The Cross

‘Federation scum. Your time is over.’ The vampire’s voice.

The next few seconds of footage left no doubt as to what was happening in the cellar. The flash and boom of the gunshot. The scream of the vampire, falling into the shadows, the Nosferol already ravaging his body. The camera gave a violent wobble and seemed to turn away in horror.

It was then that Alex realised how the footage had been filmed. The surviving human had had some kind of miniature spy camera attached to him, turning whichever way he turned, seeing what he saw. It could have been anything, a badge, a button on his jacket.

Alex suddenly felt very cold and shaky. The worst was yet to come. She remembered what the human had said to her next, when he’d seen the way she’d destroyed the vampire with a single bullet to the chest:

‘How did you—’

And her reply, just before she’d injected him: ‘It takes a vampire to destroy a vampire properly.’

Immediately afterwards, she’d pumped her syringe-load of Vambloc under his ear, erasing his memory of everything that had just happened. Her comment to him had been no more than a throwaway line, intended for dramatic effect and meant to be instantly forgotten. Just a way to liven up a routine chore she’d been carrying out for decades.

But captured on digital audio, an admission like that to a human was a Federal crime that meant a one-way trip to Termination Row.

And Olympia had heard it loud and clear, Alex thought. This was it, then. Her fate was sealed.

But just as it reached the crucial moment, the footage cut off abruptly. In its place was a line of text that promised: ‘TO BE CONTINUED …’

Alex let out a long inward sigh of relief.

‘A fine day’s work that was, Agent Bishop,’ said Olympia.

‘How could I have known?’ Alex started to protest.

‘What happened to the human?’ Donskoi asked.

‘I carried him out of there, pumped full of Vambloc.’

‘With the camera intact,’ Gibson put in. ‘That’s one memory you didn’t erase.’

‘Why didn’t you dispose of him?’ Olympia demanded. ‘If you had destroyed the body, you would have destroyed the video evidence.’

‘My job is to terminate rogue vampires, not to kill humans. I thought that was just slightly against Federation laws?’

‘Your job,’ Olympia snapped, ‘is to protect and uphold the Federation. At all cost, vampire or human. The Federation laws are the code we expect our common vampire citizenry to abide by. For the sake of the greater good, however, those of us granted the appropriate authority may sometimes have to bend the rules in a considered fashion. I would have thought that you, as a senior agent, would have understood that.’ She paused, visibly seething. ‘Evidently not. And now, thanks to you, the humans know about us. They know about the Federation. The very thing we have most sought to avoid since its foundation. Concealment is, has always been, the whole purpose of its existence.’

‘Did you speak to the human, Agent Bishop?’ asked Donskoi, looking at her with the penetrating eye of a hardened interrogator. ‘Is there anything we should know about — anything you might have revealed that will be shown in the next instalment this Knightly posts on his website?’

Alex stared at Donskoi. Did he know the truth, or was he just cleverly trying to lure her into incriminating herself? She swallowed. ‘Nothing,’ she lied. ‘I did the job I was trained and ordered to do, and I got out of there. That’s it.’

‘This Errol Knightly is gaining a great deal of publicity from his new book,’ Olympia said. ‘Drawing millions of humans to his website. I hope you realise how serious this is?’

‘With respect, I disagree,’ Alex said. ‘Ignore it, and it’ll soon be forgotten, along with all the fake footage of Yetis, ghosts and the Loch Ness monster. This is the internet, Supremo Angelopolis. It’s already so full of shit that nobody will take this seriously.’

‘We take it very seriously, Agent Bishop,’ Donskoi said. ‘We are not idiots. Within days, hours even, this footage will have spread virally across the entire web, and by then there will be nothing we can do to control the situation. We have technicians at work as we speak, attempting to hack and crash the site. That may buy us some time. But to avert this disaster fully, the footage must be destroyed at source.’

‘You have forty-eight hours,’ Olympia told her. ‘Starting from now. Find and destroy all copies of this video, any hard drives on which it is stored, and anyone who tries to stand in your way. You will then track down the human who sent the footage to Knightly and erase his memory permanently. Are these orders understood?’

Alex nodded, avoiding Gibson’s eye. She could feel delight radiating off him in warm waves.

‘Forty-eight hours, Agent Bishop,’ Olympia said. ‘Fail this time, and you have my word that you will face immediate Nosferol termination.’

Chapter Forty-Two

Bal Mawr Manor

The day’s anti-vampire weaponry training session with Knightly had been due to start five minutes ago. As he waited for him to show up, Dec wandered about the armoury room. It was a converted private chapel, partially demolished at some point in its history, but still retaining its original stained-glass windows through which the bright morning sun cast colourful reflections across the flagstones. Where the old walls had crumbled and been rebuilt — not so long ago, judging by the bits of scaffolding still propped up in one corner — a modern extension had been constructed to house an adjoining indoor archery range complete with big straw target bosses for crossbow practice. The weapons themselves were hung on the racks that took up two entire walls of the old chapel.

Dec paused to admire them and to gaze at the silver-tipped bolts in their quivers, before moving on down the line to examine some of the other devices intended for defence against the Undead. A huge spray gun with a butt like a rifle was attached by a pipe to a clear plastic canister marked ‘HOLY WATER’; beside it, another canister was labelled ‘CAUTION IRRITANT: CONCENTRATION OF GARLIC’. There was a whole variety of crucifixes, mallets and stakes. Finally, a horizontal rack housed a collection of Samurai swords in ornate scabbards.

Dec liked the look of the crossbows best. He glanced back at the huge riveted iron door of the armoury to check nobody was coming, then reached up and took one down from the wall. Holding the bow end down with the foot stirrup, he grasped the thick, taut bowstring and heaved it back with a grunt until it clicked into place. He gingerly fitted one of the silver-tipped bolts, then carried the weapon over to the adjoining practice range, stood on the firing line, raised the stock to his shoulder and peered through the telescopic sight.

Twenty yards away, the circular straw archery target looked huge in the scope. Dec squeezed the trigger and the bow fired with a sharp crack and a satisfying kick to the shoulder. The deadly bolt whistled off downrange and embedded itself deep into the outer edge of the target, sending bits of straw flying.

Dec walked up to the target with a fire burning in his heart. In his mind’s eye, the vampire now lay writhing helplessly on the floor with the bolt protruding from its shoulder. The next shot would be the coup de grace — right through the heart. He yanked the bolt out of the target and returned to the firing line. He was just about to re-cock the bow when he heard the armoury door grate open on its massive iron hinges and turned, expecting to see Knightly.

It was Griffin. The bent old man shuffled into the range, threw a sour look at the bits of straw on the floor and another at Dec, and then disappeared and returned a moment later carrying a broom taller than he was. As Griffin muttered and cursed and began to sweep up the mess, Dec somewhat resentfully replaced the crossbow on the rack. ‘Mr Knightly said I could practise here, so he did. I’m going to help him kill vampires,’ he added.

‘Said that, did he?’ Griffin made a harsh crackling sound that Dec realised was laughter, ending with something that sounded like ‘Bollocks.’