Cal Holmwood looked at their faces, and laughed. “You can thank me later,” he said. “And I’m afraid that constitutes the good news. The bad news is that I am disbanding Operational Squad G-17, and assigning each of you as squad leader to a new squad. You will no longer be working together in the field.”
Larissa was the first to respond. “Why, sir?” she asked. “How can you recommend us for honours and punish us at the same time?”
“Miss Kinley, this is not punishment,” replied Holmwood, gently.
“I have no wish to break up squads unnecessarily, especially one with as high an Operational success rating as yours. But after the events of last night, the three of you are now senior Operators in this Department, with significant Operational experience. We are going to need to recruit heavily in the coming months, and new Operators need experienced Operators to be their squad leaders; it’s necessary for the continuation of the Department. I hope you can understand.”
The room lapsed back into silence.
He’s right,
thought Jamie.
I know he’s right. But that isn’t going to make it any easier when I head out on a mission and Larissa and Kate aren’t with me. No easier at all.
He thought of all the places they had been together, all the things they had seen, and done, and he was suddenly overcome with an enormous sense of change, a feeling that things were never going to be the same as they had been. He looked at the two girls, in whose hands he had willingly placed his life, time and again, and wondered if they were feeling the same thing.
A small alarm buzzed once on Interim Director Holmwood’s desk, and he reached over and turned it off.
“You will have questions,” he said. “Many of them, I’m sure, in the coming days and weeks. When they occur to you, I’ll be here. But for now, I’m afraid I must say dismissed.”
Jamie looked at the Interim Director, his mind brimming with things he wanted to say, but held his tongue. Instead, he walked across the small room, and pulled open the door. He stepped out into the grey corridor, his friends following behind him.
The four Operators walked silently back to Jamie’s quarters, aware even as they did so that something had changed between them; that their futures no longer lay on a single path.
They sat on the chair and on his bed, and they tried to discuss the implications of what Cal Holmwood had told them, but they got nowhere; it was all too big, too profound, and all four of them needed time to process what they had heard.
Kate was the first to leave, telling them she would see them at dinner; she had agreed to visit Major Turner in his quarters. This raised the eyebrows of both Jamie and Larissa, but they said nothing; instead, they let her go without a word.
Matt went next, saying that he had better get a start on the data from the recovered hard drive if he was going to be able to say anything coherent the following morning. He too promised to see them at dinner, but Jamie wasn’t quite sure he believed his friend; again, though, he said nothing, and neither did Larissa, even after Matt shut the door and left them alone.
Jamie and Larissa lay on his bed in silence for a long time, their minds racing with thoughts they were not ready, or not willing, to express to each other. Eventually, Larissa’s hand crept across the gap between them and curled gently round Jamie’s own; he held it tightly, holding on to the one thing in his life that still felt the same.
After a period of time that neither Jamie nor Larissa could have accurately estimated, Jamie asked her if she wanted to come and see Frankenstein with him. She smiled, but told him she thought he should go on his own. Then she released his hand, and floated up into the air. She paused when she reached the door, and smiled at him, a wide, warm smile, full of love.
“I’ll see you later,” she said.
Then she was gone.
Jamie watched the space where she had been floating for a long moment, then hauled himself off his bed. He had no idea what to
do about her, or Kate, or Matt; perhaps there was nothing to be done, or nothing that needed doing. He had felt the shift that occurred as Colonel Holmwood spoke, however, as though the world had suddenly tilted a degree or two on its axis. Not enough to cause disaster, but enough to shake foundations.
He walked slowly out of his quarters, and to the lift at the end of the corridor. Inside the car, he pressed the button marked G, and realised, quite suddenly, that he was about to see Frankenstein again, about to see the man he had believed was dead. A smile crept on to his face, widened into a big grin; when the lift doors slid open, Jamie took off down the corridor at a flat sprint.
