‘Who’s there?’ Geoffrey yelled in a quavering voice, sighting the shotgun down his torch beam as he swept it left and right at the barns, the gazebo, the helicopter hangar. No reply. A lowlying freezing mist drifted around the house, making them shiver.
‘Who’s there?’ Geoffrey repeated. ‘Whoever you are, I have a gun.’
As they passed the kennels, the torch beam landed on the cowering shapes of Castor and Pollux. The two dogs were pressed against the wire mesh as far away from the house as they could get, their tails between their legs, quivering and whining with subdued fear.
‘Look at them, Geoffrey. What the—’
‘Never mind the dogs. Look at
‘Someone’s broken into them,’ Sharon gasped, gripping her husband’s arm. ‘Oh my God. We have to call the police.’
Geoffrey stared at the debris a moment longer. ‘Wait a minute. It looks like … no, it can’t be.’
‘Can’t be what?’ she asked him in terror.
‘Those crates haven’t been broken into. They’ve been broken
The two of them hurried breathlessly back to the coach-house to dial 999. As they did so, a figure stepped out of the mist.
Sharon let out a shriek. It was the figure of a man — tall and dark, in a long leather coat that hung elegantly from his slim body. Even in their shaking panic, the couple could see that this was no ordinary intruder. There was something distinguished, somehow almost princely, in his bearing as he stepped towards them. The leather coat was unbuttoned despite the cold, his white silk shirt casually open at the neck. ‘Good evening,’ he said with a smile.
‘Who are you?’ Geoffrey demanded.
The intruder just kept smiling. Out of the freezing fog behind him appeared two more figures. The woman had the wild black hair of a gypsy and was clad in tight, gleaming red leather. The other was the towering shape of the biggest, broadest man Lonsdale’s caretakers had ever seen. The three figures advanced, all smiling and exchanging knowing glances.
‘Don’t come another step,’ Geoffrey quavered, brandishing the shotgun. ‘Stay back, I tell you. This gun is loaded. I’ll shoot. Sharon, run inside and call the police, quick.’
‘There’s really no need for violence,’ said the elegant man in the long coat.
‘I mean it,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Not another step. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I will, if you make me.’
‘I doubt that very much.’ The man came on another step, still smiling.
Geoffrey Hopley made a terrorised gurgling sound from his throat, gripped the twelve-bore tightly and closed his eyes and jerked the trigger. The crash of the gunshot shattered the night and the darkness was lit up by its white muzzle flash as he discharged one barrel straight into the man’s chest at close range.
Then he opened his eyes, ears ringing from the shot, and his knees almost buckled under him as he saw the man still standing there.
The man tutted, fingered the tattered, bloodied hole in his silk shirt, and shook his head disapprovingly at Geoffrey. ‘I had always found the English to be such a hospitable and welcoming people,’ he said sadly. ‘How things change.’
Geoffrey was about to fire off the second cartridge when the enormous black man stepped forward, snatched the gun from his hands and bent its barrels into a U-shape as easily as if it had been a stick of liquorice.
Sharon had begun to gibber.
‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ said the wearer of the ruined silk shirt. ‘My name is Stone. Gabriel Stone.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tommy led Joel back to a sooty red-brick building in a narrow little empty street some way from the docks. At the bottom of a flight of steps, he clinked open a triple-padlocked door and ushered Joel inside. The place was a basement, windowless and bare brick but clean and well maintained, filled with organised clutter. Glancing around him, Joel took another swig from his bottle. Despite his disgust at the thought of it, he could feel his strength growing with every sip. It was all he could do to resist gulping the whole lot down.
‘Unless ye’re planning on starting to juice properly for yerself, I’d be sparing with that,’ Tommy warned. ‘Here, take a seat.’
Joel sat on the chair Tommy pulled out for him. Hating himself for the lust he felt for the stuff, he slipped the blood bottle back into his pocket and resolved to leave it there for a long time.
‘What do you do?’ Joel asked. Vampire small-talk. It felt absurd, surreal.
‘Buy and sell stuff,’ Tommy replied. ‘Bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’
‘So … how long have you been …?’
‘A vampire?’ Tommy chuckled. ‘Don’t be coy, laddie. Eternity’s a long time to spend ducking and diving from the truth. A long, long time, is the answer to yer question.’
‘How did you become one?’
Tommy slumped on a worn armchair and kicked his boots out in front of him. ‘Now, see, that’s not something ye should ask too freely, son. Some vampires find it rude. But I dinnae mind telling ye. Ever heard o’ the Baobhan sith?’
‘The white women of the Highlands,’ Joel said, and Tommy seemed taken aback. ‘I read about them somewhere,’ Joel explained. He was being deliberately vague, because the place he’d read about them was in his vampire hunter grandfather’s diary.
‘The white women, aye,’ Tommy said pensively. ‘Then ye’ll ken that they were a Celtic vampire warrior tribe back in what the humes call the Dark Ages. They were like Amazons, except with teeth. Their prey was young laddies, that they’d mesmerise with their beautiful singing. One of those young laddies was my only son, Stuart. It was in the year 1301, around the time Willie Wallace was stirring it up wi’ the English. Cold winter it was. One night Stuart was out with his bow, hunting in the forest. That’s when they took him. When I went off searching for him, they took me and all.’ Tommy sighed. ‘Long time ago.’
Joel’s mind was boggling. Over seven hundred years that Tommy had been living this life. Or
‘Destroyed,’ Tommy muttered. ‘By the hunters.’
‘Vampire hunters?’
‘Aye. They caught him in the daytime. Put ma wee boy in a cage and dragged him oot intae the sun. Fuckers.’ Tommy spat.
‘I’m sorry,’ Joel heard himself say, and he frowned. He’d travelled home intent on destroying every vampire who crossed his path. Now here he was, sitting with one of them, drinking blood with him, genuinely grateful for what he’d done for him and sympathising with him for the loss of his vampire son.
‘Every one of us has a story tae tell,’ Tommy said. ‘So what’s yours?’
‘A woman did it to me. A woman I thought I loved. She kind of held back from me that she was a vampire.’
Tommy nodded thoughtfully. ‘And ye resent her for it, don’t ye?’
Joel said nothing.
‘Normal enough. Nothing tae be ashamed of. It happens tae all of us who’ve been forced to turn, against their
