“Da, da,” the girl said. “Please… help…”
“Nate?” Monica asked, entering the corridor. She hurried over.
“Hey,” she said, taking the girl’s arm gently. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Can we call someone for you?”
“No…” The girl wobbled on her feet, no surprise, her heels were freaking high. When Monica saw her face, her eyes went wide with shock.
“Kseniya? Kseniya Krovopuskov?”
The girl staggered back as though Monica’s touch had burnt her. “No! NO!” she shouted, her accent growing even thicker. Then she turned and ran, surprisingly fleet-footed. Nathan hurried after her, but she vanished behind a group of giggling twenty-somethings and when they moved, she was gone.
Damn. How had she disappeared like that? He turned back to Monica, who looked shaken.
“You knew her?”
“Kseniya… she joined my old coven—the London coven—for a couple of months before I was excommunicated,” Monica said. “Last I heard, she didn’t stay long. They kicked her family out again. I haven’t seen her since I was fifteen.”
“Weird,” Nathan said. He recalled her eyes. “She looked like she was on drugs.”
“Maybe,” Monica said grimly. “But there’s magic that can do that, too.”
Dread seemed to pool in Nathan’s stomach. “Should we try and find her?”
Monica shook her head. “She had an invisibility ward on her arm. She’ll have activated it. Must be hiding from someone.” She frowned. “I’ll keep an ear to the ground, this next week. I might have to report her. Listen...” She laid a hand on Nathan’s arm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed. It’s… is it the initiations? Is that’s what got you so… upset?”
“I’m not upset,” Nathan said.
“Worried, then.”
Nathan shifted his weight. Her fingers were cool against his skin. Kseniya had been all skin and bones, but Monica wasn’t much better. Three months in Morocco had given her a bit of colour, but she still resisted putting on weight.
“A bit, maybe,” he admitted, and it felt like a load off his shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s just. Lily. And Adrian, too, I guess. Killing ferals is one thing, but…”
Monica pulled him into a hug.
“Can’t you postpone your initiation?”
“Yeah, but you shouldn’t. It reflects badly on you.” Nathan sighed. “If my family weren’t so important…”
The Delacroix family was pretty much one of the original hunter families. All eyes would be on Nathan to continue the legacy. His parents and cousins all seemed to be incredibly successful—and apparently unburdened by fits of conscience.
“Hey,” Monica said, rubbing his back and bumping her chin against his shoulder. “You’ll figure it out. Sometimes things just need time and they come clear.”
If only he had time. But his birthday was a week and a half away.
“Yeah,” Nathan mumbled.
“Want another drink?”
“Yeah,” he repeated.
Monica bought them Devil’s Brews, which sounded much creepier than they actually were. Witches loved their occult-themed cocktails. Nathan sipped the hot fruity punch, sitting on a sofa in the common area, and Monica leaned against him. Her magic curled around him like wisps of smoke. Witches acted human, so it was easy to forget that they weren’t. They were dangerous and exotic, just like vampires, but Monica had never felt that way.
“Can I stay at your place tonight?” Monica asked sleepily.
“As long as you don’t complain when I get up early.”
“Promise I won’t,” Monica said, but Nathan knew that she probably would. Monica didn’t like early mornings.
Nathan slept on an air mattress on the floor and was up before his alarm. He prodded Monica awake before he left, and she peered around like she didn’t know where she was.
“Happy birthday.” Nathan gave her a one-armed hug. Monica’s birthday was exactly ten days before his own.
“Oh, it’s you.” Catlike, she rolled out of bed. “Are you leaving now?”
“Yep,” Nathan said, pulling on his trainers.
“Mmm… okay.” Monica put her jeans and jumper back on. Her hair was in two plaits, because she always wore it that way for sleeping, and her makeup had smudged overnight. She looked about fifteen. Nathan waited for her while she washed her face in the bathroom. It was light out, but on a Saturday the neighbourhood was still sleepy at seven AM.
Aunt Anna gave Monica a surprised look when they came downstairs. “Monica, hi. I didn’t know you were here.” She frowned at Nathan. “What about that other girl?”
“It’s not like that with Monica. I slept on the air mattress.”
“Oh, good,” Aunt Anna said. “Because I’d hate to have to have the Talk with you. People are having sex too young these days.”
“Aunt Anna!” Nathan cried. Monica sniggered, but she’d been sexually active since she was about fourteen, so she had no right to talk. Nathan frowned at her, and she smirked back.
“Monica, do you want breakfast?” Aunt Anna asked. “Nathan has to go, but I’ll make Jessica eggs in about half an hour, if you want to hang around.”
“That’s alright,” Monica said. “I have to head home and get ready for my graduation ceremony.”
“Oh yes, that’s today, isn’t it? Congrats.”
At seven-fifteen, Nathan hugged Monica goodbye. “You’ll be great today.”
“All I have to do is say ‘do fidem’ and not trip over my gown.”
