The Cross (34 page)
Authors: Scott G. Mariani
The fire was gaining all through the lower floor of the chalet, timbers blazing everywhere and thick black smoke choking the stairway and passages so that Chloe and Dec were running almost blind.
‘Which way’s outside?’ he yelled.
‘Try that door,’ she replied, her eyes streaming tears.
He crashed it open. ‘Fuck it! Some kind of store-room.’
‘Try another.’
But it was too late. Ash’s footsteps were pounding towards them through the smoky corridors. Dec and Chloe ran into the store-room, clambering through the clutter of junk they could see in the dim moonlight from the window. Dec hid between an old Yamaha snowmobile and a stack of Butane gas cylinders. Chloe ducked behind a pile of packing cases.
Now they were trapped. They could only pray that Ash would run by the door so they could escape from the storeroom and make their way outside before the whole place went up in flames. The acrid stench of burning was making it harder and harder to breathe.
In a tiny square of moonlight shining on the floor next to her, Chloe examined the pistol, trying to see what the hell had gone wrong with it. The answer came to her immediately. A piece of grit from the rocky ledge had got stuck in the crook of the gun’s hammer, preventing it from snapping forward to hit the firing pin. She picked at it with her fingertip, breaking the nail – but the grit didn’t move.
Ash’s footsteps came storming down the passage. They stopped at the door.
Chloe held her breath as she scrabbled around for something to pick the blockage from the gun.
The door crashed open and Ash stood silhouetted against the smoke and the flickering orange fire-glow that was spreading through the chalet with every passing second.
‘I know you’re in there,’ he said. ‘I can smell you.’
Chloe’s fingers clasped something in the shadows. It was an old nail, bent and rusty. As Ash burst into the room, she dug the point of the nail frantically into the crook of the pistol’s hammer and felt the trapped piece of grit spring free.
‘Give me back the cross,’ Ash said, ‘and I’ll kill you quickly. You have my word.’
Chloe checked the Desert Eagle’s magazine and her heart stalled for an instant as she saw it was empty. Then, in her panic, she remembered the breech: there might still be a round in the breech. That was how these weapons worked. She grasped the back of the slide, inched it back and the moonlight glimmered on shiny brass. Her heart began to race again. She still had one shot left.
She closed her eyes.
Make it count, Chloe.
‘Give – me – the – CROSS!’ Ash roared as he came charging through the smoke, kicking debris out of his way.
There was a rending screech from above as the ceiling gave way and a burning beam came crashing down into the store-room. The wall collapsed. Flames leaped through the broken planking and spread hungrily in all directions. An old armchair burst alight, setting fire to the heap of cardboard boxes next to it. The flames flew up the walls, hugging the contours of the room, spreading everywhere, flaring up into a raging inferno.
Chloe knew that if she and Dec didn’t get out of here within the next few seconds, they’d be burned alive.
Or maybe it was already too late. Hot smoke seared her lungs. The taste of death: so this was what it felt like.
But then, through her streaming tears she saw the door at the far end of the room that had been hidden in the shadows before. She leaped to her feet. ‘Dec!’
Together they raced for the door. Chloe wrenched it open and gasped as she burst out into the cold night air. The whole front of the chalet was ablaze now.
Ash marched through the burning room, ignoring the flames that licked up his trouser legs.
‘Hey, Ash!’
He looked round. Chloe stood in the doorway, her face shining with sweat, her eyes glowing from the firelight. In her hands was the battered, singed case. She held it open for him to see the cross inside. ‘You want this? Come and get it.’
Ash bellowed and came charging through the flames.
Chloe snapped the case shut. She tossed it to Dec and pulled out the pistol and fired off her last shot.
The bullet missed Ash by a good five feet. But that was only because she hadn’t been aiming at him.
‘Burn, fucker,’ Chloe said. Then she ran.
Ash heard the impact of the bullet against the tall Butane gas cylinder. He had no time to do anything else but stare at the neat half-inch hole the jacketed hollow point had punched straight through the steel.
The gas hit the flames. And Ash was pulverised by a hot white blast that he never even saw.
The chalet exploded in a gigantic rolling fireball that lit up the night sky. Burning wreckage was catapulted hundreds of feet into the air.
Alex and Joel felt the heat on their faces from halfway up the mountain as the goblins closed in on them. A moment later, a great rumbling shook the ground under their feet. The whole mountain seemed to be trembling.
The goblins looked up in fright and then scattered as the entire face of the towering peak seemed to detach itself and came crashing towards them – millions of tons of snow and ice and rock dislodged by the sound vibrations of the explosion and hurtling downwards in a devastating wave. The fleeing goblins were crushed as if a giant fist had pounded down on top of them.
