In the police station’s lobby area, several confused-looking people stood looking at shattered glass and the body splayed in the chair behind the reception desk. Excuse me, one had asked as Kat and the other man shoved through the swinging door, and she’d shot him in the face.
Outside, three mounted police were waiting for them. But Kalashnikovs and horse meat do not mix.
“Didn’t we do well?” Kat asked now, subservient and pathetically pleading, and the vampire standing before Marty sighed in frustration. Without being told, Marty knew that this was Duval. He exuded power, as obvious and rich as the stink of death on him, and the three other vampires stood quietly behind him. They deferred to him when he spoke, terrifying in their own right but nowhere near as brutal looking as Duval.
“Get them the fuck out of here,” he growled. Though he spoke English, it was plainly not his own language. Marty could not imagine any coherent language suiting a mouth like that. Stoner, Kat, and the other junkie were ushered from the room, Kat mewling in exasperation.
“You promised!” she whined, and Marty had no wish to know exactly what she’d been promised.
“Yeah, yeah,” Duval growled. He never took his eyes from Marty. The door closed behind the three vampires and their human slaves, and they were alone in the stinking room.
Marty had no idea where they were. He’d been taken underground into tunnels and shafts, carried by Kat and the others through darkness lit only by weak lights, and then deposited alone in this room that smelled of dampness and shit and something older, and more like death. The vampires had come soon after.
“And now we’re alone,” Duval said, and Marty felt his bladder let go a little. This vampire was totally inhuman, nothing like Rose or Francesco. They could at least pass for being normal people, and had been doing so for a long time. But before him now was something from out of nightmares. His eyes were dark, the pupils so dilated that there was no color around them at all, just black, and white. His head was bald but for a narrow Mohawk of black hair, grown long and pulled back across his scalp, secured somehow at the base of his neck. The scalp was pocked with open wounds, though none of them bled. His mouth… that was the main reason this monster could never pretend. His numerous teeth were sharp and pointed, designed for tearing and ripping instead of chewing and grinding. Whoever this man had once been, vampirism had removed all traces of him ever having been omnivorous. Now he was made to consume meat. And blood.
“Fuck you,” Marty managed.
“You’ve pissed yourself,” Duval said. He was standing several feet away from where Marty stood pressed against a damp wall, yet it still felt as if his personal space were being invaded. The monster’s presence was huge.
“Just trying to cover up your stink.”
Duval hissed. He opened his mouth and stretched his head forward, swollen tongue seeming to lick at the air, clawed hands by his sides. The hiss went on for some time, and it sounded like it came from deep within him. His nails were long and curved, dull in the pale artificial light. One bare bulb hung above them, and Marty was terrified the vampire would turn it off. I’m okay if I can see him, he thought. However terrible he looks, I’m okay. But if I’m alone here with him in the dark…
“You think you’re brave?” the vampire asked, pointing one long finger. “Think your taunting and joking can come between me and what I want to know? I’ve fed on pricks like you every week of my life, sometimes every day. And I keep count. Does that surprise you?”
Marty didn’t know how to answer, so he feigned disinterest.
“That a monster like me bothers to keep count? I’m sure it does, a little. But it’s always good to know how many cattle I’ve fed from. How many weak human freaks I’ve destroyed to keep this one undead body going, and growing.” He ran his hands down his front and looked down at himself admiringly. His clothes were old, scruffy and stained. If there was perverted pride here, it had nothing to do with aesthetics.
“If we’re so weak, that makes you weak for feeding on us.”
“The blood is strong, Marty,” Duval said. “And ten minutes from now, if you haven’t told me what I need to know, you will be number…” He touched his chin and looked at the ceiling, an awful human pose of contemplation that looked so out of place. “Nine thousand eight hundred and forty-seven.”
Marty blinked, but held back his gasp of shock. He’d like to think this stinking fuck was lying… but he thought not.
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I’m just a weak human. I’m just cattle.”
“I’ll say only once that I don’t believe you. Next time you deny knowing anything, I’ll hurt you. I’m not sure how much physical pain you can take.” He tilted his head to one side and licked his lips, tongue catching and tearing on some of his teeth. “I’d say you’ve never had… a fingernail pulled out, for instance.”
Before Marty knew what was happening, Duval had crossed the space between them and held Marty’s right hand, fingers splayed. He had time for one pleading “No!” before Duvall clasped the fingernail on his index finger and pulled.
Marty screamed, hating himself for doing so but unable to hold back. The pain was instant and exquisite, the shock shattering. Blood pulsed down his throbbing finger, and Duval’s tongue snaked out and lapped at it. He flicked the ripped-out fingernail away.
“Hmm,” Duval said, releasing his hand and taking a few steps back. “Forgot how hungry I was.”
“I… I thought you said…”
“Never trust a vampire, Marty. Hasn’t your sister told you that?”
“My sister isn’t—”
“Let’s cut through the fucking bullshit here,” Duval growled. He came forward again, and he seemed to have had changed even more. His eyes were darker, if that were possible, and his teeth seemed longer, more vicious. “I don’t like talking to cattle. You all smell of blood to me, and your petty attempts at valor just make me cringe. So tell me what I need to know and… I’ll let you go.”
“Never trust a vampire,” Marty said, and Duval did not even honor him with a response. The vampire just stood before him, seeming to sway in the poor light, though that could have been Marty’s vision pulsing with the pain in his hand. He hissed softly, and Marty thought, Does he breathe, does he have a heart, does it pump? Everything he thought he’d known about vampires had been from the world of fiction; everything he knew for sure had been gleaned from the last couple of days. And it was minimal.
“Your sister,” Duval said. “The Bane. Everything. Now.”
Marty searched deep. The pain helped, strangely, distracting him from the true terror of the thing standing before him now; a thing that should not be. And he reached deep for the courage that he knew he possessed, the knowledge of the right thing to do, and the wisdom to hold back what he knew he should never tell. The courage was an ambiguous thing, and when he found it he didn’t analyze it too closely, for fear that it was a lie.
“You killed my parents,” Marty said. “And my sister’s a fucking vampire. You think I give a shit what you do to me?”
But with that card played, Duval grinned around his terrible mouth full of teeth, and in that grin was damnation way beyond death. He reached up and smashed the lightbulb with a casual wave of his hand.
Into the sudden darkness, the vampire said, “Yes.”
Rose’s instinct was to go after Marty. But she had come to accept that there was much more at stake here.
As Lee drove them quickly toward the British Museum, she sat beside Francesco in the back of the car and checked the internet news channels for any information from Lewisham Police Station. The news was sketchy: the death toll was still unconfirmed, which meant it was high, and the media was calling it a terrorist attack. Perhaps, if Lee could take time and access his contacts, he might be able to find out more of what had happened, and who was dead, and who had survived. Rose wished she could say she had some psychic link with Marty, but she had no sense of whether he was alive, dead, or undead. All she could assume was that the vampires had taken him away for their own purposes, and that the murders at the police station were collateral damage.