“Why would he have gotten himself arrested?”
“Protection,” Francesco said.
“From what?”
Us, he was going to say, and she saw it on his lips. But then he frowned and turned away.
“We can’t tell whether he got himself arrested,” Lee said.
“We can.” Francesco was facing the far wall now, where hooks were embedded in reinforced concrete padstones, and thick chains hung ready to restrain vampires they would never touch. “Rose is right. We have to assume he reached the archaeologist.”
“He’ll be safe in jail,” Rose said. “Dusk comes, we go and get him out.”
“How?” Lee spurted. “You’re going to do a prison break, are you?”
“We have our means,” Francesco murmured. “Rose, call the others, tell them what’s happening. Lee, can you find out which police station he’s being held in?”
“They’re taking him to Lewisham.”
“Rose, tell them to meet us close to Lewisham Police Station an hour after dusk.”
Rose was already dialing Connie’s number, still going through what might have happened to make Marty give himself up like that. He’d been frustrated that she wouldn’t even consider turning him, yes, but she couldn’t imagine his reaction being that extreme. She’d sensed grief over their parents circling him, held back perhaps by his perception of her own reaction to their deaths. He must have been confused by her lack of regret or sadness, and perhaps this added to the surreality of the situation. That in turn might help maintain the protective wall he seemed to be holding around himself.
Her finger hovered over the last digit, then she canceled the number, turning to Francesco at the same time he looked up at her with dawning realization.
“They’ll have followed him,” she said.
“Yes, of course. Whoever scared him.”
“What are you on about?” Lee asked.
“Marty got himself arrested because he was frightened,” Rose said. “Stupid going back home, but there must have been someone waiting there in case he showed up.”
“Servants to the vampires?” Lee asked.
“Slaves,” Francesco said.
“But he’ll be safe in a police station,” Rose said.
Francesco raised an eyebrow. “Who can tell if—?”
Her cell phone buzzed as a text message came in. “Marty,” she said, looking at the screen and frowning. “Sent two damn hours ago. It says, She took it to British Museum. Will be back soon. Going home first to see what’s left.”
“Two hours ago?” Francesco asked.
“Must’ve been just before they arrested him,” Lee said. “Crappy phone signal. But I knew it was the museum!”
“Call the others,” Francesco said to Rose. “Tell them to meet us at the museum at dusk.”
“But Marty—”
“Is locked away safe and sound. And come dusk, while they’re trying to get to him, we’ll be getting inside the museum to find the Bane.”
“He’s bait.”
“Not anymore, Rose. He’s expendable. You know it.”
Rose closed her eyes and felt her fury rising. Marty had played his part, true. They knew where the Bane was being kept, and though finding it in the massive museum would be no easy task, it was a priority. She would go with the others, for whom her mortal brother’s safety was now secondary. But she would never let him go so easily.
She opened her eyes and nodded, then started dialing Connie’s number again.
They paced the room. He couldn’t blame them. What must it be like being so beholden to what the sun was doing and whether the darkness was deep? He watched them, fascinated and disgusted, and at the same time he worked. On his knees sat the tool through which he had access to the whole world. Day or night, good weather or bad, could not hold him back, because he knew his way without having to move an inch.
He knew which building the Bane was in, but not where it was. He hoped that in the brief time between now and dusk, he could find out. The British Museum had hundreds of rooms and millions of specimens and artifacts, both on display and locked away down in the basements and sublevels where research was carried out. It could take weeks to find something in there. And Lee didn’t have that long.
He opened a new window on his computer and it was his window. A tap on the cursor pad would close it down and hide it. Everything else he was doing was for them, but this one was for him. The most important thing.
Five minutes’ searching gave him Ashleigh Richards’s archived blogs from eight years before. They were hidden away on a locked site, but relevant word searches, combined with knowledge of which ISPs she’d been using at the time, brought them up. He used more word-filtering software to scan each blog for keywords and, finding none, he thought about how he could expand the search.
“Blood.” That was the obvious word. It appeared seventeen times, and he narrowed the search to blogs written post–Wiltshire dig. There were three. He opened each in turn and scanned them, and soon found what he was looking for.
But he had to be careful. He tapped the pad and closed the window, surfing police bands some more, trying to find out more about the gunfire. It seemed everything on that had gone quiet, but he’d already set up a notifier for when it started appearing on news sources. Rose sat beside him for a moment, checking out what he was looking at but saying nothing. He’d become less than useful to them now, he guessed. She soon stood and started pacing again, and then he realized uncomfortably that neither of them had fed that night.
Did a vampire need blood every night? Could they go a few days between feedings if necessary? Was it different for these who called themselves Humains? He didn’t know any answers, and that annoyed him. After so long obsessing about vampires, he still knew so little.
But now, opening the window on his laptop again and reading one of Ashleigh Richards’s final sane blogs, he started to know more than them.
After memorizing its vital contents, he copied the web address into another, more malicious piece of software he’d acquired recently. At the touch of the ENTER button, those blogs were sent a unique, constantly reconfiguring virus that accessed and corrupted them beyond repair.
Really, it had been the only thing Marty could do. If he’d tried to run, they’d have caught him and taken him away. And if he’d simply approached the police for help, maybe that big bastard Stoner really would have attacked and killed the two cops. He couldn’t have faced having that on his conscience, and if they’d managed to grab him…
The vampires had already killed both of his parents. As soon as they had what they wanted out of him, Marty had no doubt that this Duval character the woman had mentioned would have killed him too. Slowly. Horribly. It was the memory of his parents that had made his final decision.
He’d want them to be proud of him.
So he sat in his cell, relieved that he’d managed to get the text message off to Rose before they’d taken his mobile. That had been from the back of their car, spelling out the message with one hand while the male cop kept glancing over his shoulder. Vampires? he’d said, but he hadn’t laughed. Too pissed off at the damage to their car, most likely.
Once at the station, Marty had asked for his phone call and they’d laughed, telling him he needed time to cool down in his cell before they started questioning him.
He’d never been in a police cell before. His friend Gaz had, for a couple of hours one evening after he’d given a policeman some lip in town after drinking too much cider. They’d let him out soon after with a warning, and he’d told Marty that it had scared the shit out of him.