It was a quiet residential area, only a few terrified passersby and a smattering of traffic. Public gun battles weren’t strictly part of VIA’s low-profile policy, but then allowing a celebrity vampire to run amok wasn’t exactly on the agenda either. Alex raised the pistol again and was about to fire at the fleeing figure of Baxter Burnett when she realised that the set of open wrought-iron gates he’d just sprinted past was the entrance to a school and that there was a crowd of kids gathered just inside them. Some of the older ones, girls and boys of up to about twelve or thirteen, had ignored the frantic shouts of their teachers to get inside, and had come running towards the street at the sound of the gunshots. Alex lowered the gun, not daring to risk a shot. Killing humans wasn’t on the cards for her.
A couple of yards from the crowd of schoolkids, Baxter’s run faltered. He turned to look at them. Suddenly they were all pointing at him, eyes were opening wide and mouths were dropping open. There was a shout of ‘It’s Baxter Burnett!’ Those who could tear their gaze from their cinema idol stared delightedly at Alex. Not a camera or crew anywhere in sight, but they obviously thought they were in the middle of a film shoot, complete with blank- firing movie weapons.
‘He isn’t Baxter Burnett,’ Alex called out to the kids. ‘He’s just a lookalike. Get away from him.’
But before anyone could react, Baxter reached out and grabbed the nearest of the crowd, a girl of about twelve with masses of golden curls and a look of bedazzlement that very quickly turned to terror as he dragged her roughly across the pavement and wrenched a handful of her hair to one side to expose her little neck. ‘I’ll bite her,’ he yelled at Alex. ‘I’ll turn her.’
Alex hesitated. The kids were screaming. The teachers had run back inside the building.
‘Put the gun down, Agent Bishop,’ Baxter shouted.
Alex tossed the Desert Eagle to the ground. ‘Now you let go of the child.’
‘Back off!’
Alex retreated a step. ‘This isn’t going to look too good in
‘Like I care,’ Baxter screamed. ‘I’m sick of being told what to do all the time! I’m not going to take it any more, not from you, not from the goddamn fascists you work for!’
‘There’s nowhere you can run that they won’t track you down,’ Alex said.
‘Oh yeah? I heard the rumours. I’m not the only one that’s joining the Trads.’
‘There are no Trads left, Baxter. We wiped them out.’ There wasn’t much conviction in Alex’s voice as she said it.
‘Bullshit. I’m going to find them, I’m going to join them, and I’m going to come back and kick your Federal ass.’ Spotting a car coming down the street, Baxter dragged the little girl to the kerbside and out into the road, blocking its way. Baxter hauled the child around with him to the driver’s side, wrenched open the door and with his free hand hauled the elderly woman driver out from behind the wheel, sending her spinning to the opposite kerb.
Alex could do nothing. Baxter dumped the child on the road, then hit the gas and took off with a maniacal laugh.
Alex scooped up her gun and launched herself at the back of the car as it accelerated away. Her fingers raked smooth metal, but she had no purchase and went sprawling to the ground as the car sped into the distance.
The twelve-year-old girl was still crying hysterically at the roadside. Alex went over to her and quickly checked her for scratches or bites. Nothing. She trotted over to the old woman Baxter had pulled out of the car. Minor grazing, a couple of nasty bruises.
‘I’m with the police,’ Alex told her. ‘My unit’s on its way. They’ll look after you.’ The wail of sirens had been within vampire earshot for the last few seconds. The teachers had reported the gunshots, she guessed, and someone must have called the fire brigade too. A dark column of smoke was rising from Piers Bullivant’s nearby apartment building.
As Alex helped the old lady to her feet, suddenly feeling hungry and trying not to think about the human blood flowing within easy range, the first police car came screeching into view at the top of the street.
Alex wasn’t worried about getting away from the cops. But explaining to her Federation superiors that Baxter Burnett had now officially gone rogue, evaded her and was on the loose …
That part might not be quite so simple.
Chapter Twenty-One
For the last three years, Matt Dempsey’s home had been a rambling three-storey Victorian terraced house in a quiet street in North Oxford, fifteen minutes’ bus ride from the city centre. The place was much too big for a solitary academic, but over the years he’d nonetheless managed to fill it with stuff his ex-wife would have called junk. In many cases, Matt secretly admitted that she’d have been right — the collection of antique brass lamps jostling for space on the mantelpiece of his downstairs study, for instance — but he prized them just as highly as the fourteenth-century Chinese statuettes on his bookshelf, the rare Mayan pottery in the display cabinet and the Italian medieval-period lute that hung on the wall behind his battered desk.
At this moment, though, they were the last things on his mind as he struggled to figure out the strange markings that ran around the circumference of the stone cross’s outer ring and along its pitted crosspieces.
It took him a while to root out the books he needed: the most useful of the cracked, musty leather-bound volumes were Crosman’s 1822
Finally, after what could have been three hours or thirty, he found himself staring with bleary eyes at what he reckoned was the closest possible translation of the markings on the cross.
Bizarre. Had he got it right? Some of the inscriptions that hadn’t been destroyed by the ravages of time still eluded him, and not even the scholarly erudition of A.P. Kerensky could shed light on them. But there it was, as best he could figure it out:
Matt studied the smooth, creamy-white stone of the cross and wondered how old it must be. There could be no question of sending it off for testing through the normal Pitt Rivers Museum channels — that could take weeks. But what about his pal Fred Lancaster? Stiff from being bent over the desk for so long, Matt hobbled over to the phone and looked up his number at the Oxford University Department of Geology.
‘Fred? Matt Dempsey here.’
‘Matt, old boy. How long has it been?’
‘Listen, I need a favour. Wondered if I could run by the lab with something interesting that’s come my way?’
Chapter Twenty-Two
