It had been funny though
, she thought, remembering the look of surprise on his face. She let out a chuckle. Half detached amusement, half hysterical sob.
‘Something funny?’
April’s heart gave a bump and she whirled around, but she was too slow. She felt a stinging blow to her ear and she flew sideways, landing painfully on one knee.
Who? What?
she thought, turning her head to see. ‘Gabriel …?’
Thud
. Another thump to her back and she pitched forward face down onto the path, a crushing weight –
a knee?
– pressing her down into the cold tarmac, her palms scraping the gravel. She tried to raise herself, tried to fight it, but the weight bore down harder.
‘Not Gabriel,’ hissed a voice close to her ear. April’s blood ran cold. She would know that voice anywhere.
‘Marcus?’ she whispered in disbelief, her mind scrabbling to cope.
How can he be here? How?
A high-pitched giggle rang out. ‘And here I was thinking you’d forgotten me.’
Marcus gripped her hair and yanked her head back painfully. ‘Did you miss me, little rabbit?’
‘Go to hell, Marcus,’ she spat and instantly regretted it as Marcus slammed her head back down onto the path. She tried to roll over, but Marcus grabbed her wrist and dragged her backwards, pulling her across the path, grazing her arm and leg. A rage rose up in her. She’d had just about enough of people pushing – and pulling – her around for one night. She twisted her body around so that she was on her knees and, with all her strength, yanked herself backwards. To her surprise, she broke free and fell back onto her bum. April knew she had only seconds to act before he came flying at her again. There was no time to think, no time to run. He was a vampire; she
was a mouse trying to escape a tiger. She sprang to her feet just as he loomed up at her.
‘You want to kill me?’ she yelled. ‘You want revenge? Well come on, then! You’ll be doing me a favour.’
She heard a bubbling chuckle from the dark and saw him step towards her.
‘Oh, I want to kill you, little rabbit,’ he said. ‘But not for revenge, oh no.’
As he walked towards her a beam of moonlight lit his face and she saw him for the first time – and she understood immediately. His skin was grey, mottled, his eyes sunken, his cheeks hollow. Marcus Brent was dying.
‘You see it, don’t you?’ he whispered, spite dripping from his lips. ‘You see what you’ve done to me, don’t you –
Fury
?’
Her heart lurched. He knew,
he knew
. Her worst fears had come to pass. They all knew she was a Fury and they would tear her apart. And once April was gone, the vampires would continue their plans unhindered, turning the world into a living hell. Gabriel would stay a vampire for ever, Caro and Fi would be turned into Suckers, her mother married to Sheldon … and her father’s death was all for nothing. Pointless.
Futile
. Marcus must have sensed her despair, because he laughed.
He took a step forward and April stumbled backwards, not wanting him to get any closer, but knowing she had no chance of escape if she ran.
‘You know why we call you Furies, rabbit?’ he hissed, his voice fully of quivering menace. ‘I bet you think it’s from Greek mythology, don’t you? The three Furies,’ he said sarcastically, ‘the daughters of the night. I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you? All very superhero.’
April didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything.
‘No, we call you Furies because of the Romans. It’s from
fures
– the Latin for “thief”. That’s all you are, Fury. A dirty little thief, sneaking in and stealing our glorious light.’
She could tell Marcus was enjoying this, gleefully drawing the moment out. Why? Why not just get on with it? And then she realised. Because this was his last act. There was no
Dragon’s Breath for Marcus and if the vampires found him, they’d probably kill him. And it was then April decided she wasn’t going to give him the pleasure.
‘Didn’t like it, then?’ she whispered, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
Marcus frowned.
‘Didn’t like what?
‘The taste of my blood.’
With a roar he leapt forward, grabbing April by the throat. His fingers squeezed viciously into her flesh and she flinched at the foul breath on her face.
‘No, I did not,’ he snarled. ‘But that doesn’t matter, does it? You’ve already infected me with your disgusting little disease. I can’t catch it twice, can I? So now …’
He ran a finger down her cheek until it was touching her neck. ‘… now when I drink you dry, we’ll go to Hell together.’
