The Cross

Chapter Seven

London

Twelve hours’ worth of Solazal protection had only just been enough to get Alex safely home. She’d been watching the clock intently for the last couple of hours of her long journey, teeth on edge. Half a day was about the longest any vampire could expect to get out of one of the photosensitivity neutralisers. When the effects eventually wore off, which they had a habit of doing very suddenly, the spectacular results had once or twice over the last twenty-five years been mistaken by nonvampires as the rare phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. These days, unsuspecting passersby witnessing the fiery demise of a careless vampire might be convinced that they’d come close to being engulfed by some kind of half-hearted incendiary suicide bombing.

Either way, it didn’t make for a very pleasant end for the vampire concerned. Alex was mightily relieved to see the sun sinking behind the London skyline as she finally made it to the door of her Canary Wharf apartment building and rode the lift to her penthouse.

Once inside, she grabbed a remote control from a table. At the touch of a button, thick blackout shutters whirred down to cover every one of the flat’s many large windows, blocking out the sunset glow that was settling across the river, and plunging the whole apartment into pitch darkness.

Safe. She sighed. This was how vampires had lived once, before the Federation had come along and introduced the whole new modern era that had so incensed the champions of the old ways. Alex, who’d been turned back in 1897, remembered the old ways and the old days very well — and in her more reflective moments, she had to admit privately that she’d never felt fully comfortable with the idea of popping pills to help her walk about in daylight. Someone else had put it more eloquently than she could:

‘To cheat the sun, embrace the night. Living dangerously, living free. To hunt, to feed like a real vampire, honouring our sacred heritage and a culture that had reached its pinnacle when human beings were still dragging their knuckles in the dust and grunting like apes.’

Those had been the words of the rebel vampire Gabriel Stone to her, just a couple of days earlier, when he’d been trying to recruit her to his crusade to bring down the heretical Federation forever. Alex had to confess they’d left a mark on her. She also had to confess she was beginning to run out of illusions when it came to the Federation that had employed her since its foundation in 1984.

Uncomfortable thoughts. ‘Back to work,’ she said to herself, and pressed another button on her remote, activating dim sidelights throughout the apartment. She fetched herself a glass of chilled blood from the kitchen — not quite the freshly-spilled article, but satisfying enough — then settled at her desk and fired up the laptop.

Vampires tended not to have a very active social life, so it wasn’t a surprise when only two emails landed in Alex’s inbox. The first was from Baxter Burnett. That was a surprise. She didn’t normally receive emails from movie stars. Baxter Burnett was currently raking in the millions, and getting slated by the critics in equal measure, for his role in the Hollywood schlock-horror, mega-budget Berserker franchise. Except that Baxter was no ordinary movie star: what his millions of adoring fans didn’t know was that he was also a vampire. His little secret was the reason that he and Alex, in her official capacity as a VIA agent tasked with keeping vampires in line with Federation regs, had had some recent dealings. As she recalled, things hadn’t ended too amicably.

She clicked on the email. The message was short, pithy and to the point:

Fuck you, Bishop!!!

Love, BB

‘Thanks for that, Baxter,’ she said, and then moved on to the other message. If anything, it was even less welcome than the first. Its sender, Ivo Donskoi, had been a Prussian army colonel back in the day, before he’d become responsible for hundreds of tortures and executions as part of the East German secret police; now he was personal assistant to none other than Olympia Angelopolis, the Vampress herself, at the Federation’s main HQ in Brussels.

‘What does he want?’ Alex groaned aloud as she opened the email.

Agent McCarthy reports from our field station in Prague that you are now en route to London. Be advised that Supremo Angelopolis has returned to Federation Headquarters. You are hereby requested and required to provide your full written account of recent events

without delay

on your return, to be sent directly and solely to this office. Failure to comply will result in the strictest penalties.

There was a lot to say in the report, and eleven o’clock had come and gone before Alex had finished typing it all up. The Vampress might not like everything that was in it, but she’d asked for a full account and that was what she’d get.

Alex emailed it back to Donskoi’s office, then got up from the desk and went over to put on some Satie piano music that had been popular around the turn of the twentieth century. Ever since she’d become a vampire, Alex had tended not to keep up with musical trends too much, and she normally found the Satie relaxing. But as she reclined on the sofa with her eyes shut, trying to let the tension ease from her muscles, she knew she didn’t feel safe here any more. As much as she loved the place, with its spacious rooms and views over the river, there was no way she could stay here. It was the first place Joel would come looking for her.

The phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. Alex flashed out an arm and grabbed it from the coffee table. She immediately recognised the crisp, efficient tones of Miss Queck, one of the admin staff at VIA’s London office. ‘Agent Bishop, your presence is required at base.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’ Queck ended the call.

‘Bitch,’ Alex said. She looked at her watch. If she moved fast, she could be at the office just after midnight. She sighed, then flipped herself up, catlike, from the sofa, scooped another remote and Utz McCarthy’s 9mm pistol from the side table and trotted up the polished aluminium spiral staircase that led to her bedroom. The floor-to-ceiling mirror at the far end of the room slid aside at the touch of a button on the remote. She strode through into the large hidden space beyond the glass.

The concealed weapons store was filled with racks of firearms of various shapes and sizes, mostly high-velocity semi-automatics compatible with the Nosferol-tipped rounds produced by the Federation munitions-manufacture division for its VIA personnel. Alex preferred something a little more potent than the standard issue: across one wall was the crowded work-bench where she prepared her own special handloaded cartridges for the massive.50 calibre Desert Eagle pistols she personally favoured for their unstoppable penetration and sheer knock-down power. Combined with the horrific effects of Nosferol on a vampire’s system, it made the pistols the most formidable weapon in her, or anyone’s, private arsenal.

Discarding Utz’s comparatively feeble 9mm on the bench, she took one of the matching Desert Eagles from their wall rack, snatched up a loaded magazine and rammed it into the grip. She slipped on her well-worn calfskin shoulder holster, clipped the pistol snugly into place against her left side, and headed back into the bedroom, using the remote to close up the weapons store behind her.

She selected a long suede coat from her wardrobe, put it on and looked at herself in the mirror. Fashionable without being too distinctive. In her job, it was important to blend into the human crowd — and the coat hid the gun perfectly. Alex nodded to herself and trotted back down the spiral staircase. She grabbed her handbag and VIA ID from the table in the hallway.

Sixty seconds later she was riding the lift down to the neon-lit underground car park. Her sleek black Jaguar XKR fired up with a throaty blast that echoed through the concrete cavern. She reversed hard out of her parking space, hit the gas and her tyres squealed as she sped up the ramp and out onto the deserted night street.

She cut westwards across the city. The VIA offices were twenty minutes’ drive with a human at the wheel. She’d be there much sooner.