“No! I live by rules my condition demands. I’ll never walk in sunlight or fall in love. You can relish life, Marty, but I can only crave the blood of the living.”
“But you said you—”
“We go against our base desires. It’s a choice we make, and a good one. But the hunger’s always there.”
Marty turned away, angry at Rose for telling him so much. “I’m not a fool. I don’t see glamour. But I also don’t see what I have left.”
“Choice,” Rose said. Marty felt a breeze against his cheek, and when he turned back to Rose she was sitting in her chair again, as relaxed as if she hadn’t moved at all.
“You’ve made a choice as well,” he said.
Rose sighed and shook her head. “You’re so fucking human.”
“Thanks, Sis.” He looked for a smile but there was none; Rose’s face was as grim as ever. So he closed his eyes instead, the headache still throbbing and his throat dry and sore. And he thought of his dead mother and missing father, and what was left behind for him.
Not much.
He held back the tears, but he was crying inside.
She carried him up to a bedroom and laid him out on a bed, her baby brother who was now slightly taller than her and so much more vulnerable. He was awake as she left the room but they didn’t exchange a word.
She performed a circuit of the house, checking the window and door locks, amused to see the little crosses fixed across each frame, but a little saddened as well. Lee had been leading what he thought was such an honest, responsible life, and now all that had been turned upside down. He was a ruined man making the most of what he had left, and they had misled him for longer than she had known him. He’ll do well by us now, she thought. But she couldn’t help but feel anything except doom in the man’s future. His life had gone through upheaval ten years before, and now they had shattered it again.
She called Patrick, Jane, and Connie on their mobile phones. Patrick was in Covent Garden, hiding amongst the crowds. Jane was wandering the East End, and Connie was walking circuits around Hyde Park, edging out into the surrounding streets and back again. None of them had sighted anything suspicious, and if any of them were being followed, it was covertly. Rose arranged to meet back underground before dawn, then went to find Francesco.
He was sitting in Lee’s office. Lee was on his computer, surfing websites, tapping away at the keyboard, and Rose could see the tension in his shoulders.
“Marty’s sleeping,” she said to Francesco.
“Fine.”
“I can’t just leave him to them, you know. Not after what’s happened. They’ll track and kill him just out of revenge.”
“Maybe.”
“In fact, it’s more likely they’ll turn him. Even better revenge. And with everything he knows about us—”
“I’ve already thought about all of that, Rose,” Francesco sighed. “We can’t let them find him or turn him. He stays with us until this is over.”
“And when will that be?”
“Lee?”
The ex-SIS man glanced back over his shoulder at Francesco and Rose.
“I’m not a fucking miracle worker.”
“Fine. Keep looking, dickhead.”
Lee turned back to the screen and opened a new window.
“Might be nicer if we could all get along,” Rose said.
“He shot me with a crossbow.” Francesco sounded grim, but Rose knew that this was as close to amused as he ever got. Toying with the human pet.
Rose sat on one of the chairs in the corner and leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
“So they knew the Bane was in London, but not where. And they assumed we knew where it might be?”
“Seems logical. There are others like us around the world. Stands to reason the vampires know our outlook, and if they have tracked the Bane this far, where better to go than to those who’d seek to keep it hidden?”
“They could have just asked.”
“Not a vampire’s style,” Lee said. “They’re all mad as a box of fucking frogs.”
Francesco snorted.
“And they smell,” Lee continued.
“We fooled you, dickhead.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He tapped away some more on his keyboard, and Rose couldn’t help admiring him. He’d adapted quickly to knowing the people he’d talked about vampires with for so long were vampires themselves. Maybe some of that had to do with their Humain philosophy; she hoped so, because it meant he was believing them. Or perhaps he was simply being defiant.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“What I always do,” Lee said.
“Sure you’re not just emailing some of your old mates at SIS?”
“And saying what? ‘Help, come and rescue me from a family of vampires that are holding me hostage’?”
“He knows he’d be dead before they broke down the door,” Francesco said.
“If that meant they get to kill you all, wouldn’t bother me. But if the Bane’s out there, and so are those other monsters…”
“We’re on the same side,” Rose said.
“Until this is over, yeah.”
Rose went to stand behind Lee and tried to make out what he was doing.
“So?” she asked.
“Message board, mainly German,” he said, pointing to one of the open windows. “It’s a place others like me sometimes leave messages. This one over here is a word usage filter: a sort of advanced search engine, with a whole host of search parameters. I put in all the relevant words I can think of—Bane, London, Marty, Rose, Humain, Spanish, Francesco, Connie, Patrick, Jane, fucking vampire shitheads—and it’ll search the net for any and all combinations.”
“This one?”
“Porn. Need to keep my feet on the ground.”
“Really, what is it?”
Lee paused, betraying his humanity. “You probably don’t want to see.”
“Open it up.”
Lee shrugged and expanded the window. It was a slide show of photographs of a place she’d once known so welclass="underline" home. Most of them showed the blackened remains of the fire, but here and there were close-up shots of cooked meat and charred bones, and one featured a skull with false teeth melted into a surreal, grotesque mask across its lower jaw. They were graphic and honest, not the sort of filtered shots that would make it onto the evening news or into the newspapers.
“Don’t let Marty see these,” she said.
“Of course. Poor kid.”
Rose looked at the pictures as they were displayed, spotting the Metropolitan Police stamp on the bottom right of each one. Crime scene photos. She wondered how many other crime scenes Lee had viewed like this over the years, and whether any of them had involved a dead man in a suit. She was so focused on the screen that, for a second, she didn’t notice Lee staring right at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Just… trying to come to terms with it.” For a moment it seemed that he was about to say more, but then his computer played the opening strains to Muse’s “Take a Bow.”
“Message,” he said. He opened the relevant email account and clicked on the new message. Rose tried to read it but he quickly closed it again.
“What was it?”
“Bad news.”
“What sort of bad news?” Francesco asked.
Lee swiveled in his chair to face both of them.
“Your father’s dead,” he said, looking at Rose. “That was from my old crime scene officer friend in the Met.”
“Where?” Rose asked. “How?” She felt nothing approaching pity, but there was sadness for Marty. She’d have to tell him, and she didn’t look forward to it.
Lee opened the email again, scanned it, then clicked on an embedded link. It led through to another slew of crime scene photographs. These looked somehow more rushed than those she’d just been viewing, less well framed, and she could see why. People who took these photographs must see a lot in the course of their jobs. But there was always something new.