He opened his mouth, pulling his cracked lips back to reveal bleeding gums and broken teeth. Horrified as she was, April felt some satisfaction at that: they were teeth she had knocked out during their battle in the snow last Christmas. All of her fear and pain and loss rose up inside her and she let out a scream. Marcus flinched in surprise and April used that moment to bring down the heel of her shoe like a hammer, hitting him square on the temple. He cried out in pain and fury, but April didn’t wait to see if she’d done any real damage. She turned and ran.
Stay down, stay down
, she repeated over and over in her head, hoping she’d hurt him enough to at least slow him a little, but knowing he was a vampire and that a little tap like that would barely register. With every step, every heartbeat, she knew he would reach out for her and pull her down like a tiger falling on a fleeing deer. She could almost feel his fingernails digging into her skin. Yet still she ran, faster than she had ever run, tearing along the path past the tennis courts and out through the gate onto Swain’s Lane.
‘Hey!’ shouted a security guard, but she didn’t even pause, her feet pounding, her only focus getting home to safety.
Safe?
she mocked herself,
Safe at home? The place your father was murdered? You call that safe?
But there it was, looming in front of her, the tall windows, the friendly yellow door. She tore across the road, crashing through the gate which clanged back and forth behind her. And there was the door. Closed. Locked.
Ohmygodohmygod
, she thought, hammering on the wood.
I left my key in my coat. I left the key in my coat!
‘Mum!’ she shouted, knowing full well that she was out. ‘Mum! Please!’ she shouted, the flat of her hand stinging as she banged it on the door. ‘Help me! Please!’
But who would help her? She was cornered like … like a rabbit. Then she heard him coming for her, the footsteps running across the square straight for her.
‘No!’ she shouted, crying. ‘No!’ She turned to face him. But it wasn’t Marcus. It was a man in a black coat. A uniform.
‘It’s okay, love,’ said the man, holding up his hands. ‘You’re all right now. You’re okay.’
Then there was another man and a woman, also in uniform. Uniform? For a moment, her brain didn’t register, then she was flooded with relief.
The police! The police were here!
‘April!’ shouted DI Reece as he ran up the path. ‘It’s okay, love, it’s okay,’ and she fell into his arms.
‘Marcus!’ she sobbed, ‘Marcus is back.’
‘I know, April. It’s okay, we’ve got him. We’ve got both of them.’
She looked up at him. ‘Both? Who else have you got?’
He looked grim.
‘Gabriel, April. We’ve arrested Gabriel. I know he was only trying to help, but …’
‘What? Why have you arrested Gabriel? Why haven’t you arrested Marcus?’
Reece looked across at the female officer who shook her head.
‘We can’t arrest Marcus, April. Marcus is dead.’
April walked through the open gates and up towards the house. She gently pulled her scarf higher up her bruised throat. It seemed colder today – perhaps it was, it was coming up to midwinter – or perhaps it was just how she was feeling. The gravel crunched under her shoes and she came down through a line of trees. There it was: Kenwood House. She had been meaning to come here for ages – after all, the Georgian mansion was all of ten minutes’ walk from the square – but she had never managed somehow. It was the pull of the cemetery, the pull of the past.
It had been three days since the police had charged Gabriel with Marcus’s murder. With unintentional dark irony, they were calling it manslaughter. April still had little idea of what had happened, but she guessed that Gabriel had followed her after their argument and caught Marcus just as she was running away. That was evidently the police’s theory too – they had made her go over and over the events in detail, until she had felt she was going mad, but at least they hadn’t made her speak to Dr Tame again. Her mother had, of course, gone completely ballistic that the police had allowed a crazed killer to attack her daughter for a second time. She said she would have their jobs, and from the look on DI Reece’s face, April guessed he agreed with her. Of course, the story had made the papers, the tabloids lapping up this juicy new twist to the story of murder in Highgate: ‘
Daughter of slain journalist is attacked for second time in weeks, police are powerless
’. Poor DI Reece. It wasn’t as if his panda cars and house-to-house inquiries ever had much chance against a nest of vampires, was it?
