Method of Termination: Gas leak in home.
Banes scanned her home address, the facts about her life...he recognised the name of the hospital where she was stationed from the news; it, along with the other free hospitals in London was to be shut down by the end of the year, and its patients to be relocated to hospitals outside of the capital and every Accident and Emergency department to go private. He remembered how tired she had looked.
Carefully, he removed the file from the cabinet, and placed it on Malik’s desk. The computer screen was still lit. He guessed that there would be digital copies of this folder and rapidly removed the card from the port. He grabbed correction fluid from the desk draw, and covered the method of termination, blowing on the paper to harden it quickly. His body seemed to radiate with energy as he turned back to the cabinet of soon to be dead hunters. She had friends; he knew what one of them looked like. He noticed, as he flicked through the files, that most of the hunters were already dead, and that the ones who had not yet reached their date of termination were either medium or low levels of threat.
The correction fluid had dried on Khalida’s file; Banes slotted it into the typewriter on the desk, and replaced ‘gas leak’ with ‘house fire.’
Chapter Twelve
What Kind Of Reprimand
Banes had thought that trying to sleep would be pointless, given how tightly wound his nerves had been, but the moment he closed the door of his flat, everything fell away, and he was left exhausted. He re-taped the memory cards to the underside of his drawers and staggered to the kitchen, draining half a bottle of blood, before collapsing on his bed. He kicked off his shoes and pulled the sheets tightly over his body before, seemingly seconds later, his alarm blared. He groaned and turned over in bed. Nervous energy settled through his body as he stirred awake. Had he left something there? Had someone seen him?
He showered and dressed, racking his mind, trying to resort to calmness.
He had taken note of the hunter’s home address and name, and was leafing through her online presence as he ate breakfast, her face looking out at him through the screen. Her life seemed to be comfortable and ordinary as he looked through her social media pages; he had found her house on street view, a photo of her taken several years ago with a women’s rugby team at university. He clicked back to the search engine; it was intensely difficult to see the same woman who was blackmailing him with the image of a young woman on the screen.
He ran her surname through Google, and the name Natakarn appeared in connection with a massacre in Malaysia. He frowned, leaning in slightly closer to his laptop screen. The human authorities believed that it was related to organised crime, or a supposed dam construction. He read quicker, feeling his heartbeat starting to race. Dozens of people had been killed, and the village had been all but wiped out, with the handful of survivors fragmented. Two child sisters by the name of Natakarn had survived by hiding under their house, while their parents were butchered above them, leaving the country shortly afterwards to be taken in by relatives in England. Luan’s revenge.
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he whispered, flicking the page back to her face.
He closed the screen down and leaned back in his chair, looking around at his apartment as the city grew darker outside, his nerves spiking and ebbing inside of him. It was tempting to head out of the door, start running, and not stop until he was far away from this country. The bars of Soho were calling to him.
He was walking down the brightly lit Old Compton Street in the tightest leather jeans he owned when his phone began to ring.
‘Hey,’ the hunter, Khalida, said, ‘can you talk?’
‘Not for long,’ he said, spotting Nox walk past a flower seller and over towards him, with a playful gleam in his eyes and a cigarette in hand.
‘So, did you do what I asked of you?’
‘Yep.’
‘Great, let’s meet tomorrow.’
‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I’m busy with work.’
‘In the early evening?’ she said. ‘Say, five o’clock?’
‘Do you know how early that is for me?’ he said.
‘Six?’
‘Eight.’
‘I thought you were busy,’ she said.
‘It’s eight, or nothing,’ he said. There was a tense silence on the other end of the line before Khalida sighed.
‘Fine,’ she said, ‘meet me at the Primrose Hill viewpoint then.’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Nox purred in his ear, as she hung up.
‘A girlfriend,’ Banes said. ‘No-one special.’
Nox raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t deserve whoever she is.’
‘I do not,’ he said. ‘So, do you want to get a drink, or something?’
‘You look tense,’ Nox said, running his fingers along Banes’s jaw. ‘I can loosen you up, if you want.’
Flames bubbled up beneath his skin, the noise of the city entrapping him as smoke drifted over him.
‘You have no regard for personal space,’ Banes said, brushing Nox’s hand away from him.
‘Is that a no?’ Nox asked. ‘Suit yourself. A few of us are going to have a meal together tomorrow, though, think you’ll come along?’
‘I’ll see. I have things to do tomorrow,’ Banes said. ‘Also, I wasn’t saying no. I just wanted to get a drink first.’
Nox grinned and kissed him. ‘Good boy.’
* * *
‘What happened to you?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, taking a seat next to her with a cup of coffee in hand.
Khalida was sat on the end of a bench overlooking the London skyline, a mass of glittering white lights and orange haze against a deepening dark blue sky.
He noticed that some effort seemed to have gone into her appearance; she was wearing makeup to conceal how tired she looked, her hair hung loose and glossy, and she was wearing a red and black dress.
‘You look like you were beaten up,’ she said.
