The Cross (15 page)
Authors: Scott G. Mariani
Just after 4 a.m., and the black Rolls Royce Phantom was streaking through the lanes of rural Kent at over a hundred and twenty miles an hour. A relaxed Gabriel Stone was at the wheel, idly listening to a Mendelssohn string quartet as he hurtled the big car through the night. Beside him in the luxurious passenger seat, Lillith was pouring more of the 1993 Dom Pérignon champagne into a crystal flute.
Zachary lounged stretched out in the back, a bottle in one giant fist and a full glass in the other. ‘One thing you gotta say about Lonsdale – that human-ass motherfucker certainly liked to do things in style.’
Gabriel’s hands tightened a little on the wheel in disapproval of Zachary’s language, but he said nothing.
‘What a fun evening this has turned out to be,’ Lillith said, glancing over her shoulder at the bundle of antique sabres, rapiers and broadswords propped up against the back seat next to Zachary. She could still taste the blood from the social call they’d just made to the secluded house a few miles from Rochester. It had been easy enough to find the antiquities collector via an auction catalogue.
‘All in the line of duty,’ Gabriel said.
‘This mission is becoming more and more fun,’ Lillith laughed. ‘I feel quite refreshed, and it’s so nice to be properly armed again. Come on, brother,’ she said, passing the brimming champagne glass to Gabriel, ‘step on it. We barely seem to be moving. What’s wrong with you? I miss my Lotus,’ she added with a sigh.
Gabriel put his foot down as he quaffed the champagne, and the car surged forward. ‘That’s more like it,’ Lillith said, pouring him another glass.
As the car sped along with uncanny smoothness, flashing blue lights appeared in the rearview mirror.
‘Looks like we got some company, guys,’ Zachary rumbled from the back seat.
For a while, Gabriel amused himself speeding along the lanes, skidding round icy bends and leaving the police car floundering in his wake as Lillith and Zachary craned their necks to look back and laugh at the antics of the humans. When the game began to bore him, he slowed the Rolls to a crawl, letting the police car catch up, and then pulled up alongside the grassy verge on a lonely stretch of wooded country road.
The police car’s tyres crunched to a halt on the road a few yards behind them. Its doors opened and two officers climbed out, shining torches at the Rolls. One cop rapped on Gabriel’s window while his younger colleague stood officiously by with his arms folded.
‘Oh, boy,’ Zachary muttered into his champagne, his shoulders quaking with mirth.
‘Shush,’ Lillith giggled, bright-eyed. ‘Try to look nervous.’
Gabriel calmly whirred down his window. ‘Can I be of some assistance to you, orifice? That is to say, officer.’
‘Do you realise that you’re driving without registration plates, sir?’
‘Certainly,’ Gabriel told him. ‘I refuse to be reduced to a number.’
The older cop narrowed his eyes. ‘Have you been drinking, sir?’
‘Why yes,’ Gabriel told him. ‘We all have, in copious quantity. Would you care for a glass? There’s plenty for everyone.’
Zachary fished another bottle out of the icebox to show them.
‘Any idea how fast you were driving back there, sir?’
‘I believe we peaked at just over a hundred and thirty?’ Gabriel said. ‘I could have gone faster, but the roads are a little slippery tonight.’
‘See your licence, please,’ the older one snapped. His officious-looking colleague was having a hard time taking his eyes off Lillith.
‘I’m afraid you have me there, officer,’ Gabriel said with a smile. ‘I never quite got around to taking the driving test.’
The officer stared at him. ‘Name?’
‘The name is Schreck. Maxwell Schreck.’
Meanwhile, the younger cop had managed to tear his gaze away from the beauty in the passenger seat and was shining his torch beam around the rest of the car’s interior. The light glinted off the steel blades in the back. ‘What are those?’ he asked, pointing.
‘I believe those are technically known as
swords
,’ Gabriel explained slowly and patiently.
‘They belong to you?’
‘Well, until this evening, they were the property of a collector chap who lives a few miles from here. He, ah, well, you might say he has loaned them to us. Indefinitely.’
‘We may want to verify that, Mr Schh— uh, sir,’ the older officer said.
‘You could try calling him,’ Lillith purred from the passenger seat. ‘But I think the poor man’s feeling a little drained right now.’
The younger officer was beginning to lose his cool. ‘You do realise it’s illegal to carry those weapons in public?’
Gabriel made a gesture of mock amazement. ‘Speeding, consumption of a little wine, driving without a licence or registration, unauthorised transportation of a few inoffensive swords: my list of crimes grows with each passing moment, it seems. Tell me, officer, is
anything
still legal in this strange, frightened little nation in subjugation? It was great once. I remember those days well, and cannot for the life of me imagine what has become of them.’
