She tapped her nose.
“You... smelled me?”
“I have your scent. I can detect you from far away.”
“How far?”
“Miles. Like a bloodhound. When I woke up, I got wind of you—you were in distress. It was like a clarion call.”
Redlaw couldn’t help but shake his head in wonder. “All vampires have an acute sense of smell, we know that, but yours is...”
“Extraordinary?”
“I was going to say ‘better,’ but we’ll go with extraordinary if you like.”
One more flight, then Redlaw said, “So, what do I smell like? What’s my scent?”
“When distressed? Like vinegar and urine.”
“And when not distressed?”
She grinned. “Roses and incense. The odour of sanctity. Saintly incorruptibility.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Only somewhat.”
They halted at the door to the lobby. Redlaw motioned Illyria to stay back and peered through the narrow slot of safety glass.
“Damn. Should have known this’d be too easy.”
“What is it?”
“Main entrance is guarded.”
“How many?”
“Six. No, seven. Guns drawn.”
“Not a problem.”
“It is for me. I’m not getting involved in a shootout.”
“Then don’t. I’ll deal with them.”
“Will you kill them?”
“If they’re shooting at me, then it’ll be hard not to. If my life is in peril, their lives are forfeit. It’s only fair.”
“Then I’m glad I checked beforehand,” said Redlaw. “There’s another way out. Come on.”
They climbed to the second floor and passed through an open-plan section. On any other night there would have been a score of officers here in their cubicles, taking calls, gathering intelligence on reported rogue sightings. As it was, the place was deserted. On every terminal the standard screensaver, a SHADE logo, glided to and fro like a skater on a rink. Phones chirruped once, twice, and went to voicemail.
There was a back room—a coffee lounge with a couple of vending machines and a handful of not quite comfortable plastic chairs. French windows opened out onto a smokers’ balcony situated on top of a one-storey extension. It overlooked a parking area shared with one of the neighbouring office buildings, the London branch of a Middle Eastern commercial bank. Vehicle access was obtained via a side-street.
“There’s our escape route,” Redlaw said, pointing to the large barred gate on the far side of the car park. “Think you can manage the jump down to ground level?”
“Never mind me. Think
you
can?”
Probably not
, thought Redlaw.
Not with my knees
. But he straddled the safety railing anyway, giving the drop on the other side a wary glance. It was nigh on twenty feet.
Blam!
The pane of one of the French windows disintegrated, shards of glass pouring down in an avalanche. Out through the empty frame stepped Heffernan, holding his Cindermaker in a double-handed grip.
“Now that I have your attention,” he said, “that’s far enough, the pair of you. Redlaw, get back up on the balcony. You, woman—don’t know your name—keep your hands where I can see them and don’t move.”
“You didn’t hear
him
coming?” Redlaw said irritably out of the side of his mouth as he clambered back over the railing.
“He moves quietly for such a big blighter,” Illyria answered.
“Well, well, well. Making a break for the border, eh, Redlaw?” Heffernan’s cheek was stippled with surgical strips. “Not any longer. Give up your gun. Again.”
“May I?” said Illyria.
“Go ahead,” said Redlaw. “Be my guest. Non-lethal still—but you don’t have to go so easy on this one.”
“Less muttering, more surrendering.” Heffernan gestured with the Cindermaker. “I’m not mad keen on the idea of using this on people, so don’t make me do something I don’t—
Whuff!
”
Illyria punched him in the gut, driving the air from his lungs. She had crossed from Redlaw’s side to Heffernan’s, a distance of five metres, in a fraction of a second.
“
Nnghh!
”
She rammed an elbow down onto his trapezius, forcing him to his knees like a hammer pounding in a nail.
“
Uggkk!
”
She chopped him across the back of the neck, and Heffernan toppled headlong onto the balcony’s all-weather tiles as though every muscle in his body had suddenly turned to rubber. He lay there, head twitching spasmodically, mouth working like a goldfish’s.
