Shamrock Rovers were playing Rapid Wien on a Thursday night in November, in the Conference League group stage, and Kit O’Shea had been talking about it for six weeks.
“It’s fate,” he said, for perhaps the hundredth time, at the front desk of the clinic, with his scarf already wrapped twice round his neck four hours before kickoff.
“Two years I’ve been dead.
Two years I’ve been stuck in a cave in Austria.
And the Hoops come to Vienna.
To my city.
In Europe.
What are the odds?
It’s a sign.
It’s God telling me to go.” “God doesn’t care about football,” said Mara, without looking up from the appointment book.
“God invented football.
Everyone knows that.” Kit turned to Magnus, who was restocking the blood fridge.
“Boss.
Boss.
You’re coming.
You said you’d come.” “I said I’d think about it.” “Which means yes.
Everyone knows that, too.” Magnus looked at him.
Kit was bouncing on his toes.
His red hair was sticking up.
His gap-toothed grin was so wide it looked painful.
He had saved up for the ticket for two months, Mara had told Magnus quietly, working extra shifts at the clinic, and he had bought two, the second one in case Magnus said yes.
The Warden had said no going up.
Not since the Command.
Not until they knew who was watching the doors.
But it was only a football match.
Thirty thousand humans in a stadium, under floodlights, at night.
Nobody would notice two more.
And Kit had been dead for two years and had never once, in all that time, asked anyone for anything.
“All right,” said Magnus.
“But we come straight back after.” Kit whooped so loudly that a patient upstairs threw something at the ceiling.
It was the best night Magnus had had in his life.
He would think that, afterward, and hate himself for it, and think it anyway, because it was true.
The stadium was out in the west of the city, in Hütteldorf, a big modern bowl of steel and glass and green seats, and the away end was full of Irishmen, two thousand of them, singing.
They had flown in on cheap flights and taken the U-Bahn and spent the afternoon drinking in the city center, and now they were in full voice, a wall of green and white, and Kit walked into the middle of them as though he were coming home.
Nobody noticed.
That was the thing.
Nobody noticed that Kit’s skin was too pale, or that he didn’t drink the beer someone pushed into his hand, or that his eyes caught the floodlights like a cat’s.
Nobody noticed Magnus, standing beside him with his aura pulled in so tight it hurt.
They were two lads in scarves in a crowd of two thousand lads in scarves, and somebody’s uncle from Tallaght put an arm round Kit’s shoulders in the first five minutes and called him son, and Kit looked as if he might cry.
Rovers went a goal down in the twentieth minute and the away end groaned like a wounded animal.
They equalized just before halftime, a scrappy header from a corner, and the away end went off like a bomb.
Kit grabbed Magnus round the neck and screamed in his ear, and Magnus found himself screaming too, a wordless noise of pure joy, jumping up and down in a crowd of strangers with his arms in the air.
In the eighty-ninth minute, a Rovers midfielder hit a shot from thirty yards that went in off the underside of the bar, and two thousand Irishmen lost their minds.
Two–one.
Rovers won.
Kit cried.
Openly, unashamedly, the tears running down his face, his scarf held up over his head with both hands, singing at the top of his lungs with all the others.
Magnus stood beside him and watched him and felt something so warm and so fierce in his chest that for a moment he couldn’t tell which of his two hearts it was coming from.
“Best night of my life,” Kit said, afterward, outside, in the cold, in the crowd streaming toward the station.
His voice was hoarse.
“Best night of my whole life, boss.
Alive or dead.” “Mine too,” said Magnus.
He meant it.
They should have gone straight back.
They didn’t.
They went to an Irish bar in the city center with the uncle from Tallaght and his three sons, because Kit couldn’t bear for the night to end, and Magnus couldn’t bear to make him.
They stayed until it closed at two.
Then they walked through the empty streets of the Seventh District, the two of them, Kit singing under his breath, Magnus listening to the city.
Then they sat on the steps of a church in Mariahilf and talked, about nothing, about everything, about football and Dublin and Manchester and the woman who had turned Kit and told him she was a fashion student.
“I don’t hate her, you know,” Kit said.
“Funny, isn’t it.
I should.
She left me in a flat in Rathmines with no idea what I was.
I nearly died.
But I don’t hate her.” He shrugged.
“If she hadn’t done it, I’d never have come to Vienna.
Never met Noah.
Never met Mara.” He went pink.
“Never met you.” “Mara likes you, you know,” said Magnus.
Kit’s head whipped round.
“Did she say that?” “No.
But I can tell.” “How can you tell?” Magnus thought about it.
