Uprising

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Cormac had been reluctant to stay behind, but his directions were good and it didn’t take Joel long to find the block of concrete flats in Brewer’s Lane on the other side of Wallingford. Joel left the car in the shadows a few yards down the lane and walked the rest of the way, clutching the metal case tightly under one arm and wondering what he was going to find at this Matt’s place. Metal steps wound up and round onto each terraced balcony. He climbed two flights, checking door numbers until he came to the one he was looking for.

The pale blue door to Flat 22 was open an inch. Joel listened to his instincts and didn’t knock. He pressed his hand against the worn wood, praying the hinges weren’t creaky, and slipped silently inside. He found himself in a narrow passage that was dimly lit by a lamp shining through from the open door at the far end. Through the gap he could see garish floral carpet, the corner of a peeling James Bond poster tacked to the wall, and the end of an old couch that had someone’s hand resting on it.

Someone was talking inside the room. Joel tensed, listening hard. The voice was little more than a whisper, but he recognised it as Dec’s. Who was he talking to?

The answer came a second later when Joel heard a low giggle.

A girl’s voice.

Joel’s blood turned ice cold. Scarcely breathing and terrified to make a sound, he slowly unclipped one of the catches of the metal case. Then the other. And opened the lid just a fraction.

That was enough to tell him all he needed to know. The quiet room exploded into uproar. A piercing, wailing shriek of agony and terror. Dec’s voice yelled, ‘What’s wrong, Kate? What’s wrong?’

Joel slammed the lid shut, sealing the cross back inside its lead lining. He burst into the room to see Kate Hawthorne scrabbling desperately across the carpet, frantic to escape. She made a dive for the window, but he quickly stepped across and blocked her exit. Her eyes were fixed on the case. She backed away like a cornered leopard –

frightened but dangerous. She rolled back her red lips and Joel quaked at the sight of the long curved fangs. There was a smear of blood on her chin, and her fingertips were red with it. Her hair was tousled, feral. She was naked underneath the translucent white dress she was wearing.

‘You!’ she hissed at him. ‘Policeman.’

Dec stood frozen next to the couch, watching the scene in horror. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks hollow and colourless. The wounds on his neck looked as if they’d crusted over and been reopened several times. Fresh trickles of blood were running down to his shoulder, soaking into the material of the grimy T-shirt that clung to his emaciated torso. He staggered towards Joel.

‘What are you doing to her? Leave her alone!’

Joel shoved him lightly in the chest, and he fell back on the couch. ‘This isn’t Kate, Dec. Kate’s gone.’

‘He’s lying,’ Kate spat. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

‘How long has this thing been feeding on you?’ Joel demanded, pointing at her.

At that moment, she tried to make another break for it, and he opened the box a crack.

A huge ripple of pain seemed to shudder through her body and she collapsed to the floor, thrashing and writhing. Joel smelled burning, saw the smoke rising from her bare flesh. He shut the lid.

‘That’s just a small dose of what’s in here,’ he told her. ‘You know what it is, don’t you? You know what it can do to you.’

‘Stop it!’ Dec shouted at him from the couch. ‘What are you doing? You’re hurting her.’

‘She’s a vampire, Dec. Forget about her.’

The kid turned to gaze at Kate with tears of longing in his eyes. ‘We love each other. We’re going to be together forever.’

‘She’s been living here with you, hasn’t she?’

Dec nodded. He pointed at a cupboard. ‘She sleeps there during the day. I take care of her. That’s how it’s going to be. Nothing you can do about it, get it?’

‘This has to end,’ Joel said. ‘If she keeps feeding on you like this, you know what you’ll become. One of them.’

Tears flooded down Dec’s cheeks. ‘I don’t fucking care any more. I love her, man.’

Coiled in the corner, Kate was slowly recovering from the blast of the cross’s energy. She raised herself up weakly on her elbows. ‘He loves me, you fuck. Leave us alone.’

Joel shook his head. ‘I’m sorry for what’s about to happen,’ he murmured.

