Copyright

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

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London SE1 9GF

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Copyright © Will Hill 2015

Cover illustration © Bose Collins; logo images © Shutterstock.com

Will Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007505890

Ebook Edition © MAY 2015 ISBN: 9780007505883

Version: 2015-05-09

For everyone who has come this far.

Just a little further …

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

We have learned to believe, all of us – is it not so? And since so, do we not see our duty? Yes! And do we not promise to go on to the bitter end?

Abraham Van Helsing

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Six Months Earlier: Zero Hour Plus 2 Days

Chapter 1: Home Truths

Chapter 2: Diminished Responsibility

Chapter 3: Running on Empty

Zero Hour Plus 11 Days

Chapter 4: The Definition of Insanity

Chapter 5: Fallout

Chapter 6: Acceleration

Zero Hour Plus 13 Days

Zero Hour Plus 41 Days

Zero Hour Plus 67 Days

Zero Hour Plus 91 Days

Zero Hour Plus 109 Days

Zero Hour Plus 140 Days

Zero Hour Plus 163 Days

Zero Hour Plus 191 Days

Chapter 7: Redundant

Chapter 8: Not for Profit

Chapter 9: The Faintest Glimmer

Chapter 10: Collateral Damage (I)

Chapter 11: The Enemy of my Enemy

Chapter 12: Haven

Zero Hour Plus 192 Days

Chapter 13: Sleight of Hand

Chapter 14: Strange Bedfellows

Chapter 15: At Ease

Zero Hour Plus 193 Days

Chapter 16: A Butterfly Flaps its Wings

Chapter 17: The Weight of The World

Chapter 18: Huddled Masses, Yearning to Breathe Free

Chapter 19: Ratcatchers

Chapter 20: Human Trial

Zero Hour Plus 194 Days

Chapter 21: No going Back

Chapter 22: Quicksand

One Week Later: Zero Hour Plus 201 Days

Chapter 23: Empirical Evidence

Chapter 24: Collateral Damage (ii)

Three Days Later: Zero Hour Plus 204 Days

Chapter 25: A new Day

Chapter 26: Rapid Reactions

Chapter 27: Prometheus

Chapter 28: Close Enough To Touch

Chapter 29: Death From Above, Part One

Chapter 30: The Art of War

Chapter 31: Death From Above, Part Two

Zero Hour Plus 205 Days

Chapter 32: The Morning After

Chapter 33: The Elephant in The Room

Chapter 34: A Vision of the Future

Chapter 35: International Aid

Chapter 36: Willing Victims

Chapter 37: Down the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 38: The Hottest Ticket in Town

Zero Hour Plus 206 Days

Chapter 39: Collateral Damage (III)

Chapter 40: Jurisdiction

Chapter 41: The Scouring of Carcassonne

Chapter 42: All Good Things …

Zero Hour Plus 207 Days

Chapter 43: The Morning After

Chapter 44: Scorched Earth

Chapter 45: Sins of the Father

Chapter 46: The Waiting Game

Chapter 47: Aftershocks

Chapter 48: Directors’ Guild

Chapter 49: Enemy at the Gates

Zero Hour Plus 208 Days

Chapter 50: Just when you Think …

Chapter 51: … It can’t get any Worse

Chapter 52: Insertion Point

Chapter 53: Come Together

Chapter 54: Some Corner of a Foreign Field

Chapter 55: The Tip of the Spear

Zero Hour Plus 209 Days

Chapter 56: A Promise is a Promise

Chapter 57: Clean Slates

Chapter 58: Dulce Et Decorum Est

Chapter 59: In Fading Light

Chapter 60: Death’s Grey Land, Part One

Prologue, Redux

Chapter 61: Death’s Grey Land, Part Two

Chapter 62: Death’s Grey Land, Part Three

Chapter 63: Death’s Grey Land, Part Four

Chapter 64: Death’s Grey Land, Part Five

Chapter 65: Death’s Grey Land, Part Six

Chapter 66: Death’s Grey Land, Part Seven

Chapter 67: Death’s Grey Land, Part Eight

Chapter 68: Death’s Grey Land, Part Nine

Chapter 69: Death’s Grey Land, Part Ten

Chapter 70: Death’s Grey Land, Part Eleven

Chapter 71: After the Fire

Zero Hour Plus 210 Days

Chapter 72: The End (I)

Zero Hour Plus 211 Days

Chapter 73: The End (II)

Zero Hour Plus 213 Days

Chapter 74: The Beginning

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Will Hill

About the Publisher

Jamie Carpenter soared over the battlefield, carrying Frankenstein effortlessly beneath him, marvelling at the scale of the fighting taking place below.

His view of it was fleeting, such was the speed he and the rest of the strike team were travelling, but it was enough to make quite an impression; the battle was already spread out across more than a mile of blasted landscape, the air full of movement and gunfire and screaming, the ground littered with black-clad bodies and soaked with vampire remains. Jamie tore his gaze away and focused on the looming shape of the medieval city, its pale stone darkening in the fading light, and, as he rose over the outer walls, his squad mates close behind him, he saw a distant figure floating near the summit of the hill, high above the raging battle.

Dracula, he thought, his heart leaping in his chest. Right where they said he would be.

This is going to be too easy.

Jamie swooped over the walls, rising above the wide cobbled street that led up through the city. He accelerated, the evening air cool as it rushed over his uniformed body, the rooftops passing below him in a blur, and allowed a smile to rise on to his face. As he soared over a wide square, he heard something above him, something that sounded like a flock of birds, and rolled to the side so he could look up and see what it was.

The sky above him was full of vampires.

They dropped silently out of the clouds, a vast dark swarm, and ripped into the strike team like a bolt of lightning, sending them spinning towards the ground. Something connected with the side of his helmet and he saw stars, his vision greying at the edges as his grip on Frankenstein loosened and gave way; the monster slipped from his grasp and fell towards the ancient city. Jamie lunged after him, but was hammered from all sides by heavy blows that drove him back and forth, bellowing with pain. He fought back furiously, but might as well have been trying to punch the wind; there seemed to be vampires all around him, as insubstantial as smoke, apart from when they struck. He ducked under a swinging fist and looked desperately around for his squad mates, but it was like trying to see through a colony of bats that had taken wing at the same time; all around him was darkness and churning movement.

A boot slammed into his stomach. Jamie folded in the air, the breath driven out of him, and sank towards the ground, barely able to even slow his fall. Cobblestones rose up to meet him, and he hit them hard enough to drive his teeth together on his tongue, spilling warm coppery liquid into his mouth. Pain raced through him, before being driven away by the heady taste of his own blood.

He leapt to his feet and scanned the narrow street he had landed in. There was no sign of his squad mates, or the vampires that had attacked them. He looked up, expecting to see them hurtling down towards him, but the sky was clear and empty; it was as though they had never been there at all.

Stupid, he told himself, and felt his eyes blaze with heat. Arrogant. Stupid.

Jamie leapt into the air, determined to locate the rest of the strike team and get their mission back on track.

A hand closed round his ankle and whipped him downwards.

Surprise filled him so completely that he didn’t get his hands up until it was too late; his helmet thudded against the ground, and everything went black.

Jamie Carpenter stared at his father.

Time seemed to have stopped; there was utter silence, as though even the wind that had been gently rustling the trees around the cottage had paused. Jamie’s heart was a solid lump of ice, his limbs frozen in place, his eyes unblinking, his mind stuck on a perpetual loop.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

His father looked different than the last time Jamie had seen him; he looked old. His face was deeply lined, and pale, as though he had not seen the sun in a long time. There were streaks of grey in his still-thick hair, and he looked worn out, like he was stretched too thin. But his eyes, the bright blue eyes that his son had inherited, still danced in the yellow glow of the light bulb above the door, and it was into them that Jamie found himself staring as his mind tried to process what he was seeing.

The still, silent moment lasted an unknowable length of time. The two men – one young, one old – stood motionless, a distance between them that was far more than merely physical; it contained an ocean of history, of grief and loss and wasted time. Then a noise emerged from Jamie’s father’s throat, a thick, involuntary sound like a gasp for air, and the spell was broken. The inertia in Jamie’s mind spun loose, replaced by outright horror, by disgust so strong it was almost physical. He was suddenly full of the desire to run, to turn and flee from this place, from this apparition from the past, but, before he could force his reeling body to move, his father swept forward and lifted him into a hug so tight the air was trapped in his chest, and the disgust was replaced by a shuddering wave of relief, of something utterly, essentially right.

His eyes closed of their own accord, and his face fell against his father’s shoulder, his hands dangling at his sides. He could feel his dad’s heart pounding, feel the tremble in his arms as they held him tight. Jamie gave himself over to the emotions flooding through him, powerless to resist them; grief, pain, relief and desperate, sharp-edged happiness combining into a sensation he could barely endure.

Then his mind conjured up a single memory: his mother, standing beside him at the funeral of her husband. She was dressed all in black, and her beautiful, dignified face was etched with pain and covered in the shiny tracks of her tears. She was gripping his hand as though it was the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the floor, and she looked utterly lost, as if she had been thrust unwillingly into a world that no longer made sense, that was full only of pain and grief. The memory cleared Jamie’s mind in an instant, wiping away the bittersweet cocktail that had momentarily overwhelmed him and replacing it with a single, burning emotion.

Fury.

He raised his arms and pushed his father backwards, breaking the embrace. Julian stumbled, a frown of confusion on his face, then regained his balance and stared at Jamie.

“What’s wrong, son?” he asked, his voice low and thick.

“What’s wrong?” growled Jamie, fury boiling and raging inside him, the sensation familiar and entirely welcome. “You actually have the nerve to ask me that? Everything’s wrong! Everything! And all of it’s your fault!”

His father’s eyes widened with shock. “Jamie, I—”

“Shut up,” said Jamie, his voice trembling with anger. “Just shut up. I went to your funeral. I stood next to Mum, next to your wife, and watched them bury you. Do you have any idea what that did to her?”

“No,” said Julian. “I can’t possibly—”

“I’m not done,” interrupted Jamie. “Not even close. You let us think you were dead. I watched you die, and that memory has lived with me every single day since. Our entire lives turned to shit after you were dead. You couldn’t let us know? Couldn’t even get a message to us? Something?”

“It wasn’t safe,” said Julian. “I was trying to protect you both.”

Jamie heard a growl rise from his throat, and felt a momentary surge of savage satisfaction as he saw his father take a frightened half-step backwards.

“That’s all right then, is it?” he said. “Everything’s cool, because you were trying to protect us. How well do you think that went?”

“I know,” said Julian. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Jamie. I made a mistake, I understand that now. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Ask your friends for help?” suggested Jamie. “The ones who’d fought alongside you dozens of times, and who would have done everything they could if you’d just asked them.”

Julian nodded, and held his hands up. “You’re right, Jamie. You are. And I don’t blame you for being angry with me. I’m just trying to explain.”

“You can’t,” said Jamie. “There’s nothing you can say to make this OK. Don’t you get that? Mum cried herself to sleep every night after you died, and we had to move house every few months because the whole country believed you were a traitor. We had to leave our home, and our friends, and we just barely survived the chaos you left behind. And now you’re back, and what? You want me to tell you that I forgive you, that we can just put it all behind us and be a family again? Not a chance. Not a chance in hell.”

“I’m sorry,” repeated Julian. His face was ashen. “There’s nothing else I can say, Jamie. I’m truly sorry.”

“I believe you,” said Jamie. “But I don’t have time to give a shit about how sorry you are. Where did you go?”

“What?”

“When you pretended to die,” said Jamie. “Where did you go?”

“America,” said Julian. “There was a rumour about a vampire who’d been cured. When I heard about what happened to your mum, I went looking for him.”

The fury boiling through Jamie turned as cold as ice.

“You knew?” he asked, his voice low and full of menace. “You knew about Lindisfarne?”

Julian nodded. “I knew,” he said. “I heard about what you did. I was so proud, son, so proud of—”

“You knew your wife had been turned and your son had joined Blacklight, and still you didn’t come in? Even then, you couldn’t do the right thing?”

Julian winced, and said nothing.

“How did you know?” asked Jamie. “Who told you?”

“I can’t say,” said Julian. “I swore.”

The answer burst into Jamie’s mind like a bolt of lightning, filling him with white-hot clarity. He felt his stomach churn and his legs turn to jelly beneath him.

Oh no. Oh please, no.

He sought another answer, one that wasn’t so terrible, but knew instantly that he was wasting his time; there was only one person it could have been.

The one person he wished it wasn’t.

“I have to go,” he said, and turned towards the door.

“Hey!” shouted Julian. He stepped forward and took hold of his son’s arm. Jamie turned his head and stared down at the hand until his father released his grip and stepped back.

“What?” he asked. “What do you want from me?”

“This isn’t how I wanted this to go, son,” said Julian. “This isn’t what I wanted at all.”

Jamie laughed, incredulous. “Even now?” he said. “Even now, what you want is all you care about.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” said Julian, his face reddening. “You know it isn’t. Why are you making this so hard?”

“And now you’re blaming me?” asked Jamie, his voice a low hiss. “You actually have the balls to stand there and blame me for this? You did this, Dad. You did it all on your own. I don’t know why you’ve decided to reappear now, and I don’t know what you want from me, but I have to go. Now.”

Julian stared at him. “Don’t you even want to know how I did it?” he asked. “How I faked my death?”

“I couldn’t give less of a shit,” said Jamie. “And I’ll tell you something else, something that you can think about when I’m gone and you’re on your own again. I’m ashamed to be your son. Do you hear me? Ashamed.”

The red in Julian’s face darkened. “That’s enough, Jamie,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t care what’s happened, or how angry you’re feeling right now. I am still your father and you will not speak to me like that.”

Jamie laughed again, a sharp grunt of derision, and turned to the door. Again, his father stepped forward and took hold of his arm, and Jamie felt heat burst into his eyes as his self-control finally failed him. He spun, eyes blazing, fangs gleaming, and shoved his father away, hard. Julian was thrown across the room, slammed against the wall, and landed in a heap on the floor. He stared up at his son with a face full of terror, the expression of a man who is watching his worst nightmare come true before him. Jamie stepped into the air and floated above the carpet, fixing his father with his terrible crimson gaze.

“I never want to see you again,” he growled. “Do you hear me? Never.”

His father’s face crumpled. Tears brimmed in the corners of his eyes.

“You’re my son,” managed Julian, his voice barely audible.

Jamie’s eyes darkened. “Fuck you,” he said, then turned and flew through the door of the cottage. He swept down the path, ignoring the sobbing sounds behind him, and flew back towards the idling SUV. He could see Frankenstein behind its wheel; the monster was staring through the windscreen, his face set in a stern line.

He knew, thought Jamie. He knew what I was going to find out, but he brought me here anyway.

For a moment, his heart softened towards the man who had sworn to protect him and his family, as he considered the position his father’s actions must have put Frankenstein in, particularly once the monster became acquainted with Jamie and his mother. But then the cold reappeared, freezing his heart solid.

He should have told me. I don’t care what he swore. He shouldn’t have left me in the dark.

Jamie reached the SUV and tapped on the passenger window. Frankenstein looked round, and wound it down.

“Is everything OK?” he asked.

“No,” said Jamie, and heard the catch in his voice. “But I think you already knew that, didn’t you?”

A grimace crossed the monster’s face. “What happened?”

“I know you knew,” said Jamie. “Please don’t deny it.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You helped him fake his death.”

“Yes.”

“And it was you that told him about Lindisfarne. About what happened to me and my mother.”

“Yes,” said Frankenstein. His face was very still, his grey-green skin paler than usual, his eyes locked on Jamie’s.

“So when you rescued me from Alexandru,” said Jamie, “you knew my father wasn’t dead, even then. You knew I hadn’t watched him die, and you never told me. Never told my mum.”

A look of immense pain creased the monster’s face. “I couldn’t, Jamie,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “I couldn’t do that to you. You have to understand.”

Jamie felt the block of ice in his chest crack sharply. Pain bloomed out of it, accompanied by a profound sense of loss, of awful, bitter grief.

“I do,” he said, and blinked away sudden tears. “So I want you to understand something. You and I are done. I want you to stay away from me.”

He tore his gaze away from the monster, leapt off the ground, and accelerated into the sky, desperate to leave everything, and everyone, behind.

Kate Randall took a deep breath and pushed open the door to the Security Division, trying to slow her racing heart.

It was ridiculous, she tried to tell herself, to be nervous about entering the wide suite of desks and offices that had essentially become her home in the months since she had accepted the offer to join Blacklight; her office had come to feel like a sanctuary, as chaos and darkness raged around the Department, and the Division contained men and women she would have readily trusted with her life.

But now the Division had changed.

Major Paul Turner, who had for a number of years been the Blacklight Security Officer and Kate’s immediate boss, was now Director of the entire Department, having been promoted following the loss of Cal Holmwood on the gravel surrounding Château Dauncy. Paul was unquestionably the right choice and, as a serving Operator, Kate was delighted; she had no doubt that he would lead the Department with the same bravery and dedication that had characterised his entire Blacklight career. But on a personal level, she was far less thrilled; she and Turner had become close over the preceding months, tied together by an unswerving commitment to the Security Division, by the punishing ordeal that had been ISAT, and by red-raw grief over the death of Shaun, who had been both Major Turner’s son and Kate’s boyfriend.

Inside Blacklight, Kate had found friends, Larissa Kinley, Jamie Carpenter and Matt Browning foremost among them, and she was grateful; she trusted them implicitly. But if she was completely honest with herself, which she always tried to be, it had been Paul Turner she had come to rely on most heavily, and her heart was racing because she was no longer sure that would be possible.

Kate stepped into the familiar hum of voices and activity that always filled the Security Division and made her way through the clusters of desks, nodding to colleagues as she passed, her eyes focused on the door of the office that belonged to the Security Officer. It was next to her own, a proximity that had given rise to a number of unkind comments in the early days of her transfer to Security, in the aftermath of ISAT. She knew that there had been plenty of whispered insults, accusations that she was Paul Turner’s pet, that she was given special treatment because she had been his dead son’s girlfriend. She had never confronted the charges, and done her best never to show how much they hurt her; she knew that Turner had treated her favourably, that she had become his most trusted Lieutenant in the Division – perhaps even the entire Department – but she did not believe that it had all been about Shaun. She was, all arrogance aside, a damn good Operator, and damn good at her job.

The new Security Officer was Angela Darcy, and Kate would never, even for a moment, have disagreed with her selection – not only was she personally one of Kate’s favourite people in the Loop, she was a genuinely outstanding Operator, one whose record more than justified her promotion, and Kate was looking forward to working with her. They had been scheduled to meet the following morning, as part of Angela’s first official day as Security Officer, but Kate was eager to get the formalities over with. She reached the door, took a deep breath, and knocked sharply on it.

“Come in,” called a familiar voice from inside the office. Kate turned the handle, opened the door, and stepped through it.

The office was no more colourful or full of life than it had been when Paul Turner had occupied it; the walls were the same bare grey, the shelves full only of folders and box files. Behind the desk at the rear of the room, Angela Darcy was leaning back in her chair, a welcoming smile on her face.

“Lieutenant Randall,” she said, her voice dripping with fake formality. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too, Captain Darcy,” said Kate, smiling back at her.

“This feels weird,” said Angela. “Does it feel weird to you?”

“A bit,” said Kate. “Should I call you sir from now on?”

“God, no,” said the Security Officer, her face reddening. “Call me Angela, please. Captain, if you absolutely have to.”

Kate nodded, her smile still in place. “All right. I’ll do that.”

“Good,” said Angela. “How’s everything looking?”

“Fine,” said Kate. “There was nothing unusual in the overnight logs, and today’s been pretty peaceful so far, all things considered.”

“That’s good,” said Angela. “That’s great, to be honest with you. I could really do with a quiet day or two while I get to grips with everything. I’m going to be relying on you a lot in the next few weeks, Kate. Is that all right with you?”

“Of course,” said Kate. “Whatever I can do to help.”

“Thanks,” said Angela, and grinned at her. “I know you think you should be sitting in this chair, so I appreciate you getting on my side.”

Kate frowned. “I’m sorry?”

“Come on, Kate,” said Angela. “This is me. You don’t have to play dumb. I know you wanted to be Security Officer. I know at least part of you thinks you should be, and I’d honestly think less of you if you didn’t. But this is the situation we find ourselves in, and I really, really want you on my team, so I hope it’s not going to be something we can’t get past?”

“No,” said Kate, instantly. “It really isn’t. You have my word.”

Angela nodded. “Good news,” she said. “Tell yourself I’m just keeping the seat warm for you, if it helps.”

Kate’s smile returned. “All right, Captain,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

“Fantastic. In which case, I’ve got about a million reports to read, and every one of them is apparently the most important thing in the world. So is there anything else right now?”

“Just one thing,” said Kate. “Major Turner and I used to meet first thing every morning to go over anything important that had come up overnight. I don’t know whether you want to continue with that arrangement?”

“Yes,” said Angela. “I do. I think that will be extremely useful. Let’s start tomorrow. Nine o’clock?”

Kate nodded. “Nine o’clock.”

“Great,” said Angela. “Thank you. For now, dismissed.”

Kate walked back through the Security Division, a warm wave of relief flowing through her.

She knew it had been stupid to be nervous about meeting Angela Darcy, a woman who was already almost a friend, but she had not been able to help it, for the reason her new Commanding Officer had immediately identified.

Although she would never have admitted it to anyone, Kate had been jealous when the new Security Officer had been announced. She knew – objectively, at least – that it could never have been her; she was far too junior, still only a Lieutenant, and her Blacklight experience even now consisted of less than a year’s service.

But objective knowledge hadn’t stopped it hurting when the decision had been announced.

Now she could feel the pain ebbing away. Angela had instantly seen through her and brought the issue out into the open, which meant they could move past it. And in truth, Kate had to admit that not being the new Security Officer would make her life inside the Loop a lot easier; there were plenty of Operators and staff who already muttered about how quickly she and her friends had been promoted.

That’s not our fault, though, she thought. None of us ever asked for any of it. And seriously, I don’t know why people are so surprised. Jamie is a descendant of the Founders and a natural Operator. Larissa was the first vampire Operator the Department had ever had. And Matt is an honest-to-God genius. How stupid would it have been for Blacklight not to use them? Honestly, how could they not have ended up as important as they are?

And what about you? whispered an oily voice in the back of her head. What makes you so special? What have you done? Nothing …

Bullshit, thought Kate, firmly. I was on the team that took down Albert Harker. I volunteered for ISAT when nobody else would, even though I knew it would make me unpopular, and I saw it through even after Richard Brennan tried to kill me over it. I’ve earned everything that’s come to me. The people who matter understand that. And Angela Darcy is one of them.

I’m sure of it.

Kate strode towards the lift at the end of the Level A corridor. She stepped through the metal doors when it arrived, and pressed the button marked 0. Barely ten seconds later the doors opened again, and she walked straight into the dark, floating shape of Larissa Kinley.

“Kate!” exclaimed the vampire Operator. “I was just about to come looking for you. Have you got a minute?”

Kate smiled. “Evening, Larissa,” she said. “Of course I have. What’s going on?”

“Have you seen Jamie? In the last few hours, I mean?”

She frowned. “Isn’t he on Patrol Respond?”

Larissa shook her head. “His squad’s off tonight.”

“I haven’t seen him,” said Kate. “Not since yesterday. What’s so urgent?”

“He went somewhere with Colonel Frankenstein,” said Larissa. “Hours ago. But I’ve just seen Frankenstein come back through the hangar, and he didn’t look very happy. Jamie wasn’t with him.”

“Maybe he flew back on his own?”

“Maybe,” said Larissa, although she didn’t sound convinced. Kate took a closer look at her friend and saw the downward curves at the corners of her mouth, the eyes that were slightly wider than usual.

Something’s wrong, thought Kate. She looks worried half to death.

“Talk to me, Larissa,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” said Larissa, a little too quickly. “I just really need to find him, Kate. Can you help me?”

“Have you run his chip?”

“I tried,” said Larissa. “The function has been locked. Apparently, only Security can access it.”

Kate frowned. “That’s news to me,” she said. “Do you want me to try?”

Larissa nodded. “Please.”

Kate pulled her console from her belt, unlocked it, and scrolled to the chip location programme. She searched for Jamie’s name, and pressed his ID number with her thumb. The console vibrated in her hand as it worked, then fell still as the results appeared.

“He’s somewhere in Kent,” said Kate. “A village called Brenchley.”

“Shit,” said Larissa, and grimaced. “That can’t be good.”

“Why?” asked Kate. “What’s in Brenchley?”

