There are more on the way… Yaseem had typed. Lee shivered, stood, and as he went to watch over Marty, the boy started screaming.
Lee dashed into the hallway again, crossbow shouldered. But it was just another dream. Marty thrashed on the bed, clawing one hand in front of his face as if to clear his vision of something terrible. “Mum!” he groaned, and in his sleep he began to cry. “Mum, Mum…”
Lee settled back against the banister and watched through the open bedroom door. Such grief. Such a terrible way for—
“Rose!” Marty shouted. “Rose, help me! Help Mum!”
Rose? Lee listened for more, but Marty settled back into sleep then, hugging a pillow to himself.
Lee watched the boy in confusion. Rose had brought him here, had told Lee that his family had been attacked and killed, that she and Francesco and the others had intervened and killed one vampire… but never had she mentioned that she and Marty knew each other.
And neither had the boy.
Suspicion aroused, fear tweaked by Yaseem’s email, Lee glanced at his watch. It was almost mid-afternoon. Rose had said that she’d return that night. He stalked back to his computer and propped the crossbow against the wall. Drummed his fingers on the desk. Checked through his emails again, deleted a few spam mails that had come in, sat down to surf a few of his regular sites… and all the time he was thinking of Rose.
If she had been deliberately targeted by vampires—her and her family alike—why wouldn’t she tell him that?
He took out his mobile phone and placed it gently on the desk. Spinning it in a gentle circle, he thought things through. Trust was important, and honor, and he knew that fear could destroy both.
But this wasn’t fear. This was being thorough. And she never had to know.
He opened his phone menu, found what he sought, and sent it to his computer. As Marty slept in the next room, Lee went about discovering exactly who he was.
None of them could call what they had a friendship, because they were all strangers to one another. The only thing that connected them was their hatred of vampires and the desire to see them all dead. But Lee’s training in the SIS was hard to shake, and right at the beginning he had taken steps to protect himself.
The photograph he had taken of Rose surreptitiously almost three years ago was good quality and clear. She’d been sitting at his breakfast bar in the large, sterile kitchen, and at the bottom left of the photo Lee could just make out Francesco’s shadow. While Rose drank and Francesco talked, Lee had aimed the phone from his hip and taken several silent shots. Back then, technology had lagged behind what he wanted, so he had kept the photographs for another time. Now was that time.
He cropped the photo and reformatted it, feeling a surge of guilt as he transferred it into the relevant program file. He pressed ENTER and glanced away as her face was scanned, over a million points of reference taken and recorded. It felt as if he were deconstructing the trust they had sworn to uphold between each other, but he tried to offset that with the certainty that she had misled him about Marty. She must have had her reasons, and maybe tonight she would fill him in on what they were. But between now and then, he was arming himself with as much knowledge as he could.
The computer indicated that the process was complete, and Lee initiated the search software he’d hacked from the SIS’s main server two years before. Even with the hardware he owned, it would take some time. The world was a big place, and there were hundreds of billions of photographs online.
He needed a beer.
Almost an hour later, scanning through the file of photographs downloaded by the search software, flipping through almost two hundred pictures entitled “possible match,” Rose stared out at him at last.
Lee put his third beer gently down on his desk. It wasn’t a surprise that he’d found a picture. Somewhere behind the face she showed him she had a life, after all, and not everyone could be a fuckup like him. She probably had a job and a husband, maybe even kids. And nowadays most people could probably find a picture of themselves on the internet, whether they’d posted it there themselves or not. Many pictures would not be captioned, and it was usually word searches that people relied on. This facial recognition software was a hundred times more powerful.
He opened the link that came with the picture and reached for his beer again. He already knew that he’d need it.
And Rose stared out at him, a younger, prettier Rose, missing from her family home for over five years now, and—
“Presumed dead,” he whispered, reading from the screen. It was a database of missing people in London. He’d used it before when trying to track a vampire and found it a depressing place because there were so many faces, some of them smiling, some frowning, all of them gone, leaving someone behind to mourn.
He read on, taking in details he had never known about Rose. Twenty-two when she vanished—
Christ she looks older, I put her at forty, those wrinkles, and those weird eyes when she even bothers to take off the sunglasses…
—no sign of depression, no indication that she wanted to leave her family. And as he scrolled down the page he saw the picture he’d been expecting. Rose, her parents, and a younger Marty, smiling around a table in what must have been their small back garden.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered, sitting back in his leather chair and trying to piece together what all this meant. The truth circled him and he tried to grab it, but there was too much in the way. Denial, fear, disbelief—all combined to haze what he should know. He shook his head and stood, draining the beer and instantly regretting it.
Francesco. He had a photo of him as well, another secret snap taken with his phone camera.
He went through the same procedure and viewed the file of possible matches, going through it three times before admitting that Francesco was not there. Not so unusual, maybe. Not everyone was on the net, and the software wasn’t infallible. If he managed to procure the new updated version, maybe with its regional allowances and automatic aging conditioner, but…
“Marty is Rose’s brother. And his parents were attacked. So… where has Rose been all this time?” Talking to himself was a habit he’d tried shedding a few years before, but now he hardly noticed that he did it. Sometimes he was his only living company for days on end, until Rose or one of the others might call by one night and—
And they only ever came at night.
Lee dropped the empty beer bottle and felt his knees give way. He tried to prevent it but he couldn’t, slipping to the floor and biting his lip to prevent the faint taking him all the way down. It was shock, he supposed, and fear, because the idea that he had been colluding with anyone or anything other than human was just too horrible.
He knew it happened. Vampires had their servants, and those vampires that chose not to feed on humans—to live among them as another species of human—also sometimes took their helpers. Stella Olemaun had told him that.
He had known Francesco for over six years.
Lee stood and walked into Marty’s room, sitting on the edge of his bed and shaking the boy awake.
“Marty!” he said.
Marty’s eyes snapped open and he cried out.
“It’s okay! Don’t worry, it’s okay. Rose called and…”
“…told me she’s a vampire. Francesco too. All of them.”
“Why would they tell you?” Marty asked. “Last thing she told me was to not say a word.” And then he was fully awake and saw the look in Lee’s eyes—dawning realization, and growing terror. Tricked me.