The Cross

Chapter Sixty-Four

The voice was Yuri’s. They found him standing at the living room window, joined by Dec and Chloe. ‘Look!’ he shouted again as everyone raced into the room.

While they’d been distracted by the goblin attack, the cable car had started moving again. They watched, helpless, as the gleaming aluminium and glass cube glided smoothly back down towards the boarding station across the valley.

There was a woody thunk behind them as another arrow hit the chalet from the mountainside. Zachary grabbed hold of the living room door and ripped it off its hinges. ‘Someone run down to that storeroom and bring me up a hammer and nails, quick. We don’t board up the windows and outside doors, those little fuckers’re gonna be swarming all over this place.’

Joel left the room and crossed the hallway behind it to peer out of the rear window, across the balcony to the rocky slope behind the house. There was no sign of movement out there, no running figures flitting across the snow. No telling how many of these goblin things could be out there, either: and by now they should be pressing their attack, storming every weak point, swarming up the walls, jumping up on the roof, smashing windows. It would be tough to stop them getting inside.

So why wasn’t it happening?

‘I wouldn’t bother boarding the place up,’ he called through the open doorway to the vampires in the living room.

‘Say what?’ Zachary rumbled.

‘This is no invasion,’ Joel told him. ‘It’s a containment strategy. They’ve no intention of coming in; they only want to prevent us from leaving. Don’t you see? They want to trap us in here.’

‘Guys! The cable car!’ Alex shouted from the living room window. ‘It’s coming back!’

Lillith turned to Gabriel. ‘Can’t we stop it?’

‘I’m afraid it is too late for that,’ Gabriel replied.

The solitary figure of Ash was unmistakable behind the glass front of the cable car. At one hip hung the executioner’s sword in its scabbard; at the other, attached to a strap around his shoulders, was the lead-lined case. As in a trance of horror, the assembled vampires watched the man reach inside and slowly draw out the horribly familiar shape of the cross.

Standing by the window with Yuri and Makiko, Alex cried out at the jet of agony crackling through her body. All three recoiled violently away from the glass, their bodies spasming as the awful pain took hold. Alex’s fingers loosened on the grip of the pistol and it dropped out of her hand and bounced away from her. To go back for it now would be suicide. She staggered away in the opposite direction, desperately trying to reach the door and widen the distance between herself and the approaching cross.

Makiko was attempting to do exactly the same. In her frenzied haste to escape she cannoned into Chloe, stumbled over the edge of the rug and sprawled on the floor. Makiko struggled to get to her feet, but the crippling power of the weapon was too much to overcome.

Chloe was standing just a few feet away as, with a final shriek that rose up in a horrible tortured wail, Makiko turned black and then cracked and peeled apart and crumbled into a puff of cinders.

It wasn’t the first time Dec had seen the effects of the cross, but even he gaped in appalled horror at the sight. Chloe covered her face with her hands.

Alex had reached the door, just inches ahead of the lethal energy field, and was racing across the hallway outside towards the back of the house along with Lillith, Kali, Gabriel and Zachary. Joel had no choice but to flee along with them. He could scarcely believe what was happening to him. Only days ago, wielding the cross himself, he’d been the predator. Now he was the prey, just one of the pressing melee of vampires all desperate to get beyond its reach.

Yuri hadn’t been as fast as Alex to the door. A shockwave of agony arched his back to breaking point and slammed him down to the floorboards at Dec’s feet.

‘Help me!’ Yuri croaked, reaching out a trembling hand.

For an instant that seemed to last minutes, Dec stood frozen. This was a vampire. It sucked the blood of humans. It deserved to fry.

Yet in that moment, all he could see was a man suffering horribly, screaming in pain, red-rimmed agonised eyes imploring him for help. Dec thought of Joel, and a powerful surge of pity made him reach out to grasp Yuri’s wrist and drag him towards the door fractions of a second before the cross’s power would have blown him apart.

‘Thank you, human,’ Yuri shouted as he went staggering off across the hallway.

‘Any time,’ Dec mumbled. Dec Maddon, vampire hunter. A great start to his career, this was.

The cable car was getting closer. And now the single figure inside could be clearly seen through the glass. Even from forty yards away, the triumphant jagged grin was visible on Ash’s face.

Chloe spotted Alex’s fallen pistol and scooped it up off the floor. The controls were different from the air gun she was used to, but the essentials were the same. She stuffed it into her waistband. ‘Down the stairs, quick!’ she yelled to Dec. ‘We have to stop that thing so I can get a clear shot.’

They raced down to the chalet’s ground floor, tore down the short passage and burst through the door of the boarding station to see the cable car just thirty yards away. Chloe ran to the landing platform and felt her knees turn to rubber at the sight of the dizzy drop to the valley below. The mountain wind blew her hair and whistled around the chalet.

She looked across at the approaching glass front of the cable car and her eyes met Ash’s.

Both his eyes.

For a moment of bewilderment, Chloe wondered whether it could be the same man. Because Ash had changed. Something had happened to him. His features were sculpted, symmetrical, chillingly beautiful. The new clothes he was wearing clung to his leaner, taller and more powerful form.

But it was him, all right. Chloe could see the cross in his hands, clutched tightly against his chest — and, sticking up above his shoulder in a back-scabbard, the hilt of the great sword that had killed her father.

And now he was hers. All she had to do was halt the cable car, and there’d be nowhere he could run from her. She glanced around for the control box. Sure enough, there was no way to stop the cable car except by cutting the power. ‘The wires, Dec!’ she yelled.

Dec was no electrician, but the large transformer of the electric motor was easy to spot. There was just one thick cluster of wires running into it, wrapped up in a black shielded covering. He swung his katana at it with all his might, praying that the leather handle of the sword would protect his hands when the high voltage shot up the blade and the tang.

Crack. The blade missed its target and hacked a piece out of the transformer box. The cable car glided on another few feet.

Dec swore and hit the wires again, and this time the blade found its mark through the armoured covering. The jolt of electricity almost took the sword out of his hands. A loud bang, a flash and a shower of sparks, and the cable car motor drive suddenly ground to a halt.

‘Got you now, asshole,’ Chloe said, and raised the pistol.