Darkest Night

“That’s likely true,” said Callum. “You coming back out, or are you calling it a night?”

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said. “I just need to get changed and sort a couple of things out. See you on the grass.”

Callum nodded, and strolled towards the fire, the beer bottles gleaming in the moonlight. Larissa watched him for at least a moment or two longer than was necessary, then walked up the stairs and into the house.

She dodged a toy train set that had been carefully laid out on the living-room floor, nodded to Kim, one of Haven’s teenagers, who was sprawled on a sofa with headphones in her ears, and floated towards the staircase. Pinned to the wall at the bottom was the rota of jobs that needed doing to keep Haven running smoothly, everything from collecting firewood to stocking up on food at the twenty-four-hour supermarket to felling trees and bleeding the cattle Larissa had installed in a meadow near the riverbank. The rota had originally been written on a single whiteboard; now there were four of them tiled together, with more than a hundred names printed down one side and dozens of tasks listed across the top. Almost half the residents had no job allocated on any given day, as she had never wanted Haven to feel like a work camp; she knew, however, that the majority found some way to help, even on what were supposed to be their days off.

Larissa was constantly amazed at how content she was with the simple life she and the others had built. Everything – the place, the work, the people – simply felt right; she believed, with total conviction, that she had done more good in the last six months, had made more of a positive difference, than she ever had at Blacklight. Providing sanctuary and peace for those who craved it sat far more easily with her than ending lives ever had, no matter the justification that had been offered inside the Loop. There was only a single dark cloud on her new horizon, one that she had come to terms with, but which showed no sign of departing anytime soon.

She missed her friends.

And she missed Jamie so much it hurt.

In the first days after her frantic, headlong departure, when the loneliness had been at its worst and she had spent a great many hours wondering if she had made the biggest mistake of her life, Larissa had thought about getting in touch with him, if only to let him know that she was safe. And even as Haven began to take shape, as her days filled up with work and companionship and laughter, the same urge had gripped her at least once a day. She still had her console; it lay at the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom, its batteries removed. She didn’t dare turn it on inside Haven, as she had no doubt that Blacklight would be able to trace it, but she could easily have flown to New York or Boston, turned it on, and sent Jamie a message. It would have been easy, the work of no more than an hour at most. But she had not, and she knew why.

She had no idea what she would say to him.

Telling him not to worry would be redundant to the point of insulting; of course he would have worried when she disappeared, and if she knew Jamie, as she believed she did, he would still be worrying now. And trying to explain herself would be impossible; she knew there was no way to justify vanishing into the night without even doing him the courtesy of saying goodbye. How could she make him understand that their fight in Brenchley had just been the final straw, the last push she had needed to act on doubts that had been building inside her for months?

She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. It would make him feel no better, and would only raise more questions, which wasn’t fair. It would be easier, as she regularly told herself, if she simply no longer loved him; if that was the case, she could have closed the box containing that part of her life, buried it deep down inside herself, and moved on.

But she did still love him. And there was nothing to be gained from lying to herself about it.

Larissa flew slowly along the upstairs landing and turned the handle on her bedroom door. It had a lock, but she had never bothered to use it; it would be useless if any of the vampire residents of Haven was determined to get into her room, and she believed it would have sent a bad message to the rest of the community. She didn’t want it to look like she was positioning herself as something special, or that she had anything to hide.

She closed the door behind her and undressed. Her clothes clung to her skin, gummy with sweat and sap from the trees she had helped to pull down; she threw them into the basket in the corner of the room, and flew across to her wardrobe.

Upon her arrival at Haven, she had only possessed a single set of civilian clothes, the same ones she had been wearing when Alexandru Rusmanov had dropped her, broken and unconscious, out of the sky and into Matt Browning’s suburban garden. She had rebuilt her wardrobe in the subsequent months, filling drawers and rails with summer dresses and vest tops and checked shirts and jeans, choices made for the practicality of life at Haven rather than for aesthetics. She dragged one of the dresses down and pulled it over her head, shook her hair out, and was about to close the wardrobe and head back downstairs when something at the back caught her eye, something black and smooth.

Larissa reached out and ran her fingers down the fabric of her Blacklight uniform. She had worn it across the Atlantic, with every intention of burning it as soon as she found the place that Valentin had described. And she had almost gone through with it; that first night, which now seemed so long ago, she had put the uniform in a steel bucket she found in one of the outbuildings and stood over it with a bottle of alcohol and a box of matches. But something had stayed her hand. Instead, she had relegated it to the back of her wardrobe, out of sight but not entirely out of mind. She scratched involuntarily at her forearm as she stared at it; there was no scar where she had dug out her locator chip, but the memory of doing so remained, so potent it was almost physical.

