Department 19: Zero Hour (7 page)

For almost a minute, Valentin didn’t move; he was frozen to the spot by the scale and frenzy of the invasion, his eyes wide, his face pale, the initial shock and outrage already evolving in the pit of his stomach into a boiling, howling fury beyond anything he could remember.

Something in the centre of what was left of his desk caught his eye: a narrow sliver of dark pink. Valentin forced his body into action, floated across the room, and picked it up with his long fingers. It was a Bliss cigarette, one of many that had sat in an ornate rosewood box on his desk, and had miraculously survived the ransacking. Valentin placed it between his lips, found a match, and lit it, dragging the smoke deeply into his lungs. The potent mixture of tobacco, heroin and human blood thundered into his system, and he felt an ethereal calm settle over him.

You should have expected this
, he told himself.
Valeri was here the day before you left. You should have known there would be a price to be paid for what you did.

Valentin finished the cigarette and ground it beneath the heel of his shoe. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t sure what he should do next. His first instinct was to bellow for Lamberton, the butler who had served him faultlessly for almost a century. But Lamberton was gone, his heart torn from his chest by Valentin’s own hand, punishment for an act of stupidity that had threatened to blacken his master’s name along with his own. It was a misjudgement that still made Valentin furious with disappointment; Lamberton’s affection for his master had been exploited by the traitor Richard Brennan, and his determination not to trouble Valentin with the problem had left the ancient vampire with no choice but to destroy his oldest companion.

I have not yet forgiven you,
he thought, as he floated back out into the corridor,
for what you made me do.

Valentin felt a stab of pain in his heart as he looked at the priceless treasures that now lay in tatters; the accumulated wonders of a long life destroyed for reasons no grander than malice and spite. He flew slowly down the corridor towards the round atrium at the centre of the floor; there were identical spaces on each level of his home, the five above ground and the two below. All were flanked by two elevator shafts and opened on to the central staircase, the grand, sweeping column of marble and carved wood that Valentin thought of as the spine of the house.

He was greeted in the atrium by another deluge of spray-painted insults, and the twisted, broken remains of the Alexander Calder mobile that had hung from the ceiling since Valentin had liberated it from an SS Colonel fleeing for South America in 1945. The mobile’s beautiful, delicate wings had been pulled down and torn apart, the broken shards strewn across the floor. Valentin stared at them, and realised he could not go downstairs; he knew what he would find, and the prospect of floating through the ruins of his life filled him with a despair so profound it was almost physical.

Then something drifted through the silent atrium, carried up from below on the faintest current of air, and his eyes flooded a dreadful crimson-black. It would have been undetectable to anyone without Valentin’s supernatural senses, but to him it was as strong and clear as the beam of a lighthouse.

It was the scent of a vampire.

Still here,
he thought, and felt his body physically tremble with anticipation.
Whoever did this. They’re still here.

The heat in Valentin’s eyes built to an almost unbearable temperature. He floated in the air, letting the scent of the intruder fill his nostrils, tasting heat and blood and sweat. Then he swept silently forward, his jacket billowing out behind him, and descended the staircase like a bird of prey. He ignored the graffiti and destruction in the atria as he soared through them; his mind was burning solely with the prospect of vengeance. Within seconds, he was standing before the grand double doors that led into the ground-floor ballroom, the cavernous space where he had first encountered an agent of what would become known as Blacklight, where the chain of events that had led him to this moment had been set in slow, languorous motion.

Valentin took a deep breath, then threw open the doors. They hit the walls of the atrium with a noise like coffin lids slamming shut, the impact reverberating through the thick stone of the old building. He stepped into the ballroom and took a quick glance around the room; the grand chandelier, beneath which thousands of men and women had twirled and spun, lay shattered across the black and white marble floor. Tiles had been torn up and hurled throughout the room, sticking out of the walls and ceiling like splinters in skin. The long bar that ran the length of the far wall had been tipped over and smashed, its bottles and glasses now little more than a carpet of twinkling wreckage spreading out across the broken tiles. Then he saw the two figures standing at the edge of the floor, and the damage to the room was forgotten.

The vampires were embracing, frozen in the middle of what looked to Valentin’s experienced eye like an amateurish waltz. The woman was wearing a long ballgown dripping with jewellery that he immediately recognised; it had been taken from the collection in his dressing room on the fifth floor. The man was wearing a tuxedo that had been crafted for Valentin by Coco Chanel in her apartment on Rue Cambon, as Europe breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the Great War. They stared at him with wide eyes, with the guilty half-smiles of people who have been caught doing something they are not supposed to.

“At last,” said the man, finding his voice first. “The traitor returns. I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your—”

The last words the man ever spoke died in his throat as Valentin crossed the ballroom in a blur of navy blue and trailing red. The vampires, who had been happily desecrating his home for almost a month, didn’t have time to blink before he was upon them.

Valentin closed a pale hand round the man’s neck, crushed his windpipe as though it was tissue paper, and threw him across the cavernous room. The vampire crashed into the panelled wall, sending an explosion of blood and splintered wood into the air, then slid to the floor, clutching weakly at his neck as his face turned rapidly purple. The woman’s eyes began to redden as her mouth yawned open, but before she could form a single syllable, Valentin shoved his hands through skin and muscle and took hold of her shoulder bones, his fingernails scraping across them like metal down a blackboard.

Blood gushed out across the backs of his hands, soaking the cuffs of his shirt, as the woman threw back her head and screamed in agony. Valentin lifted her into the air, blood raining down on to his face and neck, and spread his arms wide. The woman came apart with a sound like a roll of paper being torn in half, huge and wet. She fell to the ground in two pieces, her eyes wide with shock as her insides spilled out across the black and white tiles.

