Bermondsey, South London.
Two nights later.
The vampire had been feeding in the arches for eleven weeks, and in all that time nobody had noticed, because nobody had been looking.
That was how they always did it, now.
Elena Ward had learned that in her first year in the field, and every year since had only taught it to her again.
The old vampires, the ones in the history books, had fed on lords and ladies and lonely girls in country houses, and left bodies in their beds with two neat marks on their throats.
The new ones fed on people who had already disappeared.
The homeless.
The undocumented.
The addicts.
The sex workers.
The ones who slept in doorways and under bridges and in the railway arches south of the river, and whose names went into no one’s phone, and whose absence nobody ever reported.
A vampire who was careful could feed in a city like London for years, and never once make the news.
This one had not been careful.
He had been greedy.
That was why Elena was here.
She crouched on the roof of a self-storage warehouse on Druid Street with the rain running down the back of her neck and watched the arches through a thermal scope.
There were twelve of them, a long brick viaduct carrying the railway into London Bridge, each arch bricked up and fitted with a garage door and rented out to some small business: a mechanic, a microbrewery, a gym, a man who restored old pinball machines.
Eleven of them glowed warm orange in the scope, the residue of a day’s heat in the brick.
One was cold.
Arch nine.
Blue-black, dead cold, like a hole cut in the night.
Nothing living had been in arch nine for weeks.
“Thermals confirm,” she said quietly into her throat mic.
“Nine’s cold.
Any movement on the street?” “Negative,” said Tariq, from the van.
“Rain’s keeping everybody in.
Last train through was twelve minutes ago.
Next one’s not till five-ten.” “Jonah?” “In position.” Jonah’s voice came from the other end of the viaduct, a low Glaswegian murmur.
“Got eyes on the back.
There’s a service door.
Chain’s been cut and wired back on to look intact.” “Mac?” A single click on the line.
Mac didn’t talk on ops.
Mac didn’t talk much at all.
Elena lowered the scope and checked her weapons one last time, by touch, in the dark, the way she had done before every operation for eight years.
She had a ritual for it.
Everybody in the Corps had a ritual.
Some of the older hunters said a rosary.
Jonah touched a photograph of his mother.
Tariq recited a verse from the Qur’an his grandfather had taught him.
Elena said a litany, under her breath, so softly that not even the mic picked it up, the same one she had said every night since she was fifteen.
Silver for the blood.
The pistol on her right hip, a modified Glock, loaded with .40-caliber rounds jacketed in pure silver.
Three spare magazines on her belt.
Fire for the flesh.
The two thermite canisters on her vest.
The UV flares in her left thigh pocket, each one bright as a slice of noon.
Steel for the heart.
The blade on her back, a short straight sword of consecrated Sheffield steel inlaid with silver along the fuller, a gift from Marcus Reed on her eighteenth birthday.
The ash stakes in her boots, two of them, sharpened that afternoon.
And faith, for everything else.
The small plain cross of black iron at her throat, under her body armor, against her skin.
She touched it through the Kevlar.
She had worn it every day for fourteen years.
It had been her mother’s.
“Going in,” she said.
She had been nine years old.
She did not think about it on operations.
That was part of the training, and she was very well trained.
But sometimes, in the moment before a door opened, in the half second when her body was moving and her mind had nothing to do but wait, it came back.
Not as a memory.
As a smell.
Cut grass and woodsmoke and the sweetish copper of blood, and the cold, dirt-and-apple smell of the root cellar under her parents’ farmhouse in the Peak District, where her father had put her the night the strangers came to the door.
Her father had been a sheep farmer.
He had been a big, slow, gentle man with red hands and a laugh like a tractor engine.
He kept an old double-barreled shotgun in a cupboard by the back door for foxes and had never, as far as Elena knew, fired it at anything but a tin can.
That night he had gone to the cupboard and taken it out and pushed it into Elena’s arms, and lifted the trapdoor in the kitchen floor, and put her down into the dark among the apples and the potatoes and the jars of her mother’s plum jam.
