Uprising

Chapter Sixty-Three

Joel’s attackers circled him. Four of them, all dressed in similar black clothes and wearing the cold, impassive expressions of hired thugs. The one who’d kicked him held something in his hand. Even before the long tongue of steel flicked out, Joel knew it was a switchblade. And something told him this was no ordinary mugging.

‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them said. ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’

‘Think again. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Fine. Then we’ll do it the hard way,’ the guy said. The circle closed in towards Joel. Four to one.

‘Put it in the case!’ Alex screamed from behind the column. Her voice broke up into a racking cough.

Joel ignored her. He swung the cross at his attackers. It was all he had to defend himself with, and he wasn’t about to toss it away.

But the four guys weren’t that easily put off. They all rushed him at once. He clubbed one of them, aiming for the side of the head, but the blow was deflected. One grabbed his wrist, another caught him with a hard punch to the jaw. Stars exploded in his eyes. He felt the cross fly from his hand. It turned a somersault in mid-air and landed in the steel case. The force of its landing caused the lid to slam shut.

By then Joel was down on the ground and curled up in a ball to protect himself from the kicks and punches raining down on him. He was too preoccupied with trying to escape being beaten to death to notice Alex get to her feet in the background. The pallor in her face had vanished abruptly and the sharpness in her eye was back as she came striding fast towards Joel’s attackers. Two broke away from the fight when they saw her coming, leaving their friends to take care of Joel while they dealt with this crazy woman who seemed to think she could take them on. They had their orders, in any case. She wasn’t supposed to leave here alive.

‘Leave him alone,’ she said as she walked up to them. ‘One warning is all you get. Then you die.’

One of the men laughed. ‘Listen to her. She’s fucking nuts.’ His friend reached inside his jacket and his hand came out with a.45 automatic.

The first man stopped laughing. ‘Thought we were meant to use the 9-mils they gave us.’

‘Fuck that,’ said the guy with the gun. ‘What for? You know me. I’m a big-bore kind of guy.’ He aimed the pistol at Alex and squeezed the trigger…Twice, three times, four times. The heavy-calibre slugs took Alex in the chest and she went straight down on her back and lay still. The sound of the gunshots reverberated across the canal.

‘There. Who needs poxy 9-mils anyway?’ the guy said, putting away his smoking pistol.

Joel’s cry of rage when he saw Alex go down was cut short by another kick to his stomach. In his fury he grabbed his attacker’s leg and sent the guy tumbling backwards. He leapt to his feet in horror.

Just in time to see Alex get up again.

Faster than the eye could follow, her hand shot out and her fist closed on the wrist of the guy who’d shot her. One wrench, and his arm was broken. Compound fracture, the bone jutting out of the ripped flesh and tearing through his jacket sleeve.

Another wrench, and she’d ripped his arm away completely at the shoulder, like a large joint of meat in her fist. His empty sleeve dangled at his side as his knees buckled and he collapsed in instant shock.

Alex swung the severed arm like a club at the one who’d laughed. The wet end caught him in the side of the head with a showering spatter of blood and battered him to the ground. She stepped over to him and drove her heel through his face, before turning back to his friend, who was gibbering and shaking violently in a pool of his own blood. Alex bent calmly over him, seized his head between her hands and twisted it until there was a splintering crack like a branch snapping. Straightening up, she shunted the body into the canal with her foot. Where the four shots had punched through her coat, the edges of the bullet holes were still smoking.

Joel saw it all, but the remaining two thugs had their backs to Alex and were too intent on him to have noticed anything. She walked swiftly up behind them and, before they had time to react, she reached out her arms, jerked them off their feet and cracked their heads together with bone-shattering power. They hit the ground, dead.

And there was silence. Carnage littered the canal-side. The pools of blood quickly spread to the edge and began trickling into the water.

