“Only you wanted to hog all the glory for yourself,” said Redlaw. “And the credit. No doubt you’ve an eye on the commodore’s chair.”
Khalid tried to look affronted.
“You know that I didn’t kill Lambourne? I’m innocent of that one. It was Macarthur.”
Khalid puffed out his lips. “What does it matter?”
“And with Slocock and Macarthur, it was self-defence, not murder.”
“Frankly, I couldn’t give a toss. Those are matters for a judge and jury to establish. Me, I just want to be the one who drags you back to HQ by your ear. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you once you’re there, you can count on it. There’s any number of officers who’d like to drop in on you in the interview room, pay a nice social call, and I’ll make sure Heffernan gets a ringside seat for the whole event.”
“I won’t come quietly. You must realise that.”
“I’m really hoping you won’t. Injured, intact, it doesn’t make any difference to me. This way, I get to see you squirm in pain before anyone else does. A win-win. I believe a leg shot ought to do the trick. I’ll try my best to miss the femoral artery.”
Khalid re-sighted his aim at Redlaw’s thigh.
Redlaw leapt.
The bullet splintered the floorboard just beneath his feet.
At the same time, Redlaw struck Khalid horizontally like a battering ram.
The force of the collision drove them straight into the window... and through.
They plummeted onto the pavement outside, Khalid underneath, Redlaw on top. It was a drop of some twelve feet, and Khalid took the brunt of the impact on his back. He and Redlaw lay together amid shards of glass and splinters of frame, both stunned, but only one of them was capable of getting to his feet. Khalid moaned as Redlaw pushed himself up off him. Redlaw suspected the SHADE captain was hurt pretty badly, but that was the least of his concerns. Khalid might have been in the squat alone, but he wouldn’t have come without backup. There would be other shadies somewhere around, lurking out of sight, and the sound of the gunshot and the window smashing would surely—
“Hey!”
A voice from across the street. Someone emerging from the door of another empty house. Footfalls, rapid, running.
Redlaw snatched up Khalid’s Cindermaker and fired it wildly in the direction of the voice. His intention was to deter, not hit, and he succeeded. He glimpsed the SHADE officer scurrying for cover behind a lamppost. He fired again, to convince the man to stay put, then sprinted off along the road.
Return fire came his way, but belatedly, not before he was more or less out of range.
Round the next corner, Redlaw came face to face with a SHADE patrol car rolling towards him. Without hesitating, he loosed off two bullets at it. One pierced the radiator grille, the other the bonnet. Whether he had fatally damaged the engine, or just startled the driver, the car skidded to a halt. Two shadies sprang out and started shooting.
Redlaw doubled back, racing past the end of the curry house road. Fraxinus rounds pinged and ricocheted around him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a couple of SHADE officers standing over the supine Khalid, concerned. Several others were haring up the road and quickly joined in the chase with the pair from the car. Redlaw ran, and ran, and kept on running, London a blur around him, until his body couldn’t bear to run any longer. When he finally stopped, staggering to rest against a wheelie bin, his lungs felt as though they had been stripped inside out, his legs burned, and his heart was hammering so fast and hard that he seriously thought it was going to give out or else seize up like an over-wound alarm clock. He bent over and heaved his stomach contents onto the paving stones. For a time, everything went hazy. He may even have blacked out, while somehow still managing to remain upright.
Only as his head cleared did he realise that he had given his pursuers the slip. Up until that moment, he had been beyond caring. He dimly recalled zigging and zagging through the city, darting down side streets and up back alleys and across patches of park, using his knowledge of the lay of the land to throw his pursuers off. He sagged against the bin in relief.
For the rest of the night he wandered the wintry city, twitchy as a trodden-on cat. Every unexpected sound, every wail of an emergency vehicle siren, was a sharp reminder that he was a hunted man. By dawn he had come to a decision. It wasn’t so much a choice as an acceptance of the only course of action available to him. The Hand of God seemed to be pushing him in a definite direction. The usual divine strategy of closing all other doors and leaving just a single exit. Free will? Well, you didn’t
have
to take the exit...
Redlaw found a branch of his bank, and the minute it opened he cleaned out his savings account.
Luckily, he had his passport on him already. Even more luckily, no one had considered that John Redlaw might be an international flight risk and taken steps to warn the Border Agency.
From Heathrow to JFK, and a bridge as wide as the Atlantic lay in smouldering ruins behind him.
I
F THERE WAS
one thing Redlaw knew how to do, it was locate vampires. He was in a strange, alien city, and the weather was diabolical. But wherever you were and whatever the conditions, certain aspects of vampires’ behaviour were constants. They took refuge in shabby, tucked-away places, mostly through necessity but also by preference. They tried to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. And they always left traces, signs that the eye could be trained to detect.
It might be a litter of dead vermin, rats especially, heaped in a basement lightwell. It might be a pile of faeces, unusually red, spattery and pungent. It might be the urine with which, doglike, they left their scent and alerted other vampires to their presence. Vampires were not the cleanest or most foresighted of creatures. They were as much animal as human, and didn’t think to tidy up their own mess or consider that others could track them by their detritus.
Redlaw, with Cindermaker lodged in trouser waistband, steered clear of the well-lit avenues with their shops and restaurants. He ranged southward, down to where the city’s grid pattern broke up and intersections were no longer invariably right-angled crossways. The rigid geometry of upper Manhattan and midtown gave way to something he found more recognisable: unplanned urbanisation, a street layout that seemed to have occurred naturally rather than been imposed by ruler and set square.
Here, between the ruins of the World Trade Center and the vaulting arrogance of the financial district, was the sort of warren of cramped old buildings he could see vampire immigrants favouring. He assumed that, like the City of London, this part of New York tended to be busy by day but unfrequented at night, which also suited the Sunless.
