Scott G. Mariani - Uprising

near the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border

12.17 p.m.

Sandra Roberts threw the stick and watched as Bertie went hurtling after it down the leafy riverside path. It hit the ground and bounced, and the golden retriever jumped in the air to catch it in his jaws.

‘Bring it to Mummy,’ she called to him brightly. ‘Come on, Bertie. Good boy.’

Bertie trotted back to her, the stick in his mouth, and dropped it proudly at her feet, looking up at her with keen anticipation, tail wagging. She patted his head, picked up the stick and threw it again. This time her throw wasn’t quite as straight, and it landed in the reeds at the side of the water. Bertie went charging after it.

‘No, Bertie! Not in the water!’ Last time he’d gone for an impromptu swim, he’d been impossible to recall, had got absolutely filthy and completely saturated the back seat of the Volvo.

Christopher had not been at all pleased. But then again, not much pleased Christopher.

‘Bertie, you bloody dog! Get back here now!’

It was too late. Bertie completely ignored his mistress’s shouts as he went ploughing straight through the reeds, sending up a spray of mud and water. She huffed in exasperation as he hunted around in the shallows, rustling the long reeds as he sniffed excitedly here and there. Then he seemed to freeze, as if he’d found the stick. Oh, good.

‘Good boy, Bertie! Fetch now; bring it to Mummy!’

And, thank God, he was responding. She could see the yellow of his fur through the reeds as he scrabbled back onto the bank. Now she was going to get the damn animal on the lead, so he couldn’t run off again. She was sure she’d stuffed the lead into her pocket, but it wasn’t there. She tried the other pocket. There it was.

She looked back at the riverbank. Bertie was up on dry land now, still half hidden in the grass. She called him again, but he didn’t respond. She sighed in irritation, went striding over the grass to grab his collar and snap the lead on.

Bertie looked up at her as she approached. He was standing over something, his soggy tail flicking back and forth as if to say, ‘Look what I found!’

Whatever it was he’d fished out of the river, it wasn’t the stick.

Sandra took a step closer, and peered down at the thing. It was grey and bloated and horrible.

It was a couple of seconds before she realised what she was looking at. She recoiled, tasting the vomit that instantly shot up her throat.

The young girl’s face stared up at her from the grass. She had no body. All that remained attached to the head was part of the left shoulder and a section of upper trunk. The throat was slashed wide open, black with congealed blood.

Sandra began to scream.

St Aldates Police Station

12.39 p.m.

The ham and cheese baguette sat untouched on Joel’s desk. He’d peeled half the cellophane wrapping off it ten minutes ago, before realising that the hollow, gnawing feeling at the pit of his stomach wasn’t hunger. He couldn’t eat a bite.

He’d been sitting staring blankly at his lunch ever since; but what he was seeing in front of him wasn’t an uneaten sandwich. It was the pale face and dark-ringed eyes of a badly frightened young guy in a hospital ward, locked in a mental battle against himself. His brain tearing itself in two, striving yet dreading to believe the impossible. The only thing more terrifying than the fear that you were going crazy was the fear that the nightmare was for real.

Joel knew that. He’d been through it before, and he was fighting desperately not to start feeling that way again now. It was as if he were suddenly viewing the world through a distorting lens. Reality had shifted gears, sidestepped into a parallel dimension where the normal parameters of logic and rationality had been blown away. He was standing on the brink of the abyss, looking down.

He shoved the sandwich out of the way and snatched up his phone. Dan Cleland was Joel’s closest contact at the forensic lab. Joel asked him if there was any way they could speed up the tests on the Maddon samples.

‘That depends on what you mean by speed up.’

‘Today?’

‘Hmmm. Pushing it.’

‘It’s pretty important, Dan.’

Cleland sighed. ‘Okay, because it’s you. Leave it with me, and I’ll get back to you by the end of the afternoon.’

Joel felt better after the call. If Dec Maddon’s pills turned out to be ecstasy and the blood sample tested positive for the drug, then maybe he could breathe again. Maybe the world would return to normal. Maybe the vampires inside his head would go slinking back into the world of the imagination where they belonged, and bad dreams would remain just dreams.

Maybe.

Joel lobbed the ham and cheese baguette into his waste bin and reached for his coffee. It was cold.

The Jag was blasting down the outside lane of the motorway at just a shade under ninety, heading in towards London, as Alex talked to Harry Rumble on her phone. He listened quietly as she ran through the account of her morning. There was just one thing she left out.

‘What I don’t get,’ Rumble said after she’d finished, ‘is why a detective inspector, someone high up, a guy up to his eyeballs day to day in serious crime, even in a hick town like Oxford, would go out of his way like that to talk to some kid on a petty drugs charge who’s raving on about stuff no humans would take seriously.’

‘That’s because he believes the story, Harry.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘I could smell his fear. I saw the look in his eyes. I don’t think he wants to admit it to himself yet. He’s holding back. But trust me. He believes.’

Rumble thought for a moment. ‘He believes, even though he has nothing to go on but the testimony of a kid who might very well have dreamed the whole thing up on drugs? Then he’s either highly impressionable—’

‘Which he isn’t,’ Alex cut in. ‘He’s young, around thirty. If he’s made DI by then, it means he’s ambitious and determined and he’s no idiot. Guys like him don’t do impressionable. There’s another reason.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said.

When the call was over, she gripped the steering wheel and pressed a little harder on the gas, felt the surge of the Jaguar’s engine as the needle flirted with the hundred mark. Her acute senses could make out every minute detail of the rushing tarmac, computing speed and distance to a degree of accuracy that a fighter pilot could only dream of. She was completely in control, completely zoned in. Of course she was: she was a vampire.

So why was her heart fluttering like this?

That was the part she hadn’t told Harry.

As she drove, all she could think about was Joel Solomon. And she knew the reason why.

Joel was on his way over to the machine to get himself a fresh cup of warm coffee when he spotted Carter steaming the other way down the corridor with a phalanx of uniformed officers in his wake. He was built like a bear and when he was moving fast, like he was now, the world simply parted to make way for him or it got knocked flat on its back.

Superintendent Sam Carter was thirteen years older than Joel, and they’d been friends for ten of those years, ever since Joel had joined up with Thames Valley. Joel knew him pretty well – well enough to know that behind the gruff exterior was a guy who burst into tears at the mere sound of Dolly Parton’s voice, especially when he was drunk, which wasn’t unusual for him. And well enough to know that when he had the grim look on his face that he was wearing now, something extremely serious was up.