Authors: Helen Keeble
“Jane,” said Ebon’s voice, sleep-blurred and rough. “Did you get her?”
“Yeah, she’s captured. And Sarah’s got Van at gunpoint, forcing him to drive us.” Lily looked sharply at
me. I put my finger over my lips. “Where are we meeting you?”
“It’ll be somewhere in Croydon. I’ll check exactly where Hakon wants you to go—he’s not awake yet. As soon as he’s up and has confirmed the capture, I’ll call you back. Don’t let her out of your sight, Jane.” There was a pause. “And thank you.” The line went dead.
“Xanthe, my darling,” Lily said slowly. “What
are
you doing?”
“Making Hakon think that we’re doing exactly what he wants.” Picking up the second video headset and iPod, I went over to her. “Here’s one we made earlier.” I put the headset on her nose, and pressed
PLAY
on the video loaded into the connected iPod.
Lily’s mouth made an O shape of understanding as she watched the video. “I
see
. And so will Hakon.”
“Exactly.” I turned to Sarah, my fingertips twitching nervously. “How’s it going? Anything we can do to help?”
“Yes,” Sarah snapped. The glow of the screen lit her delicate face from below, showing her intently focused expression. “If you’re an expert in video-editing software, you can clip for me. Otherwise, everyone can shut up. I’m trying to
concentrate
here!”
The minutes crawled by. I kept a nervous eye on the iPhone clock, mentally counting down the time until Hakon would wake up. Sarah crouched over her laptop like a concert pianist. I checked through her eyes and was dizzied by frames of video leaping and jumping in arcane patterns. Her fingers flicked commands faster than I could follow.
Van honked the horn again, giving us our three-minute warning that Hakon was about to wake up. Just as I was starting to sweat about how close Sarah was cutting it, she sat back. “There! I’ve stretched it to two hours of footage, looping perfectly.” She slid iPod and headset across to me, then dashed over to Lily to adjust her own headset. “That should—”
Her voice cut off, replaced by the recorded drone of the van as I shoved the video headset’s earbuds in. On the screens in front of my eyes, Lily appeared, glaring.
“Wow.” I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the video’s sound. There was nothing to tell that I wasn’t looking at the real Lily. I switched perspective, hijacking Sarah’s senses. Through her eyes, I could see both Lily and myself, our heads swathed in hardware.
The phone rang.
Sarah picked it up. “This is Sarah,” she said. It was
weird hearing her voice through her ears rather than my own; it sounded deeper and stronger. “Jane’s in back, busy watching Lily.”
“I know!” Ebon sounded ecstatic. “Hakon’s confirmed the capture. He says to tell Jane it’s a most satisfying sight. Meet us at the Croydon Travelodge. Room 301.”
“See you there.” Sarah turned the phone off. She cracked her knuckles, shaking out her hands. “Ow. I think I have blisters.” She crawled over to Lily and started undoing the chains.
I got to my own feet, watching Lily carefully through Sarah’s eyes. Lily’s shoulders and back tensed as she fumbled free of the last of her restraints, and my own muscles coiled—but with a quick, blind glance in my direction, she relaxed back into her usual attitude of studied languor. I guessed she must have sensed my readiness to deck her if she tried anything. Her long fingers brushed her headset in exploratory fashion. “I’ll assume all is well,” she said, speaking too loud. “But whatever you’re planning—and I’m presuming it’s some sort of rescue—I’m not going to be much use until we can all take these things off.”
“It’s okay—” Sarah started, then scowled as she realized that of course Lily couldn’t hear her through the
headphones. She caught up one of the vampire’s hands instead, giving it a reassuring squeeze, then guided her out of the van.
“Ah, so I’m to stay here,” Lily said as Sarah pushed her up the garden path. I still wasn’t thrilled about this, personally, but Sarah had flat-out refused to help at all if we took Lily into danger with us. “Excellent. Xanthe, I’m monitoring you—if I see your view change, I’ll know it’s safe to come to your aid.” She entered the house, then popped her head back out to add, “But this tape is going to get excruciatingly monotonous. Would you mind hurrying as much as possible, darlings?”
I waited until Sarah had returned before banging on the wall. “Van!”
