“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,