“Well, you didn’t tell us about this little place,” he said.
“I always had my secrets,” Lee said.
“And why’s that?” Francesco turned to look at him. “Didn’t trust us?”
“I was hoping to catch one and surprise you,” Lee said. “Give us all an opportunity to…”
“Torture it?”
“Research it,” he said. “Find out what makes a vampire tick. Live. Die.”
“Garlic and crosses,” Francesco said. “And yet I’ve also found a UV light and some pretty heavy duty ammunition. Though I haven’t found the guns yet.”
“They’re around.”
“So amongst the superstitious bullshit”—Francesco grabbed a clove of garlic from a rack on the wall and sniffed at it—“you still knew some of what you were doing.”
“Covering all bases.”
“Francesco, we know who might have found the Bane: an archaeologist called Ashleigh Richards,” Rose said. “She’s… well, gone a bit mad. Still lives in London, but…” She nodded at the ceiling, and Lee sensed the silent communication.
“I can go,” Lee said. “Find out where it is while you… do whatever you do during the day.”
“You hate us,” Francesco said.
“What you are, yes. What you stand for, I’m not so sure. But I hate those other fuckers more.”
“So, that should make us trust you?”
Lee sighed in frustration. “Look, you’re out of action for the next twelve hours, Einstein. And so are they. But if they have some scumbags working for them in London, and if they’re trying to find this Bane thing as hard as you think, then maybe they’ll already have made the connection.”
“You think they have someone as smart as you?”
“No,” Lee said. “But there’s always luck and chance.”
“Lee, there’s just no way,” Francesco said. “You’ll come back and pour petrol down here, burn us alive.”
“‘Alive’?” Lee asked, snorting. Rose shifted uncomfortably next to him. He was glad to see he could get to them. Not petrol, he thought. Just the Bane. Find that damned thing today and, come dusk, I’ll be ready for any of them.
He glanced back at the steps, judged how quickly he could make them. Rose seemed distracted, and Francesco had made no move to restrain him yet. If he made it up out of the basement, there was a good chance he could get out into the rising sun before they caught him. He knew the house better than they did.
“No, Lee,” Rose said, and without him noticing she had moved close beside him. She clasped his arm in her cold hand, and Lee closed his eyes, disgusted that he’d ever entertained thoughts of touching her like that. He’d daydreamed about her breasts, her pussy, but they were undead things like her, lifeless and empty.
She squeezed tighter and he opened his eyes.
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
Lee hung his head. Not now. Of course not. This was when they most expected him to try and get away.
“You’ll stay down here with us today,” Francesco said. “We’ll call the others and tell them what’s happening, and as soon as the sun sets we’ll all make our way to the woman’s house. Tonight is when we’ll find out where the Bane is, and also when we’ll dispose of it.”
“Have you even considered how ridiculous this is?” Lee asked. “A thing from four thousand years ago? Superstition. Like crosses and garlic.”
“Actually, I have,” Francesco said, smiling a horrid smile. “But there’s no way we can take even the smallest chance.”
“Right,” Lee said. So they don’t really believe. Good. Because he did. Some of the superstitious shit was wrong, granted… but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a kernel of truth in any of it.
And he couldn’t take even the smallest chance, either.
“Rose, you need to get Marty down here,” Francesco said. She thought it might have been the first time he’d used her brother’s name. And she knew that he was right.
So Rose went back up into the house, cringing from the colored light now filtering through the stained-glass window beside the main door. It was still very early, but already she could feel the tingling across her skin where that light had touched her.
“Marty!”
“Yeah?”
“We need to talk.” She heard a door opening and closing again, and then footsteps, and she thought, He wasn’t in the room where I left him. As he rounded the bottom of the staircase, she saw a look in his eyes that she didn’t like at alclass="underline" he was readying to do something.
“Marty, Dad’s dead,” she said, and that stopped him cold. His expression fell away, leaving his face a blank as the reality bit in. He leaned against the oak paneling beside the staircase, and Rose saw ridiculous details: the wood creaked in, it needed polishing, and some of the molding had been badly replaced. It was a heightening of her senses that always came before hunger started to haunt her, and when she’d talked about it to Francesco he’d said, Evolution, sharpening your senses before the hunt. Evolution—as if they had evolved naturally.
“Dad,” Marty said. His face was still blank. “Really dead?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I mean… really?”
“Yes.” Rose nodded, understanding. “They killed him just like Mum.”
“What, you mean… ripped…”
“Come on,” she said, gesturing him to her. But he backed away instead. “Marty?”
“So now we’re going to hide in the dark and let them get away with all this for another day?”
“I can’t go out in the light,” she said quietly.
“Well, I can! I fucking can! You expect me to sit down there with you while you do your vampire thing? I could be out there finding the Bane and teaching those bastards a lesson. We can’t let them win, Rose.”
“And we won’t let them win,” Francesco said. He’d come up behind Rose, so quietly that even she hadn’t heard him. “But we have to work this right, otherwise everything will play into their hands.”
“So you’re going to sit and think things through while they—”
“They can’t go out in the daylight, either,” he said.
“Which is why we have to take the advantage!” He was backing into the wide hallway now, and behind him the colored windows beside the door were growing brighter. Rose squinted against the light, but her head ached from the glare, and the promise of the pain that glare could bring.
“You’ll get yourself killed like your parents,” Francesco said.
“What do you care?” Marty shouted, and Rose had to ask herself the same question: What does Francesco care?
“Wait with me, for Mum and Dad’s sake,” she said. “We’ll talk about them, remember things…”
“They’re not your parents anymore, remember?” Marty said. “You… you won’t turn me, and you won’t let me go. What am I? One of those sad fucking vampire servants Lee talks about?”
“You were listening up there?” Rose snapped.
Marty grinned. He held his hand out and must have felt the subtle heat of the morning sun on his skin. “The day’s my time,” he said, and Francesco leaned into Rose and hissed her name.
She knew what that meant. There was no way they could let Marty go out there on his own for a day: he was a danger to himself and, more so, to them. He knew where they were, and all it would take was a policeman willing to investigate, or the wrong word whispered to the wrong person…