Valentin wiped blood from his own eyes and saw the woman’s heart lying in the centre of the steaming mess. He stamped it flat, and what was left of the vampire burst with a series of pitiful bangs and thuds. Valentin had already turned away, and was bearing down on the other stricken male vampire like the angel of death, a bloodstained vision from the depths of some terrible nightmare.

The vampire raised a trembling hand in a futile plea for mercy. Valentin kicked it aside with such force that he heard the bones in the man’s arm snap like cocktail sticks, then lowered himself over the vampire, his knees resting either side of the man’s chest. Air whistled out of the vampire’s ruined throat; he was incapable of forming words, but his eyes were wide and pleading.

Valentin didn’t say a word; he began to punch the vampire in the face, over and over again, his arm rising and falling like a piston. Blood flew in the silent air of the ballroom, as the ancient vampire gave himself over entirely to the terrible, brutal beauty of revenge.

Sometime later his mind cleared.

What lay on the ground beneath Valentin was now little more than a bubbling mass of red and pink. His arm screamed with pain, and he found he could no longer raise it above his shoulder. He got slowly to his feet and stamped a foot through the vampire’s chest, crushing the heart that was still flickering with life. There was a thump as what was left of the vampire’s body burst, spraying the already soaked Valentin with yet more blood, but he barely noticed. The euphoria of vengeance was gone, and all that remained was the inevitable emptiness, the inescapable truth that one act cannot cancel out another.

He flew across the ballroom without a backward glance, then up the sweeping curves of the staircase and along the corridor until he was again standing in the middle of his study. He strode over to room’s north wall, slid his fingers across a wooden panel that appeared identical to all the others until he found the tiny depression the invading vampires had missed, and pressed it firmly.

A motor whirred into life, and a large section of the wall slid out and to the side, revealing a vault with a round metal door that looked like it belonged on a submarine. Valentin placed a hand into a plastic slot and felt a needle break the skin of his index finger. A drop of blood fell into the chamber of a small centrifuge which spun into life, analysing the DNA contained in the crimson liquid. There was a long pause, then a black panel above the slot turned green and the door rumbled open. Valentin stepped through it and into the vault, a metal cube with an uncrackable safe at the rear and metal shelving on either side.

Two of the shelves were full of gold bars, gleaming under strip lights set into the ceiling. Below them were three shelves full of money: dollars, euros, pounds, yen and yuan, all wrapped tightly in clear plastic. On the opposite wall, clear plastic boxes contained bonds and share certificates, many of them more than a hundred years old.

Under the boxes lay three wooden racks full of wine bottles, and it was these that Valentin first turned his attention to. He reached out a blood-soaked hand, carefully lifted a bottle from the middle of the highest rack, and examined the label. The word
Petrus
was printed in ornate red lettering beneath a severe illustration of a bearded man and
1947
in simple black print. He had been saving the bottle, arguably the finest of the entire twentieth century, for an occasion that was special even by his own rarefied standards; he was now beginning to think that such an occasion might never arise.

Working incredibly carefully, Valentin applied an opener to the bottle’s cork, until it gave way with a loud pop and an escape of air that was overpoweringly, almost impossibly fragrant as it entered his nostrils. He raised the bottle to his lips, took a delicate sip, and sighed deeply as a smile of glorious contentment appeared on his face. He took a second, longer drink, then put the bottle down and forced himself to focus.

Valentin lifted an elegant overnight bag from the bottom shelf, filled it with two stacks of each currency and two of the gold bars, and zipped it shut. He hoisted the bag on to his shoulder, picked up the bottle of Petrus, and took a long look around the vault; he knew there was every chance he would never see it again. Then he floated through the door, pushed it shut behind him, and flew out of his study, heading for the roof he had landed on less than fifteen minutes earlier.

The ancient vampire looked out across the dark expanse of Central Park, swigging liberally from the priceless bottle of wine. His head was starting to feel agreeably fuzzy, and the lights of Manhattan that shimmered to the south were starting to ever so slightly blur.

You could just go
, said a voice at the back of his head. It was the voice that had encouraged him to live exactly as he pleased for more than a century, to think of nobody but himself.
Fly south. Brazil, or Cuba. Let Blacklight deal with this.

Valentin had stood in the grounds of the Loop barely three hours earlier, promising Paul Turner that he would find Valeri and Dracula, find them and deliver their location back to Blacklight, and he had meant it; he had leapt into the cold air of eastern England, burning with an alien desire to help prevent his former master plunging the world into darkness. But now, standing on the roof of his devastated home with the evening breeze fluttering against his skin, he found himself torn.

If the end was truly nigh, if the rise of Dracula was genuinely unavoidable, then the sensible thing to do would be to disappear into the dark corners of the world he knew so well and enjoy whatever time still remained. But something nagged at him, something that manifested as a stubborn reluctance to do so. Part of it was the invasion of his home, a cruel, petty violation that he had no doubt had been personally ordered by his brother. And another part was something that surprised him even as he realised it: a curious unwillingness to betray Paul Turner. The Blacklight Security Officer was hard, and had made absolutely no secret of his dislike and distrust of Valentin. But he was also honest, courageous, and utterly committed to both his mission and his men, qualities that the former General Rusmanov had once prized extremely highly, in the time when he had still been a man.

Valentin drained the bottle of Petrus and flipped it casually towards Central Park; it spiralled end over end, light reflecting off its dark green surface, until it disappeared into the gloom. Then he lifted the overnight bag, swung it over his shoulder, and stepped off the roof.