Alex and Joel ran to avoid the path of the avalanche, but not even a vampire could run that fast.
‘Don’t let go of my hand!’ Alex shouted over the deafening roar.
Then it hit.
Hundreds of yards away across the mountain slope, Gabriel Stone was crouched forlornly by Lillith’s prone body when the explosion lit up the sky.
At the same moment, Zachary let out a whoop of joy. Lillith was stirring. She blinked, once, twice, drew in a gasping breath. ‘Gabriel, is that you? Zachary?’
‘I thought I had lost you, my dearest love.’ As Gabriel held her tightly, the ground began to shake and little landslides slithered down around them.
‘Look,’ Zachary said.
They watched as the avalanche flung its wrath down the mountainside, sweeping away everything before it. It bore down on the burning wreck of the chalet. Blazing timbers shattered and were driven over the edge of the abyss. The cable car went plummeting down the valley and smashed into a thousand pieces among the trees below.
Once the fury of the mountain was spent, all was silent. Just the whistle of the wind and the gentle patter as a fresh snow began to fall.
A large, flat rock suddenly overturned and Alex crawled out from under it, bloodied and bruised, her hair white with snow. She staggered to her feet.
‘Joel!’ she called out, anxiously scanning the new landscape that the avalanche had left in its wake.
There was no sign of him.
‘Joel!’ she called again. A healthy vampire could always dig its way out, even from under tons of rock and snow – but not one so close to starvation. She couldn’t bear the thought of what could happen to him if he didn’t feed very, very soon.
Her heart leaped as she saw a hand sticking up out of the snow. She ran over to it and clasped it. It was as cold as ice. She dropped to her knees and started digging. After a few moments, she was able to haul him out. He wasn’t moving as she laid him down on the snow.
Joel opened his eyes. ‘I’m starving, Alex,’ he said, barely audible over the wind. ‘I don’t think I have much time left.’
Alex rolled up her sleeve, brought her wrist up to her mouth and bit deep into the veins. Dark blood trickled down her hand and onto the snow.
‘Drink from me,’ she said to him. ‘It’ll keep you going a while.’
Joel hesitated, then grasped her hand. She threw back her head in a strange mixture of pain and pleasure as he sucked greedily at the blood from her wrist.
‘You’ll stay with me now?’ she said, and felt that rarest of all things trickle down her cheek: a vampire tear. ‘Forever?’
He nodded. Blood on his mouth. ‘Forever.’
They embraced, then turned to gaze at the spot where Baxter Burnett’s majestic hunting lodge had once stood. Nothing remained except the few smouldering timbers that hadn’t been buried in the avalanche.
But there was something else down there. Dark against the snow, two tiny figures, huddled close to one another, one limping, the other carrying a small rectangular object.
‘What now?’ Dec asked Chloe as they trudged along together. The snow was falling more heavily now, and after the heat of the fire he was shivering with cold. Like Chloe’s, his hair was frizzed and scorched from where the explosion had rolled over them as they hurled themselves into the snow.
Chloe looked down at the case in her hand, her father’s cross nestled inside. ‘We’re vampire hunters, aren’t we?’ she said.
‘Sure, I don’t know
what
we are exactly,’ Dec replied.
Chloe nodded. She clicked the locks shut, rolled the combination wheels, then tossed the case down on the snow and walked away from it.
She and Dec were holding hands as Joel and Alex came down to meet them.
‘Are you all right?’ Joel asked Dec, noticing the blood that was caked over the kid’s face.
‘Ah, hardly a scratch, like. I’ll do rightly.’ Dec grinned through the pain.
‘You did good, Dec,’ Joel said. ‘I’m proud of you.’
Chloe handed Alex the empty gun. ‘Ash is dead. You can have this back now.’ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the case lying on the snow. ‘You can have the cross, too, if it’s any use to you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alex said. ‘I should have trusted you, shouldn’t I?’
‘It can’t be easy.’
‘I guess we all had some learning to do,’ Alex said. She touched Chloe’s arm.
Chloe smiled. ‘Does this mean I have a new vampire friend now?’
‘You know what?’ Dec said. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if there aren’t worse things than frigging vampires.’
‘You got that right,’ Alex replied.
‘Indeed he did,’ said a familiar voice behind them. The four turned to see Gabriel standing there with Lillith and Zachary. Kali was skulking jealously in the background.
‘The question is, Gabriel, what were you planning on doing about it?’ Alex asked him.
Gabriel shrugged. ‘I believe the time may have come to call a truce. Strictly on a temporary basis, you understand.’
‘Depends on what you mean by a truce,’ Joel said.
‘We’re gonna go back to Siberia and kick those Übers’ asses,’ Zachary grunted. ‘Could do with some help from you guys.’
