‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Gabriel, taking her hand and leading her up the hill. The shadows seemed longer up here,
closer to the moon. They passed the circle with its huge cedar tree and saw the strange shape of the Beer tomb with the pyramid roof looming above it.
‘Where are we going?’
‘This way,’ he smiled, pulling her up a flight of steps, bright white in the moonlight. There was a wide terrace at the top with a low balustrade, a little neglected with plants and moss growing here and there, but impressive nonetheless.
‘What is this place?’ asked April.
‘We’re on top of the catacombs. It was built to give a perfect view of London; people used to come here to promenade and pass notes to each other.’
‘Seems a strange place to come.’
‘No, it was wonderful back then, flowers growing everywhere, the paths swept clean and those trees ahead of us were cut back to make the view as spectacular as possible.’
April fought back a pang of jealousy, thinking of Gabriel coming here with other girls.
Be happy that he’s here at all
, she scolded herself.
‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘it’s beautiful.’
‘No.
You’re
beautiful,’ said Gabriel. He leant in and kissed her neck, his nose pressing against her ear. His hands slipped inside her coat and she sighed with pleasure.
Oh God, I’ve missed this
, she thought, urging him on, pressing her body against his.
‘I wish I could kiss you,’ he murmured, ‘you’re so …’
She waited for more, but Gabriel had frozen. April looked up and flinched; Gabriel’s teeth were bared, his eyes narrow, darker. His whole body seemed tense.
Oh God, he’s not going to kill me, is he?
she thought miserably. There was no terror, no fear for her life, just sudden misery that their romance had all been a sham, that Gabriel had simply been attracted to her Fury scent all along.
‘Wha—’ she began, but Gabriel put a finger to her lips.
‘Shhh …’ he said in a low whisper. ‘Can you smell that?’
‘What?’
He shook his head and led her back to the stairs. He was
moving like a lion stalking prey, his head turning from side to side, his eyes taking everything in. When April reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned back to her. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘If anything comes for you, scream. And then run. In that order.’
‘Bugger that,’ said April, ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘No, April, there’s something dangerous here.’
‘What, and it’s going to be less dangerous if you leave me by myself? I’m sticking to you like glue, hero.’
She followed Gabriel along the path. To their left was a long grey stone wall with arched doors let into the sides, the occupants’ names carved above them: tombs for London’s wealthiest Victorian families. April remembered coming along here on her tour of the cemetery; the main doorway ahead of them was the entrance to the Highgate Catacombs. It had been a pretty creepy place then, and that had been in full daylight. Gabriel stopped and crouched down, as if he were searching the ground for tracks.
‘What is it? What can you see?’
He looked up and pointed ahead of him to the high black iron door set into a stone archway. The catacombs were open.
‘Oh no,’ whispered April. She remembered the tour guide making a big deal about how the catacombs were kept locked at all other times.
‘Someone’s been here,’ said Gabriel.
‘Someone or some
thing
?’
Gabriel turned to her, the moonlight catching his face. She didn’t need an answer. He looked like an attack dog straining on the end of his lead. Whatever the something was, he wanted to get at it.
‘Stay outside, April,’ he said, moving towards the door. ‘I’m serious.’
April watched as he stepped into the vault, staring at the entrance after he vanished inside. She turned around, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow, wondering if the something was out here watching her from behind a tree or a tomb.
Scrabbling in her pocket, she brought out the little torch
and began shining it at the tree line, back at the tomb, anywhere. There was nothing – nothing she could see, anyway. There was a noise to her right and she whirled around, holding the torch in front of her like a gun. What was that? All she could see were trees, but she was sure she’d heard something: a whisper? A chuckle?
God, not again
. ‘Gabriel,’ she hissed, backing towards the door. ‘
Gabriel!
’
She wasn’t going to stay out here alone. She walked slowly towards the dark open doorway, her body tensed, hearing her heart thumping in her ears. Where was he? As she reached out to touch the stone archway, she immediately jerked back as Gabriel stepped in front of her.
‘Dammit, Gabe, you scared me!’
‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, putting his arms around her. It was a gesture of protection and sympathy, the same sort of embrace people had given her at her dad’s funeral.
‘Why not?’ she said, trying to look around him, ‘What’s in there?’
‘You don’t need to see,’ said Gabriel, his face grave. ‘We should go.’
‘No,’ said April angrily. She didn’t know why, but suddenly it was very important that she see inside the vault. ‘Whatever’s in there, I want to see it,’ she said, trying to get around him. ‘Don’t tell me what to do, I’m sick of people telling me what’s best for me.’
More than that, she was sick of not knowing what was going on, of half-glimpsing things, of constantly feeling that she was groping around in the dark. She could tell from the look on his face that she wasn’t going to discover a box of fluffy kittens, but at that moment she wanted – she
needed
– to see, however horrible it was. She darted to the side and ducked under his arm.
‘April, don’t …’
But he was too late. There, in the entrance to the catacombs, she could see a body. Hanging by the neck.
‘Jesus, God …’ said April, a hand over her mouth. Her heart was hammering and bile rose in her throat. Because she knew
who it was; she recognised the dress, and the shoe hanging loosely from the toe of the left foot. She knew who it was, but still she couldn’t help raising her torch beam towards the face. Because she
had
to see, she simply couldn’t help herself. She had to be sure that what she was seeing was real. April let out a sob as she saw the horribly distorted face, her eyes mercifully closed, her blonde hair falling in waves, still perfect even in death. ‘Layla,’ she moaned. ‘Oh Layla.’
Gabriel caught April as she staggered backwards, wrapping her in his arms and pulling her outside. He held her tightly as she shook, her breath coming in gulps. It was horrible, monstrous, unreal. She looked up into Gabriel’s face, tears streaking her own.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why is this happening? God, Gabriel, why?’