Shaking with anticipation, he moved his hand to open the box and take out the cross.

Now he would see exactly what happened when a vampire was exposed to the full force of its power. Kate saw what he was doing and screamed.

But then a thought came to him and he stopped.

‘How did she know where to find you, Dec? Did you tell her where you were?’

Dec just looked at him. Joel grabbed him by the collar of his bloody T-shirt and hauled him off the couch and shook him violently. It was shocking to feel how little the kid weighed.

‘How did she find you?’ he repeated.

‘She just did,’ Dec muttered. ‘I don’t know how. I was here, and she turned up.

Don’t hurt her, Joel. For fuck’s sake, don’t hurt her.’

Joel let Dec slump down again, thinking hard. The idea that was forming in his mind seemed crazy — but in a reality that had already been turned upside-down, even a crazy idea made perfect sense.

He was thinking about the potentially infinite relationship of vampire to victim.

One created another, then on it went down the line, one new vampire after another being endlessly hatched out of the wreckage of its human host. Stone had created the Kate Hawthorne who lay before him now. She was his progeny, eternally bonded to him; and, left to her own devices, the fledgling vampire girl had been about to turn Dec into the next link in the chain. The same connection must exist between every single vampire and each of their victims.

Stone had turned Kate at Crowmoor Hall — that much was clear — and yet he’d been able to find her home in Wallingford. Just as Kate had, in turn, managed to find Dec here.

What was guiding them? Some kind of extra-sensory homing ability?

Clairvoyance? The same nebulous psychic connection that seemed to enable human twins to sense one another’s emotions, even their whereabouts, over distances that defied rational explanation?

Joel took a step towards her. ‘Where’s Gabriel Stone?’ he demanded.

Kate glowered up at him. ‘Fuck you.’

‘Not the answer I was looking for,’ Joel said. He took another step. ‘You want me to open this case?’

Kate flinched violently, slumped back down to the floor and let out a tortured moan.

‘Where is he, Kate? Tell me.’

‘He’s gone,’ she blurted out. ‘Far away from here.’

Against the wall to Joel’s right was a home assembly bookcase bulging with well-thumbed issues of car books, motoring magazines, repair manuals, a few tatty sci-fi and thriller paperbacks. Stuffed in between a Subaru maintenance manual and Classic Supercars was a big hardback world atlas. It looked immaculate and out of place in Matt’s book collection, like an unwanted gift that was only on the shelf out of obligation. Still clutching the case, Joel grabbed the atlas on an impulse and cracked it open, flipped a few pages and laid it flat on the floor showing a double-page spread of the world map. He thrust the book across the carpet under Kate’s nose. ‘You show me where he went. And I promise I’ll free you.’

‘Show him, Kate,’ Dec groaned faintly from the couch.

‘Never!’ she spat out.

‘You think he cares for you?’ Joel shouted at her. ‘He’s gone. He was just playing with you. You’ve nothing to be loyal to.’

Kate went quiet, defeated. She looked warily at Joel. Her fangs had receded and, apart from her wild hair and the blood on her chin and hands, she seemed just like any other normal girl again. Joel thought of Alex, and his throat tightened so badly he wanted to scream.

‘Can you do it?’ he asked her.

‘You’ll set me free?’

‘I promised.’

Slowly, reluctantly, Kate sat up and closed her eyes. Her chin sank towards her chest. She began to sway gently backwards and forwards, as if falling into some kind of trance.

Dead silence in the room. Joel could hear the beating of his own heart.

Kate reached a hand out across the open map. Extended her bloodstained index finger. It hovered uncertainly over the pages, wavered back and forth, and for a moment Joel was certain his idea really had been crazy. But then something in the girl’s expression seemed to focus, and her finger landed right on the small shape that was England, leaving a red print on the paper.

‘He travels,’ she murmured. Joel could see rapid darting movement behind the pale skin of her closed eyelids. Then, slowly, like the upturned glass moving of its own accord across an Ouija board in a seance, her finger began to move across the map. It traced a jagged red line of blood from west to east. Joel watched in morbid fascination as the line skimmed the southern tip of the Netherlands, moved across into Germany, then the Czech Republic and on into Hungary. It moved a little more, then came to a trembling halt. Kate’s hand went limp and she slumped back down to the carpet, mumbling something indistinct.

