The stake hovered, poised above his chest. The fist around it tightened its grip.
“Drop it.”
The voice was deep, calm. Its tone did not expect refusal.
“I’ll give you to the count of three. Drop it, or I drop you.”
Nikola’s English was not good, but he knew enough to tell that the person speaking was threatening his four attackers, not him. He twisted his head round on the tarmac to look. He saw boots, a long overcoat, a tall man with moon-white hair and a face as craggy and imperturbable as a chalk cliff. He saw, too, a high shirt collar like a priest’s, one that went all the way up to the jawline, and a gun, a weighty, long-barrelled handweapon of the type he knew was called a Cindermaker.
Which meant SHADE. The Night Brigade.
Which in turn meant Nikola was no less doomed than he had been a few seconds ago.
“One last chance,” said the SHADE officer. “Put down the stake or be put down. A bullet’s a bullet. Wooden or not, it’ll still put a damn great hole in you.”
“Fuck off, fangbanger,” said one of Nikola’s attackers. “This here’s a vamp and it’s out of its nest. If we weren’t about to dust it, you’d be doing the same yourself.”
“Maybe,” came the reply. “The difference is that I’m a servant of the law. You, you’re nothing but vigilantes. Stokers, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, drop the stake and move away from the Sunless.” The SHADE officer advanced, Cindermaker to the fore. “One. Two...”
“Wait,” said another of the Stokers, one of the rollerbladers. “Wait just a second. Let us poke a hole in the bloodsucker”—he gestured at Nikola—“and we’ll be gone. No one will know we were ever here, and you can claim the dusting as your own. Come on, what do you say, shady? That’s reasonable, isn’t it? Everybody wins.”
“Do you know who I am?”
The Stokers shook their heads.
“The name ‘John Redlaw’ ring a bell?”
Not with three of them, but the fourth man stiffened. “Yeah, I’ve heard of this geezer all right. Tough bastard, they say.”
As for Nikola, he was truly terrified. He might not have been in this country long but even he had heard of John Redlaw. The man was spoken of among his kind often and only ever in hushed tones, the name rarely uttered louder than a whisper.
“Then,” said Redlaw to the man, “you’ll know I can’t be dissuaded and I can’t be bargained with.” He halted less than five paces from the Stokers and Nikola. “I’ll happily blow each and every one of you out of your socks, and to hell with the paperwork. The ’Less is mine. Leave now, and you leave intact. My best and final offer.”
The Stokers looked at one another. Then the one with the stake said, “Fuck it,” and flung it at Redlaw. As Redlaw twisted to evade it, the Stoker pounced on him. He punched Redlaw’s gun hand, sending the Cindermaker flying, then he punched Redlaw himself, full in the face. Blood spurted from the SHADE officer’s nose.
“Fuck’s sake, come on!” the Stoker yelled to his cohorts as Redlaw went down. “There’s just one of him, and he’s old. Let’s have some fun here.”
The other three needed little encouragement. They relinquished Nikola and dived in to beat up Redlaw.
“Wave a gun at us, will you?” one cried.
“Ash-wood fucking bullets?” snarled another. “Ash-wood? On
people
?”
Kicks and punches flew. Nikola could no longer see Redlaw. The SHADE officer was buried beneath the Stokers, the hidden eye of a storm of violence. He didn’t appear to be fighting back. Why not? Was he really not as fearsome as his reputation suggested? Was he, in fact, nothing without a gun in his hand?
Then there was a loud crunch, and one of the rollerblader Stokers whirled to the ground, clutching a broken knee.
A snap, and a second Stoker sank down, shrieking, his left arm skewed hideously at the elbow.