Gabriel didn’t answer. What could he say? ‘Because creatures like me have come to destroy everything you know, to turn this place – to turn the world – into a living hell’? There was no way to explain this, to explain the endless horrors which kept coming again and again. Alix, Isabelle, her father, her own ordeals and now Layla. Who would be next, who was safe? No one was; April saw that clearly now. She had been floating in her naïve belief that the worst was over and all they had to do was catch the bad guy. But now she saw with sickening clarity that any one of her friends, her neighbours … anyone she knew could be next, anyone who stumbled onto the vampires’ secret, anyone they felt could be a threat. And if she didn’t do something about it, something very, very soon, then any day now, that vault would be piled high with bodies.
‘We have to stop them, Gabe,’ she said fiercely.
‘We will, baby,’ he said. ‘We have to.’
The police examiner thought Layla had been dead for two days. Which placed her time of death on the night of the party at Davina’s house.
‘Are you okay, April?’ DI Reece had found April in the kitchen where she was staring into a cup of tea which had gone cold ten minutes before.
She looked up. ‘Not really.’
Reece nodded. ‘Well, I think I’d have been more worried if you were doing cartwheels. Do young people still do cartwheels?’ he wondered aloud.
April forced a smile: he was only trying to lighten the mood, but she really didn’t feel up to swapping jokes. And to think only half an hour ago, she had been feeling so happy. Happy that her boyfriend had lived, happy that she hadn’t killed him with her kiss after all.
Well, that didn’t last long, did it?
she thought cynically.
Gabriel had taken her back to her mother’s house, where they’d raised the alarm. They both agreed that having Gabriel find another body would prompt too many questions. It was bad enough that April was wrapped up in yet another violent death, but at least she had an excuse for being in the cemetery – even if it had involved some minor breaking and entering.
‘I know you and Layla weren’t exactly friends,’ said Reece, sitting on the stool opposite her, ‘but it’s never pleasant to hear about a suicide.’
Suicide
. It was all April had been thinking about. Could Layla really have committed suicide? Or had the Suckers forced her into the noose? She wasn’t sure which was more horrible.
‘But she just wasn’t the type, Mr Reece,’ said April urgently. ‘She wouldn’t have killed herself, she was too …’ she trailed off.
‘Too what, April?’
‘Too arrogant.’ She shrugged. ‘Too full of her own self-importance. Layla loved herself, Mr Reece, there’s no way she would have done that.’
‘People do funny things sometimes. You think you’ve seen everything, but they will constantly surprise you. No one can really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head.’
He looked at April sympathetically.
‘I’m sorry, she was your friend. You don’t want to hear this right now.’
‘It’s okay, I want to work it out as much as you. Because if someone as self-obsessed as Layla can kill herself, then something’s seriously wrong in Highgate.’
Reece nodded.
‘Okay, well let’s see if we can work it out. Her boyfriend’s death could certainly have been a trigger, but is there anything else you can tell us?’
April hesitated. She wasn’t sure how much she should tell him. She never was: that was the eternal problem.
‘Well, there was one thing,’ she said slowly. ‘Layla said something to me the other day about how “they” were after her. She was acting really strangely.’
Reece noted it down in his notebook, then tapped the page.
‘And who were “they”?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, avoiding his gaze, ‘I assumed she was talking about some of the other girls in her clique, you know, that they were pushing her out of the group or spreading rumours about her or something, not that anyone was actually threatening her life. Especially since when I asked her about it the next day, she acted like I was talking rubbish. She was back to being the same cocky girl she was before.’
‘So you think there could have been a bullying element to this? Something that pushed her over the edge?’
‘Look … I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Layla
was a bit of a bully herself. It’s like asking if a shark could be attacked by another shark. I suppose it’s possible, but … I can’t see how someone calling her names would make her do … that. Like I said, it doesn’t make sense that Layla would kill herself.’
‘And yet she did.’
‘Did she?’
Reece raised his eyebrows.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, are you sure it was suicide?’
Reece looked down the corridor towards the living room where DS Amy Carling was talking to April’s mother and Mr Sheldon.
‘Just between us, just in conversation – and I’m not saying she was killed, we’re just talking hypothetically here, okay? – it’s an awful lot of effort to go to, faking a hanging. Someone must have really wanted her dead. Given that people have been killed in much more bloody ways recently, as you well know, why would anyone bother?’
And suddenly it came to her in a rush. All at once, she knew who had done it and more importantly,
why
they had.
‘Oh no,’ said April, clamping her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh God.’
Why didn’t I think of it before?
She jumped to her feet, knocking her stool to the floor with a great clatter, and ran from the room, pushing through the kitchen door and out into the back yard, gulping at the cold air, her head spinning.
Stupid! So stupid. How did I miss it?
They had killed Layla because of
her
. Because they thought Layla was a Fury, rather than April. The vampires had watched Milo waste away, eaten away from the inside by disease, and they’d thought ‘vampires don’t get sick’. The only possible cause was a Fury. The only creature on earth which could destroy a vampire. As Milo’s girlfriend Layla must have been their prime suspect. Perhaps he fed from her, perhaps not. Either way they had kissed. God, that was why they had killed her in such a horrible way – snap her neck, no blood, no danger to the vampires.
She squeezed her fingers into her eyes.
It was me, it was
me
, she thought,
I killed Layla. If I wasn’t a Fury – if I hadn’t accidentally killed Milo – they would have left her alone
. And ironically, Gabriel would have been the perfect cover for April. All the Suckers had seen them kissing and yet here he was, a picture of vampire health. Killing Layla had made her safe – for the moment, anyway. God, that just made her feel worse.