Joel snatched the atlas from her and stared at the spot where the line of drying blood ended. She’d traced a path southeast across most of Europe, all the way to the northern reaches of Romania. The line broke off somewhere in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains.

‘You said something just then. A word. What was it? Kate?’ Forgetting himself, he was about to reach across to shake the girl’s shoulder — then drew his hand away quickly and laid it on the lid of the case so he could yank it open if she went for him. He was too close to this vampire to get complacent.

Her eyes fluttered open and she mumbled it again, more clearly this time.

‘Vâlcanul.’

The accent she used to pronounce the word sent a tingle down Joel’s back. That wasn’t something she’d learned in school. It seemed to come from some other place, as if the word was being channelled through her. He knew he’d been right. Backing away from her, he shut the atlas and tossed it on a chair.

‘You promised you’d free her,’ Dec croaked from the couch.

‘And I meant what I said,’ Joel replied.

He stared down at the girl on the floor, and she gazed up at him with pleading in her eyes. He was suddenly looking at a normal seventeen-year-old, a pretty girl with red hair and intelligent blue eyes and her whole life ahead of her.

Except he wasn’t.

He opened the lid of the case. Her wild cry filled the room as he reached inside and his fist closed on the cold cross. He drew it out with a shaking hand.

‘Nooo!’ Dec screamed, twisting up off the couch and making a desperate lunge at Joel. Joel sidestepped him, and the kid crashed to the floor with a wail.

Before the cross was even out of the case, Kate’s shriek was dying on her lips.

Joel felt a sudden surge of heat in his fist as the cross seemed to pulse with invisible, ferocious power. Faster than he could register, the invisible force of it hit her. Blew her apart. Obliterated every shred of her being. Like something out of a nightmare, she disintegrated before his eyes.

Then it was over. Her final cry seemed to echo in the crashing silence. Joel looked grimly down at the mess on the floor that had once been a beautiful, happy young girl, and for the second time that night he tasted the harsh sting of vomit rising up in his throat.

Dec was struggling to his feet, ashen-faced and trembling. ‘You killed her.’

‘You can’t kill what’s already dead,’ Joel said quietly. ‘I did what I promised. I freed her.’

Dec nodded slowly, swallowed hard and gingerly touched the wound on his neck.

He looked at Joel. ‘I’m going to become one of them, aren’t I?’

Joel glanced at the cross in his hand. He held it out. ‘Touch it,’ he said.

Dec tentatively reached out and brushed its surface with his fingertips.

‘Take it,’ Joel said softly, and Dec grasped it in his palm.

Nothing happened.

‘I think you’re going to be okay,’ Joel said.

Dec stared at the cross in his hand, blinking in confusion. ‘She bit me. She drank from me.’

‘I don’t know exactly how this works, Dec. She’d only just been turned herself.

Maybe her powers weren’t strong enough. Maybe if she’d come back to you a few more times, drank a bit more…’ He shrugged. ‘You’ve been lucky.’ Already Joel thought he could see a change coming over Dec’s face. Almost as though he’d been freed too, from some kind of hypnotic power that had held him like a fly in a web. Joel laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss. You’ve been brave, Dec. I’m proud of you.’

Dec rubbed the tears from his face with his sleeve. His face twisted in sudden disgust.

‘I’ve been weak,’ he sniffed. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to stop you. I should never have let her in here.’ He handed the cross back to Joel. ‘What is that thing?’

‘Just a little something I picked up on my travels,’ Joel said.

‘Where are you going now?’

‘To take you home to your family. They’re worried about you. After that, I’m going to finish this once and for all.’

‘Let me go with you. I want to be there too. I want to see the fucker who did this to my Kate go down.’

Joel shook his head. ‘This is something I’ve been waiting eighteen years for. I need to do it alone.’