Suddenly Redlaw was on his feet, and he was gripping the other rollerblader by the jacket, swinging him into the fourth Stoker, and sending them both crashing onto the road in a heap. Redlaw straddled them, grabbed the uppermost by his neck guard, and began pounding his head against the man below’s. The helmet visors shattered; splinters of black polycarbonate were hammered into skin. Redlaw didn’t relent until both Stokers were half senseless and their features were like bloody maps of hell. Then he went over to the rollerblader Stoker with the crippled knee and, almost clinically, stamped on his good knee until it was crippled too. Finally he turned to the man with the broken arm, who was hobbling away, whimpering. He yanked the man’s helmet off, exposing a pain-wracked, tear-streaked face.
“If there’s one thing lower than vampires,” he said, “it’s people who prey on vampires. I want you to carry a message to your cronies, all those other Stokers who think they’re so self-righteous and clever. A personal message. Will you do that for me?”
Desperately the Stoker nodded.
“Tell them this, from Captain John Redlaw of the Sunless Housing And Disclosure Executive...”
Headbutt
.
The Stoker toppled backwards with a ghastly yelp. His skull cracked on the road surface, and he lay still.
Redlaw straightened out his shirt collar, smoothed down his overcoat, and went to retrieve his Cindermaker.
Throughout the fight Nikola did nothing but gawp. He knew he should flee while Redlaw was busy with the Stokers, but he was still badly shaken from the attack. He’d been moments away from getting staked, his immortality over almost as soon as it had begun. He was hollowed with fear, and besides, once the tide of the fight turned and Redlaw started taking the four men apart, he had wanted to watch. It was an awesome sight, Redlaw despatching the Stokers with such ruthless, savage precision. Gratifying, too, to Nikola. They deserved what they were getting. Every bit of it and more.
In hindsight, he realised he had made something of an error. For now Redlaw was striding towards him, Cindermaker in hand, its barrel levelled at Nikola’s heart. Nikola started scrabbling to free himself from the bolas ropes.
“
Bun seara
.” Redlaw said. “
Labvakar
.
Blaho ve er
.
Jó estét
.”
The last one, Nikola recognised. “
Jó estét
,” he replied.
Good evening.
“Ah,” said Redlaw. “Hungarian.
Magyar
?”
Nikola nodded. “
Igen
.”
“You speak English?”
“A little. Please, not shoot.”
Redlaw glanced at his gun, then back at Nikola. “Don’t give me a reason to shoot and I won’t. You understand?”
Nikola did, just about. The SHADE officer’s expression was, if not gentle, then marginally less severe than when he’d been addressing the Stokers. His face’s solidity had softened just a fraction, though his eyes remained hard and watchful.
“It would help if you stopped staring at the blood from my nose.”
Nikola averted his gaze guiltily. The fresh blood sang to him. Its sweet ferrous smell was unbearably enticing. As a boy—a human boy—back in Miskolc, the most wonderful aroma he’d ever known was his grandmother’s hot chocolate, warming on the stove, and the most wonderful flavour he’d ever known was the drink itself, laced with spices and a dash of apricot
palinka
. But blood was a hundred, a thousand times more wonderful than even that.
Redlaw dabbed at his upper lip with a linen handkerchief. “Lucky shot. I should never have let the idiot catch me unawares like that, or get so close. Old man. Losing my edge. Although, having said that, I did fancy a bit of a scrap. Listen, sonny.”
Dark eyes bored into Nikola’s.
“From the looks of you—incompletely emerged fangs, still a trace of pink in your complexion, only the faintest reddening of the sclera—it wasn’t so long ago that you were turned. My guess is you don’t just look young, you
are
young. So I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s not something I often do. Ever do, actually. But I’m prepared to make an exception. You wanted to see the outside world. I get that. Don’t. Don’t ever want that. You can see why.” He indicated the four Stokers strewn in their various poses of agony and semi-consciousness. “You don’t belong out here. No one wants you out here. The Sunless Residential Area is your home. Your only home. Forever. Clear?”
More or less. His tone, if not his words. Nikola nodded.
“Then go. Get back behind the fence. Before I change my mind.”
The Cindermaker continued to point, unwaveringly, at Nikola’s beatless heart.
Ropes loosened, Nikola ran no longer in an ecstasy of dread, but suffused with relief and joy.
