shot him a look full of sympathy. “You still miss her, don’t you?” she said.
Jamie nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I still miss her.”
Larissa Kinley stared at the wide, slowly moving river, felt the night breeze gently tug at her hair, and allowed herself a rare moment of satisfaction.
It was not an emotion she was particularly prone to, at least not since the night she had lost herself in Grey’s glowing crimson eyes and woken up changed forever. She had spent her years with Alexandru and his gaggle of violent sycophants, alternately disgusted with herself and genuinely terrified for her own life, and her time with Blacklight wracked with guilt as she again participated in something she could not justify.
She would not dispute that she had done some good in her time as an Operator; she had helped destroy both Alexandru and Valeri Rusmanov, had saved the lives of dozens of innocent men and women, and had fought as hard as anybody to prevent a true monster from entering the world. But did that make up for the harm she had done? For the innocent vampires she had destroyed for no better reason than what they had been turned into, in a great many cases against their will? Jamie, Kate and the majority of her former colleagues clearly believed so, and she did not begrudge them that conclusion.
Sadly, it had not been enough for her.
But now, as she stood in the place she had created and looked out across a river on the other side of the world, she was almost content. A hundred metres out from the bank, one of the river cruise boats chugged slowly south towards the distant lights of New York. The captain sounded his horn, and the tourists on the upper deck waved enthusiastically in her direction; she returned the gesture, a broad smile on her face, and watched until the boat slipped round the bend in the river. When it was out of sight, Larissa turned and walked up the gentle slope; her stomach was rumbling, and she was suddenly keen to see how dinner was coming along.
Spread out before her, extending for several hundred metres in either direction along the riverbank, was the property that Valentin had told her about on that awful night, now more than six months past, when she had stumbled into the cellblock on the verge of tears, desperate for a way out. It was a vast piece of land, running up from the river for almost a mile, so big that many locals believed there were several large estates behind the pale wooden gates that opened on to Highway 9.
The houses that overlooked this section of the riverbank were grand, garish, multimillion-dollar mansions, the rural refuges of Manhattan bankers and actors and rock stars. But when Larissa had arrived on the piece of land that had become known to those who lived on it as Haven, the only standing structures had been a row of sheds and a large antebellum house, two neat storeys fronted with white pillars and a small veranda, surrounded by towering trees, at the centre of the estate.
Now, it was also home to the row of wooden cabins that she was walking alongside as she climbed the slope. They were simple enough, their walls, floors and ceilings constructed of wood from the ash trees that filled the sprawling property, but they were comfortable, and they were warm, thanks to the stoves and metal chimneys that Callum had installed. Most had two occupants, although some had as many as five or even six, family units who had arrived together and refused to be separated. A handful had only one person living in them, which several of the community’s earliest residents had suggested was wasteful. Larissa had disagreed, saying that people who wanted to live on their own had every right to do so; they could always build more cabins, which was exactly what they had done.
There were another dozen in the woods surrounding the huge lawn that stood in front of the main house, where the trees were younger and less densely packed together, and another row that followed the route of the felling that had been done, a neat, straight path that reached almost to the highway. All told, there were fifty-three finished cabins on the property, forty-nine of which were occupied, and another twenty under construction. Hidden away from prying eyes, it was rapidly becoming a small town, in much the same way that Valhalla, the commune from where Larissa had drawn inspiration, was a functioning village in the remote Scottish Highlands.
There were now more than a hundred vampires living in Haven, men and women and children who had been on the run when word reached them of a place where they might be safe or who simply wanted no part of what was coming, had no interest in choosing a side when the only two on offer were Dracula or NS9 and Blacklight. For the first ten days after she arrived, Larissa had lived in the big house on her own, suffering loneliness so acute she had begun to wonder whether it might prove fatal, unsure how to go about realising the idea that she could see so clearly in her mind. In the end, she had come to the conclusion that there was no option other than to simply get on with it.
On the eleventh day, she had flown into town, called the number Valentin had given her, and spoken to a man who seemed, superficially at least, to be some kind of financial advisor to the ancient vampire, although it had quickly become apparent that his remit extended far beyond matters of money. They had spoken for five minutes, in which the man never asked Larissa to identify herself or provide any proof that she was calling with Valentin’s permission; the mere mention of the vampire’s name had clearly been enough. The following day, workers reconnected the house’s gas, water and electricity, installed a new wireless network, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and mowed the wide lawn; Larissa had stood quietly to one side, too bemused to do anything but watch them work. Before they left, one of them handed her an envelope containing a credit card with her name embossed on the front, issued by a bank she had never heard of, and she had said a silent thank you to Valentin.
The following night she had flown down to New York and spent three days searching the towering glass and steel city for vampires, pounding the streets, tracking them down one at a time by scents that only those of her kind could detect. She found them in bars, in subway stations, in houses and apartments, or simply walking the bright streets after dark. They were almost uniformly wary when she approached, and not a single one of those who had listened to her pitch had come with her there and then; in every case, she left them the location, told them they would be welcome, and moved on. Three days later she returned to Haven, and waited to see whether the stone she cast into the water had caused a ripple.
The first vampire had shown up two days later, landing cautiously on the lawn with a bag over his shoulder and a suspicious look on his face; his name was Ryan and he later confessed to Larissa that he had wondered right up until the last minute if he was walking into a trap, whether she was part of some NS9 plot to trick vampires into handing themselves in to be destroyed. She had welcomed him, showed him to the spare bedroom in the big house, and the following morning, the two of them had got to work. They had felled two trees and were about to start the process of sawing their trunks into boards when a second vampire had appeared, a woman from New Jersey called Kimberley who had heard about Haven from an ex-boyfriend of hers and had immediately packed a bag. She wanted no part of any war, and had no desire to spend her life running. A warm feeling had spread slowly through Larissa as Kimberley talked; the woman’s arrival was exactly what she had hoped would happen, that vampires would pass the word about Haven among themselves.
Larissa walked towards the big house, remembering those early days of the community’s existence with great fondness. The vampires appeared in ones and twos at first, until, almost two weeks after she had been to New York, a group of five – three women, a man and a young boy – arrived from northern California. It had been a hectic time; for the first month, the house had been full to capacity and people had slept in tents on the lawn outside. But then the first cabins had been finished, and Haven had really started to take shape; there was now a network of well-worn paths cutting across the open expanses
