The Cross

echoed deafeningly from three tiered rows of communal cells, a waving, yearning forest of arms stretching outward through the bars. When they saw the group approaching and the bewildered-looking Ash with them, the prisoners erupted into a wild cheer.

‘We ought to let them all out,’ Lillith shouted over the din, amping up the already enormous volume of noise with a flourish of her bloody sabre and a beaming smile to her audience. ‘A mass breakout of thieves and murderers. Something to spice this dreary old island up a lit—’

Her words and the cheering of the prisoners were drowned out by the sudden blaring whoop of a siren.

‘Shit,’ Zachary mouthed, and he drew the scimitar out of his belt, still keeping a tight grip on Ash. Gabriel looked across to see a barred door flying open and nine prison guards swarming through towards them. It seemed that the survivors of the vampires’ inward journey through Blackheath had regrouped and broken out their anti-riot equipment. Their terrified faces peered over the tops of their shields. Four of the nine men were clutching rubber bullet guns. Without waiting for a command, one let off his weapon with a booming thump.

The heavy cylindrical composite-plastic missile crossed the distance between the guards and the vampires at several hundred feet per second. Just a blur to the human eye, but to a vampire’s senses it might as well have been a gently-thrown beach ball. Lillith slashed out with her sabre and cut the rubber bullet in half before it could reach its target.

The other three panicking guards let rip with their weapons in quick succession. Zachary easily deflected the second bullet with the blade of his scimitar, sending it bouncing away harmlessly across the floor. Gabriel reached out and simply snatched the third and fourth out of the air with his hands, like catching apples falling from a tree. He tossed them over his shoulders, clicked his fingers and said, ‘Kill them.’

Lillith and Zachary charged. The fight was brief, bloody and brutally uneven. The roar of the prisoners rose to a frenzied howl as the two vampires’ blades chopped and hacked. An ear flew. A hand. Lillith decapitated one guard with a single stroke. Zachary sliced another almost in half from shoulder to hip. In moments, nine men had been reduced to a pile of body parts lying scattered in a huge pool of blood.

‘More will be on their way,’ Gabriel said over the whoop of the alarm. ‘Let’s go.’

Before squadrons of armed police and half the British Army could descend on the place, the vampires had retraced their bloody steps back through the rest of the prison and burst out into the misty night. Ash ran hard to keep up as they sprinted to the perimeter fence and climbed out through the hole that Zachary had slashed in the wire earlier.

When Ash sucked in the cold night air, then laid eyes on the helicopter that was waiting for them on the tarmac beyond the fence, the rush of exhilaration at his new found freedom made him want to shout in triumph. Lillith chuckled at his expression. ‘Don’t count your chickens just yet, Golden Boy. You don’t know what’s in store.’

Before the human could reply, Zachary had shoved him through a cargo hatch in the fuselage and slammed it shut. The three vampires piled into the cockpit. Gabriel calmly took the controls, and in seconds the rotors were building up speed.

‘Hey, Gabriel, have you got a licence to fly this thing?’ Lillith yelled over the screech of the turbine as the helicopter lifted off the ground, dipped its nose and accelerated aggressively skywards. Looking down, they could all see the ocean of flashing blue lights illuminating the North Yorkshire hills and hear the sirens as dozens of emergency response vehicles sped towards the prison. But by then, the chopper was already just a rapidly shrinking red twinkle among the stars.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Oxford

Hours after the rest of the team, exhausted by a long, fruitless day of chasing up dead-end leads and blind alleys, had packed it in and gone home to their beds, Joel was still in the office. The last one to leave had been Cushley. Joel hadn’t been unaware of the way the female detective kept glancing at him across the office, the lowered eyelashes and the frequent darting of her fingers to touch her hair whenever they were talking alone. Even worse was the way she’d undone the top button of her blouse in the stifling heat of the room, making him blush and look away, stammering and blinking as terrible unwanted visions sprang out of his fevered imagination. It had been a huge relief when she’d finally left him alone and he no longer had to deal with the scent of her hot, fresh blood so close by, or the provocative pulse of her heartbeat pounding in his ears.

It was after 1 a.m. by the time Joel eventually wrenched himself away from his desk and left the building, feeling bitterly frustrated at making so little progress after so many hours’ work and mentally drained by the effort to appear normal in front of his colleagues. Just another normal cop chasing after just another bunch of normal criminals.

In truth, Joel hardly knew where to begin. His head was whirling with confusion as he walked home through the quiet night streets.

He was desperately worried, too. The blood bottle Tommy had given him was emptying fast. The drop in its level seemed to be accelerating as he became more and more accustomed to the taste, no longer taking furtive little sips purely for the sake of survival, but beginning to crave great gulps of the stuff — all that remained in the bottle, and much more besides. The part of his mind that recoiled and protested in disgust at the idea seemed to be weakening by the minute, and it frightened him deeply that the old Joel, the human Joel, might be slipping away from him.

Was it?

Not yet, he reasoned with himself — or else he wouldn’t be frozen with terror and horror at the inevitable prospect of having to refill his precious bottle when the last drop was finally used up. No, the old Joel was still alive somewhere inside him, still clinging resiliently on. But for how much longer?

With no need to sleep, he mooched restlessly about his flat. The more he worked himself up into a frenzy, the stronger the impulse became to grab the bottle from his pocket and feel the wonderful, dizzying, restorative energy of the blood feeding into his system. The constant internal struggle depressed him even more.

But this was no time for weakness or self-pity. If he chose to starve himself of blood and face the horrible fate Tommy had described, then whatever time he had left had to be devoted to his quest. If his resolve weakened, and he damned himself forever by taking some poor innocent as a victim, he could at least commit himself for all eternity to hunting down and ridding the world of this scourge. He’d annihilate all of them.

Joel thought of Tommy and felt a strange pang of guilt. Could he slaughter him so easily, just like that? Tommy, who’d given him sympathy and kindness when he’d been at his most vulnerable; Tommy, who attacked human beings and drank their blood. The moral compass was swinging all over the place. What was right? What was wrong?

And Alex Bishop. What about her? Could he destroy a woman he’d felt so close to? The idea made him shudder.

He balled his fists.

Joel, Alex is dead. She was dead long before you were born. She’s not a woman, she’s not a person. She’s a thing, a terrible thing, a monstrosity. Just like you.

Then she did have to be destroyed, and he had to be strong.

Alex. She was never far from his thoughts. He closed his eyes and saw her face vividly in his mind, her image so clear that it was almost as though he could speak to her and she’d hear him and reply. He suddenly felt oddly separate from himself, drifting, falling into a dreamlike state …

Alex, he called out to her. Why? How could you have done this to me?

But she didn’t reply. He stretched out harder with his feelings, yearning to touch her. Where are you?

Still no reply. And yet, he could almost sense her presence, uncannily close, somehow even tangible. She was close. ‘Alex is in London,’ he heard himself say out loud, in a voice that was almost