‘I can’t,’ he mumbled. He screwed his eyes shut and for a moment he seemed about to faint. ‘I can’t.’
‘It’s what you want, isn’t it? You told me that next time you saw me, you’d destroy me. What are you waiting for?’
Tears ran through the blood on his tortured face. ‘Why you? Why did you have to be one?’
‘Finish it!’ she yelled. ‘Don’t draw it out. Get it done.’
He shook his head. Wearily raised his empty hand and pointed towards the side door and the winding, dark passage Alex had spotted earlier.
‘Get out of here. Don’t let me see you again.’ Then he stepped back, and kept moving away from her, lowering the cross.
Alex climbed shakily to her feet and stumbled through the arch into the echoing corridor. Her footsteps quickened, and she ran and ran until she was lost deep inside the castle’s hidden passages. As she stumbled onwards in the dark, a strange sound came from her throat. One she hadn’t heard herself make for over a hundred years.
She was crying.
Chapter Eighty-Five
Gabriel Stone stormed through his castle, cursing Lillith for having left his side. He shouted for his ghoul. Lonsdale appeared from behind some drapes.
‘What are you hiding there for?’ Stone yelled at him in fury. ‘You’re supposed to protect me, not go skulking off like a rat. Get back there and kill the human.’
Lonsdale swallowed and looked blank. ‘How?’
‘Zachary has a gun,’ Stone snapped. ‘Even you can work a gun, can’t you?’
They rushed into a hallway to find Zachary thundering down the grand staircase towards them, clutching the gun he’d been keeping in his quarters. The shiny, long-barrelled .357 magnum revolver was dwarfed in his fist. Stone grabbed it from him.
That was when Lillith appeared in the doorway behind them. Her eyes were ringed with black and she was unsteady on her feet. Her chest heaved with the effort to breathe.
‘He’s coming. He’s right behind me.’
Zachary’s eyes opened wide with horror, and he ran over to a window overlooking the outer wall.
‘I’m outta here,’ he rasped. He drew back his massive fist and smashed it through the glass, piled himself through the jagged hole and disappeared into the night.
Stone and Lillith were about to follow, when they both simultaneously felt the crippling power of the cross wash over them once more. Lillith fell back from the window, clutching herself and crying out in fear. Stone whirled round to see the human Joel Solomon limping towards them. Seizing Lillith’s arm, Stone took off at a staggering run, knocking over a table and shattering a vase in his haste to get away.
‘Help me, ghoul!’ he roared, tossing the gun to Lonsdale. But Lonsdale stared in terror at Joel, and fled in his master’s wake. The vampires crashed through a doorway and emerged on the castle’s upper battlement. A narrow walkway ran along the rim of the wall, leading to a round turret that had once been used to spot approaching enemy armies. Beyond the battlement wall, the sheer cliff face dropped away into the night.
Lillith screamed. The human had appeared on the battlement behind them.
Joel didn’t know how much longer he could go on. A black mist was rising up to cloud his vision, but he could still see the vampires frantically trying to escape along the battlement wall. Only one of them seemed unaffected, the haggard, wild-eyed man whom Gabriel Stone was clutching tightly behind him like a shield. His face looked familiar, but through the fog of his pain and nausea Joel couldn’t place it. He barely even registered the large, heavy handgun in the man’s fist.
As he staggered out onto the battlement after them, the biting wind almost knocked him off his feet. He steadied himself and took another step towards them. They were backing away towards the tall round turret, and he had them cornered.
‘You’re finished, Stone!’ he shouted through the roar of the wind, blinking the driving snowflakes out of his eyes. ‘It’s over!’
He took two more steps forward and heard the leather-clad woman vampire let out another tortured wail as she pressed herself desperately against the far wall of the turret.
Gabriel Stone seemed to have shrivelled with terror. He shoved his servant roughly onto the battlement.
‘Kill him! Shoot him! Don’t just stand there, Lonsdale!’
Lonsdale moved cautiously along the wall. Raised the pistol and took an unsteady aim at Joel.