And then he had knelt over the trapdoor and looked down at her, and his face had been a stranger’s face, white and calm and terrible.
Whatever you hear, he said.
Don’t come up.
Not for anything.
Not even if it sounds like me.
She had heard everything.
She had heard her mother start to pray, and stop.
She had heard her father shout, and stop.
She had heard the strangers talking to each other in light, pleasant voices, like people at a dinner party, while they did what they did.
She had heard one of them come and stand over the trapdoor, right over her head, and laugh softly, and say, Oh, there’s a little one down there, I can hear her heart going like a rabbit’s.
And she had heard another one say, Leave it.
We’re full.
Let it grow.
And then, in the voice of her father, a perfect imitation, warm and slow: Elena.
Sweetheart.
It’s all right.
You can come up now.
She had not come up.
She had stayed down there in the dark, with the shotgun across her knees, for nine hours.
The Foundation had found her in the morning.
A man with a gray face and a scar on his cheek had lifted the trapdoor, and she had pointed the shotgun at him, and he had not flinched.
He had looked down at her for a long moment.
And then he had climbed down into the cellar, very slowly, and sat on the dirt floor across from her among the apples, and said, My name is Marcus.
I’m going to sit here with you until you’re ready.
However long it takes.
It had taken until the afternoon.
He had sat there the whole time.
She had not spoken again for a year.
When she did, the first thing she said was: Teach me.
The service door at the back of arch nine opened with a whisper of oiled hinges.
The smell came out to meet them first.
Elena had smelled it a hundred times and it still hit her like a fist: old blood, rotten and sweet, and under it something worse, something that wasn’t decay so much as the absence of it.
The smell of meat that would not rot.
The smell of something dead that was still moving around.
Inside it was darker than dark.
She slid her night-vision goggles down and the arch leapt up around her in shades of green.
A long, narrow brick tunnel, curving up overhead into a barrel vault, its floor littered with rubbish: sleeping bags, cardboard, plastic bottles, a shopping trolley on its side.
Deeper in, a sofa with the stuffing coming out of it.
A gas camping stove.
A television, its screen smashed.
Whoever the vampire was, he had moved into somebody else’s home.
Somebody who wasn’t here anymore.
Jonah came in behind her, then Mac, a silent shape with a pump shotgun loaded with Hellsing Serum rounds.
They moved down the tunnel in a wedge, the way they had a hundred times, stepping over the rubbish without a sound.
Halfway down, Elena stopped and lifted a fist.
There was a body on the sofa.
A man, sixty or so, thin, with a long gray beard and a filthy army-surplus coat.
He lay on his back with his arms at his sides and his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
His throat was a ragged ruin.
He had been dead for at least two days.
She made a mark on the wrist display of her suit to tag the location for the cleanup crew.
One.
She would add his name later, if the Intelligence Division could find one.
Usually they couldn’t.
They found four more before they reached the end of the arch.
At the back, in the last ten feet of the tunnel, where the brick met the curve of the earth bank behind the viaduct, there was a mattress on the floor.
And on the mattress, curled on his side with his back to them like a child asleep, was the vampire.
He was young.
That was the first thing she saw.
Or he had been young, when he was made: twenty, perhaps, a boy with shaggy dark hair and a thin face and a hoodie with the logo of a university football club on the back.
A fledgling.
A new one.
Probably only a year or two turned.
Nobody’s creature, from the look of him.
A stray.
Made by some careless older vampire on a whim and then abandoned, the way they abandoned so many of them these days, left to work out for himself how to feed and hide and survive.
He had not worked it out very well.
Elena raised her pistol, and stepped forward, and the vampire’s eyes snapped open.
He was very fast.
They always were.
He came off the mattress in a single fluid explosion of movement, straight up the curved brick wall like a spider and then across the ceiling, upside down, hissing, and dropped onto Jonah from above.
Jonah went down.
Mac’s shotgun boomed in the enclosed space like a bomb, and a spray of serum rounds stitched the brick where the vampire had been half a second earlier.