The non-supernatural cells were located on Level H, but were only accessible via a secure lift from Level G. Jamie entered the Director override code into the panel beside the door that sealed the corridor that led to the lift, a corridor that was restricted under normal circumstances to Operators from the Security Division. The door slid open, and Jamie ran down the long curved corridor to the secure lift. He pressed the CALL button, stepped in between the opening doors and waited impatiently for it to take him down.
On Level H, Jamie signed in with the Duty Operator. Then he was past the small guard desk, and on to the block itself. It was a much smaller version of the supernatural containment block, just four cells on either side of a white corridor, with heavy metal doors instead of ultraviolet walls. Seven of the doors were standing open; the eighth, the last one on the right, was not. He stopped in front of it, and shouted to the Operator. The guard keyed a code into a pad on his desk, and the heavy door unlocked with a series of rumbling clicks and thuds, and the heavy tone of a buzzer. Jamie stood stock still, and watched it swing open.
Inside the cell, sitting on the floor opposite a narrow bed that
could never have possibly held his huge, mangled frame, was Frankenstein’s monster. He looked up as the door opened, his great grey-green head swivelling in Jamie’s direction, where it stopped.
Jamie stared at his friend, unable to breathe. Then he took a tentative step into the room. Frankenstein lumbered to his feet, his head scraping the ceiling of the cell, and peered at Jamie with wonder on his face.
“I remember you,” he said, softly. “I know your name. It’s Jamie, isn’t it?”
Jamie felt tears spill down his cheeks, and then he was running into the cell, and hurling himself against the monster’s broad, uneven chest. He wrapped his arms round the monster’s back, as far as he was able to reach, then felt Frankenstein slowly envelop him in his huge arms. He laid his head on the monster’s chest, and closed his eyes, and they stayed like that for a long time.
“I forgot myself,” said Frankenstein. He was sitting on the floor again, while Jamie perched on the narrow bed. “I couldn’t remember anything. Who I was, where I’d been. Nothing.”
“Do you remember what happened after Lindisfarne?” asked Jamie, gently. “After you fell?”
Frankenstein shook his head. “I remember falling,” he said. “Then I remember waking up aboard a fishing boat. What happened in between is lost to me.”
“We wondered why you hadn’t contacted us,” said Jamie. “It was the main reason no one believed you had survived. It makes sense now.”
There was silence for a moment.
“You saved me,” said Frankenstein. “Like your grandfather did. Saved me from my own past. From myself.”
“We don’t have to talk about this now,” said Jamie. “You need to rest.”
“How did you find me?” asked Frankenstein, his voice trembling. “How did you come to be there last night?”
“That’s a long story,” said Jamie, smiling at his friend.
Frankenstein looked round at his cell. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” he said.
Jamie smiled, and sat down on the floor beside the monster. “I almost don’t know where to start,” he said.
“At the beginning is traditional,” replied Frankenstein, the corners of his mouth curling into the faintest of smiles.
Deep, empty darkness gave way to a midnight purple shot through with scarlet ribbons of pain. Henry Seward forced his eyes open, and stifled a scream.
He couldn’t see anything. His field of vision was nothing more than a sheet of inky blackness.
The Director of Department 19 grabbed for his face, his hands clutching upwards from where they had been dangling at his sides, and he felt soft material covering his skin. The relief that flooded through him was so sweet it made him gasp, but was short-lived. Claustrophobia burst through Seward, and he clawed at the material. It came free easily, sliding up and clear, until light streamed into the Director’s eyes, and he hauled in a deep, aching breath as he waited for them to adjust.
Not blind. Thank God. Oh, thank God.
Slowly, the bright motes of light before him began to shrink, and solidify. He breathed deeply, in and out, and watched a large, wood-panelled room take shape before his eyes.
He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the floor, a worn,
comfortable armchair made of green leather. In front of him was a huge, imposing desk, its brown leather surface empty. Beyond it, the wall was wood, stained dark with ancient varnish. Pictures hung on it, oil paintings of ancient-looking battles and medieval encampments. To his right, a large window looked out over dark forest, and he realised he could faintly hear the rustling of the trees.
