The atmosphere in the back of the van should have been triumphant; instead, it was as cold and treacherous as the surface of a glacier.
Kate and Larissa were sitting next to each other, their arms folded and their eyes fixed on the wall opposite them. Between their gazes sat Jamie, deliberately looking anywhere other than at either of the two girls. Separated from Squad G-17 by an ultraviolet screen that had been generated more for reasons of protocol than any faith in its effectiveness sat Valentin Rusmanov, his butler Lamberton and Ted Ellison.
The servant appeared to be asleep, his head resting against the wall, his eyes closed, his hands folded neatly in his lap. Ted unquestionably
was
asleep; the old man’s chin had descended towards his chest as soon as they pulled away from the Twilight Care Home. Valentin, on the other hand, was wide awake. He was sprawling lazily in his chair, his left foot resting on his right knee, and was watching the three Operators intently.
They’re so young
, he marvelled.
They’re just children. But the boy, Jamie, whom the two girls are so angry with, destroyed Alexandru. How is that possible?
Valentin was hosting a party at his mansion in New York when word reached him of the death of his brother.
He was sitting on a sofa in one of the rooms on the second floor, sipping a glass of bourbon that was almost as old as the building and smoking Bliss through a clear crystal pipe, watching the show that was being played out in front of him. There were a number of people, men and women, vampires and humans, begging for his attention, but he ignored them all; in the middle of the floor, a small company of actors were acting out the death of Julius Caesar, with the part of the Roman Emperor being played by a human man in his fifties.
When the scene reached its climax and the vampires thrust their daggers into the man’s flesh, spilling his blood across the wooden floor, Valentin began to applaud. The vampires bowed, before one of them knelt beside the dying man, and gently bit his neck. Within minutes, the newly-turned vampire was back on his feet, his eyes glowing red with pride as he accepted the congratulations of his audience, revelling in his rebirth.
Around the room, flesh intertwined with flesh, and the air was thick with grunts and muffled screams. The scent of blood filled Valentin’s nostrils, and he savoured it. He had thrown his annual Theatrical Revue for more than a century, yet it was still one of his very favourite nights on the social calendar he maintained; the willingness of mortal men and women to offer up their bodies for the chance of immortality, or just to quench the darkness inside themselves, never ceased to delight him.
He turned his attention to a woman who was standing against the wall, a look of nervous excitement on her face. She remained within a pace of the door, as though she was not sure whether she had the courage to enter the room and give herself over to what was happening within it, needed to know she was within easy reach of escape if her nerve failed her. The woman was tall and slender, with long curls of strikingly red hair, and Valentin was deciding whether to go and introduce himself or have
her brought before him when Lamberton appeared silently at his side, and whispered that he bore bad news.
Valentin nodded, and followed the servant out of the room. They walked along the corridor towards the stairs that led to Valentin’s private suite of rooms on the building’s uppermost floor, Lamberton following a respectful distance behind his master. They reached the seventh floor, and Lamberton stepped smoothly in front of his master. He opened the study door, stepped inside the room and held it wide.
Valentin nodded, then made his way to his wide desk as Lamberton turned on the collection of antique lamps that illuminated the study. With the room acceptably lit, he appeared before Valentin’s desk just as his master settled into his chair. His timing was, as always, impeccable.
“Bad news, you said?” asked Valentin, pouring himself a drink from the crystal decanter on his desk. He could have told Lamberton to do it, but they were long past such petty demonstrations of authority.
“Yes, sir,” replied Lamberton. “I’m afraid so.”
“Out with it then,” said Valentin. “I doubt it’s going to get any better the longer I have to wait to hear it.”
“It’s your brother, sir,” said Lamberton, his voice tinged with exactly the appropriate amount of sensitivity. “Alexandru. I’m afraid he is dead, sir.”
Valentin’s hand froze halfway to his lips. Then he raised the glass the rest of the way and drained it.
“Is that so?” he said. “Your source is reliable?”