‘Only consensually,’ he said. He had examined his reflection in Nox’s bathroom mirror, and was grateful that bright sun of the day had given him a reason to cover up his skin in a large, white hoodie, a baseball hat, and sunglasses, since he was covered in bruises and bitemarks. His red eye was bloodshot, giving it a disturbing look that the entire eye was bleeding through from the inside.
‘So, do you have them?’ Khalida said. He dug out the memory cards for her and handed them over.
‘I did what you told me to do,’ he said.
‘And it went smoothly?’ she asked.
‘I hope so,’ he said, leaning back on the bench. ‘I also overheard a conversation between Cecilia and Tycho. The Shield of Scarlet are breathing down their necks, Cecilia said that the Shield doesn’t know the full extent of Rebirth, but they will soon, and Rebirth needs the Blood Thieves as leverage against them, but Tycho’s pissed them off. There’s also some poison involved somewhere, and Clarence is working as a diplomat for Rebirth, and Tycho thinks he’s fucking it up.’
‘Poison?’ Khalida asked, looking up at him. ‘Could it be code?’
‘He said ‘once you have poison is administered,’’ he said, ‘so it’s probably actual poison.’
‘Poison doesn’t work on vampires, though, does it?’
‘It’s very difficult,’ he said, ‘but not impossible. If you want my advice, take what you’ve got, and go to the Shield of Scarlet with it. Don’t even bother waiting for an audience, just go to Paris.’
‘And you think that will work?’ she asked.
‘It’s your best bet,’ he said, ‘but, sweetheart, I’m out.’
‘What do you mean, you’re out?’ she said.
‘I’m gone,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘I’ll publish the photos,’ she said. Banes could tell that the firmness in her voice was artificial.
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘but please give me a few days of a head start.’
‘Why now?’ she asked.
‘It’s how I survive,’ he
said, taking a sip of coffee. ‘You get out when you’re ahead. Get out and move on. They have me under surveillance, sweetheart.’
‘Surveillance?’ she said, her eyes darting around from trees, to a group of youths passing a cider bottle around. ‘Are we safe?’
He shrugged. ‘No idea, but if they haven’t already found out about us, then they will.’
‘But if you stay, we can fight them together,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t just keep running away!’
He smirked. ‘Sweetheart, even if I thought that there was a hope in hell of defeating them – and I don’t – you’re asking me to fight against my friends. People I care about. And I can’t do that, either.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘I’ll leave tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Leave the country, keep my head down, wait until this blows over.’
‘And what if it doesn’t?’
‘Then I’m fucked, aren’t I?’ he said. ‘But it will, in the end. All meat rots the same. Every empire eventually falls into the sea; that’s just how the world works. I just have to survive until then.’
‘You’re such a coward,’ she muttered, sinking down on the bench.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but I’m alive. And I do want Rebirth to fail. I want you to win. And I’ve done my bit,’ he said, gesturing to the memory cards. ‘You know more about them than you ever could without me, even though it was all under duress.’
Banes looked over across at her; her hands were gripped into fists on her lap.
‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘look – you’re young. You’re very, very young, and I’ve lived through a ton of evil shit in this world. It’ll disappear from one place, then reappear in the other. I’m just going to keep living.’
‘It disappears because people keep fighting it away!’ she said. ‘If everyone was like you, then nothing good would ever happen!’
‘I know,’ he said.
She looked away from him, her hand coiling around her handbag. Banes looked across at the peaks of the city.
‘I spent a good deal of the Nineteen-Twenties in Berlin,’ he said slowly, as he took his sunglasses off and turned to her. ‘I really liked it there. I made a lot of great friends; humans, of course, and some of them knew that I wasn’t quite like them. And, sweetheart, I really fucking loved it there, but…the speed of how quickly it changed surprised me. Within four years, it had changed from a cosmopolitan hotbed of progression, to the capital of a fascist regime. Of course, my lot – vampires – began to gather in Germany because of that, but this wasn’t the country for a queer man to enjoy life anymore, so I left as soon as I could.
‘Those of my friends who couldn’t get passage were imprisoned by the Nazis, and a lot of them were murdered by them. And you’d think that once a war was won, everyone would just go home and things would be back to normal, clearing away the rubble and basking in victory, but it’s never like that. These things hang over you. Some of the world’s sparkle is lost. You realise who your neighbours are, and you realise that they’re all around you. You see all of that anger, and loathing, and bitterness, and the utter apathy to it all in their eyes, which you never knew existed…how can anything go back to fucking normal after that?
‘It wasn’t the first time that something like that had happened to me; stuff like this has been happening for centuries. And if I had stayed to fight, as you suggested, then I would have been killed, as well. It’s a grand idea, and I do applaud you for holding it, but it’s not an indictment against anyone if they can’t live up to it.’
‘Your jaded, then?’ she asked.
Banes raised an eyebrow, ‘live and enjoy existing. Fun is the first thing to die in any war.’
Khalida sighed and placed in head in her hands, ‘I can kind of see why you’re an asshole now. So you’re seven-hundred-years old, that’s seven-hundred years of watching shitty things happen…so…does the good ever balance out the bad?’
He shrugged, ‘I suppose it must. I’m still here, I’m still alive and I like being alive.’
‘But did you ever care? Did you ever try and make the world a better place to be in?’
