The Cross (28 page)
Authors: Scott G. Mariani
The back door was unlocked. Alex slipped quietly inside. The décor was pretty much what you might expect from a midpay-grade admin official at VIA, but Alex winced at the colour of the living room.
Ouch
. Last time she’d been here, for a hundred-and-fortieth birthday party (some vampires took longer than others to get bored of them), the walls hadn’t been quite this shocking shade of pink.
Jen Minto was perched on the edge of an armchair staring intently at the TV news. Her short blond hair was unbrushed and she was wearing a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms.
‘I shouldn’t imagine there’d be anything on there about us,’ Alex said.
Minto jerked round in astonishment, her eyes opening wide. ‘Alex! I . . . I wasn’t expecting . . .’
Alex walked up to her. ‘Door was open. Got to be careful. There are bad people around.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Utz McCarthy told me you made it out. I came to see how you were.’
‘I wasn’t there when it happened,’ Minto said. ‘I was one of the first ones to go in, after . . . oh, Alex, it’s so awful. And the word is that Supremo Angelopolis . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I’m so glad that you didn’t get caught up in it.’
‘I would have been, if I hadn’t been called away on urgent business,’ Alex said. ‘Not that any of it matters now.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Minto said. ‘Everything’s in ruins.’
‘Too early to say. All I know is that right now, it’s every vampire for herself.’ Alex smiled, but it was a hard smile. ‘You should know something about that, Jen.’
Minto gave a puzzled frown. ‘What do you mean by that remark?’
Alex perched on the arm of the sofa opposite. ‘Things have been kind of hectic for me lately,’ she said. ‘You might even say I’ve been a bit rushed off my feet, with one thing and another. Which is why certain little niggly details might have slipped my mind. Careless, I know.’
‘That’s normal enough,’ Minto said, still frowning. ‘Working for VIA takes its toll on the best of us.’
‘Little niggly details like, for instance, something you said to me the day I got back from Romania,’ Alex said.
The lines in Minto’s brow had deepened to corrugated furrows. She kept glancing at the door and her breathing had quickened a fraction. ‘I don’t understand, Alex.’
‘I think you do,’ Alex said. ‘I think you understand exactly what I’m saying. Remember what you told me? You said, “And Xavier Garrett? He was one of them?”’
‘But he was.’
‘Yes, he was. The whole time Gabriel Stone was mounting his uprising against the Federation, Xavier was his spy inside VIA, feeding him all the juicy little bits of information he needed. We lost a lot of good agents because of him. That’s why I put a bullet in the bastard at the conference in Belgium. But the funny thing is, Jen, I never said a single word about any of it to you.’
Minto’s face flushed. ‘No . . . no, I know you didn’t. It was Cornelius who told me about it.’
‘Kelby?’ Alex shook her head. ‘Kelby couldn’t have known about it either, because the one and only place I ever mentioned it was in the confidential field report I sent directly to Brussels HQ, and the one and only person who ever saw it was Olympia Angelopolis herself. Given some of the stuff I wrote about, I know for a fact she wouldn’t have shown it to anyone else. So, any other ideas where you might have heard about Garrett, Jen?’
Minto said nothing.
‘You know, Jen, it’s less than twelve hours since our whole organisation got fucked sideways by something that’s been hidden away for hundreds of years and hardly anyone could have seen coming – and you haven’t even asked me what it was.’ Alex smiled that hard smile again. ‘That’s because you already know all about it, don’t you? Because Xavier Garrett wasn’t Gabriel Stone’s only mole inside VIA. He had an accomplice. Someone who knew all about the attack, exactly when it was coming, and was able to get out of the way just before Ash arrived there with the cross. Oh, and not to mention letting Stone know where I’d gone in Wales, so that he could send his goons to assassinate me. That made me feel so important.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Minto gasped.
‘Really?’ Alex stood up and whipped the Desert Eagle out of her bag. Minto’s eyes bugged at the sight of the gun. Alex came a step closer. With a
snick-snack
of the Desert Eagle’s slide she racked the top round from the magazine into the breech, then shoved the muzzle against Minto’s right temple. ‘You didn’t give them a chance, Jen. But guess what. I’m giving you one, because that is what a nice vampire I am. Where’s Stone?’
Minto opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a strangled croak. Her eyes strained sideways to stare at the gun muzzle pressed against her head.
