The photograph had been taken on the day he arrived.
Magnus remembered it now, the way he was beginning to remember everything: suddenly, completely, with a clarity that was almost violent.
That was one of the things the change had done to him that he had not noticed until tonight.
A ghoul’s memory was like a fogged window; things came and went, and the years blurred together, and it was easier that way.
A vampire’s memory, it seemed, was glass.
He looked at the photograph and the fog was simply gone, and he was nineteen years old, standing against a white wall with a number on a placard held under his chin, squinting into a flash.
He could smell the disinfectant.
He could feel the paper gown on his skin.
He could hear the man behind the camera telling him to smile, and his own voice saying, Is this like a mugshot?
and the man laughing.
He had been trying to be funny.
He had been nervous.
He had thought he was going to be rich.
SUBJECT: H-013 NAME: WILLIAMS, MAGNUS (no middle name) DOB: 14 MARCH 2001 ORIGIN: Manchester, UK.
Ward of Manchester City Council 2004–2019.
No known living relatives.
RECRUITMENT: Via Meridian Clinical Trials (Foundation front).
Selected for: physical health, blood type O-negative, absence of family/social ties.
Absence of family/social ties.
Magnus read the line three times.
Then he turned the page, and let the rest of it come back.
The advertisement had been on a bus shelter on Oxford Road, the winter he was nineteen.
He remembered it exactly now: a white poster with clean blue letters, a stock photo of a smiling young man in a lab coat.
PAID MEDICAL RESEARCH.
£14,000 FOR A 12-MONTH RESIDENTIAL STUDY.
ACCOMMODATION AND MEALS PROVIDED.
HEALTHY VOLUNTEERS 18–30.
There had been a phone number, and a website, and a little line of small print at the bottom that he had not read.
He had aged out of care eight months earlier.
He had a room in a shared house in Fallowfield with four strangers and a mold problem, and a job stacking shelves in a supermarket on nights, and four hundred pounds in his bank account, and nobody, anywhere, who would notice if he stopped coming home.
He had stood in front of that poster in the rain for a long time.
Fourteen thousand pounds.
It was more money than he had ever seen.
It was a deposit on a flat.
It was a course at a college, maybe.
It was a year without anybody being able to tell him to leave.
He had called the number from a phone box, because his own phone had been cut off.
The woman who answered was kind and warm and asked him a great many questions.
Was he in good health?
Did he smoke?
Did he drink?
Did he take any drugs?
What was his blood type?
Did he have family?
Did anybody depend on him?
Was there anyone who would need to be informed of his whereabouts during a residential study abroad?
Abroad?
he had said.
Oh yes, said the kind, warm woman.
The facility is in Romania.
It’s very beautiful.
Mountains.
You’ll love it.
He should have hung up.
He knew that now, with his glass memory.
He could see himself in that phone box, rain running down the glass, and he could see the exact moment the boy he had been decided not to ask any more questions, because asking questions was how you lost things.
Every foster home had taught him that.
No, he had said.
There’s nobody.
There had been a long, satisfied pause on the other end of the line.
That’s perfect, the woman said.
The facility was called Site Seven, and it was beautiful, the way the woman had promised.
That was the worst of it, in a way.
It sat at the end of a private road in the mountains above Brașov, two hours from anywhere, a long low building of glass and pale stone set into a hillside among pine forests, with a view across a valley so wide and green that the first morning Magnus had stood at the window of his room for an hour just looking at it.
He had never seen mountains.
He had never seen that much sky.
The room had its own bathroom.
The food was good.
There was a gym and a library and a lounge with a television and a pool table, and twice a week they were allowed to walk in the gardens with an escort.
The staff wore white and spoke softly and called him Mister Williams or, after a while, Magnus.
They took a great deal of blood.
They gave him a great many injections.
They ran him on treadmills with wires on his chest and put him in machines that hummed and clicked and wrote down everything.
For the first two months, it was the best place he had ever lived.
He had noticed the beds, of course.
He was not stupid.
Site Seven’s residential wing had a long corridor of rooms, each with a number on the door, H-001 through H-020, and when he arrived only his door and one other had names written on the little whiteboard beside it.
The rest were empty.
The beds were made, the sheets were crisp and tight, and the rooms smelled of disinfectant so strong it made his eyes water.
Previous participants, the nurse said, when he asked.
The earlier phases of the study.
They’ve all gone home.
He had believed her.
He had wanted to.
Now, in Veyr’s study, with the file open in front of him, Magnus turned the pages and found them.