She walked slowly along the back of the house, peering in through the glass doors, winding in and out between its white marble columns. She almost had it to herself; Kenwood was a summer place, picnics on the lawns by the lake and all that. It meant that she could take her time. Apart from a few cuts and grazes, she had escaped injury – ‘this time’, as Silvia had reminded the police commissioner down the phone at high volume, but the main damage was to her feeling of well-being. April was scared and she didn’t mind admitting it – and her fear had nothing to do with having been a hair’s breadth from getting her throat torn out. The thing which still frightened her was the fact that Marcus had known she was a Fury. Obviously it hadn’t taken much for him to work it out, considering that her blood was slowly killing him. But who else knew? Had he told anyone else? Had other vampires seen him in his grey-faced, hollow-eyed state and made the connection? Marcus had never been close to Layla and they all knew he’d drunk April’s blood in the cemetery at Christmas. But then, if any of the Suckers had seen Marcus, they would never have let him live. He had committed the cardinal sin: he had risked uncovering them all. April shivered again, tugging at the scarf. The funny thing was, she was far more scared of being hunted than she was of being killed. Facing Marcus last night she had been frightened – terrified, in fact – but it hadn’t been anything like as bad as the graveyard chase and fight during the Winter Ball. Maybe she was becoming a super-powered arse-kicking vampire killer after all. Or maybe you just got used to being beaten up after a while. But she couldn’t get used to the suspense, the not knowing, the sense that she was being watched and hunted, killers waiting for her around every corner. Certainly Marcus had tracked her like an animal and if it hadn’t been for Gabriel’s timely arrival, she could well have been torn apart on that lonely pathway.
Gabriel! Bloody Gabriel!
‘And bloody men!’ she whispered to herself. How dare he come steaming in on his white charger to rescue her? It was so typical. She could just imagine him sitting there in his cell
feeling smug and thinking he was the big hero, when she wouldn’t have been walking home alone in the dark if it hadn’t been for him and his bloody secrets.
She headed down the sloping pathway towards the lake, wondering if it would be frozen solid. There had been a pond near the house where April had grown up, out in the countryside – she wasn’t sure where exactly – they had collected frogspawn there and sailed little boats in the summer. In winter it had frozen so hard that April could walk out on it and see the fish swimming under her feet.
DI Reece had explained that her scream had alerted the police waiting by the lower gate. When they had arrived, they had found Gabriel standing over the body, his hands covered in Marcus’s blood. He was being charged with Marcus’s murder and they were once again looking into his connection with both Isabelle and Alix Graves’s murders, maybe even Layla’s death. April knew in her heart that it was rubbish, but she was so angry with him, she didn’t care. He could rot in prison for ever for all she cared.
Her heart gave a leap as she remembered his betrayal. How could he? She had given him everything, saved his life, and he had repaid her by grabbing the first girl who came along.
She cursed out loud, then felt bad about it.
God, why can’t I just find a nice, simple, straightforward boy who just wants to love me instead of all this destiny, vampires, good versus evil crap?
she thought.
The truth was, however angry she was with Gabriel, she still felt a bit guilty. Gabriel had been trying to save her. Or perhaps he was just angry after the argument and found Marcus in his way. Had she brought about Marcus’s death? Obviously, Marcus had been planning to kill her:
he
wouldn’t have felt bad afterwards, but that didn’t stop April from feeling that perhaps she could have done something to prevent it. She obviously wasn’t cut out for this Fury business.
April was disappointed to find that the ice on the Kenwood lake was thin and had already been broken. Kids had thrown rocks and sticks at it, turning it into a patchwork of giant ice
cubes. Shame. She checked her watch: five to two. She turned and walked briskly back towards the house, where she was pleased to see Miss Holden was early.