Fang Girl (25 page)

“Well,” Sarah said after a second of collective appalled silence, “I think we’ve just discovered why shopping here always seems to take so long.”

Banks of white, coffin-sized cubbies lined the walls. Each one had a pair of manacles hanging at the top, and an empty blood donation bag at the bottom, tubing neatly coiled. A rack of hypodermic needles gleamed in the center of the room, next to a scrubbed steel operating table and a humming refrigerator. The whole setup looked horribly efficient, like a factory production line. Each of the cubicles was precisely identical.

“The Blüd System,” Sarah read from a sheet of paper taped to the side of the nearest cabinet. She examined the pictorial operating instructions far more closely than I would have liked. “Huh. Now there’s something that’s not in the catalogue.”

Van made a low growl deep in his chest. The shopping cart full of unfortunate shoppers was parked in the corner; he pulled the tarpaulin off, then shoved the cart out the door. “I hope someone finds them,” he muttered.

I swallowed hard, trying to ignore the scent of blood hanging enticingly in the air. “It’s the best we can do for now. Anyway, I think we’ve found the right place. Which way?”

Van’s eyes went vague for a second, then he shook his head. “I can’t see your family using any of the nearby vampires. Everyone of your Bloodline seems to be congregating in a room upstairs.” A slightly bemused expression crossed his face. “Someone’s switched on a PowerPoint presentation about building workplace team morale.”

“Let’s hope it’s really long and boring.” As I spoke, I pushed Sarah across the horrible room, wishing that she would stop looking with interest at the blood-draining equipment. The door on the other side led to a long, featureless white corridor, and a staircase off to the left. Assuming that Hello-my-name-is-Sven and friend had gone up that way, I picked the corridor instead, desperately praying that Hakon had left Ebon somewhere down here to guard my family alone. We hastened past various innocuous, perfectly ordinary offices and meeting rooms.

A door opened ahead. Out of it stepped a familiar white-blond figure, with a quick glance left and right. His pale blue eyes widened in astonishment as he saw us.

I vaulted over the wheelchair in a blur of superspeed, abruptly getting a view of my own back as I lunged for Ebon. I slammed into him so hard we were both knocked off our feet, sliding back into the room he’d just left. I grappled blindly with him, trying to pin him down. Sarah was still out in the corridor, so I had no way to see what I was doing—

“No!” Hands closed over my wrist. I jerked away, twisting to strike at whoever was attacking me, and came perilously close to knocking my little brother’s head off his shoulders.

“Zack!” I yelled, pulling my blow at the last second. Thankfully, Sarah had entered the room just in time for me to realize who was attacking me. But the effort made me lose my grip on Ebon; he heaved, twisting, and I was flung to one side. I bounced to my feet, only to find that Zack had flung himself between us. “Zack, get out of the way!”

“No!” Zack wailed. He spread his arms wide, shielding the groggy Ebon. “You can’t kill him! He’s a
Victorian
!”

S
arah, and me through her, stared at my little brother. His face was dirty and tracked with snot and tears, but he seemed unharmed and rational. Apart from the fact that he was determinedly shielding the vampire who’d kidnapped him. How fast could Stockholm syndrome set in?

“Xanthe!” Mum grabbed my shoulders, pulling me into a bone-crushing hug. It lasted barely a second—then she thrust me to arm’s length, shaking me hard enough to rattle the video glasses. “What are you doing here? We told you to stay away!”

Zack’s defiant gaze had slid to focus on something over my—no, Sarah’s—shoulder. His eyes widened.
“Janie, look out!”

I dropped in a rolling dive, as Sarah spun her wheelchair in a sharp, practiced motion—but we found ourselves looking at nothing more threatening than Van, who had sprouted a crossbow and was trying to aim at Ebon without also skewering Zack.

Unfortunately, my surprise acrobatics made him jerk the crossbow, instinctively tracking my motion.

“YOU!” roared my dad, snatching up his plastic chair and lunging at the vampire hunter. My mum was only a second behind him, wielding a ream of printer paper. To his credit, in the face of this outraged parental assault, Van dropped his crossbow and simply cowered.