Larissa shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Thank you, Kate. I’ll see you later.”

“Larissa, wait—”

But the vampire girl had already turned and flown through the hangar doors at the end of the corridor. Kate momentarily considered following her, but she knew how fast her friend was; Larissa would likely be several miles away already, and accelerating. Instead, she stared at the yellow and black striped doors, her heart suddenly full of worry.

Larissa flew south-east, the wind whipping her hair back, her stomach churning with nervousness that felt increasingly close to panic.

It had been wrong to leave Kate standing in the Level 0 corridor without an explanation, but she had not been able to help it; the news that Jamie was in Brenchley, the location of his childhood home, had sent an awful chill running up her spine. That her boyfriend had left the Loop with Frankenstein without telling her was cause enough for concern; it was clearly a private matter, and private matters involving the monster and the Carpenter family were rarely sources of light and happiness. The fact that Frankenstein had returned home alone had deepened her unease, especially after she had seen the thunderous look on the monster’s face as he strode through the hangar, and the results of Kate’s chip search had been the final straw; she needed to see her boyfriend immediately. Not least because a voice in the back of her head, the one she hated and tried her hardest to ignore, was whispering that whatever was happening with Jamie was very likely related to the secret that she had made the decision to keep from him.

It’s not fair, she thought, as she urged herself ever faster through the night air. I was going to tell him. I was literally on my way to tell him.

But the voice in her head was unsympathetic.

You could have told him a hundred times, it whispered. That you didn’t is nobody’s fault but your own.

The dark countryside swept past below, dotted with yellow lights from roads and buildings, from which Larissa’s supernaturally powerful ears made out snatches of conversation and the occasional bar of music. Her console was in her hand, and she was following its GPS reader towards the small village where Jamie and his parents had lived before the supernatural had intruded on their lives. Although the truth was that Julian Carpenter had opened the door to it, unbeknownst to his family.

Eighteen miles. Should be there in a couple of minutes.

She shivered. Her altitude and speed were making the climate-control system of her uniform work overtime to keep her warm, but she knew the shudder had nothing to do with the temperature; it was the result of her growing certainty that, no matter how fast she pushed herself towards her boyfriend, it was already too late.

Larissa swooped down until she was barely clearing the tops of the trees, and headed straight towards the red dot at the centre of her console’s screen. An empty country road stretched out beneath her and she followed its slowly winding curves, slowing her speed as she banked left and right. Up ahead, a small cluster of houses appeared, set back from the road and surrounded by a dark landscape of fields and woods. The red dot stopped moving, but she would have known she was close to Jamie without its assistance; she had picked up his unmistakable scent floating on the gentle night breeze.

She zeroed in on it, a potent combination of both her boyfriend’s distinctive smell and something that bloomed from the centre of her being: familiarity, connection, and love, as clear and bright as a beacon. The road swept away to the right, and just before the bend stood a house, a large, slightly rambling pile of old bricks with an angular tiled roof, a long garden at the back and a front lawn leading down to a towering oak tree that extended far out over the road.

Sitting on one of its highest branches, staring down at the old house, was Jamie.

She brought herself to a halt, floating easily in the air, and stared at her boyfriend. He was pale, which was not unusual, but his skin looked almost grey, apart from around his eyes, where it was red. She felt her heart thump in her chest; she wanted to go to him, to cross the space between them and wrap him in her arms, but she didn’t dare.

She was not yet sure exactly what she was dealing with.

“Hey,” she said, cautiously.

Jamie forced the tiniest smile she had ever seen him produce. “Hey,” he said. “How did you find me?”

“Kate ran your chip for me,” said Larissa. “I was worried about you, Jamie.”

He nodded his head, and returned his gaze to the house. She floated where she was, unsure of what to do and hating the feeling.

“This was where he was,” said Jamie, eventually, his voice low. “Alexandru. The night it happened, he was in this tree with his followers. I heard him laugh, but I couldn’t see anything. It was dark and everything was covered in shadows.”

“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” said Larissa. “He’d have killed you without a second thought.”

Jamie stretched out an arm and pointed down at the house. “You see that window? The big one?” Larissa followed the path of his finger and nodded. “That’s where I was,” he continued. “I was looking through that window because I heard Dad’s car pull into the drive and I was so excited that he was home. I was always so pleased to see him.”

“Of course,” she said. “You were just a kid.”

Jamie nodded again, and fell silent. After a seemingly endless moment, Larissa forced herself to speak.

“What’s going on, Jamie?” she asked. “Where did you and Frankenstein go this afternoon?”

He raised his head, and Larissa felt her stomach lurch at the sight of the empty expression on his face.

“He took me to see my dad,” he said, his voice low and halting. “He’s still alive. After everything that’s happened, after all this shit, he’s still alive. There’s a cottage in Norfolk, where we used to go and visit my nan. That’s where Frankenstein took me. That’s where he is.”

Larissa stared helplessly at her boyfriend. “Jamie …”

“He hugged me. Can you believe that? Just hugged me, like nothing had happened. I was nearly sick.”

“What happened to him? Where has he been?”

Jamie shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I told him I never want to see him again. Told Frankenstein the same thing.”

Larissa grimaced. This was exactly what she had dreaded, every time she closed her eyes at the end of another day in which she had failed to tell her boyfriend what she had overheard.

“Why?” she asked. “What did Frankenstein do?”

“He knew, Larissa,” said Jamie. “He knew Dad didn’t die, that he was still alive the whole time. He was sending him emails, for Christ’s sake, giving him updates on me and Mum. How could he do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Larissa, her voice low. “I presume he thought it was for the best. He would never hurt you, Jamie, not on purpose. You must know that.”

“I don’t know anything any more,” said Jamie. “I can’t trust anyone apart from you and Kate and Matt. And my mum. My poor mum, Larissa. What am I supposed to tell her about all this?”

Larissa stared at him. She had no answer to his question.

“She thinks he’s dead too,” said Jamie. “She mourned him. We mourned him. It’ll destroy her if I tell her.”

“So don’t,” said Larissa, “if you don’t think it’ll do any good. Let her be.”

“I don’t have the right to keep it from her. I can’t make that decision on her behalf.”

“You can,” she said. “If you think it’s the right thing to do, if you think you’re sparing her pain. Or you just don’t know how to tell her.”

Jamie stared at her for a long moment, then frowned. His eyes narrowed, and Larissa saw red light flicker into their corners.

“Why aren’t you more surprised?” he asked, his voice suddenly low.

“What are you talking about?”

“I just told you that my dad faked his death, that he’s been alive this whole time, and that Frankenstein knew about it. So why do you look like I just told you tomorrow’s weather forecast?”

“Jamie …”

His face fell, and Larissa felt a shard of ice pierce her heart.

“Oh no,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper, his eyes huge and staring. “Not you too, Larissa. Please. I can’t bear it.”

“I didn’t know,” she said, her voice high and unsteady. “Not for certain. You have to believe me, Jamie, I didn’t know. I just overheard something I wasn’t supposed to.”

“What?” he asked. “What did you hear?”

“When I came back from Nevada,” she said. “There was a prisoner on the same flight, in handcuffs and a hood. We weren’t allowed to even speak to him. When they brought him off the plane at the Loop, Cal Holmwood was waiting in the hangar and I heard him say, ‘Welcome back, Julian.’ That’s all, I swear.”

“That’s all?” said Jamie. “That’s all? How many prisoners called Julian do you think the Director would have made a point of personally welcoming?”

“I see that now, Jamie.” She was on the verge of tears, but she ordered herself to stay strong, to get through this without breaking down. “But I didn’t know if it would do any good to tell you. What if it wasn’t him? Or Cal refused to tell you either way? It would just have made things worse.”

“Worse?” said Jamie, his voice rising as his eyes narrowed. “It would’ve made things worse? Are you kidding me?”

Here it comes, thought Larissa. Here comes the explosion.

But she was wrong. Jamie stared at her, his face reddening, then let out a long, weary sigh and dropped his eyes.

“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?” he asked, his voice barely audible.

“I was going to tell you this afternoon,” said Larissa, realising how pitiful the words sounded. “I was coming to find you when I found out you and Frankenstein had left the Loop.”

Jamie let out a grunt of laughter with absolutely no humour in it. “That’s convenient,” he said.

“It’s the truth,” she said. “I hope you can believe it.”

“No more secrets,” he said, and grimaced. “Right? That’s what we promised each other.”

Larissa didn’t respond. There was nothing she could say. She stared silently at her boyfriend, profoundly aware of the chasm that seemed to have yawned open between them. Jamie kept his gaze on the ground, his shoulders hunched, his arms wrapped tightly round himself. He looked so small, as though a strong breeze could have blown him off the branch and sent him tumbling to the lawn below. When he finally spoke again, he didn’t look at her.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About everything that’s happened since Alexandru arrived in this tree. Blacklight, Dracula, vampires, all of it. And I’ve realised something. Nothing good has come of any of it.”

Larissa felt her heart break in her chest. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

She tried to ignore the pain his words had sent coursing through her body, and forced her vocal cords into action. “You can trust me,” she said, hearing the unsteadiness in her voice. “I know it probably doesn’t feel like it right now, and I understand if you find it hard to believe. But you can trust me, Jamie. You really can.”

He raised his head and looked directly into her eyes. “I’ve heard that before,” he said. “More than once.”

Anger burst through Larissa as her vampire side rushed to the fore. She knew she was in the wrong, that Jamie had every right to feel disappointed and let down, but she could not simply float in the cold air and allow herself to be tortured indefinitely.

“What are you saying, Jamie?” she demanded. “No more bullshit. Talk to me.”

“I need to think.”

“About what?”

“About everything,” said Jamie. “About what happens next. It’s all coming to an end, Larissa. Everything. Can’t you feel it?”

She shook her head, and felt red heat boil into her eyes. She was suddenly furious with him for wallowing in self-pity when there was so much at stake.

My family won’t even talk to me, she thought. They might as well be dead. At least your mum is safe, and your dad still wants you, even if he did lie to you. At least he cares that you’re alive.

“I don’t recognise this version of you,” she said, her voice little more than a growl. “The Jamie I know, the one that I fell for? That Jamie fights to the very end, even when everything seems hopeless. Where the hell is he?”

Jamie stared at her. “I’m tired of fighting,” he said.

“So what do we do now? Tell me.”

“Go back to the Loop,” he said. “I just need some time. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Larissa floated in the air, her glowing eyes fixed on his. He held her gaze for a moment, then shifted it to the gravel drive below, where everything had been set in motion by the thunder of machine-gun fire and the apparent death of a man who had been desperate for a way out. She wanted to shake her boyfriend, to scream at him to snap out of it, then wrap her arms round him and tell him that she loved him, couldn’t he see that, wasn’t that enough for him?

Instead, she turned away without a word and flew back towards the Loop as fast as she could force her body to move. The cold air made her eyes water, hiding tears that she would never have let anybody see, not least the boy she was leaving behind.

Matt Browning’s stomach rumbled so aggressively that he immediately looked around to check whether any of his colleagues had heard it, his face reddening with embarrassment. Mercifully, it had either not been as loud as it had seemed or his fellow members of the Lazarus Project were simply too engrossed in their work to have noticed it; there was not so much as a raised eyebrow to be seen.

Matt checked his watch and saw that it was well past noon. He had been at his desk for almost seven hours, and had not eaten since grabbing a sandwich sometime the previous afternoon.

He was absolutely starving.

Matt got to his feet and carefully stretched his arms out above his head until he felt the muscles in his shoulders creak. The doctors had told him he could remove the foam neck brace tomorrow, but for now it was still wrapped round his throat like a thick collar. His back and neck were in constant pain, the result of the car crash he had caused in San Francisco, but a regimen of dizzyingly strong pills was keeping it at bay. The finger that Major Simmons had broken as he gripped the steering wheel was splinted and wrapped in bandages, but mercifully it was the little one, and it didn’t interfere with his ability to work.

He lowered his arms and took a look around the lab. At the far end of the long room, Professor Karlsson, the project’s Director, was deep in conversation with two of his senior staff. In the corner nearest the door, three of Matt’s colleagues were sitting in plastic chairs, staring intently into a slowly rotating holographic model of their best guess at what the genetic structure of a cure for vampirism might look like: a swirling cone of DNA strands, balls of blue and red proteins rotating round grey stretches that represented sections as yet unmapped, of which there were still a frustratingly large number. The rest of the Lazarus staff were huddled at their desks, grinding through the seemingly endless potential formulas that required testing on the project’s supercomputer array. Every one would almost certainly turn out to be flawed, at which point the results would be written up and filed away, and the process would begin again.

To Matt’s right, her blonde head buried in what looked like a protein recombination equation, sat Natalia Lenski, the girl he no longer knew exactly how to refer to. His friend? His girlfriend?

He had no idea.

Whatever existed between them was fragile, the result of a halting, tentative courtship involving two people to whom confidence did not come naturally, a courtship that had culminated in a kiss that had quite literally taken Matt’s breath away. It had been instigated by Natalia as he arrived back from California and been designed to soften the blow of the news he was returning home to: that Jamie Carpenter, his best friend, had been bitten by a vampire, and turned.

There had been two more kisses since. Whereas the first had been full of fire and passion, the second had been gentle, almost chaste, as Matt lay in the infirmary after a scan had confirmed there was no permanent damage to his spine. The third had been frenzied, a stolen moment the previous day when they had run into each other in the Level B corridor, a remarkable coincidence given how much time they both spent in the Lazarus laboratories. The momentarily empty corridor and the possibility of being caught had lent the kiss an urgency that had left Matt dizzy; he still blushed at the memory of it.

But that had been yesterday. Now he was standing two metres away from her without the slightest clue what he should say or do, and the determined way that Natalia was staring at her screen suggested she had no more idea than he did. In moments like this, the ones that other people appeared to navigate with ease but which he found as difficult and confusing as a labyrinth, Matt often asked himself what Jamie would do. The honest answer was usually something reckless and arguably foolhardy, but it was still a helpful exercise. Inaction did not come naturally to Jamie; he would do something, even if it turned out to be wrong, and Matt was gradually realising that it was better to try and fail than do nothing.

He took a deep breath, and crouched down beside Natalia’s desk.

“Hey,” he whispered.

The Russian girl turned her head to look at him, and the smile on her face made his head spin; it was wide, genuine, and utterly beautiful.

“Hello,” she said, her voice low. “Are you OK?”

Matt nodded. “I’m good,” he said. “Well, not really. I’m hungry. Come to the canteen with me.”

Natalia frowned. “Now? I have work to do.”

“It’ll still be here when you get back,” said Matt. “Did you have breakfast this morning?”

“No.”

“Then you have no excuse,” said Matt. “Come on. I’m buying.”

Her frown deepened. “The canteen is free, Matt.”

“I know,” he replied, and smiled. “It was a figure of … oh, forget it. Just come with me.”

“To our canteen? Or the one downstairs.”

“Downstairs,” he said. “The main one. I want to get out of here for fifteen minutes.”

Natalia nodded. “OK,” she said, and pushed her chair back from her desk. She got to her feet and blushed a delicate pale pink as Matt stood up and looked at her.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Not a thing,” he replied. “Let’s go.”

They walked along the corridor and into the lift without saying a word.

The silence wasn’t awkward, however; it felt safe, and comfortable, and as soon as Natalia pressed the button marked G and the lift began to descend, she turned and kissed him, her body pressed against his. Matt’s eyes flew wide with surprise, then closed as he kissed her back, his hands on her waist as her fingers pressed into his shoulders. A flash of pain raced down his back, but he ignored it, concentrating only on not concentrating on anything, allowing himself to sink into a moment that needed no input from his endlessly rational mind.

The lift slowed to a halt with a familiar beep and Matt and Natalia sprang apart as the metal doors slid open, revealing two Operators in full uniform. They nodded as the two teenagers exited the lift, their faces flushed, their skin tingling. Matt momentarily considered taking hold of Natalia’s hand, but quickly decided against it; the busy canteen was only a hundred or so metres away, and it was not the time or place for such a wildly extravagant display of public affection.

Natalia smiled as he held open the canteen door for her. The cavernous room was as loud as ever, full of conversation and laughter and the clatter of plates on trays and boots on the tiled floor. As Matt led Natalia to where the long run of metal counters began, she whispered to him in a voice that was barely audible.

“People are looking at me.”

He frowned, and glanced around the room. A few heads were turned in their direction, although the expressions on the faces did not appear unkind, or hostile; if anything, they seemed curious. Matt stared back, until understanding hit him and he turned to Natalia with a smile on his face.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not you. Well, it is, but it’s both of us. It’s Lazarus. People aren’t used to seeing us out of the labs.” He tapped the distinctive orange pass that hung from a lanyard around Natalia’s neck. “This is what they’re looking at.”

Natalia nodded with apparent relief. “Good,” she said. “Although it is not as if we never leave the laboratories.”

“Really?” he asked. “When was the last time you were anywhere apart from the labs or your quarters?”

“When I went to the infirmary,” she said, instantly. “To see you.”

Matt smiled. “Fair enough,” he said. “But you know me, and I was here before Lazarus existed. And you know Kate, and Jamie. Most of our colleagues have never spoken to anyone outside the project. I doubt most of them would even know what happened at Château Dauncy if the Professor hadn’t briefed them on it.”

Natalia picked up a pair of trays and slid them on to the first counter. “Perhaps it is better that way,” she said. “Perhaps it is easier.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inside the laboratories is science. There are problems that need solutions. Outside there is blood and fear and everything is life or death. Perhaps thinking about that would not help.”

Matt nodded; he knew exactly what she was saying. Not thinking about the consequences of Lazarus undoubtedly made it easier to get up and go to work every morning, whereas dwelling on the ramifications of each day that passed without the discovery of a viable cure would likely be crippling.

“How are your friends?” asked Natalia. “I have not seen them since France.”

Matt shrugged. “Truthfully?” he said, placing a cheeseburger on his plate and piling the remaining space with fries. “I’m not sure. It was bad when they got back, after what happened to Cal, and so many others. Bad for everyone. I don’t know how they keep going, to be honest with you.”

“Because they have faith,” said Natalia, as she filled a small bowl with salmon salad. “They believe we will win in the end.”

“They did believe that,” said Matt. “And I’m sure some of them still do. Not all of them, though. Not any more. That was their best shot, as far as a lot of the Department is concerned. And they missed it.”

“So it is all down to us,” said Natalia, and smiled at him.

Matt grinned. “Then I guess we’re screwed, aren’t we?”

He lifted his tray and led Natalia across to an empty table. He attacked his burger as soon as he sat down, and within three bites half of it had disappeared. Natalia picked delicately at her salad with a fork, a smile on her face as she watched him eat.

“Sorry,” he said, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. It’s like you’re so deep in work that you manage to forget you’re even hungry, then you remember all at once.”

Natalia frowned. “Why did you say sorry?”

“When?”

“Just then. You said sorry, then that you hadn’t realised how hungry you were. Why were you sorry?”

Matt shrugged. “I saw you smile at how fast I was eating,” he said. “It’s just what people say.”

“Perhaps you apologise too often,” said Natalia.

Matt sat back in his chair. “What makes you say that?”

“I hear you say sorry many times. But you are a brilliant scientist, and a good friend, and you have nothing to apologise for. I wonder if you know that.”

Matt grimaced. “It’s hard for me.”

“To do what? Believe in yourself?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Matt. “I felt like a disappointment for a long time. It’s a hard habit to shake.”

“Because of your father?”

His eyes widened with surprise. “I … yeah. Maybe. I think I always felt like I should apologise for not being the kind of son he wanted.”

“If you are not what he wanted, he is an idiot,” said Natalia, and smiled fiercely at him. “He should have been proud every day to be your father.”

Matt felt heat rise into his cheeks. “Thank you,” he said. “I think he is now. But I wish we could go back in time and have you tell him that.”

“I would tell him.”

He smiled. “I know you would.”

Natalia smiled back at him, then frowned as a shadow fell across their table. Matt looked up and saw an Operator he didn’t recognise standing over them, his helmet under his arm, his face set and solemn.

Oh shit, he thought. We’ve been here before. Why are neither of my super-powerful vampire friends ever with me when this type of crap happens?

“Can we help you?” asked Natalia.

The Operator glanced at her, shook his head, and fixed his gaze on Matt. He put the helmet carefully down on the table and extended his hand towards the teenager. Matt took it, a look of profound confusion on his face, and was almost jerked out of his seat as the Operator pumped his arm up and down.

“I’m Tom Johnson,” he said, in a thick American accent. “You’re Matt Browning, right?”

Matt nodded; bewilderment had robbed him of the ability to form words.

“Awesome,” said Johnson. “I just wanted to tell you that me and the rest of Intelligence heard about what you did in San Francisco. Driving into a brick wall on purpose to take out a double agent? That’s insane, dude. Seriously.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw a smile spread across Natalia’s face.

“Thanks,” he said. “That’s good of you to say. I didn’t really plan it, to be honest.”

Johnson laughed. “Probably a good thing,” he said. “You might have had second thoughts. Your neck all right?”

Matt touched his fingers to the foam brace. “Getting there,” he said. “This comes off tomorrow.”

Johnson nodded. “Glad to hear it. And apologies for the interruption, I just wanted to say hello. You two look after yourselves, all right?”

Matt nodded. “Thanks. We will.”

Johnson turned and strode across the room to where a group of Operators were waiting for him. They exited the canteen, and Matt turned to Natalia as the doors swung shut behind them.

“Well,” he said. “That was different.”

Jamie walked along Level B, concentrating on keeping his feet on the ground.

He wanted to fly down the grey corridor as fast as he was able, but he shared Larissa’s instinctive reluctance to demonstrate his vampire abilities inside the Loop. It was not that his colleagues were unused to seeing such powers – the Blacklight base was one of the few places in the world where they might be considered unremarkable – but rather that they felt like something that separated him from the ranks of Operators, a sensation he took no pleasure in.

Jamie had flown back from Brenchley as the eastern sky had begun to purple, reaching the hangar minutes before dawn broke over the horizon. After Larissa had departed, he had spent the rest of the long night deep in thought, his mind churning as it sought answers and explanations. His anger had eventually given way to a profound sense of loneliness, of having everything that he most relied on ripped away from him, and that loneliness had in turn been replaced by self-pity and bitter tears, as he silently raged at the unfairness of it all. He did not deserve the lies he had been told and the betrayals he had suffered; he had always tried to do the right thing, and had received only heartbreak in return. The eventual drying of his tears had been accompanied by a burst of self-loathing at having acted like such a child, like a spoilt brat who believed the entire world revolved around him.

Finally, as the darkness began to soften and lift, determined clarity had settled on him. The intermingled issues of his father and Frankenstein could wait, as could the decision about what, if anything, to tell his mum.

What could not wait was Larissa.

As soon as he touched down on the concrete floor of the hangar, he had sent her a message asking if she was awake. He had received no reply by the time the lift had carried him down to Level B, so he had walked quickly along the corridor and knocked on her door. There had been no response, and his supernaturally sharp ears had detected no sounds of movement from inside her quarters, so he had gone reluctantly to his room and slept fitfully, his mind whirring with worry. He had climbed back out of his bed barely two hours later and pulled a clean uniform on, trying all the while to quiet his increasingly frantic brain.

It’s fine. It’ll be fine. She just didn’t want to talk to you last night, and you can’t really blame her for that. Go and find her and tell her you’re sorry and sort it out. It’s not too late.

But there had still been no answer to his repeated knocks on her door or increasingly frequent messages, and no sign of her in the canteen or the Playground or the Briefing Rooms on Level A. He had sat through a routine Operational review with his feet tapping and his fists clenching and as soon as it was finished, after what felt like a thousand hours, he had sent a message to the one person he could ask for help in finding Larissa. To his enormous relief, Kate had replied immediately.

IN MY QUARTERS. WHAT’S UP?

Jamie stopped outside his friend’s door, took a deep breath, and knocked on it, hard. A second later it swung open and Kate appeared, a slightly quizzical look on her face; it took all of Jamie’s self-control not to hug the breath out of her.

“Morning, Jamie,” she said. “Everything all right?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Can I come in?”

“Of course,” said Kate, and stepped aside.

Jamie walked into the small room and stood beside Kate’s desk as she closed the door behind them. “Have you seen Larissa?” he asked. “Today, I mean?”

Kate laughed. “What is it with you two? I had her asking the same thing about you yesterday. Can’t you keep in touch with each other without my help?”

“Have you seen her or not?”

Kate frowned. “No,” she said. “Not today. What’s going on, Jamie?”

He grimaced. “We sort of had a fight.”

“I’d worked that much out for myself,” said Kate. “What about?”