Illyria nudged his Cindermaker away from his limp hand with her toe. “Although I doubt he’ll be holding it again any time soon.”
“What have you done to him?” said Redlaw. “I heard a bone snap.”
“Second cervical vertebra. It’s called the hangman’s fracture.”
“Is he paralysed?”
“Probably. But it’s not as permanent as it once was. Modern medicine can perform miracles. What? What’s that look for? You said not to go easy on him, and he
was
threatening us with a gun...”
Redlaw bent down beside Heffernan, who was making a guttural, terrified moaning sound. “We can’t leave him here like this.”
“I can. More shadies are coming. They’ve heard the gunshot. I’m not hanging around to let them take pot shots at me.” So saying, she vaulted nimbly over the railing as though it was nothing more than a fence between two fields and vanished down the other side.
Redlaw was torn. Self-preservation wouldn’t let him stay. His conscience wouldn’t let him leave.
SHADE officers appeared at the entrance to the coffee lounge, taking cover behind the doorway, guns out.
“This man is badly hurt,” Redlaw called out. “Make sure he’s immobilised and taken to hospital immediately.”
Then he straddled the railing once more and surveyed the landing zone. His best bet was the bonnet of a BMW 3-series cabriolet—some banker must be working late; no shady could afford such a car—stationed just below. He launched himself off the balcony, hitting the bonnet feet first with a resounding
boom
, and the BMW’s alarm started to warble. He slithered out of the deep dent his impact had created and raced to catch up with Illyria, who was already halfway across the car park.
Shouts from the balcony were swiftly followed by volleys of bullets. Redlaw zigged and zagged between cars, hunching low. The windscreen of a Rover shattered to smithereens just beside his elbow. A new-model Mini Cooper lost a wing mirror as he sped past.
Illyria was at the gate. It was a solidly made thing, several hundredweight of steel, which rolled across the entranceway on a track and was operated by a keycard. She braced one foot against the outer pillar and hauled backward on the bars. The gate squealed, screeched and shuddered as gradually, inch by inch, she heaved it open. Her body trembled with the strain. Her lips drew back from her fangs in a grimace. Bullets, meanwhile, zinged and whined around her.
At last she had made a wide enough gap. “Through!” she exhorted Redlaw. “Get through!”
Redlaw squeezed through, and Illyria followed him. They sprinted down the side-street to the junction at the end. The right turn led back towards SHADE HQ, so Redlaw chose the left, then cut through a cobbled mews to a parallel road. Traffic was almost nonexistent and they had the pavement entirely to themselves. Their footfalls resounded between the buildings. They ran and kept running, past glaringly lit display windows, until Redlaw was so winded he could scarcely catch a breath. Only when they halted, taking refuge in a bus shelter so that he could recover, did he realise that he was holding hands with Illyria. For the last few hundred metres she had been dragging him along.
He stared at their linked hands, then at her face, then at their hands again.
Illyria got the hint and let go.
“We needed to go faster,” she said. “Well,
you
did.”
“Sorry I... was slowing... you down,” Redlaw replied, panting. His shoulder was on fire again, thanks to Illyria tugging so hard on his arm.
“Don’t assume we’re girlfriend and boyfriend now, just because we’ve held hands. I won’t tell any of the other children at school if you won’t.”
“Ha... ha.”
“I think your Commodore Macarthur might be a tad jealous of me, though, if she knew.”
Redlaw scowled in puzzlement.
“You heard how she was talking,” said Illyria. “It was like I was stealing a husband from her.”
“Husband?” He started to chuckle mirthlessly. It ended up as uncontrollable wheezing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Macarthur’s hardly the marrying kind,” he gasped out.
“She prefers women?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she has a preference at all. The job is her wife, husband, whichever. As it is for most of us.”
“Was, you mean. For you.”
“Oh, yes,” said Redlaw, remembering. He was exiled from SHADE, like Adam from Eden. Forever. “Damn. Yes. Was.”