The cops were both doing their best not to look flustered. It wasn’t a convincing act. ‘Step out of the vehicle, sir.’
‘Happy to.’ As Gabriel opened the door and climbed out, Lillith couldn’t hold back her fits of giggles any longer and was rocking back and forth in her seat. Glowering at her, the older officer asked, ‘Something amusing you, madam?’
‘It will,’ she said. ‘Just wait and see.’
The officer turned the glower on Gabriel. ‘How much would you say you’ve had to drink tonight, sir?’
‘Oh, three, perhaps four,’ Gabriel said. ‘Glasses?’
‘Bottles. A very good vintage, too.’
‘You
are
aware of the drink-driving limit?’
‘Why yes, officer. That’s why I was drinking. I consider it my civic duty. You see, I read that three out of ten accidents are caused by drunken drivers. In which case, should you not be more concerned about the seventy per cent of sober drivers who are the true culprits behind the carnage on our roads?’
‘Sir, I think you’re in a good deal of trouble,’ the officer said, producing a breathalyser.
‘Not nearly as much as you are,’ Lillith muttered.
‘Don’t you want to know what else I had to drink tonight?’ Gabriel asked him.
‘Four bottles of champagne not enough for us, then? Blow into this, please.’
‘The champagne was merely the chaser. Before that, I drank . . .’ Gabriel turned to Lillith. ‘How much would you say we drank tonight, sister?’
‘Hard to tell exactly,’ Lillith said. ‘He was a biggish guy.’
‘She’s right – he
was
a large fellow,’ Gabriel said. ‘Not quite as substantial as my friend Zachary here, but fairly hefty nonetheless. Say seven of your standard British pints? Divided three ways, I calculate that would come to approximately 2.333 pints each. As I note from your rather blank expressions that neither you nor your colleague has the wits to fully grasp my meaning, let it be clear that I am, in fact, referring to his blood.’
‘. . . You’ve been drinking blood,’ the older cop said numbly. ‘Well done. Correct. And I will soon be drinking more.’
‘And whose blood do you think you’ll be drinking,
sir
?’ smirked the officious-looking one.
Gabriel smiled at them both. ‘Care to hazard a guess? Either of you?’
The officers looked at each other in bewilderment. Just for a second, because in the next, Gabriel reached out and grabbed the older one by the shoulder, jerked him off his feet and sank his fangs deep into the man’s neck.
The tortured, burbling, hysterical screaming began. Lillith and Zachary stepped casually out of the Rolls as the other human tried to make a run for it back to his patrol car. He was less than halfway there when Zachary knocked him to the ground, took one ankle in his large fist and dragged the struggling, wailing human over to the verge.
‘Ladies first,’ Zachary said, holding him down with one hand and motioning politely to Lillith. ‘Careful, Lil. This one’s a kicker.’
‘Such a gentleman, Zach.’ Lillith’s eyes twinkled with anticipation as she knocked back the last drop of champagne from her glass, fell on the human, shoved his head back and ripped into his throat with her teeth. She laughed for joy as she felt the warm pleasure jetting out of his severed artery onto her parted lips. She drank, swallowed, laughed again and drank some more, until she was breathless and heady with it – then wiped her mouth, leaving a red smear across her perfect cheek.
‘Blood and champagne,’ she gasped in ecstasy. ‘Does it for me every time. But darling, I’m being selfish.’ Jerking the human upright, she held the champagne glass under his torn throat, watched as the spray of luscious red juice quickly filled it to the brim, and gave it to Zachary to knock back in a single gulp.
‘Always tastes better from crystal,’ he rumbled, smacking his lips. ‘Why is that, you think?’
Gabriel had finished with his human. As he approached, leaving the exsanguinated corpse by the roadside, Lillith handed him the refilled glass. Gabriel sipped from it, then passed it back to her.
‘To victory,’ she smiled, raising it in a toast.
‘To eternity,’ Gabriel said.
Oxford
Joel had caught the early train from Southampton, using the money that Tommy had lent him. In his pocket were six tubes of Solazal pills, and he could still taste the one he’d taken earlier. So far, the stuff seemed to be working: the pale morning sun seemed to have no effect.
At moments he almost felt normal again. And yet, walking through the crowds at Oxford station, it was bewildering to think that all these people around him had no idea what he really was, what he’d become. Even more bewildering to realise that, in such a short time since wakening up on that snowy Romanian mountainside, he’d already grown used to hiding himself away from the humans. Being openly among them now seemed alien to him.