Jamie hesitated; he didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to tell anyone. But he had thrown the promise they had all made to each other in Larissa’s face, had deliberately used it to make her feel guilty, and it would be unforgivably cowardly if he did not apply it to himself.

No more secrets.

He lowered himself into Kate’s chair and began to talk. To his great relief, his friend listened in silence; she allowed him to plough through the whole story of his trip to Norfolk with Frankenstein, his reunion with his father, and the terrible conversation between himself and Larissa, without interruption or reaction. But as soon as he was finished, she shook her head and stared at him with eyes full of anger.

“You’re an idiot, Jamie,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you sometimes. Do you like being unhappy? Are you actively trying to make your life colder and more miserable?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I was angry, Kate. I’d just found out that my dad wasn’t dead, that he and Frankenstein had lied to me for years. I wasn’t really thinking straight.”

“I get that,” said Kate. “I really, really do. And I’m sorry about what you discovered. But none of it was Larissa’s fault.”

“Don’t you think she should have told me what she heard?”

“What did she hear?” said Kate. “A name? Three words that might easily have been completely meaningless?”

“They weren’t, though,” said Jamie. “And if she’d told me I could have—”

“You could have what?” interrupted Kate. “Asked Cal if he was keeping your dead dad in a cell? What do you think his answer would have been?”

“I’m not stupid, Kate,” said Jamie. “I know Cal would have denied it. But maybe I could have found out some other way, or managed to get in to see him, or …”

“That’s all well and good,” said Kate, “but you’re overlooking the most important thing. She was going to tell you, unless you’re actively calling her a liar. It’s bad timing that Frankenstein decided to come clean on the same day, but that’s not Larissa’s fault either. She was going to tell you, and before you say she had plenty of time to do so, think about what’s been going on around here lately, and whether or not she might have had one or two other things on her mind.”

Jamie stared at his friend. He knew she was right; everything she was saying was true.

“I need to see her, Kate,” he said, his voice low. “I was angry, and I said some stuff I regret. I just … I need to tell her I’m sorry. Can you help me?”

“I’ll run her chip,” said Kate. She drew her console from her belt and Jamie watched as she tapped the screen with her fingers, silently urging her to hurry. After an agonisingly long wait, the console beeped as the results of the search were returned. Kate grimaced as she read them, and Jamie felt his heart sink.

“What is it?” he asked. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” said Kate, looking up and staring at him. “Her chip stopped transmitting nine hours ago.”

“Where?” asked Jamie. “Where was the last position it was tracked?”

“About seven hundred miles off the west coast of Ireland,” said Kate. “The middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

Kate pushed the door of her office shut and slid into the chair behind her desk. She turned on her terminal, trying to slow her rising unease as she waited for it to go through its series of security checks.

She had left Jamie in her quarters with strict instructions to stay there until she got back. He had looked thoroughly defeated, as though the life had been drained out of him, but she knew from long experience that it would only be temporary; his despair would rapidly turn to anger, and before she knew it he would be charging through the Loop, demanding a search party be raised for Larissa or, more worryingly, going to look for her himself. He’d agreed to sit tight, but Kate knew she needed information fast; right now, they had nothing to go on, and a response based on nothing was only likely to make an already bad situation worse.

Her monitor bloomed into life and Kate’s fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing the Security Division logs and entering Larissa’s name into the search field. The terminal worked quickly, bringing up a minute-by-minute record of her locator chip for the last twenty-four hours. Kate scrolled down to the point where Larissa had left Brenchley, and studied the subsequent lines of text and coordinates.

She came back through the hangar. Went to her quarters, then down to the cellblock, where she stayed for eleven minutes. Then back to her quarters, out through the hangar, and in a straight line west until her chip stopped transmitting.

Kate’s eyes settled on the line that listed the Level H cellblock. She knew full well that there were only two vampires currently being held down there: Marie Carpenter, who was perhaps the least likely person in the Loop that Larissa would decide to visit, and the third oldest vampire in the world.

Valentin, she thought. Why did she go and see Valentin? And what the hell did he say to her?

One floor below, Jamie sat on Kate’s bed, his foot tapping incessantly as he waited for his friend to return. He knew that waiting was the right thing to do – they needed to know more before he made the fuss that he was already itching to make – but doing so was frankly killing him.

She’s out there somewhere, he thought, as he checked the time on Kate’s bedside clock for the hundredth time. And there’s only one reason why her chip would have stopped transmitting.

Because she doesn’t want to be found.

He checked the clock again.

Twenty-six minutes.

That’s how long Kate had been gone.

It felt like hours.

Jamie checked his console again, hoping against hope that he would see a message from Larissa glowing on its screen. He knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t help himself; it made him feel like he was doing something, no matter how insignificant, and distracted him for a brief moment from the onslaught of accusation the guilty part of his brain was currently hurling at him.

Your fault! You drove her away! You ruined everything! Idiot! Loser! Failure!

He tried to ignore the howling voice, but couldn’t; it was, after all, absolutely right. He had driven her away, of that there could be no doubt; she had come back to the Loop after their fight and within an hour she had been gone. There was simply no way to even begin to pretend that the two events were not connected. It was his fault, plain and simple, and if he got the chance he would apologise to her until he lost his voice.

What if she’s gone for good? What if she’s never coming back?

Jamie shook his head. He could not allow himself to think like that. It was possible that Larissa was simply blowing off steam, that she had just needed to get away from everything, including him, for a little while. Maybe she had gone back to Nevada, where he knew she had been happy. Maybe a message would arrive from General Allen, telling them that she had gone to visit her friends at NS9 and would be home soon.

Then why would her chip have stopped transmitting?

“Shut up,” whispered Jamie. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

Footsteps echoed down the corridor, a rapid rhythm that would have been inaudible to anyone without his supernatural senses, and Jamie froze, listening for the telltale pause outside the door that would signal Kate’s return. The steps stopped, followed a second later by a beep and the whirring sound of locks drawing back. Jamie was on his feet before the door swung open, heat boiling into the corners of his eyes. Kate stepped into her quarters and recoiled.

“Jesus, Jamie,” she said. “Have you been standing there the whole time?”

“What did you find out?” he asked. He was aware that his voice was on the verge of becoming a growl, but was helpless to control it.

“I pulled her chip’s record,” said Kate. “She got back here just after eight thirty last night and left about forty minutes later. Other than her quarters, she only went to one place while she was here.”

“Where?” he asked.

“You have to promise me that you’re going to stay calm.”

“I can’t promise you that,” he said. “Where did she go, Kate?”

“To the cellblock,” said Kate. “She went to see Valentin.”

Jamie stared at her for long seconds, then strode across the room, and hauled the door open. His feet left the ground and he was halfway down the corridor before Kate managed to shout, “Wait!”

In his quarters on Level A, Paul Turner opened the message that had appeared on the screen of his console and frowned.

It was from Angela Darcy, announcing that she was back from the cellblock and had ordered the Security Division to officially list Larissa Kinley as AWOL while an investigation was conducted. Turner knew that the formal classification was merely procedural – he had no reason to believe that the vampire Operator represented any kind of threat to the Department – but her disappearance was a body blow nonetheless; with the exception of Valentin Rusmanov, whose loyalties were murky and changeable at best, as the morning’s developments were illustrating yet again, Larissa was the most powerful Operator in the Department and her loss would severely diminish Blacklight’s ability to respond to Dracula’s next move, whatever it was and whenever it came.

The news of Larissa’s disappearance had been a bad start to the day. Beyond the tactical problem it presented, Turner was also seriously concerned about the effect her disappearance was going to have on the morale of the Department.

There had been widespread distrust of her when she had accepted the offer to become the first vampire Operator in the Department’s long history but, while it had never entirely gone away, it had been dramatically reduced by Larissa’s role in repelling Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop and her performance at the Battle of Château Dauncy, in which she and Valentin Rusmanov had fought Dracula to a standstill. He knew there were still people in the Loop who were uneasy at the thought of a vampire Operator, and a small number who would simply never accept her, but he also knew that the majority had come to believe that they were better off with Larissa on their side than without.

Now she was gone, and he suspected that her disappearance would be yet another blow to the already fragile confidence of the Department he now led.

And there’s one thing that’s absolutely certain, he thought. Jamie and Kate and Matt are going to be devastated.

The relationship between Jamie Carpenter and Larissa Kinley – the descendant of the Founders and the vampire girl – was an endless source of whispered curiosity throughout the Loop. Turner had stood in the infirmary barely two weeks earlier as Larissa threatened to murder every Operator in the Department if the medical staff didn’t give her boyfriend the transfusion that would stop his turn taking place. Only Jamie’s intervention had calmed her down, and Turner knew that her disappearance was going to hit the teenager like a ton of bricks. They had been through so much together that he believed it would be hard, if not impossible, for Jamie to move on if she simply didn’t come back.

He wasn’t sure the same would go for Jamie’s best friend. Matt Browning was buried deeply in the endless grind of the Lazarus Project – too deeply in the opinion of most neutral observers – and Turner doubted that even the unexplained absence of his friend would prove anything more than a momentary distraction. It wasn’t that he believed that Matt wouldn’t care about Larissa being gone, or wouldn’t be worried about Jamie, but rather that he was so completely engrossed in his work that his remarkable brain would not be able to justify expending any of its prodigious capacity on something that he could do nothing about.

Kate Randall, on the other hand? On that score, Turner was far from certain. She had first-hand experience in dealing with loss, awful, dreadful experience that had first pushed the two of them together, and he knew how tough she was, how resilient and capable. But she was also devoted to her friends. He was sure there would be a part of her, the part she hid from almost everyone, that would wonder whether there had been anything she could have done, whether there had been signs and signals that she had missed, whether she had somehow failed Larissa when she needed her.

Turner found himself smiling as he thought about Kate, then felt a sharp pang of guilt stab at him. After he became Director, he had made the decision to allow some distance between himself and the teenage girl he had come to rely on. It was for her own good; her rapid rise to a position of influence within the Security Division had caused resentment, and he knew full well that there were many people inside the Loop who believed she had intentionally cultivated a close relationship with him or, even more unkindly, that he had given her special treatment because she had been in a relationship with his son when he died. If he kept her close now that he was Director, as he would have preferred to, the accusations, the belief that she was a teacher’s pet, that she was nothing more than his favourite would become ever more insistent.

Accusations which were complete bullshit.

In an ideal world, he would have made her Security Officer, and done so without the slightest hesitation; his job was to ensure that the vital roles inside Blacklight were filled by the best people, and Kate was simply that good. But the world was far from ideal, and it would have been an endless distraction that he, and Kate, did not need.

Especially not now, he thought. Not if Larissa really is gone.

The wall screen opposite his desk lit up as a loud tone rang out of the speakers, displaying an INCOMING CALL message. He read Angela Darcy’s name in the window and clicked ACCEPT.

“Sir?” asked the Security Officer.

“I’m here, Captain Darcy,” he replied. “What is it?”

“I need you to go online, sir. Right now.”

Turner frowned, and opened a browser window. “What site?” he asked.

“Any of them, sir,” said Angela.

The Director’s frown deepened. “Stay on the line,” he said, and typed the address for BBC News into the search bar. The site loaded, and a thick black BREAKING NEWS headline filled the screen, twelve words that stopped the breath in his lungs.

VIDEO MESSAGE SHOWS VAMPIRE CLAIMING TO BE DRACULA, ISSUES WARNING TO HUMANITY

Turner clicked on the headline. The page shifted to an article that was only two paragraphs long, with More to follow beneath them, but he paid the words no attention; his eye was drawn instantly to the video embedded at the top of the page. The rectangular box was black, with the words A MESSAGE at its centre. With a hand that had begun to almost imperceptibly tremble, Turner clicked PLAY.

The words faded away, replaced by a dimly lit shot of a seated figure. Turner felt his stomach lurch. Little more than the figure’s face was visible, but that was more than enough; the pale skin, the narrow features, the piercing eyes, the moustache and the long hair were instantly, awfully recognisable.

Dracula.

“Citizens of the world,” said the first vampire, his voice low and smooth. “I am Dracula, and I bring glad tidings for you all. You shall have the privilege of witnessing my rise, which is now at hand. It cannot be stopped, nor given pause. It is certain. It is as inevitable as the setting of the sun. Those of you who kneel may find me merciful. Those of you who oppose me will die. In time, I will speak again.”

The footage returned to black, before two words appeared that chilled Turner to his core; he had seen them so many times, in photographs and grainy phone footage, on walls and pavements across the country.

Turner let out a long, deep breath.

“Are you still there, Angela?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said the Security Officer.

“Get the Intelligence Division on this immediately,” he said. “Every single frame. I want them to find something that tells us where Dracula is. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did it first appear? The video?”

“Everywhere, sir,” said Angela. “It was posted from hundreds of different accounts on hundreds of sites at exactly the same time, twelve minutes ago, and it’s spreading faster than Surveillance can track it.”

“Assume I don’t understand the mechanics of online distribution,” said Turner. “Could that have been one person scheduling the release under aliases, or is it hundreds of people acting at the same time?”

“It could have been either, sir,” said the Security Officer. “It was highly organised, whichever it was.”

“Clearly,” he said. “Which makes me wonder what else is being planned that we don’t know about.”

“Yes, sir,” said Angela. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“In terms of the Department, nothing yet,” he replied. “I don’t want to issue new orders or change the SOPs until we have more information. But I want you to stay in close contact with the police and the Intelligence Services. The public are already scared and paranoid, and this is only going to make things worse.”

“Understood, sir.”

“All right,” said Turner. “Message everyone in the Loop, then play the video on every screen. Let’s make sure everyone sees it and try to move past it as quickly as possible. Out.”

He reached out and clicked END CALL. There was a low beep as the connection was severed, then silence.

Jamie heard Kate shout for him to wait as he rocketed along the Level B corridor, but ignored her.

He banked to the right, past the metal doors of the lift, and crashed through the door that accessed the emergency staircase, a shaft of concrete and metal that descended all the way to the very bottom of the Loop. The door was ripped off its hinges and clattered to the ground, but Jamie didn’t pause; he spun up over the metal banister and shot down the shaft between the spiralling stairs like a bullet from a gun.

Concrete staircases and doors marked with letters flew past in a blur as the distant ground rose up to meet him. At the very last moment, the point at which it seemed that he must surely crash into the unforgiving concrete, Jamie pivoted in the air and slowed his descent, his arms wide, his eyes blazing. He landed silently in front of a door marked with an H and hauled it open.

He emerged in front of the airlock that controlled access to the long supernatural cellblock. He pressed his ID card against the panel beside the airlock door and waited as it slid slowly open. As the billowing cloud of gas passed over him and the inner door opened, he allowed a brief smile to rise on to his face; part of him had suspected that Kate would have already disabled his access, given that there had been no doubt where he was going.

Jamie exited the airlock, took a brief moment to compose himself, and strode towards his destination; the fourth cell on the right, the home of Valentin Rusmanov. Kate’s voice shouted in his head as he approached the ultraviolet wall that enclosed it, pleading with him to stay calm, to not do anything stupid, but he barely heard it over the torrent of furious panic that was roaring through him.

What did you do, you old monster? What did you say to her?

He stopped in front of the purple barrier and looked into the cell. Valentin Rusmanov was sitting in a chair near the back of the room, his legs crossed at the ankles, a paperback book in his hands. He was looking directly at Jamie.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said the old vampire. “What an entirely expected surprise. How are you?”

“What did you say to her?” growled Jamie. “Tell me right now.”

Valentin got slowly to his feet, stretched his long arms above his head, and regarded him with a wide smile.

“I assume you are referring to Miss Kinley,” he said. “In which case, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you. I don’t disclose the content of private conversations.”

Jamie took a step forward, his eyes flaming red. “What did you do?”

“I did nothing but listen, and talk,” said Valentin. “I assume she has left this charming facility?”

“You know she has,” said Jamie.

“Actually, I didn’t,” said Valentin. “Might I enquire as to why you are so clearly angry with me?”

“Why?” asked Jamie, his voice a low rumble of thunder. “Why the hell do you think? She came down here to talk to you and twenty minutes later she disappeared halfway around the world. That’s why.”

“I see,” said Valentin. “You have my sympathies, as I have no doubt you will miss her greatly. But if you are blaming me for her departure, then I’m afraid you are somewhat overestimating my influence. I would suggest you consider why Miss Kinley might have wanted to leave, why she might not have been entirely happy with the status quo. I suspect that will be a more productive use of your time.”

“Everyone thought you’d changed,” said Jamie. “You’ve been down here for months like a rat in a cage, telling us to believe you, telling us that you’re on our side, but you’re not, are you? You don’t give a shit about anyone apart from yourself.”

“I think Miss Kinley would disagree with that assessment,” said Valentin. “Maybe you should ask her. If you ever see her again, that is.”

The old vampire’s words cut through Jamie like a scalpel. He stared at Valentin, hatred pumping through his veins, filling his body with fire.

“You disgust me,” he growled. “I thought you were better than this. I trusted you.”

Valentin’s smile returned. “Silly boy,” he said.

The fire inside Jamie flickered and died, replaced by a misery so overwhelming it almost drove him to his knees. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, trying to squeeze shut the chasm of loss that had yawned open in his stomach, to push it closed and down and away.

“Jamie.”

He didn’t move; he focused only on the pain, on the grief that was threatening to paralyse him.

“Jamie. Look at me.”

He took a deep breath, raised his head, and opened his eyes. Valentin was standing directly in front of him, the ultraviolet barrier all that separated them.

“What?” he managed.

“I’m not going to tell you what Larissa and I discussed,” said Valentin, his tone softer, kinder than it had been. “It was a private conversation, and it’s none of your business, to put it bluntly. But if you think I manipulated her in some way, then I don’t think you know her very well at all. And if you think this is all about you, then I would suggest you need to get your ego under control. There are things that happen in this world that have nothing to do with you.”

“Did you tell her to leave?” asked Jamie, his voice on the verge of cracking. “Just answer me that. Did you tell her to go?”

“I won’t tell you what was said, Jamie, no matter how many times you ask.”

“I know you have a house in New York,” he said. “Larissa’s chip stopped transmitting over the Atlantic. Is that where she is? Did you send her there?”

“Please, Jamie,” said Valentin. “This desperation is undignified. The Security Officer has the addresses of all of my residences, including the house in Manhattan. I’m sure that will be the first place they look for her.”

“You talked to Angela about this?” asked Jamie. “She knew Larissa was gone?”

Valentin nodded. “We spoke about fifteen minutes ago. Do you know what her answer was when I asked her why she was so keen to find Miss Kinley?”

“No,” said Jamie. “What did Angela say?”

“Her exact words were, ‘She’s our most powerful weapon.’”

“So what?”

Valentin smiled softly. “So maybe she didn’t want to be,” he said.

Jamie grimaced; it felt like he had been punched in the stomach. He stared silently at the old vampire for a long, empty moment, then turned away without a word and walked back down the cellblock.

He stood in the airlock, his shoulders slumped, his head lowered, his eyes closed. When the gas cleared, the outer door slid open, and he stepped out. He stood still, trying to compose himself, to slow his racing mind and think, think about what he should do now. In front of him, the metal doors of the lift parted silently and Kate appeared, her eyes wide with worry.

“Jamie?” she said. “Are you all right?”

He shook his lowered head.

“Jamie, look at me,” she said, stepping forward and taking hold of his shoulders. He did so, and saw concern in her eyes, saw clear, bright love. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “He wouldn’t tell me what he said to her. Wouldn’t tell me where she is. He knows, though. I know he does.”

Kate winced. “I’m sorry, Jamie,” she said.

He forced a tiny smile. “Everyone’s sorry. Me most of all.”

“You can’t make this all about you,” said Kate, her tone suddenly strict and forceful. “She’s a grown woman, not a petulant kid. She wouldn’t leave the country just because the two of you had a fight.”

“That’s how it feels,” said Jamie.

“I’m sure it does,” said Kate. “But you know how she’s been since she got back from Nevada. You know she hasn’t been happy with Blacklight, with what she was expected to do. She had doubts about it all, Jamie, serious moral objections to this whole thing. Maybe they got too much for her.”

“Maybe,” he said, as a lump rose into his throat. “But what if our relationship was one of the things that she thought it was worth sticking around for? What if it was why she was still here and I took it away from her?”

Kate stared at him, and said nothing.

“She’s gone,” he said. “What if she doesn’t come back, Kate? Where does that leave us? Where does it leave me?”

Kate stepped forward and wrapped her arms round him. Jamie let his head rest on her shoulder, but as he allowed his eyes to close he was acutely aware that she had not answered his questions.

A deafening crackle of static burst out of the speakers set along the corridor walls; the two friends sprang apart as Angela Darcy’s amplified voice replaced it.

“This is a Priority 1 announcement,” said the Security Officer. “Please direct your attention to the nearest screen.”

The Level H atrium was one of the few places in the entire Loop that didn’t contain a single wall screen. Jamie silently screamed at the Department’s apparent refusal to allow him even a single uninterrupted minute to himself, and pulled his console from his belt. He accessed the Blacklight network as Kate stood beside him and peered down at the screen, the look on her face suggesting that she was asking herself the same question that was filling his own mind.

What now? For the love of God, what now?

CIVILIAN MEDIA EXTRACT

Ref: 399252/F

Source: The Manchester Post

Date: 2nd May

EXTRACT BEGINS

PM CONFIRMS EXISTENCE OF BLACKLIGHT

John Ballance, Political Editor, Westminster

In a specially convened session of the House of Commons yesterday afternoon, the Prime Minister confirmed to packed benches that the secret organisation commonly referred to in the press as Blacklight is real, and enjoys his “full faith and confidence”.

Reading from a prepared statement, the Prime Minister confirmed that the clandestine unit is officially named Department 19, and that its operation is overseen directly by his office and the senior hierarchy of the Ministry of Defence, placing it in a similar position to the SAS and SBS – a military organisation with the same levels of secrecy as the Intelligence Services.

Calls by backbenchers for Department 19 to be subject to greater transparency and accountability were given short shrift by the Prime Minister, who stated that the organisation must be allowed to continue unheeded with its remit of protecting the public from threats relating to the supernatural.

The Leader of the Opposition criticised the Prime Minister’s statement, claiming that “it raised more questions than it answered”, while a senior government backbencher was quoted by the BBC as saying that, in his opinion, “a secret military organisation with an all-too-real licence to kill conducting operations against British citizens is incompatible with a civilised democracy”.

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Ref: 401132/B

Source: The London Record

Date: 30th May

EXTRACT BEGINS

VAMPIRES PETITION EUROPEAN BODIES FOR MINORITY STATUS, CRIMINAL CHARGES

Julian Dawes, Senior Political Correspondent, Strasbourg

A petition was last night presented to the European Court of Human Rights that seeks to have ‘vampire’ officially recognised as an ethnic minority group. The legal status of the supernatural has been widely debated in recent weeks, following an announcement by the G8 countries in which they confirmed their position that vampires retain the nationalities they held before they were turned, along with any restrictions those nationalities may entail.

A parallel petition to the International Criminal Court at The Hague requested that Department 19 (UK), National Security Division 9 (USA), and similar organisations around the world be investigated for possible charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Major Paul Turner (UK), General Robert Allen (USA), and Colonel Aleksandr Ovechkin (Russia) were among those named in the petition, although the identities of individuals who work or have worked for any of the listed organisations have never been publicly confirmed.

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CIVILIAN MEDIA EXTRACT

Ref: 403019/C

Source: The New York Register

Date: 25th June

EXTRACT BEGINS

BEIJING BREAKS SILENCE – ADMITS VAMPIRES ARE REAL

Alan Horner, International Affairs Correspondent, New York

The Chinese government in Beijing today issued a statement formally recognising the existence of vampires and reassuring Chinese citizens that their safety remains the regime’s highest priority. The statement leaves North Korea as the only nation not to have officially recognised the existence of the supernatural.

The statement, which had been widely expected after a draft document leaked online over the weekend, stopped short of acknowledging the existence of PBS6, heavily rumoured to be the Chinese equivalent of the USA’s NS9. Chinese citizens were urged to report all incidents of a supernatural nature to the police.

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Ref: 405102/F

Source: www.newsonline.co.uk

Date: 19th July

EXTRACT BEGINS

EXCLUSIVE! THE SSL FOUNDERS SPEAK OUT IN THEIR ONLY INTERVIEW

The internet has been buzzing for the last twenty-four hours, following the announcement of the formation of the Supernatural Survivors League, which the mainstream media is already referring to as the Samaritans for the supernatural.