“She really didn’t want to lose you. I could see it in her eyes.”
“Nevertheless, she has. SHADE has. For better or worse, I’m freelance now. My own boss.”
“And what’s your first instruction to yourself, as your new boss?”
The bus shelter had a scroller billboard that cycled through three different posters, with a soft mechanical hum: one for toothpaste, one for face cream, then one for Vamp-B-Gone, a garlic-based repellent spray. This came in a canister small enough to fit in a pocket or handbag but was strong enough, if the strap-line was to be believed, to
Stop The Undead Dead In Their Tracks
.
“I don’t know,” Redlaw admitted. “I’m stymied. I need time to think.”
“You know what I used to do in Albania, during the Communist regime, when I needed to think?”
“I’m all ears.”
“Caught a bus. Sounds silly, I realise, but you must understand, under that jumped-up little tinsmith Xoxe and then later under Enver Hoxha, there wasn’t much freedom. Postwar, the country was rebuilt with Soviet Russian money and everything seemed good for a while, but Hoxha cut us off from the rest of the world and naturally the infrastructure went to pot. The buses were terrible. You were never quite sure where you were going or if you would even get there. That was part of their attraction for me—the randomness, the uncertainty. The state rigidly controlled every aspect of daily life, but the buses were a law unto themselves. You could rely on them only to be unreliable.
“So I’d board one and ride along and wait to find out where it ended up, and in the meantime I’d feel as though, for once, nobody was spying on me and I could allow my guard to drop and my mind to wander. An illusion of independence, perhaps, but it helped. And if the bus broke down—and they often would—I’d step out, and chances were I’d be somewhere unfamiliar, a district of Tirana I’d never visited before, say, or on the shores of the Adriatic, or near one of the huge black lakes, Shkodër or Ohrid. And if a Sigurimi, a secret policeman, should come up and demand to know why I was there, looking out of place, I’d simply say, ‘The buses,’ and he would nod in understanding and say back, ‘Ah yes, the buses.’
“It was on one of those trips that I...” She stopped, reflecting.
“Was turned? Became ‘shtrigafied’?”
“Yes. But that’s a story for another day. Unless...?”
He didn’t take the bait. “So you reckon we should catch the next bus that comes along. That would be the answer.”
“It beats just sitting here, and who knows where it might lead? At the very least, it’ll give us some breathing space.”
As luck would have it, a night bus was approaching. Redlaw would probably have let it go by, rejecting Illyria’s suggestion out of sheer perversity. But then he spied a SHADE patrol car some way off up the road, prowling towards them from the opposite direction. That decided it for him. He stuck out a hand and hailed the bus. It pulled up with a loud hissing and huffing, as though grumbling at the delay, and the doors flattened open. Redlaw flashed his SHADE badge at the driver.
“For her and me.”
The driver had no way of knowing how meaningless the badge was. She jerked a thumb at the empty bus.
“Make yourselves at home, luv. If you can find a seat.” She chuckled.
The SHADE car drove up on the other side, and Redlaw ducked his head. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the car slowed somewhat. When he looked up again, however, it had carried on past and was going its merry way.
“Hold tight, please,” the driver called out.
Redlaw and Illyria climbed up to the top deck as the bus lurch-lumbered off along the road.
CHAPTER TWENTY
For all that it had been hastily arranged, the transportation programme—dubbed Operation Moonlight Flit—ran pretty smoothly. Two and a half thousand infantrymen were deployed to marshal the Sunless onto coaches, which then drove convoys up the M1, leaving the motorway just past the junction with the M25 orbital and heading off into the wilds of Hertfordshire. On each coach were a dozen soldiers and half as many shadies, and two dozen Sunless, who sat bewildered and for the most part passive, having no clear idea what was going on. All they knew was that people armed with guns, grenades and religious totems had rounded them up and were taking them somewhere else, somewhere new. They accepted this with equanimity, mainly because there didn’t appear to be an alternative.