Rose checked her heart. One final, weak beat and she was dead. Gone. But her blood was still…
She bit out the woman’s throat and started drinking.
Warm.
Down in the basement of the British Museum, the darkness felt so much more threatening. It was deeper, for a start, and the Humains hadn’t allowed Lee to use his light. There was some background light, provided by faint yellow emergency lighting which he guessed was on all the time, though the glow did not reach very far. But there was also something else: a sense that this darkness was occupied, and that down here the rest of the world mattered little.
Gunfire sounded far off, a rapid crackle. Lee froze and grasped the .454 in his hand harder. Connie nudged him.
“Move on,” she said. “They’re doing their job, we need to do ours.”
Patrick rushed past them and paused twenty steps ahead by an open door. He ducked into the room and emerged again almost immediately. “Dead guard.” As they passed the door Lee was not tempted to look in, but he smelled the devastation done to the man.
They reached another staircase, and he saw that they’d been in a subbasement, a place of offices and storage, but not where the majority of items not on display were kept. That explained the lack of room numbers.
It was one long flight down, and then he could smell the past around them. It was not only the must of old things, packaged away and perhaps not opened for years or decades. It was the smell of gathered time, artifacts from all of human history brought together to bear witness to the passage of time, whatever that was. Sometimes the ten years since he’d left the SIS felt like ten days, and other times he couldn’t remember ever having worked for them at all. Time messed with him. He wondered what it felt like for someone all but immortal.
They stalked down one corridor and entered another, doubling back on themselves and finally reaching room number seventy-two. He paused, nodded at the door, and Patrick tried the handle. It was locked. The vampire twisted harder, shoved, and the door gave with a brief shriek of broken metal.
A sound came from somewhere else in the building, a hollow boom. Lee felt subtle vibrations transmitted through his heels, but he couldn’t tell where it had come from. It might have been a door slamming in the next corridor, or a cannon firing up in one of the great display halls.
“We might not have very long,” Connie whispered, coming close to do so. Her pale face hovered before him, but there was no hint of warm, stale breath. Instead, only a smell that reminded him of the rest of these basements: time, confused.
They entered the large room, and neither Humain objected when Lee snapped on the overhead fluorescents. Patrick pushed the ruptured door closed as much as he could and stood guard, ear pressed to the opening.
“What are we looking for?” Connie asked.
“You don’t know?”
“I thought you were the expert.”
Lee chuckled dryly. “And that from a vampire. Well, I guess we’ll know when we see it. From what I could glean from Richards’s blog, she’d never even opened the package again. So it’ll be wrapped, packed away, addressed to her at her home, Otter Street. She brought it here soon after, hid it away.”
“Like Indiana Jones,” Connie said.
“Eh?”
“Raiders of the Lost Ark. The end. You know?”
“You saw that?”
Connie shrugged. Lee had a brief, disturbing image of Connie sitting in darkened theaters, watching a movie while she selected who she would follow home. Right now, that wasn’t his business.
They started searching. He pulled the first box from the first shelf and lifted off the top. It was an archival box, sturdy and with a proper lid that didn’t need ripping or cutting open, and the contents were varied. A smashed jug, shards packed together in foam; a curved metal moon shape, rusted and rotting away; a handful of innocuous-looking pebbles in a wooden box. And, going through the box, Lee realized that he didn’t really know what he was looking for. He paused for a moment and looked at the other two—Patrick by the door, Connie just visible at the other end of the room, searching through the contents of the first shelf there—and then he started looking again. He’d have to assume that he’d know it when he found it.
He only hoped he’d lay hands on the Bane first. If that happened, he’d use it to kill the vampires that had come to London searching for it. And after that, these Humains.
Lee closed his eyes briefly, trying to shove down the sense of betrayal that idea prompted. Patrick had only ever been a prick to him, and Connie—
Just a little girl!
—pretended to be a young teenager, but she was likely older than him. Travesties of nature. And yet there was Rose, whose body he had once fantasized about, and who maintained some of her human cares and concerns.
“Fuck it,” he said quietly.
“What?” Patrick asked.
“Nothing. Moving on.” He took down another box and started rifling through its contents, but realized that he could never move on, not really. Whatever happened here tonight, whoever emerged from the British Museum after this was all over, there would always be one more vampire for him to hunt down.
Starting with that deceitful Olemaun bitch.
Flushed with blood, senses blazingly sensitive, Rose prowled the halls of the British Museum looking for something else to kill. Her clothes were sprayed with blood, her teeth rich with it. Her hands were smeared, and she licked between her fingers without really thinking about it, tongue snaking down across the back of her hand to lap at the droplets on her delicate arm hairs. She hadn’t fed that well since…
But she was dead, she thought. Her heart had stopped. It’s how Jane survives, taking blood just past the moment of death. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with it.
There was more gunfire from a couple of rooms away, and Rose went that way, passing ancient Mayan statues that stared down at her with timeless ambivalence. She could imagine that a human would find these great silent halls spooky at night, places so used to the bustle of school groups and foreign visitors unsettling in their silence. But there was no silence now. More machine-gun fire erupted, and behind it came a scream she thought she knew.
Jane!
Rose ran, the feeding giving her speed. She sprinted silently into the great African hall where she thought the shooting had originated. She dashed fast and silent as a shadow, unconcerned at the bullets that might come her way, and she smelled something she had no wish to smelclass="underline" insides and blood, but not of the living.
Jane was sprawled on the floor in a circular seating area, empty benches bearing witness to her demise. Her long skirt was played around her legs. Her head was a mashed mess, skull and brains scattered across a wide swath of floor. Rose could see the white scars of bullet marks beneath the gore from her shattered head, and imagined the shooter standing above her as he or she fired down at an angle.
Bastard! she thought, and it came as a surprise. Bastard! She and Jane had never really been friends. No Humains ever grew that close, and she suspected no vampires could, but the two of them had acknowledged their differences and let that be that.
She looked around, searching for the killer, and that was when she heard the groaning. She moved quickly, low and fast, and she was standing astride the huge man before he even knew it. His back was broken: he was hauling himself along with his hands, gun discarded, legs trailing behind him like a scarecrow’s. He rolled onto his back and stared up at her, opened his mouth to say something. But there was nothing to say.