Marie Carpenter stood at Alexandru’s left, her face pale and tightly drawn.
“Mom!” he cried. He couldn’t help himself.
She’s alive. She’s still alive. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
His mother’s eyes lit up at the sound of his voice, and she looked at him with such love that he thought his heart might burst. She hadn’t realized that one of the figures that had entered the hall was her son, but even as relief flooded through her that he was still alive, Jamie was still alive, she was screaming at him not to come any closer, to stay away, to run for his life.
“Listen to your mother, boy,” advised Alexandru, his voice warm and friendly, and spread his arms wide.
Jamie had taken a step toward her, without realizing he had done so, and he paused. He looked along the length of the stone platform, beyond Alexandru’s outstretched hands, and his heart sank.
Standing silently along the platform were more than thirty vampires in a loose line. At Alexandru’s right was Anderson, the huge vampire with the child’s face. His shoulders rose like a ridge of mountains, vast and misshapen, a long black coat covering them and reaching almost to the floor. Beyond him, and beyond his mother on the other side, were vampires of every age and gender. A woman in her sixties, dressed in a prim trouser suit, stood alongside a skeletally thin teenage boy, wearing torn jeans and nothing else. His ribs stood out on his narrow torso, and his eyes were sunken into his skull. Beside his mother, looking at her in a way that made Jamie want to tear his eyes out, was a fat man in a shiny gray suit. His face was red and a coating of sweat stood out on his forehead as he stared at Marie. The vampires looked contemptuously down at Jamie and his companions, while their master regarded him calmly.
“So,” Alexandru said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together, as though he were about to start a particularly exciting debate. “Jamie Carpenter. We meet again, if you’ll forgive the cliche.”
His eyes flickered to Jamie’s left, his attention caught by something. Then his face twisted into a scowl, and he stared at Larissa with his blood-red eyes. “ You,” he said, all the warmth gone from his voice. “You dare show your face in front of me again?”
“I dare,” replied Larissa.
“Your death will be my masterpiece,” Alexandru said, and grinned at her. “No creature on earth has ever suffered like you will suffer.”
“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” said Larissa, staring up at the ancient vampire.
“You should be,” said Thomas Morris. Then he pulled Quincey Morris’s bowie knife from his belt and ran it across McBride’s throat. The operator fell to his knees, blood jetting from severed arteries, and folded to the floor. McBride was dead before Jamie had time to realize what had happened.
Morris walked slowly across the chapel hall, his head lowered, like a man going to the gallows, and stepped up onto the platform. Anderson moved aside to accommodate him, and Alexandru laughed gently as the Blacklight operator took his place at his side.
Jamie stared at the platform, at Morris standing stiffly beside Alexandru, and realized he was dead. They all were; Larissa, Kate, his mother, and him.
All dead.
Oh, no. Oh, please, no.
“Tom,” he said. “Tom, what are you doing?”
Behind him he heard a small noise emerge from Kate’s throat, and a snarl emanate from Larissa.
Morris was looking down at Jamie with pure hatred; it twisted his features into a face he didn’t recognize. “I’m doing what needs to be done,” he said. “What should have been done a long time ago.”
Jamie felt tears welling up within him and shoved them back down. He had never felt so utterly alone.
“But why?” he asked in a broken child’s voice. “We’re friends. You said we were the same.”
Anger flashed across Morris’s face. “We are nothing alike,” he spit. “My family has been betrayed and held back by Blacklight for more than a century. Yours was given every advantage, even though you never deserved them.” He smiled cruelly at Jamie. “You want to know why I did it, is that it? You want an explanation? Fine, I’ll tell you why. Your father killed my father.”
Morris sighed deeply, as though he had wanted to get this off his chest for a very long time. “He didn’t pull the trigger,” he continued. “But he might as well have. Him and Seward and Frankenstein, and the rest. He gave his life to Blacklight, and they turned on him at the first sign of trouble. They betrayed him and sold him down the river, and they did it with smiles on their faces.”
“But we checked the logs,” said Jamie, desperately. “You haven’t accessed the operational frequency in weeks. How did you give it to Alexandru? How did you tell him we were coming to Northumberland?”
Morris smiled at Jamie, a wicked grin that turned the teenager’s stomach.“You should read your Juvenal, boy. ‘ Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ’? I’m the security officer. I can access the entire Blacklight network, including the security protocols; I can add, amend, and delete anything I want, as I did the log of my accessing the frequency database. When your father, your arrogant, superior father, destroyed Ilyana, I reached out to Alexandru, and we came to an understanding. He would give me two things I wanted, and I would hand him Department 19; your family in particular. I sent him the maps that let him bring down the Mina, just like I hacked the personnel files and found him your address. You should have died the same night as your father. But someone interfered and warned your father they were coming. So when he ran home to protect you, I faked the e-mail from your father to Alexandru and framed him as the traitor. Alexandru could have you and your mother, and I would get him access to Julian later. But your father died, and you were hidden away. So I wrote the document that implicated Julian, making sure no one would suspect anyone else was involved, and spent years tracking down your whereabouts. Once I had it, I passed it on, and we moved against you and your mother.”
He glared at Larissa. “But she failed to kill you, and the goddamn monster rescued you. I’ve been working to get you into the open, away from him, ever since. And now here we are. Blacklight are in Russia on a rescue mission that is far, far too late to do any good. There’s no one to help you this time.”
Jamie stared at Morris, his whole body numb. His mother was looking at him with panic in her eyes, Larissa was snarling beside him, but he felt nothing. It was too much for him to bear, one last betrayal too many, and he was on the very edge of collapse.
“What did you get?” he asked. “What did you get for helping to kill my family?”
“Eternal life,” replied Morris, simply. “And the righting of the greatest wrong in Blacklight history: the death of my great-great-grandfather Quincey Morris. He died on a mountainside in the middle of nowhere, while lesser men survived. But the Russians found his remains in 1902, when they recovered Dracula’s ashes. Alexandru is going to bring him back to me.”
“You’re wrong,” said Jamie. “Dracula’s remains were never found.”
“You really shouldn’t believe everything the Department tells you,” replied Morris. “It’s a shame Seward isn’t here; if he were, you could ask him about vault thirty-one. But he isn’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me. Dracula’s remains were recovered, along with my great-great-grandfather’s. And soon they will both walk the earth again.”
Grey was right, thought Jamie. We should have listened to him.
Then he looked at Morris, saw the desperation lurking an inch beneath the surface of his face, and felt savage satisfaction flood through him.
“You idiot,” he said. “Quincey Morris wasn’t turned. He just died. They can’t bring him back. They’re just using you to get to Dracula’s ashes.”
Morris’s smile remained in place, but the light in his eyes faded. He looked at Alexandru, who was watching the exchange with obvious relish. “That isn’t true,” he said. “You promised.”
Alexandru grinned; an expression of pure malice, of utter sadism. “It seems that even the valet’s great- grandson is cleverer than you,” he said.
Far, far too late, Thomas Morris saw how simply and completely used he had been. His face fell, as the realization of what he had done sank into him, and he staggered on the raised platform.
You fool, thought Jamie. You poor, desperate fool. You’ve given away everything for nothing. For absolutely nothing.
Morris let out a strangled cry and fumbled the bowie knife from his belt. He lunged at Alexandru, who laughed delightedly, and slid liquidly to his feet. He reached out a hand and snapped Morris’s wrist, the sharp crack echoing around the chapel hall. Morris screamed, until Alexandru plucked the bowie knife from his fingers and slid