He appeared at the back of the van. “I’m ready.” He clutched a bottle containing the world’s worst cocktail—a shot of vodka, orange juice, and the shredded remnants of Sarah’s nightshirt. Van had insisted on the vodka. “Now?”
“Do it.”
Van threw back the drink. For a nasty moment I thought it was going to come back up, but, with a slightly sick expression, Van swallowed manfully. His green eyes unfocused.
“Found him.” He pointed off through the wall; Sarah hastily marked the direction with a piece of tape. Van’s head tilted, forehead furrowing in concentration. “Ebenezer is standing next to your family in what looks like a … warehouse, I think. Two other vampires are there too, talking with him. They’re … they’re Hakon’s Bloodline, Jane; they’re speaking Swedish. Can’t understand it. Ebenezer seems upset by something, but they’re calm. There’s a large van behind them. Blue, yellow trim. Can’t read the license plates.” He held up a hand to forestall interruptions, as both Sarah and I opened our mouths to ask questions. “Wait, now they’re opening up the van doors. Ebenezer is helping your family inside—they’re handcuffed, but they look unharmed. He’s … no, he’s not getting in. He’s closing the doors. The Scandinavian vampires have gone round to the front of the van—I think they’ve got in, I can’t see them anymore. The taillights have come on.”
I frowned. “Are they actually taking my family to the place they said? I thought they’d go back on the deal.”
“They will,” Sarah said. “In some way, they will.”
“They have,” Van interrupted. “The van hasn’t moved. Ebenezer’s opened the doors up again. Your family is getting out. I don’t know what Ebenezer’s
expression is—there aren’t any other viewpoints to look through—but your parents look … upset. The van’s driving off without them.”
Sarah looked at me, giving me an interesting view of my own expression of dawning enlightenment. “What was all that about?”
“They
are
going back on the deal,” I said, pieces falling into place in my head. “Just in case Van was looking through the Scandinavian bloodline, they staged it to look like they were driving off with my parents. But they aren’t taking them there at all. They’ve left them with Ebon—but they don’t know we can see him.”
“I think Ebenezer’s taking them back deeper into the warehouse,” Van said. “They’re in a room, a depot, racks of shelves. Boxes. Different sizes. Letters on them. They’re—” He shook his head. “I’m losing it. The blood’s nearly run dry. I think they’re going through a door—
STAFF ONLY
—it’s gone.” His eyes refocused. “That’s all I can do.”
Sarah let out her breath. “Well, we got a direction,” she said, despondent. “But that could have been anywhere, from the description.”
“What did the boxes say?” I demanded. “Think, Van!”
“I couldn’t read proper words; it was gibberish!” He
struggled, brows knotting as he tried to piece it together. “I saw … it looked like … Hopen? And … Komplement. Billy, that was the only real word. I’m sorry, Jane, Sarah, I tried …” He trailed off, looking from Sarah to me. “What?”
“There’s only one place that names things like that,” Sarah whispered. She spun to face me. “And there’s one in Croydon.”
Through Sarah’s eyes, I saw my own jaw drop open. “And it’s even Scandinavian,” I said. “They’re in IKEA.”
D
espite all our plans on how to get into IKEA—I’d proposed trying a staff-only entrance, Van wanted to climb the sides of the building to find a ventilation shaft, and Sarah was in favor of shooting the security guards and stealing their uniforms—in the end we walked in the front door.
“Open until midnight?” Sarah muttered as we rode the elevator down to the warehouse area. Her hands nervously toyed with Lily’s gun, hidden under the blanket over her legs. “No wonder Hakon is using this as his hideout. Who desperately needs to buy shelving in the middle of the night?”
“Those of us who only wake up at night,” I said,
pushing her wheelchair out as the doors opened. A passing late-night shopper did a double take at my video glasses; I ducked my head, feeling horribly conspicuous. Despite the anxious churning in my stomach, I couldn’t help slowing down as we passed a mouth-watering display of innovative storage solutions. “And you have to admit, the shelves
are
awesome.”
