The Cross

Alex smiled at the memory of the panic-stricken Olympia desperately trying to bribe her way out of trouble at any price as she and the helpless Supremos were being led away at swordpoint by their captors.

‘But we cannot afford to dwell on the past,’ Olympia went on firmly. ‘Let us now look to the future, to rebuilding our Federation into the veritable New World Order for our kind that it is destined to become.’ She paused, drawing breath as if the power of her own words had stunned even her into silence. A few awed murmurs rippled up and down the table. Alex’s lips remained tight.

‘We may have sustained some minor damage,’ Olympia continued, ‘but we are more resilient than our enemies suppose. Such contingencies, unthinkable as they may be, were foreseen from the very foundation of our organisation. I assure you, my friends, everything is under control.’

‘That’s the same line she spun us in Brussels,’ Alex whispered to Kelby, leaning close to his ear, ‘a couple of minutes before Stone’s helicopter blew the shit out of the place.’

The whisper might have been a fraction too loud. Petronella Scragg swivelled her long neck in Alex’s direction and gave her an icy stare. Olympia glowered momentarily from the screen, and then went on, waving a magnanimous hand in the direction of Doug Slade. ‘As we all know, our pharmaceutical plant in Italy was also destroyed by these cowardly terrorists. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Mr Slade, whom I am now promoting to the position of Director of Pharmaceuticals, the production of Solazal and Vambloc is expected to reach normal operating levels very shortly.’

‘One of our technicians came up with a new formula that halves the time it takes to complete the Solazal creation process,’ Slade explained laconically. ‘As for the new plant in Andorra, we have construction teams working night and day.’

Olympia smiled benevolently. ‘Excellent.’

‘But stocks are still dangerously low,’ Slade went on. ‘My department’s drafted a memo to all registered Federation members, recommending that everyone needs to ration their consumption and limit activities to after dark whenever possible. Of course, that means some vampires with day jobs may have to take time off work. Not much we can do about that, I’m afraid.’

‘The Federal Treasury is looking into reserving a special fund to compensate loss of income,’ Petronella Scragg said importantly.

‘Synergy,’ Olympia sighed, and linked her hands together. ‘Friends, this is what makes our Federation so special, so indomitable. We truly are a family.’

Everybody applauded again, except Alex, who was leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed.

‘The immediate threat is gone,’ Olympia said, motioning for silence. ‘Gabriel Stone and his followers have been defeated. But we must not be complacent. Moving forward, a major part of our reconstruction is to ensure that this never happens again. I therefore propose the creation of a special new task force, whose purpose will be to compile intelligence records on every single vampire suspected of having been linked, however loosely, to this rebellion. The task force will have unlimited powers of arrest and surveillance – putting cameras in their homes, if necessary – as a means of cleaning up any pockets of terrorist insurgents that may remain. Only by digging up the roots can we ensure that the weed never regrows.’

She turned to Alex. ‘Agent Bishop, apart from myself you are the sole survivor of the tragic recent events in Romania – making you the most senior VIA operative with direct experience of dealing with these Traditionalist rebels. For that reason, I am appointing you in charge of the new task force, with the rank of commander.’

All eyes turned towards Alex. Not everyone was smiling. Kelby nudged her elbow and flashed her a wink, as if to say, ‘See? Told you so.’

Alex said nothing.

‘In the wake of the annihilation of Gabriel Stone and his band of criminals, other misguided vampires may seek to follow in his footsteps. Your job from now on will be to make any renewed attack on the Federation an utter impossibility. To assist you in this role, I propose appointing Agent Gibson as your lieutenant.’

Alex fired a glance at Gibson across the table. Gibson must have seen her expression, as the broad smile at the news of his promotion quickly dropped off his face.

‘Do you accept this enormous responsibility we are entrusting you with?’

Alex maintained steady eye contact with the Vampress. ‘Before we go any further,’ she said, ‘I think it would be a mistake to assume that Gabriel Stone has been “annihilated”.’

Shocked silence reverberated around the table.

Olympia frowned darkly. ‘But in your report you state . . .’

