Latour cocked his head, and looked at the monster.
“Why?” he asked. “That would be far more unkind.”
Then he strangled the girl, as Frankenstein squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for it to be over.
Seconds later, seconds that seemed like hours, he felt hands on his shoulders, and opened his eyes a fraction. Latour, his eyes returned to normal, the majority of the blood gone from his face, was crouching in front of him, regarding him with a kind expression.
“Come,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of Boulevard de Magenta. “You will stay with me. My apartment is only a short walk from here.”
Frankenstein shook his head, slowly. His mind was reeling with the sheer unnatural cruelty of what Latour had done. His stomach was churning, and a hopelessness, a self-loathing more powerful than anything he had ever felt, was washing over him, threatening to drown him.
Crack.
Latour slapped his face, hard.
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” he said. The kindness was once more gone from his face, replaced by a look of vicious amusement. “Come now, while you can do so under your own steam.”
He gripped the lapels of Frankenstein’s coat, then pulled him to his feet. He linked arms with the monster, as though they were nothing more than two old friends out for a stroll on the town, and led him out on to the street. Then he began to walk north, with Frankenstein following mechanically at his side, lost inside his own ravaged mind, trapped in a nightmare from which there seemed to be no waking.
For a moment, nobody moved. Kate stared at the blood pumping out of the hole in her arm, as Shaun Turner looked on with an expression of total incomprehension. Jamie felt like his legs had been turned to lead, as though he couldn’t move them, physically couldn’t move them. In the end, it was Larissa who reacted first.
Her eyes flooded involuntarily red at the sight and smell of the running blood, but the look on her face was pure concern. She shoved Jamie and Jack out of the way and slid to Kate’s side, ignoring Shaun completely.
Her movement broke the spell that had been momentarily holding them fast; Jamie started to shout, asking Kate over and over if she was all right. Jack got on the radio and ordered the helicopter to make an emergency medical pick-up. Angela stared at Kate, her face unreadable, the face of someone who has seen horrors that no one should have to see. Larissa clamped her hand over the wound, squeezing it tightly with her superhuman strength, and Kate cried out in pain. Shaun Turner pulled the stake from his belt, turning towards the comatose vampire.
“No!” yelled Jack Williams, as he realised, too late, what his squad member was going to do. But Shaun gave no indication that he had
even heard his squad leader’s voice; he dropped to his knees and hammered his metal stake into the motionless vampire’s chest. The foreman exploded with a dull thud, a pathetic spray of blood that flickered briefly in the cold night air. Then Shaun was moving again, this time to Kate’s side, demanding that Larissa let him see the damage.
“Get back,” growled Larissa, and Shaun recoiled.
“It’s OK,” said Kate, in a low voice, but Larissa ignored her.
“Jamie,” she said, her eyes blazing. “Call the Loop and tell them to have a transfusion ready when we land.”
“I’ll do that,” said Jack Williams, then took a step backwards as Larissa snarled at him, her fangs bared and gleaming in the light from the truck.
“I don’t want
you
to do it. I want Jamie to do it,” she growled. “Your squad has done enough already. We’ll take care of her from here.”
“Take it easy,” said Angela. “Shaun didn’t—”
“It’s OK,” interrupted Turner. “She’s right. I shouldn’t have… it was stupid.”
“We agree on that at least,” said Larissa, her voice vibrating with anger. She looked over at Jamie, who was watching her with wide eyes. “Jamie,” she snapped. “Get on the radio. Why am I having to ask you again?”
Jamie’s face flushed with heat, and he fumbled the radio from his belt. He entered his passcode, acutely aware of the look of enjoyment on Angela’s face as she watched, then tuned into the Operational frequency.
“NS-303, 67-J reporting a medical emergency. Over.”
The radio crackled as his message was passed through layers of encryption and voice recognition in the Loop’s Communications Division.
“What is the nature of the emergency? Over.”
“Vampire bite to the left forearm of Operator Kate Randall. Over.”
“Significant blood loss? Over.”
Jamie glanced over at Kate. Her arm was still bleeding, but the pressure Larissa was exerting had slowed it to a steady trickle. Kate’s face was pale, but her jaw was set with determination; as he watched, Larissa leant in and whispered something, and Kate smiled, weakly.
“Negative,” he replied. “Infection is the primary risk. Over.”
“What’s your ETA? Over.”