All twelve.
H-001.
Male, 24.
Phase 1 infusion (0.5ml D-sample).
Deceased Day 3.
Cause: acute hemolytic reaction.
H-002.
Male, 31.
Phase 1 infusion (0.3ml).
Deceased Day 9.
Cause: cardiac arrest, myocardial necrosis.
H-004.
Female, 22.
Phase 1 infusion (0.2ml).
Survived to Day 41.
Severe psychiatric deterioration.
Aggression.
Hematophagic behavior.
Terminated.
On and on.
Some died in days.
Some lasted months.
Several, the reports said, had “exhibited partial ghoulification” before they died, whatever that meant to the people who had written it.
Two had simply vanished from the record with no note at all.
And every entry ended in the same handful of words, typed in the same font: Deceased.
Terminated.
Remains disposed per Protocol 9.
D-sample.
Magnus touched the letter on the page with one long, dark nail.
He knew what D stood for now.
He had been afraid of knowing for three days, and before that he had been afraid of knowing for five years, in the back of his ghoul mind where he never went.
He knew.
He kept reading.
H-012.
Male, 29.
Kane, Tobias.
Recruited concurrent with H-013.
Tobias.
Magnus put the file down for a moment, flat on Veyr’s desk, and closed his eyes, and let the glass memory take him wherever it wanted to go.
Tobias Kane had been the other name on the whiteboard.
A big, loud Welshman from Cardiff with a shaved head and a broken nose and a laugh you could hear through three walls.
He had been a soldier, two tours in Afghanistan, and then a bouncer, and then, for a while, nothing much; he had a bad back and a worse habit he didn’t talk about and a little girl in Swansea he wasn’t allowed to see.
He was doing the trial for her.
He was going to clear his debts and get himself straight and go to court and get visitation.
He had a photo of her taped above his bed.
She had red hair and no front teeth.
Tobias had taken one look at Magnus on the first day, thin and silent and wary as a stray cat, and decided they were going to be friends.
Magnus had not been given any say in the matter.
He had taught Magnus chess, in the lounge, in the long evenings.
He played terribly and talked through every move and cheated when he thought Magnus wasn’t looking, and Magnus had beaten him eleven times in a row before Tobias admitted it.
He had taught Magnus to play pool.
He had told Magnus a thousand stories, half of them true.
When Magnus woke screaming from the injections in the second month, sweating through his sheets, it was Tobias who came through the connecting door at three in the morning and sat on the end of his bed and talked about rugby until he fell back asleep.
Nobody had ever done that for Magnus before.
Not in sixteen years of foster care.
Not once.
In the third month, they started the infusions.
They did them in a room at the bottom of the building that Magnus had never seen before.
You went down in a lift that needed a key card, and then down a corridor with no windows, and then through two sets of heavy doors with a hiss of air between them like the airlock on a spaceship, and then you were in a white room with a white chair, and a man with a gentle smile was waiting for you.
Dr.
Elias Mordane had been perhaps fifty, then.
Slim and neat, with silver hair cut close and wire-rimmed glasses and long, clean, delicate hands like a pianist’s.
He wore a gray suit under his lab coat, always, and a tie with a small silver pin in it, a shield and a cross and a stake.
He had a soft voice and a faint accent that Magnus could never place, and he always, always smiled.
“Magnus,” he said, that first morning.
“Sit down.
Make yourself comfortable.
You’re going to make history today.” The vial on the steel tray beside the chair was very small.
A glass ampoule no bigger than a fingertip, with a little red-and-black label, and inside it a fluid so dark it looked black until the light hit it, and then it looked red, and then it looked like nothing Magnus had a word for.
It moved strangely in the glass.
Slow.
Thick.
As though it were thinking.
“What is it?” Magnus asked.
Dr.
Mordane smiled.
“Something very old,” he said, “and very precious.
Something that has been waiting a long time for someone like you.” It went into his arm through a cannula, cold, and then very hot, and then Magnus did not remember anything for two days.
When he woke up, Tobias was in the next bed, and Tobias was screaming.
It took Tobias Kane nineteen days to die.
Magnus watched all of it, because they were in the same room now, the observation ward at the bottom of the building, and there was nowhere else to look.
He watched the big Welshman’s fever spike and break and spike again.
He watched his skin go gray and then sallow and then a strange, translucent white, like the skin of a candle.
He watched him stop eating, and then stop sleeping, and then start, in the second week, to talk to people who weren’t there.
