Department 19: Zero Hour (19 page)

Holmwood felt cautious excitement begin to spread through him. “What was his name, Julian?” he asked, his voice almost hoarse. “What was his real name?”

“I don’t know it, Cal,” said Julian. “I’m sorry, that’s all I know. You have to believe me.”

And with that, he lowered his head to his folded arms, and began to cry.

Valentin Rusmanov stared up at the dacha in which he had spent the long summer months of his childhood and tried to work out what exactly he was feeling.

Behind him, below the barren headland that marked the edge of the estate, the waves crashed against the cliffs, sending up great sprays of salt water that filled his nostrils with their acidic scent. The storm was starting to blow, whipping the water into foaming peaks and sending wind howling through the trees that filled the grounds of the grand summer house. The port of Constan
ţ
a, less than three miles across the bay, was barely visible as the roiling thunderclouds closed in.

Valentin had skirted their edges as he made his final approach, the rain lashing his face and steaming up from the boiling red of his eyes. The clouds appeared to rise endlessly, so high that even his supernatural eyes could not see their end. He was soaked to the skin, his clothes clinging to his cold flesh, but he barely noticed as he looked up at the dacha.

Despite himself, there was nostalgia. His youth, although dysfunctional and full of horrors that no child should have witnessed, had nonetheless been luxurious to the point of debauched; neither he, nor his brothers, had ever wanted for anything. He could see himself and Alexandru sprinting down the slope towards the promontory where Valeri’s chapel now stood, hands clasped together, hair flying out behind them, their faces pink with exertion and mouths wide with laughter that had still been full of innocence.

The memory was over five hundred years old, but it felt like it had happened only yesterday. It went directly to the part of himself he would have never admitted existed, the part that missed his brothers and the lives they had once led; lives that had been plunged into endless darkness at the whim of their former master, when he had first become more than a man.

Alongside the nostalgia was anger, an emotion that was never far from the surface, despite Valentin’s gleaming, charming façade. Anger at his remaining brother for the violation that had been visited on his home in New York, and for his willingness to unleash Hell on earth for no better reason than blighted, desperate loyalty to a man who had spent more than a century as a pile of buried ash.

And anger at himself, for not destroying his brother when he had the chance, before Valeri had been able to provide the distraction of tearing out Larissa Kinley’s throat.

Despite the driving rain, and the electricity that was rapidly gathering in the air around him, Valentin could isolate nine distinct vampire scents emanating from the dacha above him, nine individual combinations of blood and sweat and pheromones. He would have expected them to have been aware of his presence by now, but was happy to discover that their senses were clearly far duller than his own; the element of surprise would make things even easier.

Far worse than the smell of the vampires, however, was the odour drifting from the chapel behind him: a foul stink of rot and decay, so thick he could almost taste it. He looked up at the house, indulging himself in his memories, then turned his back on it and flew slowly towards the edge of the cliffs.

The stench intensified as soon as Valentin opened the chapel door, causing his throat to tighten and his stomach to churn. He felt his fangs slide into place and the heat in the corners of his eyes rise; the smell was so bad, so
wrong
, that his vampire side had leapt forward, asserting control. It was death and pain, agony and fear, helplessness and violated despair.

The chapel looked as it had since Valeri had built it in the early 1900s, when the two brothers had been on better terms. Two rows of wooden pews faced a plain stone altar and a stained-glass depiction of the crucifixion grotesque in the detail of its violence, but faded by more than a century of wind and salt. Valentin made his way round the altar and down the spiral stone staircase behind it, the smell thickening around him. He knew what he was going to find beneath the chapel; the only question was just how bad it would be.

The bottom of the stone pit, in which Valentin assumed his brother’s long-held dream of reviving their former master had been realised, was covered in a thin crust of dried blood. Beside the bottom step of the staircase stood an empty glass tube, the number
31
printed on its side beneath an accumulation of dust. Valentin barely noticed it; his attention was fixed on the dreadful tableau that surrounded the pit.

Suspended from a series of ropes and pulleys were the corpses of five naked women. Their backs were arched, their wrists and ankles bound, the skin that still remained mottled black and covered with thick patches of sprouting mould. They had been gagged when they died, but the material had long since fallen to the floor, revealing wide screams of eternal agony. Their torsos were misshapen, twisted and swollen as their organs had settled and begun to decompose, and their throats still bore the marks of their murders, wide cuts that ran from ear to ear.

The smell was eye-watering: old blood and rotten flesh and the remnants of the potent, acrid gases that had escaped the stricken women’s bodies. Their eyes were gone, and they stared at him with empty sockets full of reproach. Beetles shuffled across the green and black skin, and white bone gleamed where their foreheads had been, the skin chewed away by rats that had climbed up the women’s hair.

Here
, thought Valentin.
In this place. This is where the end began.

He stared down into the pit, then growled and spat on the dried blood. Then he turned away from the women whose unwilling sacrifices had birthed a monster back into the world, and flew up the stone staircase without a backward glance. He swept through the chapel, giving momentary thought to tearing it down with his bare hands, and thundered back out into the storm. The rain had worsened, and he accelerated as he flew up the sloping grounds towards the dacha, determined to do what he needed to do and leave this old place behind. He reached out for the ornate brass handle on the front door, then paused as a memory from his childhood rooted him to the spot.

The exact year was lost to him, although he believed he had been either eight or nine, young and scrawny and trailing after his brothers as though they were gods.

