The Cross

Chapter Twenty-Six

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.’