‘Kill him!’ Stone roared.
Alex had lost all sense of where she was when she suddenly smelled the night air. She ran out of the winding passage to find herself standing on the high outer castle wall. The howling gale ripped at her hair.
Fifty yards away through the blizzard she could see Gabriel Stone and Lillith. They were cowering, cringing in terror and fury at the top of a tower at the very far corner of the opposite battlement wall. Running her eye along, she spotted Joel’s ragged, bloody figure, dragging himself along the walkway with the cross in his fist. She was out of its range, but Stone and Lillith were dangerously close to it and had nowhere left to run. A few more steps, and it was over for them.
Standing halfway between Joel and the two vampires was Stone’s ghoul, Lonsdale. In his hand was a big revolver. Alex watched helplessly as Lonsdale aimed it at Joel. Stone’s screaming commands to shoot were being snatched away by the wind.
Joel must have seen the gun, but he was behaving as if he no longer cared. He took another limping step and raised the cross higher.
There was nothing Alex could do to stop what was about to happen.
Lonsdale seemed to hesitate, then, half-turning his face away, he squeezed the trigger. The revolver recoiled up in his hand, a halo of white flame bursting from its muzzle.
Joel kept coming. Lonsdale fired again, and this time his bullet found its mark. Blood spattered on the snowy battlements. Joel flailed with his arms and went down on his back, still clutching the cross.
‘Joel!’ Alex screamed. But she was powerless to do anything – as long as he held the cross she couldn’t go near him. His body lay slumped on the battlement. Snowflakes were settling rapidly over him, turning red as they melted in his blood. He wasn’t moving.
Chapter Eighty-Six
Jeremy Lonsdale lowered the heavy pistol. He stared at the fallen man he’d just shot. Turned to look at Gabriel Stone in the tower behind him. The vampire was gesticulating wildly at him through the blizzard.
‘Pick up the cross, you cretin. Get it away from us! Throw it over the cliff!’ Stone’s voice was cracked with pain. Lillith was on her hands and knees beside him in the tower, her black hair plastered over her face as she clutched her head and her body shook violently.
Lonsdale nodded. He understood what he had to do. Still holding the gun, he walked slowly over to the body in the snow and bent down to pick up the cross from the limp fingers of his victim. Blood was seeping across the battlement, dripping down the wall; red on white under the black sky.
Lonsdale turned away, the cross still in his grasp. It seemed to thrum in his hand, and was warm to the touch. He looked out over the craggy castle wall, at the swirling snow and the distant mountains. The wind whipped at his clothes. He raised his arm to hurl it far over the battlement, where it would go spinning and tumbling a thousand feet before it smashed into a million pieces against the rocks below. His master would be saved. The war would be won – thanks to him, Jeremy Lonsdale. The power was his.
He grunted with effort as he hurled the heavy object in his fist. It sailed high up in an arc over the battlements and then dropped away into the night. Then, slowly, he turned to face Gabriel Stone.
Still holding the cross. It was the big revolver that he’d thrown away. He had no further need for it. But the cross…
He looked down at it. Its thrumming warmth spread up his arm.
‘No,’ he said softly. And took a step towards the two vampires.
‘Throw it, ghoul!’ Stone’s scream of desperation cut through the howling wind.
‘No,’ Lonsdale repeated, loudly this time, and took another step. ‘You’ve come into my life and poisoned everything. You’ve taken everything from me, taken away the one person I loved. Look at what I’ve become. And now you’ve made me a murderer for you.’
‘Jeremy, stay away from us. I’m commanding you—’
‘I’ve taken enough of your orders, vampire.’ Lonsdale stood straighten There was a glow in his eyes and his face was contorted as he slowly approached the turret. His knuckles were white on the shaft of the cross. ‘I don’t give a damn what happens to me any more,’ he shouted. ‘But by God I’m going to destroy you!’