“It is, sir,” replied Lamberton. “I sought confirmation before I disturbed you and, regrettably, was able to secure it from a number of trusted acquaintances. I’m very sorry, sir.”
Valentin nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Do you know how it happened?”
“The details are still somewhat unclear, sir. It appears that he was
destroyed by Julian Carpenter’s son, in retaliation for the abduction of his mother. That is all that is currently known, sir.”
“One of the Carpenters,” said Valentin. “I confess to being unsurprised. I warned him that his obsession with avenging Ilyana was dangerous, warned him several times. I have never understood why our kind seeks to provoke the likes of Blacklight; they may be mere insects, but even insects can sting you.”
“Exactly as you say, sir,” replied Lamberton.
Valentin nodded, then reached for a second glass and poured a measure of bourbon into both. “Toast my fallen brother with me, Lamberton,” he said, holding one of the glasses out to his servant. “I suppose he deserves that much.”
Lamberton stepped silently forward and accepted the glass.
“Thank you, sir,” he said, then raised himself straight, as if standing to attention, and lifted his glass into the air. “To Alexandru Rusmanov, who lived life exactly as he pleased.”
Valentin laughed. “Perfect,” he said. “To my brother.
Noroc.”
“Noroc,”
repeated Lamberton, and the two vampires drained their glasses.
Sitting in the back of the van, with the laughable ultraviolet wall separating him from the three young members of Department 19, Valentin found himself full of an emotion he had not been expecting.
For all their differences, Alexandru had still been Valentin’s brother; the blood that coursed in their veins had been the same. This was why he had sought out Jamie Carpenter, why he had decided to make his offer to him rather than to Henry Seward, who was widely known to be the current Director of Blacklight; because he had needed to see the boy who had destroyed his brother face to face. Now, sitting merely metres away from him, what he felt as
he looked at Jamie was not anger, or grief, or the desire for revenge; what he felt was nothing short of admiration.
The bravery it must have taken for this boy to stand face to face with my brother and not falter, I simply can’t imagine. I would have thought twice about it, had the situation ever arisen.
It was not merely that Alexandru had been old, or powerful, although he had been both in enormous measure; it was the rampaging flame of madness that burned at the heart of the middle Rusmanov brother which had always made Valentin uneasy.
As a man, it had been there, buried deep beneath a mostly convincing veil of humanity, appearing rarely and always apparently at random. As a vampire, it had been given free rein, and it had consumed Alexandru from within, until it was all that remained. His sadism, his unpredictability, his absolute lack of interest in the preservation of any life, including his own, had made him less a vampire than a force of nature; he moved through the world like a hurricane, dispensing death and pain and misery wherever he touched down, leaving nothing but devastation behind him.
Valentin, who considered such indiscriminate carnage to be both reckless and vulgar, had ceased to have anything to do with him several decades earlier. They had last spoken in the aftermath of Ilyana’s death in Hungary, when grief had temporarily overwhelmed madness, and the man Alexandru had once been had resurfaced, if only for a few short days, days in which the middle Rusmanov brother had spoken exclusively of his desire for revenge on Julian Carpenter and his family.
It had been painful for Valentin to turn his back on Alexandru. He had done the same to Valeri many years earlier, without even a second thought; he had hated his oldest brother since they were children, and four centuries had not changed his feelings. He and
Alexandru, on the other hand, had once been as close as it was possible for two brothers to be.
Since Valentin had been old enough to be allowed to play without the supervision of the gaggle of nannies their mother had employed to protect her fragile nerves from the vexations of her sons, they had been inseparable. Alexandru had never resented the presence of his little brother, even when the older boys in the village remarked on it with derision; he had allowed Valentin to follow him around like a nervous puppy, without complaint or resentment.