Larissa closed the wardrobe and flew quickly back through the house. The smell of barbecuing meat was intoxicating, and she could hear laughter and the gentle rhythm of Callum’s guitar over the distant sound of the river as it ran along the edge of the place she now called home.

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Jamie was pacing impatiently around his quarters when his console beeped on his belt. He thumbed the rectangular screen into life and read the message that appeared.

FROM:Turner, Director Paul (NS303, 36-A)

TO: Carpenter, Lieutenant Jamie (NS303, 67-J)

Five minutes. Come up Now.

Jamie’s eyes flared; a second later he was striding along Level B, resisting the urge to leap into the air and fly down the corridor as fast as he was able.

He had been awake most of the night, turning the Patrol Respond over and over in his mind. His squad had waited for the Security Division to arrive and load the Night Stalkers’ van on to a flatbed truck, only to receive a message informing them that the remainder of their Operation had been cancelled, and they were to return to the Loop immediately. But that had been absolutely fine with Jamie; he had been preoccupied by an awful thought as he wheezed on the ground, one that rattled ceaselessly through his brain as they were driven back to base. He had finally slipped into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning, and as soon as his eyes reopened he had typed a message to Paul Turner, telling the Director he needed to see him as soon as possible.

He reached the Level B lift, pressed CALL, and shifted impatiently from one foot to the other as he waited. He had not mentioned the thought to Ellison or Qiang; he trusted them completely, but he wanted to keep it to himself, at least for the time being. It was something that went beyond suspicion or theory and, without proof, it could easily be dismissed as paranoia – or wishful thinking – by those who, like his squad mates, were not in full possession of the facts. And there was something else, something simpler, and more pressing.

It was personal.

The lift arrived. Jamie stepped into it and pressed A. When the doors opened again, barely five seconds later, he walked down the corridor, nodded to a pair of Operators heading in the opposite direction, and stopped at the short corridor that led to the Director’s quarters. The Security Operator on duty stepped forward.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” she said. “You can go straight in.”

“Thanks,” said Jamie, and strode forward. The heavy door swung open before he reached it, and he heard the Director’s voice emerge through the gap.

“This better be important, Lieutenant. I’ve got about ten free minutes today and I’m giving half of them to you.”

Jamie smiled, and stepped into the room he had come to know so well; he had spent hundreds of hours in it, talking to the men who had sat behind the wide desk on the far side of the room. Paul Turner was the third Director he had served, a turnover that spoke volumes about the turmoil the Department had been through in recent years, and the former Security Officer eyed him carefully as he stopped in front of the desk and stood to attention.

“At ease, for God’s sake,” said the Director. “What’s going on?”

“Morning, sir,” said Jamie. “I don’t know if you’ve seen my Patrol Respond report for last night—”

“There are currently forty-nine Operational Squads in this Department,” said Turner. “Even now, depleted as we are, if I read every report that every squad filed every night, I would quite literally get nothing else done. So assume I haven’t read it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jamie. “We got a 999 intercept on a possible Night Stalker incident in a Nottingham suburb. We checked it out, tracked a vehicle that had been seen in the area, and found them, sir.”

Turner narrowed his eyes. “You found them?”

“Yes, sir,” said Jamie. “We were too late to stop them killing the vampire they’d abducted, and we failed to apprehend them. But I saw them, sir. There were two of them. And I think I might know who one of them was.”

The Director sat back in his chair. “Go on.”

Jamie took a deep breath. “I think it was my dad, sir.”

“Come again?” said Turner.

“My dad, sir. Julian Carpenter.”

“What on earth would make you think that?”

“They were carrying MP5s, just like we used to. And the man I saw had military training, I’d bet my life on it. The way he moved, the way he didn’t panic, even when I went for him. He wasn’t remotely scared of vampires, sir.”

“And you think your father is the only person in the country who fits that description?” asked Turner.

Jamie frowned. “Of course not, sir. But it makes sense. Cal wouldn’t let my dad back into the Department, but even he knew that it was a waste of time telling him to behave himself. There’s no way he would just sit quietly and wait, on the off chance that you decided to reverse Cal’s decision. The Night Stalkers are exactly the sort of thing he’d do.”

“How would you know that, Jamie?” said Turner. “You never knew the Operator side of him.”

“I understand that, sir,” said Jamie, aware that his voice was beginning to rise. “But I do know how stubborn he was, right up to the point where it cost him everything he cared about. I don’t believe he’ll just sit on the sidelines, sir. It’s not in his nature.”

“On that point, you and I are in complete agreement,” said Turner. “And I do see why you reached this conclusion. But the man you saw last night wasn’t your father.”

Jamie frowned. “How can you say that, sir?” he asked. “I was there, and you were behind that desk.”