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‘It’s good to meet you again, Cosmina. I’m Joel. Listen, I don’t want to be any trouble . . .’
‘No trouble,’ she said. ‘My son leave home last year. To study business in Bucharest, yes? He leave behind some of his things. You are the same size. No trouble.’
Joel reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of lei banknotes. Cosmina frowned at the money, then waved it away.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be on my way.’
‘Later. First you eat. Then we get clothes. Then you stay here and wait for the autobuz in the morning. Yes?’
‘That’s really not . . .’ he began, then decided there was no use in arguing. A wave of heat slapped him in the face as she fussed him into a small kitchen at the top of the hall. Next to an antique cast-iron cooking range, a woodburner crackled, giving off a faint smell of smoke. A cat that had been curled up in a basket near the fire arched its back at the sight of Joel, spat ferociously and then scuttled into hiding under a tall oak dresser.
Cosmina seemed not to notice as she sat Joel down in a wooden chair at the kitchen table. As if nothing could please her more, she battered about for a few moments fetching down an earthenware plate the size of a wagon wheel from the dresser, some cutlery and a huge stone pitcher from a cupboard. Using an oven glove, she slid a large iron pot onto the hotplate of the range to warm up. It smelled like some kind of meat stew.
The kitchen door suddenly burst open and an old man walked in. Joel remembered him, too. Cosmina’s father. He was about eighty, whiplash-thin and bent, with a mane of pure white hair and a face like saddle leather. Snow clung to his boots. In one wiry hand he clutched a walking stick; under the other arm he had a stack of freshly-cut logs that he dumped with a loud clang in a metal bin by the wood-burner. There was a big bone-handled Bowie knife in a sheath on his belt. He looked even more of a hard, mean old bastard than the rangy hunting dog that trotted into the room behind him.
Cosmina stared disapprovingly at the dog and rattled off a stream of Romanian to the old man as she stirred the bubbling stew. The old man pulled up a chair opposite Joel and said nothing. His eyes were deep-set, wrinkled and inscrutable, taking in every detail of Joel’s appearance.
‘I tell my father you become lost in forest,’ Cosmina said, filling Joel’s pitcher from a jug of what looked like home-brewed dark beer.
‘That’s right,’ Joel replied, smiling at the old man. The old man didn’t smile back. Staring fixedly at Joel from beside the table, the hunting dog bared its fangs and let out a long, menacing growl. Joel glanced down at it. Its tail curled between its legs and it retreated behind its master’s chair. The old man’s stare was just as fixed on Joel as his dog’s.
‘Please excuse Tascha,’ Cosmina said, looking perplexed. ‘She does not normally act this way with people.’
‘Animals don’t like me very much,’ Joel said, as Cosmina ladled a mound of stew into Joel’s plate and set it down in front of him. She stepped back and watched him expectantly. ‘You eat now.’
‘This looks lovely,’ Joel muttered. He picked up his fork and spoon. His objective senses told him that the stew smelled delicious. He’d lost count of how long ago solid food had last passed his lips. Normally his mouth would have been watering so badly that wild horses couldn’t have stopped him diving in and stuffing himself.
But some other sense, some internal voice that seemed to override all his lifelong instincts, was telling him that this food was worthless to him. No amount of it would satisfy his real hunger.
Joel’s hand was shaking as his fork hovered over his plate. He swallowed. His mouth was dry. Cosmina was hanging on his every movement and expression. He speared a piece of meat, carried it up to his mouth and chewed it.
Cosmina looked suddenly crestfallen. ‘Not good? You don’t like?’
‘No, no, it’s delicious,’ Joel protested, and tried to eat with enthusiasm. He felt both daughter and father’s gazes on him in stereo as he ate. The dog was still snarling quietly from its hiding place.
The old man let out a loud snort. He leaned back in his chair, slipped the big knife out of its sheath and began nonchalantly picking out the grime from behind his fingernails with the tip of its eight-inch blade. Cosmina scolded him angrily in Romanian. He appeared not to notice.
‘I go to find clothes for you,’ Cosmina said to Joel, and left the room.