Henry Seward gripped the arms of the chair, intending to push himself up on to his feet, and felt pain flare from his right forearm. He looked down at the limb, and saw a neat square of white bandage halfway between his wrist and his elbow. He looked at it, nonplussed, then sank back into his seat as memory and realisation flooded into him.
He had fought and struggled against Valeri Rusmanov’s grip, every second of the way, but the ancient vampire had not so much as flinched.
They had already reached the Lincolnshire coast when the silent explosion of purple light had filled the sky behind him. Seward, who had been marvelling, even through his panic, at the awesome speed of the old monster, let out an involuntary roar of triumph, a roar that was cut off as he was jerked through the air and lifted to face Valeri.
“What was that?” growled the vampire. “What did you do?”
Seward smiled, then spat in the oldest Rusmanov brother’s face.
Valeri recoiled, raised his hand towards his face to wipe the saliva away, then thought better of it. Faster than Seward could follow, he reversed the course of the hand, and crunched it into the Director’s stomach. A noise like a bursting balloon exploded from his mouth, and he felt his eyes bulge in their sockets as the weight of the impact shuddered through his body. He opened his mouth to gasp in fresh oxygen, but nothing happened; his body was spasming, jerking and flailing in Valeri’s grip.
As he fought to stay calm, as he tried desperately to open his airways
and pull in the cold night air, he felt a hot spike of pain in his forearm. He looked down, panic gathering at the edges of his mind, and saw Valeri had sliced his flesh open with one of his long, pointed fingernails. The old vampire dug his fingers into the wound, sending blood pouring out in thick, dark rivers and fresh agony pulsed through Seward’s reeling system. The vampire’s fingers stopped moving, then pulled sharply at something.
The Blacklight Director tried to scream as his locator chip was torn from the thick muscle of his forearm, dragging ragged strips of dark red matter with it. Valeri crushed it in his hand, let the pieces fall to the dark waters below, then regarded his captive.
“You are lucky,” the vampire breathed. “If my master did not want you alive, I would make you watch while I flayed the skin from your bones. Now breathe, damn it.”
Valeri’s other hand sliced through the air and thumped Seward’s back. The paralysis in his lungs and throat was broken, and with a great quavering shriek, he dragged air back into his lungs. He breathed out, in, then out again, before the damage to his system overwhelmed him, and he sank into unconsciousness.
Henry Seward let the terror that the memory induced fill him, then took a deep breath and pushed it aside. There was no time for him to be scared; he knew who had him, why he had been taken.
Then he froze.
There had been no sound, but something was suddenly obvious to Henry Seward. It was a change in pressure, the softest shift in the still air of the room.
There was somebody standing behind him.
Slowly, he pushed himself up to his feet, waiting for a blow to land from behind. When no such assault came, he gritted his teeth, and turned to face whoever was in the room with him, his face set
with determination. But when he saw the figure standing less than a metre before him, it took every ounce of his resilience not to cry out.
Standing in front of him, a warm, welcoming smile on his thin mouth, his eyes shimmering the colour of infected blood, was Count Dracula.
Seward stumbled backwards, his mind reeling at the reality before him. The world’s first vampire made no move to pursue him; he remained where he was, standing easily, his arms behind his back, his pale face alive with excitement.
The Director felt the small of his back thud against the edge of the desk, and realised he had nowhere to go. He stared at the original vampire, fighting for control of himself.
This is where it ends,
he thought.
At the hands of this monster, far from home. Dear God, I didn’t even tell Jamie his father was alive.
Dracula stepped lightly round the chair in which Seward had awoken, and crossed the space between them. Seward braced himself for the worst, determined that he would not give this creature the satisfaction of breaking him, that he would die as well as his friend Yuri Petrov, the former General of the SPC, had done, with honour.
The reborn vampire stopped less than a metre away from the Director. Seward found his gaze drawn to the swirling insanity of the monster’s eyes, and forced himself to look away.
“Admiral Henry Seward,” said the vampire. “I am Vlad Dracula. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”