“Seems about your speed.” Nathan laughed when Monica tried to hit him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PRISON WAS HALFWAY between Oxford and London. After leaving the M40, they bounced along ever smaller roads until they finally reached a tall metal gate which blocked the entrance. A man in a hunter uniform climbed out of the gatehouse and came over to the car. Grey rolled down his window.
“Agent Larson,” Grey said. “With Nathan Delacroix. Training visit. Benjamin Delacroix called ahead.”
His dad knew they were coming? That was news to Nathan.
“ID?”
Grey handed over his hunter ID and Nathan passed his provisional driver’s license over. He’d never taken a driving lesson, but the ID came in handy occasionally. The gatekeeper checked his list, then handed them back.
“You’re good to enter.”
Nathan wondered if talking in monotone would be part of hunter training, or if it was something you just learnt after a couple of years on the force.
Grey handed Nathan a sheet of paper, before pulling the car through the gate and up the drive. The building ahead looked like an old-fashioned manor house from the outside, and the signs made it out to be a private hospital. Only hunters knew better. When Nathan read the paper, he understood. It was a non-disclosure agreement. Breach of the NDA could mean expulsion from the force, or even termination.
Wow.
As though Nathan would risk initiating as a hunter on this. He hadn’t even told Monica or Adrian where he was going. He scribbled his signature as they pulled into a parking space to one side of the front door.
Grey paused before getting out, his hand on the door handle. “Look, Nathan, when we get inside… what you see might shock you. Stay with me at all times, and don’t try to speak to the subjects, okay? And don’t look in their eyes.”
Rule number one about vampires: never look in their eyes.
Nathan wanted to say, I know that. He said, “Yes, Sir.”
“Good,” Grey replied.
They entered the reception. It was a funny trick of the imagination that even though everything was sterile and white, it somehow looked grey. Even the receptionist looked grey. Nathan gave her his NDA and she handed over an access badge without saying a word.
Grey led the way through security doors and down sterile corridors. It was very like a hospital: cheap yellow paint on the walls, rubber floors, plain white doors. They descended a flight of sta
irs into the basement. Everything changed. Suddenly, the hospital atmosphere was replaced with a prison. Reinforced steel doors. Nathan could guess they had a high enough silver content to repel vampires. The same sort of lights that you got in light boxes, which mimicked the sun, because vampires were weakened by sunlight.
And wards.
Magically sensitive people, who made up a good thirty percent of hunter forces, could sense wards. Being magically sensitive was conventionally called ‘the sight’, and it did sometimes involve seeing magic as colours, but sensing wards had nothing to do with vision. Wards that were rooted in buildings had an almost physical presence which seemed to wriggle under your skin. It was tolerable for a short time, but being around powerful wards for too long drove Nathan crazy.
These wards were incredible. Every inch of the building had to be slathered in them. How did they even power this many wards? These had to have a tangible power source, some sort of magical well or spring, so to speak.
Nathan had no idea how you could power a ward apart from through ambient magic, and he wished he could ask Monica. Monica loved wards; she was obsessed with them. When they were younger, she used to sneak warded keychains into his school bag, give him wristbands with wards embroidered on them, sew warded patches onto jackets, all sorts of things. If it could be warded, Monica had figured out how to do it.
Monica was obsessed with the idea of the people around her dying.
Nathan closed his eyes and focused his mind, trying to block out the sight for a short time. Grey had trained him to do that, but it wasn’t easy with millions of wards all screaming, “I’m here! Look at me!”
He took a deep breath and caught up to Grey again.
“The wards?”
“Yes, it’s an impressive piece of work, isn’t it?” Grey said. “I understand that to vampires it’s quite torturous.”
“Wow,” was all Nathan could think to say.
They walked to the end of the corridor, passing no one. Finally, Grey scanned his card and punched in a security code at the last door. There was a little beep and the door unlocked.
“Are you ready?” Grey asked.
No.
“Yes.”
Grey opened the door. Inside was an observation room. There were several armchairs, a desk and a utilitarian desk chair. On the far side was a window, which looked down onto another room that reminded Nathan of his school sports hall.
The room below might have been furnished, once. The furniture had been shredded and shattered, but Nathan thought that it might have contained bunkbeds.
“Are those ferals?” Nathan asked.
“Yes,” Grey said. “You can observe that in some the decay process is less pronounced than others.”
He said it so clinically, like this was all just a science experiment. Nathan felt sick.
The thing with ferals was that it was easy to forget they had once been human. It was a tricky sort of irony, because feral vampires were what happened when humans were turned, and the change was rejected.
There were two reasons why it could go wrong.
Reason one: the vampire who did the turning got the process wrong somehow.
Reason two: the human couldn’t deal with their new existence as a bloodsucking parasite.
Whatever the reason, the result was a creature that turned against itself, went completely mad, and then went on a rampage. If they were left to run wild, they would kill and drain every person they came across, until eventually they could drink no more. The final stage was usually tearing themselves apart.
This happened worryingly often. In fact, official hunter estimates stated that forty percent of all attempted turnings ended up going feral.