“Mum! Dad! No!” I yelled as Dad cracked Van over the head with the chair. “He’s here to help
rescue
you!” I grabbed my dad’s impromptu weapon as he raised it for another swing, while Sarah charged her wheelchair into Mum, knocking her back. “Stop it!”

“But that’s the vampire hunter guy,” Zack protested. He was still hovering protectively in front of Ebon, who was leaning against the wall and looking as if he had not yet caught up with current events.

“Yes, but he’s on our side now.” At least, he was on my side. I wasn’t sure what side Zack was on. “Mum,
Dad, this is Van Helsing—really,” I added, as three sets of eyebrows shot up. Even though he was still reeling from being battered with tasteful furniture, Van managed a resigned sigh. “And this is Sarah. She’s—uh.” How best to put it? “She’s sort of the protégé of Lily, my vampire sire. And she’s also the person who received my heart after I died but before I became a vampire, but when I rose from the dead my heart became a vampire heart, so now we’ve got this sort of psychic-bond thing where I feed off her blood and can use her eyes and ears, which is how I’m able to see and hear you now even though I’m wearing this headset.”

When you said it really fast, it almost made sense.

My family, as one, boggled.

“Hi,” Sarah said with the briefest of glances around at them all. “Jane, can you info dump later? I remind you we’ve still got dozens of vampires above our heads. Kill the freak, so we can get out of here.”

For a second I thought she meant Zack. He spread himself even wider in front of Ebon. “You can’t hurt him. He’s an endangered species!”

“Vampires are not endangered.” Van’s tone made it clear that it was his life’s work to rectify this regrettable situation.

“No, not that,” Zack said dismissively. “He’s a Victorian!”

“Brainwashed,” Van muttered.

“Crazy,” Sarah proclaimed.

“Steampunk,” I corrected with a sigh. “Zack, just because he knows how to make frock coats or whatever—”

“He’s so awesome, Janie! He went to the
Great Exhibition
.” Zack’s entire face was alight with enthusiasm. “And he worked in a proper factory, and was a subscription member to save up for railway trips, and he saw Brunel, and—”

“And, in case it escaped your notice,” I interrupted, “he kidnapped you.”

Dad cleared his throat. “Actually, he didn’t.”

“I told you, Jane,” Ebon croaked. He put his hands on Zack’s shoulders and bodily moved my protesting brother aside. “It wasn’t my idea to capture your family. I’ve been trying to free them.”

“It’s true.” Dad held up his left arm, displaying a snapped set of manacles.

“Mr. Lee seems to have had a change of heart regarding his current employer,” Mum said.

I stared at Ebon through Sarah. He had his hands in the air, but was otherwise totally ignoring Van and his
crossbow. His head turned to look straight at me, which put him in profile to my current line of sight. What I could see of his face bore a curiously calm, resigned expression. “But why?”

“Jane!”
Sarah deliberately turned her eyes away from Ebon, treating me to a view of the storage units lining the room. “Either shoot him or decide to trust him for now, but let’s move!”

“I vote for the former,” Van said. Zack emitted a howl of protest and tried to tackle Ebon to the ground, bodyguard style.

I made up my mind. “All right—
no
!” I yelped, as Van’s finger tightened on the trigger. “I mean, all right, we won’t kill him.” For one thing, my little brother would have made my unlife a living hell. “Don’t make me regret this later, Ebon.”

Ebon, with Zack still clinging to his waist like a squirrel trying to climb a greased tree, bowed solemnly. “My thanks,” he said, dropping his hands and gently disentangling himself from Zack. “I can but hope that there
is
a later.” He cocked his head, studying my video apparatus. “That, by the way, is most ingenious.”

“Thanks. Seems to be working so far. Lily’s wearing one too. Did you have a plan for getting out of here?”

Ebon nodded. “There is a fire exit down the corridor, which leads to the car park.” His mouth quirked ruefully. “After that, I confess my plans were somewhat nebulous.”

“We’ll work on that. Van, vampire update?”

“Still gathered up above us. If we hurry—” Van broke off in mid-sentence, his head snapping up toward the ceiling. Utter horror filled his face. “Jane! The vents!”

