Uprising (15 page)

The glass panels of the pod blew apart, fragments raining down from the ceiling. The pod’s other occupants began to scream in terror. A man clutched his arm, blood pumping through his fingers. Another woman was screaming as she clamped her hand over a torn earlobe.

‘We need to go higher,’ Alex said. She shoved past the petrified humans and launched herself up through the shattered roof.

‘I think you’re right,’ Greg said as he quickly followed her. A second volley of shots punched through the pod. The humans huddled on the floor, moaning and shrieking.

Standing on the roof of the pod, Alex and Greg were surrounded by the white steel latticework of tubular struts that held the arms of the enormous wheel on its axis. The metal was slick with moisture from the drifting mist, slippery to the touch. If Alex had a plan, it was simply to keep putting distance between them and the enemy until the four vampires ran out of ammunition. Just a scratch from a Nosferol bullet, and it was game over.

The wind crackled in their ears as they hauled and swung themselves from one strut to another. Two tiny spiders on a gigantic steel web three hundred feet across. Alex looked down; they were already a long way above the pod. Greg was making his own way up, ten feet below her and a little way to the right. The river was a black mirror shimmering with coloured lights. The spangled cityscape sprawled all around as far as the eye could see. It was a dizzy drop down, but that was the last thing on Alex’s mind.

She knew she’d made a bad mistake. The four vampires had split up. She couldn’t see the other three, but the black-haired female had boarded a pod. As it steadily rose into the air, the motion of the wheel was bringing her and Greg downwards in relation to it. In minutes they’d be level with one another. Alex climbed on, using all her vampire strength to keep moving faster – but the laws of physics were an opponent nobody could defeat.

The dark female punched out the glass side of her pod. She stepped out onto the arm with a smile and walked nonchalantly towards Alex. Leaning on a vertical strut, she crossed her arms. ‘Going somewhere?’ she purred.

‘Oh, I come up here all the time,’ Alex said.

‘You’re Alex Bishop, aren’t you? Heard all about you, but you don’t know me. My name’s Lillith. Thought you’d like to know who destroyed you.’ She shrugged, then pulled the gun from her belt and aimed at Alex’s face. Taking her time, drawing it out.

A gust of wind caught her unawares. Her foot slipped on the shiny, wet steel piping and she lost balance. Grabbing for a strut, she knocked the gun from her grip and it went clanging and tumbling down through the lattice to the water far below.

‘Clever,’ Alex said.

Lillith flushed, but quickly regained her composure. ‘Who needs a gun? More fun this way.’ She grabbed the hilt of the sword at her hip, drew out the blade with a ringing of steel and lunged at Alex.

If Alex had stayed where she was, the whooshing sword would have taken her head off. Instead she ducked, moving in towards Lillith’s body, and threw a right hook that connected hard with her face. The punch would have knocked a human out cold. Vampires were a little tougher than that. Lillith went sprawling on her back on the pipe, but sprang instantly back on her feet and came on again with the sword poised. Another humming sideways slice, so fast a human wouldn’t even have seen death coming.

It takes a vampire to destroy a vampire properly.
Alex recalled the words she’d spoken in Romania just days ago. In a quarter of a second the blade was going to chop through her windpipe, carve through her neck and separate the spinal vertebrae on its way out. Her head would hit the water just before her body.

Quarter of a second was enough. Alex stepped back out of the swing of the blade and let herself drop down twenty feet, landing on a broad strut below. She’d lost sight of Greg in the forest of white steel. Where was he?

Lillith peered down at her for an instant, then launched herself into space and landed ten feet away.

The motion of the wheel had brought another pod level with them – and Alex saw that the massive black vampire was in it, accompanied by his weaselly little friend and the blonde in the white leather jacket. The big guy crashed through the glass as though it was nothing and walked out towards them, a 9mm pistol like a toy in his fist.

