He threw out his arm. Plucked the dagger from Sonia’s garter belt. Slashing the throat of the nearest goblin, he brought the silver hilt down with a vicious skull-cracking blow on the head of another. Then he was free and springing up onto his feet, and his fallen katana was back in his hand, the long curved blade hissing through the air. Blood hit the snow. Five goblins were reduced to twitching body parts before the rest went fleeing over the rocks.
Joel stepped towards the dismembered trunk that had been the beautiful Sonia. He couldn’t leave her like this, doomed to the worst possible fate a vampire could face.
He raised the sword. The last look in her eyes was one of profound gratitude.
When it was done, Joel bent double, retching and wheezing up the few drops of Errol Knightly’s blood that were still in his system.
At that moment, he thought he heard a voice call his name.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
The smoke was pouring thickly out of the boarding station now and through it the flicker of flames was getting brighter. Chloe could feel the heat of the spreading fire and hear its crackle as she tried to gain a handhold on the slippery rocks and pull herself up to the platform.
‘Dec! Where are you?’
No reply. As she called his name again, a gust of wind enveloped her in thick hot smoke and she fell into a fit of coughing. She couldn’t see the cable car any more.
Suddenly there was a figure standing next to her on the ledge. Chloe backed away in dread, reaching for her pistol — but as the figure stepped towards her through the swirling smoke, she saw it wasn’t Ash, but the vampire called Yuri.
‘Come with me,’ he croaked in his thick accent. ‘Quickly!’ Yuri let out a cry as pain racked his body. Chloe took his hand, and felt herself being lifted up towards the platform as though she weighed nothing. The smoke was blinding. The fire was everywhere, its heat unbearable. Then Yuri’s hand was guiding her firmly through the middle of the leaping flames.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she gasped.
‘Your friend save me. Now I save you. Move, move. There is no time.’
‘Dec!’ Chloe yelled. There he was, dragged free of the fire, sitting propped against the wall, groggy but alive, his face blackened by the smoke. His eyes widened as he saw Chloe. He swayed up to his feet, staggered towards her and held her by the arms. ‘Where’s Ash?’ he coughed.
Yuri glanced back in terror in the direction of the cable car. His body suddenly twisted into a violent agonised convulsion. He screwed his eyes shut, opened his mouth to scream … and blackened and burst apart into charred nothingness.
‘Ash is here,’ Chloe breathed.
They turned to see him striding towards them through the fire. The flames flickered in his eyes and gleamed on his teeth. In his right hand he clutched the cross. The left arm hung limply, blood still dripping from the stump where his hand had been. His face twisted in hate as his eyes locked on Chloe and Dec.
Chloe wrenched the pistol from her jeans and took aim. She couldn’t possibly miss him this time.
Ash took another step closer. He bared his teeth.
Chloe braced herself and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened. The trigger wouldn’t move.
Ash kept coming, the jagged smile on his face broadening as Chloe struggled with the gun. He dropped the cross into the case at his side and reached for the hilt of his sword.
But before the blade was clear of the scabbard, Dec was charging at him like a man possessed, yelling at the top of his voice. Dec was half Ash’s weight but he hurled himself at him with such force that they both fell back into the fire. All Chloe could see through the flames was a sprawling tangle of limbs, kicking and punching and gouging. One instant, Dec was on top, pummelling Ash’s face with his fists — the next, Ash had flung Dec off him with a savage blow and was leaping back on his feet. His clothes were singed and the strap around his shoulders was on fire. He ran at Chloe, ripping the sword from its scabbard and raising it for a massive downward cut.
Then a loud meaty clang resounded off the back of Ash’s skull and he fell forward, stunned. The sword spun away into the flames. The burning strap around his shoulders snapped, and the case slithered across the floor to Chloe’s feet.
Dec emerged from the smoke, his face half-covered in blood from an ugly gash over his eye. He tossed away the large wrench he’d used as a club.
Not hard enough. Ash was already getting back up.
‘Let’s go!’ Dec yelled to Chloe. Spotting the case on the floor, he snatched it up by its charred strap and they ran out of the burning room.
Ash roared with fury and raced after them.
Chapter Seventy
Joel hadn’t imagined it — the sound of Alex’s voice on the wind, calling his name. There it was again … It was coming from further up the mountainside.
He ran, leaping over rocks, stumbling through deep snow. As the slope steepened, he clamped the katana blade between his teeth and climbed like he’d never climbed before.
‘Joel!’ It came out as a scream this time, just the other side of a rocky overhang a few yards up the slope. He launched himself over it and saw her.
Alex was surrounded by a whole pack of goblins, desperately beating them off with a gnarled old tree root in one hand and a jagged lump of stone in the other as they attacked her from all sides.
In an instant he was there with her. One of the creatures that hurled itself at Alex fell back, headless. Joel’s blade rose and fell. He killed another, then another, striking again and again with all the energy that was left in him, left and right, screaming with fury and hitting and slicing until he was standing knee-deep in the middle of a slaughterer’s yard of dead or dying goblins.
Still they kept on coming. So many of them, swarming in from everywhere, their number growing faster than Alex and Joel could kill them.
And now the strength was beginning to ebb out of Joel’s body, drained to such a low ebb that he could barely swing the sword or even stand upright. He dropped to his knees and looked at Alex. ‘I’m sorry,’ he groaned.
Alex shook her head. ‘I’m not. At least this way, I don’t have to lose you a second time. Better we go out together, Joel.’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘You know, I love you,’ she whispered.
The goblins gathered around them.
‘Where’s Lillith?’ Zachary shouted from behind the rocks.
‘I don’t see her,’ Gabriel shouted back from the other side of the mountain path, where he and Kali had taken cover from the flying arrows. The shooting seemed to have abruptly died away. Gabriel craned his neck out a little further from behind the boulder. ‘No,’ he groaned. ‘Oh, no, no.’
Lillith was still on the path, a few yards away. She was lying on her face in the snow, her arms outflung.