‘My report states simply that I saw Stone and his second-in-command, Lillith, go over the castle battlements,’ Alex said. ‘It’s true, they’d taken a bad hit from the cross, especially Stone himself. But annihilated? I wouldn’t assume that they didn’t survive. Which means they still could be out there – and I don’t think Stone would give up his plans to bring down what’s left of us. I met him. I talked to him, face to face, and I can tell you that no vampire was ever more dedicated to their cause than him.’

She gazed steadily at each vampire around the table in turn. ‘And there’s something more. Supremo Angelopolis knows about it, because I included it in my report. But I wanted to make sure everyone here is aware of it.’ She gave a dry smile. ‘Just in case any information got accidentally overlooked.’

Olympia’s expression had hardened into granite. She raised a warning eyebrow. ‘That will be enough for now, Commander Bishop.’

‘They need to know,’ Alex said.

‘Need to know what, Alex?’ Kelby asked, frowning.

‘We all talk about Gabriel Stone’s rebellion,’ Alex said, ‘as if the whole thing had been his idea. It wasn’t. He was working for someone else. The uprising against the Federation was just the first step in a much greater plan, and that plan wasn’t devised by ordinary vampires.’

Olympia’s face loomed large onscreen as she stepped closer to her webcam with a look of thunder. ‘I am warning you, Commander.’

‘Gabriel Stone’s superiors, and the masterminds behind this whole thing, are the Übervampyr,’ Alex said.

The words seemed to suck all the air out of the room. There was a long, bewildered silence.

Nathaniel Creasy gasped. ‘But they don’t . . . really . . .’

‘. . . exist?’ Jarvis Jackson finished uncertainly.

‘The Über-what?’ Gibson said, looking confused.

Olympia slammed her fist on her desk, making the webcam shake. ‘Hearsay!’ she shouted. ‘You foolish child. Stone was just playing games with you, in order to frighten you. You will not believe these dangerous lies, nor will I allow you to promulgate them among your colleagues. Did you even see any of these alleged superiors of his?’

‘No,’ Alex said. ‘You know I didn’t. You were there in Romania.’

The Supremo’s face was quickly darkening to a shade of deep crimson. ‘Of course you didn’t,’ she screeched, the power of her voice overloading the monitor’s speakers. ‘Because the Übervampyr are a figment of myth and folklore. Hocuspocus and bogeyman tales from an age of superstition that has thankfully long since been abandoned in our modern, enlightened era.’

‘Like the myth of the cross of Ardaich?’ Alex said.

‘The cross that is now destroyed,’ Olympia spat. ‘It has been consigned to history where it belongs. As if it had never existed.’

‘If it had never existed,’ Alex replied, ‘your head would be in a basket about now, alongside the heads of the other Supremos Stone guillotined on the battlements. Or have you forgotten already?’

‘Enough!’ Olympia shrieked. ‘One more word from you, Bishop, and I will have you incarcerated and terminated as a traitor to the Federation.’

‘Ma’am,’ Kelby protested, getting to his feet. ‘With all due respect, Alex Bishop is no traitor. I believe she’s proved that enough times.’

Olympia glowered from the screen. She raised a finger. ‘This discussion is over,’ she seethed. ‘What you have heard today is not to leave this room. On pain of extermination. Is that absolutely clear to every single one of you?’

A rapid round of nods and ‘Yes, Ma’am’s around the table. Several of the vampires rose from their seats, looking disapprovingly at Alex.

‘And as for you, Bishop,’ Olympia said, ‘you are hereby demoted back to your former rank of field agent.’

Kelby rolled his eyes. Here we go again, his expression said.

‘I can’t be demoted,’ Alex said, ‘because I never accepted the position in the first place. I won’t have anything to do with putting spy cameras in the homes of Federation members. It isn’t right.’

‘Silence!’ Olympia shrieked even more loudly. ‘Count yourself lucky that I do not – for now – sanction your immediate termination.’ She turned to Gibson. ‘Commander Gibson, you are henceforth placed in charge of the special task force.’

Gibson’s face lit up.

Olympia clapped her hands sharply. ‘This conference is now officially concluded.’

The screen went dark.

Chapter Ten

Cell 282, Blackheath High Security Prison North York Moor, 15 miles south of Middlesbrough 1.09 a.m.

