Scott Mariani - The Cross

The fire was gaining all through the lower floor of the chalet, timbers blazing everywhere and thick black smoke choking the stairway and passages so that Chloe and Dec were running almost blind.

‘Which way’s outside?’ he yelled.

‘Try that door,’ she replied, her eyes streaming tears.

He crashed it open. ‘Fuck it! Some kind of storeroom.’

‘Try another.’

But it was too late. Ash’s footsteps were pounding towards them through the smoky corridors. Dec and Chloe ran into the storeroom, clambering through the clutter of junk they could see in the dim moonlight from the window. Dec hid between an old Yamaha snowmobile and a stack of Butane gas cylinders. Chloe ducked behind a pile of packing cases.

Now they were trapped. They could only pray that Ash would run by the door so they could escape from the storeroom and make their way outside before the whole place went up in flames. The acrid stench of burning was making it harder and harder to breathe.

In a tiny square of moonlight shining on the floor next to her, Chloe examined the pistol, trying to see what the hell had gone wrong with it. The answer came to her immediately. A piece of grit from the rocky ledge had got stuck in the crook of the gun’s hammer, preventing it from snapping forward to hit the firing pin. She picked at it with her fingertip, breaking the nail — but the grit didn’t move.

Ash’s footsteps came storming down the passage. They stopped at the door.

Chloe held her breath as she scrabbled around for something to pick the blockage from the gun.

The door crashed open and Ash stood silhouetted against the smoke and the flickering orange fire-glow that was spreading through the chalet with every passing second.

‘I know you’re in there,’ he said. ‘I can smell you.’

Chloe’s fingers clasped something in the shadows. It was an old nail, bent and rusty. As Ash burst into the room, she dug the point of the nail frantically into the crook of the pistol’s hammer and felt the trapped piece of grit spring free.

‘Give me back the cross,’ Ash said, ‘and I’ll kill you quickly. You have my word.’

Chloe checked the Desert Eagle’s magazine and her heart stalled for an instant as she saw it was empty. Then, in her panic, she remembered the breech: there might still be a round in the breech. That was how these weapons worked. She grasped the back of the slide, inched it back and the moonlight glimmered on shiny brass. Her heart began to race again. She still had one shot left.

She closed her eyes.

Make it count, Chloe.

‘Give — me — the — CROSS!’ Ash roared as he came charging through the smoke, kicking debris out of his way.

There was a rending screech from above as the ceiling gave way and a burning beam came crashing down into the storeroom. The wall collapsed. Flames leaped through the broken planking and spread hungrily in all directions. An old armchair burst alight, setting fire to the heap of cardboard boxes next to it. The flames flew up the walls, hugging the contours of the room, spreading everywhere, flaring up into a raging inferno.

Chloe knew that if she and Dec didn’t get out of here within the next few seconds, they’d be burned alive.

Or maybe it was already too late. Hot smoke seared her lungs. The taste of death: so this was what it felt like.

But then, through her streaming tears she saw the door at the far end of the room that had been hidden in the shadows before. She leaped to her feet. ‘Dec!’

Together they raced for the door. Chloe wrenched it open and gasped as she burst out into the cold night air. The whole front of the chalet was ablaze now.

Ash marched through the burning room, ignoring the flames that licked up his trouser legs.

‘Hey, Ash!’

He looked round. Chloe stood in the doorway, her face shining with sweat, her eyes glowing from the firelight. In her hands was the battered, singed case. She held it open for him to see the cross inside. ‘You want this? Come and get it.’

Ash bellowed and came charging through the flames.

Chloe snapped the case shut. She tossed it to Dec and pulled out the pistol and fired off her last shot.

The bullet missed Ash by a good five feet. But that was only because she hadn’t been aiming at him.

‘Burn, fucker,’ Chloe said. Then she ran.

Ash heard the impact of the bullet against the tall Butane gas cylinder. He had no time to do anything else but stare at the neat half-inch hole the jacketed hollow point had punched straight through the steel.

The gas hit the flames. And Ash was pulverised by a hot white blast that he never even saw.

The chalet exploded in a gigantic rolling fireball that lit up the night sky. Burning wreckage was catapulted hundreds of feet into the air.

Alex and Joel felt the heat on their faces from halfway up the mountain as the goblins closed in on them. A moment later, a great rumbling shook the ground under their feet. The whole mountain seemed to be trembling.

The goblins looked up in fright and then scattered as the entire face of the towering peak seemed to detach itself and came crashing towards them — millions of tons of snow and ice and rock dislodged by the sound vibrations of the explosion and hurtling downwards in a devastating wave. The fleeing goblins were crushed as if a giant fist had pounded down on top of them.

Alex and Joel ran to avoid the path of the avalanche, but not even a vampire could run that fast.

‘Don’t let go of my hand!’ Alex shouted over the deafening roar.

Then it hit.

Hundreds of yards away across the mountain slope, Gabriel Stone was crouched forlornly by Lillith’s prone body when the explosion lit up the sky.

At the same moment, Zachary let out a whoop of joy. Lillith was stirring. She blinked, once, twice, drew in a gasping breath. ‘Gabriel, is that you? Zachary?’

‘I thought I had lost you, my dearest love.’ As Gabriel held her tightly, the ground began to shake and little landslides slithered down around them.

‘Look,’ Zachary said.

They watched as the avalanche flung its wrath down the mountainside, sweeping away everything before it. It bore down on the burning wreck of the chalet. Blazing timbers shattered and were driven over the edge of the abyss. The cable car went plummeting down the valley and smashed into a thousand pieces among the trees below.

Once the fury of the mountain was spent, all was silent. Just the whistle of the wind and the gentle patter as a fresh snow began to fall.

A large, flat rock suddenly overturned and Alex crawled out from under it, bloodied and bruised, her hair white with snow. She staggered to her feet.

‘Joel!’ she called out, anxiously scanning the new landscape that the avalanche had left in its wake.

There was no sign of him.

‘Joel!’ she called again. A healthy vampire could always dig its way out, even from under tons of rock and snow — but not one so close to starvation. She couldn’t bear the thought of what could happen to him if he didn’t feed very, very soon.

Her heart leaped as she saw a hand sticking up out of the snow. She ran over to it and clasped it. It was as cold as ice. She dropped to her knees and started digging. After a few moments, she was able to haul him out. He wasn’t moving as she laid him down on the snow.

Joel opened his eyes. ‘I’m starving, Alex,’ he said, barely audible over the wind. ‘I don’t think I have much time left.’

Alex rolled up her sleeve, brought her wrist up to her mouth and bit deep into the veins. Dark blood trickled down her hand and onto the snow.

‘Drink from me,’ she said to him. ‘It’ll keep you going a while.’