Department 19: Zero Hour (6 page)

An uncooperative prisoner.

“Sorry,” he said. “You can have regular food again whenever you want, as well as your things back. Just tell me what you know about Adam.”

“Let me see my family,” said Julian.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then we’re both screwed, aren’t we?”

Holmwood took a step into the cell, his hands balling into fists. He was suddenly furious with his former colleague, at his stupid, reckless intransigence; he wanted to grab Julian and shake him until he saw sense.

“If you really cared about your family,” he said, forcing his voice to remain steady, “you would tell me what you know. Adam might very well represent the only chance of finding a cure for Marie, and for reducing the threat your son faces every night. I don’t think you give a shit about anyone apart from yourself, Julian. This is about you trying to assert your influence over a situation you must know you can’t control.”

Julian stared up at him and said nothing. His eyes, although sunken and red around the edges, still shone the same brilliant blue they always had.

Jamie’s eyes,
thought Cal.
One thing you gave him that’s worth having.

“I could have you tortured,” he said. “It would give me no pleasure, but I could. There are things I could order that even you wouldn’t be able to resist. Is that what you want?”

Julian didn’t respond, or drop his gaze; his blue eyes remained fixed on his old friend.

“Say something, for Christ’s sake!” shouted Cal. “What happened to the man I trusted with my life, Julian? Where the hell has he gone? I don’t recognise this person you’ve become.”

“What do you want me to say, Cal?” said Julian, softly. “Things change. I used to have a family, and a career, and friends, but all I have left is something you want. And I’ll give it to you, Cal, gladly, if you give me one thing in return.”

“I can’t let you see your family, Julian,” said Cal. “You know I can’t. You’d be saying the same thing if you were me, and you damn well know it.”

“Maybe so,” said Julian. “But I’m not you. I’m just your prisoner.”

“That’s right,” said Cal, his voice low and thick with anger. “You’re a prisoner. And that’s not all. You’re a disgrace to the uniform you used to wear, to the uniform your son now wears, and to everything you once stood for.”

Julian opened his mouth to speak, his eyes flashing with fury, but Cal steamrollered over him.

“I don’t want to hear it, Julian. You have forty-eight hours to voluntarily tell me everything you know about Adam. After that, I will use every means available to compel you to do so, and I will personally ensure that you never see daylight again. So I suggest you think very hard about what you want your future to be.”

The first thing the vampire felt as he awoke was the cold.

It surrounded him, pressing against his skin like razor blades; he was shivering before he even managed to open his eyes. The sky above him was black and blazing with stars; it hung low, looming down, inky and infinite.

The vampire pushed himself up on his elbows and looked unsteadily around. He was lying in a field, the grass hidden by a covering of deep white snow. A wooden fence ran round the edge, and at the south-eastern corner stood an electrical substation; the wires hummed in the freezing air, the electricity setting his teeth on edge. In the distance, across a dark expanse, pale orange light bloomed against the horizon. The vampire shut his eyes, attempting to gather himself.

For a terrible moment, he had no idea who he was; the searing cold seemed to have wiped his mind clear, leaving behind nothing but a vacuum. Where he was, and why, were unclear; the field and the substation were entirely unfamiliar. He squeezed his eyes shut more tightly, searching in vain if not for answers then for a clue, a single, solitary hint as to who he was and what he was doing in this snowy field. He only opened them again when a warm, pungent smell drifted into his nostrils, causing saliva to burst into his mouth in a torrent.

Beside him, lying in a patch of newly melted snow, was a freshly killed deer. It stared blankly at him, its mouth ringed with terrified foam. Hunger rumbled through the vampire, and he felt his fangs slide into place as heat spilled into his eyes. He lurched to his knees, his frozen limbs screaming in protest, then buried his face in the deer’s throat, tearing at the soft flesh, digging for a vein or an artery. One split beneath his teeth and blood, still warm, spurted into his mouth; pleasure overwhelmed him and he threw back his head, his neck muscles standing out, his face coated with crimson. He rode out the wave of sensation, then clamped his mouth back over the pulsing vein and drank until he could drink no more.