Much of that buzz has been about the two men who founded the organisation, Greg Browning and Pete Randall. Why, you ask? Because both men were already notorious for their rumoured involvement in Kevin McKenna’s now infamous posthumous article, widely considered to have been the first crack in the wall of secrecy surrounding the existence of the supernatural.

As regular visitors to this site will be aware, our Features Editor Dan Bennett has shown great bravery in writing about the impact of the supernatural on his own family, in particular his sister Catherine, who is still missing after being attacked by a vampire two years ago in Melbourne. As a result, it came as no surprise to us that Randall and Browning chose to give their ONLY interview to Dan. We proudly present their conversation in full, unedited and unexpurgated.

DB: Pete, Greg. Thanks for doing this. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

PR: Cheers, Dan. And I’d just like to say how sorry we both are for your loss.

GB: Absolutely.

DB: Thank you. And I guess that’s as good a place to start as any. Can you tell me how your personal experiences with the supernatural led to the founding of SSL?

GB: Sure. It involves telling you something that we’ve thought long and hard about whether we should tell anyone, but here goes. Approximately nine months ago, my son Matt, and Pete’s daughter Kate, were brainwashed by the group that calls itself Blacklight, and coerced into joining them. So, for starters, that’s why SSL is different from—

DB: Hang on. I’m sorry to interrupt, but are you saying that you both have children who are serving members of Blacklight?

PR: That’s right.

DB: How do you know that? My understanding is that Blacklight Operators aren’t allowed to tell anyone what they do.

GB: We believe that’s the case.

DB: So how do you know?

PR: It’s a long story, Dan. Greg and I first met online, when neither of us was in a very good place. I’m a survivor of the vampire attack on Lindisfarne, and at the time I was grieving for Kate. She went missing during the attack, and the police told me to assume she was dead. I watched them cover it all up and was ordered never to talk about what had happened. So I started searching for other people who were in the same boat as me, and I met Greg on a forum for people who’d survived vampire encounters. Everyone on there was nervous, paranoid even, but it was instantly clear to me that some of them had seen the same things I had. And I knew I wasn’t alone.

GB: I was grieving too, although I didn’t know whether Matt was alive or dead. I’m still not supposed to talk about any of it, even now, but I don’t give a shit any more. A vampire fell out of the sky into my garden, and Blacklight stormed our house, pointed guns at my family, brought scientists in protective suits to collect the vamp. My son got hurt, badly hurt, and they took him with them. Didn’t say anything to us, didn’t tell us where they were taking him. They just packed him into one of their helicopters and took off.

DB: That’s incredible. I mean, that’s kidnapping, surely? It’s hard to believe something like that can happen in a supposedly civilised country.

GB: Supposedly is right. Anyway. Afterwards, my life fell apart. Matt’s mother and I, we’d had some problems, and his disappearance, and what we’d seen, just brought them all to a head, and she left me. Then one day, completely out of the blue, Matt came back. He couldn’t tell me where he’d been, but he was safe, and he was home, and that was all that mattered to me. But two days later he was gone again, for good this time.

DB: Gone where?

GB: Back to them. They’d got into his head while they had him, filled it up with God knows what. They let him go, and he went straight back to them. I know that now.

DB: How come?

PR: We saw them with our own eyes. After what happened last year, in Reading. A Blacklight squad arrested us, and Matt and Kate were part of it. I’m sure they weren’t supposed to let us know it was them, but they did. We saw them, and actually talked to them for a little while. Then their bosses sent us home, and warned us not to tell anyone what we’d seen.

DB: Jesus. OK, so you mentioned Reading. You’re referring to your roles in the publication of Kevin McKenna’s final story?

PR: Right. Ever since Greg and I got to know each other, we’ve looked for ways to make a difference. But we trusted somebody we shouldn’t have, and we made a terrible mistake.

GB: We were misled. Afterwards, we both wondered whether we should just keep our heads down, you know? But neither of us could do it. We’d seen so much. And people needed to know the truth.

PR: I don’t mind admitting that after McKenna’s story came out, I was scared for a long time. Blacklight threatened us with prison when they let us go, and we didn’t know whether we were making things harder for Kate and Matt.

GB: But then Gideon went on TV, and everything changed. We saw a chance to do something.

DB: And you definitely took it. So what exactly are the aims of SSL?

PR: We don’t have aims as such. This isn’t a political movement, it doesn’t have a cause. What we hope to provide is a sympathetic ear for people who have been hurt by the supernatural, directly or indirectly.

GB: And I think our own experiences with Blacklight are what set us apart from the other vampire support groups that are out there—

PR: —although some of them do excellent work—

GB: —right, sure. But SSL is for anyone whose life has been affected by any aspect of the supernatural, including the people who are supposed to protect us from them.

DB: So what can someone who calls SSL expect?

PR: Someone who’ll listen to them. And believe them. And won’t judge them.

GB: I should make it clear that SSL is more than just a helpline. That’s an important part of it, but we also have programmes that will be going live over the next few months that we believe will make a real difference to the public, both humans and vampires. We’re going to be offering safe sources of blood, ultraviolet torches and bulbs for people to protect themselves with. The helpline is just the beginning.

DB: SSL is a registered charity.

PR: Right.

DB: But in your statement you announced that you won’t be taking donations from the public. Why not?

GB: Because we don’t need them. We have a board of directors and a number of private individuals who have been extremely generous in helping us get started. If at some point the financial situation changes, then we’ll look at it. But, for now, we don’t want people’s money. We’d rather they kept it in their pockets.

DB: Let me ask you both a blunt question. Do you hate vampires?

GB: I just told you that we’re going to be running programmes designed to make the lives of vampires easier, so let me be very clear. SSL is absolutely not an anti-vampire group. It’s a victim-support group.

DB: Right. I hear you. But given what you’ve been through, I guess a better way to phrase my question would be: how can you not hate vampires?

PR: Because we don’t believe that they’re inherently evil. Many of them are victims themselves, turned against their will.

DB: So if a vampire wanted to volunteer with SSL, he or she would be welcome?

GB: Absolutely.

DB: What about Blacklight? What are your feelings towards them?

PR: SSL doesn’t believe that a highly armed military unit operating in secrecy is a good thing for the country.

DB: Come on. Get real. What do the two of you really think?

GB: They kidnapped my son and brainwashed him into a bloody stormtrooper. What do you think I think?

DB: I would assume you’re angry with them.

GB: And you’d be right.

DB: So what would you say to those commentators who are calling SSL a personal crusade? Who claim that your motivation for founding it is revenge against Blacklight?

PR: That’s completely ridiculous. As we’ve already said, this is not a lobbying organisation or a pressure group. It’s a way for us to reach out to people whose lives have been touched by darkness and let them know they’re not alone. It’s as simple as that.

DB: And I wish you the very best of luck with it. Thank you both for your time.

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CIVILIAN MEDIA EXTRACT

Ref: 409043/A

Source: The London Record

Date: 6th August

EXTRACT BEGINS

RIOTING BREAKS OUT AS ICC RULES THAT BLACKLIGHT WILL NOT FACE CHARGES

Julian Dawes, Senior Political Correspondent, London

Armed police were called to deal with rioting in more than a dozen European cities overnight, following the International Criminal Court in The Hague’s announcement that it would not be pursuing charges against Blacklight, its international equivalents, or any individuals for either genocide or crimes against humanity. The verdict was met with violent protests outside the court, and triggered a wave of unrest across the continent that only ended with the rising of the sun. Professor David Albright, who has campaigned for vampire rights and co-authored the petition that was presented to the ICC, spoke to the media on the steps of the court.

“This is a dark day for European democracy,” said Albright. “For more than a century, secret death squads have been carrying out summary executions of men and women guilty of nothing more than being vampires, without affording them due process, or legal counsel. History will view this as the secret holocaust of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a holocaust that the International Criminal Court is now a party to.”

Authorities in all major European cities have placed police and emergency services on high alert, in anticipation of further unrest as the sun sets this evening.

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Source: The National Recorder

Date: 6th September

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ALLEGED FORMER HEAD OF BLACKLIGHT RETIRES ON MEDICAL GROUNDS

Kimberley Dennison, News Editor, London

Buried deep in a Ministry of Defence bulletin released online yesterday morning, among the regular schedules of public events and awarded medals, was a small, seemingly innocuous announcement that read as follows:

The Royal Navy announces the medical discharge and retirement of Admiral Henry Seward (GCB(Mil), OM(Mil), DSO) after thirty-four years of distinguished service to his country. Admiral Seward is a recipient of the Military Cross, the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, and more than two dozen other awards and decorations. Ad perpetuam rei memoriam.

Less than fifteen minutes later, however, the bulletin had been updated, and Admiral Seward’s retirement announcement removed. Why? Why would the Royal Navy remove a tribute to such a highly decorated member of their ranks? Was it a premature announcement? Was it removed at the request of the man himself? Or was it because Admiral Henry Seward has been named by multiple witnesses, both human and vampire, as a former Director of Department 19?

Let us consider the facts: firstly, the name. One of the most popular theories to have emerged since V-Day is the belief that the contents of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, notably its main characters, were real. This has proven problematic as, with the exception of the Hon. Arthur Holmwood, who was a notable public figure of the time, no records have ever been found of Jonathan Harker, Abraham Van Helsing, or any of the other men and women described in the novel. Those inclined towards the conspiratorial insist that all such records were destroyed when Blacklight was founded, although this correspondent finds that explanation somewhat hard to swallow. Nonetheless, if one is inclined to believe, as has been widely claimed, that Blacklight has evolved over the decades and centuries under the stewardship of the descendants of a small group of founding fathers, then the name Seward is clearly of significance.

Secondly, the Admiral’s record. The decorations listed include three of the highest honours that this country bestows – the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath, the Order of Merit, and the Distinguished Service Order. These honours make Henry Seward one of the most highly decorated Royal Navy officers of the last half a century. But nobody that I have spoken to today, either in Whitehall or at Portsmouth, has been able to provide me with a single detail of the Admiral’s career – not a posting, a ship, or even a personal anecdote. To put it bluntly, nobody has ever heard of him.

Could that be because the Admiral spent his career in the shadowy, highly classified world of Blacklight? It’s likely that we, the public, will never know, at least not with any certainty. But one thing is clear – as Department 19 is dragged, slowly and unwillingly, into the light, Henry Seward’s will not be the last name subjected to close scrutiny in relation to this country’s defence against the supernatural. In the meantime, all that remains is for this correspondent to wish the Admiral a happy and peaceful retirement, hopefully with nary a vampire to be seen …

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Source: The South Yorkshire Herald

Date: 29th September

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NEW ‘NIGHT STALKER’ ATTACK INCREASES TENSION IN MIDLANDS

Robert Viner, Senior Correspondent, Sheffield

A vampire was killed last night on the outskirts of Nottingham in an attack that bears similarities to the so-called ‘Night Stalker’ killings that have blighted the Midlands over the last month.

The victim was killed in a warehouse in the Trent Bridge area of Nottingham, his remains marked in the same way as the nine previous victims – a wolf’s head sprayed on to them with white paint. Previous vampire victims attributed to the ‘Night Stalker’ have had the front doors of their homes vandalised in the same way, in what has been interpreted by many as a reference to symbols painted on medieval dwellings to mark the presence of plague.

The identity of only a single one of the ‘Night Stalker’ victims has been released to the public – Albert Matheson, a convicted child molester who had been living in the Kimberley area under an assumed name. Nottinghamshire Police have confirmed that they believe they are looking for a single individual, although they have not ruled out the possibility of copycat attacks. They have appealed for anyone with information regarding last night’s incident to contact them immediately.

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Jamie Carpenter walked along the corridor of Level 0 towards a meeting he no longer saw any point in.

The Zero Hour Task Force had been created specifically to deal with Dracula, and to attempt to prevent the passing of the Intelligence Division’s best estimate of when the first vampire would regain his full strength, the implication being that unless he was stopped before then, it would be unlikely he could be stopped at all.

Zero Hour had been six months ago.

Jamie reached the Ops Room, laid a hand on its door, and took a deep breath, steeling himself against the next thirty minutes or so. There had been a time when he had been proud to be a member of the Task Force, working on matters of the very highest priority alongside people he had respected. But Henry Seward was gone, Cal Holmwood was dead, he no longer spoke to Frankenstein, and Richard Brennan had turned out to be a spy who had tried to assassinate Kate and Paul Turner before he too had died. The Zero Hour briefings, once so full of purpose, had become meetings of misery, of decline and failure.

The release of Dracula’s video had initially shocked them, then given them momentary hope that it might provide clues to the first vampire’s location. But it had led nowhere, despite painstaking analysis of every frame; there had been nothing in the video to suggest where he was or what he might do next, and every other line of enquiry had turned as cold as ice. As a result, Jamie no longer believed there was any chance of finding Dracula before he wanted to be found, and was far from alone in that opinion. And with no updates on the vampire the Task Force had been created to stop, the Zero Hour briefings were now usually full of the terrible things that the public were routinely doing to vampires, and to each other.

The revelation of the existence of the supernatural had unleashed a wave of chaos and violence, one that showed no signs of abating. Patrol Responds, the routine missions that had once seen Operational Squads hunting down and destroying vampires, had become exercises in policing the human population as they hacked and clawed at each other, fear and paranoia hijacking their reason. On a seemingly daily basis, the government called for calm, the supernatural integration groups called for harmony, and those vampires who had been brave enough to put their heads above the parapet tried to explain to the frightened populace that the overwhelming majority of their kind were not dangerous.

But more than six months after V-Day, as the date of Gideon’s explosive appearance on Coffee Break had become known, the violence continued to escalate, and nobody seemed to have a clue how to stop it.

Jamie pushed open the door and nodded at the men and women already sitting around the Ops Room table. He spotted an empty seat next to Kate, avoided Frankenstein’s uneven gaze, and sat down at the same moment as Paul Turner got to his feet and walked to the lectern at the front of the room.

“Zero Hour Task Force now in session,” said the Director. “Apologies from Lieutenant Browning and Major Van Thal, good morning to the rest of you.”

There was a chorus of muttered greetings and a ripple of nodded heads.

“There’s nothing major that needs covering this morning, so I’ll keep it quick,” continued Turner. “Firstly, I’m—”

“You’re pleased to report that Dracula was successfully located and destroyed overnight?” suggested Angela Darcy.

Turner gave her a cold stare, then smiled and shook his head as the rest of the Task Force burst out laughing. And for a brief moment, the dull pain that had taken up residence inside Jamie’s chest was replaced by a bittersweet feeling of nostalgia. This was how it had been at the beginning, when he was first introduced into a world full of the fantastic and the terrifying, when the camaraderie of the Department had filled a hole in him that he had believed unfillable. The darkness had always lurked outside, but inside there had been laughter, and light.

Now all that remained was the darkness.

Most of the time, at least.

“Very amusing, Captain,” said Turner.

“Thank you, sir,” said Angela. “I do my best.”

“Clearly,” said Turner. “Anyway. As I was about to say, this afternoon I will be circulating the latest collection of statistics and reports that Surveillance and Intelligence have put together. They don’t make for particularly pleasant reading, but it is more important than ever that we fully understand what’s happening beyond the borders of the Loop. There will be a full briefing tomorrow, but in the meantime it goes without saying that I expect you to keep your teams informed, and maintain morale.”

Jamie’s good humour disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

That’s a joke, he thought. Surely it is. There’s no morale left to maintain. Most of the time it feels like fear of being court-martialled is the only thing stopping half the Department doing exactly what Larissa did.

Jamie winced as the pain rushed back to him. Where possible, he tried not to think of her, and had become better and better at not doing so as the months had passed, as it had become ever clearer that she was not coming back. But when someone said her name, or his mind unexpectedly drew her from his memory, the wound that he doubted would ever heal gaped open, raw and bloody. It was another reason that the Zero Hour briefings were always hard: her absence was impossible to ignore.

“As ever,” continued Turner, “my advice is that you not dwell unnecessarily on things beyond your control. We do what we can and we keep going, like always. Moving on, I have an update from the Security Division regarding the continuing search for—”

Something came loose inside Jamie, demanding release as heat rose behind his eyes. “What’s the point?” he heard himself ask. “Really, just what the hell is the point, sir?”

Turner narrowed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant?” he said.

“Dracula’s gone,” said Jamie. “It doesn’t matter how many updates we get from Security, we still don’t have a clue where he is or what he’s planning. We’re only going to know what his move is when he actually makes it, and by then it’ll be too late. And while we wait for that to happen, the people out there are tearing each other to pieces and it seems like all we can do is stick our finger in the dam and hope it holds. So I’ll ask again, sir. What’s the point?”

He stared at the Director, refusing to drop his eyes from Turner’s famously glacial gaze, and waited for the explosion. Part of him was looking forward to it; he was hopeful it might make him feel something, even just for a moment.

But it didn’t come.

Turner stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “That’s a good question, Jamie,” he said. “And I wish I had a good answer for you. For all of you. I wish I had a speech that would make you feel better, that would fill you with fire and fury and send you on your way with nothing but righteous faith in your hearts. But Cal was far better at that sort of thing than I am. All I can tell you is the truth. So yes, things are bad. Despite our best efforts, they’re as bad as I’ve ever known them. Dracula’s move will come, sooner or later, and although many of the men and women in this base, perhaps even some of you in this room, believe that it’s too late to stop him, I don’t. I can’t. When the day comes, when we’re called to fight again, I will expect every member of the Department to be ready. So feel frustrated by all means, feel angry and helpless and like everything is pointless. Then deal with it, put it aside, and do your jobs. For now, that’s all we can do.”

Jamie stared at the Director as silence fell over the Ops Room.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Angela Darcy, eventually, a wide grin on her face. “As speeches go, that one wasn’t too shabby.”

Laughter rippled around the table, and Jamie felt a small smile rise on to his face.

“Thank you,” said Turner. “I’m delighted to have your approval. Now if I might be allowed to continue with this briefing?”

Pete Randall shoved his chair back from his desk and looked out of the window of his office. The view was an unappetising panorama of industrial units, roads and roundabouts, and low suburban sprawl. In the distance, above the angled roofs of houses and squat grey blocks of shopping malls, rose the spire of Lincoln Cathedral, its beautifully carved stone incongruous against the landscape it overlooked.

More than two months had passed since Pete had accepted Greg Browning’s invitation to move south and help him launch SSL, and the view was one of the things he was finding hardest to adjust to. From his study in the house he had once shared with his wife and daughter, Pete had looked out across the shoreline of Lindisfarne to an endlessly churning grey-blue strip of the North Sea and the rugged coastline of Northumberland. He had taken the spectacular vista for granted after long years on the island, but now, faced every day with a grey urban expanse, he realised how much he missed it.

He had not instantly said yes to Greg; in fact, he had made him wait more than a week for his decision. After the nightmarish days the two of them had spent with Albert Harker and Kevin McKenna and the bittersweet relief at seeing his daughter alive – even if she was wearing the black uniform of Blacklight – he had returned to Lindisfarne and tried to make sense of everything that had happened. He didn’t blame Greg; they had been deceived and manipulated by a monster, and although the method had ultimately veered into madness, he would always believe that the end result of their time with Harker and McKenna had been worthwhile. They had forced the world to open their eyes to vampires, and to the hateful soldiers who policed them, and he would always be proud of that.

It did not, however, mean that he was keen to involve himself again, and he had said as much to Greg when he rang with the proposal that had become SSL.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I’m in, on two conditions. Firstly, I don’t want there to be anything I don’t know. I won’t work in the dark again, like we did with Kevin, so, if there’s anything you’re not telling me, I want to know about it right now, before we go any further. Is that clear?”

“Clear,” said Greg. “That’s absolutely fair, mate. And there is something. The funding for SSL is coming from a series of charitable foundations, backed by private donors who wish to remain anonymous. Which means I can’t tell you the names of the people writing the cheques, because I honestly don’t know them. If that’s going to be a problem for you, I understand, but it’s the only thing I can think of that you don’t know. There’s loads of stuff that still needs working out, but if you come on board you’ll be making those decisions with me. You’ll be in the loop on absolutely everything, I promise.”

“All right,” said Pete. “That’s fine.”

“Great,” said Greg. “What’s the second condition?”

“I want you to promise me that this has nothing to do with revenge,” said Pete. “That it’s not about Matt, or how much you hate Blacklight and the way they treated us. Because if it is, you’re on your own. I won’t say anything to anyone, but I won’t be a part of it. I’m done with all that, Greg.”

“Me too,” said his friend. “I’m not angry any more, mate, I promise you. All I want to do is try and help.”

“I believe you,” said Pete. “So what’s the next move?”

“I’m taking office space in Lincoln,” said Greg. “You can work remotely if you want, but to be honest, it would be good to have you down here in person. What do you think?”

“I think I can handle it,” said Pete. “Let me sort some things out up here. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days.”

Pete roused himself from his memories and returned his attention to his computer. He was reviewing the entire log of calls made to their helpline, aware that it was almost time for him to help Greg welcome the latest batch of volunteers. The public response to SSL had so far been beyond their wildest expectations; the projections they had given to their board had predicted three hundred calls a day by this point.

The previous day, they had taken nine hundred and twelve.

The phone operators were working incessantly, starting early and staying late for no reason other than faith in what they were doing. The blood drives, where SSL volunteers took fresh, clean blood from slaughterhouses into communities and made it available to any vampire that wanted it, were also proving massively popular; in Birmingham two nights earlier, they had run out of blood in less than two hours. Pete was in the process of trying to secure more stocks as Greg worked to bring in new volunteers, both for the main Lincoln office and to run the regional projects; after barely three months, SSL already needed every pair of hands it could find.

What struck Pete most as he scanned through the call logs was how often the same names appeared, time and time again. SSL did not record transcripts of the calls it received – they had promised their callers anonymity, and Pete was adamant that they adhere to it – but each call did have a number of acronyms marked against it. Some were obvious – a capital V for vampire, a capital H for human – whereas others were harder to decipher: SI for suicidal ideation, TTCH for threatening to cause harm, ATHK for admits to having killed, and many, many others. Most callers did not identify themselves in any way, but perhaps as many as fifteen per cent gave their names; it seemed to Pete, from the acronyms beside those particular calls, that they were largely men and women who were dealing with crushing guilt, who were searching for absolution. The phone calls he was looking at represented probably the only chance vampires had to speak openly about the things they had done, about the life that had been thrust upon them.

Pete scrolled through the log list, and paused. A name halfway down the fifth page had caught his eye, a name that seemed familiar. He realised why at the same moment Greg Browning knocked on his office door and stepped through it.

“Morning, mate,” he said. “Ready?”

“Morning,” said Pete. “Come in for a second.”

Greg frowned, but closed the door and walked across the office. “What’s up?” he asked.

Pete pointed at the name on the screen. “Recognise him?”

“Albert Matheson,” read Greg out loud. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Should it?”

“Not really,” said Pete. “He was the vamp the Night Stalker killed a couple of months ago. I read about him at the time.”

“No shit?” said Greg. “ATHK too. I guess he was confessing.”

“He was a convicted child molester,” said Pete. “He probably had a lot to confess.”

Greg shrugged. “Poor bastard,” he said. “Does it bother you, mate? That he’s dead, I mean? Because given what’s going on out there, he probably won’t be the last vamp who calls us and ends up getting killed.”

“I know that,” said Pete. “And no, it doesn’t bother me. It was just weird to see his name on the call log.”

“Weird,” said Greg, and nodded. “Close that down, mate. It’s time to meet the new recruits.”

Pete rolled his eyes and got up from his desk. He followed Greg out into the open-plan centre of SSL, full of people talking into phones and concentrating intently on computer screens. As they made their way across the space, several of the volunteers looked up and nodded; Pete nodded back, smiled, and stepped through the door in the corner of the office that his friend was holding open for him.

Standing at one end of the small boardroom was the latest group of men and women who had volunteered to be a part of SSL. There were eleven of them; they were mostly young, apart from a couple of middle-aged women and one man who looked to be in his sixties, at least. They all appeared nervous, and Pete moved quickly to calm them down.

“Morning, everyone,” he said. “I’m Pete Randall, and you’ve already met Greg Browning. Thank you all for volunteering to help us out here at SSL. We appreciate it more than you can imagine.” He watched smiles rise on to several of the new volunteers’ faces and continued. “I’m not going to go over why Greg and I founded SSL, or what we’re trying to do here, because I’m going to assume you wouldn’t be here unless you already knew what we’re about. What I am going to tell you is that what we do here is really, really important. The existence of the supernatural is the biggest social issue to hit this country in many decades, quite possibly the biggest there has ever been, and everybody’s struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Including us.