About the sense Adrian’s blood had given him.
About the way he could feel, faintly, what people felt, if he let himself.
About Mara at the front desk of the clinic, at the moment Kit walked in every night, and the little warm flicker that went through her, like a match being struck.
“I just can,” he said.
Kit looked at him for a long moment with an expression of total, dazed happiness.
Then he looked up at the sky, and his face changed.
“Boss,” he said.
“What time is it?” Magnus looked up too.
The sky over the rooftops of Mariahilf was no longer black.
It was gray.
Dark gray, still, with a few stars.
But gray.
He had not been watching the time.
He had been listening to Kit, and he had not been watching the time.
And Kit was two years turned, and Kit could stand the sun for perhaps a minute before it started to hurt and perhaps ten before it killed him.
“It’s all right,” said Magnus, getting up.
“It’s fine.
There’s an entrance in the Mariahilfer Kirche.
Five minutes.
Come on.” They ran.
They were three streets from the church when the trap closed.
Magnus heard it before he saw it.
A soft, wet, mechanical click, from above, from a rooftop.
Then another, from behind.
Then a dozen more, all around them, on every side, the sound of weapons being readied by people who had been waiting a long time in the cold for this exact moment.
And he felt it.
Not with the blood-sense.
Humans didn’t light up on the blood-sense the way vampires did.
With something else.
Something older and deeper, in the second heart.
A pull.
Like a hand closing around it.
Like the heart was being tugged, very faintly, toward the west, toward England, toward something that was calling it.
“Kit,” he said.
“Get behind me.” The first net came down from the rooftop on his left.
It was silver mesh, fine and gleaming, weighted at the corners, and it dropped over him like a falling sheet.
He was already moving, already stepping into the shadow of a doorway, and the net hit the pavement where he had been and hissed.
The shadow closed around him like water.
He came out of it on the other side of the street, behind the first of them: a man in black body armor with a helmet and a visor and a strange, bulky rifle, crouched behind a parked car.
Hellsing.
Not like Elena.
These were different.
Bigger, slower, more heavily armored, more like soldiers than hunters.
Their armor had a different patch on the shoulder: not the Hunter Corps’ shield and stake, but a shield and a chain.
Containment.
Magnus hit him, not hard, just enough.
The man went down.
The rifle went skittering across the cobbles.
And then the floodlights came on.
They were mounted on the rooftops, four of them, and they were not ordinary floodlights.
They were ultraviolet.
Huge, humming, blinding banks of it, the light of noon, the light of the desert, the light of the dawn in the chapel window magnified a thousand times and poured down into the narrow street like boiling water from a pot.
Magnus screamed.
It was like being skinned.
It was like being thrown into a furnace.
His skin blistered and smoked and split, all of it at once, every inch that was exposed.
His eyes burned.
He threw his arms over his face and staggered and felt the blisters healing and re-forming and healing again, faster than they ever had, so fast that he could feel his body fighting it, burning through blood at a rate he could feel, like a fire eating through paper.
But he could stand it.
He had stood in the dawn on the riverbank in Prague, and he could stand this.
He could stand it for a while.
Kit couldn’t.
Magnus heard him.
Over the hum of the lights.
Over his own screaming.
Kit’s voice, high and thin and terrible, not screaming, not quite.
Gasping.
Like a man drowning.
He forced his eyes open.
Through the white blaze of the ultraviolet he saw Kit, in the middle of the street, on his knees.
His scarf was on fire.
His red hair was on fire.
His skin was going black, from the edges in, like paper held to a candle, and smoking, a thick gray smoke that rose up into the white light and vanished.
And he was not trying to get away.
He was crawling toward the nearest of the Containment soldiers, the one who was raising another net launcher toward Magnus.
Crawling on his burning hands and knees across the cobbles.
And as Magnus watched, Kit reached him, and got a hand around his ankle, and pulled, with the last of his fledgling’s strength, and the soldier went down, and the net went off into the sky.
And Kit looked up, across the street, through the smoke, at Magnus.
“Go,” he said.
His voice was a croak.
His face was black.
His eyes were still green.
“Boss.
Go.” Magnus ran to him.
He did not decide to.
He ran into the center of the light, into the worst of it, where it was so bright he could not see, so hot he could feel his own eyes boiling in their sockets and healing and boiling again.
He got his arms around Kit.
He picked him up.
He was so light.
He was so terribly light, lighter than Petra had been, as if most of him were already gone.
Magnus turned, with Kit in his arms, and looked for a shadow, any shadow, a doorway, an alley, a car, anything.