‘The Federation might be finished,’ Alex said, ‘but there’s still some Nosferol left in this world. A nice fat hollowpoint full of it, about eight inches from your brain, to be precise. I’ll ask you one more time: where’s Stone?’
‘They were all at Lonsdale’s place in Surrey,’ Minto blurted out. ‘But Gabriel left there last night.’
‘You’re making progress. Where did he go?’
‘Switzerland!’ Minto said, her voice rising in pitch. ‘Baxter Burnett’s place in Switzerland. That’s all know, I swear!’
‘Good enough for me,’ Alex said. ‘See you in vampire hell, Jen. This will only hurt for a minute.’
Minto yelped in terror. ‘But you said you’d give me a chance!’
‘A chance to redeem yourself, sure. Not a chance to talk your way out of this. We’re way past that.’
‘No! Please!’
‘And by the way, your buddy Gabriel would
really
disapprove of the décor in this place. Have to say I agree with him on that one.’
Alex didn’t blink as she pulled the trigger. Even before Minto’s throes of agony were over and the mess had spattered across the living room carpet, she was heading through the front door and walking back out into the street towards the parked Jaguar.
‘Well?’ Joel said as she climbed in behind the wheel.
‘We’re going on a trip,’ she said, firing up the engine.
The Swiss Alps, north-east of Zermatt
Baxter Burnett had bought the luxurious, rambling three-floored chalet, perched high over the mountain valley, from an Austrian industrialist billionaire who’d used it as a hunting lodge. Taking pot-shots at curly-horned wild goats in a blizzard had never been Baxter’s idea of fun; whereas entertaining two or three star-struck wannabe actresses at once by a crackling log fire was much more in his line, and with a little imagination and a lot of hard cash he’d transformed the place into a perfect haven of hedonism and debauchery. Gabriel Stone was unimpressed by the movie star’s lamentable taste in art, and even more so by the tubes of Solazal he found in the bedside drawer and promptly tossed in the fire – but the chalet would do very nicely for a few weeks, as a base from which to celebrate the success of his mission.
It was eight thirty and the night was cold. Standing on the balcony overlooking the valley, Gabriel breathed in the crisp mountain air and looked out across the stillness at the twinkling lights of towns and villages in the distance. The heavy snow had come early that year, capping the tops of the pine forest. Stars were shining in their millions; the Milky Way laid a luminous wash across the whole white landscape.
Far below, a vehicle was tracking its way slowly along the winding valley road. Gabriel watched its progress like an eagle surveying its prey. He imagined the humans sitting inside, cradled in the warm blast of their heater, listening to their music, completely oblivious of the predator’s eye on them from high above. Nobody out here in the snowy wilderness would have heard their cries for help. And they would never know how lucky they were to have reached their destination that night.
As Gabriel watched the vehicle disappear behind the trees, a pair of willowy arms encircled him from behind and Kali’s tousled black hair nestled against his shoulder.
‘Hmmmm,’ she sighed happily. ‘It’s so good to be here, just the two of us. Like old times.’ She kissed his ear. ‘Do you remember the old days, Gabriel, sweet?’
‘With as much fond pleasure as I look forward to the glorious times yet to come,’ Gabriel said, stroking her hair. ‘Get dressed, Kali. The hunting hour is here.’
Access to Baxter Burnett’s top-of-the-range cable car was from a custom-designed boarding station on the ground floor of the chalet. Through its grand expanse of glass, the cable car offered a 360-degree view of the valley below and the stars above. Its smooth cable system glided it downwards, suspended high over the snow and the trees, to the landing station at the bottom, where a gated private lane led to the winding valley road. Waiting for them there, its black body-work gleaming under the stars, was the brand-new Ferrari Enzo that Gabriel had had delivered earlier that day, the funds wired the night before to the dealership in Geneva from the numbered account in Zürich that his late, much-missed ghoul, Seymour Finch, had opened for him.
‘This is a pretty little toy you’ve bought yourself,’ Kali said as he held open the passenger door for her. Grinning boyishly, Gabriel leaped behind the wheel and fired up the engine. The blast of the twin exhausts melted the snow, the tyres spun against the road and the Ferrari took off like a missile.
‘Some aspects of the modern world suit you well, Gabriel,’ Kali said, leaning back in her seat and noticing his obvious enjoyment as he threw the car into tight bends at 125 miles an hour.
‘I will admit that it offers certain pleasurable distractions that we could once only have dreamed of.’ He glanced at her and saw her broad smile. ‘What amuses you?’