The vampire was already gone, a blur in the green of Elena’s goggles, coming straight at her.
She didn’t think.
She had stopped needing to think, in moments like this, years ago.
She fired three times as he came, and saw two of them hit, and then he was on her and they were both going down, and she felt his teeth snap shut an inch from her throat, and smelled his breath, the dead-sweet reek of five bodies’ worth of stolen blood.
She drove the stake up under his ribs with her left hand.
Not quite the heart.
Close.
He shrieked and convulsed and rolled off her, clawing at the wood.
Elena came up onto one knee with the Sheffield blade already in her hand, and he looked at her, on his back on the filthy floor of the arch, and for one moment his face changed.
The animal went out of it.
The hunger went out of it.
And what was left behind was a boy.
Twenty years old.
Frightened.
Lost.
“Please,” he said.
His voice was hoarse and thin and very young.
He had a Midlands accent.
Birmingham, maybe.
“Please.
I didn’t know how to stop.
Nobody told me how to stop.” Elena hesitated.
It was a fraction of a second.
It was nothing.
A breath.
A heartbeat.
It was the first time in eight years.
Then she brought the blade down, and it was over.
The ghoul was hiding under the shopping trolley.
They found her during the sweep, afterward, while Jonah was cursing and Mac was strapping a field dressing on the gash the vampire had torn in Jonah’s shoulder and Tariq was bringing the van round to the front of the arch for the bodies.
She had pulled a filthy sleeping bag over herself and gone completely still, the way prey animals do, but she could not hide her heat from the thermals.
She was curled into a ball so small that at first Elena thought she was a child.
She wasn’t.
When Elena pulled the sleeping bag off her, the woman underneath was perhaps thirty, with bleached hair grown out dark at the roots and track marks on both arms.
Her eyes had the strange, flat, glassy shine that all ghouls had, like the eyes of a doll.
She stared up at the barrel of Elena’s pistol and did not move.
“He made you?” Elena said.
The woman nodded, very slightly.
“How long?” A whisper.
“Christmas.” Ten months.
Ten months of obeying a starving boy in a railway arch.
Bringing him people, probably.
Luring them in.
That was what ghouls did, for strays like him: they hunted for their masters, when their masters were too weak or too stupid or too scared to hunt for themselves.
“Did you bring them here?” Elena asked.
“The people on the sofa?” The woman’s face crumpled.
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t need to.
“He’s dead,” Elena said.
“Your master.
Do you understand?
He’s dead.” “I know.” The ghoul’s voice was barely a breath.
“I felt it.
Like a string.
Like somebody cut a string.” She looked up at Elena, and her doll’s eyes were wet.
“What happens to me now?” Elena knew the answer.
Everybody in the Corps knew the answer.
It was in the manual.
It was in the training.
It had been drilled into her since she was fifteen years old, in the classroom on the Command level, under the Latin words carved above the door.
A ghoul without a master went Grey in a month and died.
A ghoul without a master who found another vampire would serve that vampire instead, and bring it people, and help it hide.
A ghoul could not be cured.
A ghoul could not be saved.
There was no rehabilitation, no protocol, no hospital bed for a human being who had drunk a vampire’s blood and been changed by it.
There was only one procedure.
She raised the pistol.
“Please,” said the ghoul, very quietly.
The same word.
Almost the same voice.
“I didn’t want to.
He made me.
He made me do it.” Nobody told me how to stop.
Elena fired once, cleanly, and the woman went still under the shopping trolley, and the arch was very quiet.
Mac was watching her from across the tunnel.
He didn’t say anything.
Mac never said anything.
But Elena felt his eyes on her as she holstered the pistol and turned away, and she felt them on her back all the way out of the arch, into the rain.
She stood on the cobbles of Druid Street with the water running down her face and waited for her hands to stop shaking.
They did, eventually.
They always did.
She told herself it was the cold.
