Scott G. Mariani - The Cross

The cave was deep and low. Bent double, crawling desperately on his knees, he wished like he’d never wished for anything before that the terrible light couldn’t reach him there. The shaft tightened as it deepened, and it took all his strength to force his body through. Then, with a surge of relief that made him cry out, he realised it was opening up again, into a wide crooked fissure that ran diagonally upwards into the bowels of the mountain. A pitch-black sanctuary where the sun hadn’t penetrated for a billion years.

Joel snuggled deep into the darkness. For a few moments, the fierce joy of survival burned intensely through him and he couldn’t stop grinning. He’d done it. He was safe from the hateful sun. He’d survived. He’d won.

No, Joel , said another voice in his mind. You lost. You failed miserably.

He closed his eyes as his ecstasy suddenly gave way to revolted self-loathing. He’d had his chance to end it, right here, right now. But not even the steeliest resolve he could muster up stood the remotest chance against the vampire’s all-conquering urge to survive. Not now, not ever. He was doomed to go on like this for the rest of eternity.

As the sun rose over the snowy forest and mountains and began its arc across the sky, Joel remained in the darkness of the cave, thinking of only one thing. He was going to return home and destroy the woman who had done this to him. Her and all her kind.

Send them all back to hell where they – and now he – belonged.

Chapter Two

Prague

Alex Bishop stood alone at the railing of the bridge, the wind in her hair. Beyond the river and all around her, the city lights were fading with the coming of the dawn. The rising sun glittered off cathedral domes and glassy high-rise towers and cast a diffused golden streak across the water. She could feel its warmth on her face. If it hadn’t been for the last remaining Solazal photosensitivity neutraliser pill that she’d managed to retrieve from the castle before her escape from Romania, she’d hardly have been standing here to welcome the sunrise. As for any other vampire, it would have been a straight choice between frazzle and hide. Nobody ever voluntarily opted for the former.

She sighed to herself as she gazed out across the cityscape. So much had happened in the last few days that even her ultra-sharp vampire mind was reeling from it. None of it was good. All through the night she’d been making her way as best she could from the snowy wilds of Romania. A stolen farm truck had got her as far as a desolate country railway station, where she’d hitched a ride on a freight carriage. Now here she was in Prague, not quite halfway to where she wanted to be and hoping that her call to Utz McCarthy was going to pay off.

She didn’t have to wait much longer before a black BMW SUV peeled off from the growing traffic over the bridge and pulled up a few yards from where she was standing. She stepped away from the railing to meet it. The driver was alone. His door opened. He climbed out and walked towards her, grey-haired, tall and lean, not quite smiling, not quite frowning, wearing a long raincoat that billowed in the wind.

At only eighty or so years of age Utz McCarthy was much younger than Alex, but he looked much older: compared to the twenty-nine years she’d spent as a human, he’d survived for over half a century before an unexpected encounter with a vampire had set him on a whole new course. Nowadays, he was a minor sectional official running the small and somewhat dingy Prague offices of the same organisation Alex belonged to: the global Vampire Federation. Part of Utz’s job was facilitating the movements of VIA agents like Alex.

The last time they’d met face to face had been eighteen months earlier, when Harry Rumble, Alex’s boss at the Vampire Intelligence Agency Headquarters in London, had sent her out this way on a mission to check out reports of rogue vampire activity in the Czech city of Brno. As it had turned out, it had been a false alarm. No Federation regs were being contravened, the local vampires were behaving themselves and not turning unauthorised victims; no arrests or Nosferol terminations had been necessary and all had been well.

Alex’s job wasn’t always so easy.

Utz looked distraught. ‘Jesus, Alex, are you okay?’ he blurted out. ‘I can’t believe what I’ve been hearing. An attack on the Federation grand assembly? A fucking helicopter gunship , taking out the whole conference centre? Tell me it’s not true.’

‘I was there,’ Alex said coolly. ‘It’s true.’

‘But how could this happen ?’

‘It happened because we broke one of the cardinal rules of warfare,’ Alex said. ‘Never underestimate your enemy. When a rogue vampire like Gabriel Stone decides to mount a rebellion against an enemy he perceives as a threat to everything he believes in, he does it on a major scale. It’s a long story, Utz. The bottom line is that virtually the whole of the Federation top brass has been wiped out. Thanks to Stone’s rebels and the moles he had working for him inside VIA, we just became a leaderless army.’

Utz gaped at her, visibly weakening at the knees. ‘ All of them? The Supremos?’

She nodded. ‘Goldmund, Korentayer, Hassan, Borowczyk, Mushkavanhu. Not to mention our illustrious former Federation second-in-command, the late and much-lamented Gaston Lerouge. Stone executed them all. With a guillotine.’ She gave a dry smile. ‘Some style, that Gabriel. You’ve got to hand it to him.’

‘What about the Vampress?’ Utz croaked. He was referring to Supremo Olympia Angelopolis, the grand Matriarch of the whole Federation. ‘Surely not her as well?’

Alex shrugged. ‘She might have got out. Things were kind of chaotic.’ She didn’t pretend to care any more than she did about Olympia’s fate.

‘This is unreal. You’ve got to be kidding me about this.’

She looked at him. ‘You should know by now that I’m a very humourless person and I don’t dick about making jokes. Especially when I’ve been shot at with Nosferol bullets, kidnapped and incarcerated in a damp cell in some middle-of-nowhere castle in Romania and then almost guillotined myself.’

And left behind the only man I’ve given a shit about in a hundred and thirteen years , she wanted to add. Left him to fend for himself in the wilderness, more alone and more terrified than he could ever have imagined. Making that stark, brutal choice had ripped her guts out: either let Joel die in her arms of the terrible wounds he’d suffered in the battle with Stone’s gang, or help him to survive, the only way she knew how.

Turning him had seemed the only option.

And now what? She knew he’d make it out of there. Of all the things vampires could do, survival was what they did best. He’d have sought out a dark place by now, to hole up in for the day. Come sundown, he’d begin his new existence – one he’d never forgive her for having inflicted on him. And then, sooner or later, more likely sooner, he’d come looking for her. The indelible connection between vampire and victim would lead him to her. When that day came, she’d have to account for what she’d done to him.

Alex quickly pressed that thought to the back of her mind. ‘Got any Solazal?’ she asked Utz. If she wanted to move around safely in daylight, she’d need more than just the twelve hours’ worth of protection that one salvaged pill could offer.

Utz was still stunned from the news, leaning heavily on the bonnet of the car for support. He shook his head. ‘Just what I need for myself,’ he said distractedly. ‘There’s a shortage.’

Alex was well aware of that. Gabriel Stone’s doing. In a lightning raid in Italy, his heavily-armed assault team had blown up the pharmaceutical plant where the Federation produced its special drugs. With a blast of high explosive, Stone’s Traditionalist uprising had sent the vampire world halfway back to the sacred old ways of ducking and dodging the sun. It was anyone’s guess how long it would be before Solazal production went back to normal. As for Nosferol, the lethal anti-vampire poison that Federation agents used to destroy rogue members of their kind, the attack on the pharmaceutical plant had reduced stocks almost to zero.