He watched Tobias begin, in the third week, to look at the nurses’ throats.
“Mags,” Tobias whispered, on the eighteenth night, when the lights were low and the nurses were at the end of the ward.
His voice had gone strange.
Too smooth.
“Mags.
You awake?” “Yeah.” “I can hear your heart, mate.” A long, horrible pause.
“I can hear it from here.
Is that normal?
Is that the drugs?” Magnus had lain very still and said nothing.
He had been feeling it too, a little: a tightness behind his eyes, a strange new sharpness to sounds and smells.
But it was small.
It was manageable.
Whatever was happening to Tobias was a fire, and whatever was happening to Magnus was a candle.
“It’ll pass,” Magnus said.
“It’s just the drugs.” “Yeah.” Tobias was quiet for a while.
“Mags.
If it doesn’t.
Pass.
You’ll tell Lily, yeah?
You’ll find her.
In Swansea.
Tell her her dad was trying to get better.
Tell her he was doing it for her.” “You’ll tell her yourself.” “Promise me.” “I promise.” The next night, Tobias came off his bed at three in the morning, and he moved faster than Magnus had ever seen a human being move, and he went for the night nurse.
He got as far as her shoulder before the doors at the end of the ward hissed open and the men in black came in with their strange guns.
They did not shoot bullets.
They shot something that went into Tobias with a sound like a slap and made him scream, a high, inhuman, tearing scream, and then made him fall.
And then a man in a gray suit and wire-rimmed glasses came in behind them and stood over him and watched him convulse on the floor until he was still.
Dr.
Mordane looked at the body for a long time, with his head on one side.
“Rejection,” he said, to nobody in particular.
“Again.” He made a note on his tablet.
Then he looked up, across the ward, at Magnus in the next bed, staring back at him.
And he smiled.
“Don’t worry, Magnus,” he said gently.
“You’re different.
I can feel it.” In Veyr’s study, five years later, Magnus turned the page and read it in black type: H-012.
Deceased Day 19.
Cause: acute vampiric rejection syndrome; hematophagic aggression.
Terminated (Hellsing Serum, 3 rounds).
Remains disposed per Protocol 9.
Next of kin: none on file.
None on file.
There had been a photo above his bed.
A little girl with red hair and no front teeth.
Magnus had promised.
He had promised, and then they had cut him open, and then a vampire had owned him for five years, and he had never once, until this moment, remembered that promise.
He sat in Veyr’s chair and wept for the first time since the forest, and the tears that ran down his face and dripped onto Tobias Kane’s death certificate were red.
The rest came in pieces.
H-013 tolerating D-sample infusion at 4x the H-012 dosage.
No rejection markers.
No psychiatric deterioration.
Minor sensory enhancement.
Subject compliant.
Recommend escalation to Phase 3.
Phase 3 was the surgery.
Magnus remembered the morning they told him, in the white room, Dr.
Mordane sitting on the edge of the white chair with his hands folded and his eyes bright as a child’s at Christmas.
“We’re going to give you a gift, Magnus,” he said.
“A very great gift.
You won’t understand it now.
You may never understand it.
But I want you to know that you will be carrying, inside your body, the single most important object in the history of the human race.
You will be a vessel.
A living reliquary.
There has never been anything like you before, and if this works, there will never need to be anything like you again.” “What if it doesn’t work?” Magnus asked.
Mordane only smiled.
The surgery took eleven hours.
Magnus was not supposed to remember any of it, but the glass memory had found things the anesthetic had hidden, and they came back to him now in flashes: a bright light, a man’s voice saying retractor, the sound of a saw.
A cold, metallic smell, and under it another smell, old and deep and impossible, iron and smoke and winter.
A voice, a woman’s voice, saying, Doctor, it’s beating.
It’s beating on its own, it’s not connected to anything yet, it’s just beating— and Mordane’s voice answering, reverent as a priest’s: Of course it is.
It’s been beating for a hundred and twenty-four years.
The file did not use the word heart.
It used a code.
Organ D-1, partial.
And then a list of other codes, shorter, D-3 marrow, D-5 tissue graft, D-7 lymphatic, and a great many numbers Magnus did not understand.
At the very end of the surgical report, someone had written in pen, small and neat, beside the typed text: Integration appears complete.
Godspeed.
And then: Post-Op Day 14: No measurable change.
Vitals normal.
No enhanced function.
Post-Op Day 30: No measurable change.
D-1 activity undetectable.
Hypothesis: organ dormancy or failure.
