‘To eternity,’ Gabriel said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Joel had caught the early train from Southampton, using the money that Tommy had lent him. In his pocket were six tubes of Solazal pills, and he could still taste the one he’d taken earlier. So far, the stuff seemed to be working: the pale morning sun seemed to have no effect.
At moments he almost felt normal again. And yet, walking through the crowds at Oxford station, it was bewildering to think that all these people around him had no idea what he really was, what he’d become. Even more bewildering to realise that, in such a short time since wakening up on that snowy Romanian mountainside, he’d already grown used to hiding himself away from the humans. Being openly among them now seemed alien to him.
As he scanned the faces of the people around him, Joel wondered if any of them were vampires like him — Federation vampires able to walk about in daylight. Would some recognition instinct kick in if he encountered one?
Heading out of the station building and towards the taxi rank outside, he passed a woman with a small spaniel on a leash. It suddenly transformed from a placid little creature to a furiously-snapping piranha fish on legs the instant he came within five yards of it.
‘Quiet, Bethany,’ the woman scolded, aghast at her dog’s behaviour. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘Dogs don’t like me,’ Joel explained with a weak smile, and walked on. Still dazed, he took a cab westwards through the city to his home district of Jericho. As they drove, the radio news was reporting the disappearance of a police patrol car and two officers in Kent the night before, but the reception was crackly and Joel caught little of it before the driver skipped impatiently to a loud music station. Ten minutes later the taxi pulled up outside the row of Georgian red-brick terraced houses in Walton Well Road. Joel paid the driver and got out, slamming the door so hard that it made the whole car rattle.
‘Hey, steady on, mate,’ the taxi driver said, scowling at him.
‘Sorry,’ Joel mumbled, and turned to climb the steps to the front door of his ground-floor flat. The door had been boarded up. He remembered the fight he’d had with Gabriel Stone’s ghoulish manservant, Seymour Finch. Finch had burst through the glass panel as if it had been nothing. Yet he wasn’t a vampire. What other powers could a vampire transmit to a human to give them such extraordinary strength?
Joel’s dark thoughts were interrupted as the ruddy face of Mrs Dowling from next door appeared over the fence. ‘Inspector Solomon? We’ve been worried about you. Maurice fixed up the door for you. We didn’t know where you’d gone. Anyone could have just walked in.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Dowling. I had to go away. I’m back now.’
‘Your kitchen’s completely wrecked. We thought of calling the police, but … well, seeing as you
‘Just redecorating,’ he reassured her. ‘Nothing to worry about. Thanks for thinking of it, though.’
‘Is everything all right?’ she asked, peering at him curiously. ‘You seem … I don’t know.’
‘I haven’t been quite myself the last couple of days,’ Joel said.
‘You don’t look ill, or anything. Just different, somehow.’
Joel left her to figure it out and went inside. The wreckage of the kitchen had been tidied up a little — Maurice again, he supposed. He went over to the phone, checked his calls and messages and found that someone had been calling him repeatedly from a mobile whose number he didn’t recognise. The messages, on the other hand, were from someone whose voice he knew right away.
Sam Carter was Joel’s longtime friend, as well as his superior at Thames Valley Police. He’d always been a man of few words, and his phone messages were true to form.
‘Need to talk. Give me a call right now.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
One part of the late Jeremy Lonsdale’s mansion that the pale morning sun couldn’t reach was the vaulted, windowless wine cellar that ran almost the entire length of the house. It was filled with the kind of collection of fine vintages that only a multi-millionaire with a taste for the good life could have put together.
Now, though, the cellar had been put to another use. Back in business and on a mission to finish what he’d started, Gabriel Stone had designated the place the nerve-centre of his renewed rebellion against the Federation. The heavy oak wine racks had been shoved aside to make room for the long table they’d brought down from Lonsdale’s plush dining room. Its gleaming surface was crisscrossed with a spaghetti of wires connecting the politician’s desktop computer to a bank of extra monitors.
‘Man, I don’t know why you think I can do this,’ Zachary groaned from where he sat hunched massively over the computer keyboard, tapping the odd key more or less randomly and scratching his head. ‘I mean, this ain’t nothing I’ve done before. Setting up email accounts and shit was always Anton’s job.’
‘Zachary darling, you know Anton’s not with us any more,’ Lillith said nonchalantly, honing the edge of her new heavy cavalry dragoon’s sabre with a whetstone, a cloth and a bottle of gun oil at her elbow. ‘Someone else has to do it.’
‘Yeah, but why me? I ain’t a morning kind of guy, you know?’
‘Because we’re busy,’ she said, closing one eye and peering down the curve of the sword blade. ‘Aren’t we, Gabriel?’
Gabriel had been standing at the far end of the cellar, head bowed in meditation. He turned and looked coldly at Zachary. ‘You know how to operate one of those small communication devices the humans carry around with them, do you not?’
‘A mobile phone,’ Lillith put in. ‘Zach’s a dab hand with one.’
Zachary shrugged his huge shoulders. ‘Sure. But this—’
‘Then you will soon learn to penetrate the mysteries of the technological Tower of Babel that our food source call the interweb, in order to re-establish communications with our network of associates. Surely the principle is similar.’
‘They call it the inter
‘There. Already it becomes evident that you are far ahead of either myself or Lillith in these matters. Now get on with it.’ Gabriel walked over to the table and slid a piece of paper across it towards Zachary. ‘With these electronic mail addresses you will be able to rally round the faithful. Send out the word of my survival, of our renewed mission. Summon them all here. Rolando, Petroc, Elspeth, Yuri and the others. And Kali, of course.’
‘Oh, yes, let’s not forget Kali,’ Lillith muttered under her breath.
Gabriel turned to her with a frown. ‘I believe my disapproving sister had been allocated the task of drafting a letter?’
Lillith looked up from her blade-sharpening. ‘“Dear Prime Minister, regret to inform you that due to personal reasons, blah blah blah, compelled to resign my position forthwith, will be taking a trip around the world and will not be contactable, etc., etc., yours sincerely, Jeremy Lonsdale.” What am I, your secretary now? Get Kali to write it when she gets here, as you seem to value her so much.’
Gabriel was about to reply sharply when the cellar door creaked slowly open and a balding head appeared through the gap, followed by a slouching, stooped form. Lillith snatched up her sabre, then relaxed. ‘Oh, it’s only the
