stopping, and Bakare and his team don’t give a shit. Nobody will give a shit until it’s someone they think matters.’
‘You think that someone has to be you?’
Gabriel snorted his opinion of that comment. ‘I’m nothing to them, James. You can see that. But I’m fucked if I’m going to just sit around and wait for the next murder. We’ve got an opportunity here. A literal trail. I’m going to bloody well follow it and see if I can give Bakare something concrete to chase, at least. You don’t have to come if you’ve got something better to do.’
Gabriel strode off, keeping his eye on the drops of blood as they led him into a side street.
James followed, hoping that Gabriel would lose the trail, but he didn’t. That worried James more than everything else combined, because he was pretty damned sure that nobody could follow a vampire’s trail unless the vampire wanted to be followed. Hell, a human bite would hardly still be bleeding this far away from the scene in normal circumstances.
Normal. Christ. What does that even mean anymore?
James kept at Gabriel’s heels, wondering what the hell to do with that thought. They were being led into a trap. But why was someone baiting Gabriel like this?
And it had to be Gabriel they were after. They were targeting Gabriel’s friends. Even with the whiff of Cael West about the whole hideous thing, West had no connection with Gabriel. Anyway, West was in Afghanistan, if he was around at all. And if he wasn’t, he’d be after James, not James’s new tenant. It didn’t make any bloody sense.
‘James, are you coming or not?’
James didn’t pick up his pace. ‘They’ll be long gone, Gabriel.’ But he wasn’t optimistic.
‘No, no, the blood’s fresh. Oh, through here.’ Gabriel darted into an alley. James followed.
The fact that the sun was setting was neither here nor there, James knew. Vampires were perfectly capable of operating in the daylight, supernatural strength and senses undiminished. Being a vampire didn’t stop you having psychosomatic health problems, either. Being a vampire didn’t make you as all-powerful as it looked in all those stupid films. It didn’t make you smart.
But being a vampire did make you fast, and deadly.
Gabriel vanished in front of James’s eyes, plucked straight up into the air, feet kicking against the sudden pull, hands scrabbling at his scarf tightening around his throat.
James took three running steps and leapt straight up, wrapping one arm around Gabriel’s waist, the other hooked into the scarf to keep it from choking its owner. James twisted his body as he seized Gabriel, an action that wrenched him from the grip of the man on the roof of the lock-up and they fell together, spiralling six feet to the street.
James landed first and bent his knees into the landing, absorbing the shock and bringing Gabriel down with him. He heard the other vampire land behind them and released Gabriel instantly, whirling to face the threat. There was nothing for it. Gabriel would see whatever he would see, because it was too late and too dangerous to hide anything now.
The vampire leapt at him, and James, instead of ducking, threw himself shoulder-first to meet the attack. The vampire grabbed his arms and used the leverage to flip himself right over James’s head, landing elegantly in front of Gabriel Dare and sending James sprawling.
‘Hello, Mr Dare,’ said the vampire in a silken voice. ‘You finally found the trail. It took five killings for you to notice one I’d laid.’
‘A trail,’ Gabriel repeated, puzzled, before his voice flattened to a darker tone. ‘A trap. For me?’ He scowled. ‘You’ve been killing them to get to me? You utter fuck.’
James scrambled up. You’ll have noticed his teeth by now. You should be terrified. But of course you’re not. You have no idea what you’re looking at. He cast about for a weapon, preferably something pointy, but anything would do.
‘Well, you’re a stop on the way to where we want to get,’ the vampire was saying, ‘and the opportunity for proper kills for the first time in a hundred years was too good to pass up. I love the struggle from the feistier humans. I have so missed the taste of that, and feeling really, properly, full.’
‘Human?’ Gabriel was unable yet to make sense of it.
Any answer was lost when the vampire took an impossible vertical leap as James’s fist, wrapped around a discarded crowbar, whistled through the space he’d occupied a moment ago.
‘James, what–’
‘Down!’
Afterwards, Gabriel was able to reconstruct events from strobe-like memory.
How the stranger landed beside him, grabbed his shoulders and bared long, sharp teeth as he lunged for Gabriel’s throat.
How James thrust his arm between those fangs and Gabriel’s neck, taking the bite in the forearm, and swinging a crowbar with his free hand onto the assailant’s skull.
How the assailant, snarling, tore his teeth free from James’s arm and how James pulled them both backwards, away from Gabriel.
How the assailant drew a short wooden spike from an inside pocket and plunged it into James Sharpe’s chest, right through his crisp, white cotton shirt.
How James grunted, hissed, ‘Missed, ye walloper’, wrenched the spike out of his diaphragm and in turn smashed the primitive weapon, point-first, into the left-hand side of the assailant’s chest.
And how the assailant exploded into a storm of dust that sprinkled gently onto the street.
‘James?’
‘You right, Gabriel?’ James was clutching at the wound in his torso, the hole surrounded by dark blood. ‘He… he didnae bite you… while I was down? Wouldnae… change you, obviously… but it’s… nasty. Filthy wounds, bites.’
‘James, what just happened?’
‘Oh.’ James’s knees wobbled, ‘Stuff. It’s… hard tae… Damn.’
His knees buckled and he folded to the ground. Gabriel was instantly at his side, pushing aside James’s suit jacket and pulling up his shirt to inspect the ghastly wound.
Gabriel made a peculiar noise in the back of his throat and began to tear off his scarf to have something to press against the oozing hole in James’s pale chest.
‘No, no Gabriel, it’s f-f-fine.’ James tried to reassure him, but although the bastard had missed his heart, being staked hurt like a bitch.
‘God, James, you’re not fine, you’re… you’re…’ The panic faded from Gabriel’s voice, replaced with bemusement, ‘You’re hardly bleeding.’
‘Aye. S’all right. Side effect. One of the better ones. Feck.’ A piercing twinge of pain made him gasp at air that, strictly speaking, he didn’t need any more, except to talk. Right now, he couldn’t think of anything to say.
Gabriel rucked up James’s sweater again to stare at the wound.
‘Gabriel.’