‘Once,’ he said. ‘A long time ago.’
‘And why did you stop?’
He tapped his shoulder, ‘got burnt for it. Look, sweetheart…’
He stopped. He wanted to tell her that he knew about her family, that he knew everything about her. She leant forward in her seat, her hair falling down over her shoulders, the material of her dress tightening over her breasts, ‘yes?’
‘You can’t constantly care for others the same way you want to be cared for yourself.’
She faltered, ‘what?’
‘Your passionate, and your driven, and you care about other people and you risk your life for strangers. But none of that means you’ll get the same back.’
‘I can try,’ she said. ‘I can try and be a good person and help others. Really, that’s all I can do.’
It was mindless self-destruction to retroactivity raise the dead.
Khalida sighed and leaned back. ‘So, you’re leaving for good, then?’
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘With some luck, you’ll never see me again. And you’re not going to release the photos, are you?’
‘Would it matter if I did?’ she asked.
‘Not one bit,’ he said.
‘I won’t release them, Banes,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Well, best of luck with everything.’
‘You too,’ she said, standing up beside him, her red dress falling in ripples to above her knees. He held out his hand to her. She looked down it and blinked in surprise, before slowly accepting it. Her hand felt small; work-worn, yet soft, and warm in his. He brought it to his lips, planting a gentle kiss on it.
‘Goodbye, Banes.’
‘Goodbye, sweetheart.’
Banes watched Khalida walk away; with each step she took, he could feel waves of daring, excited relief colliding with regret bubbling up inside him. He let the minutes slip by, watching the sky of London darken, and groups slowly move away from the park. He walked back along Regent’s Canal and into Camden Town, where people were gathering to begin the night.
Khalida would be dead soon, and it would be like this had never happened. Just another, tiny, awkward glitch of discomfort in his life. Soon, it wouldn’t matter, she wouldn’t matter. But he had wanted her to live. But she didn’t matter. But she did.
As he neared Kings Cross, he reached into his pocket to dig out his keys. As he neared his apartment building, two people seized his upper arms and pulled him sharply away.
‘What the fuck?!’
Banes instantly tried to pull back, but their grip was steel against his arms.
There was a car parked in front of the building. The back door was open, and, not wanting to be pushed, Banes stepped inside. One of them got into the passenger seat, and as the other joined him in the back, he saw that someone was already sitting in the driver seat. He heard the thump of the locks as he turned to look out of the tinted window, his heart beginning to race and flutter inside his chest as they drove off.
If they knew about the hunter, then it might be worth attacking the driver, so that he had a chance of crashing the car and fleeing. He fiddled with the end of one of his plaits, twisting the end of it around his finger. There was no certainty that he would be able to leave the country before they caught him. He sat back in his seat while the car moved closer to central London.
The car inched its way down towards Piccadilly and through St James, to a dead-end street, where a garage door opened and they drove down into an underground car park. The door was opened.
‘Out.’
Again, not wanting to be pushed, he stepped forward. Before he could properly take in any of his surroundings, a black hood was shoved onto his head. He was seized again by two of them, his arms pulled back behind him, and was marched forwards, before coming to a halt. There were electronic be
eps, then a long, high-pitched sound, and the sound of a door unlocking, as a draft of stale air came to greet them.
Though it was now night, he couldn’t hear anything, and the usual background of foot traffic, indistinct chatter, and typewriters was replaced with a flat silence, broken by the sounds of his breath and their footsteps. He was certain that he was now in the part of Rebirth’s base which was closed off to him, and a shiver ran through him.
They came to a halt; another door was opened, and Banes was shoved inside another room and brought to sit at a table. The hood was snatched off his face; Cecilia was sat in front of him.
Banes blinked. The white-tiled room was wide with a low roof, and he was sat at a large desk, with the two who had brought him there standing behind him. Tycho was also in the room, standing up straight beside the wall behind Cecilia. His eyes flickered up to meet his, his expression troubled. The desk had a long, white belt fastened onto it.
‘Mr Intuneric,’ Cecilia began, her voice sweet and gentle, ‘do you have any idea as to why you were brought here tonight?’
‘No,’ he said, his eyes on the belt.
‘Really?’ she asked, one eyebrow raised. ‘You honestly have no idea why you are here?’
‘None at all,’ he said. ‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘You were warned, when you first entered Rebirth, that you had a tendency to side with pro-human sentiment,’ she said, ‘which would need to stop immediately.’
‘And it has,’ he said, his voice was even but his heart was racing.
‘Nevertheless,’ she continued, ‘this showed us that you were a challenging individual to work with, and you were warned about what would happen if you continued to disrespect Rebirth’s authority. These were issues I addressed personally with you, and it saddens me that you did not adhere to them.’
Banes looked between Cecilia and Tycho; Tycho wouldn’t meet his gaze, but Cecilia wouldn’t look away, her eyes alive and daring, as a silence stretched out before them.
‘Commander, why have I been brought here today?’ he asked, breaking.
‘It has come to light that, during your training period, you disobeyed various orders,’ she said. ‘You trespassed on land that you were repeatedly warned against going onto.’
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