Sarah looked from me to Van—who was also eyeing the unit with a wistful expression—and sighed in exasperation. “Snap out of it, you two,” she said, deliberately turning her head away from the enthralling cupboards so that I lost sight of them. “Try raptly contemplating a store map instead.” My point of view swung as she looked around the cavernous depot, with its towering racks of plain brown boxes. “How’re we going to find where they’re storing Billy and Komplement?”
“Easy. Van, how big were the boxes you saw?” I poked Sarah to turn to look at him, and saw the dimensions he sketched in the air. “Great. Then … Sarah, look around again?” I considered the shelves nearby. “Okay. We want to go that way.”
Sarah followed the line of my pointing finger. “How do you know?”
“Because I’m a vampire,” I said. I shrugged as we
started off down the row. “Believe me, if you were a hyperacute OCD sufferer with supernaturally sharp senses, the organization system would be obvious to you—”
Van grabbed my shoulder, yanking me back before I could step into the aisle. He tapped his forehead in warning. His internal radar must have picked up a vampire, courtesy of the bit of my blood he’d drunk while we were in the parking lot. I could feel a sort of white-noise hum, like a detuned radio, over my own Bloodlines. Someone related to me was approaching.
“—so irritating that the signs don’t tell you that the last piece you need is out of stock before you’ve collected everything else,” a woman’s frazzled voice was saying in the next aisle. “Who on earth would want to buy the wardrobe body and shelves without the door?”
“Love, don’t worry about putting it back where it came from. Dump it anywhere so we can leave,” a man said, sounding fed up.
“Excuse me, madam,” said a third voice. Sarah peeked through a gap in the boxes, and I saw a big, blond guy stalking toward a middle-aged couple. Sarah’s breath drew in as she read his name tag—
HELLO MY NAME IS SVEN HAKONSSON
—and she ducked back down into
the shadows. “What are you doing?”
“About time!” said the first man. His voice rose in indignation. “I’ve been looking for a member of staff—all on a bloody tea break, were you? I want to make a complaint—”
“One moment, sir. Madam, I said
what
are you
doing
?”
“I’m putting these boxes back. We decided we don’t want them after all—”
“You’re putting them in the
wrong place
.” Hello-my-name-is-Sven’s voice dropped into a low, venomous snarl that sent a chill up my spine.
“Look, mate, you can’t talk to my wife like that! I demand to speak to your manager!”
There was a moment’s pause. “Certainly,” said the vampire blandly. “Quick, look over there!”
“Wh—?”
I heard two muffled thumps in quick succession, followed by a rustle. Sarah risked a quick peek round the corner. The vampire had loaded the limp forms of the shoppers into their own shopping cart, and was covering it with a tarpaulin. Whistling, he strode briskly off, pushing the cart in front of him.
It was my turn to grab Van’s arm. His muscles were bunched with outrage. “No!” I whispered. “They’re only
unconscious, I can hear them breathing. Follow him!”
We shadowed Sven through the maze, Van keeping us two aisles behind and out of sight. The trail ended at a plain, handleless door marked
STAFF ONLY
. Sarah started to push at it, but Van caught her hand, shaking his head warningly.
“… a whole store to choose from, and you bring back this,” a woman was saying inside, sounding aggravated. “You know I hate O-negative.”
“They deserved it,” Sven replied. “Anyway, it makes a good seasoning.”
“Yeah, well,
you’re
not the one who has to glamour them. A glass of O-negative is like drinking neat Tabasco.”
“So submit the application form to kill them instead. Hakon will approve it. We’re well under the fatality quota for the quarter.”
“We are? I missed the last newsletter.” The woman sounded happier. “Well, stash them over there for now; we’ll process them later. The boss wants us upstairs. Did you see that memo …?” Her voice trailed away into the distance as the two of them left.
Van put his palm on the door, pushing, but it didn’t move. “There’s no handle on this side,” he muttered.
“Let me try.” I misted, slipped under the door, and
re-formed on the other side. Thankfully, the video headset stayed with me, like my clothes had; unfortunately, being separated from Sarah left me blind. The now-familiar video of Lily glared at me as I fumbled for the door handle. “Great,” I said as the door opened and Sarah’s eyes gave me a view of myself standing there. “Let’s move—” Then I stopped as I saw what was in the rest of the room.