Scott Mariani - The Cross

Few things could spell a quicker end for a vampire than the sweep of a well-honed blade lifting their head from their shoulders. Joel knew that, all too well. He’d once been forced to do the very same thing to his own grandfather.

He tried to imagine what it would feel like, watching the blade come whooshing towards his throat. The parting of the flesh as the steel sliced cleanly through. Would it hurt? Would unconsciousness come instantly? Or would his senses remain alert as his severed head hit the ground and bounced and rolled out of the path of his falling body? For all that he craved for his torment to be over, the urge to run was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.

‘There he is!’ The shout needed no translation. Angry cries and gasps of horror. Fingers pointing. Faces turning to stare at him, eyes filled with fury and teeth bared. The wild old man waving the knife at him.

‘Why do you hate me?’ Joel wanted to yell at them. ‘I’ve done you no harm. Just let me go. I won’t come back here.’

For a few frozen moments, he hovered there on the doorstep of the house as the crowd, more than a hundred strong now, hung back. Then, at the same instant that the old man let out a roar of fury and led the charge towards the house, Joel bolted. With blinding speed he tore across the tiny front yard, vaulting the low wall into the neighbouring property.

The screaming mob came rushing after him. Joel sprinted harder, unleashing power from his heart and lungs and muscles that he’d never dreamed possible. A crossbow bolt cut whistling through the air towards him; he heard it coming and dipped his head, and it embedded itself with a juddering thwack in the wall of the house inches away.

Both barrels of a shotgun boomed out in rapid succession and a window smashed. Joel skidded around the side of the building, crashed through bushes, vaulted clear over the derelict body of an old car and leaped a six-foot fence as if it were nothing.

Suddenly, he was alone. He stopped, assessing his surroundings. He wasn’t even out of breath. A narrow lane ran up between more houses, curving away out of sight between dilapidated wooden fences. He could hear the shouts of the mob approaching. ‘Get him! Get the Moroi ! Cut off his head!’

Joel took off up the lane, stumbling and slipping in the snow that had drifted up against the fence. Lights were coming on in windows all across the village. Up ahead, the lane opened out onto the main street through the village.

Joel burst out into the road and glanced all around him. More villagers were spilling out of their houses and massing together in a second hunting party just a hundred yards down the street. Nobody saw him as he kept down low in the shadows and ran like crazy over the ice-rutted road towards the edge of the village.

He desperately tried to recall the layout of the place. Where was the rundown old service station from which he’d managed to borrow a motorcycle and sidecar for his outward journey?

If he could find it again, maybe he could steal a car or truck before the mob caught up with him again. But then he remembered the Alsatian dog that had been chained up outside the garage. If it was still there, it would raise the alarm. Not wise.

He kept moving, constantly glancing back over his shoulder. Any moment now, he’d hear the yells and they’d be after him again, ready to beat him to the ground and stamp him into the dirt and dismember him, to chop him up into quivering pulp and torch whatever remained. Suddenly the full force of the realisation was hitting home. He truly understood now what it was that Alex Bishop had done to him. This was his destiny now: to be this abhorred, detested creature, spurned and condemned and hunted wherever he went. This was her parting gift to him.

As he dashed towards the village outskirts, he heard the chatter of a diesel engine and yellow headlights appeared around a bend. It was a battered old Nissan pickup truck with jacked suspension and snow chains that clanked and rattled against the road surface as it headed his way down the street. Joel ran straight towards it, waving his arms.

The pickup slowed, then slid to a juddering halt in the middle of the slippery road. Its roof and bonnet were thick with snow. Its wipers blinked away the white dusting on its windscreen.

Joel tore open the driver’s door. The fat-gutted guy in his fifties, wearing a baseball cap and a quilted bodywarmer, was alone in the vehicle. Joel grabbed his chubby arm, hauled him violently out of the cab and spilled him tumbling across the snow.

‘Sorry.’ Joel threw himself behind the wheel, crunched the truck into gear and stamped on the gas. The vehicle slewed violently around in a circle, the snow chains biting deep and throwing up a spray of mud and grit and slush.

The crowd had spotted him. In his rearview mirror he could make out the hobbling figure of Cosmina’s father leading them furiously down the street. At the old man’s side, the big guy with the beard was waving his flashing scimitar as he ran. Joel floored the accelerator and the diesel roared. The snow chains flailed and crunched against the icy ruts in the road. For a frightening instant the crowd seemed to loom large in the mirror and then he was accelerating away and leaving them in his wake. The ka-boom of a shotgun, and his wing mirror disintegrated. Houses flashed by as he sped through the village outskirts.

Then the last house was behind him, and he was alone again. Just him and the snowy road ahead, and the mountains, and the wild forest creatures that knew to stay away from him.

Joel drove on, and wept.

London

Twelve hours’ worth of Solazal protection had only just been enough to get Alex safely home. She’d been watching the clock intently for the last couple of hours of her long journey, teeth on edge. Half a day was about the longest any vampire could expect to get out of one of the photosensitivity neutralisers. When the effects eventually wore off, which they had a habit of doing very suddenly, the spectacular results had once or twice over the last twenty-five years been mistaken by nonvampires as the rare phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. These days, unsuspecting passersby witnessing the fiery demise of a careless vampire might be convinced that they’d come close to being engulfed by some kind of half-hearted incendiary suicide bombing.

Either way, it didn’t make for a very pleasant end for the vampire concerned. Alex was mightily relieved to see the sun sinking behind the London skyline as she finally made it to the door of her Canary Wharf apartment building and rode the lift to her penthouse.

Once inside, she grabbed a remote control from a table. At the touch of a button, thick blackout shutters whirred down to cover every one of the flat’s many large windows, blocking out the sunset glow that was settling across the river, and plunging the whole apartment into pitch darkness.

Safe. She sighed. This was how vampires had lived once, before the Federation had come along and introduced the whole new modern era that had so incensed the champions of the old ways. Alex, who’d been turned back in 1897, remembered the old ways and the old days very well — and in her more reflective moments, she had to admit privately that she’d never felt fully comfortable with the idea of popping pills to help her walk about in daylight. Someone else had put it more eloquently than she could:

‘To cheat the sun, embrace the night. Living dangerously, living free. To hunt, to feed like a real vampire, honouring our sacred heritage and a culture that had reached its pinnacle when human beings were still dragging their knuckles in the dust and grunting like apes.’