Maybe that’s what they’ll carve on my headstone
, April thought
as she hurried through the black iron gates and waved at Miss Leicester, the grey-haired guardian of the cemetery office. At least Miss Leicester wouldn’t want to chat or offer her sympathy. She never seemed to move from behind her desk in the converted chapel, and she never, ever seemed to smile. And as April had become the cemetery’s most frequent visitor – she had been visiting most days since she was discharged from hospital a week ago – no one needed to ask her business. Miss Leicester merely nodded at her and looked meaningfully up at the large clock on the wall. The cemetery closed at five on the dot and woe betide anyone who lingered. April shivered at the notion; she had no desire to be on the receiving end of a telling-off from Miss Leicester and she certainly didn’t want to be trapped here after dark.
Passing through a stone archway and walking up the steps, April was struck by how beautiful the place was. No, beautiful wasn’t quite the word, not given the haunting, mournful nature of the place. It was
proud
, like a once-elegant face riddled with lines and wrinkles or like an old house full of secrets. But it wasn’t creepy – not until after dark, anyway, and even then, April could remember the romantic night she had spent here, walking hand in hand in the moonlight with a mysterious boy she barely knew. She smiled at the memory, but still hurried up the winding path towards the family vault. She hadn’t quite been able to get used to the faces of the carved angels watching her as she passed. Alone in Highgate Cemetery as the light dimmed, it was easy to see things out of the corner of your eye – a face or a figure that disappeared as soon as you looked again.
‘Stop jumping at shadows,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Everyone here’s dead, remember?’
Yeah, like that makes me feel better
, she thought. As she turned left a gap opened up in the trees and April could see far beyond the darkening headstones to the London skyline to the south, the city lights just blinking on. It looked like a mirage, a sketchy outline of something she could spend her
life running towards but never reach. Civilisation seemed a long way away.
April pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the screen – a reflex action, a desire to feel in touch with someone. There was a picture on the screen: her best friend Fiona and her newest school friend Caro, the two girls who had kept her sane since she’d moved to Highgate a year ago. They were hugging each other and pulling faces for April’s camera. She smiled, then felt a stab of sadness, remembering that the snap had been taken at her dad’s funeral. It was nice to know you had friends, and that people cared for you – loved you – but at that precise moment, seeing them made April feel even more alone.
That’s the problem with being hunted by blood-sucking killers
, she thought with a grim smile.
You never really know who’s on your side
.
April reached up and rubbed her neck. It was still tender and bruised where Marcus had tried to strangle her. Marcus Brent, who had seemed just another schoolmate, and who turned out to be a vicious vampire. Who had tried to kill her. Considering the ferocity of his attack, April supposed she had recovered fairly well. Two months of hospital care and intense physiotherapy meant that her arm was fully functional again, with just a long raised scar as a reminder. But nothing would heal the memory of those open jaws lunging at her. There was no medicine for that.
Wrapped up in her thoughts, April almost stumbled into the tomb, a tall stone building jutting from the south side of the path. At first, April had felt weird about her father being buried above ground – it seemed wrong somehow. But since she had started visiting her father’s resting place, it actually felt better that he wasn’t under six feet of soil. If you were buried, it was all over, right? There was no clawing your way back out. But here, April felt she could swing open the iron door and her dad would be there, exactly as she remembered him: kind, happy, wittering on about how mermaids were real or how the pyramids were actually landing lights for UFOs. She
walked over to the steps and crouched down, taking the wilting flowers from the vase and replacing them with the small bunch of yellow daisies she had brought with her.
‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said quietly, ‘how’s things?’
She’d been coming to chat to her father every day, telling him the mundane details of her life: who she’d been talking to, what was in the news, all the latest gossip exactly as if they were having a cup of tea in the kitchen.
‘Mum’s been winding me up again today,’ she said. ‘We had another fight. I go back to Ravenwood tomorrow and she said I should get my hair done first. I mean, after all that’s happened, she thinks how I look at school is important? I know she’s only being herself, but sometimes I can’t stand her …’
Sitting on those steps, April could imagine William Dunne sitting behind the door, listening to her, smiling, nodding. She supposed it was her version of therapy. Of course, she should probably have been going to real therapy, the kind where you lie on a leather couch and talk about your pain. God knows she had enough of that to go around. But then the whole point of therapy was that you were honest with the psychiatrist, wasn’t it? And April really couldn’t do that. She smiled to herself as she imagined the conversation:
‘Well, Doctor, it all started when I discovered that Highgate – and my whole school – was infested with vampires. Then I fell in love with a boy called Gabriel and it turns out that he’s a vampire too. Yes, vampires are real, they’re everywhere! Ha-ha! No, I haven’t considered medication.’
Gabriel
. She gave a little shiver as she thought of him, his tall outline, strong shoulders and those moody, darkly intense eyes. Your regular common-or-garden vampire heart-throb. It had taken a lot to convince her that Gabriel was really a vampire, an undead blood-drinking killer. She’d buried a knife in his chest and seen the wound heal before her eyes before she accepted it was true. It seemed vampires had always lived among humans, hiding in plain sight, infected with some disease that kept them at the point of death, allowing them to be constantly rejuvenated. That was why they didn’t age and
why they looked so good. And Gabriel looked good.
God, he looked good
. But her stomach lurched as she realised she was using the past tense to describe him. Because Gabriel was dying – and all because or her. She had infected him with a sort of vampiric anti-virus she carried in her body, and if they didn’t find an antidote to it he would die.