The only sounds Denny Morgan could hear as he lay in his bunk that night were the soft, rhythmic snores coming from Pete Tulleth in the bunk beneath him, and the tramp of the guards’ footsteps patrolling the corridors on the other side of the thick steel door. The cell was pitch black, except for the little barred square of dim moonlight from the single window.

Denny was still and his eyes were shut, but he was wide awake and his mind consumed by a state of furious brooding, unable to shut out the thoughts that had occupied him over the last few days.

Denny Morgan was a guy who knew what he liked: and he liked things always the same. Back when he’d been a free man, it had always been the same beer drunk with the same mates in the same pub, with the same tracks playing on the jukebox; the same Tandoori chicken dish from the same Indian take-away every Wednesday night; the same steak and chips on a Friday. That had always been his way, deriving comfort from routine, invariably bristling with resistance to change of any kind. So much so that, when his wife Mandy had come home one day with the long blond hair she’d had since the age of eighteen unexpectedly, shockingly cropped and dyed black, Denny had – quite justifiably, as far as he was concerned – beaten her to death with an empty beer bottle: Newcastle Brown Ale, his favourite.

Denny’s preference for a steady routine had adapted itself well to the prison life he’d now been living for eight years; and for the last two of those years, he’d shared cell 282 with a pair of other inmates he got along well with. Pete Tulleth was given to unbelievably malodorous bouts of flatulence, though he made up for it with his inexhaustible supply of jokes. Kev Doyle was a sombre and pensive man, didn’t say too much, but you could trust him with anything. Both of them steady, dependable blokes. For the last couple of years, Denny had been pretty content with the way things were.

Until the recent arrival of the cell’s fourth occupant had changed everything.

As infuriating and unacceptable as Denny considered it, it wasn’t just the violation of the established regime in cell 282 that he objected to most vehemently – it was the fact that, as both Pete and Kev concurred, this new guy whose presence had been imposed on them was a real fucking weirdo.

Denny opened his eyes and rolled his head to the left across the thin pillow. Eight feet away on the other side of the cell, the new guy was lying completely still on the opposite top bunk, with his HM Prison Service regulation bedclothes draped over him from head to toe, so all that could be seen was his silhouette in the dim moonlight. Denny could make out the shape of his hands crossed diagonally across his chest, palms flat over his shoulders.

The mad bastard had been lying like that all day. Never seemed to move. He didn’t speak, didn’t get up to take a piss, didn’t snore, barely even seemed to be breathing. It was like sharing a cell with a fucking reanimated corpse.

All that the other inmates of Blackheath knew about the new occupant of cell 282 was what they’d gleaned from the papers and the TV in the rec room, which was a fair amount. His murderous sword attack on the little parish church in Cornwall had been so widely reported by a scandalised British media that even the guys banged up in solitary confinement knew about it. Many of the inmates who were committed Christians, especially those who’d turned to religion in prison as a way of dealing with their past sins, were angry about the new guy. This ‘Ash’, this self-proclaimed ‘vampire’, with his fucked-up filed teeth and his strange ways, was neither liked nor trusted.

Denny Morgan was no Christian, but he was no less pissed off with the new arrival, and even more irate with the prison governors for having picked this, of all cells, to dump him in. Why did they have to put him in with us? he thought angrily to himself, glowering hard at the opposite bunk as if he could project his rage by telepathy. The shape under the covers didn’t flicker. Denny whispered it out loud: ‘Why did they have to put you in with us, eh, you fucking fucker?’

Nothing. The body on the opposite bunk remained deathly still.

What kind of a stupid name was ‘Ash’, anyway?

‘Fucking shithead weirdo,’ Denny muttered. ‘Vampire my arse.’ And closed his eyes again.

After a few minutes, his brooding indignation finally started to give way to sleepiness. His body relaxed into the bunk’s mattress, and his breathing fell into a soft and shallow rhythm. The corners of his mouth twitched as he slept. In his dreams, he was walking into his garage back home, slowly pulling back the tarpaulin to reveal the glittering chrome mag wheels and gleaming candy-red paintwork of the Dodge Viper underneath. His, all his. He was running his hands over the contours of its cool, smooth, waxed body. The key was in his pocket. Just him and this beauty and the open road. He could almost hear the growling note of the tuned V8 . . .

