Scott Mariani - The Cross

Tiberius made an apologetic gesture to Gabriel as Baxter, sensing he was being ignored, redirected his ranting at Lillith and Zachary.

‘He was going on so much, Gabriel,’ Tiberius said. ‘Announcing he was going to come over here and reckon things up with you. I thought we should accompany him, in case he did anything rash.’

‘Rash?’ Baxter yelled, interrupting his own stream of abuse. ‘I’ll give you rash, you buncha dipshits. Listen to me, Gabe, I want my fucking money back. That’s all there is to it, okay? The deal’s off. I don’t wanna be part of this Trad thing any more. I mean, Jesus Christ, we were better off under the fucking Feds …’

‘Enough,’ Gabriel said.

But Baxter hadn’t finished. ‘And another thing. Where’s my plane? What’s the point of having my own goddamn plane if I’ve gotta charter another one just to fly to my own …’

‘Enough!’ Gabriel repeated more loudly.

Baxter’s eyes bulged. He was about to add just one more tiny comment when he stopped suddenly and pointed at the window. ‘Hey. Did you see that?’

‘See what?’ Gabriel said, turning.

‘I saw it too,’ Alex said. ‘Something ran past the house. Down there in the snow, on the edge of the crag.’ She’d only noticed it out of the corner of her eye — a flitting figure that had darted out of the shadows of the rocks and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

‘What was it?’ Joel asked. Alex shook her head, scanned the rocks intently for another sign of it.

‘Extinguish the light,’ Gabriel commanded, and Makiko flipped off the switch, the smile gone from her face.

‘The back window,’ Alex whispered. Joel and Dec followed as she trotted nimbly out of the living room and into the hallway behind it, where the rear balcony overlooked the face of the mountain behind the chalet. ‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘Two more of them.’ She’d seen them better this time. As Joel followed the line of her finger he spotted a third: the hooded figure, no taller than a child, scampered out from behind a rock, darted across the snow and disappeared again.

‘What was that?’ he said again.

‘God damn these local brats,’ Baxter yelled, joining them at the back window.

‘Kids couldn’t make their way up here,’ Joel said.

‘Fucking gypsies,’ Baxter growled. ‘Last year they stripped out a whole ski hut for firewood, down the valley. Well they ain’t robbing a solitary plank from this place, that’s for damned sure.’ He marched out onto the rear balcony, swung a leg over the sturdy wooden rail and dropped off the edge. It was only a twenty-foot leap to the snow below, nothing for a vampire, and Baxter prided himself on doing his own stunts.

There was nobody there. Baxter trudged around the corner of the chalet, wading through the thick snow, cupping his hands around his mouth as he shouted, ‘Hey, you little rat-asses! Get away from here! You hear me? This is private property! So fuck off!’

A whistling sound, moving fast towards him. Baxter turned and felt something strike him in the chest. ‘What in hell’s name—?’ he muttered, squinting down his nose at the peculiar object that had attached itself to him.

The shaft of an arrow.

‘Those bastard gypsies,’ Baxter said, outraged, but in a strangely slurred voice. He plucked the arrow out and was about to toss it away when he suddenly realised that his arm wasn’t obeying the command of his brain. He tried to make his fingers open and release the arrow, but they wouldn’t move. Panic began to surge through him. What was happening? He couldn’t even turn his head. Gazing fixedly at the bloody point of the arrow, he could see its strange glass tip, like a vial, that had been shattered by the impact. Dripping from the broken glass was an odd kind of liquid that was too black and thick to be just his blood.

At that point, the paralysis took Baxter over entirely and he went down like a felled tree in the snow.

He didn’t scream, didn’t move, was completely unable to react as the horrible little hooded figures appeared as if out of nowhere and gathered around him in a circle. Something glinted in the moonlight. A razor-sharp blade gouged his flesh, and Baxter felt every bit of the pain.

Then the figures were all over him, hacking and chopping and slicing. The arm clutching the arrow rolled away across the bloody snow. The last thing Baxter saw was his body rolling away from him — no, it was him rolling away from his body. A glimpse at the stars above … then down at the snowy ground … and then nothing at all.

Alex was the first to leap down from the rear balcony and follow Baxter’s tracks in the snow around the side of the chalet. She heard the meaty chopping sounds and the strange chittering, twittering noises before she rounded the corner and saw the strange little figures, no taller than children, that were crowded around what was left of the movie star. The crude, hooded robes they wore were like scaled-down versions of the habits worn by medieval monks, held in at the waist with broad leather belts or lengths of stout rope. But what drew Alex’s eye was the cruel-looking assortment of bloodied butcher’s knives, machetes and cleavers the creatures clutched in their grey, clawed, three-fingered little hands.

The twittering stopped abruptly. The creatures looked up from the bloody circle in the snow and stared at her from under their hoods. Alex counted eight of them as she backed away a couple of steps. Suddenly she was aware of Joel at her side. Lillith, Gabriel, Zachary and Tiberius had joined him. Glancing up, she glimpsed Dec and Chloe standing above on the balcony, leaning out over the rail with looks of horror.

‘It seems to be curtains for our thespian friend,’ Gabriel said, nudging Baxter’s severed head with his toe.

‘Never mind him,’ Alex said. ‘What about those?’

‘Whatever they are,’ Joel said, ‘they’re not afraid of us.’

As if to prove him right, the little hooded figures charged at them with uncanny speed and aggression. Alex shot the nearest one in the face and it somersaulted backwards in a dark mist of exploded skull and brain matter, the wicked machete flying from its hand.

Lillith snatched the weapon out of the air. As the creatures closed on them she windmilled it around her, splitting one from hip to shoulder and lopping off another’s arm. Without a sound, the thing bounded away from her, blood spraying the snow from its stump. It would have knocked Joel off his feet if he hadn’t thrust out his katana in time. Impaled through the middle, the creature fell back, its surprising weight almost tearing the sword from Joel’s grip.

Tiberius stepped back out of the arc of a cleaver blow that would have halved a strong man, grabbed his attacker by the folds of its habit and dashed its brains out against one of the chalet’s thick wooden support struts; meanwhile, Gabriel swept the feet out from under another and crushed its throat with a stamping kick. Zachary had scooped one up by the rope around its middle, knocked the knife out of its hands and was busy strangling it in his fists.

The remaining creature turned, chittering to itself, and went bounding away like a mountain goat over the rocks.

‘One thing’s for sure,’ Alex said, using her foot to roll over one of the corpses. ‘These things are no vampires.’

‘Then what are they?’ Joel said. He knelt down beside the dead creature and ripped away the hood, exposing its face to the moonlight. Its skin was grey and leprous. It had the wrinkles of a very, very old man. The large eyes of a cat. The jutting, muscular jaws of a barracuda, slick with slime and drool. Joel looked away in disgust.