‘Leave her to me, Zachary,’ Lillith yelled. But before she could finish, the weaselly one had produced a gun and let off a shot. The bullet sang off a thick pipe inches from Alex’s head. At the same instant, Lillith let out a shriek and dropped the sword, clutching her wrist. She’d been hit by the bullet’s ricochet. For an instant there was wild terror in her eyes as she anticipated the first bite of the Nosferol’s effects; then she peeled back the sleeve of her red jumpsuit, and Alex saw the dented gold bracelet on her wrist that had saved her.

‘Anton, you fucking
moron!’
Lillith hissed furiously at the weaselly guy.

He frowned apologetically, letting the gun waver, then tightened his grip and started to bring it back up to aim. His second shot was going to find its mark. But Alex wasn’t hanging around for it.

Instead, she threw herself off the wheel.

The white pipework flashed by as she went hurtling down in freefall, and the ground rushed up to meet her. Vampires could take a lot of damage, but she’d never pushed her luck as far as leaping two hundred feet down onto concrete. She was about to find out whether it was survivable.

The impact knocked the breath out of her. She knew to flex her knees to prevent her thigh bones spearing up through her shoulder blades, and to roll like a parachutist. Stunned, she lay there for a moment or two while she tried to ascertain whether her body was still intact or whether she was going to spend the rest of eternity as a pile of mincemeat. Someone screamed in horror. Voices around her.

‘Jesus Christ. Did you see that?’

‘She fell.’

‘Fuck no, she jumped.’

‘Ambulance must be on its way.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘I think she is, yeah.’

‘Course she’s bloody dead.’

‘Oh my God…’

Alex stirred, then picked herself up off the concrete and dusted her hands. She seemed to be okay. The crowd that had gathered round her backed off sharply. People were gasping, pointing. Another scream, if anything more shocked than before. Apparently, the only thing scarier than witnessing a suicide was when the body upped and walked away.

Partygoers were milling around at the foot of the Eye in the wake of the shooting. Most were pale and silent, huddled in corners like disaster survivors as they waited in shock for the emergency services to arrive. Women wept in their men’s arms. Someone had laid a coat over the dead body of the security guy. The howl of sirens was getting close. It sounded like half the police force and a hundred ambulances were carving through the London traffic towards them.

Alex peered up at the towering wheel. No sign of Greg anywhere. Maybe the fight had given him the chance to escape – but she hadn’t seen him come down. Had he managed to board another pod? She narrowed her eyes.

Greg, where are you?

Lillith was a tiny figure perched high above. Not even she was crazy enough to attempt a leap like that.

Alex knew what she was thinking.
We’ll meet again.

And it was something Alex was looking forward to as well.

She let her gaze linger just a moment longer. Then, as the ambulances and police cars came screaming into sight and the place was suddenly swirling with blue lights, she slipped away.

Chapter Thirty

Oxford

12.50 a.m.

The rain was turning heavy as Mickey Thompson walked through the empty city centre, but he didn’t care about getting wet. The atmosphere of the party he’d just left was still with him, making him smile. But the thing that was really putting the spring in his step as he walked past Carfax Tower and headed down the slick High Street pavement towards his digs was the memory of Sally Baker.

He’d worshipped her from afar ever since he’d first bumped into her in the mathematics section at the college library. Three whole terms had gone by, and he’d never been able to pluck up the courage to ask her out. But tonight he’d done it. And she’d said yes.

Mickey made a fist as he walked.
Yes!
So it was dinner, tomorrow night. Then he remembered how late it was. Not tomorrow, today. Even better. He began to worry about where to take her. He couldn’t afford much on his postgrad allowance, but he really needed to make an impression here. How about that nice little French brasserie on Little Clarendon Street? Or maybe Chinese? Or was that too obvious? Mexican? Too spicy, maybe.

Those were the happy concerns that filled his mind as he wandered all the way down the High Street, humming a little tune to himself, until he reached the cobbled lane that wound past the Radcliffe Camera.

Mickey Thompson suddenly froze. Stopped, and very slowly turned.

No, he must have imagined it. But he could have sworn someone was there behind him.

He shrugged and kept walking through the rain.

Must have been the wine.

He walked on under the looming shadow of the circular Radcliffe Camera building.

