“Jack and Connie are still trying to find the one that ran,” Jane said.
“Might be a trap. This was. Jane, go and find them, tell them to meet back underground. And for fuck’s sake, make sure you’re not followed.” He nudged the door open so that they could see the prone vampire he was dragging behind him. His neck was broken, arms crushed and bent at awful angles, both eyes a melted mess. A long way from destroyed, but further from alive than he’d ever been.
“What about that one?” Patrick asked.
“This is just what we came for,” Francesco said. “He’ll talk, given time.” Then his eyes settled on Marty, still struggling feebly in Rose’s grasp. “Rose, you know you can’t take him.”
“I know,” she said. “But…”
“He’s not your brother anymore, Rose,” Francesco said.
“I am,” Patrick said. “We’re all your brothers and sisters.”
“I know,” she said again, trying to project confidence. They have our father… and I just stepped through our mother.
“Meet us,” Francesco said. He gave Rose a last, lingering look which she did her very best not to translate as she saw. But as he left with the damaged vampire, Patrick set about gathering Rain’s and the dead vampire’s remains, and Jane dashed away to find the others, Rose knew what the unspoken command had said.
Kill him.
4
MARTY FELT NUMB. He ran because Rose ran, her hand grasping his right arm so tightly that he’d lost all sense of feeling in his wrist and hand. If he stopped running she would drag him, and then carry him, and he had no wish to be carried by his sister again. She’d hauled him through the house as if he were little more than a sack of straw, and he had no desire to be a straw man. He was of flesh and bone and blood, all parts in the correct place. He wanted to stay like that.
He attempted to think of his mother.
Rose seemed to know where she was going. There was a sense of urgency about her, though he could not hear her breathing quicken even a little. For the first time he noticed her smell, a hint of human with more complex, richer scents hiding underneath. There was something basic and animal there, the aroma of something that existed with little thought of its relationship with others. It was not a dirty, sickly smell but something more powerful. He thought she smelled of the wild.
But perhaps that was the blood. Once, when he was six, Marty had fallen from his bike when he and his father were out on a ride, gashing his knee on the rough edge of the pothole that had thrown him. His dad had taken a look and said, It doesn’t look so bad, and then the blood had started to flow. What he remembered more about it wasn’t the blood but his father’s panicked, fearful reaction, and it had taken him a few seconds to take control and act. That was the most blood Marty had ever seen before, and it had been his own.
Now he had bathed in blood. He felt it sticking together the fingers on his left hand. It made his shoes and jeans heavy. It filled his nostrils, the stench so rich that he thought he must have been smashed in the nose. He hoped he had; that would mean it was his own blood he was smelling, not…
Not his mother’s.
He realized he was still clasping the sharpened cricket stump in his left hand, and he thought he couldn’t let go even if he wanted to. He almost laughed at the feel of it—as if that thing could have done anything against the vampire. He’d fired the stone into its eye, true, a lucky shot that had seemed to enrage it more than anything else. But perhaps he’d angered it enough for that weird flash of light to take effect, the tall guy with the light—
Another vampire, that’s what he was: just like Rose, different from the thing they’d been fighting.
—bursting in at just the right time.
“Rose,” he said. He wanted to hear her voice, however different it now sounded.
“Quiet, Marty. They could be anywhere.”
He realized then how much danger they were still in. The night sang to him with streetlights and shadows, sirens and silences, and in the few illuminated house windows they passed he caught memories of his mother. TV light flickered, the rooms behind those curtains warm and welcoming, and he could sense the love and safety behind each window. That’s what his mother had been: safety and love. And he had betrayed both by not trying hard enough to persuade her and his father to run. The threat of death still upon him, he could consider her fate and what it meant. And while the numbness kept his tears at bay for now, it also allowed him to remember the particulars. Blood and bone and… meat. The flesh of her he had hugged, the hands he had held on to when he was a child, the comfort he had taken from those eyes… all of them taken apart and spread around their home like an insult.
And his father…
“He’s still out here somewhere,” he said.
“Probably dead,” Rose said, pausing at the junction of two streets. She looked left, then ran right. “They’ve probably—”
“Fed on him? Drunk his blood? That’s not what they did to Mum, is it? She was… all torn up, Rose.”
“Quiet.”
“They ripped her up, and just for blood?”
“It’s not like in the movies,” she said. “They’re animals, not dandies.”
“So you’re an animal too.”
She stopped again, pushing him back across the pavement until he was pressed against a brick wall. It was cold. “Shut up, Marty. I’m trying to save your life. Understand?”
“He told you not to, didn’t he?”
“He’s not my boss.” She moved back a little, looking around the street. It was mostly silent; a fox trotted across the road, and from somewhere out of sight came the distant hiss of music. “But I’ve got to ask you one thing, Marty, and it’s important. Very important.”
He was shaking now, and not from the cold. He tried to blink away the shock but felt it circling, just ready to settle down at any moment and reduce him to a wreck. Each blink showed him another view of his slaughtered mother.
The slap was soft but shocking. It focused his vision back onto his sister, and her altered face. She’s not beautiful anymore, he thought, and it was more to do with her eyes than her subtly altered features.
“Marty, there’s so much behind this, and I don’t have time to even begin. But do you trust me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Completely?”
He nodded.
“Even knowing what I am?”
“You’re nothing like the thing that killed Mum.”
Her eyelids flickered, and she glanced away before looking back at him. Something there, he thought, but right then he didn’t want to know. All he needed was for Rose to keep him safe.
“I’m taking you to someone we trust. His name’s Lee Woodhams. He’ll keep you safe until we find the rest of them.”
“A vampire?” Marty asked, but already he knew this was something different. This was her doing something the tall guy would have been angry about.
“Lee’s… He hates vampires. With a vengeance, you could say. That’s why we’re in touch with him, because he knows what’s going on.”
“What’s going on where?”
“In the wider world. And I can’t tell you any more. Just trust me.”
“But if he hates vampires…”
“He doesn’t know. He thinks we’re like him: vampire hunters.” She laughed softly. “That’s what he calls himself, anyway. It’s all about security with him, which is good, because he doesn’t know anything about us. But we use him to keep track of…”
“The wider world.”
“Yeah. So you can’t tell him a thing, Marty. Not a single thing about what’s happened, or me, or anything. Understand? Not if you want to stay safe, and if you want me to be safe. Now come on.”