“As you know, the second S in our name stands for Survivors. It’s a big word, and to us it means anyone who has been adversely affected by an experience with the supernatural. We’re not just talking about people who have been attacked, or whose family or friends have been killed. We’re also talking about vampires themselves, the majority of whom never wanted to be turned and are simply trying to get through each day without doing any harm. They are survivors too, of a monstrous violation. At SSL, we view everyone equally, we don’t prioritise humans over vampires, and we don’t judge anyone for the things they might have done. Ever. Is that clear?”

The volunteers nodded as one.

“Good,” he said. “Those of you who work the phones are going to hear things that will upset you, that will probably make you angry. You need to be prepared for that. And those of you who work in our outreach teams are going to come face to face with things that are frightening, possibly even terrifying. It’s hard work, and it’s not always popular, I warn you now. There are plenty of people out there who think that there should be no help or sympathy for any vampire, so be careful who you tell that you work here. ‘Vamp sympathiser’ can be a dangerous label to be stuck with. So if you decide that SSL isn’t for you, we won’t think any less of you, I promise. But if you stay, you’ll have not only our gratitude, but the gratitude of everyone who wants the world to be a better place than it is.”

Pete stopped, and surveyed the group. He had given the same speech at least a dozen times in the last fortnight, and was pleased to see it have the same effect it always did; the nervousness on the faces of the volunteers was gone, replaced by clear-eyed determination.

“Any questions?” he asked.

Silence.

“All right then,” said Greg, casting a smile in Pete’s direction. “There’s a six-week probationary period, but I’ve got a good feeling about you all. You’re on the side of the future.”

Matt Browning looked up from his screen and squeezed his eyes shut. Dots of light whirled and spun across his field of vision as a dull ache pulsed down the back of his head and across his shoulders; he had been in the Lazarus Project labs for almost seventeen hours and he was absolutely spent.

He sat back in his chair, stretched his arms above his head in an attempt to lessen the knots in his neck and upper arms, and checked the time. It was just after 10pm, but the lab was almost full; the Lazarus staff were prone to working until they could no longer keep their eyes open. There were perhaps half a dozen desks unoccupied, but Matt knew they would not remain so for long; they belonged to those men and women who had drifted into nocturnal cycles of working and sleeping, and who would likely arrive any minute to start shifts that would go through the night.

Matt glanced to his right and saw Natalia looking at him; she grinned, before turning her attention back to her screen. He stared at her, marvelling, as he always did, at both her very existence and the impact she had had on his life. The talk had happened almost five months ago now, and there was no longer any doubt: she was his girlfriend.

His first girlfriend.

The first girl he had ever kissed. Or done … anything else with.

Matt blushed at memories that were never far from his mind, feeling heat rise into his face. He doubted he would ever understand why the brilliant, beautiful Russian girl was interested in him, but, for one of the very first times in his life, his prodigiously powerful brain had steered him through the ever-present clouds of self-doubt. Its message had been simple: don’t question this, don’t overthink it, just hold tight with both hands and refuse to let go. Because relationships tended not to end well for those who had given their lives over to Blacklight, including those he considered his closest friends, and nothing, absolutely nothing about the future was certain.

Kate and Shaun.

Jamie and Larissa.

In a display of resilience that Matt could still scarcely comprehend, Kate had managed to move on from the terrible sight of her boyfriend lying dead in front of her, his neck broken, his eyes wide and staring up at nothing. But although she had found the strength to keep getting out of bed each morning, Matt didn’t believe for a second that she was really, truly over what had happened to Shaun; he doubted, in all honesty, that she ever would be.

He had similar doubts about his best friend. It was painfully clear to everyone that Jamie still missed Larissa so much that it hurt, despite his protestations to the contrary. Matt had been furious when Kate told him that Larissa was gone, had disappeared into the night without so much as a goodbye, so he could not imagine the depths of anger and misery Jamie must be feeling. In truth, Matt had worried for a while that it might prove the final straw; his friend had been beset by a trio of revelations that would have been hard for anyone to deal with – the truth about his dad, and Frankenstein, and the sudden disappearance of the girl he had relied on far more than he wanted people to know – and it had taken Matt a number of long weeks to truly believe that Jamie was going to be able to carry on.

Be grateful, he told himself. For Natalia, and Jamie, and Kate, and for the simple fact that you’re still breathing in and out. Because the world could literally end at any moment.

Matt looked around the long rectangular space that comprised the Lazarus Project’s central laboratory. There were three more large labs, sealed behind airlocks and disinfectant showers, along with a twenty-four-hour canteen and two corridors of quarters for those men and women who chose to eat and work and sleep without ever setting foot beyond the project’s borders. He briefly considered trying to persuade Natalia to call it a day as well, but saw the lines of data scrolling down her screen and decided not to disturb her. He would send her a message later. With that settled, he reached for his mouse, intending to log out of the Lazarus network, and paused as a window popped open at the bottom of his screen.

He groaned inwardly. The window was an automated notification, informing him that the results of his most recent set of data runs were now available, and for a brief moment he considered pretending he hadn’t seen it and leaving as he’d intended. But he knew he couldn’t; he knew that wondering about the results would prevent him sleeping, regardless of how tired he was. Instead, he clicked the window open, and double-clicked on the secure link that would load the results. While the computer worked, Matt lowered himself back into his chair and waited.

The data he had brought back from San Francisco had allowed Lazarus to take giant leaps forward; it was no exaggeration to claim that it had saved years of research and development. To best handle the huge amount of new data, the project had subsequently been separated into eight smaller teams, each working independently, each focused entirely on one aspect of the search for the cure. Matt’s team had been tasked with analysing the protein coat and envelope of lipids that enclosed the genetic material of the vampire virus itself, and had made rapid progress, to the point that it was widely believed they had learnt all there was to learn.

It was clear that the genetic material inside the virus was responsible for the DNA rewriting that took place in the early stages of the turn, and contained the trigger which began the physical alteration, but Matt had retained a nagging suspicion that the key to undoing the transformation lay in the protein coat rather than what it surrounded, and he had designed structure after structure based on that suspicion. The results that were now loading were the last of what had been officially listed as a dead end, a line of enquiry that the project had moved on from, but which Matt had found himself strangely unwilling to drop.

The screen filled with data, with page after page of equations and genetic analysis. Several lines of text and numbers were purple, and Matt recognised them instantly; they were the protein pairs that had been extracted from the DNA in John Bell’s blood, the first reliable building blocks for what would eventually be the genetic blueprint of a cure for vampirism. Matt scanned the rest of the lines, reaquainting himself with the structure he had built, one of literally thousands that he had sent into the supercomputer array for testing over the last year or so. Forty-three per cent of the structure had been confirmed when he sent it in, which was about normal for a test formula; it didn’t sound like much, but the percentage had been a lot lower before Matt scraped John Bell’s blood and flesh up from the tarmac beneath the wheels of a truck.

Matt tabbed past the structural overview to the preliminary testing results, and sat forward to read them. He skipped the document’s first section, which was the Analysis Team’s assessment of the design he had submitted, confirming that it met all the criteria to be taken forward for testing. The second section detailed the results of their attempts to physically produce the gene itself, hundreds of lines generated by the sequencers and growth managers showing that this particular gene could be provisionally manufactured with ninety-seven per cent reliability. The third and final section showed what had happened when the gene was introduced into cells infected with the vampire virus, and was always the point at which hopes were dashed. Every set of test results had concluded with the word NEGATIVE, eight letters that every member of the Lazarus Project had come to both hate and expect.

But as Matt looked at the screen, he saw that this report was different; there were two words at the bottom of the document, rather than one, and they were words he had never seen before.

VIABLE REACTION

Matt was suddenly aware that his mouth was incredibly dry. He stared at the screen, trying to comprehend what he was seeing, trying not to let his brain go racing ahead of itself, then picked up the phone on his desk and dialled the number for the testing laboratory.

“Analysis,” answered a voice.

“Hey,” said Matt, trying to force himself to at least sound calm. “I sent a sample through three days ago and I’ve just got the results back. Can you tell me if these are simulated findings?”

“Which sample?”

“Submission 85403/B.”

“Hang on,” said the voice. “Let me just bring it up …”

Matt held his breath.

“OK, got it,” said the voice. “Those are real-world results. I’m looking at the production vials right now.”

Matt felt a shiver race up his spine. “You’re sure?” he said. “You’re absolutely sure? The computers really built this and this is really what it did?”

“I’m sure,” said the voice. “Why? What do the results say?”

Matt looked back at the two words at the bottom of the document, as if he was afraid they might have disappeared in the second he had taken his eye off them.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “Thanks. I have to go.”

He hung up the phone, and took a deep breath. There was an unfamiliar feeling spreading slowly through him, one that it took him a moment to identify.

Hope, he realised. It’s hope. My God. This could change everything.

Max Wellens strolled through quiet streets, whistling a tune he had been trying to place all evening.

It was maddening; he was sure it was a television show theme, most likely from his childhood in the 1980s, but none of his friends had been able to identify it, not even Sam, whose knowledge of popular culture was usually encyclopaedic. It was a simple melody – duh-duh-duh-da-duh-dum-duh-da-daa – and it had settled comfortably into Max’s brain, with no sign of it leaving any time soon. The only consolation, as far as he was concerned, was that he had successfully managed to pass the earworm on to his friends; both Dan and Barry had left the pub humming it, cursing him as they went.

Max smiled at the memory as he turned off the high street and headed for the park gates. It had been a good night: United had won in the Champions League, the special had been pulled pork burgers, and everyone had been on good form, laughing and joking and mocking each other, as they had been doing for the fifteen years since they met on the first day of senior school. But, as it always did, the walk home from the pub filled Max with pre-emptive nostalgia; he had at least a couple of years before he needed to worry, but he knew there was going to come a time when his youthful appearance was going to raise questions that he could no longer answer with claims of yoga and a balanced diet. When that time came, he would leave Nottingham for somewhere nobody knew him and start again; he knew he would have the strength to do it, but the prospect, unavoidable as it was, nonetheless tightened his chest with sadness.

Part of him believed he should simply tell his friends the truth; he was sure they wouldn’t judge him, and it was far from an uncommon problem these days. But he knew it would change things. And he didn’t want things to change; he never had.

The sound of the cars and the yellow glow of the street lights on the main road faded away as he walked into the park, his footsteps clicking rapidly across the tarmac of the main path. Trees towered above him on all sides, and Max could hear the movement of animals in the undergrowth and the rustling of branches as they swayed in the gentle night breeze. He followed the path round the lake, past the boats tied up to a small wooden jetty, and out across the football pitches, their rusting goalposts gleaming in the moonlight. On the far side of the field, Max heard voices and laughter coming from the playground. He headed towards it, knowing what he would find: teenagers drinking cheap booze and smoking cheap cigarettes, exactly as he and his friends had done in a dozen similar parks when they were the same age.

“Mate, you got a fag?”

The voice came from the swings at the centre of the park, and Max turned towards it. There were five teenagers clustered round the metal frame and three actually sitting on the seats, as clear a social hierarchy as it was possible to imagine. The boy who had spoken was in the middle, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a thick hoodie, and staring at Max with an expression that he no doubt thought looked hard.

“Don’t smoke,” said Max. “Sorry.”

The teenager looked at him for a long moment. “Prick,” he muttered, the volume of his voice clearly intended to be audible to Max. Two of the girls giggled in approval, and one of the standing boys, clearly a member of the lower order of the playground hierarchy, clapped him on the back.

Max stopped. He had no doubt they were harmless, just as he and his friends had been, but he was full of a sudden urge to teach them a lesson, to make them realise that there were things in the night that were far more dangerous than kids full of cider-inflated bravado. And on a gut level, in the base part of himself that he kept hidden from everyone, he was hungry.

“What?” asked the teenage boy, getting up from his swing. “You got a problem?”

Max stared at him, feeling the first flush of heat behind his eyes. The boy’s acne-ridden face was pale in the moonlight, his mouth curled into an arrogant smile.

Don’t rise to it, he told himself. There’s eight of them. Too many.

“No problem,” he said. “Have a good night.”

He walked along the path towards the west gate without a backward glance, knowing the boy would stare daggers after him until he was out of sight; it would be no less than his friends would expect. Max strode through the gate and into the quiet estate where he’d lived for the last five years; his house was a square brick box standing behind a paved drive and a small lawn that he only mowed in the evenings. He unlocked the front door, hung his coat on the hook rack in the hall, and walked through to the living room where he flopped down on to the sofa, put the TV on, and was asleep within a minute.

Thud. Thud thud.

Max’s eyes flew open, his heart racing in his chest. He had dreamt of her again, the same dream as always: the trees, the blood, the screams, the freezing water. He sat up on the sofa, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, the one that had been his mother’s.

Two forty-three, he thought. Almost three in the morning.

He got unsteadily to his feet. Something had woken him, something that had managed to penetrate the fabric of his dream and engage his conscious mind. Max went to the window, slid open the curtains that were always closed, and peered out at the dark street.

Thud. Thud thud thud thud.

He jumped. The sound was coming from the front of the house.

Someone was knocking on his door.

Max pulled his phone from his pocket and checked its screen. No messages. No missed calls. Slowly, his heart pounding, he walked out into the hallway and turned on the lights. A dark silhouette loomed outside the front door, clearly visible through the pane of frosted glass.

“Who’s there?” he shouted, and heard a tremor in his voice.

“Nottinghamshire Police, sir,” came the reply. “Open the door, please.”

Max frowned. “What’s this about?” he asked.

“We’ve had a complaint of a disturbance at this address, sir.”

“There’s no disturbance here,” said Max. “You must have the wrong house.”

“Sir, we’re required to follow up on all complaints,” said the silhouette. “Please open the door.”

Max hesitated, then slid the security chain on the back of the door into place. He unlocked the door and pulled it open a few centimetres. “I’d like to see your identification,” he said.

“No problem, sir,” said the man. A gloved hand pushed a leather wallet through the gap between the door and the frame. Max opened it and found a plastic warrant card in the name of Sergeant Liam Collins of the Nottinghamshire Police.

He breathed a silent sigh of relief, and pushed the door shut. “I’m sorry, officer,” he said, as he slid the chain back. “Can’t be too careful, you know?”

“I understand, sir,” said the man, as the door swung open. “There are a lot of dangerous people out here.”

Max had just enough time to see a circle of glass gleaming in the moonlight. Then a searing beam of purple light blinded him, and his face burst into flames.

He fell backwards, screaming incoherently and beating desperately at the fire erupting from his skin and hair. The pain was unthinkable, far beyond anything he had ever known, enough to drive reason from his mind; all he knew, on an instinctive level, was that he had to put the fire out, had to stop himself burning. His fangs burst involuntarily from his gums, slicing through his tongue and transforming his screams into high-pitched grunts. One of his eyes was empty blackness and awful, sickening pain, like someone had tipped boiling water over it. Through the other, he saw billowing smoke as he clawed at his face and head, and the dreadful sight of two men dressed all in black stepping into his house and shutting the door behind them.

The pain in his head lessened fractionally as his pounding fists finally extinguished the flames. The skin on his hands was charred red and black and peeling away in wide sheets, revealing the pink muscle beneath. Max tried to focus, but felt his reeling body resist him as he rolled over on to his front and crawled towards the kitchen, each agonising centimetre requiring a Herculean effort. He heard voices behind him, but ignored them; his remaining eye was fixed on the fridge, and the bottles of blood he knew were chilling inside it. If he could reach them, perhaps there might still be a chance.

Then he felt a tiny stab of pain in the side of his neck, and realised there was none.

He slumped to the ground as the syringe was drawn out of his flesh, as though the power supply to his muscles had been turned off. His ruined tongue slid limply out of his mouth as one of the black-clad men pressed a boot against his ribs and rolled him over on to his back. Max stared up at him, his diminished vision beginning to blur and darken, and managed a single mangled word.

“Blacklight …”

The man grunted with laughter. “Not us, mate,” he said, as Max slipped into unconsciousness. “We’re something else.”

When he awoke again, he could feel the steady vibration of an engine somewhere beneath him. Max opened one eye and the pain came rushing back to him, deep, searing agony in his face and scalp. He gritted his teeth and let out a low groan; his stomach was spinning, and he was sure he was going to be sick. He tried to roll on to his side, but couldn’t move; whatever had been in the syringe was still working on him, paralysing his muscles.

Above him, sitting on a wooden bench and leaning against a metal panel, was one of the dark figures that had burst into his home. He stared up with his good eye and wondered how he had ever mistaken them for Department 19. Max had seen a squad of Blacklight soldiers once, a long time ago, and they had been slick, almost robotic in appearance; the man above him was wearing a black balaclava, a cheap black leather jacket, and a backpack that looked like it had been bought in a sports shop. But then he focused more closely, and felt terror spill through him.

Painted on the man’s chest, in crude sprays of white, was a wolf’s head, its teeth huge, its jaws open wide. And all of a sudden, Max knew who had him.

“Night … Stalker …” he managed, his tongue barely obeying his brain’s commands, his mouth filling with saliva.

The man looked down at him. “Welcome back, mate,” he said. “Don’t try to talk. It’ll just make things worse.”

Max stared, his eye wide with fear. He tried to move, felt nothing happen, and bore down with all that remained of his strength. His left hand trembled, but stayed flat against the floor.

“You want me to dose you again?” asked the man. He leant forward and held up a thick black torch. “Stay still or die. It’s up to you.”

The purple lens seemed huge, as though it was about to swallow Max up. He forced himself to look away, and fixed his gaze on the ceiling above him. It was the roof of a van, moulded metal and plastic, long and wide. Beneath him, the engine rumbled on. He knew what happened to vampires taken by the Night Stalker, had seen the bloody aftermath on the news and online. His only chance was to wait, to not provoke his captors, and hope that enough of his strength returned before they reached wherever they were taking him.

Maybe I’ll have a chance then, he thought. Maybe.

The van pulled to a halt, and Max was jerked awake. He had drifted back into unconsciousness and dreamt about her again: the blood, the water, the screams. He opened his eye, saw the man with the wolf on his chest still sitting above him, and tried to move the fingers of his hand, silently praying that whatever they had drugged him with had worn off.

Nothing. Not even the tremble it had managed before.

Panic flooded through him; he wondered whether they had given him another shot while he was unconscious, but he couldn’t check his neck and he didn’t dare ask, providing he could even form the words to do so.

“Are we on?” asked the man, looking towards the front of the van.

“Yep,” replied a voice that presumably belonged to the driver.

“All right then,” said the man, and looked down at Max. “Let’s get you up.”

“No,” he managed. He tried to force his limbs into action, but felt not even the slightest flicker in response. “Please …”

The man ignored him, opened the rear doors of the vehicle, and disappeared. Max lay on the floor, terror pulsing through him, unable to move, barely able to think. Then hands reached under his armpits, and dragged him backwards out of the van.

His heels scraped uselessly across the ground as, despite the panic that was coursing through him, Max forced himself to look around, to see if there was something, anything he might be able to use to save himself from the fate he knew awaited him. He was being hauled across a barren, weed and pebble-strewn patch of wasteland, a place he didn’t recognise; he had no idea how long he had been unconscious, and therefore no idea how far he might have been taken from his home. A squat industrial building rose up before him, its windows barred and broken, its bricks crumbling and its paint flaking away; it looked long abandoned. Max strained his supernatural hearing, listening for a human voice, the sound of a car engine, anything that might suggest that help could be nearby.

He heard nothing.

“That’s far enough,” said a voice from behind him.

The fingers digging into his armpits disappeared, and Max tumbled to the ground, unable to do anything to break his fall. His head connected sharply with the ground, sending a fresh bolt of pain through his battered system, and he let out a gasping sob as he was pushed over on to his back. The two men with the white wolves on their chests crowded over him, torches in their hands, and his vocal cords dragged themselves into life, galvanised by a terror that was almost overwhelming.

“Please,” he said, his voice slurred. “Please don’t kill me. Please. It isn’t fair.”

One of the men tilted his head to one side. “What’s not fair about it?”

“It’s not my fault,” said Max. “Being a vampire. It’s not fair. Please …”

“What do you drink?” asked the man.

Max stared up at him. “What?”

“You’re a vampire,” said the man. “So you need to drink blood. Where do you get it?”

“Raw meat,” said Max. He felt tears well in his remaining eye. “Butchers. Stray dogs and cats.”

“Is that right?” asked the man, and squatted down beside him, his eyes narrow behind his balaclava. “What about Suzanne Fields?”

“Who?” asked Max.

“Surely you remember her?” said the man. “Pretty blonde, nineteen years old. You attacked her when she was walking home through Bridgford Park, then you drank her dry and broke her neck when you were done. Divers found her a week ago, at the bottom of the river half a mile from your house.”

“I don’t know anything about her,” said Max, his voice low. “I never hurt—”

“Don’t give me that,” said the man. “It’s time to come clean, Max. Time to confess your sins. It’ll be better for your soul, if you still have one.”

The nightmare burst into his mind: the blonde hair, the screams, the taste of blood in his mouth, the freezing water as he pushed her under the surface. He had suppressed it, buried it as deep as it would go, but it bubbled up when he was at his most vulnerable; she had haunted him every night since he killed her.

“I didn’t mean it,” he whispered, and let out a low sob. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“That’s good,” said the man. “Admit what you did. Be a man about it.”

“I never wanted to be a vampire,” said Max, the combination of pain and misery flooding through his mind threatening to unmoor it. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t. You have to believe me.”

“I do believe you,” said the man. “But that doesn’t change what you did.”

The tears spilled out of Max’s eye and rolled down his cheek, burning across the ruined flesh like acid.

“What makes it OK for you to kill me?” he asked. “What gives you the right to sentence me to death?”

“It’s got nothing to do with rights,” said the man. “This is a war. And in a war you don’t show mercy to your enemies.”

The black-clad man drew a wooden stake from his belt and held it out; Max stared at it, overcome by horror at the realisation that his life was going to end in this place, far away from his friends and the people he loved.

“Make your peace with whatever you believe in,” said the man. “You’ve outstayed your welcome in this world.”

Max closed his eye. He saw the faces of his friends, and felt his heart ache at the thought of never seeing them again. But then, in the depths of his despair, he felt a momentary bloom of relief: he was glad they had never known what he had become, that he had never had to see the disappointment on their faces.

Because he had told the truth to the man who was about to murder him: he did regret the girl in the park, as he regretted the four others he had killed. He had never meant to hurt any of them; he had lost himself in the hunger, and by the time he had remembered himself, they had been dead.

He couldn’t change it now.

Couldn’t change any of it.

It was too late.

Jamie sat back in his seat and stared at the screen that had been folded down from the ceiling of the van. The connection to the Surveillance Division was active; all that remained now was to wait for their first alert of the night to come through.

“What’s your bet?” asked Lizzy Ellison, from her seat opposite him. “Domestic disturbance? False alarm?”

“Domestic,” said Qiang. “They are always domestic now.”

Jamie shrugged. “You never know,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and actually see a real vampire tonight.”

“Steady on, sir,” said Ellison, smiling broadly at him. “Let’s not get carried away.”

Qiang let out a grunt of laughter, a sound that never failed to amaze his squad leader. When he had first arrived at the Loop, the Chinese Operator had seemed more like a robot than an actual human being: utterly professional, precise, and not given to conversation beyond what was necessary for the Operation at hand. Now, more than six months later and following a concerted campaign by both Jamie and Ellison, Qiang was a markedly different person. He was still unlikely to ever win the award for most light-hearted member of the Department, but he was now capable of making a limited amount of small talk, of telling his squad mates about the family and friends that he had left behind in China, and, on extremely rare and joyous occasions, making small, bone-dry jokes.

As the months after Zero Hour had lumbered slowly past, Jamie had come to see his squad as a lone beacon of stability in a world that was becoming ever more uncertain, and when he had thrown himself into his job in an attempt to escape the misery and chaos that had been threatening to drag him down, his squad mates had been right there beside him. Neither Ellison nor Qiang knew the truth about his father, or why he no longer spoke to Frankenstein, but they knew about Larissa; everyone in the Department did.

Word of her departure had raced through the Loop, causing dismay among those who understood that Blacklight was weaker without her and relief among the many Operators who had never truly been comfortable with a vampire wearing the black uniform. In the first days after her disappearance, dozens of Jamie’s colleagues had asked him what had happened, if he had any idea where she might have gone, until his patience began to visibly wear thin and people realised that questioning him further would have been unwise.

The only thing Ellison and Qiang had ever asked was whether he was all right. He had told them that he wasn’t, but that he didn’t want to talk about it, and they had left it at that. It had been a show of respect for which he remained profoundly grateful.