‘God, what a mess,’ April whispered to herself, thinking that that was the understatement of the century. The vampires were recruiting converts through her school, they had killed her father and now the boy she loved was perhaps days away from a horrible painful death – and she had no one to talk to about it. Gabriel was too wrapped up in his own problems – not least his own impending death – and besides, when they were together, meeting secretly after dark at Gabriel’s insistence, they didn’t waste much time talking. So who did that leave? Her mother seemed more interested in her blow-drys and even her best friends Fee and Caro had been out partying with the vampire girls they called the ‘Suckers’: could she trust them? So April was here, huddled on the cold stone steps of a tomb, talking to a dead man. And tomorrow was her seventeenth birthday.
‘Dammit’, she whispered as she realised she was crying. ‘Not again,’ she said, brushing the tears away. ‘Sorry, Daddy. I keep doing this, don’t I?’
She knew she didn’t need to apologise. William Dunne would have been thrilled to hear that April had found real-life vampires on their doorstep. And of course
he
would have believed her. He would have just given her a big hug and said ‘Come on, we’ll sort this out.’ He was such a great dad.
Had
been a great dad.
Until someone ripped out his throat
.
She shook her head angrily. This was happening all too often lately. She tried to get everything straight in her head, then a self-destructive part of her mind would pop up and mock her. But
was
the voice in her head? Or had someone actually said it? She glanced around. No one there. Of course there wasn’t. God, she was getting paranoid.
Was it just paranoia? The truth was, the vampires
were
after her – or they would be when they realised who she was – because April Dunne was a Fury. That was the vamps’ term for someone who carried the anti-virus in their blood. And if they figured out her secret, they’d stop at nothing to wipe her from the face of the earth. She took a deep breath and picked up one of the yellow daisies, absently pulling off its petals one by one as she spoke.
‘I’m dreading going back to Ravenwood, Daddy,’ she said, ‘Everyone tells me I’ll feel better once I get back into a routine, but I’m not sure I want to, you know? So much weird stuff has happened since we moved to Highgate, it seems wrong to sweep it all under the carpet. And until I get to the bottom of what happened with you, I don’t feel I can move on, have a future. And with Gabriel …’
What was that?
April stood up, looking around her.
She was sure she had heard a –
what was that?
– a laugh?
‘Who’s there?’ she said as evenly as she could. Was there someone in the bushes listening to her? Was someone laughing at her? No one else would be in the cemetery at this time would they?
‘Is someone there?’
There it was again: a giggle, and not a light-hearted one. There was evil in that laugh. But where was it coming from? The trees? The tomb?
‘Hello?’ she whispered under her breath – and she heard real laughter this time, echoing around the cemetery. She whirled around, scanning the trees, but in the dimming light every statue and bush looked like a crouching figure ready to leap. Her mind flashed back to that terrible night in the snow when Marcus Brent had tried to break every bone in her body before choking her half to death.
‘Who’s there?’ she shouted.
And then, behind a tomb, she saw a dark figure. It was just standing there, like a statue.
Was
it a statue? Or was it a vampire?
‘You’re next.’
This time April was sure she had heard it: a real whisper, low and dripping with spite.
Screw this
, she thought. She dropped the flower and ran, sprinting down the path as fast as she could go, the graves passing in a blur, the angels and statues seeming to lean in, reaching out to her. Turning a corner, she slipped on some leaves and almost went down, skidding, catching the edge of a tomb and grazing her elbow.
Dammit. Dammit. Run
. She didn’t dare look behind her, not knowing who or what was following her. Now she could see the top of the steps and she took them three at a time, tearing across the wide courtyard and through the gates onto Swain’s Lane without stopping. Just as she thought she was free a dark figure stepped out in front of her, arms spread wide, grabbing her. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t, she couldn’t even draw breath.
‘Hey, hey! Calm down!’ said a familiar voice. ‘What’s going on?’
She looked up – Gabriel! It was
Gabriel
!
‘Oh thank God, it’s you,’ she breathed clinging to him and hugging him tight. ‘It’s you, it’s
you
.’
‘It’s me,’ he said in an amused voice.
April stepped back and slapped him on the arm.
‘Hey! What was that for?’
‘You scared the life out of me! I thought you were …’ she glanced around, ‘You know, one of
them
. They were chasing me!’
His eyes narrowed and he looked behind her, back through the iron gates and up the darkening path.
‘What happened? Tell me quickly.’
‘I thought I heard – saw – something up by my dad’s … by the tomb.’
Gabriel’s eyes locked with hers, intense.
‘What exactly did you see?’
‘I saw someone behind one of the graves. Well, I think I did.’
‘And they spoke?’
‘I think so. They were laughing, whispering,’ she said, knowing how lame it sounded. ‘It was horrible.’
He paused, looking through the gates again.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t the gardeners or …’
‘I
heard
someone, Gabriel,’ she said.
He looked at her, then looked up towards the dark path again. ‘Wait here, I’ll take a look.’
‘Oh no,’ said April, holding on to him. ‘You’re not leaving me here alone.’
He seemed about to say something, then changed his mind and pulled her into a hug.
‘Whatever happens, I won’t let anyone hurt you, do you understand?’ His eyes met hers. ‘Do you understand?’
April knew she was letting down a generation of feminists, but she couldn’t help but smile.
He’s lovely when he gets all macho
.
‘Okay, Ironman,’ she said, ‘but let’s get away from here, just in case, okay?’
‘Sure,’ he said, putting his arm around her protectively and steering her up Swain’s Lane. His tone was reassuring, but she could feel he was alert for danger, peering through the black railings of the East Cemetery looking for the enemy. Looking for his kind.
‘Listen, I know you like to visit your dad alone, but next time maybe I should come with you, rather than meet you here afterwards. And maybe we could visit in the daytime,’ he said.