The Cross

Instantly, four guards appeared from a side entrance, opened the cage that encased Gabriel and carried him out on his slab. The Council members all began filing towards the exit.

Lillith turned to Master Xenrai in alarm, but couldn’t read his expression. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked desperately as he approached her and Zachary. ‘They’re going to execute him, aren’t they?’

Almost tenderly, the Master laid his long hand on her arm. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘The Chamber of Whispers is our room of healing. The Judge’s pronouncement is that Gabriel be given the second chance that you desire. Congratulations. You have saved your brother.’

Chapter Fourteen

London

Alex was at VIA Headquarters before nine the next morning, wading through the backlog that had amassed in her absence. In the wake of the heavy casualties inflicted by Gabriel Stone’s uprising, she now found that her workload had taken a sudden 300 per cent leap thanks to a mountain of ongoing investigation files inherited from deceased VIA agents. It looked like she was going to be tethered to the desk for a while.

The file currently open in front of her had come from the vacated desk of agent Rakesh Mundhra, one of her colleagues taken down in the gun battle with Gabriel Stone’s gang on board the Anica, the Romanian cargo ship now docked in London that Stone had used to smuggle himself and his cronies into the country. Alex felt a jab of sadness at the memory of Rakesh. So much had happened in the short time since the incident that it seemed like months ago. Pushing her regrets to one side, she went on scanning quickly through his notes.

The case Mundhra had been investigating was that of a highly publicised massacre that had taken place a few days earlier in a quiet little parish church in a place called St Elowen, Cornwall. It was the first Alex had heard of it — but then, she’d had other matters on her plate. It seemed that the church choir, composed of singers from the village community, had been engaged in their regular weekly practice when an intruder had entered the church armed with a sword. After slaughtering fifteen people including the vicar, a young boy and his parents, a teenage girl and the local butcher, the killer had made no attempt to escape. When the police firearms response unit had arrived some time later, they’d found him drinking the blood of the victims. Pouring it over his body. And proclaiming himself to be a vampire.

‘Interesting,’ Alex said to herself.

She read on. The killer, a drifter who had first been sighted apparently living rough near the village a few days before, had been arrested and locked up in a maximum security prison awaiting trial. The media had gone wild in the wake of the ‘St Elowen Massacre’ and predictably it had been the vampire angle that generated the most sensation: VAMPIRE IN CORNWALL; DRACULA SWORD MANIAC; FEAST OF BLOOD were just some of the typically asinine headlines the humans had come up with.

Mundhra’s initial feeling had been that the attacker might be a Federation-registered vampire running amok. These things occasionally happened, as Alex knew only too well — though seldom so publicly — and one of the daily duties of VIA field agents was to check each and every possible report of rogue vampire activity. More often than not, the case turned out to be a hoax, a false alarm or just another stupid psychopathic human inflicting atrocities against his own kind. When it wasn’t, agents like Alex were called to step in.

She spent a few minutes online, checking out the development of the St Elowen Massacre news story over the days since Mundhra’s final report. The killer called himself ‘Ash’, refusing to give any other name. Detectives were still trying to establish his real identity, starving the howling media hounds of any really juicy tidbits of information about his past or background — and the fact that he couldn’t be fingerprinted, due to apparently having mutilated his own fingertips at some stage with a razor blade, didn’t help matters either. He was around thirty years of age, and it seemed he’d lived off the grid long enough for any official trace of him to have disappeared. His sharpened teeth were the subject of a lot of appalled fascination; it appeared he’d done the job himself with a file. A set of pointy gnashers doth not a vampire make, Alex thought to herself. The murder weapon itself had been a cheap reproduction of a Scottish basket-hilted broadsword, crudely inscribed with weird markings that the tabloids were proclaiming ‘satanic’.

The latest on Ash was that he’d murdered and partially dismembered three of his prison inmates, apparently in order to drink and anoint himself with their blood. Seemed like old habits died hard. Ash was now in solitary confinement and several heads had rolled within the prison service administration for having placed such a crazed murderer in a shared cell. The press were either morbidly lapping it up or screaming for justice system reforms, depending on which paper you read.

Alex searched out some related articles. Shortly before his prison cell stunt, the self-styled ‘vampire’ had been taken under heavily-armed police escort to the first court hearing prior to the start of his trial. There were pictures of him being marched from a prison van to the back of the court, amid the usual angry scenes: a tall, muscular figure, hooded to hide his face from the photographers swarming to get a shot of him.

And right there was a dead giveaway that Mundhra would’ve spotted, if he’d been around long enough to get the chance.

‘Daylight,’ Alex said to herself. No fizz, no pop, no inexplicable spontaneous human combustion when they marched the killer out into the morning sun. At that point he’d been well past the twelve hours’ worth of protection that Solazal could have offered. Not easy to smuggle any of the stuff into a high-security prison, and anything he’d had on him at the time of arrest would have been confiscated and analysed.

‘You’re no vampire, Mr Ash-whoever-you-are,’ she muttered. It was just as she’d suspected. Nutjobs like this guy were strictly a human problem, not hers. She reached for a stamp. Bang. Case closed. ‘Bye, bye, Ash. Enjoy your stay in prison. Watch it in the showers.’

The next file in the heap was one that had come straight to her. When she opened it, she saw the reason why.

‘Oh, Baxter,’ she groaned. ‘What have you done now?’

It wasn’t so long ago that Alex had been tasked by Harry Rumble to go and have a gentle chat with the movie star and secret vampire, Baxter Burnett, about the latest hot role he’d been gunning for: the part of Jake Gyllenhaal’s wayward, feckless younger brother in the upcoming Universal production Firestorm. The part was perfect for Baxter, and it was set to propel him into the A-list. VIA had just one issue with it: in all the years since his first breakout hit, Down and Dirty, Baxter had very noticeably not aged a day; now here he was, playing yet another fresh-faced thirty-year-old. CGI effects couldn’t account for his eternally youthful appearance. The movie magazines and the nerds online were beginning to talk about it. It was the kind of attention that VIA didn’t want.

So, under orders, Alex had leaned on him. Just a little. Persuading him not to take the part had involved sticking a cocked.44 Magnum loaded with Nosferol tips in his face. At the time, she’d thought he’d got the message.

Now it looked like she’d been wrong.

The top page of the case file was a printout from the website of The Hollywood Reporter. ‘BURNETT SIGNS UP FOR FIRESTORM‘, proclaimed the headline.

‘This is the most demanding role I’ve ever taken on,’ the star was quoted as saying, next to a photo of him beaming at the camera with a blonde on each arm, ‘but I was born to play this guy. I can’t wait to work with Jake and Stephen. I’m their biggest fan. I’m just so jazzed about this!’

And the rumoured twelve-million-dollar paycheque couldn’t have been much of a disincentive either, Alex thought. Now she understood what his email to her had been about. She sighed. ‘Baxter,’ she groaned again. ‘You’re a very silly boy.’

It got worse. Clicking into the official Baxter Burnett website to check any latest news, Alex noticed that the star’s blog had had more than a dozen updates in the last few days.

It was the one titled ‘FUCK VIA!’ that drew her eye.