Marty shouted something next door. Lee stood quickly and silently, grabbed the crossbow leaning against his desk, and approached the door in a crouch. Any killer waiting with a gun would be aiming high. He listened, moved again, and ducked into the corridor and around Marty’s bedroom doorway. The boy was asleep on the bed, curled into a ball and shifting slightly. Bad dreams. Lee waited until he settled again, stood, checked the windows, and went back into his small office.
He reduced the search window on his computer and opened the house security monitor. There were six cameras and twelve motion detectors. One detector alarm was flashing, and he shifted an external camera to scan his back garden. A neighbor’s cat was taking a sit at the edge of his lawn. That was okay: cats were sensitive, and if there were any dangers close by, it would have fled.
The next email account he checked was for ex-colleagues who’d had some sympathy with his experiences. There weren’t many. He’d been all but laughed out of the Service when he’d entered a report that mentioned vampires, and the brief mention he’d heard of Operation Red-Blooded—a shady American research project into vampires—had been quickly swept away. One day the signs were there, the next they led nowhere, and Lee’s days in the Service were at an end.
But there were several people who had not laughed out loud at his claims. Even over the ten years since he’d left, he’d not been able to glean any reason from any of them as to why that was, but he suspected they each knew of a vampire encounter, if they hadn’t actually experienced one themselves. This inbox was usually empty, and today was no exception. He sent a brief email to each of them—An attack in London last night, eyes and ears open—and then moved into the next.
He checked several more email accounts until he came to the one that had gleaned the most information. He always checked this last in the mornings, teasing himself with the possibility that she had made contact again and usually disappointed that she had not. For a while, a few years back, they’d had regular email conversations, then she had fallen from the radar and the emails became much less frequent. He’d heard things about her that he found difficult coming to terms with, but her information had still been rich, and though she knew who and what he was, he’d respected her honesty. But today, as most days now, there were no new emails from Stella Olemaun.
There must be something…
Lee took a swig of his cooling coffee and reached for a cigarette. The pack sat beside the computer, always open, always half-full. He’d given up ages ago, but he left the pack there as a temptation to deny. Sometimes he toyed with a cigarette, smelling it and tasting its tip in his mouth before shredding and tossing it. Other times he just looked. And sometimes, like now, he lit one unconsciously, so distracted that he forgot that he no longer smoked.
“Damn it,” he said, dropping the cigarette and feeling the smoke flooding his lungs. Since giving up, he’d taken another spoonful of sugar in his coffee and tea, and his consumption of biscuits had increased. He’d piled on twenty pounds. He’d once prided himself on his fitness and stamina, but now he was panting by the time he reached the third floor of his home. Another thing he could blame on the vampires.
He finished his coffee and closed his eyes, and the flash of memory hit him again. He’d been trying to forget for ten years but knew he never could. Phil, his partner and friend for several years at the SIS, pinned against the wall and writhing as his throat was ripped out, his blood flowed, his eyes grew wide and pleading as he saw Lee running for him. His own hand aiming the gun and firing several times, each bullet finding its mark because he was a good shot and had been well trained. The thing breaking Phil’s neck with a snap of its wrist and then turning on him. The blood, the teeth, the meat hanging from them, the roar, the click of his gun snapping on empty…
He’d watched it climb the side of a building and disappear across rooftops, an ascent that he knew was impossible for a normal person.
Phil, dead and staring.
Lee opened his eyes and sighed, and then the soft ping of a new instant message grabbed his attention.
He’d left three accounts open and went to the one showing a new message. Stella, he hoped, but no, this was from one of his contacts in North Africa. Yaseem was an ex–Libyan gunboat captain, in hiding in Tunisia for six years. He and Lee had “met” in a discussion forum three years before, swapping brief but punchy instant messages about how deluded and foolish most of those in the discussion were. A level of trust had grown over the next few months, and now they were regularly in contact.
Yaseem had seen his first vampire when his boat intercepted a refugee dinghy sailing north from Libya. There were eight people in the boat, he’d told Lee, trying to escape an oppressive regime with no idea of what a future in Europe might hold. Following orders, they’d machine-gunned the refugees and sunk the boat, leaving the bodies to the fish.
But not every refugee died. One swam away, and however much they fired at him, he continued swimming. Eventually he dived and they thought he was dead. But between then and dawn two hours later, three men vanished from their gunboat. It must have been holding on to the hull, Yaseem had told Lee. We were doing twenty knots, and by the end we were all panicked, shooting at shadows, but it still managed to take one last man before the sun rose. Then it was gone, and we had explaining to do. We blamed pirates.
He’d fled soon after. Across land.
You there? the message said.
Lee smiled and typed, As usual.
Busy time in London?
Lee frowned. What do you mean?
The attack.
He supposed it could have bled onto the net already. It was possible there were people in London doing the same thing who he didn’t know about. But Yaseem’s knowledge made him instantly suspicious.
What do you know about it?
My source tells me it’s the first of an incursion. They’re looking for something.
Marty, Lee thought. He’s important to them somehow. He stared at the blank wall above his desk, listening to Marty’s troubled breathing from the next room. What the hell could they want with a young man like him?
What are they looking for?
Don’t know. But there are more on the way, mostly from Europe. Your gang seen anything?
Lee hesitated, but only for a second. No, he typed. Lying. He wasn’t sure why, but he was the one here in London, with Marty sleeping in one of his spare rooms. Putting himself at an advantage felt like a necessity.
OK, Yaseem sent. Keep your eyes open.
Will do. And let me know if you hear anything more.
Stay safe.
Their usual sign-off. Stay safe. This from two men who knew the world to be so much more dangerous than anyone could imagine.
Lee breathed deeply and tried to analyze what this meant, but the more he thought, the more clouded his perceptions became. He quickly checked the regional and national online press for coverage of the attack, seeking anything that might have caused Yaseem to jump to conclusions. But the only thing he found was in the morning edition of a London paper’s website, a hastily written paragraph about a house fire in which “two people were believed to have died.” The full report might appear in tomorrow’s papers, or maybe not. Lee knew that events such as this tended to be swept under the carpet.