When he was sated, the vampire rose to his feet. Steam was billowing from him in a thick cloud as the snow that had covered him melted, and his mind pulsed with the regained memory of himself. What he had been doing, the trail he had been following, returned to him in a nauseating rush, although why he had found himself lying in a field beside a dead deer still remained unclear. He pushed the sleeve of his coat back and looked at his watch. The time was irrelevant; the day was what mattered. There was a hole in his memory, and the vampire wanted to know exactly how deep it went. He read the small numbers in the date window and felt his lips curl into a thin smile.

It was two days later than he was expecting.

Somehow, somewhere, he had lost forty-eight hours.

The vampire dug his hands into the damp pockets of his coat and found a crumpled piece of paper in one of them. He pulled it out and unfolded it. Three words were scrawled on it, in a handwriting he didn’t recognise.

For several long seconds, he merely stared at it. Then understanding flooded through him, as he realised what the words meant, and who had written them. He stuffed the note back into his pocket and buttoned his coat with fingers that were still numb.

I have to tell them,
he thought.
They need to know that I found him. That there’s still a chance.

The vampire known as Grey lifted himself easily off the ground, and flew steadily towards the distant light.

Valentin Rusmanov knew something was wrong the moment he touched down on the roof of his building.

His home, which was not so much a house as an entire block of Central Park West reconfigured into a vast mansion, was equipped with a remarkable array of security systems: laser grids, pressure pads, motion-sensor cameras, decibel monitors, thermal evaluators. The small electronic panel that was resting in the inside pocket of his suit jacket should have begun to beep as soon as he landed on the tiled terrace between the roof gardens and the glass dome that topped the building, giving him thirty seconds to disarm the system before his home was locked down.

Instead, there was nothing.

Valentin took the panel from his pocket and had his suspicions instantly confirmed. Where there should have been a pattern of green blocks representing the various zones of the alarm system, there were only two words of glowing red text.

SYSTEM FAILURE

Valentin narrowed his eyes and felt his fangs slide smoothly down from his gums. He floated quickly across the roof, noting the dead blooms of jasmine and nightshade that hung limply in their marble pots, and found what he was expecting: the ornate double doors that controlled access to the roof, smashed to splinters. Valentin let out a low growl, and floated silently through the hole where they had stood.

The staircase that led down from the roof opened on to one end of the corridor that ran the length of the top floor of the building, the floor which contained Valentin’s private suite of rooms. In the more than a century since he had taken ownership of the building, tens of thousands of guests had danced and drank and laughed and killed in its many rooms, at party after debauched party. But at every single event, each one thrown with the ancient vampire’s legendary style and generosity, there had been a single, non-negotiable rule.

Nobody went to the top floor.

Ever.

That rule had evidently been broken in his absence. The corridor’s blood-red carpet was tracked with dirty footprints, and the pictures that had covered the long walls had been lifted from their hooks and smashed on the ground. Valentin surveyed the carnage, his heart accelerating in his chest. The corridor contained a mere fraction of his art collection, but had been home to several of his favourite pieces, including a Francis Bacon triptych that not even the most exhaustive record of the man’s works had ever listed. He floated slowly forward, trying to control the rage that was building within him, and gripped the handle of the door to his study. He took a deep breath before turning it, steeling himself for what he was sure he was going to see.

The room had been destroyed.

Valentin’s beautiful ornate desk, which had been carved from dark mahogany when the nineteenth century was still new, had been reduced to splinters and piled in the middle of the floor on top of a Persian rug that was now little more than lumps of coloured string. The shelves had been torn down from the walls, their contents smashed and scattered; next to the broken remnants of a pair of Chinese terracotta warriors lay the deflated corpses of three basketballs and the shattered glass of the tank they had floated in. His armchair had been shredded, its beautiful navy blue leather torn and hacked beyond repair, its stuffing spilling out like intestines. And spray-painted across the walls and ceiling, in a dozen different colours, was a single word.