“So, how many?”
“Three. Rain, Jack, and Connie.”
Rose nodded and stretched. “Seven of us. Unless that vampire’s bringing an army behind him, that should do.” She looked past Francesco and saw the others gathered around the small table at the center of the room. They sat and stood quietly, the Humains, and she felt a stab of doubt that was becoming all too familiar. Perhaps it was a leftover from her dream, but she had a brief, intense conviction that they were all wrong. That their philosophy was destined to failure.
“We won’t know until tonight.”
“What time is it?”
Francesco looked at the pocket watch he always kept on a chain tucked into his waistcoat pocket. She’d laughed when she first saw it, thinking it was a clichéd affectation. But it had been his mother’s. She had been a nurse during the Napoleonic Wars.
“Almost midday,” he said. “We should really be resting.”
“Not sure I can.” She saw that suit, those eyes, and felt the warm blood flooding around her tongue.
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He held out his hand and took hers. It was not often that any of them welcomed contact, but Francesco had turned her. He was special. He’d told her that he had turned her to replace a mad fool called Chase who had turned back to warm blood and taken six children in six nights. They’d hunted him down and killed him, cutting him into pieces and burying him deep in London’s underworld. Rats and deeper creatures would consume the evidence that he had ever existed.
They approached the assembled Humains, and Rose exchanged nods of greeting.
“You know the basics,” Francesco said. “Now that we’re here together, it’s time to plan.”
As they started talking, and Rose realized what might happen that night, she hoped that Marty had managed to persuade his parents—her old mother and father—to leave the city. She hoped she would never see her living brother again.
But she doubted it.
3
MARTY STAYED IN HIS bedroom until his father called him down for breakfast. It was Saturday. His parents usually went uptown on Saturdays, going through the motions of shopping and browsing and having lunch and enjoying themselves, even though a part of them would always be missing. Sometimes Marty went with them, but he went less and less nowadays, now that he was almost an adult and had a life slowly building itself around him. If he didn’t go he’d spend time with Gaz, jamming with their guitars in his friend’s bedroom or wandering the neighborhood with their other mates. Smoking, drinking, laughing. Sometimes the future reminded them of the frightening weight of its potential, but usually at that age they lived for the moment. Some Saturdays he’d have mates around to his house for the evening, and his mum and dad would go upstairs to read or watch TV while Marty and his gang watched horror movies in the living room. They had a thirty-six-inch TV, great for expanding scares. Marty’s favorite had always been The Thing. Gaz liked Underworld.
“Marty? It’s almost eleven. You up?”
“Yeah, Dad.” He’d been up all night. He was standing in front of his mirror, staring into his own tired eyes and wondering just what the hell he could say.
“Fried egg on toast? Me and your mum are going into town later; you want to come with us?”
“Dunno!” He heard his own voice, saw his mouth move, but felt distant from the day and the boy he was looking at in the mirror. He had a pretty decent mustache and beard for a seventeen-year-old. He looked terrified of his own image.
“I’ll get breakfast going,” his father called uncertainly. Marty heard his parents in the kitchen below him, the rumble of their unheard words tinged with concern.
He took in a deep breath, taking in the day. It did nothing to disperse the events of the night before, and when he looked at his hands, he was glad. They were dirty from sprawling on the pavement. Under two fingernails of his left hand was black stuff, and he wondered if it was vampire blood. He wondered if vampires even bled—whether they had blood at all—and what would happen if he scraped it out and watered it down and drank it. Not that he wanted to. It was going right down the sink, down into the rat-infested darkness where it belonged. But still he wondered.
While he was washing and cleaning his teeth, he thought about what he was going to say. As he dressed and sprayed deodorant, trying to clear away the stink of fear that had hung around him ever since he’d seen his undead sister the night before, he formed the words in his mind.
And, sitting down over breakfast, realizing how foolish every one of them sounded, he let them out.
He should have expected such a reaction, he supposed. His mother had left the house in tears, and he’d never seen his dad so mad. Even though he thought they must have seen how serious he was—how he believed every word he was telling them—there had not been a single moment when they had seemed ready to entertain the truth. The incredulity was obvious in their eyes as he told them about the thing stalking and attacking him. He made sure from the beginning that it did not for a second sound like a normal man, and his mother said, “Really, Marty.” His father just scoffed and went on eating his breakfast.
Then Marty told them how Rose had rescued him and they both lost their tempers. True to form, his mother’s anger quickly gave way to silent tears, and his dad ranted for a few moments before falling silent, fuming. Marty tried to convince them, telling them they had to get out of London that night in case the thing came back, but he’d already lost them.
Alone in the house, he wondered whether adulthood made everyone so blind to the incredible. His own belief in the things he had seen had been instantaneous: he trusted his eyes too much, perhaps, but he was more than willing to believe the obvious. He tried convincing himself again that it had been a dream, brought on by some sort of delayed grief at the loss of his sister. He spent some time sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, staring into the small back garden at the birds hopping from the nut and seed feeders his parents liked hanging there, waiting for his memories to take flight. They’d disperse and reveal themselves to be lies, exposing the most inexplicable parts of themselves that could not possibly be true. But now matter how hard he concentrated, now matter how hard he remembered, the memories retained the weight of reality.
“I did see Rose,” he said to the silent room. And then he took his tea back up to his bedroom and opened his laptop.
A simple Google search for ”vampires” brought him sixteen million results. He messed around with various word combinations, not really sure what he was looking for. Pretty soon he came to realize just how much crap there was on the net about such things, and he endeavored to filter out as much of the cinematic and literary content as he could. Discovering some more serious content about vampires was not easy, and once he did, most of it seemed to have been written by mad people. There were vampire clubs he could join in Denmark and Belgium, places where he could go to clubs and drink someone else’s blood to a death metal sound track. There was a vampire family in New Zealand who invited people to their community to be ”initiated.” Message boards, forums, and blogs told the real life stories of vampires, some even going so far as to feature, from what Marty could tell, real murders in their tales. A researcher in France had written a reference book about Hitler’s vampire storm troopers. Nearly ten years ago, a woman in the States had also written one, labeled as fiction but which she went to great lengths to portray as fact, about how vampires had been responsible for an oil pipeline disaster in Alaska. Since then, there had been a slew of sightings and reports, behind which Marty perceived the skeleton of a conspiracy. The word was mentioned many times, and many of the links he clicked on appeared to have been taken down. Several links pointing to “genuine footage of a vampire attack” went to YouTube, but the familiar This video has been removed message always came up.