The creatures in the room below didn’t look like they’d ever been human. Their skin was decayed, and their hair hung in limp clumps. Most of them only wore rags, and their forms no longer adhered to anything resembling human biology. There were bits visible that shouldn’t have been. Nathan had read accounts in hunter records of zombies. These creatures looked like zombies.
Worse, every one of them knew he was there. As he and Grey approached the window, they all turned as one to look up at the two hunters.
“That’s creepy.” Nathan shivered.
“In the beginning, we isolated every subject,” Grey explained. “It was considered expedient to house them together for observation. The truth is, despite in depth research, we are no closer to understanding the how or the why of the vampiric need for blood.”
Nathan thought many things. He thought:
These experiments are kind of inhumane
Is there any point in experimenting on ferals, the vampires gone wrong?
Wait, does that mean that they’re experimenting on actual vampires, too?
How come doesn’t the Council know about this?
Does the Council know about this?
Holy shit
Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck
This is messed up
He said, “I never realised this place existed.”
“It’s necessary to keep this close to our chests,” Grey replied. “But the breakthroughs we could make here could revolutionise human safety. Toxins, for example, that are harmless to humans, but fatal to vampires. Humans could effectively be given inoculations against being bitten by vampires. Perhaps even an immunisation against being turned.”
“Hunters are working on that?” Nathan asked, curious despite himself.
“Many things are in development,” Grey said. “Once you’re initiated, you will be inducted into the experiments on a need-to-know basis. I know you’re interested in science at school. There may be a chance that you could end up working here.”
Never in a thousand years, Nathan decided on the spot. Not for all the money in the world.
“Wow,” he replied. “This is… incredible.”
“Of course,” Grey added, “I can’t show you the whole facility. Even my security clearance isn’t high enough for that. But your father gave me permission to show you one or two other things, if you’re interested?”
Nathan tried to look enthusiastic. “Sure, that’d be cool.”
“This way, then.”
Before they left the observation room, Nathan couldn’t help but take another look. The ferals still watched him, every last one of them. They didn’t have human gazes. Their eyes were red, but more importantly, they were hungry.
Adrian had never looked at Nathan like that.
He forced himself to look away from those hypnotic red eyes and trailed after Grey.
The next few rooms he was shown into were laboratories, not dissimilar to the chemistry lab at Nathan’s school.
“The important work all takes place below ground,” Grey said as they walked. “This is only one level of the operation, really, but I wouldn’t dream of taking a trainee any deeper. There’s plenty to see up here.”
Nathan nodded along and managed to feign interest in the scientific experiments. Some of them were genuinely interesting, like the attempts at creating artificial blood. So far, none of the results had been able to sustain vampires, although they appeared to meet the basic dietary requirements.
“We think there might be a magi-scientific component that we are missing,” Grey said. “But, of course, it’s quite difficult to get the Council’s buy-in to study this any further. Witches don’t like sharing magic, and vampires appear to enjoy the savagery of sinking their fangs into human flesh. Perhaps the idea of a substitute is simply too sterile to them.”
Nathan nodded along, but he wasn’t sure he agreed. He was pretty sure it was the sexual aspect that vampires enjoyed, but he wasn’t sure someone as square as Grey was capable of comprehending that drinking blood was sexual to vampires.
Did that mean that forcibly taking someone’s blood was like rape? He’d have to ask Adrian. Then again, if the answer was yes, maybe it was better not to know.
Some of the experiments were less savoury, such as the various different
ways of weaponizing silver.
Adrian carried a silver knife. He was a vampire who armed himself against other vampires. Had Adrian ever killed a human? Had Adrian killed other vampires since he’d been turned?
Nathan had so many questions all of a sudden. There were so many things he hadn’t thought of.
Grey had brought him here to make things clearer, but Nathan was pretty sure that they were only getting murkier.
The piece de resistance of the trip was their final stop.
“Your father requested that the subject be moved up here for the day so that you could see him without breaching security clearance,” Grey said as they headed down a narrow corridor. There were almost no doors here, and Nathan was starting to feel claustrophobic. When they finally reached the end of the hall, there was only a pair of doors on the left side. The first one was vaulted and reinforced, made of almost solid silver. It was the brightest thing Nathan had seen since they’d come underground.
He studied the runes on that door whilst Grey unlocked the other door. Silver didn’t take runes very well, because by nature silver repelled anything magical, but these runes were active. Nathan could feel them.
The room he followed Grey into was another observation room, but there was no window. Glass was almost impossible to ward, because all you had to do to break the wards was smash the glass, and even a human could do that. Instead, there was a bank of monitors on one wall.
Nathan felt the dampening effect of the wards the moment he entered. He had no magic, but even he felt like he was suffocating. Monica, Lily, any of his friends—none of them could have entered this room.
“Magical null,” he said, impressed.
“There are several rooms like this,” a voice said. “I apologise in advance. If you are wearing any wards on your person, they may become dysfunctional for a time after leaving here.”
Nathan looked around in surprise and saw a man with snow white hair sitting at a desk, watching the monitors intently.
“This is Doctor Bourne,” Grey said, shaking the man’s hand. “Doctor Bourne, my trainee, Nathan Delacroix.”
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