There were no shadows.
The ultraviolet had eaten them all.
He felt the serum round hit him in the back.
Then another.
Cold.
Burning.
Spreading.
His blood recoiling, curdling.
His legs going numb.
He did not fall.
He would not fall.
He stood in the center of the street in the white light with his friend in his arms and his skin on fire and his blood going thick and sluggish and wrong, and he reached down inside himself, past the serum, past the pain, past everything, to the bottom, to the deep dark place where the second heart lived.
And he pushed.
The floodlights exploded.
All four of them, at once, in a shower of glass and sparks, as every drop of blood in every soldier on every rooftop around the street lurched, all at once, toward Magnus, and their bodies lurched with it, and their hands clenched on their weapons, and the cables, and the lights.
And the lights went over, and smashed on the cobbles, and went out.
In the sudden gray dark of the early morning, Magnus stood in the middle of the street and looked down at Kit.
The smoke had stopped rising.
Kit’s eyes were open.
They were still green.
He was looking up at Magnus, and his black, cracked lips moved, and Magnus bent his head to hear.
“Two–one,” Kit whispered.
“Did you see it, boss?
Off the bar.” “I saw it,” said Magnus.
“I saw it.” Kit smiled.
The gap in his teeth was still there.
Then he went very still, and very light, and Magnus felt something go out of him that was not blood, and not breath.
And then, slowly, from the edges in, Kit O’Shea crumbled into ash, and the ash ran through Magnus’s fingers, and the wind took it, and there was nothing left in his arms but a burned green-and-white scarf.
He did not remember the next part clearly.
He remembered the Containment soldiers, the ones who could still move, coming down off the rooftops.
Slower now.
Shaken.
Shouting to each other in English.
Is it down?
Is it down?
Serum’s in it, three rounds, it should be down— He remembered turning to look at them.
He remembered them stopping.
He remembered the voice in his blood saying, very calmly, very softly, Kill them.
All of them.
Now.
And for the first time in his life, he did not want to argue.
And he remembered, through the serum and the grief and the roaring in his ears, through the new warm sense in his chest that was Adrian, a long way away, under the city, suddenly waking in the dark, terrified, Magnus, Magnus, what’s happening, where are you— He remembered thinking: If I do this, I am Veyr.
He remembered stepping backward, into the first shadow the dawn had left him: the narrow strip of dark under a parked delivery van.
And he remembered the shadow closing over him, thick and slow and heavy as tar, because of the serum, and carrying him, he did not know where.
And coming out of it somewhere else, in another street, alone, on his knees, in the sun.
Because the sun was up now.
Properly up.
Cold and white and pale in a November sky, over the rooftops of Vienna.
And it burned.
He walked for twenty minutes in the sun.
He would never know how.
He would never know where he was going, or why.
He walked with Kit’s burned scarf wrapped around his fist and his hood up and his head down and his skin blistering and healing and blistering again, every second, every step, until he could feel his body running out of whatever it was burning to do it.
Until every step was like walking through fire.
Until the second heart, which had been pounding, began to slow.
Tap.
Tap.
And the first heart, his own, began to stumble.
People stared at him.
He knew they did.
He could hear them.
He could hear them saying things in German.
Is he all right?
Should we call someone?
Look at his face.
He kept walking.
He didn’t know where.
He found himself, at some point, in front of an enormous building.
Concrete and glass, gray and brutal and enormous, taking up a whole block, with signs everywhere in German and ambulances coming and going.
A hospital.
The General Hospital, the AKH, the biggest in Vienna.
He did not know why he had come here.
Maybe because it was big, and full of people, and full of shadows.
Maybe because some part of him that was still Magnus Williams, nineteen, from Manchester, knew that when you were hurt you went to a hospital.
He went in through a side door, a staff door, propped open with a fire extinguisher.
He found a stairwell.
Concrete stairs, going down, dark, with a broken light.
He went down them.
He got halfway down the second flight before his legs went, and he sat down very suddenly on the cold concrete steps, in the dark, with his back against the wall.
He could not get up again.
He sat there.
He could feel his skin still trying to heal, slowly now, sluggishly, the burns crawling back across his face and hands like the tide coming in.
He could feel the serum still in him, thick and cold, three rounds of it, curdling his blood.
He could feel the second heart beating very slowly.
Very faintly.
Like the knocking in the forest, in the body bag, on the first night.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Keeping the house from falling down.
He held Kit’s scarf in both his hands, in his lap, and looked at it.
Above him, a door opened.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Light, quick, a woman’s.