Patiently, doggedly, Redlaw trudged through the snow. He bent to check doorsteps for the telltale, acrid-smelling stains that betokened territorial marking. He scanned the upper-storey windows of the more dilapidated tenement blocks, looking for crude methods of blotting out daylight, such as newspaper pages and scraps of cardboard box taped inside the panes. He was a big game hunter searching for spoor, but to passers-by—of which there were few—he looked like nothing so much as a madman, one of those quietly tormented schizophrenics of which New York seemed to have more than its fair share, performing arcane public rituals to stave off some private apocalypse.
Midnight deepened into the small hours, and Redlaw had nothing to show for his efforts except sodden shoes, damp feet, and an uncontrollable shiver that came and went but was more violent each time it returned. He had never, ever been so cold.
Tomorrow—note to self—buy warmer clothing
.
To add to his woes, around 2
am
fresh show started falling. The flakes were huge and silent, floating down like autumn leaves. They clumped on his eyebrows and built up in white epaulettes on his shoulders. His unprotected head was soon snowcapped, which made his scalp ache, especially at the crown where the covering of hair was thinner.
He forged on because that was the sort of man he was. A bit of snow—no, a
lot
of snow—wasn’t going to deter John Redlaw. He could almost hear Róisín Leary telling him he was an idiot and he should get his arse indoors now or he’d catch his death. His former SHADE partner had not been one to mince her words.
Similarly, he could almost hear the voice of Illyria Strakosha, the shtriga he had allied himself with not so long ago, saying much the same as Leary. Putting it less bluntly, perhaps, but with an equal amount of eye-rolling exasperation.
Really, Redlaw, stop this bally nonsense. You’re only human, old bean
.
Ghosts of the dead. The sounds of his conscience. Redlaw knew they were just memories, disembodied echoes haunting the hollows of his mind, but sometimes he thought of them as angels.
And then, at last, success. A result. Persistence rewarded.
He had passed the deconsecrated church twice already, and only on the third time did something about it strike him as anomalous. A small round window high in its façade appeared to have been neatly removed. Not vandalised, as some of the others were, with starred holes in their stained-glass panes where stones had been hurled at them. This one window was simply not there any more, leaving a circular aperture that was just large enough to permit a human-sized body to squeeze through.
Looking closer, Redlaw discovered scratches in the stonework below the empty window. A column of little runic scuff marks led up the wall, the kind that might be left by unnaturally sharp, powerful talons. For a vampire, climbing up the sheer face of a building was a far from impossible feat.
The church was tall and sandwiched between two former warehouses that had been converted into blocks of fashionable boho loft apartments. In its day, it would have been quite something. No doubt a property developer was eyeing it up with a view to making it quite something again in the near future. For now, though, it was very much nothing. A useless, hollow excrescence. A place of worship that was no longer needed, especially in a part of the city where money was God and the general opinion of religion was that it was a madness that made people fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers. The world had moved on and left this church behind like a large, steepled gravestone.
The handles on the double doors were secured by a padlocked chain. A laminated notice warned that, by civic ordinance, trespassing on this property was an offence punishable by a steep fine and a possible jail sentence.
Redlaw glanced both ways along the street. Nobody around as far as the eye could see. Nobody but him. The snow tumbled in thick flurries, encrusting streetlamps and burying parked cars. His gaze fell on the railings that fronted the church. Vandals had been busy there too. Several of the railings had been worked loose from their settings; a couple lay discarded, poking up out of the snow. Redlaw fetched one. The sturdy iron rod promised to make a decent crowbar. He inserted it inside the loop of chain. Several minutes of wrenching and twisting him did him no good. The chain held fast. He tried another tack. He stuck the railing inside the shackle of the padlock. Bracing the tip of it against one of the doors, he leaned back like a signalman pulling a lever. The padlock resisted. Redlaw strained, putting his back into it, all his strength. He grimaced. Breath steamed through clenched teeth.
There was a loud metallic
snap
and the shackle sprang open. The sudden release caught Redlaw by surprise and he collapsed backwards.
The chain rattled loosely to the ground. Redlaw picked himself up and grasped one of the handles. He dragged the door open, heaving it against the knee-deep snowdrift that had accumulated in front, until he’d made a gap just wide enough to slip through. Drawing his Cindermaker and chambering a round, he went inside.
T
HE MOMENTS IT
took his eyes to adjust to the gloom were the most dangerous. Anything could happen while he was temporarily blind.
At SHADE, image-intensification goggles were standard issue equipment. Now that he was “freelance,” Redlaw was having to learn to do without the things he had once taken for granted.
Dimly, the church interior took shape. Pews stood in haphazard rows, some overturned. The font had been removed—presumably a nice piece of marble masonry, worth reselling—leaving just a bare plinth. The pulpit was intact, and so was the life-size crucifix that stood in the apse behind the altar. On it hung a Christ depicted in that pose that so many ecclesiastical sculptors seemed to think appropriate: the Son of God wasn’t exhibiting any apparent pain. There was only profound sorrow written across His face, His anguish spiritual rather than physical.
The presence of the crucifix gave Redlaw pause. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. He had assumed the church would be bare inside, stripped of its holy regalia. How could there be vampires here with this large sacred symbol still dominating the place? To them it was as toxic as radioactive waste.
Then he caught the distinctive, meaty whiff of vampire scat. It smelled fresh.
And, above his head, he detected faint, furtive movement.
The rafters.
Vampires were up there. Watching him. He could sense pairs of crimson eyes staring down.
He walked further into the church, along an aisle over whose flagstones countless congregations must have passed, and many a bride; many a funeral procession, too. He tried to exude an air of calm and peaceability. He didn’t want to alarm anyone. The Cindermaker hung by his side, concealed discreetly in the folds of his overcoat.