Stone was frantically trying to shield Lillith with his body, absorbing the energy blast in a bid to save her. But the power of the cross, now just a few yards away, was too much for him. As Lonsdale came closer, Stone collapsed inside the turret beside Lillith. He cried out. Smoking blisters burst out across his skin. Lillith was writhing and shrieking. In one last desperate surge of energy she raised herself to her knees, drew out her sabre and hurled it with all the strength she had left.
The blade whirled hissing through the blizzard. Lonsdale flinched as he saw it flying towards him, but too late. Its point drove hard into his chest and went right through him, piercing his heart and sticking out of his back. He staggered, gasping, blood sputtering from his lips, and for a moment he seemed about to go tumbling down over the battlement, taking the cross with him.
But still he kept on coming, coughing blood, staggering towards them in a jerky dying gait, the hilt of the sabre protruding grotesquely from his chest. His bloody lips were spread into a lunatic grin.
The vampires screamed their fury. There was nowhere to run.
Unless…
Lillith grasped her brother’s arm. They looked at one another, and understanding flashed between them. Staggering to their feet in the last instant before the cross destroyed them utterly and forever, they linked hands and threw themselves off the turret.
Alex watched from a distance as their bodies went spinning down. After the first hundred feet their linked hands broke apart and they fell separately, turning over and over like tiny dolls. Then the shadows engulfed them and they vanished into the deep, dark valley.
Lonsdale had made it to the turret. Moving like a zombie now as he virtually died on his feet, he clambered up its steps and lurched to the spot where Stone and Lillith had jumped. With his dying breath, he threw the cross over the turret wall and it went tumbling down after them. Then he slumped face down. The weight of his body pushed the sabre through his chest up to the hilt so that the blade stuck up out of his back like a bloody flagpole. He didn’t move again.
Joel hadn’t moved either.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
With a cry of despair, Alex leapt down from the opposite battlement and sprinted across the snowy courtyard to scramble up the wall and get to Joel. She shouted his name over and over as he lay there immobile. The snow was stained red all around him, but the sight of his blood meant nothing to her now – only that he was dying.
She turned him over. His eyes were shut. She said his name again, ran her fingers through his hair.
His eyes fluttered open. ‘Alex…’ he whispered.
‘You did it, Joel. Stone’s gone. It’s over.’
He smiled weakly, then closed his eyes again. His breathing was shallow. Alex knew he wouldn’t last long.
She picked him up in her arms and carried him down from the battlements. He had to be taken to a hospital. Her mind worked fast. Even out here, in this remote wilderness, there surely had to be human settlements. If she couldn’t find a town, just a humble village doctor could help save Joel’s life and radio for an air ambulance.
The vehicles. The vehicles she’d spotted down by the gates, in the lower courtyard. That was the answer. Holding his unconscious body tight in her arms, Alex ran like crazy. Just when she thought she was hopelessly lost in the maze of passages, she picked up the blood trail that Joel had left on his way up, now half-obscured with snow. She didn’t glance twice at the bodies of the gypsies. Bursting out of an archway she found herself in the lower courtyard, a few dozen yards from the main gates.
‘Hang on, Joel.’
In moments she’d reached the parked vehicles. Two big off-road trucks, fat knobbly tyres, rows of lamps mounted on heavy bull bars across their grilles. She laid Joel gently down in the snow as she punched out the window of the first vehicle, looking for a key in the ignition. If neither truck had them, it would mean having to search the bodies of the guards in the hope of finding them.
The first vehicle had no keys in it. She swore and held her breath as she ran round to the other, smashing the glass as if it had been eggshell. Her heart jumped. A ring of keys dangled from the ignition.
‘You’re going to make it, Joel. Hold on.’ She scooped him up and laid him down in the back of the truck, hastily covering him with an old blanket before throwing herself into the cab. Two twists of the key, and the engine roared. The courtyard lit up in a blaze of light from the truck’s powerful lamps. She cleared the snow from the screen, gunned the throttle and the tyres bit hard into the snow as she floored the pedal and aimed the truck at the gate. With a screech of ripping wood she went crashing right through.
Now all she had to do was get Joel to a doctor. There was no telling how long he had left. It could be a few hours, or a matter of minutes.