Ellison had, in fact, been entirely awesome since the day she had joined the Department. Jamie had once told Cal Holmwood that she was going to sit in the Director’s chair one day, and nothing had happened since to make him revise that opinion. She was a brilliant Operator, smart and agile and fearless, but more than that, she had the uncanny ability to drag him out of himself, to cut through the fog of gloom that hung over him and force him to laugh, usually at himself. Jamie knew he was susceptible to self-pity, and Ellison was the perfect antidote: irreverent, kind, funny, and absolutely unwilling to indulge him. He loved Kate and Matt and relied on them more than anyone, even more than his mum, who, for all her empathy and unconditional love, could never really, truly relate to what his life had become. But Ellison was close behind them on his priority list; when he was on Operations with her and Qiang, he felt accepted and valued and appreciated. He felt at peace. As a result, it was not uncommon for his heart to sink when the time came for them to head back to the Loop.

Jamie was roused from his thoughts by the loud alarm that accompanied a new window opening on the van’s screen.

ECHELON INTERCEPT REF. 97607/2R

SOURCE. Emergency call (mobile telephone 07087 904543)

TIME OF INTERCEPT. 23:45

OPERATOR: Hello, emergency service operator, which service do you require?

CALLER: Police.

OPERATOR: What is the nature of your emergency?

CALLER: I just got home from work and something’s been painted on my neighbour’s front door.

OPERATOR: Does this qualify as an emergency, sir?

CALLER: It’s the same thing that’s been in the papers, that Night Stalker thing. The wolf’s head. It’s right on the front door.

OPERATOR: You can call your local police station to report vandalism, sir. This line needs to be kept clear for emergencies.

CALLER: Right. Sorry.

INTERCEPT REFERENCE LOCATION. Violet Road, West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire. 52.933714, -1.122017

RISK ASSESSMENT. Priority Level 2

“All right,” said Ellison, rubbing her hands together. “Let’s go.”

“Have you got the location, Operator?” asked Jamie.

“Yes, sir,” replied their driver, his voice sounding through the speakers. “ETA three minutes.”

“Very close,” said Qiang, as the van accelerated, its engine rumbling beneath them.

“Weapons and kit check,” said Jamie. Excitement was crackling through him at the prospect of something that might actually be worth the attention of his squad. Ever since V-Day and Gideon and stupid, reckless Kevin McKenna, Patrol Responds had become purgatory: night after night of false alarms, attacks on suspected vampires who turned out to be every bit as human as their assailants, denouncements and accusations that were usually the malicious result of some minor grudge. This, the call they were now racing towards, had the potential to be different. Everyone inside the Department was following the Night Stalker attacks with great interest, although, for once, Blacklight seemed to know little more than the public and the media.

There had been ten attacks so far, all in the Midlands and East Anglia, all bearing signature similarities, most notably the wolf’s head painted on the doors of the victims’ homes and across their bloody remains. Public opinion seemed to favour the lone crazy theory, that the Night Stalker was a single individual carrying out vigilante executions, but Jamie, along with the majority of his colleagues, thought otherwise. He knew better than anyone how powerful vampires were, how fast and agile, especially when cornered; even allowing for the element of surprise, he didn’t believe that anyone could carry out ten vampire killings on their own, unless they were also a vampire. Which was a possibility, although Jamie subscribed to a simpler solution: that there was no such thing as the Night Stalker, but several Night Stalkers, at least two, perhaps even four or five.

“Twenty seconds, sir,” said their driver.

Jamie fastened his helmet into place, flipped up the visor, and looked at his squad mates. “Ready One as soon as we touch the ground,” he said, and felt his eyes bloom with heat. “Non-lethal. Clear?”

“Clear,” replied his squad mates.

The van slowed to a halt. Jamie twisted the handle on the rear door and pushed it open. “Go,” he said.

Ellison and Qiang leapt down on to the tarmac, their weapons at their shoulders, their visors covering their faces. He was beside them in an instant, floating a millimetre or two above the ground; his vampire side, the part of himself that heightened his senses and kept him sharp, was wide awake, and hungry, as he looked around. They were standing in a quiet suburban estate, a long row of square, two-storey houses with neat lawns and mid-range Japanese cars in their driveways.

“Shall I circle, sir?” asked their driver, his voice loud and clear through the comms plugs in Jamie’s ears.

“No,” he replied. “We’re not going to be here long. Ask Surveillance to bring up the CCTV grid for a ten-mile radius from this location and leave a line open.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jamie nodded, and looked at the house standing before them. It was identical to all the others on the estate, with one ghoulish exception; sprayed on its front door, in white paint that had dripped all the way down to the step, was a crude wolf’s head, its teeth huge, its eyes wide and staring.

“Night Stalker,” he said. “Or a good impression, at least. Check the door.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ellison, and jogged up the driveway, Qiang close behind her. She moved to one side of the door frame, her back against the front wall of the house, and tried the handle. It turned in her hand, and the door swung open.

“Sweep the house,” said Jamie. “Both of you. Quick as you can.”

His squad mates disappeared inside as he took a closer look at the quiet street. The night air was still and cool; his supernatural ears could pick out the low drone of dozens of televisions from inside the identical homes. Jamie spun slowly in the air, until movement on the other side of the road caught his eye; a curtain had fluttered in the window of the house opposite, as though someone had been peering through it until he looked in their direction.

Nosy neighbour, he thought, and flew slowly towards the house. What would we do without them?

Jamie rose over the low wall at the front of the garden, crossed the lawn, and waited in front of the window for the curtain to open again. He had absolutely no doubt that it would; the van and his squad’s unusual appearance would prove too tempting. Long seconds passed until the curtains parted, ever so slightly, and the face of an elderly woman peered through them. Her eyes locked with Jamie’s, and he smiled widely as they flew open with fright. The curtains snapped shut again; he waited a moment, then flew along the front of the house and knocked hard on the door.

“I didn’t do nothing,” called a voice from inside. “Get away with you. I won’t look no more.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I need to ask you some questions.”

Silence.

“I’m not opening the door,” shouted the woman, eventually. “I don’t care who you are, I don’t open up after dark and that’s all there is to it.”

“That’s fine, ma’am,” said Jamie. “That’s a sensible policy. I just need to know if you’ve seen anything unusual in the last hour or so.”

“Just you lot,” said the woman. “What’ve you come back for? Can’t you leave that poor man alone?”

Jamie frowned. “What do you mean, just you lot?”

“You lot,” repeated the woman. “All in black, with that big van of yours. Twenty minutes ago it was.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Jamie. He turned away, flew towards the house with the wolf on its door, and touched down on the drive as Ellison and Qiang reappeared.

“Clear,” said Ellison. “Nobody home, no remains.”

“Signs of a struggle?” asked Jamie.

“There is a burn mark on the hall carpet,” said Qiang. “A recent one.”

“And a lot of something that looks like blood,” said Ellison.

“Shit,” said Jamie. “They’ve taken him, whoever he is. Load up.”

The three Operators ran down to the kerb and climbed back into the van. Jamie dropped into his seat and took his helmet off.

“Surveillance?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Go ahead, Lieutenant Carpenter,” replied a voice from the speakers.

“We’re looking for a black van that left this location within the last twenty minutes. Anything on CCTV that fits that description?”

“Hold, please.”

An agonising silence filled the van’s hold.

Come on! thought Jamie. Hurry up, for God’s sake!

“I’ve got a black 2008 Ford Transit leaving your location seventeen minutes ago,” said the Surveillance Operator. “Do you want me to track it?”

“Yes,” said Jamie.

“Tracking,” said the voice. “OK. The last camera hit was in Bramcote, four minutes ago. Seven miles west of your location.”

“Good,” he said. “Keep tracking. Operator?”

“Yes, sir,” said their driver.

“Get us there as fast as you can,” said Jamie. “Don’t stop for red lights.”

The van raced through winding suburban streets, weaving in and out of traffic and raising a cacophony of angry horns in its wake.

Jamie listened silently to the Surveillance Division updates, trying to ignore the frustration building inside him; he could have got out of the van, leapt into the air, and been on top of their target within a minute, two at the most. But he was the leader of Operational Squad J-5, and they worked as a team; otherwise, he might as well carry out Patrol Responds on his own. The van’s external cameras fed the wide screen, and Jamie watched as the landscape they were speeding through changed; the houses and pubs and rows of shops were disappearing, giving way to dilapidated industrial buildings and bridges and yards.

“Thirty seconds,” said their driver. “Dead ahead.”

“Ready One,” said Jamie. “Be prepared for whatever this is.”

Ellison and Qiang nodded. This was the highest priority call they had taken in more than two months, and the air in the van’s hold was thick with anticipation.

“Ten seconds,” said their driver.

Jamie got to his feet, took hold of the door handle, and lowered his visor as calm flooded through him. Then the van screeched to a halt, its brakes squealing, and he flung the door open.

“Go,” he bellowed.

Jamie dived out of the vehicle, swooped up into the air, and surveyed the scene. He found himself looking at a patch of wasteland behind a ragged chain-link fence, squeezed in between two warehouse buildings, both of them boarded up and abandoned. Kneeling on the ground was a badly burnt figure, his head lowered, his hands hanging limply at his sides. Standing over him was a figure dressed in black with a wolf’s head painted on its chest in white; a second, identically dressed figure was standing off to the side. Both were staring at the Blacklight van with wide eyes.

“Freeze!” yelled Jamie. “Weapons down, hands in the air!”

Without a second’s hesitation, the two Night Stalkers moved. One sprinted for the shadows between the buildings as the other darted forward and slammed a stake into the kneeling figure’s chest. The vampire exploded with a wet thud, spraying blood and guts in a wide radius. Jamie screamed with fury, and hurtled towards the man as Ellison and Qiang burst through the torn fence, their weapons drawn.

Jamie closed the distance between himself and the man – it was a man, he was sure of it, both of them were – at dizzying speed, his eyes roaring with red heat, his fangs filling his mouth, a deadly black bullet fired with unerring accuracy. But when he was still five metres away, the air was suddenly filled with flying lead.

The man spun, pulling an MP5 from his belt, and emptied the submachine gun at Jamie; the speed of the movement took him by surprise, and he had no time to react before the bullets hammered into him. The body armour inside his uniform held, but the impacts were still agony; they drove him backwards through the air, his momentum arrested, his balance gone. The firing continued and Jamie screamed as at least two of the bullets slipped past his armour and pierced his body below the armpit. The scream was cut off, replaced by a rasping wheeze. Jamie tried to draw breath, but felt only the thinnest current of air flow down into his chest.

Punctured lung, he thought. Oh Christ, that hurts.

He crumpled to the ground, his back slamming against the hard concrete, and gritted his teeth as he tried to force himself back to his feet. Footsteps rattled around him, seemingly from all sides, until Ellison appeared in front of him and slid to her knees, her visor pushed up to reveal a face contorted with worry.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Jamie? Are you—”

“Don’t worry about me,” he growled, his eyes blazing. “Get after them. That’s an order.”

Ellison stared at him for the briefest of moments, then leapt to her feet and raced away into the darkness, Qiang at her side. Jamie lay where he was, concentrating on taking only the shallowest of breaths. It was hard work, and it hurt, but oxygen was reaching his lungs; not as much as he needed, he was sure, but enough to keep him alive. He stared up at the night sky, furious with himself.

Underestimated them, he thought. You had no idea what you were dealing with and you just charged in like a rookie. That guy was so fast, and so calm. He knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t remotely scared of me. Military, I’d bet my life on it. Military, or …

A terrible thought leapt into Jamie’s mind, one so huge and awful that the fire in his eyes died instantly as what was left of his breath froze in his chest.

No, he told himself. No way. It couldn’t be.

He gritted his teeth again, forced the thought from his mind, and pushed himself up to a sitting position. Something moved inside him, sending fresh agony thundering through his body, and glowing light returned to his eyes as sweat broke out on his forehead. It felt like the Night Stalker’s bullets had broken at least two or three of his ribs as well as tearing a hole in his lung. He reached down with a trembling hand and twisted the comms dial on his belt.

“Ellison?” he said. “Qiang? Report.”

“Lost them,” said Ellison, instantly. “It’s a bloody rabbit warren back here. Qiang followed one over a fire escape and I chased the other into one of the buildings, but they’re gone, sir. No sign of them, and nothing on thermal.”

Jamie swore heavily, then broke into a fit of coughing that ripped through his chest like he had swallowed a pack of razor blades. His mouth was suddenly full of liquid, and he spat it on to the ground beside him. The blood was shiny-black in the moonlight, and he felt his stomach lurch at the sight of it.

“What should we do, sir?” asked Qiang.

“Regroup,” said Jamie, his voice low and hoarse. “I need blood.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ellison.

Jamie waited for his squad mates to return, trying to ignore the pain and resist a sudden, overwhelming desire to lie back down. His arms shook with the effort of holding himself up, but he was bleeding from somewhere internal, and he had no desire to choke on his own blood.

His supernatural hearing picked up the sound of footsteps in the distance. Thirty seconds later Ellison and Qiang emerged from the shadows, their weapons in their gloved hands, their visors raised. Qiang peeled away and strode towards their van as Ellison approached Jamie, a deep frown on her face.

“Jesus, Jamie,” she said, stopping in front of him. “You look like shit.”

He forced a thin smile. “Lucky shot,” he grunted. “Got round the edge of my armour.”

“Nothing lucky about it,” said Ellison. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think exactly the same thing I did when you saw that guy shoot.”

Jamie nodded. “Military.”

“Right,” said Ellison. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“I don’t know,” said Jamie. “But I think we can conclude that the lone vigilante theory is bullshit.”

Qiang appeared beside Ellison, crouched down, and held out two plastic bottles of blood. Jamie took them, twisted the top off the first, and drank the contents in one go, his head twisted back, the muscles standing out in his neck, his eyes blooming red. Euphoria flooded through him as his body began to repair itself; the pain faded away, and he felt his punctured lung reinflate, filling him with energy. He put the empty bottle down, drained the second, and got to his feet, his body coursing with heat.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “That was stupid. I let you both down.”

Ellison rolled her eyes. “Drama queen,” she said, and smiled. Qiang gave one of his short grunts of laughter, then turned towards the black Transit parked by the kerb, his focus instantly returned to business.

“We have their vehicle,” he said. “That is good.”

Jamie nodded. “Have Security come out here and impound it. I doubt it’ll tell us much, but you never know.”

Qiang nodded, and stepped back as he twisted his comms dial and established a connection to the Loop. A second later he was giving coordinates in his clear, steady voice. Jamie left him to it, and walked slowly towards the remains of the vampire the Night Stalkers had killed. He looked down at the bloody circle as Ellison joined him.

“I wonder who this one was,” he said. “I wonder whether he did anything to deserve this.”

“Does anyone deserve to be dragged out of their home and murdered in cold blood?” asked Ellison.

“I’ve met one or two over the years,” said Jamie. “But not many. And this wasn’t murder. It was an execution. They were carrying out a sentence.”

The two Operators stood in silence, staring at the smear of drying blood that had, until barely five minutes earlier, been a living, breathing human being. Whatever he had been, whatever he might one day have become, was gone, ended in misery and pain at the point of a stranger’s stake.

A splash of colour caught Jamie’s eye and he dragged his gaze away from the remains. The red-brick side of the warehouse on the opposite side of the road, beyond the wire fence and the two parked vans, was covered in faded graffiti and peeling posters, but what had drawn his attention was fresh and bright at the edge of the yellow glow cast by the street light overhead. It was two familiar words painted in dripping fluorescent green, each letter more than a metre tall.

Jamie grimaced. The words seemed to be everywhere these days, painted on walls and bridges and the shutters of abandoned shops, written in dozens of different colours by dozens of different hands; they were a constant mockery, a colourful reminder of the Department’s failure.

Qiang appeared at his side. “Security are on their way,” he said. “Forty minutes. We are to stay until they arrive.”

Jamie nodded. “Fair enough.”

Qiang peered down at the bloody remains. “One less vampire,” he said. “Even if we did not destroy him ourselves. It is good.”

Jamie smiled. “I used to know someone who would have disagreed with you,” he said.

Ellison narrowed her eyes and shot him a look full of sympathy. “You still miss her, don’t you?” she said.

Jamie nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I still miss her.”

Larissa Kinley stared at the wide, slowly moving river, felt the night breeze gently tug at her hair, and allowed herself a rare moment of satisfaction.

It was not an emotion she was particularly prone to, at least not since the night she had lost herself in Grey’s glowing crimson eyes and woken up changed forever. She had spent her years with Alexandru and his gaggle of violent sycophants, alternately disgusted with herself and genuinely terrified for her own life, and her time with Blacklight wracked with guilt as she again participated in something she could not justify.

She would not dispute that she had done some good in her time as an Operator; she had helped destroy both Alexandru and Valeri Rusmanov, had saved the lives of dozens of innocent men and women, and had fought as hard as anybody to prevent a true monster from entering the world. But did that make up for the harm she had done? For the innocent vampires she had destroyed for no better reason than what they had been turned into, in a great many cases against their will? Jamie, Kate and the majority of her former colleagues clearly believed so, and she did not begrudge them that conclusion.

Sadly, it had not been enough for her.

But now, as she stood in the place she had created and looked out across a river on the other side of the world, she was almost content. A hundred metres out from the bank, one of the river cruise boats chugged slowly south towards the distant lights of New York. The captain sounded his horn, and the tourists on the upper deck waved enthusiastically in her direction; she returned the gesture, a broad smile on her face, and watched until the boat slipped round the bend in the river. When it was out of sight, Larissa turned and walked up the gentle slope; her stomach was rumbling, and she was suddenly keen to see how dinner was coming along.

Spread out before her, extending for several hundred metres in either direction along the riverbank, was the property that Valentin had told her about on that awful night, now more than six months past, when she had stumbled into the cellblock on the verge of tears, desperate for a way out. It was a vast piece of land, running up from the river for almost a mile, so big that many locals believed there were several large estates behind the pale wooden gates that opened on to Highway 9.

The houses that overlooked this section of the riverbank were grand, garish, multimillion-dollar mansions, the rural refuges of Manhattan bankers and actors and rock stars. But when Larissa had arrived on the piece of land that had become known to those who lived on it as Haven, the only standing structures had been a row of sheds and a large antebellum house, two neat storeys fronted with white pillars and a small veranda, surrounded by towering trees, at the centre of the estate.

Now, it was also home to the row of wooden cabins that she was walking alongside as she climbed the slope. They were simple enough, their walls, floors and ceilings constructed of wood from the ash trees that filled the sprawling property, but they were comfortable, and they were warm, thanks to the stoves and metal chimneys that Callum had installed. Most had two occupants, although some had as many as five or even six, family units who had arrived together and refused to be separated. A handful had only one person living in them, which several of the community’s earliest residents had suggested was wasteful. Larissa had disagreed, saying that people who wanted to live on their own had every right to do so; they could always build more cabins, which was exactly what they had done.

There were another dozen in the woods surrounding the huge lawn that stood in front of the main house, where the trees were younger and less densely packed together, and another row that followed the route of the felling that had been done, a neat, straight path that reached almost to the highway. All told, there were fifty-three finished cabins on the property, forty-nine of which were occupied, and another twenty under construction. Hidden away from prying eyes, it was rapidly becoming a small town, in much the same way that Valhalla, the commune from where Larissa had drawn inspiration, was a functioning village in the remote Scottish Highlands.

There were now more than a hundred vampires living in Haven, men and women and children who had been on the run when word reached them of a place where they might be safe or who simply wanted no part of what was coming, had no interest in choosing a side when the only two on offer were Dracula or NS9 and Blacklight. For the first ten days after she arrived, Larissa had lived in the big house on her own, suffering loneliness so acute she had begun to wonder whether it might prove fatal, unsure how to go about realising the idea that she could see so clearly in her mind. In the end, she had come to the conclusion that there was no option other than to simply get on with it.

On the eleventh day, she had flown into town, called the number Valentin had given her, and spoken to a man who seemed, superficially at least, to be some kind of financial advisor to the ancient vampire, although it had quickly become apparent that his remit extended far beyond matters of money. They had spoken for five minutes, in which the man never asked Larissa to identify herself or provide any proof that she was calling with Valentin’s permission; the mere mention of the vampire’s name had clearly been enough. The following day, workers reconnected the house’s gas, water and electricity, installed a new wireless network, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and mowed the wide lawn; Larissa had stood quietly to one side, too bemused to do anything but watch them work. Before they left, one of them handed her an envelope containing a credit card with her name embossed on the front, issued by a bank she had never heard of, and she had said a silent thank you to Valentin.

The following night she had flown down to New York and spent three days searching the towering glass and steel city for vampires, pounding the streets, tracking them down one at a time by scents that only those of her kind could detect. She found them in bars, in subway stations, in houses and apartments, or simply walking the bright streets after dark. They were almost uniformly wary when she approached, and not a single one of those who had listened to her pitch had come with her there and then; in every case, she left them the location, told them they would be welcome, and moved on. Three days later she returned to Haven, and waited to see whether the stone she cast into the water had caused a ripple.

The first vampire had shown up two days later, landing cautiously on the lawn with a bag over his shoulder and a suspicious look on his face; his name was Ryan and he later confessed to Larissa that he had wondered right up until the last minute if he was walking into a trap, whether she was part of some NS9 plot to trick vampires into handing themselves in to be destroyed. She had welcomed him, showed him to the spare bedroom in the big house, and the following morning, the two of them had got to work. They had felled two trees and were about to start the process of sawing their trunks into boards when a second vampire had appeared, a woman from New Jersey called Kimberley who had heard about Haven from an ex-boyfriend of hers and had immediately packed a bag. She wanted no part of any war, and had no desire to spend her life running. A warm feeling had spread slowly through Larissa as Kimberley talked; the woman’s arrival was exactly what she had hoped would happen, that vampires would pass the word about Haven among themselves.

Larissa walked towards the big house, remembering those early days of the community’s existence with great fondness. The vampires appeared in ones and twos at first, until, almost two weeks after she had been to New York, a group of five – three women, a man and a young boy – arrived from northern California. It had been a hectic time; for the first month, the house had been full to capacity and people had slept in tents on the lawn outside. But then the first cabins had been finished, and Haven had really started to take shape; there was now a network of well-worn paths cutting across the open expanses of grass and through the depths of the woods. Long canopies covered the winding tracks, and gazebos and awnings shaded the junctions from the sun’s rays, in a recreation of the system that had allowed Larissa to travel around Area 51 without bursting into flames.

She reached the edge of the lawn and walked towards the house. In front of the old building, a fire had been lit in the stone pit that she and some of the earliest arrivals had dug and lined months before. Grills were positioned around the flames, groaning with meat and foil-wrapped potatoes and sweetcorn, and a plastic barrel of lamb’s blood had been placed on two piles of bricks. Two dozen or so vampires were sprawled on the grass around the fire, chatting and eating and drinking. She could see lights in many of the distant cabins, and knew that more of Haven’s residents would make their way over to the fire before long. Eating together in the evening had become a widely observed tradition, although it was by no means mandatory; nothing inside Haven was, other than obeying the two central rules upon which the community was founded.

If you wanted to live in Haven, it was strictly forbidden to harm another human being, and you were expected to do whatever work was asked of you.

Beyond that, you were free.

Larissa skirted the cluster of relaxing vampires, strode across the wide strip of gravel in front of the house, then stopped as someone called her name from the darkness. She turned to see Callum stroll round the side of the house, a guitar in one hand, a six-pack of beer in the other, an easy smile on his handsome, bearded face. She returned his smile; the tall, softly spoken Texan had arrived two weeks after her recruitment trip to New York, and they had quickly become close. He had been turned against his will by a girl he met in a bar on the outskirts of Dallas, and was a gentle, hard-working soul who would never hurt a fly; he was exactly the sort of person she had founded Haven for.

“Hey,” said Callum. “Beer?”

“Not right now,” said Larissa. “How’s your day been?”

“Good,” said Callum. “I’ve been helping Pete Conran tar his roof. Messy business. Fun, though.”

Larissa’s smile widened. “You’ve got a strange idea of what fun is.”

“That’s likely true,” said Callum. “You coming back out, or are you calling it a night?”

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said. “I just need to get changed and sort a couple of things out. See you on the grass.”

Callum nodded, and strolled towards the fire, the beer bottles gleaming in the moonlight. Larissa watched him for at least a moment or two longer than was necessary, then walked up the stairs and into the house.