Denny’s eyes snapped open and a chill gripped his heart as he turned his head to stare again at the opposite bunk.

It was empty.

It was empty, because Ash had risen. In the pale square of moonlight from the window, Denny saw the tall, powerfully-built figure cross the narrow cell towards him and his heart began to flutter. He propped himself up on one elbow. ‘Oy! what you up to?’ he demanded in a hoarse whisper that had more of a quaver to it than he wanted to hear.

Ash stopped at the side of the bunk and cocked his head curiously, peering up at where Denny lay. He bared his sharpened teeth in a crooked smile.

The pair of prison guards patrolling the corridor were the first to respond to the unearthly, high-pitched screams emanating from cell 282. Their footsteps reverberated off the hard floors and bare white walls as they sprinted to the door with their extendable batons drawn and ready for action. The terrible screaming continued from inside the cell. One of the guards wrenched the ring of keys from his belt clip. The other turned on the external light switch beside the riveted steel door, flipped open the viewing hatch cover and tried to peer through.

‘Oh, my Christ,’ he groaned. The glass was smeared opaque with thick, bright blood. ‘Hurry.’ As his colleague frantically twisted the key in the lock, the screams were rising to a tortured wail of terror and agony that neither of the guards had ever heard before, not with over thirty-five years’ prison service experience between them. Bursting inside the cell, clutching their batons, they recoiled at the scene in front of them.

‘Oh, Jesus. No.’

The cell was rank with the hot stink of death. It looked as though it had been hosed down with blood. The floor swimming in it; the walls running; the crisp white HM Prison Service bed linen soaked and dripping with red.

In the spreading pool on the floor lay the broken corpses of Tulleth and Doyle. Tulleth’s head was twisted almost 180 degrees on his neck. He had no chin or lower teeth, because his jawbone had been torn out by the roots. Doyle’s brains were exposed, like grey-white cauliflower, through the shattered mess of his skull.

Denny Morgan was still alive, though only for a few seconds more. He was thrashing like a landed fish and screaming his lungs out, dark blood pumping and spraying everywhere. Most of his face had been pummelled beyond recognition. Both eyes gouged from their sockets.

From the centre of the cell, the fourth inmate of 282, the prisoner known as Ash, turned to gaze impassively at the guards. He looked as if he’d dived into a lake of blood, as if all he wanted in the world was to bathe and swim in it, smear it all over his body and feel its warm taste trickling down his throat. He regarded them for a moment with an expression of detachment, then quietly turned his attention to the thing he was clutching in his hand.

For a few moments, the guards could do nothing but gape dumbly at the scene – then one of them let out a yell of repulsion as he realised that the livid object trailing from Ash’s bloody fist, long and red and gleaming and quivering as if still alive, was the tongue that he’d ripped from Denny Morgan’s throat, along with most of his trachea and oesophagus.

As both men stared, Ash raised the meaty fistful to his mouth and ripped into it with his teeth. He sighed and smiled with pleasure, gobbets and veins dangling from his lips. Blood flowed down his neck, down his chest, splashing down into bright crimson pools on the floor that reflected the white neon striplights.

One of the guards tore the radio from his belt and found his voice. ‘Situation on Level 2. Get everybody up here now!’

Chapter Eleven

Siberia

Deep in the icebound heart of the Russian province of Krasnoyarsk Krai, where the continuous winter blast kept temperatures well below minus forty Celsius, the barren wilderness of frozen lakes and tundra and snowy mountains stretched for a million square miles. Soon the polar night would descend, lasting from December through January, and the mining communities of Norilsk, the nearest human settlement and one of the coldest and most polluted cities on the planet, would see no sun at all for six long, dark weeks, temperatures plummeting towards minus sixty.

Out in the frozen wastes beyond the nickel mines, virtually nothing lived except for the polar bears and the few other wild animals that had evolved to withstand the harsh environment.

Or nothing, at any rate, that was known to the few humans who ever ventured there. When travellers vanished, as they fairly often did, it was generally assumed that they must have succumbed to the murderous cold, stumbled into a whiteout and frozen to death, or lost their way and slipped into a ravine.

Sometimes, that assumption was correct. Sometimes not.

