The Cross

‘I’m all right,’ he lied.

‘You’re not feeding, are you?’

‘You saw me feeding last night.’

She shook her head. ‘I saw you licking a puddle of dead man’s blood off the floor, is what I saw. I’m talking about taking live blood straight from the vein. There’s a difference. Do you know what’ll happen to you if you don’t start learning to feed properly, the vampire way? And it will, if you don’t get the proper nutrition.’

‘I have a pretty good idea what’ll happen,’ he said miserably. She was right about the nutrition part — drinking the corpse’s blood hadn’t sustained him half as well as he’d hoped and already he could feel the first hunger pains returning.

‘Well, I’m not going to let it,’ she said. ‘I saved you so that I could have you near me, not to sit back and watch you wither into a wraith. That’s worse than being dead.’

He almost smiled. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m touched.’

From the Pas de Calais they headed south-west down the autoroute, skirting the Belgian border. Alex was reminded of the Brussels Headquarters, and wondered whether Olympia Angelopolis had survived the London attack. As they drove on, the sky turned a solid grey and a heavy drumming sleet set in that didn’t relent until they’d crossed half of France. They were still two hundred miles from the Swiss border when Alex had to pull over at a roadside fuel station. The Jaguar’s tank was getting down towards the red line; and the car wasn’t the only thing that needed replenishing.

The humans got out of the car and stretched their legs while Alex attended to the petrol pump. Dec borrowed a handful of euro coins that Joel had found in his jacket pocket — left over from his Venice trip with Alex — and, using a mixture of pidgin French and hand signals, somehow managed to communicate to the woman in the filling station shop that he wanted to buy chocolate bars and cans of Coke for himself and Chloe.

‘Don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any of this,’ he said tentatively to Joel as he tore the wrapper off his chocolate.

Joel gazed at it and shook his head. ‘Not really, no.’

‘Can’t you — you know, eat? Regular food, like?’

‘I can eat it, but it doesn’t do me any good.’

‘What does it feel like?’ Dec said. ‘Being, you know …’

‘Look, Dec,’ Joel snapped, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ The thought of food, of feeding, was making his whole body cramp. Sorry that he’d spoken sharply to the kid, he said, ‘All right, if you want to know, it feels terrible. It’s not the best thing that ever happened to me. Let’s just say I haven’t come to terms with it yet. And I don’t know that I ever will.’

‘You wouldn’t ever think about biting one of us, would you?’ Dec said with a touch of nervousness.

Joel didn’t reply.

‘I’ll take that as a no, then?’

‘Where’s she disappeared to?’ Chloe said, looking around for Alex. Quarter of an hour had passed since she’d gone to pay for the fuel, and there was no sign of her anywhere. It was another ten minutes before she came back, looking just a little flushed.

‘Where were you?’ Chloe asked.

‘Answering the call of nature,’ Alex said, putting something away in the small pouch she wore on her belt. Joel had seen Vambloc before, but Chloe was understandably ignorant of the ways of a modern-day vampire. ‘Vampires use the bathroom?’

‘I wasn’t talking about the bathroom,’ Alex told her. Catching Chloe’s look, she added, ‘Listen, if I’m travelling with humans I’ll understand if they need to stop off to go to a restaurant twice a day. You got a plate of something on the ferry, now it’s my turn. You get my meaning?’

‘You’re sick.’

‘We’re vampires. Get used to it. Or get walking.’ Alex turned to Joel. ‘Are you all right?’

He said nothing. He was too busy staring at the tiny drop of fresh blood that was lodged in the corner of her lip. Realising, she dabbed it with her finger and offered it towards his mouth. When he turned his head away, she sighed and got into the car.

‘Let’s go. We still have a lot of miles to cover.’

*

The journey continued. By late afternoon they’d left the motorway for winding country roads that carried them onto higher ground, where the sleet had given way to snow and the red glint of the setting sun trickled down the white-capped mountains. They saw little other traffic. Dec was glued to the window, filling his eyes with the scenery before it faded into darkness.

The last glow was sinking below the horizon when they passed an unmanned border control and Alex said, ‘Welcome to Switzerland.’

‘Why are we stopping?’ Joel asked her.

‘To get our bearings,’ she said, braking carefully on the slippery road and pulling the Jag over to the white verge. With the motor idling softly and the windscreen wipers batting away the snowflakes, she reached into the pouch behind her seat and pulled out a tiny notebook computer.

‘Senior field agent privilege,’ she said to Joel. ‘This gives me mobile wi-fi access to the whole VIA database. I can pull up anything I like on any Federation subject in the world, from anywhere in the world. Specifically’ — tapping keys — ‘every single registered address for any given member. And they make them register them all, believe me, even if it’s just a holiday home.’

‘Sounds more like a dictatorship than a Federation to me,’ Joel said.

‘The thought’s occurred to me more than once,’ she replied with a sour smile. ‘But right now, I’m not sorry. Being the pawn of a dictatorial regime can sometimes have its advantages.’ When the search box she’d been waiting for popped up on the little screen, she typed in the name Baxter Burnett. In an instant, his whole profile had come up.

Joel’s eyes opened wide. ‘The actor?’

‘I told you Jeremy Lonsdale wasn’t the only VIP Gabriel Stone hooked up with,’ Alex said.

‘You never told me it was Baxter Burnett the movie star.’

‘Who?’ Dec asked, his face appearing in the gap between the front seats and peering at the laptop screen glowing in the darkness. ‘Fuck me, that’s Baxter Burnett! He was in that fillum The Rat Pus, so he was.’

‘It was The Raptus,’ Alex said. ‘And you shouldn’t really be seeing this.’ Not that it really mattered any more, she thought, not if the Federation was history, and maybe it was this time.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Dec exclaimed, staring at the screen. ‘Are you saying he’s a frigging … I mean, he’s one of you?’

‘Managed to keep it secret from his adoring fans long enough,’ Alex said. ‘Looks like the cat’s out of the bag now, though.’ She scrolled down Baxter’s list of registered addresses. He spent so much time at the Ritz that the Trafalgar Suite was one of them, along with his homes in LA, Bermuda and Antibes. Right at the bottom of the list was The Eagle’s Nest, the name Baxter had chosen for his mountain retreat near Zermatt. Alex cocked an eyebrow. Maybe Baxter had never heard of Adolf Hitler. Or maybe he had, the little closet Nazi.

‘Gotcha,’ she said, flipping the computer screen down and typing the location into the satnav.

Seconds later, their route flashed up on the little screen.

‘If all goes according to plan,’ Alex told her passengers, ‘exactly one hundred and thirty-seven kilometres from here is where we’re going to find Gabriel Stone.’ She replaced the computer in the pouch behind her seat and grabbed her pistol from its hiding place under the centre console. ‘I hope he’s having a hell of a good time right now,’ she said. ‘Because it’s the last chance he’ll ever get.’

Chapter Sixty