She dodged a toy train set that had been carefully laid out on the living-room floor, nodded to Kim, one of Haven’s teenagers, who was sprawled on a sofa with headphones in her ears, and floated towards the staircase. Pinned to the wall at the bottom was the rota of jobs that needed doing to keep Haven running smoothly, everything from collecting firewood to stocking up on food at the twenty-four-hour supermarket to felling trees and bleeding the cattle Larissa had installed in a meadow near the riverbank. The rota had originally been written on a single whiteboard; now there were four of them tiled together, with more than a hundred names printed down one side and dozens of tasks listed across the top. Almost half the residents had no job allocated on any given day, as she had never wanted Haven to feel like a work camp; she knew, however, that the majority found some way to help, even on what were supposed to be their days off.

Larissa was constantly amazed at how content she was with the simple life she and the others had built. Everything – the place, the work, the people – simply felt right; she believed, with total conviction, that she had done more good in the last six months, had made more of a positive difference, than she ever had at Blacklight. Providing sanctuary and peace for those who craved it sat far more easily with her than ending lives ever had, no matter the justification that had been offered inside the Loop. There was only a single dark cloud on her new horizon, one that she had come to terms with, but which showed no sign of departing anytime soon.

She missed her friends.

And she missed Jamie so much it hurt.

In the first days after her frantic, headlong departure, when the loneliness had been at its worst and she had spent a great many hours wondering if she had made the biggest mistake of her life, Larissa had thought about getting in touch with him, if only to let him know that she was safe. And even as Haven began to take shape, as her days filled up with work and companionship and laughter, the same urge had gripped her at least once a day. She still had her console; it lay at the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom, its batteries removed. She didn’t dare turn it on inside Haven, as she had no doubt that Blacklight would be able to trace it, but she could easily have flown to New York or Boston, turned it on, and sent Jamie a message. It would have been easy, the work of no more than an hour at most. But she had not, and she knew why.

She had no idea what she would say to him.

Telling him not to worry would be redundant to the point of insulting; of course he would have worried when she disappeared, and if she knew Jamie, as she believed she did, he would still be worrying now. And trying to explain herself would be impossible; she knew there was no way to justify vanishing into the night without even doing him the courtesy of saying goodbye. How could she make him understand that their fight in Brenchley had just been the final straw, the last push she had needed to act on doubts that had been building inside her for months?

She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. It would make him feel no better, and would only raise more questions, which wasn’t fair. It would be easier, as she regularly told herself, if she simply no longer loved him; if that was the case, she could have closed the box containing that part of her life, buried it deep down inside herself, and moved on.

But she did still love him. And there was nothing to be gained from lying to herself about it.

Larissa flew slowly along the upstairs landing and turned the handle on her bedroom door. It had a lock, but she had never bothered to use it; it would be useless if any of the vampire residents of Haven was determined to get into her room, and she believed it would have sent a bad message to the rest of the community. She didn’t want it to look like she was positioning herself as something special, or that she had anything to hide.

She closed the door behind her and undressed. Her clothes clung to her skin, gummy with sweat and sap from the trees she had helped to pull down; she threw them into the basket in the corner of the room, and flew across to her wardrobe.

Upon her arrival at Haven, she had only possessed a single set of civilian clothes, the same ones she had been wearing when Alexandru Rusmanov had dropped her, broken and unconscious, out of the sky and into Matt Browning’s suburban garden. She had rebuilt her wardrobe in the subsequent months, filling drawers and rails with summer dresses and vest tops and checked shirts and jeans, choices made for the practicality of life at Haven rather than for aesthetics. She dragged one of the dresses down and pulled it over her head, shook her hair out, and was about to close the wardrobe and head back downstairs when something at the back caught her eye, something black and smooth.

Larissa reached out and ran her fingers down the fabric of her Blacklight uniform. She had worn it across the Atlantic, with every intention of burning it as soon as she found the place that Valentin had described. And she had almost gone through with it; that first night, which now seemed so long ago, she had put the uniform in a steel bucket she found in one of the outbuildings and stood over it with a bottle of alcohol and a box of matches. But something had stayed her hand. Instead, she had relegated it to the back of her wardrobe, out of sight but not entirely out of mind. She scratched involuntarily at her forearm as she stared at it; there was no scar where she had dug out her locator chip, but the memory of doing so remained, so potent it was almost physical.

Larissa closed the wardrobe and flew quickly back through the house. The smell of barbecuing meat was intoxicating, and she could hear laughter and the gentle rhythm of Callum’s guitar over the distant sound of the river as it ran along the edge of the place she now called home.

Jamie was pacing impatiently around his quarters when his console beeped on his belt. He thumbed the rectangular screen into life and read the message that appeared.

FROM: Turner, Director Paul (NS303, 36-A)

TO: Carpenter, Lieutenant Jamie (NS303, 67-J)

Five minutes. Come up Now.

Jamie’s eyes flared; a second later he was striding along Level B, resisting the urge to leap into the air and fly down the corridor as fast as he was able.

He had been awake most of the night, turning the Patrol Respond over and over in his mind. His squad had waited for the Security Division to arrive and load the Night Stalkers’ van on to a flatbed truck, only to receive a message informing them that the remainder of their Operation had been cancelled, and they were to return to the Loop immediately. But that had been absolutely fine with Jamie; he had been preoccupied by an awful thought as he wheezed on the ground, one that rattled ceaselessly through his brain as they were driven back to base. He had finally slipped into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning, and as soon as his eyes reopened he had typed a message to Paul Turner, telling the Director he needed to see him as soon as possible.

He reached the Level B lift, pressed CALL, and shifted impatiently from one foot to the other as he waited. He had not mentioned the thought to Ellison or Qiang; he trusted them completely, but he wanted to keep it to himself, at least for the time being. It was something that went beyond suspicion or theory and, without proof, it could easily be dismissed as paranoia – or wishful thinking – by those who, like his squad mates, were not in full possession of the facts. And there was something else, something simpler, and more pressing.

It was personal.

The lift arrived. Jamie stepped into it and pressed A. When the doors opened again, barely five seconds later, he walked down the corridor, nodded to a pair of Operators heading in the opposite direction, and stopped at the short corridor that led to the Director’s quarters. The Security Operator on duty stepped forward.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” she said. “You can go straight in.”

“Thanks,” said Jamie, and strode forward. The heavy door swung open before he reached it, and he heard the Director’s voice emerge through the gap.

“This better be important, Lieutenant. I’ve got about ten free minutes today and I’m giving half of them to you.”

Jamie smiled, and stepped into the room he had come to know so well; he had spent hundreds of hours in it, talking to the men who had sat behind the wide desk on the far side of the room. Paul Turner was the third Director he had served, a turnover that spoke volumes about the turmoil the Department had been through in recent years, and the former Security Officer eyed him carefully as he stopped in front of the desk and stood to attention.

“At ease, for God’s sake,” said the Director. “What’s going on?”

“Morning, sir,” said Jamie. “I don’t know if you’ve seen my Patrol Respond report for last night—”

“There are currently forty-nine Operational Squads in this Department,” said Turner. “Even now, depleted as we are, if I read every report that every squad filed every night, I would quite literally get nothing else done. So assume I haven’t read it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jamie. “We got a 999 intercept on a possible Night Stalker incident in a Nottingham suburb. We checked it out, tracked a vehicle that had been seen in the area, and found them, sir.”

Turner narrowed his eyes. “You found them?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jamie. “We were too late to stop them killing the vampire they’d abducted, and we failed to apprehend them. But I saw them, sir. There were two of them. And I think I might know who one of them was.”

The Director sat back in his chair. “Go on.”

Jamie took a deep breath. “I think it was my dad, sir.”

“Come again?” said Turner.

“My dad, sir. Julian Carpenter.”

“What on earth would make you think that?”

“They were carrying MP5s, just like we used to. And the man I saw had military training, I’d bet my life on it. The way he moved, the way he didn’t panic, even when I went for him. He wasn’t remotely scared of vampires, sir.”

“And you think your father is the only person in the country who fits that description?” asked Turner.

Jamie frowned. “Of course not, sir. But it makes sense. Cal wouldn’t let my dad back into the Department, but even he knew that it was a waste of time telling him to behave himself. There’s no way he would just sit quietly and wait, on the off chance that you decided to reverse Cal’s decision. The Night Stalkers are exactly the sort of thing he’d do.”

“How would you know that, Jamie?” said Turner. “You never knew the Operator side of him.”

“I understand that, sir,” said Jamie, aware that his voice was beginning to rise. “But I do know how stubborn he was, right up to the point where it cost him everything he cared about. I don’t believe he’ll just sit on the sidelines, sir. It’s not in his nature.”

“On that point, you and I are in complete agreement,” said Turner. “And I do see why you reached this conclusion. But the man you saw last night wasn’t your father.”

Jamie frowned. “How can you say that, sir?” he asked. “I was there, and you were behind that desk.”

Turner narrowed his eyes. “Be careful, Lieutenant.”

Heat rose into Jamie’s cheeks, a potent mixture of anger and embarrassment. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I just don’t get how you can be so sure.”

“And I can’t believe that you would be arrogant enough to assume that nobody else has considered this,” said Turner. “It was my first thought too, as soon as the Night Stalker attacks began. Three months ago.”

Jamie stared. “You thought it was him too?”

“Of course I did,” said Turner. “As you said, it would be just like him to find a new and different way to cause trouble.”

“But now you’re sure it’s not him?”

Turner nodded. “Face the screen, Jamie.”

He stared at the Director for a long moment, then did as he was told. He heard fingers tap a keyboard, and a moment later, the Department’s network access prompt appeared. Turner logged in, then navigated to an area that Jamie had never seen. A series of menus opened and closed, until a short list of coded entries appeared; Turner clicked on the link beside HTXB/4532MK0, and brought up a grid of video windows. For several long seconds, Jamie didn’t realise what he was looking at; then he recognised the front door he had knocked on six months earlier, and understood.

“That’s my grandmother’s cottage,” he said.

“Correct,” said Turner. “This is the surveillance web that Julian agreed to as a condition of his release. This is how I know.”

Jamie examined the wide screen. The windows showed the front of the cottage, high angles of seemingly every room, the driveway at the front, and the garden at the rear. As he watched, the door of the shed opened and his father emerged, brushed off his hands, and walked down the garden towards the cottage. Jamie felt his chest constrict momentarily with a sharp jab of grief, before it was burned away by the anger that flooded him whenever he even thought about his father; seeing him live on camera only intensified the emotion.

“We chipped him again before he was released,” said Turner. “It’s moving now, while we’re watching him, and it didn’t move last night, not once in seven hours. After he turned out the lights, the audio sensors picked up the sound of his breathing, and thermal showed a constant heat source in his bed. Surveillance checked on him at 3.12am and saw nothing unusual. He was there all night, Jamie.”

“Do you record this footage?” he asked, his eyes still locked on the screen. “Can you show me last night?”

“No,” said Turner. “We don’t record everything. We do live checks at least four times a day.”

Jamie turned back to face his Director. “This doesn’t prove anything, sir,” he said. “My dad’s an expert at faking things.”

Turner frowned. “If you don’t want to listen to me, Jamie, then there’s very little point in us continuing this conversation. I’m sorry about what you found out, what Cal and Colonel Frankenstein kept from you, but I’m afraid—”

“I’m not talking about that, sir,” interrupted Jamie. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m talking about what I saw last night.”

“And I’m telling you you’re wrong,” said Turner. “Your father has been in your grandmother’s cottage in Norfolk, exactly where he’s supposed to be, every time there’s been a Night Stalker attack. But you’re right about one thing. There’s a lot more to them than meets the eye. You saw two men, and on the twelfth of last month there were two attacks on the same night, sixty miles apart. Which means there are four of them, at least. Intelligence believes there may be as many as eight or even ten. But your father isn’t one of them.”

Jamie stared, his mind racing.

Four Night Stalkers? Maybe eight, or ten? What the hell?

“Why hasn’t any of this come up in the Zero Hour briefings, sir?” he asked.

“Because the Night Stalkers aren’t Blacklight business, Jamie,” said Turner. “We’re sharing any relevant information with the police, but this is for them to deal with. If you cross paths with them again, by all means bring them into custody if you can. God knows, it might help our standing with the local forces. But unless that eventuality arises, I want you to focus on your own job.”

Jamie tried one last time. “How are they finding the vampires they kill, sir? Haven’t you wondered about that?”

“Of course I have,” said Turner. “What’s your point?”

“The Surveillance Division keeps a vampire watch list,” said Jamie. “What if my dad has a copy of it, an old one from when he was still an Operator? What if that’s what the Night Stalkers are using to pick their targets?”

“Impossible,” said Turner.

“Why?” asked Jamie. “Why is that impossible?”

“Because none of the Night Stalker victims so far have been known to this Department,” said Turner. “That was the second thing I checked, right after whether or not your father was involved.”

Of course he thought of it all before you did. You idiot.

“Right,” Jamie said, his voice low and crestfallen. “Would anybody else have a list of vampires?”

“No,” said Turner. “And that’s more than enough on this subject. Put the Night Stalkers out of your mind unless you’re looking at one of them down the sights of your weapon. Clear?”

Jamie nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Fine. Your squad is off rotation tonight, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” said Turner. “Go and get a drink in the mess.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re eighteen now, right?”

Jamie smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It was my birthday two months ago.”

“All right,” said Turner, the corners of his mouth threatening to curl upwards into a small smile of his own. “Go and get a drink. Take Kate with you.”

Jamie frowned. “Why Kate, sir?”

The Director shrugged. “She’s your friend, isn’t she?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “But why her specifically?”

“No reason, Lieutenant,” said Turner, his face once again entirely impassive. “Do whatever you want.”

“OK, sir,” said Jamie. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Dismissed.”

Frankenstein walked down the cellblock and stopped outside the fourth cell on the right. He knew from long experience that the room’s occupant would have been aware of his presence since the moment the inner airlock door opened, but he still paused outside the ultraviolet barrier and announced himself; despite the life he had led, the horrors and violence that he had both witnessed and committed, he still set great store on good manners.

“Good afternoon, Valentin,” he said. “May I come in?”

The ancient vampire looked up from his chair, set down the book he had been reading, and smiled.

“Of course, my dear Colonel,” said Valentin. “I do so look forward to your visits. I don’t know how I would cope without the petty insults and unfounded accusations you are kind enough to level at me. I would be so very bored.”

Frankenstein rolled his eyes, and stepped through the wall of purple light. He walked across the cell, his huge frame seeming to fill much of the available space, and settled into a plastic chair that groaned audibly beneath him.

“I’m glad to be of service,” he said. “How are you, Valentin?”

“What a ridiculous question,” replied the vampire, but his smile remained. “I am exactly the same as I was yesterday, and the day before, and every day since I was put back together after our adventure in France. Very little changes inside a cell.”

“Courtesy would dictate that you enquire how I am in return,” said Frankenstein.

“Courtesy presumably believes that I am even the slightest bit interested,” said Valentin. “Tea?”

“Thank you,” he said. “You should know how I take it by now.”

This opening exchange of insults was by now a well-practised routine between the two men, performed at least once a week, despite an inauspicious start to their relationship; Frankenstein’s first visit to the cell he was now sitting in, more than six months earlier, had ended with him threatening to kill Valentin if he didn’t stop the private conversations he had been having with Jamie Carpenter, a threat that Valentin had very politely informed him he was in absolutely no position to make good on. But in the aftermath of the dreadful, catastrophic reunion between Jamie and his father, Frankenstein had, for the first time in more than a century, found himself without purpose. Julian was beyond his protection, Marie was safe in her cell, and Jamie, the last Carpenter, no longer wanted anything to do with him.

For a number of weeks, he had drifted through the Loop like a ghost, passing silently among men and women who were risking their lives every night to keep the country from descending into chaos, alone and seemingly useless. His condition, which still required him to be locked into one of the human containment cells for three days of every month, limited his ability to help. Paul Turner had offered him command of an Operational Squad, but he knew it was merely a gesture, albeit one he appreciated. He had thanked the Director as he refused his offer, then resumed his aimless existence. Until one sleepless night, when he had found himself standing outside the cellblock, without really knowing how he had come to be there. He had passed through the airlock and walked down the wide corridor, uncertain of what he was doing, but desperate to talk to someone, anyone who might have even the slightest idea of what he was going through.

Valentin walked across the cell and held out a chipped mug of steaming tea. Frankenstein took it, noting the grimace on the old vampire’s face; it clearly pained him to present his guest with such an inelegant receptacle.

“Thank you,” he said, and took a sip. The tea was excellent, as always.

“You’re welcome,” replied the vampire. “What news from the world above?”

“Nothing changes,” said Frankenstein. “People are scared, and lashing out in every direction. At vampires, at the police and the government, at Blacklight. Dozens die every night, and nobody seems to have the faintest idea how to stop it. At this point, the Operators are little more than glorified police.”

“And inside the Department?” asked Valentin. “Is Major Turner continuing to inspire everyone to keep fighting the good fight?”

Frankenstein smiled narrowly. “That is uncalled for,” he said. “Paul Turner is doing the best he can, in circumstances that are increasingly trying.”

“What circumstances might those be?”

“The public remains grossly misinformed where Blacklight is concerned,” said Frankenstein. “So the prevailing narrative has become that we have failed them, that we should have destroyed every vampire by now, or at the very least managed to keep them secret so they don’t need to worry. They blame us for a country that appears to be tearing itself apart, despite the many thousands of people who are only alive today because of the work of this Department.”

“I’m afraid that’s irrelevant,” said Valentin.

“In what way?” asked Frankenstein. “In what world, for God’s sake?”

“People not being killed by vampires was merely evidence of Blacklight doing its job,” said the vampire. “People being killed by vampires is evidence of the opposite, at least as far as the public are concerned. Surely you see the distinction?”

Frankenstein nodded. It pained him to agree with the vampire, but he was right; more than a century of silent efficiency meant far less than a single innocent victim splashed across the front page of a tabloid.

“If it makes you feel any better,” said Valentin, “my former master will likely rise before public anger reaches the point of revolution, which will resolve the situation one way or the other. You will either defeat him, and be heroes, or you will fail, and nothing will matter any more.”

Frankenstein grunted with laughter. “Thank you, Valentin,” he said, a lopsided smile on his grey-green face. “I can always rely on you to be the voice of optimism.”

“You’re welcome,” said Valentin. “How’s Jamie?”

The smile disappeared. “I don’t want to talk about him,” he said. “As I have told you so very often. Must we go over it every time I come down here?”

“Why come down here at all if you genuinely don’t want to talk about him?” asked Valentin. “You wear your pain like a badge of honour, so proud and strong and stolid, while week after week we play out this little flirtation without ever getting to the meat of anything. So let me ask you again. How is your favourite little vampire? I assume he still can’t stand the sight of you?”

Frankenstein shook his head. “You are a petty child, Valentin. Can’t you resist the urge to provoke, even this once?”

“It’s hardly provocation, my dear Colonel,” replied the vampire. “The very purpose to which you have devoted yourself for so long has been removed. One Carpenter out there alone, impotent to influence the events for which he spent his life preparing, the other a central player in what is to come, but who rejects your help. Your situation strikes me as nothing less than an existential crisis, and I am intrigued as to whether you see it in similar terms. But we can continue to talk about banalities, if you prefer? Perhaps you could tell me how the weather has been lately?”

“Mostly cloudy,” said Frankenstein.

Valentin didn’t respond; he merely stared at the monster with his pale blue eyes, and waited.

“I want to hear about Larissa,” said Frankenstein, eventually. “If we are unburdening ourselves, I want to hear about the night she left.”

“I will tell you what I feel is mine to tell,” said Valentin. “You have my word.”

“Fine,” he said. “Then no. Jamie still can’t stand the sight of me. He can be in the same room as me now, can even acknowledge me in the presence of others, but somehow that seems worse. When he hated me, when anger radiated out of him so thickly I could almost see it, it was painful but at least it was real emotion, clear and unchecked. But now? Now he just seems indifferent, and that hurts far more.”

“You have lived a long life,” said Valentin. “You have known many men, both good and bad and everything in between. Yet despite all that human experience, you were unable to see that this might unfold as it has? I find that hard to believe.”

“Of course I knew,” said Frankenstein. “Jamie prizes loyalty above everything else. It’s one of the very best things about him, even when it prompts him to be reckless and stupid. A long time ago a traitor told him I was there the night he saw his father die, and his anger at what he believed was my betrayal almost got him killed. I knew that if the truth about Julian came out, he would not be able to forgive me again. But what choice did I have?”

“Tell him the truth?” suggested Valentin.

“Brilliant,” said Frankenstein. “Just tell him that he didn’t really see his father die, because I helped Julian fake his own execution, and that the man he mourned was probably still alive, despite not even being able to be certain about that. What good would that have done him?”

“I suspect Jamie’s argument would be that it was not your decision to make.”

“I was trying to protect him,” said Frankenstein, his voice low. “As I swore I always would.”

“I believe you,” said Valentin. “What I do not believe is that you have given up any hope of a reconciliation. Surely that is not the case?”

Frankenstein let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been more than six months, and I feel nothing between us except ever-expanding distance. And in all honesty, why would he waste his time on such a reconciliation? He doesn’t need me now, if he ever did.”

“Perhaps you should tell him that,” said Valentin. “That you understand he doesn’t need you. Offer him a friend, rather than a protector.”

“I don’t know,” repeated Frankenstein. “The prudent thing to do is leave him alone. There are bigger things at stake than hurt feelings.”

“Honourable,” said Valentin, and smiled thinly. “Stupid, but honourable. If the world ends, what will prudence have mattered? All it will have gained you is months of uncertainty and unhappiness.”

Frankenstein grimaced. “You’ve made your point,” he said. “And I really don’t want to talk about this any more. You’re never going to tell anyone where Larissa is, are you?”

Valentin shook his head. “She asked me not to. And I won’t betray her, not after France. She could have let me die, but she didn’t.”

The monster smiled. “Of course, we only have your word for what she said that night,” he said. “For all we know, she specifically asked you to tell everyone where she went.”

“True,” said the vampire. “Is that what you think she said?”

Frankenstein shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think she wanted to disappear, I think she asked for your help, and I don’t think you agreed because you were grateful for France. I think you agreed because you knew it would cause trouble. Although I suppose I can’t prove that either, can I?”

“If that was the case,” said Valentin, “the person I would have known it would cause the most trouble for, the person it would upset the most, is Jamie Carpenter, whom I rather like. In the scenario you describe, my options would have been to either refuse to help someone to whom I owed my life, or do something that would cause pain to someone I respect. Can I assume that even you might find such a decision unpleasant?”

“You did cause Jamie pain,” said Frankenstein. “Just as you caused it to yourself.”

“How so?” asked Valentin, his eyes narrowing.

“When was the last time Jamie came down here to seek your counsel?” he asked. “It seems that I’m not the only person he’s withdrawn from.”

A smile rose on to Valentin’s narrow face. “Clever, my friend,” he said. “And you are quite right, he does seem to have rather tired of my company. I imagine that makes you feel delightfully warm and happy?”

“No,” said Frankenstein, his voice low. “It doesn’t. I would rather he was talking to you than not talking to anyone.”

“How flattering to be considered better than nothing,” said Valentin.

“Tell me something,” said Frankenstein, ignoring the vampire’s rebuke. “Do you think Larissa is ever coming back?”

Valentin shrugged. “I honestly have no idea,” he said. “But I’ll ask you a question in return. Would you voluntarily throw yourself into this maelstrom?”

“I did,” said the monster, a crooked smile on his face. “So did you.”

“Correct,” said the vampire. “And look where it got us.”

“In which case, let me ask you something else,” said Frankenstein. “How do you think all this is going to end?”

Valentin smiled widely. “Badly,” he said. “More tea?”

Jamie watched Kate walk into the officers’ mess and smiled as she stopped to talk to a table full of Operators near the door. It had only been thirty-six hours since he had sat beside her in the Zero Hour briefing, but he was genuinely struggling to remember when they had last spent time in each other’s company, for no other reason than that they wanted to.

On the other side of the room, Kate laughed loudly at something, and was joined by the men and women sitting at the table. Jamie recognised Mark Schneider and Carrie Burgess, two of the NS9 Operators who had been brought to the Loop by Larissa, what now seemed an impossibly long time ago, and his smile widened. It was good to see Kate chatting happily with her colleagues; there had been a time, barely six months earlier, when she would have struggled to find more than a handful of people in the entire Loop who were willing to speak to her – Kate’s involvement in the ISAT investigation and her widely perceived status as Paul Turner’s favourite had alienated much of the Department. Now, with Turner promoted and Kate reporting to Angela, Jamie assumed things were getting easier for her, and was glad.

“Hey,” she said, arriving at his table and smiling at him. “How’s it going, Jamie?”

“All right,” he said, and gestured at the empty seat opposite him. “Aren’t you sitting down?”