Marcus Reed was waiting for her when she got back to the Estate, at four in the morning, in the long gallery on the ground floor among the portraits of dead directors.
He didn’t say anything when she came in.
He just held out a mug of tea, strong and sweet, with too much sugar, the way he had made it for her when she was nine.
She took it and wrapped both cold hands around it and stood beside him, and together they looked up at the biggest portrait in the gallery, the one at the end, the one of the old man in the black coat with the white beard and the kind, terrible eyes.
Abraham Van Helsing, Founder.
1827–1912.
Under it, in gold letters: Non Nobis.
Not to us.
“Jonah’s fine,” Reed said, after a while.
“Twenty stitches.
He’s annoyed about the jacket.” “Good.” “Mac says you were clean.
Five victims recovered.
One vampire.
One ghoul.
No civilian contact.
No Veil exposure.” He paused.
“Mac says you hesitated.” Elena didn’t answer.
“Mac doesn’t say much,” Reed said.
“So when he does, I listen.” “He was a kid,” Elena said.
Her voice sounded strange in the long gallery.
Too loud.
“The vampire.
He was twenty.
He had a Villa hoodie on.
He said nobody told him how to stop.” “I know.” “Somebody made him and then dumped him in London with no idea what he was.
Like a puppy you get bored of and leave by the motorway.
And he killed five people because nobody ever—” She stopped.
She drank some of the tea.
It was very hot and very sweet and it burned her tongue, and she was glad of it.
“And the ghoul.
She’d been an addict.
He probably found her in a doorway.
She didn’t want to do any of it, Marcus.
She said he made her.” “They always say that.” “I know they always say that.” She turned and looked at him.
“What if they’re always telling the truth?” Reed was quiet for a long time.
He looked old in the dim light of the gallery.
Older than she had ever seen him.
“Then it doesn’t change anything,” he said at last.
“That’s the hell of it, Elena.
It doesn’t change one single thing.
A ghoul that didn’t want to bring people to a vampire still brings people to a vampire.
A vampire that doesn’t know how to stop still doesn’t stop.
We don’t do this because they’re evil.
Some of them are.
Some of them aren’t.
We do this because they’re dangerous, and we’re the only people standing between them and everyone who doesn’t know they exist.” He looked back up at the portrait.
“You can feel sorry for them.
You should, maybe.
God knows somebody should.
But you can’t hesitate.
Not ever.
Not for one second.
Because the one second you give them is the one second they’ll use.” “I know.” “I know you know.” He put a hand on her shoulder, briefly, heavily.
“That’s why I’m about to ask you to do something I don’t want you to do.” The Director’s office was at the top of the old Tudor wing, a long low room with dark oak paneling and a fire burning in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox.
Jonathan Harker was sitting behind his desk when they came in, in a gray cardigan, with reading glasses on the end of his nose.
He looked, Elena thought, like somebody’s kindly uncle.
He had always looked like that.
It was one of the reasons she was afraid of him.
Dr.
Elias Mordane was there too, standing by the fire, with his long pale hands clasped behind his back.
He smiled at her when she came in.
Elena did not smile back.
She had never liked Mordane.
Nobody in the Corps did.
He spent his life in the laboratories under the vault, cutting things open, and he looked at hunters the way a man looks at a delivery van: as something that brought him packages.
“Elena,” said Harker.
“Sit down.
Please.
I’m sorry about the hour.” She sat.
Reed stayed standing behind her chair, like a sentry.
Harker slid a folder across the desk to her.
It was thin, and very new, and stamped across the front in red letters she had never seen on a Foundation file before.
PRIORITY ZERO.
“Before you open it,” Harker said, “I need you to understand that what’s in there is classified above your clearance.
Above Commander Reed’s clearance, until two days ago.
There are perhaps twenty people alive who know it.
As of tonight, you’ll be the twenty-first.” He took off his reading glasses and looked at her across the desk, and his kind, sad eyes were very steady.
“Do you understand?” “Yes, sir.” “Then open it.” She opened it.
The first page was a photograph.