‘I might not have put it quite that way myself,’ Gabriel said. ‘But he expresses my intentions accurately enough. Well? What do you say to the notion of our joining forces?’
‘We need the humans, Gabriel,’ Alex said.
‘Why, naturally. Who else can wield the cross for us?’
‘Which means you’d have to swear not to lay a finger on them.’
Gabriel looked hurt. ‘Was ever a vampire so cruelly misjudged? What do you take me for, Alexandra? A monster?’
‘I won’t answer that.’ Alex turned to Chloe. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’
‘We’ve come this far,’ Chloe said.
‘Dec?’
Dec shrugged. ‘Like I said. There are worse things than vampires.’
Alex looked at Joel. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t think I have a choice,’ Joel said.
‘Then we’re a unit,’ Lillith said.
‘A veritable alliance,’ Gabriel said with a smile.
The snow was falling more heavily now, rapidly turning into a blizzard.
‘So . . . which way is Siberia again?’ Dec asked.
The Scottish Highlands
November 1992
Outside the cottage, the storm had reached its peak. Rain was lashing out of the starless sky, the wind was screaming, the branches of the forest whipped and scraped violently at the windows.
The lights had gone out, and the old place was filled with shadows from flickering candles. The twelve-year-old boy had been cowering at the top of the creaky stairs, listening to the argument between his parents and his grandfather and wishing they’d stop. Wanting to run downstairs and yell at them to quit fighting. Especially as he knew they were fighting about him—
. . . When the thing had come. A creature that looked like a man – but could not have been a man.
The boy had seen it all take place. Watched in speechless horror, peering through the banister rails as the intruder crashed in the door and strode through the hallway. The argument had stopped suddenly. His parents and his grandfather turned and stared. Then the sound of his mother’s scream had torn through the roar of the storm.
The creature never even slowed down. It caught his father and his mother by the arms, whipping them off their feet as though they weighed nothing. Like dead leaves. It dashed their heads together with a sound that the boy would never forget. Candles hissed, snuffed out by the blood spray.
Then the thing had dropped the bodies and stepped over them where they lay. Smiling now. Taking its time. And approached his grandfather.
The old man backed away, quaking in fear. Spoke words that the boy could not understand.
The thing laughed. Then it bit. Its teeth closed on the old man’s throat and the boy could hear the terrible gurgle as it gorged on his blood.
It was just like the stories. The stories his parents hadn’t wanted his grandfather to tell him. The boy shrank away and closed his eyes and wept silently and trembled and prayed.
And then it was over. When he opened his eyes, the killer had gone. The boy ran down the stairs. He gaped at the twisted bodies of his mother and father, then heard the groan from across the room.
The old man was lying on his back, his arms outflung. The boy ran to him, kneeled by his side. Saw the wound in his grandfather’s neck. There was no blood. All gone.
Claimed by the creature. ‘I’m dying,’ his grandfather gasped. ‘No!’ the boy shouted. ‘I’ll turn.’ The old man’s face was deathly pale and he gripped the boy’s arms so tightly it hurt. ‘You know what to do.’
‘No—’
‘It has to be done,’ the old man whispered. He pointed weakly at the sabre that hung over the fireplace. ‘Do it. Do it now, before it’s too late.’
The boy was convulsed with tears as he staggered over to the fireplace. His fingers closed on the scabbard of the sabre, and he unhooked the weapon from its mounting. The blade gave a soft zing as he drew it out.
‘Hurry,’ his grandfather croaked.
The boy pushed the sword back into the scabbard. ‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. ‘Please, Granddad. I don’t want to.’
His grandfather looked up at him. ‘You must, Joel. And when it’s done, you have to remember the things I told you.’ His life energy was fading fast, and he was struggling to talk. ‘You have to find it. Find the cross. It’s the only thing they truly fear.’
The cross of Ardaich. The boy remembered. Tears flooded down his face. He closed his eyes.
Then opened them. And saw that his grandfather was dead. The storm was still raging outside. The boy stood over his grandfather’s body and wept.
And then his grandfather’s eyes snapped open and looked deep into his. He sat upright. Slowly, his lips rolled back and he snarled.
For a second the boy stood as if mesmerised. Then he started back in alarm as his grandfather began to climb to his feet. Except it wasn’t his grandfather any more. The boy knew what he’d become.
Candlelight flashed on the blade as he drew the sabre. He raised it high and sliced with all his strength – the way the old man had taught him. Felt the horrible impact all the way to the hilt as it chopped through his grandfather’s neck and took the head clean off.
When it was done, the boy staggered out into the storm. He began to walk through the hammering rain. He walked for miles, numb with shock.
And when the villagers found him the next morning, he couldn’t even speak.