Everyone looked up. A thick, silvery mist was starting to trickle through the ventilation grills set in the ceiling. A very familiar type of mist.

“Run!”
I yelled, ripping off the video glasses as the first vampire solidified. The abrupt return of my own senses made me stagger, momentarily perplexed by being back behind my own eyeballs. My head felt full of wasps. Vampires were condensing like raindrops, falling ceaselessly from the ceiling. Unfamiliar hands grabbed me; I reflexively punched straight into the vampire’s chest, crushing his heart, and felt the hands dissolve again as he died.

Superspeed rushed through my veins. I whirled, ducking another vampire and ripping out her heart too. A weight crashed down onto me as a vampire resolidified right on my shoulders; but I’d barely started
to stagger before Van had shot a bolt directly into its chest. Ebon lunged past me, hurling two vampires away from my family.

I pulled everything I could down the Bloodline—no time to consider Sarah now—making myself faster, stronger, tougher. Even the other vampires seemed slow to me now. I dodged blows that would have taken my head off, and returned them with punches that sent my opponents hurtling through walls. Someone managed to get a stake through my chest; I ignored it and killed another vampire.

We were doomed from the start, of course.

There were too many of them. I caught a glimpse of Ebon vanishing under a wave of vampires piling onto him like a rugby scrum. Van kept smoothly reloading, firing, reloading, eyes tight shut the entire time—but then his left hand was empty, and in the second it took him to reach under his coat for more ammunition, they had him. He went down too, and now there were even more vampires surrounding me. I whirled, ready to fight them all—

And put my hands in the air. “I surrender.”

Vampires had my family. Two of them held my struggling parents without any effort at all.
Another had Zack’s arm twisted viciously up behind his back, immobilizing him. No one held onto Sarah—they didn’t need to. She sprawled in her wheelchair like a puppet with cut strings, motionless.

The room suddenly seemed very quiet. Hakon’s vampires ringed me, out of arm’s length. I could hear the thunder of my family’s hearts, Zack’s helpless sobs of pain.

Every vampire in the room looked up, all at the same instant, like dogs hearing their master’s whistle. Even I did it.

Something was coming down the Bloodline. I could feel it slipping closer, stalking down my veins. Something huge, and dark, and silent, and old …

Mist swirled down from the vents, and solidified. And there, unmistakably, stood Hakon.

H
e was a kid. Just a tiny kid. No more than seven or eight, small face very solemn, his golden hair as neat as if he were about to pose for a school photo. The stark whiteness of his perfectly tailored silk shirt and trousers gave an illusion of warmth to his pallid skin. He looked perfectly innocent—except that no child ever stood so still.

“You again,” Mum said to Hakon, scowling aggressively even though her voice wobbled. “Don’t you dare—”

“Silence,” Hakon said mildly, and my mum shut up instantly.
That
scared me more than any mere display of power. Zack had gone still as a frightened rabbit, huge
eyes fixed on Hakon. Dad tried to step between him and the Elder, only to hiss in pain as the vampire holding him jerked him back.

Hakon stretched on his toes, peering up into my face. His blue eyes transfixed me: bright, curious, and utterly merciless. Oh, we were so very dead. I couldn’t help glancing from him to the discarded video headset by my feet. How had he known …?

As if reading my thoughts, one corner of Hakon’s mouth curved upward. He pointed to the ceiling of the room.

I followed the line of his finger and groaned, suddenly feeling incredibly dumb. We’d spent all that time worrying about the supernatural threat, when all he’d needed to see us were—“Security cameras.”

Hakon’s tight, thin-lipped smile sat very oddly on his little-boy face. “Do not think me a displaced relic, Xanthe Jane Greene, a piece of history transported into a strange modern world.” Even his voice was just a kid’s voice, high and clear. “I have traveled through one thousand years—one day at a time.”

I heard a muffled curse off to one side, followed by scuffling sounds. Hakon glanced that way. “Ah,” he said, turning. There was something unnatural about the
way he went from perfectly still to motion to perfectly still again. It made it seem as though he hadn’t really moved. “Yes. Let me see also the hunters’ secret knife, their treacherous feeder of ravens. Bring him out.”