Jamie was about to answer when the squat black helicopter roared into view above the deserted shipyard. He heard screams from the men and women who had been captive on the freighter, and saw Larissa lift Kate into her arms as though she weighed nothing, ready for the chopper’s arrival.
“Approximately thirty-five minutes. Over.”
“Understood. A trauma team and transfusion unit are being scrambled. Over.”
“Out.”
Jamie clipped the radio back on to his belt, and ran to his friends. The noise from the helicopter was deafening, its engines screaming as it prepared to touch down.
“How’s she doing?” he yelled, over the howl of the rotors.
“She didn’t lose much blood,” shouted Larissa. “She’ll be all right as long as we get her transfused.”
The helicopter hit the ground, hard, the tyres of its wheels screeching. The side door slid open and the co-pilot appeared, framed against the glowing green light of the helicopter’s interior. He reached out his hands towards Kate, but Larissa ignored him and floated quickly up into the chopper, with her friend in her arms.
“Come on!” shouted Jack, waving his squad towards the door.
Shaun and Angela climbed nimbly into the belly of the chopper, and then Jack was shouting at Jamie. He ran forward and leapt up into the vehicle, his boots thudding on to the metal floor. He turned back to pull Jack Williams aboard, then the pilot fired the helicopter’s huge engines and they were airborne before Jamie slid the door shut.
The helicopter raced south, skimming low over the countryside, its rotors sending a bone-jarring cacophony of noise through the insulated cabin as the pilot pushed the huge aircraft as hard as she would go.
Kate had refused to lie down on one of the benches that spanned the width of the chopper’s cabin, despite pleas from Larissa and Shaun Turner for her to do so. She was sitting upright beside Larissa, who was eyeing the four male Operators with the same expression that a wolf gives when someone comes too near to one of her cubs.
Kate’s face was pale; she was holding her free hand over the wound on her arm, which Larissa had wrapped with a field dressing as soon as they were all safely aboard, and staring directly ahead, looking at no one. Jamie appeared to be doing the same; he had his head back against the rest behind his seat, and seemed to be looking at the opposite wall. But he was really looking at Shaun Turner.
Every few seconds, Turner glanced at Kate. It was almost nothing, little more than a flicker of his eyeballs, but it was there, and it was as regular as clockwork. Jamie watched, turning over what had happened in his mind.
As far as I knew, they’d never met until today. But when he knelt down in front of the vampire, she called him Shaun. And there was worry in
her voice. Then after she was bitten, he staked the vampire, even though it was our only lead, even though information was our first priority. Like he wanted to punish it for what it had done. And then he tried to push Larissa out of the way, to get to Kate.
It wasn’t a ‘eureka’ moment; no light bulbs burst into life above his head, no explosion of realisation hit him between the eyes. He was just suddenly aware of something that now seemed obvious.
There’s something going on between them. Between Shaun and Kate.
Jamie was surprised to find that the first emotion he felt was jealousy.
He didn’t fancy Kate, and in truth he never had. There had been something desperate between them on Lindisfarne, as the darkness closed in on them from all sides, but it hadn’t been real. It had been the fear of death, followed by the euphoria of survival, the primal joy of being alive. And Jamie knew full well, looking back, that by the time they had landed on the island, he was already falling for Larissa; had been ever since the first time he had gone to see her in her cell, deep in the lower levels of the Loop.
He had believed, however, without arrogance or vanity, that Kate’s feelings for him were somewhat more complicated than his for her. So had Larissa; it was why they had kept their slowly blossoming relationship a secret. Not because they were seeking to exclude Kate, or because they didn’t trust her to keep their secret – relationships between Operators were strictly against regulations – but because they didn’t want to hurt her. If they were right, and she saw Jamie as potentially more than just a friend and a colleague, then revealing their relationship to her would have been insensitive at best, and cruel at worst. Their plan had been to give her time to move on, then gently break the news.
But if he was seeing things clearly, and he was sure that he was,
then all their care and concern had been for nothing. Because now it appeared that Kate’s feelings for him were truly nothing more than fraternal.
Her feelings for Shaun Turner, however, were clearly another matter.
Jamie thought about all the time they had spent worrying about Kate’s feelings, all the tiptoeing around, all the lies and half-lies and secrets. It had all been for absolutely nothing, he realised, and his jealousy was suddenly replaced by a deep anger. It made him feel ashamed, as he looked at the blood leaking from the hole in her arm, but it was there, nonetheless; anger at the fact that she hadn’t told him and Larissa about whatever was going on with Shaun, even though he knew it was appallingly hypocritical of him to do so, and a tiny ball of anger, shot through with disappointment and rejection, that she had not been interested in him after all, that there was someone else she wanted more.
