recently.
Laying down the cross for a moment and gripping the torch under his arm, he grabbed hold of the edge of the slab and tried to move it. It was incredibly heavy. Joel thought of Finch and the uncanny strength that the man had seemed to possess.
On the third attempt, the slab shifted a couple of inches with a grinding of stone on stone. Joel recoiled and almost fell back at the stench that burst out from the dark hole. He used his sleeve to cover his nose and mouth, and kicked wildly at the slab’s edge until he’d moved it far enough to shine the torch down there.
The hole might have been ten feet deep, or it might have been fifty. There was no way to tell how far down the pile of human remains went. In the snatched glimpse Joel caught before he staggered away to empty his guts out all over the floor, he saw dozens of grey, mottled dead faces peering up at him. Homeless people, runaways, illegal immigrants, people lost in the system or whom nobody would report missing. Whoever they’d been, it would be a hard and terrible job identifying them. Among the dead, severed body parts lay scattered, flesh gnawed from bone.
As Joel stood there bent double, dry-retching and coughing now that his stomach was emptied, he already knew what was going to be the sight most indelibly seared into his memory, destined to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. It was the shattered and limbless baby skeleton lying on the top of the grisly pile. The bones had been picked clean.
Tears of rage stung his eyes as he kicked the slab back into place over the hole. He grabbed the cross and moved on.
At the end of a long, winding tunnel leading off the crypt he found a room that he immediately knew was Gabriel Stone’s private study. Clearly a vampire of taste and style, Joel thought as he looked around him at the sumptuous furnishings. But a vampire nonetheless, and this wouldn’t be over until he was sent back to hell where he belonged.
Still seething with anger and disgust and holding the cross of Ardaich out in front of him like a beacon as he stormed room after room, Joel systematically flushed out the rest of the mansion. Hi
s fear had completely dispersed. All he wanted was to find these bastards and watch them die. But with every new door he kicked in, half-expecting to see his torch beam land on a huddled cluster of terrified vampires inside, his hope diminished. It took a long time before he could admit it to himself, but in the end he had to face the truth. The unlocked gate, the open front door, the missing portrait, the empty rooms: it all added up to the conclusion that Crowmoor Hall’s occupants had abandoned the place.
How had they known? Could they have sensed the cross coming? Or had one of their contacts somehow tipped them off? Whatever the answer, they were gone. All that remained of them was the gruesome evidence left behind in the crypt.
Back down in Stone’s study, Joel ripped through the enormous antique desk for any possible clue as to where the vampires might have fled. There was nothing. Unless they returned, he’d lost them – and he had a strong feeling that they weren’t coming back, at least not for a long time.
It was raining as he trudged back up the gravel driveway with a heavy heart and the cross dangling limp at his side. So much effort had gone into finding the vampires’ nest, and now they’d simply upped and moved on somewhere else. Dec Maddon’s discovery had ultimately come to nothing.
Joel stopped. Dec Maddon. The kid had been right about everything so far: the spider tattoo on the dead girl’s neck; the sculpted birds on the gateposts; the hidden door to the crypt. Without him, he’d never have come this far. Was there anything else the teenager might have seen or overheard? Even just a tiny clue that could help track Stone and his entourage to their new lair? That thought drove Joel into a run. He leapt into the Mondeo, laid the cross back in its case and skidded away from Crowmoor Hall forever.
As he drove, he dialled Dec’s mobile but got no reply. He looked at his watch, only now realising how late it was. But he couldn’t waste precious hours waiting until morning to make a polite visit to the Maddon home.
Uprising Page 26