As he scanned the faces of the people around him, Joel wondered if any of them were vampires like him – Federation vampires able to walk about in daylight. Would some recognition instinct kick in if he encountered one?
Heading out of the station building and towards the taxi rank outside, he passed a woman with a small spaniel on a leash. It suddenly transformed from a placid little creature to a furiously-snapping piranha fish on legs the instant he came within five yards of it.
‘Quiet, Bethany,’ the woman scolded, aghast at her dog’s behaviour. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘Dogs don’t like me,’ Joel explained with a weak smile, and walked on. Still dazed, he took a cab westwards through the city to his home district of Jericho. As they drove, the radio news was reporting the disappearance of a police patrol car and two officers in Kent the night before, but the reception was crackly and Joel caught little of it before the driver skipped impatiently to a loud music station. Ten minutes later the taxi pulled up outside the row of Georgian red-brick terraced houses in Walton Well Road. Joel paid the driver and got out, slamming the door so hard that it made the whole car rattle.
‘Hey, steady on, mate,’ the taxi driver said, scowling at him.
‘Sorry,’ Joel mumbled, and turned to climb the steps to the front door of his ground-floor flat. The door had been boarded up. He remembered the fight he’d had with Gabriel Stone’s ghoulish manservant, Seymour Finch. Finch had burst through the glass panel as if it had been nothing. Yet he wasn’t a vampire. What other powers could a vampire transmit to a human to give them such extraordinary strength?
Joel’s dark thoughts were interrupted as the ruddy face of Mrs Dowling from next door appeared over the fence. ‘Inspector Solomon? We’ve been worried about you. Maurice fixed up the door for you. We didn’t know where you’d gone. Anyone could have just walked in.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Dowling. I had to go away. I’m back now.’
‘Your kitchen’s completely wrecked. We thought of calling the police, but . . . well, seeing as you
are
the police . . .’
‘Just redecorating,’ he reassured her. ‘Nothing to worry about. Thanks for thinking of it, though.’
‘Is everything all right?’ she asked, peering at him curiously. ‘You seem . . . I don’t know.’
‘I haven’t been quite myself the last couple of days,’ Joel said.
‘You don’t look ill, or anything. Just different, somehow.’
Joel left her to figure it out and went inside. The wreckage of the kitchen had been tidied up a little – Maurice again, he supposed. He went over to the phone, checked his calls and messages and found that someone had been calling him repeatedly from a mobile whose number he didn’t recognise. The messages, on the other hand, were from someone whose voice he knew right away.
Sam Carter was Joel’s longtime friend, as well as his superior at Thames Valley Police. He’d always been a man of few words, and his phone messages were true to form.
‘Need to talk. Give me a call right now.’
The Ridings
One part of the late Jeremy Lonsdale’s mansion that the pale morning sun couldn’t reach was the vaulted, windowless wine cellar that ran almost the entire length of the house. It was filled with the kind of collection of fine vintages that only a multi-millionaire with a taste for the good life could have put together.
Now, though, the cellar had been put to another use. Back in business and on a mission to finish what he’d started, Gabriel Stone had designated the place the nerve-centre of his renewed rebellion against the Federation. The heavy oak wine racks had been shoved aside to make room for the long table they’d brought down from Lonsdale’s plush dining room. Its gleaming surface was crisscrossed with a spaghetti of wires connecting the politician’s desktop computer to a bank of extra monitors.
‘Man, I don’t know why you think I can do this,’ Zachary groaned from where he sat hunched massively over the computer keyboard, tapping the odd key more or less randomly and scratching his head. ‘I mean, this ain’t nothing I’ve done before. Setting up email accounts and shit was always Anton’s job.’
‘Zachary darling, you know Anton’s not with us any more,’ Lillith said nonchalantly, honing the edge of her new heavy cavalry dragoon’s sabre with a whetstone, a cloth and a bottle of gun oil at her elbow. ‘Someone else has to do it.’
‘Yeah, but why me? I ain’t a morning kind of guy, you know?’
‘Because we’re busy,’ she said, closing one eye and peering down the curve of the sword blade. ‘Aren’t we, Gabriel?’
Gabriel had been standing at the far end of the cellar, head bowed in meditation. He turned and looked coldly at Zachary. ‘You know how to operate one of those small communication devices the humans carry around with them, do you not?’
‘A mobile phone,’ Lillith put in. ‘Zach’s a dab hand with one.’
Zachary shrugged his huge shoulders. ‘Sure. But this—’
‘Then you will soon learn to penetrate the mysteries of the technological Tower of Babel that our food source call the interweb, in order to re-establish communications with our network of associates. Surely the principle is similar.’
‘They call it the inter
net
,’ Zachary corrected him.