“Not till I’ve been to the bar,” said Kate. “I need a beer. Urgently. You?”

“Sure. Cheers.”

Kate nodded and set off towards the bar that ran along one side of the wide room. The Loop, in its current form, was barely thirty years old; it had been almost entirely rebuilt after a research trip Jamie’s father had made to Nevada in the 1980s, borrowing heavily from the American designs. The officers’ mess, however, had been transplanted intact from the first building it had occupied, one of the cluster of wooden huts and bunkhouses that had been erected under the watchful eyes of the Blacklight founders. The ceilings and walls were panelled with dark wood, the floor was hidden beneath an ancient purple carpet that was now noticeably threadbare, and the furniture that filled the room had been acquired over the course of more than a hundred and twenty years; there were leather sofas and armchairs, like the one that Jamie was now sitting in, alongside wooden benches and velvet chaises longues and clusters of plastic chairs that looked like they had been smuggled out of the Ops Room. Nothing matched, and there was no discernible pattern to anything, giving the place a chaotic charm.

Kate returned and placed four bottles of beer on the table between them.

“Thirsty?” asked Jamie.

Kate shrugged. “No sense in getting up more often than necessary.”

“The motto of alcoholics everywhere,” said Jamie.

Kate flipped him a lightning-fast V-sign. Jamie grinned, and picked up one of the bottles; she did the same, and clinked hers against his.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers.”

Jamie took a long swig and set the bottle down.

“How was last night?” asked Kate. “Patrol Respond, right?”

“Bit of a strange one,” said Jamie. “I submitted a report.”

“I haven’t seen it,” said Kate. “What happened?”

Jamie took another drink, and launched into the story of his encounter with the Night Stalkers. His friend listened in silence, sipping steadily from her beer, her expression shifting from professional curiosity to genuine intrigue as the tale progressed.

“Jesus,” she said, when he was finished. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Jamie. “Two litres of blood healed the bullet holes.”

“Don’t try and be all cool about it,” said Kate. “You got shot. I don’t care if you’re a vampire or not, it’s still a big deal.”

“I know that,” he said. “I do.”

“I hope so,” said Kate. “I worry enough without you starting to think you’re invulnerable.”

“You worry about me?”

Kate frowned. “Obviously. Why wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t have to,” said Jamie. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can look after myself.”

“Right,” said Kate. “The Fallen Gallery is full of people who thought exactly the same thing.”

For several minutes, they drank in silence. Jamie was slightly surprised to see that his bottle was almost empty; he could feel faint, fuzzy warmth in the pit of his stomach.

“Do you ever think about after?” he said, eventually.

Kate picked up her second bottle. “After what?”

Jamie looked around the mess. “This,” he said. “After all this. Assuming we win, and that we don’t die in the process, do you ever think about what you’ll do afterwards?”

Kate smiled. “You’re assuming I don’t see myself as career Operator.”

“I am.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Bullshit,” said Jamie. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Fine,” said Kate, and set her bottle down on the table. “Go to university. Spend time with my dad. Try and be normal for a while. How does that sound?”

“It sounds good.”

“What about you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Bullshit.”

Jamie smiled. “That’s fair,” he said. “To be honest, a lot would depend on my mum. Away from here, if we were out in the world, I’d be pretty much all she had. The only person who knew she was a vampire, at least, and who could understand what that’s like. I think she’d want to go somewhere where nobody knew her, and I don’t think I could let her go on her own.”

“Like where?” asked Kate.

He shrugged. “She always loved Italy when I was growing up. Maybe there. I don’t know.”

“Do you think you’d look for your dad?”

“No.”

“Just no?” said Kate. “You wouldn’t even think about it?”

“No.”

“What if your mum wanted to see him?”

“That would be up to her,” said Jamie. “I wouldn’t have to be part of it.”

“Have you told her yet?” she asked.

Jamie felt sudden heat behind his eyes. He tried to force it back down, to stop the red glow appearing, but the expression of shock on Kate’s face told him he had not been successful.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. It’s involuntary.”

“It just startled me,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not,” said Jamie. “I know what it looks like. But it was because of my dad, not because of you. OK?”

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “And to answer your question, no, I haven’t told her. If this all comes to an end, I will, and she can do whatever she wants. It won’t be any of my business. But I’m done with him, Kate. I told him so, and I meant it.”

She nodded.

“How about this?” he said, and raised his second empty bottle. “You think of something else to talk about while I get more drinks. Deal?”

Kate smiled; her face was still paler than it had been a minute earlier, her eyes a fraction wider, but it was a start. “Deal,” she said.

Jamie nodded and headed for the bar, silently cursing himself as he went. The red fire in his eyes was an involuntary reaction to certain stimuli: fear, excitement, anger, the presence of fresh blood, to name just a few. But he knew exactly what it looked like, as he had seen it for himself in the eyes of dozens of vampires; it looked like a display of aggression.

It looked like a threat.

“Four beers, please,” he said to the barman, and risked a glance over his shoulder. Thankfully, Kate wasn’t looking in his direction; she had drawn her console from her belt and her attention was fixed on its screen. He waited patiently for the barman to deliver the second round of drinks, then carried them back to their table. Kate looked up at him and smiled.

“I’ve got a new subject,” she said.

“Oh yeah?” he asked, settling back into his chair. “Let’s hear it.”

“Our genius friend and his scarily beautiful Russian girlfriend.”

Jamie grinned. “Excellent choice,” he said. “Let’s talk about Matt. When was the last time you even saw him?”

“Maybe three days ago?” she said. “I ran into him in the corridor and managed to persuade him to talk to me for about a minute. What about you?”

“Longer than that,” he said. “It must be more than a week. We message most days, although to be honest he hasn’t been answering for the last couple of days. I’d say he must be busy, but when is he ever not?”

“Busy kissing Natalia’s face off, you mean?”

Jamie’s grin widened. “How old are you, thirteen?”

“Piss off,” said Kate, smiling mischievously. “I mean, seriously, why wouldn’t he be? She’s gorgeous, and smart, and nice, and she’s totally into him. I’d probably kiss her myself if the chance came along.”

“Good to know,” said Jamie. “Honestly, I hope he is spending all his time with her. It would be a lot healthier than chaining himself to his desk.”

“Agreed,” said Kate. “But we both know that won’t be what’s happening. They’re probably in the lab right now while we’re sat here drinking beer. It’s what they do.”

“Probably,” said Jamie. “So you think it’s real? Matt and Natalia, I mean?”

“I do,” said Kate, instantly. “I talked to her about him months ago, just before the bomb in my quarters. She was falling for him then, never mind now. And Matt, thank all the stars in the heavens, seems to have managed not to screw it up. So yeah, I think it’s real.”

“I hope so,” said Jamie. “It would be good for at least one of us to have somebody. Especially if the world really is about to end.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “What a cheerful thought,” she said. “The world has been about to end ever since you all got back from France, Jamie. It’s still here.”

“For now,” he said. “Part of me just wishes Dracula would get on with it.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?” he said. “We’d either win or we’d lose. At least we’d know. Or we’d be dead.”

“Wow,” said Kate. “You’re really going for the angry nihilist thing these days, aren’t you?”

Jamie stared intently at her for a long moment, then smiled. “Am I carrying it off?”

“More or less,” said Kate. “I know you really are angry, and I know you feel like you’re alone, but you’re not. I’m still here, Jamie. So is Matt, and so are Ellison and Qiang, and Angela and Jack and Dominique and Paul and everyone else.”

He didn’t respond; he merely stared at his friend.

“Talk to me, Jamie,” she continued. “Talk to me about Larissa.”

He shrugged. “There’s nothing to say.”

“I don’t believe that. Not for a minute.”

“It’s the truth,” said Jamie. “I wish she hadn’t gone, I miss her, and I wish she’d come back. That’s all there is to it.”

“If you say so,” said Kate.

“What about you?” he said. “Do you still miss Shaun?”

Kate grimaced, but gave a brief nod. “Every day,” she said. “Being here makes it harder, to be honest. When people lose somebody out there, they grieve for as long as it takes and then they get to forget about them. I know that sounds bad, and I don’t mean they never think about the person again, but they forget enough to be able to carry on. I get reminded of Shaun every day. Every single day. I see his dad, or one of his friends, or I find myself somewhere we had a conversation. It’s like I’m not allowed to move on.”

Jamie’s heart ached for his friend as she spoke, and he was momentarily furious with Shaun Turner for leaving her like this, trapped by his memory, unable to mourn him and let him go. But it wasn’t Shaun’s fault; he hadn’t asked to have his neck broken by Valeri Rusmanov, hadn’t done anything to deserve the fate that had befallen him apart from fight bravely against almost overwhelming odds.

“I’m sorry,” said Jamie. He picked up his beer, found it empty, and took a long drink from his fourth bottle. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m really sorry, Kate.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, and gave him a fierce smile. “But thank you for saying it.”

“No worries,” he said. “I was going to ask you about your dad, but maybe we’ve spent enough time discussing friends and family?”

Kate’s smile curdled into a frown. “Oh, on the contrary,” she said. “I’m happy to talk about him. I assume you read that stupid website interview?”

“I read it,” said Jamie. “I take it you weren’t thrilled?”

“That would be putting it very, very mildly,” said Kate, a slight edge to her voice. “I mean, I get that SSL is him trying to make a difference, and I suppose I’m proud of him for that, but I’ll never understand why he decided to tell the whole world that Matt and I work for the Department. Not only was it a crime, given that they both signed the Official Secrets Act, but it was just such a stupidly dangerous thing to do. If SSL hasn’t already made them targets to the people that hate anyone who seems like they’re on the side of the vamps, what do they think announcing that they’re related to serving Blacklight Operators is going to do? What happens when the next psycho with a grudge against the Department decides they can get to me and Matt by hurting our dads? And what if I can’t protect him if that happens? It’s ridiculous, Jamie. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I’m so angry with him.”

Jamie leant forward. “That’s all fair,” he said. “Are Surveillance keeping an eye on him?”

“Yes,” she said. The colour that had risen in her cheeks as she spoke was starting to recede. “There’s a standing watch on him and Greg. But watching is one thing. Dealing with anything that happens is something else.”

“Right.”

“Anyway,” said Kate, “I’m doing what I can from Security. I just have to trust the two of them not to get themselves into any trouble.”

Jamie smiled. “How are you getting on with that?”

Kate laughed. “Pretty badly,” she said. “I sometimes forget which one of us is the parent.”

Jamie nodded, and drained his beer. His body felt pleasantly loose, his head warm and fuzzy.

“God,” said Kate, holding her own empty bottle up to the light. “I’m going to regret this when my alarm goes off tomorrow, but I really don’t care right now. This has been nice, Jamie. I think I needed it.”

“Me too,” said Jamie. “Although what I really need right now is to lie down.”

“Good plan,” said Kate, and smiled at him. “Let’s call it a night.”

Jamie got to his feet, and immediately realised that he was quite a bit drunker than he had thought; he felt unsteady on his feet, as though he was swaying gently from side to side. He looked at Kate and grinned; the expression on her face told him that she had made exactly the same discovery as him. She giggled as she noticed him staring at her, and shook her head.

“This isn’t fair,” she said. “You can just sober up whenever you want. I’m stuck like this.”

Jamie recoiled. “I can do what?”

“Your vampire side sobers you up. Larissa found out in Las Vegas. Don’t you remember?”

“Shit,” said Jamie. “That is seriously tempting. But you’re right, it wouldn’t be fair. I’ll suffer with you.”

“Solidarity,” said Kate. “I respect that. Let’s get out of here.”

Jamie followed her across the mess, concentrating hard on walking in a straight line. He nodded at Operators he knew as he passed their tables, forcing what he hoped was a sober-looking expression on to his face, and walked stiffly through the door. Kate was waiting for him in the corridor, her face red with suppressed laughter, and they cracked up as they staggered towards the lift, giggling and loudly shushing each other.

The two Operators got out on Level B and made their way along the curved corridor that, under normal circumstances, housed much of the active roster. Several of the rooms were currently empty; their occupants had been lost during the battle with Dracula at Château Dauncy, and had not yet been replaced, despite the Department’s subsequent recruitment drive. The Loop, as a result, did not feel full; the corridors seemed too empty, the canteen too sparsely populated, like a physical reminder of the ultimate price that had been paid by so many.

They stopped outside the door to Kate’s quarters. Jamie smiled at his friend, suddenly very aware of how close they were standing to one another. His hands were at his sides, but he would barely have to move them to take hold of her waist. Kate was looking back at him with an even, clear-eyed expression, but there were patches of delicate pink high on her cheeks. Silent seconds passed as they stared at each other, a tension between them that Jamie had never felt before.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Kate. She placed her hands gently on his shoulders, and kissed him. He kissed her back urgently, his eyes closing, his hands sliding up her back and neck and finding her hair, waiting for his stomach to spin, for the same dizzying abandon he had felt whenever he kissed Larissa.

Nothing happened.

After a long, awkward moment, he gently broke the kiss. Kate was looking at him with an expression of great affection, but the colour had faded from her face, and he suspected she was trying not to laugh.

“That didn’t really work, did it?” she said.

“No,” said Jamie, grinning at her. “It didn’t. My mum will be so disappointed.”

Kate laughed, and shook her head. “I love you, Jamie,” she said. “You’re my best friend.”

“I love you too,” he said. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Paul Turner was reading through a requisitions order from the Security Division for fifty new MP7s and fifteen thousand rounds of ammunition when somebody hammered on his door.

He frowned, and pushed the form to one side. An unscheduled knock on his door was highly unusual; anyone who wanted to see him was required to send a message first, and a Security Operator was stationed outside his quarters for the express purpose of preventing people from turning up unannounced. Turner reached out and pressed the TALK button on the intercom that connected him to his protection detail.

“Gregg?” he said. “Report in.”

There was a burst of static, and then the Security Operator’s voice appeared; the young American sounded out of breath, as though he had just finished a long run.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Gregg. “They pushed past me, but I have the situation under control.”

Turner’s frown deepened. “Who pushed past you?”

“Karlsson and Browning, sir,” said Gregg. “I told them you weren’t available, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Browning jumped me from behind, the little shit. I’m waiting for Security to come and collect them, sir.”

“For pity’s sake, Operator,” said Turner, getting up from his desk and walking across the room. “Your enthusiasm is admirable, but do you really think that arresting two senior members of the Lazarus Project is in the best interests of this Department?”

There was a long pause. “I don’t know, sir,” said Gregg, eventually. “It was a clear breach of protocol.”

Turner rolled his eyes. “Call off your alert and go back to your post, Operator. I’ll see Karlsson and Browning now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gregg, instantly. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“It’s fine,” said Turner, and pressed his ID card against the black panel beside the door. The heavy locks disengaged, and he pulled the thick metal hatch inwards to reveal Matt Browning and Robert Karlsson standing in the corridor outside. Both looked dishevelled, and Browning was bright red in the face. Beyond them, he could see Tom Gregg peering along the corridor, a nervous look on his face.

“Gentlemen,” said Turner, “Operator Gregg was right, this is a breach of protocol. You couldn’t have sent a message telling me you needed to see me?”

Karlsson shook his head. “I didn’t want to run the risk of anyone reading it, sir.”

Turner smiled. “You’ve been here less than a year and you’re more paranoid than me. I suppose you’d better come in.”

“Thank you, Director,” said Karlsson, and stepped into the room. Browning followed him, casting one last dagger-eyed stare in Gregg’s direction. Turner closed the door behind them and gestured towards the armchairs that sat in front of the wall screen.

“Take a seat, gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s hear what’s so important that it was worth taking on my Security detail to tell me.”

“We’ll stand, if that’s all right with you,” said Karlsson. “But I would suggest you sit down, sir.”

Ten minutes later Turner’s mind was spinning, and he was glad he had taken the Professor’s advice.

“Does it work?” he said, gripping the arms of his chair. “Does it actually work?”

Karlsson looked at Browning, who took a step forward.

“It works in the computers, sir,” said Matt. “And it works in a test tube. We’ve carried out a thousand data runs in the last two days, using living vampire tissue. Every single sample has been clear of the vampire virus after we introduced our engineered gene.”

Turner looked at the young Lieutenant. Matt’s face was still flushed from his encounter with Operator Gregg in the hallway, but his eyes were clear, and his mouth was a straight line of determination. The Director had often dreamt of this moment, of a day when his scientists would walk into his quarters and tell him they had found a cure, but, now that it was happening, he found himself unable to fully process it. The scale of the Lazarus Project’s discovery – if it’s real, he reminded himself, don’t get carried away, for God’s sake, not yet – was scarcely comprehensible; if it did prove to be real, it would quite literally change the world forever. He ordered himself to stay calm, when what he really wanted to do was jump up from his desk and wrap Karlsson and Browning in a bear hug of sheer gratitude.

“And you can produce it?” he asked. “On a mass scale?”

Matt nodded. “The genetic structure is stable, sir. We can synthesise it as fast as the labs can churn it out.”

“So what’s the next step?”

“Under normal circumstances, we would schedule at least two years of rodent and primate testing before we even considered a human trial,” said Professor Karlsson. “But these are not normal circumstances, sir.”

“Indeed they are not,” said Turner. “So what’s our alternative?”

“Test it on a vampire,” said Karlsson. “A live vampire. But there are ethical—”

“Do it,” said Turner. “Immediately. I’ll get the Operational Squads to bring you subjects. Test it as soon as there are vampires in the cells.”

“Once we have their agreement, sir?” asked Browning.

Turner shook his head. “Test it whether they agree or not, Lieutenant Browning,” he said. “My suggestion would be that you don’t waste time asking them. Bring the results straight here, whatever time of day it is, whatever my schedule says I’m supposed to be doing. The very minute you have them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” said Karlsson.

“Yes, sir,” repeated Matt.

“Good,” said Turner. “If this works, if this is what you say it is, I’ll make sure the world knows what you and your colleagues did. I promise you that. I want you to pass my profound gratitude on to every single member of the Lazarus Project. Will you do that for me?”

“Of course,” said Karlsson, an expression of pride rising on to his face. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank you, Professor,” said Turner. “And you, Lieutenant Browning. Now get back to the labs. Go and find out whether you really have just saved the world.”

Jamie walked along the cellblock corridor, safe in the knowledge that his mother would already know he was coming.

He could hear her moving about in her cell, even though it was still more than a hundred metres away, and had no doubt that she would be frantically tidying. It was incredibly unlikely that he would notice if the square room was what she considered messy, but she would be mortified nonetheless; as a result, he slowed his pace, giving her time to make the cell immaculate.

Jamie knew that he should be with Ellison and Qiang, getting ready for the Patrol Respond they would be embarking on in less than an hour. The amendment to the Operational SOP – that they were to bring vampires back to the Loop alive from now on – had arrived on their consoles ninety minutes earlier and he should have been discussing such a radical change of policy with his squad mates. In the current climate, with public anger rampant and incidents of violence occurring with dizzying frequency, carrying out the new order was going to be fraught with difficulty; it was, Jamie knew from long experience, extremely difficult to subdue a vampire that didn’t want to be subdued.

Killing them was a lot easier.

There had been no explanation for the change in SOP. Jamie had heard the subject being discussed at length as he made his way down through the Loop, thanks to his supernatural hearing, and the prevailing view seemed to be that it was a PR exercise, a way for Blacklight to try and improve their standing among the sections of the population who believed that vampires deserved the same treatment as humans. None of the Operators – or at least, none that he had overheard – had raised the possibility that had immediately occurred to him as he read the new orders, a possibility that he dearly, desperately hoped was the truth.

Matt and his team have made a breakthrough, he thought. And we’re bringing them vampire test subjects. I’m absolutely sure of it.

Jamie heard his mother stop moving and resumed his usual pace, his boots clicking on the floor beneath him. He wanted to talk to Kate about the change of orders, and he really wanted to find Matt and ask him what was going on, but he needed to see his mother first, despite the guilt he felt whenever he did so.

The previous evening, in the officers’ mess, he had told Kate the truth about his reasons for not telling his mother that his father was still alive. He knew that Kate – and Matt too, in all likelihood – thought it was a selfish decision, a way for him to get back at his dad and exercise power over a situation in which he had been left in the dark for so long, but that genuinely wasn’t the case. He had not told her, and would not tell her, because he could see no good that could come from it, and because he had no desire to cause his mother more pain than she had already suffered.

He knew that it was very likely the same rationale that Frankenstein would use for not having told him the truth about his father, and as such placed him dangerously close to hypocrisy, but he was sure, deep down, that it was not the same thing. Had he been told the truth, he could have done something about his father being alive, helped him, or brought him in, or something. Whereas there was nothing his mother could do from inside her cell, and it would only be cruel to increase her feelings of helplessness. When this was all over, when Dracula rose or fell and Blacklight survived or was destroyed, he would tell her, and take the consequences of his decision on the chin.

Jamie walked out in front of the UV wall that sealed his mother’s cell and smiled. She was sitting on their old sofa with a magazine in her hands, and looking up at him with a ludicrously unconvincing expression of surprise, as if trying to make it clear that she definitely hadn’t known he was coming and definitely hadn’t scrambled to give the cell a quick once-over before he arrived.

“Hello, love,” she said, and gave him a wide smile. “It’s nice to see you. Are you coming in?”

“Hey, Mum,” he said. “I was planning to, if that’s all right?”

“Of course,” she said.

His mother got up and busied herself with the tea tray as he pressed his ID card against the black panel on the wall. The purple barrier disappeared and he stepped into the cell, leaving the front open behind him; it was a violation of basic security procedures to do so, but he doubted he could find a single person inside the Loop who believed his mother represented any kind of a threat.

“Here you go,” said Marie, holding out a steaming mug. He thanked her, took it from her hand, and settled on to the sofa as she lowered herself into the armchair opposite.

“How are you, Jamie?” she asked.

“I’m all right, Mum. Yourself?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “Not a lot really happens down here.”

“I suppose not,” he said. “Doesn’t Valentin visit you any more?”

“He does,” said Marie. Her eyes narrowed slightly, as though she wasn’t sure whether she had said the right thing. “It’s nice to see another person now and again.”

“I bet,” said Jamie. He had avoided even glancing into the ancient vampire’s cell as he passed it, but had still been able to feel Valentin’s eyes following him.

“What about you?” she asked. “Still no word from Larissa?”

Jamie grimaced. “No, Mum,” he said. “No word from her.”

“Oh,” said Marie, and forced a smile. “Well, I’m sure there will be soon.”

Jamie laughed. “Why would you think that?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why would you think we’ll hear from her soon, Mum? She left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye and she removed her chip so that nobody would know where she’d gone. Does that sound like the behaviour of someone who’s about to have a change of heart and come home?”

“I don’t know,” said Marie. “I’m sure she had her reasons.”

“Yeah,” said Jamie. “Me. I’m the reason.”

His mother shook her head. “That’s ridiculous, Jamie. Why would you say something so stupid?”

“We had a huge fight that evening,” he said. “You know we did. And three hours later she was gone. You can’t tell me to pretend there’s no link between the two?”

“I’m not saying that,” said Marie. “I just don’t like to see you being so hard on yourself. I didn’t know Larissa, but I don’t believe anyone would throw away their entire life because they had a fight with their boyfriend. What was it about, Jamie? Can you even remember? Because I bet it wasn’t anything important.”

He bit his tongue. His memory of that evening, of their argument and what it had been about, was crystal clear, but he could not tell his mother that.

“You’re right, Mum,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

He sipped his tea as his mother stared at him, a sympathetic expression on her face. He gave her a thin smile, but her gaze didn’t change; it was unnerving.

“What?” he asked, eventually. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re a teenager, Jamie,” she said, her voice low and gentle. “Only for another couple of years, but you’re still one now, and teenagers never believe their parents have ever been through anything that might be relevant to what’s happening to them. But I would hope you remember that you’re not the only person in this room who knows what it’s like to lose someone they love.”

Jamie felt his heart lurch in his chest. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “It’s not the same thing, I know it isn’t. I just miss her, Mum. There, I said it. I know you weren’t her biggest fan and I know part of you thinks I’m better off without her, but I really miss her.”

His mother gave him a fierce smile. “I know you do, Jamie,” she said. “Did you know my parents didn’t approve of your father when we got together? Did I ever tell you that?”

Good judges of character, thought Jamie, and instantly chastised himself for such unnecessary viciousness.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t know that. Why didn’t Nan and Granddad like him?”

She shrugged. “They were snobs,” she said. “Simple as that. They wanted me to marry a lawyer or a banker, someone who could look after me properly, and your dad was just a lowly civil servant at the Ministry of Defence. Well, we all thought

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