A young man, nineteen or twenty, squinting into a camera flash against a white wall, with a number held on a placard beneath his chin.
He was thin and pale and very ordinary-looking.
Messy dark hair.
A narrow face.
A wary, watchful expression around the eyes, like someone who expected to be hit and had decided in advance not to flinch.
He looked, Elena thought, like any of the boys she had grown up around in the Peak District: farmers’ sons, apprentices, kids who worked in the petrol station in the village.
Like the boy in the Villa hoodie, before.
SUBJECT: H-013.
WILLIAMS, MAGNUS.
She read the file.
It took her twenty minutes.
Nobody spoke the whole time.
When she was done, she closed it and laid it carefully back on the Director’s desk, and sat very still, with her hands in her lap.
“You put something of his in this boy,” she said at last.
“You put Dracula in him.” “Part of Dracula,” said Mordane, from the fire.
His voice was light and pleased.
“A small part.
Though perhaps the most important part.” “And then when it didn’t work, you killed him.
Or tried to.
And you threw him in the woods for the vampires to eat.” Mordane’s smile didn’t move.
“Protocol 9 is a standard—” “Doctor,” said Harker, very quietly, and Mordane stopped.
Elena looked at the Director.
“And now he’s alive.” “We believe so.
We believe he was found by the Lord of the Ashen Court, Cassian Veyr, and made a ghoul, and kept for five years.
We believe that three nights ago, something happened.
That the material we implanted in him, that we believed dormant, has activated.
We don’t know how.
We don’t know why.
We don’t know what he is now.” Harker folded his hands on the desk.
“Every instrument we have tells us that something very powerful is waking up in the Carpathian Mountains, Elena.
We need to know what it is.
And we need you to find it.” “Bring him back alive,” said Mordane.
“Please.
Whatever it costs.” “Bring him back alive if you can,” said Reed, behind her.
His voice was harder than she had ever heard it.
“And if you can’t, you put him down.
No hesitation.
Not for one second.
Do you hear me?” She looked down at the folder on the desk.
At the photograph of the thin, wary boy against the white wall.
At the line of type beneath his date of birth, which she had read three times while the others watched, and which she found she could not stop seeing.
No known living relatives.
She had read that line before.
It was on her own file.
She had seen it, once, at sixteen, when she broke into the records office on the Archive level because she wanted to know what the Foundation had written about her parents.
It had been the second line, under her name.
Ward, Elena.
No known living relatives.
“I hear you,” she said.
The plane left Northolt at eleven the next morning: a small, unmarked private jet with Foundation pilots, bound for a private airfield outside Brașov.
Elena had a team of eight, the best Reed could give her, and two cases of equipment, and a cover story about a pharmaceutical company’s regional audit, and a satellite phone with one number programmed into it.
She sat alone at the back of the cabin, by the window, and watched England fall away beneath her, green and gray and small.
Then she took the folder out of her bag, and opened it to the first page, and looked at the photograph for a long time.
She had killed a frightened boy in a railway arch last night.
She had killed a woman under a shopping trolley who said please.
She had done it cleanly and well, and she would do it again, as many times as it took, because Marcus was right, because it didn’t change anything, because somebody had to stand between the dark and everyone who didn’t know it was there.
But she had hesitated.
For one second.
For the first time in eight years.
She had looked at a monster and seen a boy, and she had hesitated.
She looked at the photograph of Magnus Williams, nineteen years old, squinting into a flash in a white room, about to be cut open by men who smiled.
She wondered what he looked like now.
She wondered whether there was anything left in him of the boy in the photograph, or whether five years of a vampire’s slavery and a dead king’s blood had burned it all away.
She wondered which of those she was hoping for.
The plane climbed through the clouds into blinding sunlight, and Elena Ward closed the folder, and touched her mother’s iron cross through her shirt, and said her litany, very quietly, to herself, all the way to Romania.
Silver for the blood.
Fire for the flesh.
Steel for the heart.
And faith, for everything else.