To hell with you then,
he thought, viciously.
We don’t need you, and we definitely don’t need him. Larissa and I will be fine on our own.
Kate looked over at him, and gave him a small smile. Her teeth were gritted against the pain, but it was as if she was trying to tell him silently that she was all right.
Jamie watched, and the anger went out of him so quickly it was as if it had never been there at all. He realised instantly that he
did
need her, that
they
needed her. She was the ice to Larissa’s fire, the one who thought everything through, who could control her emotions and do what was best, with neither the impulsiveness that fuelled Larissa nor the lightning temper that Jamie knew was his own greatest weakness. Without her, they would be incomplete; he knew it, and he knew that Larissa would know it too. The three of them
were tied together, had been ever since the morning after they had returned from Lindisfarne.
After reading the letter that Frankenstein had left for him, Jamie had fallen into the deepest sleep of his life; he had eventually awoken ten hours later, and even then only because Admiral Seward had sent for him.
The Director of Department 19 had debriefed him in his office, where he had jumped instantly at the offer to make his temporary position at Blacklight permanent, pride flooding through him when Seward announced that he was the youngest descendant ever to take up an active commission. He immediately asked about Kate and Larissa, and felt his heart sink when Seward told him that they had decisions of their own to make, and that he might not see them again. But as it turned out, the three of them had been reunited less than an hour later, in one of the Briefing Rooms on Level 0 of the Loop.
They had made small talk in the beginning; they barely knew each other at all, not really, and the bonds that had been temporarily forged between them had been in response to a threat that no longer existed. Nervously at first, then with increasing passion, Jamie told them about his mother, and Kate explained that her dad had been confirmed as one of the survivors of the massacre on Lindisfarne. Larissa had asked Admiral Seward for a favour, and he had compiled for her a report on her younger brother Liam, who was apparently living with their mother, and doing well at school.
They exchanged pieces of trivia about their lives, talked around the terrible events of the previous night and confirmed that they had all accepted the invitation to join Department 19. Somewhere in the midst of it all, they became friends.
From that point on, they had been inseparable.
They had gone through accelerated Operator training together, encouraging each other as they neared the finish line and the course hardened and sharpened. They stood side by side as they received their commissions from Admiral Seward, smiling happily as the Director told them they were going to be formed into an Operational Squad together, even though it was not customary to do so with three inexperienced Operators.
Jamie had been embarrassed to discover that he had been commissioned as a Lieutenant, rather than as an Operator like the two girls, and that he was technically their immediate superior, but neither Kate nor Larissa had appeared anything other than delighted for him. He had loved them both for that, and had gone out of his way to ensure that beyond his being the first call sign that was announced when they entered or left the Loop, there would be no differences between them, no hierarchy to be adhered to. They had gone out together, night after night, to every corner of the country, responding to intercepted Echelon messages, or information supplied by the Intelligence Division; they had fought and survived, time and again, and they had done it together.
They all knew that Jamie, as a Lieutenant, was sometimes privy to information that he was unable to share with his two friends; it was an unspoken thing, made bearable by the fact that it was obvious to both Kate and Larissa that Jamie hated the situation even more than they did. That Kate would keep something like her and Shaun from him hurt Jamie deeply, mainly because he could now clearly imagine how Kate would have felt if she had ever found out about him and Larissa.
At least she doesn’t know about that. That’s something
.
Part of him, the childish, vicious part that he was always
disappointed by, wanted to tell Kate right now, while she was at her lowest point, when it would hurt her the most. But he fought back the urge. He was still staring at the wall above Shaun Turner’s head, wondering how things had become so complicated, when the pilot announced that they were beginning their descent to the Loop.
The helicopter’s wheels screeched down on to the tarmac, and Shaun Turner hauled the door open while it was still slowing to a halt. Then he was reaching for Kate, the look in his eyes daring Larissa to try to stop him a second time. The vampire girl’s eyes flared red, but she relaxed her grip on Kate’s arm, and let Shaun help her down from the chopper’s open door. Kate winced as she moved, a fresh trickle of blood running from beneath the dressing on her arm. Then she was surrounded by men in white coats, who lifted her gently on to a stretcher and ran her into the hangar and out of view.