‘There. Already it becomes evident that you are far ahead of either myself or Lillith in these matters. Now get on with it.’ Gabriel walked over to the table and slid a piece of paper across it towards Zachary. ‘With these electronic mail addresses you will be able to rally round the faithful. Send out the word of my survival, of our renewed mission. Summon them all here. Rolando, Petroc, Elspeth, Yuri and the others. And Kali, of course.’
‘Oh, yes, let’s not forget Kali,’ Lillith muttered under her breath.
Gabriel turned to her with a frown. ‘I believe my disapproving sister had been allocated the task of drafting a letter?’
Lillith looked up from her blade-sharpening. ‘“Dear Prime Minister, regret to inform you that due to personal reasons, blah blah blah, compelled to resign my position forthwith, will be taking a trip around the world and will not be contactable, etc., etc., yours sincerely, Jeremy Lonsdale.” What am I, your secretary now? Get Kali to write it when she gets here, as you seem to value her so much.’
Gabriel was about to reply sharply when the cellar door creaked slowly open and a balding head appeared through the gap, followed by a slouching, stooped form. Lillith snatched up her sabre, then relaxed. ‘Oh, it’s only the ghoul.’
Already the few drops of vampire blood, tapped from an opened vein and forced down the human’s throat, had worked a dramatic physical change on him. Geoffrey Hopley skulked across the cellar like a beaten dog, clutching a large tray on which were three steaming mugs and a folded newspaper. He laid it down reverently on the table.
Gabriel stared. ‘What is this, ghoul?’
‘Your tea, master,’ Geoffrey croaked.
‘
Tea?
’
‘Mr Lonsdale always took a cup of tea with the morning paper. Perhaps master would care for a biscuit?’
Gabriel peered with revulsion at the tray. ‘
Biscuit?
Certainly not. And what makes you think we would be interested in consuming this vile liquid of yours? Not to mention,’ he added, swatting away the newspaper, ‘reading the infantile and usually mendacious drivel that the humans call news.’
‘Can’t get the staff these days,’ Lillith murmured, returning to her sword-sharpening.
‘Mr Lonsdale liked to k-k-keep up with what was h-happening in the world,’ stammered the ghoul.
‘As if the human race had the remotest notion of what is really happening in the world,’ Gabriel snorted. ‘You’re wasting our time. Get back to your hole until we find further use for you.’ He grabbed the newspaper and hurled it violently at the cowering ghoul. ‘Do you hear me? Leave us, cur!’
Geoffrey picked up the tray and bowed and scraped his way backwards out of the cellar.
‘I told you those two would be useless, Gabriel,’ Lillith said with a smile when the door had banged shut. ‘We should have just drained them dry and been done with it.’
‘Damn them both. Too late now. Ghoul blood is undrinkable.’ Gabriel stooped to snatch up the fallen newspapers and tossed them on the table. ‘Zachary, are you making any progress?’ he snapped.
‘Give me time,’ Zachary muttered, tapping more keys. ‘I’ll get it.’
Lillith casually reached down for the crumpled newspaper, peeled away the front and back pages and used them to test the edge of her blade. The steel sliced cleanly through the paper like a razor; the two halves fluttered to the floor. ‘Not perfect,’ she said, giving the blade a few more strokes from her hone before peeling off another sheet. She was about to cut it when she stopped and let out a loud shuddering gasp. Her sword fell with a clang to the tiled floor as she twisted away from the newspaper in horror.
‘Lil?’ Zachary said, alarmed. ‘You okay?’
‘What is it, sister?’ Gabriel cried.
Lillith pressed a hand to her chest, catching her breath, and pointed at the newspaper without looking. ‘I can’t bear to see it. I never wanted to see that thing again.’
Gabriel strode over and snatched up the paper. His eyes searched the rumpled page, then narrowed with a blaze of anger and fear as his gaze landed on the small, crisp colour image in the bottom left-hand corner.
An image of a cross. A Celtic cross, one whose appearance was terrifyingly familiar, its shattered fragments pieced together and held in place with wire. Who had done this?
The headline of the small article was:
HISTORY PROFESSOR’S DISCOVERY IS OUT OF THIS WORLD.
‘“Oxford University boffins are baffled,”’ Gabriel read aloud, ‘“by the discovery of an ancient artifact in the mountains of Romania. Chloe Dempsey, 19, a pentathlete and student at the University of Bedfordshire, came across the mysterious object while on a skiing trip with friends and brought it to the UK to show to her father, Professor Matt Dempsey, 56, a curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum . . .” I will not read it all. Suffice to say that my fears were correct. The cross of Ardaich has been found.’