The mountain pass snaked away for miles ahead. The blizzard was driving even harder now, and the wipers were barely able to bat the snow away fast enough for her to see where she was going as the truck bounced and slithered down the narrow track. Passing a big rock on her left, she saw an abandoned motorcycle and sidecar, almost completely buried under a drift of white.
Alex hadn’t driven far before the grim realisation began to sink in that she wasn’t going to find a village, let alone a town with proper hospital facilities, in time to save Joel. Even with her sharp vampire eyes she couldn’t make out a single light, a solitary speck of civilisation anywhere on the vast horizon.
Despite her superior senses, it was hard to tell the difference between the road and the deep snowdrifts that the wind had piled up across it and either side. She felt the vehicle lurch violently. A grinding crunch and a squeal of metal against rock. The truck came to a juddering halt at a crazy angle, and with a groan it rolled over onto its passenger side. From the back, Joel let out a moan of pain as he was thrown sideways hard against the window. Alex twisted in the driver’s seat and kicked upwards so hard that she tore the door off its hinges. It went tumbling into the snow. She climbed out, grabbed the edge of the overturned truck’s roof, and used every ounce of her strength to heave it back onto its wheels.
Then she saw the black stain of the oil seeping out of the ruptured sump, melting into the snow. The impact against the hidden rocks had ripped it open.
Tough shit. She’d keep driving till the engine seized.
She jumped back inside the cab and tried to restart the stalled motor.
Dead. She tried again. Nothing. She wanted to scream with rage.
Joel was stirring behind. Hearing him murmur her name, she jumped down from the cab and went running round to rip open the rear door. Blood trickled out of the back of the truck and began to pool on the snow. She reached out for him, lifted him gently out of the vehicle and set him down on the ground.
His eyes struggled for focus. His lips opened and closed, and a trickle of blood ran down his chin.
‘Don’t try to speak,’ she whispered, cradling him in her arms.
One century, one decade and three long years since the last time she’d done this.
She was going to lose him. Just as she’d lost her William.
‘Alex…’ he croaked faintly. ‘I’m scared.’ He coughed. More blood bubbled up from his lips.
‘Me too,’ she said.
He was slipping away now.
And she lowered her face to his, looked into his eyes as t
he light in them began to fade away to nothing. She felt his muscles tense in resistance as death wrapped its arms around him, then start to slacken.
And as he breathed his long, last sighing breath, she opened her mouth and bit deep into his neck.
She drank and drank from him. Tasted his blood as it mingled with her vampire saliva and the tears running down her face. Felt his dying energy draining into her veins – and her own powers flowing into him.
When she raised her head and looked down at his face again, his eyes were closed. He looked peaceful, as though he was sleeping.
‘What have I done to you?’ she murmured.
Something she knew he could never forgive her for.
Because, the next time he opened his eyes – and there would be a next time – it would no longer be as a man. Joel Solomon would have become a vampire.
Alex looked up at the sky. There were still enough hours of darkness to find shelter before the dawn came.
And the snow kept falling.
In Conversation with Scott Mariani
What was the inspiration for the Vampire Federation hooks?
The original inspiration probably dates back to my childhood. I was vampire crazy as a kid, and always wanting to see old Dracula movies. Then about seven years ago, it came to me that it would be great to write a modern vampire story drawing on some of the classic gothic elements in Bram Stoker’s seminal novel Dracula: the spooky ship sailing in from Romania, the half-mad ghoul enslaved to his master, the wicked vampire brides, the end battle in the castle guarded by gypsies – it’s all right out of Stoker. But at the same time I wanted to combine that with all the hallmarks of a modern thriller – upbeat pacing, fast-talking dialogue, and plenty of explosive action.
Are you still as vampire crazy now as you were as a child?
I suppose I must be! I can’t seem to survive long without watching a good vampire movie, whether an oldie like Nosferatu, or something more modern and hip like Blade. My DVD collection has everything from 30 Days of Night to Eddie Murphy’s Vampire of Brooklyn]
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