The solitary figure of Ash was unmistakable behind the glass front of the cable car. At one hip hung the executioner’s sword in its scabbard; at the other, attached to a strap around his shoulders, was the lead-lined case. As in a trance of horror, the assembled vampires watched the man reach inside and slowly draw out the horribly familiar shape of the cross.
Standing by the window with Yuri and Makiko, Alex cried out at the jet of agony crackling through her body. All three recoiled violently away from the glass, their bodies spasming as the awful pain took hold. Alex’s fingers loosened on the grip of the pistol and it dropped out of her hand and bounced away from her. To go back for it now would be suicide. She staggered away in the opposite direction, desperately trying to reach the door and widen the distance between herself and the approaching cross.
Makiko was attempting to do exactly the same. In her frenzied haste to escape she cannoned into Chloe, stumbled over the edge of the rug and sprawled on the floor. Makiko struggled to get to her feet, but the crippling power of the weapon was too much to overcome.
Chloe was standing just a few feet away as, with a final shriek that rose up in a horrible tortured wail, Makiko turned black and then cracked and peeled apart and crumbled into a puff of cinders.
It wasn’t the first time Dec had seen the effects of the cross, but even he gaped in appalled horror at the sight. Chloe covered her face with her hands.
Alex had reached the door, just inches ahead of the lethal energy field, and was racing across the hallway outside towards the back of the house along with Lillith, Kali, Gabriel and Zachary. Joel had no choice but to flee along with them. He could scarcely believe what was happening to him. Only days ago, wielding the cross himself, he’d been the predator. Now he was the prey, just one of the pressing melee of vampires all desperate to get beyond its reach.
Yuri hadn’t been as fast as Alex to the door. A shockwave of agony arched his back to breaking point and slammed him down to the floorboards at Dec’s feet.
‘Help me!’ Yuri croaked, reaching out a trembling hand.
For an instant that seemed to last minutes, Dec stood frozen. This was a vampire. It sucked the blood of humans. It deserved to fry.
Yet in that moment, all he could see was a man suffering horribly, screaming in pain, red-rimmed agonised eyes imploring him for help. Dec thought of Joel, and a powerful surge of pity made him reach out to grasp Yuri’s wrist and drag him towards the door fractions of a second before the cross’s power would have blown him apart.
‘Thank you, human,’ Yuri shouted as he went staggering off across the hallway.
‘Any time,’ Dec mumbled.
The cable car was getting closer. And now the single figure inside could be clearly seen through the glass. Even from forty yards away, the triumphant jagged grin was visible on Ash’s face.
Chloe spotted Alex’s fallen pistol and scooped it up off the floor. The controls were different from the air gun she was used to, but the essentials were the same. She stuffed it into her waistband. ‘Down the stairs, quick!’ she yelled to Dec. ‘We have to stop that thing so I can get a clear shot.’
They raced down to the chalet’s ground floor, tore down the short passage and burst through the door of the boarding station to see the cable car just thirty yards away. Chloe ran to the landing platform and felt her knees turn to rubber at the sight of the dizzy drop to the valley below. The mountain wind blew her hair and whistled around the chalet.
She looked across at the approaching glass front of the cable car and her eyes met Ash’s.
For a moment of bewilderment, Chloe wondered whether it could be the same man. Because Ash had changed. Something had happened to him. His features were sculpted, symmetrical, chillingly beautiful. The new clothes he was wearing clung to his leaner, taller and more powerful form.
But it was him, all right. Chloe could see the cross in his hands, clutched tightly against his chest — and, sticking up above his shoulder in a back-scabbard, the hilt of the great sword that had killed her father.
And now he was hers. All she had to do was halt the cable car, and there’d be nowhere he could run from her. She glanced around for the control box. Sure enough, there was no way to stop the cable car except by cutting the power. ‘The wires, Dec!’ she yelled.
Dec was no electrician, but the large transformer of the electric motor was easy to spot. There was just one thick cluster of wires running into it, wrapped up in a black shielded covering. He swung his katana at it with all his might, praying that the leather handle of the sword would protect his hands when the high voltage shot up the blade and the tang.
Dec swore and hit the wires again, and this time the blade found its mark through the armoured covering. The jolt of electricity almost took the sword out of his hands. A loud bang, a flash and a shower of sparks, and the cable car motor drive suddenly ground to a halt.
‘Got you now, asshole,’ Chloe said, and raised the pistol.
Chapter Sixty-Five
On his way across the valley moments earlier, Ash clutched the cross tightly to his chest, smiled and his reflection in the glass front of the cable car smiled handsomely back at him. He liked this new Ash he’d become: he was stronger, more dangerous, and more determined than ever. So far, his new Masters had done everything they’d promised they’d do. And there was more to come, when he returned victorious to the citadel after this final mission. The new Ash would be renewed again, with capabilities far beyond anything a mere vampire could offer him. Tarcz-koi had shown him things that even Gabriel Stone had no conception of.
The smile dropped from his lips as he felt the cable car’s smooth forward momentum die away without warning and it juddered to a stop, swaying in the mountain breeze. He looked out of the window at the empty space all around him, the drop below. Then gazed back towards the girl he could see standing on the platform. He knew her face — where had he seen her before?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was his plan. He mustn’t fail.
And the powers that his Masters had given him would see to it that he didn’t. They hadn’t just restored his eye and made him prettier.
It was time for a change of tactics. Inside his head, Ash gave his soldiers the silent command to press forward the attack. Then, tossing the cross into the lead-lined case that hung from his shoulder, he drew out his executioner’s sword. With a powerful upward thrust he punched the blade through the aluminium roof of the cable car. He yanked it out with a metallic shriek, punched it through again. In seconds he’d cut a ragged hole. He sheathed the sword, jumped up and hauled himself bodily through onto the swaying roof, between the parallel cable tracks.
The girl was still standing there, twenty-five yards away on the edge of the platform, nothing below her except the thick wooden support struts of the chalet and a snowy rock ledge. Clinging on to the steel cables with his right hand, Ash ripped the cross back out of its case with his left and thrust it out towards her. He frowned. Why didn’t she fly into cinders? Everyone else did. Raising it higher, he hauled himself over the pulley apparatus towards her.
By the time he saw the gun in her hand, it was too late to react — but even as Ash tensed at the sight of the weapon, he knew that his soldiers had answered the call to attack.
Standing on the edge of the platform overlooking the dizzy drop to the valley below, Chloe squared the Desert Eagle’s sights firmly on her target’s chest. She saw her father’s face in her mind. She nodded to herself and squeezed the trigger.
At the same instant that the pistol bucked wildly in her hands and its huge flat report filled the air, she heard