Joel went on eating half-heartedly. The only sounds in the room were the ticking of an old clock on the wall and the low growls of the dog. The old man went on ignoring him. Having finished reaming out his nails, he now set about using the knife to scrape dirt from his fingers. Joel sneaked the occasional glance at him as he continued eating, and for a few blessed moments he felt almost normal in contrast to this strange, mad old bugger. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the old man pressed the edge of the blade against the pad of his thumb. Hard enough to split the flesh. A fat splot of blood dripped down on the table, then another. The old man looked at his cut thumb, then glanced at Joel.
Joel didn’t feel the fork clatter out of his fingers and onto his plate. He was lost in a sudden trance as he stared, mesmerised, open-mouthed, at the blood ebbing out of the old man’s thumb.
Instantly, a desperate battle was raging inside him.
No. It was too repellent. It was loathsome. Sickening.
And yet it wasn’t. He could smell the blood. Taste it. Feel it flowing down his throat, warm and thick and filled with goodness. The desire, deeper and more feverishly intense than anything he’d ever felt in his life, threatened to blow away all resistance.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the startling red blood was hidden from Joel’s view as the old man plucked a grimy handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his thumb. Joel was shaken from his trance. He picked up his fork with a trembling hand. His breath came in gasps.
The old man hadn’t taken his eyes off him the whole time. There was a sparkle in them that Joel couldn’t figure.
Cosmina called from the stairway, ‘I find clothes. You come get changed now.’ Joel was grateful to make his escape from the kitchen. He climbed the creaky wooden stairs to where Cosmina was waiting for him on the landing, leaning against a massive hard-carved banister post with depictions of the moon and stars. ‘My son’s room,’ she said, and motioned through an open doorway.
Joel looked inside the tiny, windowless bedroom. In one corner was a basic sink with a towel on a rail and a shaving mirror. Cosmina showed him the clothes she’d laid out on the narrow bed: a denim work shirt, a thick woollen pullover, fleece-lined jeans and a pair of socks fit for hardcore mountaineering. Joel thanked her again, and tried once more to offer her some money. She shook her head vehemently, then left him alone to change. She shut the door behind her, and he heard her footsteps descending the stairs.
Joel quickly peeled off his dirty rags. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw that all trace of his wounds had completely disappeared. Was it his imagination, or were the muscles of his torso harder and more defined than he’d ever seen them? He splashed water over his chest, shoulders and arms and watched the filth and blood wash away down the sink.
Towelling himself dry, he could hear the old man downstairs jabbering agitatedly to his daughter. That crazy old bastard didn’t like strangers in the house. Fine. He’d made his point. Joel wasn’t planning on sticking around. Maybe someone in the village bar would know of a cheap car for sale, maybe an old 4x4 if the roads were bad. Then he’d be out of this place and nothing was ever going to bring him back.
He pulled on the socks and the jeans. The work shirt was a size too large, but better roomy than too tight. Joel was halfway through buttoning it up when footsteps came thundering up the stairs. The boards creaked outside the door.
Joel craned his head to listen, and heard whispers and fumbling. The lock clicked, and then the footsteps went thumping back down the stairs in a hurry. The sound of the front door being ripped open. Noises and voices from out in the street.
Joel rattled the door handle. The door didn’t budge. Now he could hear shouting outside, more voices joining in. The cry of a woman.
Seconds later, the first clang of the church bell resonated through the still night air. Then again and again, ringing wildly, as if three strong men were hauling on its rope for all they were worth. Nearer to the house, the flat report of a shotgun boomed out once, twice, through the night air. The clamour of voices was getting steadily louder, and steadily closer. It sounded like half the village had suddenly emerged from their homes. They sounded scared, and they sounded angry as hell.
And now Joel could hear what the villagers were chanting amid the yells and panic.
Moroi! Moroi! Vârcolac!
He knew those words. They’d been written in the forgotten and decayed diary of a man who’d sacrificed his whole world, endured the ridicule and rejection of his own family, to fight the thing he’d hated most. Crazy Nick Solomon. Joel’s grandfather.