Because other creatures lived here, too, unseen, underground. Creatures that had spent a very long time, and put a great deal of effort into, concealing their existence from the rest of the world.

For much of history they’d been down there, hidden from human eyes. At a time when Northern Asia had belonged to the Empire of the Huns, the creatures had already long since made it their home. A thousand years later, when Siberia had been conquered and occupied by the Mongol hordes, the hidden networks of tunnels and caverns deep beneath the ice had already been greatly expanded. Their occupants emerged to hunt only under cover of darkness, while it was safe for them to move. When they did, there were no witnesses. Nothing left behind that could have alerted anyone to their presence.

There had always been enough for them to feed on. Many nomadic tribes had wandered across the region through the ages, staying a while before being displaced by another: the Yakuts, the Uyghurs, and other Turkic peoples whose camps and villages made easy targets during the night when the humans were at their most vulnerable. The blood of countless victims had allowed the creatures to thrive and quietly go on building their lair under the ice, where the feeble Siberian sun never penetrated and night and day were all one. Now and then, they’d allow a human to turn, and gradually amassed a contingent of humanoid vampires: in ferior, bastard beings that the creatures despised and treated with contempt, but allowed to live among them as their servants and occasionally released into the world.

But reclusion was not the natural state of such an aggressively predatory race. It had never been their intention to remain permanently hidden in their lair: their leaders had long, long pored over their plans to broaden the extent of their realm – to extend it very far indeed.

They were in no hurry. When the time was right, they would strike. And the planet would change forever.

In the meantime with the passing of the centuries, the underground domain had grown into the vast subterranean citadel that now stretched nearly twelve square miles from east to west and plunged down further into the earth than the nickel mines of Norilsk.

It was inside one of those icy chambers, hundreds of yards beneath the surface, that three unusual visitors had come to the end of a long and difficult journey east. Only in these exceptional circumstances had they been allowed to enter the hallowed inner chambers of the citadel.

Two of the visitors were conscious and on their feet. Their names were Lillith and Zachary. They were vampires. Zachary was a huge figure, towering over Lillith. Many centuries earlier, in his native Abyssinia, he’d been a hunter famed for killing lions armed with only a spear. The lion-skin loincloth was a distant memory. Over a black silk shirt, he wore a tangerine-coloured suit that shimmered in the light of the ice walls.

Across the other side of the chamber stood Lillith, a raven-haired beauty in a red leather jumpsuit. Hanging from a belt around her slender waist, she still wore the empty steel scabbard of the sabre she’d lost back in Romania, before their trek eastwards. The shoulder of her jumpsuit was ripped from when their helicopter had come down in a blizzard, and her memory was fresh with the four days of hiding from the sun as they’d made their painful way a thousand miles across the deserts of ice. Finally, at the secret entrance to the underground citadel, they’d been met by the vampire servants who’d escorted them down here and told them to wait.

Lying inert on his back on a smooth, icy slab between Lillith and Zachary was the body of their leader, the vampire that Lillith called brother: Gabriel Stone. He was tall, slender and dark, and even in his state of deep unconsciousness he managed to look elegant and composed.

‘Is he going to make it?’ Zachary asked in his deep bass rumble, peering down worriedly at the still body. He’d asked that question so many times on the journey from Romania, carrying Gabriel’s limp form on his shoulder, that Lillith had stopped replying. She stepped to her brother’s side and ran her fingers down his cold cheek.

‘Come back to me, Gabriel,’ she murmured. She’d been there with him on the battlements when he’d been exposed to the force of the weapon the human Joel Solomon had carried into the castle. She remembered the way Gabriel had shielded her body with his, absorbing the lethal energy before they’d both hurled themselves over the edge of the battlements and gone tumbling down hundreds of yards to the rocks below.

Vampires could take a few knocks. Leaping from the top of a cliff had its risks but, as long as they didn’t smash themselves too irreparably, it was nothing they couldn’t survive. One thing they couldn’t take, though, was the devastating effect of the cross of Ardaich. Of all the ancient myths and legends within vampire folklore, that cross was the most dreaded, the darkest, its name the most quietly whispered. And it was also the most mysterious. Its origins, and the source of its power, had remained an enigma since the time the humans called the Dark Ages.