Post-Op Day 60: No measurable change.
Subject exhibits depression, withdrawal.
Further investment not justified.
Post-Op Day 61: Phase 3 deemed unsuccessful.
H-013 classified non-viable.
Recommend termination and Protocol 9 disposal.
Authorized: E.
Mordane, Director, DRD.
Magnus looked at the signature for a long time.
A neat, looping, elegant hand.
Then he turned the last page, and found Protocol 9.
It was a single sheet.
A standard operating procedure, dry and dull, written in the bloodless language of a company manual.
Protocol 9: Disposal of Non-Viable Subjects.
Due to the presence of anomalous biological material, remains of H-Series subjects may not be cremated, buried, or processed through civilian channels.
Remains shall be transported by Containment Division to designated disposal zones within known vampiric territories (see Annex C) and left in situ.
Rationale: Remains will be consumed by local supernatural populations within 48–72 hours, eliminating evidence.
Observation of consumption patterns may provide additional intelligence regarding territorial activity.
Annex C was a map.
A small square of photocopied topography, the mountains above Brașov, with a red circle drawn on it in marker.
Magnus didn’t need to read the label.
He knew the shape of those valleys.
He had looked out at them every night for five years from the walls of the Ashen Court.
They had not just thrown him away.
They had fed him to Veyr.
He remembered the forest last of all.
The termination had not worked.
He knew that now, reading between the lines of the file.
Somebody, a nurse, a junior doctor, someone with a conscience or a hangover or a bad day, had given him the injection, and it had stopped his heart, his first heart, the human one, the one he was born with.
And they had put him in a body bag and loaded him into a van with no windows and driven him two hours into the mountains and left him at the foot of a pine tree in the snow, in a hospital gown with fresh stitches down his chest, on the night of the first frost.
And in the dark, inside the bag, inside his chest, the other heart had started to beat.
Not strongly.
Not enough to wake him.
Not enough to move him.
Just enough.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Like someone knocking on the inside of a door, very softly, over and over, through the long hours of the night, to keep the house from falling down.
He remembered waking in the morning to the sound of footsteps in the snow.
He remembered the zip of the bag being drawn down, slowly, and cold air on his face, and a beautiful man crouching over him with dark hair tied back in a ribbon the color of wine.
He remembered the man’s nostrils flaring, scenting him.
He remembered the man’s eyes going wide, then narrow, then very, very interested.
“Well,” Cassian Veyr had said softly.
“What have they thrown away this time?” He had leaned in close, closer, until his cold lips were almost at Magnus’s ear, and breathed in the scent of the blood that was not quite Magnus’s blood, and Magnus had heard him whisper something that had been lost in the fog of the ghoul years, and had come back to him only now, through the glass.
“Oh, you poor little thing.
What are they trying to make of you?” And then Veyr had bitten his own wrist, and pressed it to Magnus’s mouth, and that had been the end of Magnus Williams.
He did not know how long he sat in the study.
Long enough for the candle on the desk to burn down to a stub and gutter out.
Long enough for Silas to come up the tower stairs, slowly, on his old knees, and stand in the doorway, and look at him, and not say anything.
After a long time, Magnus said, “There were twelve before me.” Silas didn’t ask what he meant.
He came in and sat down on the edge of Veyr’s desk with a grunt and picked up the file and looked at the photograph on the first page, the nineteen-year-old squinting into the flash.
He looked at it for a long time.
“You were a skinny little thing,” he said at last.
Magnus laughed.
He hadn’t known he was going to.
It came out cracked and wet and red.
“They put something in me, Silas.
Something of his.” He didn’t have to say whose.
The name was written all through the file, in codes and abbreviations, and on the old map on the wall, crossed out, and in every one of Veyr’s letters, in that bitter phrase: since the King fell.
“It’s in my chest.
It’s been in my chest the whole time.
It kept me alive in the forest.
It woke up when Veyr told me to kill you.
I can feel it.
Right now.
Like it’s listening.” Silas was quiet for a while.
“What does it want?” he asked.
Magnus put his hand on the scar.
Thud, went his own heart.
Tap, went the other one.
Patient.
Old.
Waiting.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But I know what I want.” He stood up.
He took the folder from Silas, gently, and closed it, and held it against his chest.
And in the dark of Veyr’s study, under the faded map of a kingdom that no longer existed, he said it out loud for the first time, so that it would be real.
“I want to find Lily Kane in Swansea and tell her that her dad was trying to get better.
And then I want to find Elias Mordane.”