The words were from the darkest corners of ancient Romanian folklore. They meant Vampire.
Chapter Six
It was way past time to get the hell out of there. Joel yanked on his boots and laced them up feverishly. He hammered at the door. It wouldn’t give. He drew back his fist and punched at it. To his amazement his fist tore right through the solid wood. He felt no pain. Withdrawing his fist, he peered through the shattered hole and saw the stout length of rope that connected the handle on the outside to the carved banister post. He’d let them trap him in here as easily as he’d given himself away to that tricksy old man.
Bastard humans.
The thought had materialised consciously in his mind before he was able to catch it and drag it back. He wanted to vomit. But there was no time for self-pity. He lashed out again and felt the door buckle. Dust and splinters flew. Two more hits, and with alarming strength he’d torn the whole thing out of its frame and was trampling over it and racing down the stairs four at a time. He crashed through the front door.
Scores of villagers had gathered in the snowy street outside the house. More were running down the street from their homes. Young men and boys, old women, everyone who could be mustered was out in force as the alarm spread, many of them clutching whatever improvised weapons they could grab. Among the axes and shovels and scythes Joel saw a chainsaw and a crossbow, and at least a couple of double-barrelled shotguns.
Heading up the crowd was Cosmina’s old father, dementedly waving his walking stick in one hand and the big Bowie knife in the other, whipping them all up to a frenzy with his screaming chant of ‘Moroi! Vârcolac!’ Cosmina stood behind him, fearfully clutching his wiry arm. Beside her towered a bulky, heavily-bearded man with long black hair and hands like hams clenched around the hilt of some kind of ancient gypsy scimitar that he was swinging above his head as if about to decapitate a bullock with it.
Few things could spell a quicker end for a vampire than the sweep of a well-honed blade lifting their head from their shoulders. Joel knew that, all too well. He’d once been forced to do the very same thing to his own grandfather.
He tried to imagine what it would feel like, watching the blade come whooshing towards his throat. The parting of the flesh as the steel sliced cleanly through. Would it hurt? Would unconsciousness come instantly? Or would his senses remain alert as his severed head hit the ground and bounced and rolled out of the path of his falling body? For all that he craved for his torment to be over, the urge to run was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.
‘There he is!’ The shout needed no translation. Angry cries and gasps of horror. Fingers pointing. Faces turning to stare at him, eyes filled with fury and teeth bared. The wild old man waving the knife at him.
‘Why do you hate me?’ Joel wanted to yell at them. ‘I’ve done you no harm. Just let me go. I won’t come back here.’
For a few frozen moments, he hovered there on the doorstep of the house as the crowd, more than a hundred strong now, hung back. Then, at the same instant that the old man let out a roar of fury and led the charge towards the house, Joel bolted. With blinding speed he tore across the tiny front yard, vaulting the low wall into the neighbouring property.
The screaming mob came rushing after him. Joel sprinted harder, unleashing power from his heart and lungs and muscles that he’d never dreamed possible. A crossbow bolt cut whistling through the air towards him; he heard it coming and dipped his head, and it embedded itself with a juddering thwack in the wall of the house inches away.
Both barrels of a shotgun boomed out in rapid succession and a window smashed. Joel skidded around the side of the building, crashed through bushes, vaulted clear over the derelict body of an old car and leaped a six-foot fence as if it were nothing.
Suddenly, he was alone. He stopped, assessing his surroundings. He wasn’t even out of breath. A narrow lane ran up between more houses, curving away out of sight between dilapidated wooden fences. He could hear the shouts of the mob approaching. ‘Get him! Get the Moroi! Cut off his head!’
Joel took off up the lane, stumbling and slipping in the snow that had drifted up against the fence. Lights were coming on in windows all across the village. Up ahead, the lane opened out onto the main street through the village.
Joel burst out into the road and glanced all around him. More villagers were spilling out of their houses and massing together in a second hunting party just a hundred yards down the street. Nobody saw him as he kept down low in the shadows and ran like crazy over the ice-rutted road towards the edge of the village.
