The Cross

Chapter One

Romania

Five nights later

Sometime in the dead of night, the whistling wind drove away the snow-clouds to unveil the stars. From among the shadows that the moonlight threw across the deep forested valley below, the towers of the ancient castle of Valcanul were a craggy silhouette against the distant mountain peaks. All was silent. All was still. A place of desolation and morbidity.

The inert body among the trees, half-covered in snow, was that of a man. His clothes were tattered and bloody. Snowflakes clung to his hair and his eyelashes. His face was deathly pale. He had no pulse. Soon, he might be food for the wolves and other wild things in the forest.

Except that the night creatures knew better than to approach.

Inside the motionless body of the man, something was stirring. Something was awakening, resurfacing from the depths of a sleep so infinitely profound that only a very few could ever return from it. Gradually, his senses began to reanimate. As consciousness returned, he became dimly aware of the softness of the snow under him, of the weight of his body resting on it. A finger twitched. His frosted eyelids fluttered and then opened briefly to a stab of pain from the bright moon and starlight above him. Slowly, he reopened them, and could see again. A long sigh whistled from his lips.

Memories flickered through his mind, weakly at first, gradually gaining strength and clarity. He recalled a name, and realised it was his own.

Joel Solomon.

Joel sat up slowly, snow falling away from his body, and gazed around him at the white-topped forest, at the craggy mountainside and the castle towers perched high above. The road running down through the valley was now invisible under a foot of fresh snow. A few steps from Joel, the wreck of a four-wheel-drive truck lay overturned and half-buried in a snowdrift. He blinked, staring at it. Had he been in a car accident? What had happened to him?

He looked down at the thin sweatshirt he was wearing, and saw it was torn and bloody. Whose blood was this? Some of the holes had been made by bullets, another by a knife slash. He ripped the shirt open; why wasn’t he cold? The wounds in his flesh were livid and raw; why wasn’t he dead?

The memories grew more vivid. He remembered being up on the castle battlements. A blinding blizzard. A man pointing a gun at him. The sound of the shot, the terrible impact of the bullet, the sensation of falling. Unconsciousness coming and going. Then, being carried. A woman’s voice in his ear. Alex speaking softly to him as she cradled him in her arms: ‘Don’t try to speak.’

And his own voice, weak and faint: ‘Alex … I’m scared.’

Then nothing.

Joel strained his eyes at the snowy landscape all around him. He could see no trace of her. Had she just gone, left him here like this, all alone?

Alex. He’d loved her. Or thought he had, until he’d realised who she really was. What she really was.

He touched his fingers to his neck. Felt the holes there, and the sticky congealed blood. The realisation was like another gunshot punching through his body.

She’d bitten him. Drunk from him. His life blood flowing into her, while her own filth flowed into his veins.

He’d become …

He’d become …

No. No.

Joel sprang to his feet. The scream burst out of him. It echoed across the snowy valley. Rolled around the mountains.

NOOOOOO!!!

He fell back into the snow. He arched his back and ground his eyes shut and pounded his fists on the ground and beat them against his head. There was no pain. He shoved his thumbs into his mouth, felt for his upper canine teeth and pressed hard against them. They didn’t feel any different. Absurd. Insane. Maybe it was all a bad dream.

Except that it wasn’t. He’d destroyed enough of these things to know they were real. For centuries, for millennia, they’d been there, these parasites, living off the blood of human beings.

And now he was one of them.

Joel sat there in the snow, hugging himself and rocking slowly back and forth. His mind was numb, choked with indistinct thoughts, paralysed with cloying horror. An infinite expanse of time seemed to drift by before he eventually turned his head slowly to look at the blood-spattered watch on his wrist and then up at the sky. The stars were fading as the first blood-red glimmers of light tinged the eastern horizon.

Dawn wasn’t far away.

Many years before, when Joel had been just a child, his grandfather had told him what would happen to a vampire that was exposed to the rays of the sunrise. The primal instinct now flooding warnings through his mind, so alien to him and yet seeming to come from the very depths of his being, told him that his grandfather had been right.

Joel tried to imagine what it would feel like. First, the rising apprehension giving way to terror as the glow in the east grew more intense. Then the golden rim of the sun’s disc would appear shimmering over the horizon and it would be as if a million hot needles were piercing his skin. Within seconds, the lethal radiation would be cooking him, boiling the blood inside his veins; the flesh blackening and peeling from his bones, falling away in brittle carbonised flakes that drifted off like cinders on the morning breeze as he screamed and screamed and watched himself disintegrate. When the torment was over, there would be nothing left but a crater in the snow to mark his final, irreversible destruction.

And he’d welcome it. His life was already gone, the world he’d known already lost to him. The future that lay ahead of him now was unthinkable, unendurable. Joel’s eyes were fixed on the east as the red glow gradually bled across the sky.

Let it come.

Veins of gold began to spread through the crimson. The first light slowly creeping across the faces of the distant mountains.

Joel was afraid. And he was prepared to be even more afraid, and resolute in the face of terror, before the end. But the overwhelming horror that suddenly gripped him as the dawn approached was like a physical force, far beyond anything he could have imagined. Before he’d even realised what he was doing, he was on his feet and staggering away through the snow.

Behind him, the first glittering rays of sunlight peeped over the mountains. He felt it like a nuclear blast on his back. He screamed and ran harder, bolting through the trees like a wild animal instinctively impelled to survive at all cost, suddenly possessed with a speed and power that he’d never known in his thirty years of human life. All he knew was that he must find shadow. Must seek out darkness. The searing light was quickly gaining ground.

He looked up, shielding his eyes from the pain. The sunrise gleamed on the castle turrets and ramparts high above. The ancient fortress offered all kinds of dark spaces where he could hide away — but he knew that, even endowed with incredible physical strength as he was, he had no hope of scaling the mountainside and reaching it in time.

He was going to burn.

But there was a chance. The foot of the mountain was just thirty yards away; and as Joel ran he saw the dark recess in the rocks. Let it be what it looks like, he prayed. He slipped on an icy rock and went sprawling in the snow. A sunbeam cut between the naked trees and slashed across his outflung hand like a laser. The skin sizzled and he smelled burning. He screamed again. Scrambled to his feet and hurled himself towards the cave entrance.

The cave was deep and low. Bent double, crawling desperately on his knees, he wished like he’d never wished for anything before that the terrible light couldn’t reach him there. The shaft tightened as it deepened, and it took all his strength to force his body through. Then, with a surge of relief that made him cry out, he realised it was opening up again, into a wide crooked fissure that ran diagonally upwards into the bowels of the mountain. A pitch-black sanctuary where the sun hadn’t penetrated for a billion years.

Joel snuggled deep into the darkness. For a few moments, the fierce joy of survival burned intensely through him and he couldn’t stop grinning. He’d done it. He was safe from the hateful sun. He’d survived. He’d won.

No, Joel, said another voice in his mind. You lost. You failed miserably.

He closed his eyes as his ecstasy suddenly gave way to revolted self-loathing. He’d had his chance to end it, right here, right now. But not even the steeliest resolve he could muster up stood the remotest chance against the vampire’s all-conquering urge to survive. Not now, not ever. He was doomed to go on like this for the rest of eternity.

As the sun rose over the snowy forest and mountains and began its arc across the sky, Joel remained in the darkness of the cave, thinking of only one thing. He was going to return home and destroy the woman who had done this to him. Her and all her kind.

Send them all back to hell where they — and now he — belonged.