Learned his lesson
, thought Redlaw as the boy vanished from view.
The four Stokers had doubtless learned theirs too.
Redlaw pulled out the crucifix that hung round his neck. The wood was warm against his lips as he kissed it briefly. He murmured a prayer of thanks—for victory, for deliverance from his enemies. The prayer was perfunctory and low, so much so that even the Almighty might have missed it.
As he was returning the crucifix to its rightful place next to his sternum, Redlaw’s phone sounded. His ringtone was the opening chords of ‘Jerusalem’ played on a thunderous cathedral organ.
“John.” The throaty, no-nonsense tones of Commodore Gail Macarthur.
“What can I do for you, Commodore?”
“GPS puts you down Mile End way.”
“That I am.”
“But your car’s not moving and you’re not in it.”
“How do you know I’m not in it?”
“Well, if you were you’d have heard the bulletin from dispatch and be en route already. There’s a disturbance at the Hackney SRA.”
“What a surprise.”
“Local units have responded, but they need backup. Someone with some seniority.”
“Me.”
“Anything better to be doing?”
Redlaw scanned the street; eyed the Stokers. “Not much, marm.”
“Right, then. Off you go.”
Redlaw ended the call with a sigh.
It was going to be a long night.
But then weren’t they all?
CHAPTER TWO
The Hackney Sunless Residential Area was the largest SRA in all of Greater London and the most densely populated. It consisted of forty hectares of former local authority property plus an additional ten hectares of buildings wrested from private ownership by compulsory purchase order. Within its boundary lay architecture spanning a century and a half, from Victorian semi-detached villas to modern brutalist blocks, all now forming one large convoluted warren where Sunless roamed freely in their thousands.
It was a notorious trouble spot. Had been since the start, but more so now than ever. There was always
something
going on in the Hackney SRA. That, along with its sprawling size, made it a blight on the entire borough. Hackney was now considered all but uninhabitable to anyone with a heartbeat. A few hardy Somali and Eritrean refugees lived here, deeming it safer than their war-torn, drought-blighted homelands, but that was all.
Redlaw arrived to find a half-dozen SHADE patrol cars stationed outside the Residential Area’s main entrance and twice that number of officers standing around seemingly at a loss to know what to do. From beyond the fence could be heard a chorus of howls and gibbering, shrill and loathsome, echoing up to the bronze-tinged night sky.
The highest-ranking person on site, until Redlaw turned up, was Sergeant Ibrahim Khalid. He gave Redlaw a token salute, more than a little glad to be able to hand over responsibility for the situation. More than a little glad, too, that it was Redlaw who would now be carrying the can for this one. There was no love lost between these two men.
“What’s going on here?” Redlaw demanded.
“As you can hear,” said Khalid, “we have some very unhappy campers. Details are sketchy, but the gist of it is, a regular consignment of cattle blood went in at twenty-three hundred hours, as scheduled. That was forty-five minutes ago, and the truck hasn’t come back out. Thirty minutes ago the drivers—standard two-man unit—radioed in a mayday to base. Since then there’s been no further contact from them. Judging by all that caterwaul, it’d be sensible to expect the worst.”
“The hauliers?”
“BovPlas Logistics, of course. Their guys are pros. Trained for all outcomes.”
“Training isn’t always enough. Why haven’t you mounted a rescue attempt yet?”
Khalid’s eyes flicked downwards briefly. “As I said, no one’s heard from the truck for half an hour. Closer on thirty-five minutes now. It would be unreasonable to expect—”
“Unreasonable, sergeant?” snapped Redlaw. “I’ll tell you what’s unreasonable. A dozen fully-armed officers hanging around with their thumbs up their fundaments while two human beings are trapped inside an SRA surrounded by God knows how many vampires.
That’s
unreasonable.”
“Sir, with all due respect...”
“Don’t ‘with all due respect’ me, Khalid. You damn well should have gone in, and you know it.”
Redlaw swung away from Khalid and strode towards the Residential Area entrance.