He desperately tried to recall the layout of the place. Where was the rundown old service station from which he’d managed to borrow a motorcycle and sidecar for his outward journey? If he could find it again, maybe he could steal a car or truck before the mob caught up with him again. But then he remembered the Alsatian dog that had been chained up outside the garage. If it was still there, it would raise the alarm. Not wise.
He kept moving, constantly glancing back over his shoulder. Any moment now, he’d hear the yells and they’d be after him again, ready to beat him to the ground and stamp him into the dirt and dismember him, to chop him up into quivering pulp and torch whatever remained. Suddenly the full force of the realisation was hitting home. He truly understood now what it was that Alex Bishop had done to him. This was his destiny now: to be this abhorred, detested creature, spurned and condemned and hunted wherever he went. This was her parting gift to him.
As he dashed towards the village outskirts, he heard the chatter of a diesel engine and yellow headlights appeared around a bend. It was a battered old Nissan pickup truck with jacked suspension and snow chains that clanked and rattled against the road surface as it headed his way down the street. Joel ran straight towards it, waving his arms.
The pickup slowed, then slid to a juddering halt in the middle of the slippery road. Its roof and bonnet were thick with snow. Its wipers blinked away the white dusting on its windscreen.
Joel tore open the driver’s door. The fat-gutted guy in his fifties, wearing a baseball cap and a quilted bodywarmer, was alone in the vehicle. Joel grabbed his chubby arm, hauled him violently out of the cab and spilled him tumbling across the snow.
‘Sorry.’ Joel threw himself behind the wheel, crunched the truck into gear and stamped on the gas. The vehicle slewed violently around in a circle, the snow chains biting deep and throwing up a spray of mud and grit and slush.
The crowd had spotted him. In his rearview mirror he could make out the hobbling figure of Cosmina’s father leading them furiously down the street. At the old man’s side, the big guy with the beard was waving his flashing scimitar as he ran. Joel floored the accelerator and the diesel roared. The snow chains flailed and crunched against the icy ruts in the road. For a frightening instant the crowd seemed to loom large in the mirror and then he was accelerating away and leaving them in his wake. The ka-boom of a shotgun, and his wing mirror disintegrated. Houses flashed by as he sped through the village outskirts.
Then the last house was behind him, and he was alone again. Just him and the snowy road ahead, and the mountains, and the wild forest creatures that knew to stay away from him.
Joel drove on, and wept.
Chapter Seven
London
Twelve hours’ worth of Solazal protection had only just been enough to get Alex safely home. She’d been watching the clock intently for the last couple of hours of her long journey, teeth on edge. Half a day was about the longest any vampire could expect to get out of one of the photosensitivity neutralisers. When the effects eventually wore off, which they had a habit of doing very suddenly, the spectacular results had once or twice over the last twenty-five years been mistaken by non-vampires as the rare phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. These days, unsuspecting passersby witnessing the fiery demise of a careless vampire might be convinced that they’d come close to being engulfed by some kind of half-hearted incendiary suicide bombing.
Either way, it didn’t make for a very pleasant end for the vampire concerned. Alex was mightily relieved to see the sun sinking behind the London skyline as she finally made it to the door of her Canary Wharf apartment building and rode the lift to her penthouse.
Once inside, she grabbed a remote control from a table. At the touch of a button, thick blackout shutters whirred down to cover every one of the flat’s many large windows, blocking out the sunset glow that was settling across the river, and plunging the whole apartment into pitch darkness.
Safe. She sighed. This was how vampires had lived once, before the Federation had come along and introduced the whole new modern era that had so incensed the champions of the old ways. Alex, who’d been turned back in 1897, remembered the old ways and the old days very well – and in her more reflective moments, she had to admit privately that she’d never felt fully comfortable with the idea of popping pills to help her walk about in daylight. Someone else had put it more eloquently than she could:
‘To cheat the sun, embrace the night. Living dangerously, living free. To hunt, to feed like a real vampire, honouring our sacred heritage and a culture that had reached its pinnacle when human beings were still dragging their knuckles in the dust and grunting like apes.’
