He fell back into the snow. He arched his back and ground his eyes shut and pounded his fists on the ground and beat them against his head. There was no pain. He shoved his thumbs into his mouth, felt for his upper canine teeth and pressed hard against them. They didn’t feel any different. Absurd. Insane. Maybe it was all a bad dream.
Except that it wasn’t. He’d destroyed enough of these things to know they were real. For centuries, for millennia, they’d been there, these parasites, living off the blood of human beings.
And now he was one of them.
Joel sat there in the snow, hugging himself and rocking slowly back and forth. His mind was numb, choked with indistinct thoughts, paralysed with cloying horror. An infinite expanse of time seemed to drift by before he eventually turned his head slowly to look at the blood-spattered watch on his wrist and then up at the sky. The stars were fading as the first blood-red glimmers of light tinged the eastern horizon.
Dawn wasn’t far away.
Many years before, when Joel had been just a child, his grandfather had told him what would happen to a vampire that was exposed to the rays of the sunrise. The primal instinct now flooding warnings through his mind, so alien to him and yet seeming to come from the very depths of his being, told him that his grandfather had been right.
Joel tried to imagine what it would feel like. First, the rising apprehension giving way to terror as the glow in the east grew more intense. Then the golden rim of the sun’s disc would appear shimmering over the horizon and it would be as if a million hot needles were piercing his skin. Within seconds, the lethal radiation would be cooking him, boiling the blood inside his veins; the flesh blackening and peeling from his bones, falling away in brittle carbonised flakes that drifted off like cinders on the morning breeze as he screamed and screamed and watched himself disintegrate. When the torment was over, there would be nothing left but a crater in the snow to mark his final, irreversible destruction.
And he’d welcome it. His life was already gone, the world he’d known already lost to him. The future that lay ahead of him now was unthinkable, unendurable. Joel’s eyes were fixed on the east as the red glow gradually bled across the sky.
Veins of gold began to spread through the crimson. The first light slowly creeping across the faces of the distant mountains.
Joel was afraid. And he was prepared to be even more afraid, and resolute in the face of terror, before the end. But the overwhelming horror that suddenly gripped him as the dawn approached was like a physical force, far beyond anything he could have imagined. Before he’d even realised what he was doing, he was on his feet and staggering away through the snow.
Behind him, the first glittering rays of sunlight peeped over the mountains. He felt it like a nuclear blast on his back. He screamed and ran harder, bolting through the trees like a wild animal instinctively impelled to survive at all cost, suddenly possessed with a speed and power that he’d never known in his thirty years of human life. All he knew was that he must find shadow. Must seek out darkness. The searing light was quickly gaining ground.
He looked up, shielding his eyes from the pain. The sunrise gleamed on the castle turrets and ramparts high above. The ancient fortress offered all kinds of dark spaces where he could hide away — but he knew that, even endowed with incredible physical strength as he was, he had no hope of scaling the mountainside and reaching it in time.
He was going to burn.
But there was a chance. The foot of the mountain was just thirty yards away; and as Joel ran he saw the dark recess in the rocks.
The cave was deep and low. Bent double, crawling desperately on his knees, he wished like he’d never wished for anything before that the terrible light couldn’t reach him there. The shaft tightened as it deepened, and it took all his strength to force his body through. Then, with a surge of relief that made him cry out, he realised it was opening up again, into a wide crooked fissure that ran diagonally upwards into the bowels of the mountain. A pitch-black sanctuary where the sun hadn’t penetrated for a billion years.
Joel snuggled deep into the darkness. For a few moments, the fierce joy of survival burned intensely through him and he couldn’t stop grinning. He’d done it. He was safe from the hateful sun. He’d survived. He’d won.
He closed his eyes as his ecstasy suddenly gave way to revolted self-loathing. He’d had his chance to end it, right here, right now. But not even the steeliest resolve he could muster up stood the remotest chance against the vampire’s all-conquering urge to survive. Not now, not ever. He was doomed to go on like this for the rest of eternity.
As the sun rose over the snowy forest and mountains and began its arc across the sky, Joel remained in the darkness of the cave, thinking of only one thing. He was going to return home and destroy the woman who had done this to him. Her and all her kind.
Send them all back to hell where they — and now he — belonged.
Chapter Two
Alex Bishop stood alone at the railing of the bridge, the wind in her hair. Beyond the river and all around her, the city lights were fading with the coming of the dawn. The rising sun glittered off cathedral domes and glassy high-rise towers and cast a diffused golden streak across the water. She could feel its warmth on her face. If it hadn’t been for the last remaining Solazal photosensitivity neutraliser pill that she’d managed to retrieve from the castle before her escape from Romania, she’d hardly have been standing here to welcome the sunrise. As for any other vampire, it would have been a straight choice between frazzle and hide. Nobody ever voluntarily opted for the former.
She sighed to herself as she gazed out across the cityscape. So much had happened in the last few days that even her ultra-sharp vampire mind was reeling from it. None of it was good. All through the night she’d been making her way as best she could from the snowy wilds of Romania. A stolen farm truck had got her as far as a desolate country railway station, where she’d hitched a ride on a freight carriage. Now here she was in Prague, not quite halfway to where she wanted to be and hoping that her call to Utz McCarthy was going to pay off.
She didn’t have to wait much longer before a black BMW SUV peeled off from the growing traffic over the bridge and pulled up a few yards from where she was standing. She stepped away from the railing to meet it. The driver was alone. His door opened. He climbed out and walked towards her, grey-haired, tall and lean, not quite smiling, not quite frowning, wearing a long raincoat that billowed in the wind.
At only eighty or so years of age Utz McCarthy was much younger than Alex, but he looked much older: compared to the twenty-nine years she’d spent as a human, he’d survived for over half a century before an unexpected encounter with a vampire had set him on a whole new course. Nowadays, he was a minor sectional official running the small and somewhat dingy Prague offices of the same organisation Alex belonged to: the global Vampire Federation. Part of Utz’s job was facilitating the movements of VIA agents like Alex.
The last time they’d met face to face had been eighteen months earlier, when Harry Rumble, Alex’s boss at the Vampire Intelligence Agency Headquarters in London, had sent her out this way on a mission to check out reports of rogue vampire activity in the Czech city of Brno. As it had turned out, it had been a false alarm. No Federation regs were being contravened, the local vampires were behaving themselves and not turning unauthorised victims; no arrests or Nosferol terminations had been necessary and all had been well.