On one occasion the son of a local farmer had pushed Valentin over in the village square, sending him home in tears. Alexandru had patiently waited until his little brother spoke the culprit’s name, then quietly slipped out of the house, returning several hours later unable to lift his right arm above his shoulder. An hour later the farmer had arrived at their house, demanding compensation; Valentin, listening in secret from the top of the stairs, heard the man explain to their father that Alexandru had taken a branch from a white oak tree and beaten his son so badly with it that the boy would never walk again.
Valentin’s father listened carefully, expressed sympathy and handed the farmer a bag of coins. As soon as the man departed, he called for Alexandru, who appeared immediately, ready to accept whatever punishment was about to befall him. Instead, his father gave his middle son a glass of schnapps, poured one for himself, then toasted him and told him he was proud of him. Valentin, crouching in the darkness overhead, had been overcome with a love for his brother that was so powerful he had thought his chest might explode.
The last embers of that love had still flickered in Valentin’s chest when he made the decision to remove Alexandru from his life. He assuaged his guilt with the conviction that the man he had once
loved so fiercely had, in truth, been gone for many years; that the destructive, impulsive creature who now answered to his brother’s name was not his brother, not in any sense beyond the physical.
There had been attempts by Alexandru to make contact in the years that followed; each one had been met with polite refusal from Lamberton, and eventually Valentin knew his brother had ceased to try. The thought made him feel something close to grief, even though he doubted their estrangement had been a cause of significant distress to Alexandru, a creature who lived from appetite to appetite, on instinct and desire.
The growing admiration for Jamie that Valentin now felt confirmed to him what he had long suspected; that the feelings he had had for his brother, feelings that had once burned so fiercely that he would have killed for Alexandru, gladly and without hesitation, had been extinguished.
“Why are you staring at me?” asked Jamie. His tone was curious rather than aggressive, but it carried a subtle undercurrent of threat.
Valentin awoke from his memories, and smiled at the teenager.
“You destroyed my brother,” he said, in a friendly voice, and his smile widened as he saw Jamie take a sharp intake of breath. “I was just wondering how such a thing came to pass. Gossip is a remarkably prized commodity in the world I inhabit, but the details have never reached my ears. I was wondering whether you would tell me how you did it.”
Jamie appeared to consider this for a moment, as an almost infinitesimal glance of worry passed between Kate and Larissa, then began to talk.
He told Valentin the truth; that he and his friends had fought Alexandru’s acolytes for as long as possible, but that they had been
defeated, leaving him standing alone in front of Valentin’s brother. He told him that he had known there was no way he could hope to actually harm Alexandru with any of his weapons, but that he had also realised that Alexandru knew that too.
He explained that he had emptied his MP5 into the base of the huge cross behind the chair in which Alexandru was sitting, and then fired his T-Bone into its heart, under the pretence of having aimed for Alexandru and missed. And finally, he told Valentin how he had used the winch mechanism of his T-Bone to pull the cross down on top of Alexandru, tearing him to pieces, before he stabbed his stake into the ancient vampire’s beating heart.
Valentin listened to Jamie’s story with slowly widening eyes. When the teenager finished, he brought his hands together in a single silent clap, and smiled widely at Jamie.
“You are your grandfather’s grandson, Mr Carpenter,” he said. “He would have been proud to have thought up such an idea, and he was the kind of man who once faced me in my own home while wrapped in explosives, threatening to destroy us both if I did not permit him to leave unharmed with his friend.”
“My granddad did that?” asked Jamie, incredulous. “Why?”
“It was a long time ago,” replied Valentin. “He had been sent by your organisation to destroy a vampire who happened to be a guest at a New Year’s Eve ball I was hosting. When we discovered his presence, and that of his monstrous friend, we unmasked them, and were considering what to do with them when your grandfather revealed the ace contained in his sleeve.”
Jamie’s blood turned cold in his veins.
“Monstrous friend,” he said. “Who do you mean by that?”
“I’m sure you know,” said Valentin.
“Frankenstein,” Jamie said, softly. “He was with my grandfather, wasn’t he?”