Joel stood, swaying on his feet, blood running down his face, gaping down at the two corpses lying in front of him with their skulls virtually fused together. In that instant he was transported back eighteen years. He was a child again, cowering behind the banisters of his grandfather’s cottage, just a few feet from the bodies of his parents who had been murdered in just the same way.

Her strength. The speed. No human could move that way, kill with that kind of ease. Especially not after taking four bullets to the chest.

Alex finally broke the silence. ‘We need to get away from here.’ She stepped over the dead men and grasped Joel’s arm. He jerked away from her, still winded from the punches and kicks he’d taken. But it wasn’t the beating he’d taken that was making it hard to stay on his feet.

He knew now. He understood.

The way she’d dropped her cup that time at his mention of the cross. The way she’d seemed transfixed by his bleeding hand when he’d gashed himself on the broken table. This woman he’d trusted. This woman that he’d made love with.

‘You’re one…one of them. You’re a vampire.’

‘Listen to me, Joel. It’s not what you think. Not exactly.’

He raised his hands to his face, pinched the flesh of his cheeks. Wake up, Joel.

‘Tell me this isn’t happening,’ he muttered. ‘Tell me it isn’t true.’

‘Joel—’

‘Don’t come near me!’ He backed away from her. She took a step towards him, reaching out her hand towards him, and they circled one another on the bloody pavement.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘There are things you need to understand.’

‘Like how you manage to walk in daylight? Pass yourself off as a human?’

‘Things aren’t the way they used to be.’

‘I don’t care. You bite people and suck their blood.’

‘I don’t kill to do it. It’s different now.’

‘Vampires are the good guys now, is that it?’

‘Not all. Just my side.’

‘You’re a curse.’

‘I’m not your enemy, Joel. Gabriel Stone is. Yours, and mine. And he’s the worst enemy you can imagine. If you’d let me explain what’s happening—’

Joel felt his foot nudge something solid. He took his eyes off her just long enough to see that it was the lead-lined steel case. He made a lunge for it, grabbed it with both hands and wrenched it off the ground. He saw her pupils dilate as he clutched it to his chest.

‘What does it do to you?’

‘Joel—’

‘Answer me or I’ll open this lid and find out for myself.’

She sighed. ‘Your grandfather was right. The cross has the power to destroy us.’

‘Why this one? Why just this one cross?’

‘I can’t say. Nobody knows.’

‘You lied to me. All that bullshit about your sister. You used me. Then what –

once I’d helped you to find the cross, were you going to kill me, too? Was that the plan, Alex?’

‘No, Joel.’

‘There’s something you don’t know about me. I told you I believed in vampires –

but I didn’t tell you that I’d killed one once. It was a long time ago, but I can do it again. And believe me, if I could kill my own grandfather, I’m pretty sure I can kill you.’

‘One hour,’ she said. ‘That’s all the time I need to explain it all to you. Then you’ll understand why we need you, why it’s important that you work together with us.’

He frowned. ‘Us? You mean vampires?’

‘There’s a whole world you don’t know about, that no human knows about. I work for the Vampire Federation, and we’re under attack from an uprising led by Gabriel Stone and his people.’

‘Do you think I care about your politics? You’re a vampire, Alex.’

‘You will care, because it’s bad news for humans if Stone succeeds. You and I need to get this case back to London, and we’ll destroy Stone together.’

Joel shook his head violently. ‘Go,’ he yelled. ‘Get out of here. This is your one chance to get away from me. If I see you again, Alex, you’re just another vampire. God help me, I’ll finish you along with the rest.’

‘Give me the case, Joel. Don’t mess about.’

‘Come a step closer, I open the lid. I swear.’

‘You’d do that to me?’ she said softly. ‘After what happened between us?’

‘What happened between us was an obscenity,’ he heard himself say.

Police sirens cut through the night air, still far off but growing steadily louder.

Joel glanced across the canal and saw lights flashing in the mist. The bow wave of the approaching police launch was white against the dark water.

He turned back to Alex. She was gone.

He clutched the case tightly to his chest and began to run.