Those had been the words of the rebel vampire Gabriel Stone to her, just a couple of days earlier, when he’d been trying to recruit her to his crusade to bring down the heretical Federation forever. Alex had to confess they’d left a mark on her. She also had to confess she was beginning to run out of illusions when it came to the Federation that had employed her since its foundation in 1984.
Uncomfortable thoughts. ‘Back to work,’ she said to herself, and pressed another button on her remote, activating dim sidelights throughout the apartment. She fetched herself a glass of chilled blood from the kitchen – not quite the freshly-spilled article, but satisfying enough – then settled at her desk and fired up the laptop.
Vampires tended not to have a very active social life, so it wasn’t a surprise when only two emails landed in Alex’s inbox. The first was from Baxter Burnett. That was a surprise. She didn’t normally receive emails from movie stars. Baxter Burnett was currently raking in the millions, and getting slated by the critics in equal measure, for his role in the Hollywood schlock-horror, mega-budget Berserker franchise. Except that Baxter was no ordinary movie star: what his millions of adoring fans didn’t know was that he was also a vampire. His little secret was the reason that he and Alex, in her official capacity as a VIA agent tasked with keeping vampires in line with Federation regs, had had some recent dealings. As she recalled, things hadn’t ended too amicably.
She clicked on the email. The message was short, pithy and to the point:
Fuck you, Bishop!!!
Love, BB
‘Thanks for that, Baxter,’ she said, and then moved on to the other message. If anything, it was even less welcome than the first. Its sender, Ivo Donskoi, had been a Prussian army colonel back in the day, before he’d become responsible for hundreds of tortures and executions as part of the East German secret police; now he was personal assistant to none other than Olympia Angelopolis, the Vampress herself, at the Federation’s main HQ in Brussels.
‘What does he want?’ Alex groaned aloud as she opened the email.
Agent McCarthy reports from our field station in Prague that you are now en route to London. Be advised that Supremo Angelopolis has returned to Federation Headquarters. You are hereby requested and required to provide your full written account of recent events without delay on your return, to be sent directly and solely to this office. Failure to comply will result in the strictest penalties.
There was a lot to say in the report, and eleven o’clock had come and gone before Alex had finished typing it all up. The Vampress might not like everything that was in it, but she’d asked for a full account and that was what she’d get.
Alex emailed it back to Donskoi’s office, then got up from the desk and went over to put on some Satie piano music that had been popular around the turn of the twentieth century. Ever since she’d become a vampire, Alex had tended not to keep up with musical trends too much, and she normally found the Satie relaxing. But as she reclined on the sofa with her eyes shut, trying to let the tension ease from her muscles, she knew she didn’t feel safe here any more. As much as she loved the place, with its spacious rooms and views over the river, there was no way she could stay here. It was the first place Joel would come looking for her.
The phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. Alex flashed out an arm and grabbed it from the coffee table. She immediately recognised the crisp, efficient tones of Miss Queck, one of the admin staff at VIA’s London office. ‘Agent Bishop, your presence is required at base.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’ Queck ended the call.
‘Bitch,’ Alex said. She looked at her watch. If she moved fast, she could be at the office just after midnight. She sighed, then flipped herself up, catlike, from the sofa, scooped another remote and Utz McCarthy’s 9mm pistol from the side table and trotted up the polished aluminium spiral staircase that led to her bedroom. The floor-to-ceiling mirror at the far end of the room slid aside at the touch of a button on the remote. She strode through into the large hidden space beyond the glass.
The concealed weapons store was filled with racks of firearms of various shapes and sizes, mostly high-velocity semi-automatics compatible with the Nosferol-tipped rounds produced by the Federation munitions-manufacture division for its VIA personnel. Alex preferred something a little more potent than the standard issue: across one wall was the crowded work-bench where she prepared her own special handloaded cartridges for the massive .50 calibre Desert Eagle pistols she personally favoured for their unstoppable penetration and sheer knock-down power. Combined with the horrific effects of Nosferol on a vampire’s system, it made the pistols the most formidable weapon in her, or anyone’s, private arsenal.