They came down the first flight and turned onto the second, and stopped.
“Oh my God,” said a voice.
English.
Northern English.
“Oh my God.
Are you—can you hear me?
Sir?
Sir, can you hear me?” Magnus lifted his head.
She was standing on the landing above him, in blue nurse’s scrubs, with a coffee in one hand and a lanyard round her neck.
She was about his age, maybe a little older, with a round, freckled, tired face and brown hair scraped back in a ponytail and the dark circles under her eyes of someone at the end of a night shift.
She was staring at him.
At his face, which he knew must be terrible, burned and blistered and half healed.
At his hands.
At the black, crumbling scarf in his lap.
At his eyes.
He knew what she was seeing.
He had seen it himself, in the mirror of the safe flat in Leopoldstadt.
The red at the center of the pupils, glowing faintly in the dark of the stairwell like coals.
And when he opened his mouth to say something, anything, I’m fine, go away, don’t call anyone, he knew she would see the teeth.
She saw the teeth.
She stood very still on the landing.
The coffee in her hand trembled, a little.
He waited for her to scream.
He waited for her to run.
He did not have the strength left to stop her.
She did neither.
She came down the stairs, slowly, one step at a time, the way you would approach a dog that has been hit by a car.
She put her coffee down on a step.
She crouched in front of him, a little way off, just out of reach, and looked at him.
At the burns, healing.
At the teeth.
At the eyes.
At the scarf.
She was frightened.
He could feel it, through the faint warm sense that Adrian’s blood had given him.
Badly frightened.
Her heart was going like a bird’s.
But under the fear, there was something else.
Something he had not felt from a human being since a nurse at Site Seven had held his hand, once, on the night before the surgery, when no one else was looking.
“You’re burned,” she said quietly.
“You’re very badly burned.
And you’re—” She stopped.
Swallowed.
“You’re not going to hurt me.
Are you.” It was not quite a question.
“No,” said Magnus.
His voice was a ruin.
“No.
I’m not.” She looked at him for a long moment more.
Then she nodded, as if that settled something.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.
I’m Sarah.
I’m a nurse.
I’m going to help you.
Can you stand up?” He tried.
He couldn’t.
“Okay,” said Sarah again.
“That’s okay.
Stay there.
Don’t move.” She stood up.
“I’m going to get you something.
Don’t go anywhere.” She went back up the stairs, fast.
He heard the door open and shut.
He sat in the dark and waited for the shouting, the alarm, the running feet, the Containment soldiers with their nets.
They didn’t come.
She came back eight minutes later, alone, with a bulging hospital laundry bag over her shoulder.
She knelt down beside him on the step and opened it, and inside, packed in among the towels, were six bags of blood.
O-negative.
Hospital stock.
Still cold from the fridge.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said.
Her voice was very calm, and her hands were shaking.
“Just so you know.
I’ve never stolen anything in my life.
I’m probably going to get fired.
I might get arrested.” She held out the first bag.
“But my dad’s spent his whole life telling me stories about people like you, and I never believed a single one of them.
And I think, if I walk away now, I’ll regret it forever.” Magnus stared at her.
Then at the bag.
He took it.
He bit into the corner.
He drank.
And as he drank, and the cold bank blood went into him and began, slowly, very slowly, to push back against the serum, and the burns, and the dark, he started to cry.
He didn’t make a sound.
The tears just ran down his ruined face, red, and dripped onto the scarf in his lap.
Sarah Blackwood didn’t say anything.
She sat down on the step beside him, on the cold concrete, in the dark, with her shoulder almost touching his.
And she stayed there, through all six bags, until his hands stopped shaking.
Then she took out her phone.
“I’m going to call my father,” she said.
“He’s here, in Vienna.
He’s at the National Library, he’s been here all month, doing research.
He’s a historian.” She looked at Magnus.
“He’s spent forty years trying to prove that the stories are true.
About your kind.
About what happened in 1897.
Everyone at Oxford thinks he’s mad.” A pause.
“I think he should meet you.
I think he’d want to.
If you’ll let him.” Magnus didn’t answer.
He looked down at the scarf.
“His name’s Arthur,” said Sarah.
“Arthur Blackwood.” She hesitated.
“He’s the only person I know who might be able to help.” Magnus thought about the Hidden City.
About the Warden, and his rules.
About Adrian, still burning in his chest, frantic, where are you, where are you.
About Mara, at the front desk of the clinic, waiting for a boy who was never going to walk through the door.
About Kit, saying go.
“Call him,” he said.