‘I was remembering the look on that poor fool Baxter Burnett’s face when you told him how much of his money you were going to take.’
‘What of it?’ he asked innocently.
She laughed. ‘Oh come on. Don’t you think it was just a tiny little bit mean of you, pretending that you were running low on funds? With all the gold and diamonds a vampire could wish for, and all those millions you have stored in the human banks?’
Gabriel powered the Ferrari hard out of a bend and the engine note soared like a racing car’s as he accelerated down a long straight. ‘You know as well as I do, Kali my dear, that a lifestyle such as ours requires a great deal of forward planning. I have no intention of spending all eternity as a pauper.’
Arriving at a small town twenty miles or so further on, the Ferrari prowled the streets in search of likely victims. ‘There’s a charming little Bierkeller,’ Kali said, pointing. ‘Let’s scout it.’
Gabriel parked around the back of the place and showed Kali inside, down a spiral of metal steps leading down to a busy traditional Swiss beer cellar. Gabriel ordered a bottle of the best champagne, and at their little corner table they clinked a toast and sat surveying the humans in the place. Discussing the
hors d’oeuvres
menu for the evening was almost as much fun as the actual feeding.
‘What about those two?’ Kali said, pointing with the rim of her glass at a hand-holding couple a few tables away.
‘Possibly, possibly. The female is somewhat rachitic, of the unhealthy thin-blooded type. Most likely vegetarian. I would tend to favour the hale and hearty specimen over there,’ he added, pointing at the fleshier of two men sitting near the bar.
One or two faces turned towards the stairs as a din of tramping footsteps announced the invasion of the beer cellar by a boorish troop of young males in their twenties. From the beery smell they brought with them, it was obvious this wasn’t the first establishment they’d inflicted themselves on that night.
‘British tourists,’ Kali said, rolling her eyes. ‘God help us.
’ The seven young men piled around a table in the middle of the room and hollered for drinks. Within minutes their raucous laughter, crude banter and constant blaring of mobile ringtones made it all but impossible for anyone else around them to have a conversation. When the landlord went over to their table to ask them politely to keep the noise down, he was sent away with jeers and threats.
‘Is there no escape from vulgarity?’ Gabriel said. ‘Come, let us pursue our activities elsewhere. I find this environment oppressive.’ He and Kali finished their champagne and got up to leave. As they passed the rowdy table, one of the yobs twisted round in his chair to ogle Kali and lick his lips. His overfed pal next to him, sporting a roast-beef complexion and a neck like a bullock’s, grinned up at Gabriel and called out, ‘Hey, mate, what’s the matter – couldn’t you get a white one?’ They all burst out laughing, elbowing each other and raising their beer glasses.
Gabriel stopped and peered down at him. ‘This is Kali,’ he said. ‘Named after the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. I would advise caution. This Kali makes the original appear like Mother Teresa of Calcutta by comparison.’
‘What the fuck’s he on about?’ the yob asked his pals.
‘Woooo, I’m really scared,’ another one said in a mock-frightened voice.
Kali tugged at Gabriel’s sleeve. ‘Let’s go.’
It was twenty minutes later when the landlord finally managed to turf the rowdy crew out of his establishment. The street outside echoed with obscenities as the tourists staggered away in search of another bar. The large beefy member of the gang broke away from them for a moment to lurch a few steps up a dark alleyway near the Bierkeller and urinate against the wall. As he did up his flies, he let out a loud belch and was about to lumber off to rejoin his friends when a force that felt like a steel cable jerked him backwards off his feet and dragged him into the shadows of the alleyway.
By the time his companions missed him, his pallid, bloodless remains were already beginning to freeze at the bottom of three different rubbish bins and a recycling skip.
For Gabriel and Kali, the night had only just begun.
Siberia
3.44 a.m. local time
By the time the Citation Bravo touched down at the tiny airfield a few miles from the mining outpost of Norilsk, the night sky was turning white with snow and visibility was so poor that the landing lights were just yellowish blurs in the raging blizzard. Neither the pilots nor the ground crew would have ever contemplated being out in these conditions if it hadn’t been for the handsome cash handouts promised by the mysterious Mr Stone.
Beyond the rusting hulk of an old Ilyushin jet liner was the little shack where the humans had strict orders to remain until the three travellers returned; they hurried over to it to warm themselves over the woodburning stove. Stepping out of the air-conditioned plane into a minus twenty degree gale, Ash might have taken refuge alongside them if he’d been willing to show human frailty in front of his two escorts.