The sun had been blazing down from a perfect blue sky; he could remember the feeling on his skin so clearly, the warm prickle that was not uncomfortable, but that warned him he was about to burn. Alexandru and Valeri had run off into the woods that backed on to the house, delighting in his inability to keep up with them; he had tried, his heart pounding in his chest, his limbs pumping for all they were worth, but they had eventually disappeared into the distance. He had returned to the house on the verge of tears, forcing himself not to give in to them; his father had made it clear on numerous occasions that Rusmanov men did not cry.

Valentin had heaved open the heavy front door, intending to seek out the comforting words and arms of Ivana, the governess to whom he was far closer than either of his parents. She would most likely be in the kitchen, overseeing the preparation of dinner.

As the door swung silently on well oiled hinges, he heard a noise he didn’t recognise. It sounded like the panting of Sasha, the Labrador he had been given for his birthday when he was very young, only louder and deeper. He wandered into the grand entrance hall, and was about to call out for Ivana when something stopped him, a strange sense that he had stumbled upon a secret.

Instead, he followed the sound towards his father’s study, at the north-east corner of the house. The door was slightly ajar, and the grunting and growling was louder than ever as he stood outside, his feet rooted to the spot. Curiosity was coursing through him, threatening to overwhelm him, but his father’s study was a private, sacred space, and the punishment for entering it without permission was likely to be both severe and protracted. Valentin stood listening to the strange noises, desperate to know what was making them, until a solution suddenly occurred to him. He inched towards the door, soft on the balls of his feet, and leant forward until his eye was level with the gap between it and its frame, and looked down at the floor; his feet were still safely three inches outside the limit of his father’s study. He lifted his eyes, and looked into the room.

Alexei Rusmanov was leaning over the wide desk that stood at the rear of the room, his hands gripping the edges of the wooden surface, his eyes closed, the noises that Valentin had followed emerging from between his gritted teeth as his narrow body rocked back and forth. Beneath him was Anya, the maid who had joined their household the previous winter when she turned sixteen, the fourth member of her family to serve the Rusmanovs. Her black skirt was crumpled around her hips, and one of her legs was sticking straight up in the air, her stocking rolled down and gathered at her knee. She was staring up at the ceiling, her face expressionless, her arms lying on the desk at her sides.

Valentin stared. He was instantly certain that this, whatever it was, was something he was not supposed to be seeing, but he was unable to tear himself away. His mother had gone into Constan
ţ
a with her sisters and their summer guests, as they did most days; perhaps this was simply what happened when his father was alone in the house.

Perhaps it was normal.

He was pondering this possibility when his father suddenly raised his head, opened his eyes, and stared directly at him.

“Who’s there?” bellowed Alexei Rusmanov, leaping up from the desk and hauling his trousers closed. “Valeri? Is that you, boy?”

Anya rolled over on the desk and looked towards the door, her cheeks flushing with shame. She scrambled to her feet, pushing her skirt down and smoothing her clothes back into place. Valentin watched, utterly unable to move.

Caught
, he thought, frantically.
I’m caught
.

“Out!” bellowed Alexei, pointing at Anya as he strode round his desk. Her eyes widened momentarily, then she fled, scurrying out through the door that connected the study to the servants’ passageways that ran behind the wood-panelled walls of the dacha. Alexei didn’t give her so much as a glance; he stormed across the room, kicked the door open, and grabbed his youngest son by the back of his neck. Valentin’s paralysis broke, and he yelled and squirmed as his father dragged him into the study and slammed the door shut.

“You little rat!” shouted Alexei, throwing his son to the floor. “You dare to spy on me?”

Valentin fought to find his voice. “I wasn’t spying, Papa,” he managed, his voice choked with tears. “I wasn’t, truly I wasn’t. I heard noises, Papa, and I followed them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Alexei stared down at him with hot fury dancing in his eyes, his hands already undoing the belt that would be the instrument of Valentin’s punishment. Then the anger disappeared, and his father reached a hand down to him. Valentin took it, and let himself be hauled roughly up on to unsteady legs.

“It’s not your fault,” said Alexei. “You are a curious creature, Valentin, and you always have been. The error is mine.”

“I’m sorry,” repeated Valentin.

“Don’t be,” said his father. “There is no need. There are things every boy should know, in time. Normally, they come later, but you have always been unwilling to wait for anything. So perhaps it is time.”

Valentin had no idea what his father was talking about, but he nodded eagerly; being talked to was infinitely preferable to being beaten.

“Men and women,” said Alexei. “They are not the same. You understand this, yes?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Good. They are different, because what God intends for them is different. Men are hard creatures, because God wants us to fight, and kill, and defeat our enemies. Women are soft, because God wants them to keep their men happy, to provide for them, and care for them. Do you see?”

Valentin nodded.

“When the world was much younger than it is now, the men would hunt animals for food while the women waited at home, ready to clean and cook them. When the men returned, discussing the hunt with their women was forbidden. Can you tell me why?”

Valentin nodded eagerly. “Because it was not their business.”

Alexei smiled, an expression full of warmth and pride. “You are so clever, my son,” he said. “That is exactly why. It was not their business. What the men had done would upset the women, and it was better for them not to know. Because what the men did was for the good of everyone. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“So you understand why your mother does not need to know what you saw in this room. It would upset her, and you would not want to upset her, would you?”