Scott Mariani - The Cross

The hatches began to slide open.

And then something happened that hadn’t happened for more centuries than Lillith and Zachary could remember. Standing there on the observation platform, they were suddenly drenched in the golden rays of the early morning sunlight.

The shouts of rage from down below turned instantly to screams and then were silenced. Hit by the rays of light, the vampire guards disintegrated in flames. A terrified Ubervampyr burst alight and became a cloud of cinders before it could scurry into shadow.

Lillith screwed her eyes shut in terror and clung tightly to Zachary as the silent scream filled every cell of her being. This was it. The horrific nightmare end that all vampires dreaded.

But it wasn’t. Nothing happened. Lillith opened her eyes and held her trembling hands up in front of them. The sunlight shone brightly on her skin, and yet she wasn’t on fire. She wasn’t peeling or blackening or turning to cinders that floated away on the air.

‘Looks like we’re still here,’ Zachary grinned.

It took less than a minute for the two vampires to swarm up the towering shape of the telescope, feeling the sunlight on them more intensely with every yard they climbed. From the rim of its giant ice lens to the edge of the hatch was a long leap. Lillith went first, then Zachary, and suddenly they were standing on the surface looking down at the burning remains of their enemies far below.

All around them was the vast white desert — flat snow-covered tundra to the south, craggy mountain ranges to the north.

‘I never thought I could experience this again,’ Lillith said, closing her eyes for a second and feeling the long-forgotten glow of the sun’s warmth on her cheeks. It was an incredible sensation. ‘But don’t tell Gabriel I ever said that,’ she added in a warning tone. ‘And for the love of blood, whatever you do, don’t ever mention to him we took those pills.’

‘Believe me,’ Zachary said, ‘I’d be in a lot more trouble than you would. Say, how long you reckon the effects last?’

‘No idea. Give me another one, just in case.’ As she munched it and felt the strange fizzle on her tongue, she shielded her eyes from the sunlight and gauged their bearings.

‘Now let’s go and find that aeroplane,’ she said. ‘And pray that the humans are still there waiting for us.’

It had taken far longer to get out of Britain than either Alex or Joel would have liked, but there was a price to pay for doing these things semi-legitimately. No matter how flagrantly Alex flouted the speed limits, the stop-offs at Wallingford, Oxford and Bedford to collect passports and personal effects had eaten a big chunk out of the day and it wasn’t until two in the afternoon that the Jaguar was finally stowed on board the cross-Channel ferry en route for Calais.

‘Alone at last,’ Alex said to Joel as she joined him at the rail, looking out across the grey sea and the disappearing cliffs of Dover. ‘Are you talking to me now?’

‘Of course I’m talking to you,’ he said glumly.

‘I’m glad, Joel.’

He sighed. ‘I really did miss you, you know. I’m not just saying that.’

‘I came looking for you,’ he said, staring down at the white foam that streamed alongside the hull of the boat. ‘At your place in Canary Wharf.’

‘I moved.’

‘I gathered.’

‘And if I hadn’t?’

‘I don’t know what I’d have done,’ he said. ‘I thought I did, at the time, but now …’ He looked at her and saw she was smiling.

‘And I meant it when I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’d never willingly do that.’

‘I know,’ he sighed. She touched his hand. He gave her fingers a squeeze.

‘Look at those two,’ she laughed, pointing towards the porthole behind them, through which a sharp vampire eye could make out the figures of Dec and Chloe sitting together at the bar in the ferry’s main lounge. ‘They seem to be getting on well.’

‘They have a lot in common,’ Joel said. ‘They’ve both lost someone thanks to a vampire. Thanks to things like us,’ he added darkly.

‘You can say “people like us”, you know,’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘I thought we’d stopped being “people”. Isn’t that the whole idea?’

‘Technically, yes. But I know I’d rather think of myself as a person than a thing , wouldn’t you?’

‘I’m sure your victims would be delighted to know that,’ he said.

Her eyes scanned his face with concern. ‘You’re pale, Joel.’

‘I’m all right,’ he lied.

‘You’re not feeding, are you?’

‘You saw me feeding last night.’

She shook her head. ‘I saw you licking a puddle of dead man’s blood off the floor, is what I saw. I’m talking about taking live blood straight from the vein. There’s a difference. Do you know what’ll happen to you if you don’t start learning to feed properly, the vampire way? And it will, if you don’t get the proper nutrition.’

‘I have a pretty good idea what’ll happen,’ he said miserably. She was right about the nutrition part — drinking the corpse’s blood hadn’t sustained him half as well as he’d hoped and already he could feel the first hunger pains returning.

‘Well, I’m not going to let it,’ she said. ‘I saved you so that I could have you near me, not to sit back and watch you wither into a wraith. That’s worse than being dead.’

He almost smiled. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m touched.’

From the Pas de Calais they headed south-west down the autoroute , skirting the Belgian border. Alex was reminded of the Brussels Headquarters, and wondered whether Olympia Angelopolis had survived the London attack. As they drove on, the sky turned a solid grey and a heavy drumming sleet set in that didn’t relent until they’d crossed half of France. They were still two hundred miles from the Swiss border when Alex had to pull over at a roadside fuel station. The Jaguar’s tank was getting down towards the red line; and the car wasn’t the only thing that needed replenishing.

The humans got out of the car and stretched their legs while Alex attended to the petrol pump. Dec borrowed a handful of euro coins that Joel had found in his jacket pocket — left over from his Venice trip with Alex — and, using a mixture of pidgin French and hand signals, somehow managed to communicate to the woman in the filling station shop that he wanted to buy chocolate bars and cans of Coke for himself and Chloe.

‘Don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any of this,’ he said tentatively to Joel as he tore the wrapper off his chocolate.

Joel gazed at it and shook his head. ‘Not really, no.’

‘Can’t you — you know, eat? Regular food, like?’

‘I can eat it, but it doesn’t do me any good.’

‘What does it feel like?’ Dec said. ‘Being, you know …’

‘Look, Dec,’ Joel snapped, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ The thought of food, of feeding, was making his whole body cramp. Sorry that he’d spoken sharply to the kid, he said, ‘All right, if you want to know, it feels terrible. It’s not the best thing that ever happened to me. Let’s just say I haven’t come to terms with it yet. And I don’t know that I ever will.’

‘You wouldn’t ever think about biting one of us, would you?’ Dec said with a touch of nervousness.

Joel didn’t reply.

‘I’ll take that as a no, then?’

‘Where’s she disappeared to?’ Chloe said, looking around for Alex. Quarter of an hour had passed since she’d gone to pay for the fuel, and there was no sign of her anywhere. It was another ten minutes before she came back, looking just a little flushed.