Hold on.
There
was
someone there.

He could hear padding footsteps a few yards behind him. He turned again, and this time he saw the figure.

It stood on the edge of a sodium streetlamp’s diffuse amber haze. A tall man, dressed all in black, his body seeming to melt into the shadows. But Mickey could see the long, lean face, and he could see that the man was looking at him. There was a strange glint in his eye. Was that a smile on his thin lips?

Mickey walked faster now, his steps becoming jerky with tension. He glanced over his shoulder through the wet mist. The man was still there, keeping pace with him. Should he turn and confront him? If this was a mugging, could he avoid trouble by offering the guy some money to go away? But something about the man told Mickey he was no mugger. He wanted something else. But what?

Mickey couldn’t stand it any longer – he broke into a run. His heart was in his mouth and the sound of his footsteps echoed off the college buildings as he rounded the corner and headed down New College Lane. Up ahead of him, the gothic archway of the Bridge of Sighs hung darkly over the narrow street, the streetlights glinting off its rain-streaked leaded windows. Just a hundred yards further and Mickey would be at the door of the flat he shared with two other postgrad mathematicians. He fumbled for his keys as he ran – and dropped them.

As he groped cursing in the shadowy gutter to retrieve the keys, he realised the man was gone. He let out a wheezing gasp of relief.

‘You stupid bugger,’ he muttered to himself. ‘What’s got into you?’

That was when the chill feeling of dread came over him. It started at his toes and spread quickly through his body, and it wasn’t because his clothes were damp. It was that horrible feeling that he was being watched. As if by a predator.

He looked up, afraid of what he was going to see.

It was the man in black. He stood framed in the ornate centre window of the bridge, ten feet above his head.

Mickey backed away. His jaw dropped open.

With a crashing of breaking glass, the man leapt from the window and landed on his feet like a cat on the pavement in front of Mickey.

And before Mickey Thompson could turn and run, let out a scream or wet his pants in terror, the man was on him and he felt the teeth savaging his throat.

London

Alex flipped open her phone and speed-dialled Rumble as she pressed the Jag through the night traffic. It was just after one a.m.

‘Jesus, Harry, I’ve been trying to call you.’

‘I was feeding. What’s happened?’

‘It was a trap. We walked right into it. Becker and Mundhra are down. Greg and I got separated and I can’t find him. I’ve tried his phone about a hundred times. I think they might have taken him.’

Rumble was quiet for a long moment as the news sank in. ‘But who—’

‘They’re vampires. They’re better funded than us, they’re better organised than us, and they’re not fucking about. They have Nosferol, Harry.’

A sharp hiss as Rumble drew a breath on the end of the line. ‘Where are they getting it from?’

‘There’s only one way. Someone on the inside.’

‘Who?’

‘You tell me. All I know is, we’re under attack.’

Rumble fell silent once more for a few seconds. When he spoke again, she could feel the urgency in his voice. ‘I need to make some calls. Are you coming in?’

‘No, I have a visit to make.’

Chapter Thirty-One

Greg felt an enormous hand press into his back and shove him forward. He could see enough through the black hood over his head to know that he was in a dark place, like some kind of tunnel or cellar. His captors had shoved and prodded him a long way through corridors and down steps after they’d hauled him out of the car. If they were inside a house, it was a big one.

From the echo of the footsteps ringing off stone walls, he figured there were two of them marching him along, one big and heavy, the other light on his feet, like a fox. The two male vampires from the London Eye.

‘Move your ass faster,’ the big one said in his impossibly deep bass.

‘We should have just finished this bastard back in London.’ His companion sounded agitated with fury. ‘He’s the one who did for Petra.’

‘Uh-uh. Gabriel wants him.’

‘What for?’

‘You know Gabriel. Didn’t say.’

For an instant Greg thought about lashing out behind him with his foot. He might get lucky. If he could get the element of surprise, if he could somehow shake off the hood, he still could have a chance of getting out of it.

But he knew there were too many ifs in that sentence. He kept walking, his mind working furiously. Why were vampires fighting vampires? And who was Gabriel?