He wasn’t about to do that. Instead, he waited in the near-whiteout with Zachary and Lillith and shivered miserably under his fur-lined parka. Under his arm he was clutching the sackcloth-wrapped executioner’s sword that he wouldn’t be parted from. After a few minutes the lights of an approaching vehicle cut swathes through the blizzard and a snow-covered black Mercedes pulled up to collect them.
An hour later, when the car had cut as deep into the white wilderness as it could, they were picked up by a little convoy of snowmobiles.
The vampires were being careful. Even though he could see hardly anything out of his remaining eye but swirling snow, Ash was blindfolded for the remainder of the journey to the Übervampyr citadel. By the time it was removed, he was far below ground and the temperature had risen to something close to bearable. Ash looked around him at the fantastical ice caverns, like something from another world. His mouth twitched.
Zachary could see the faraway look of sadness on Lillith’s face as the guards escorted them through the citadel. ‘You’re thinking about Gabriel and Kali?’ he asked her softly.
She shrugged and said nothing.
‘He’ll come back to you,’ Zachary told her gently. ‘He always does.’
They were met by another squad of vampire guards. ‘You have it?’ their leader barked. Zachary took off the backpack he was wearing, unzipped it and took out the lead-lined case, still wrapped in the chain Gabriel had fastened around it. The guard went to snatch it, but Zachary jerked it up out of his reach.
‘This is for Master Xenrai,’ Lillith said. ‘Nobody else touches it.’
‘Is it just me, or are these guys more heavily tooled up than they were last time we were here?’ Zachary rumbled as they were led through the ice corridors. Lillith had noticed it too: there were almost twice as many vampire guards in evidence, and they carried long, cruel halberds and pikes as well as swords.
‘Only you two may enter,’ the guard said, stopping at a doorway. ‘The human comes with us.’
‘Where are you taking him?’
‘He will be kept safe. Your weapons, please. You cannot go before the Masters so armed.’
Lillith and Zachary reluctantly unstrapped their sidearms and were shown inside a high-walled chamber. Before long, the tall, bent figure of an Übervampyr appeared, followed by a second, their robes sweeping the floor as they seemed to glide along. Zachary looked away as the creatures drew back their hoods, and not just because it was impolite to make eye contact.
‘I’d been expecting Master Xenrai,’ Lillith said, recognising the face of the Übervampyr called Tarcz-kôi who had headed the prosecution at the trial.
Tarcz-kôi made a stiff little bow. ‘Just as I had been expecting Krajzok – or, as you call him, Gabriel. I am afraid that Master Xenrai is . . .
indisposed
. You will deal with me and my esteemed comrade, Grak-shükh, from now on. Where is our prize?’
‘Here,’ Lillith said. She hesitated, then passed him the case. The Übervampyr took it eagerly from her and ran a clawed hand over its surface. ‘That so small an object could cause such pain,’ he murmured.
‘Gabriel said you plan to encase the cross in liquid lead and bury it deep in the ice, where it can never do harm again and no human can ever find it,’ Lillith said.
The Master’s hideous face twisted into an expression that Lillith recognised as an enigmatic kind of smile. ‘We shall dispose of the
Zcrokczak
as we see fit. Tell me, where is our beloved Young One? His absence here today is a disappointment to us.’
Lillith told him.
‘A holiday,’ the Master sneered, with a glance at his colleague.
Grak-shükh made a distorted creaking sound that Lillith supposed was laughter. ‘What of your human companion?’ he asked in a voice even deeper than Zachary’s. ‘Is it true what we hear?’
Lillith nodded. ‘Ash got the cross for us. He was the one who carried it into the enemy’s camp.’
‘Then victory correctly belongs to this Ash, not to Gabriel,’ Grak-shükh said, his mandibles contracting in a way that showed irritation. ‘To a mere human we owe this?’
The rest of the conversation was short and strained. Tarcz-kôi and his colleague seemed desperate to take their prize away, and rapidly disappeared as guards came to escort Lillith and Zachary to the quarters where they were to rest a while before their long return journey. The swords they’d handed over seemed to have mysteriously vanished.
‘What did the uglies say to you?’ Zachary asked softly on the walk back down the icy passage.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ Lillith muttered with a glance back at the guards.
