The Cross

dozen figures inside. Alex raised the pistol, but even her sharp vampire vision couldn’t make out a clear target through the glass.

‘Is it him?’ Lillith asked tensely. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘The cross may be still in its case,’ Gabriel said.

The cable car loomed large; then its dark underside obscured its windows from view as it passed above the level of the chalet’s living room and glided in to dock at the landing station.

And then they heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Alex, Joel, Dec, Chloe, Gabriel, Lillith, Zachary and Kali: all eyes were on the door. Nobody breathed. Nobody spoke. Alex braced her feet apart and squared the sights of the Desert Eagle on the doorway. Joel, Dec and Chloe held their swords tightly.

The footsteps stopped outside. The handle turned.

And the door swung open.

Chapter Sixty-Two

An arm wearing a gold Rolex darted inside the door as it opened, and flipped on the light switch. Its owner took one step inside the room, staggered to a halt and stared at them all, colour rising instantly in his cheeks.

Not even Lillith could remember ever having seen Gabriel let out such a sigh of relief. ‘Baxter, you infernal cretin, what do you mean by bursting in here unannounced?’

It was obvious that the infernal cretin had come ready for a fight. ‘I’ve just about had it with all this bullshit, Gabe,’ he launched straight in. ‘Who the fuck are all these folks in my house? Who said you could have a goddamned party in here?’

As Baxter went on with his tirade, the rest of the group filed inside the room in his wake: a wearily resigned- looking Tiberius, then Yuri, followed by Albrecht shaking the snow from the brim of his fedora hat. They were accompanied by an extremely attractive pair of female vampire companions Gabriel recognised as Sonia and her inseparable Japanese friend, Makiko, both wearing outfits a human woman would have frozen to death in this time of year in the Alps. Sonia’s white satin skirt was short enough to reveal the ornate little silver dagger tucked into her suspender belt. She flashed a hungry look at Dec, nudged Makiko, licked her lips and let out a burbling giggle.

‘Oohh, humans,’ they chorused. ‘Gabriel, how thoughtful of you.’

Tiberius made an apologetic gesture to Gabriel as Baxter, sensing he was being ignored, redirected his ranting at Lillith and Zachary.

‘He was going on so much, Gabriel,’ Tiberius said. ‘Announcing he was going to come over here and reckon things up with you. I thought we should accompany him, in case he did anything rash.’

‘Rash?’ Baxter yelled, interrupting his own stream of abuse. ‘I’ll give you rash, you buncha dipshits. Listen to me, Gabe, I want my fucking money back. That’s all there is to it, okay? The deal’s off. I don’t wanna be part of this Trad thing any more. I mean, Jesus Christ, we were better off under the fucking Feds …’

‘Enough,’ Gabriel said.

But Baxter hadn’t finished. ‘And another thing. Where’s my plane? What’s the point of having my own goddamn plane if I’ve gotta charter another one just to fly to my own …’

‘Enough!’ Gabriel repeated more loudly.

Baxter’s eyes bulged. He was about to add just one more tiny comment when he stopped suddenly and pointed at the window. ‘Hey. Did you see that?’

‘See what?’ Gabriel said, turning.

‘I saw it too,’ Alex said. ‘Something ran past the house. Down there in the snow, on the edge of the crag.’ She’d only noticed it out of the corner of her eye — a flitting figure that had darted out of the shadows of the rocks and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

‘What was it?’ Joel asked. Alex shook her head, scanned the rocks intently for another sign of it.

‘Extinguish the light,’ Gabriel commanded, and Makiko flipped off the switch, the smile gone from her face.

‘The back window,’ Alex whispered. Joel and Dec followed as she trotted nimbly out of the living room and into the hallway behind it, where the rear balcony overlooked the face of the mountain behind the chalet. ‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘Two more of them.’ She’d seen them better this time. As Joel followed the line of her finger he spotted a third: the hooded figure, no taller than a child, scampered out from behind a rock, darted across the snow and disappeared again.

‘What was that?’ he said again.

‘God damn these local brats,’ Baxter yelled, joining them at the back window.

‘Kids couldn’t make their way up here,’ Joel said.

‘Fucking gypsies,’ Baxter growled. ‘Last year they stripped out a whole ski hut for firewood, down the valley. Well they ain’t robbing a solitary plank from this place, that’s for damned sure.’ He marched out onto the rear balcony, swung a leg over the sturdy wooden rail and dropped off the edge. It was only a twenty-foot leap to the snow below, nothing for a vampire, and Baxter prided himself on doing his own stunts.

There was nobody there. Baxter trudged around the corner of the chalet, wading through the thick snow, cupping his hands around his mouth as he shouted, ‘Hey, you little rat-asses! Get away from here! You hear me? This is private property! So fuck off!’

A whistling sound, moving fast towards him. Baxter turned and felt something strike him in the chest. ‘What in hell’s name—?’ he muttered, squinting down his nose at the peculiar object that had attached itself to him.

The shaft of an arrow.

‘Those bastard gypsies,’ Baxter said, outraged, but in a strangely slurred voice. He plucked the arrow out and was about to toss it away when he suddenly realised that his arm wasn’t obeying the command of his brain. He tried to make his fingers open and release the arrow, but they wouldn’t move. Panic began to surge through him. What was happening? He couldn’t even turn his head. Gazing fixedly at the bloody point of the arrow, he could see its strange glass tip, like a vial, that had been shattered by the impact. Dripping from the broken glass was an odd kind of liquid that was too black and thick to be just his blood.

At that point, the paralysis took Baxter over entirely and he went down like a felled tree in the snow.

He didn’t scream, didn’t move, was completely unable to react as the horrible little hooded figures appeared as if out of nowhere and gathered around him in a circle. Something glinted in the moonlight. A razor-sharp blade gouged his flesh, and Baxter felt every bit of the pain.

Then the figures were all over him, hacking and chopping and slicing. The arm clutching the arrow rolled away across the bloody snow. The last thing Baxter saw was his body rolling away from him — no, it was him rolling away from his body. A glimpse at the stars above … then down at the snowy ground … and then nothing at all.

Chapter Sixty-Three

Alex was the first to leap down from the rear balcony and follow Baxter’s tracks in the snow around the side of the chalet. She heard the meaty chopping sounds and the strange chittering, twittering noises before she rounded the corner and saw the strange little figures, no taller than children, that were crowded around what was left of the movie star. The crude, hooded robes they wore were like scaled-down versions of the habits worn by medieval monks, held in at the waist with broad leather belts or lengths of stout rope. But what drew Alex’s eye was the cruel-looking assortment of bloodied butcher’s knives, machetes and cleavers the creatures clutched in