‘I didn’t like the look in that thing’s eye,’ Zachary whispered, stooping closer to her ear. ‘In fact I don’t like any of this. You ask me, I’d say the motherfuckers are up to something.’
In another part of the vast citadel, the two Übervampyr observed unseen through a semi-opaque screen of ice as the human called Ash detachedly explored his new surroundings. They had observed many humans in captivity before, and this one didn’t behave like any they’d ever seen. After pacing up and down his quarters a few times, Ash seemed to lose interest. He crouched down to unwrap the sackcloth from his sword. They watched as he lovingly caressed the blade, and then replaced it in its scabbard to drop down to the floor and begin a gruelling series of press-ups.
‘This human is not like others of his kind,’ Grak-shükh said in his deep, deep voice.
‘You echo my sentiments, comrade Master,’ Tarcz-kôi replied. ‘And I sense that the same thoughts have formed in your mind as in my own.’
‘Yes. This latest behaviour of that fool Xenrai’s young protégé is further evidence of his growing decadence. Gabriel is weak, and he is untrustworthy. He celebrates a victory that is not his to claim, and he further insults us by sending mere servants in his stead. The Council should not have relented so easily to the Judge’s wishes.’
‘I did all in my power to influence the court,’ Tarcz-kôi said. ‘Xenrai held too much sway.’
‘Xenrai no longer poses an obstacle to us,’ said Grakshükh. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, watching as the human continued unrelentingly pumping out press-up after press-up. ‘With our eminent Master eliminated, we are free to deal with his former protégé in whatever manner we deem appropriate. Gabriel may very well have outlived his usefulness.’ He tapped the tip of a black claw against the ice screen. ‘This one, by contrast . . . Such a creature could serve our purpose far better.’
Tarcz-kôi nodded. ‘We will put him to the test.’
The ice walls of Ash’s quarters were streaming with condensation by the time guards opened his door and brought him an unexpected gift. The human female was one of the many hundreds kept in the dark caverns beneath the citadel. Born in darkness and deprived of sunlight for all of her seventeen years, she was as blind as she was naked. The vampire guards had scrubbed the filth off her body, brushed out her long hair and scented her with aromatic oils that glistened on her skin. Now they flung her down on the floor at Ash’s feet by way of an offering, and left the two of them alone with shining golden platters heaped with meats, jugs of wine and spirits.
In return for the freedom she’d been promised – even if it meant being turned loose in the hostile frozen wilderness that some of the older captives said was all that existed up there on the surface – the girl was willing to do anything to pleasure this man. She undulated her body provocatively on the floor in front of him, crawled sightlessly on all fours like a dog, tried to touch him and press herself against him.
Ash just slapped her away as if she were an annoying insect, without the slightest glance at her nakedness. He sniffed at the wine, put down the jug untouched, pulled a face at the smell of the spirits. Grabbing a piece of half-raw meat from one of the heaped platters, he went and sat in a corner, tore off a hunk with his pointed teeth and chewed for a while, still ignoring the girl’s best attempts to gain his attention.
When he’d eaten enough to take the edge off his hunger, disinterested by the piles of food that remained, he took a sharpening stone from his pocket and busied himself with total concentration whetting the edges of his sword with long, careful strokes up and down the blade. After half an hour, the girl had given up trying to gain his attention and lay curled, weeping, against the far wall.
The two Übervampyr had been watching the whole time. ‘He resists admirably,’ Tarcz-kôi said with a smile. ‘Neither by his stomach nor his loins can he be tempted. Most unusual in so base a creature.’
‘Never have I seen a human so pure of intent,’ Grak-shükh agreed. ‘He appears quite untainted by the moral degradation that corrupts his species as a whole, and to which our own Gabriel has too long been a willing party.’
Tarcz-kôi looked at him. ‘Then it is decided?’
Grak-shükh nodded. ‘It is decided. Gabriel’s time is over. Ash’s is about to begin. Is the cargo aircraft on standby?’ He was referring to the old but serviceable Antonov An-124 transport jet that was kept in a hangar at a disused military air base a hundred miles away across the tundra.
‘It is.’
‘Good. He will need help. Gather fifty of our best
Zargôyuk
.’
‘It shall be done.’
Grak-shükh drew up his hood and turned away from the screen. ‘Send in the guards. Slaughter the female and have Ash brought to me, that we may commence his initiation.’
‘What about the two servants of Gabriel who brought him here?’ Tarcz-kôi asked.
‘Destroy them. Immediately.’