tracks, and gazebos and awnings shaded the junctions from the sun’s rays, in a recreation of the system that had allowed Larissa to travel around Area 51 without bursting into flames.
She reached the edge of the lawn and walked towards the house. In front of the old building, a fire had been lit in the stone pit that she and some of the earliest arrivals had dug and lined months before. Grills were positioned around the flames, groaning with meat and foil-wrapped potatoes and sweetcorn, and a plastic barrel of lamb’s blood had been placed on two piles of bricks. Two dozen or so vampires were sprawled on the grass around the fire, chatting and eating and drinking. She could see lights in many of the distant cabins, and knew that more of Haven’s residents would make their way over to the fire before long. Eating together in the evening had become a widely observed tradition, although it was by no means mandatory; nothing inside Haven was, other than obeying the two central rules upon which the community was founded.
If you wanted to live in Haven, it was strictly forbidden to harm another human being, and you were expected to do whatever work was asked of you.
Beyond that, you were free.
Larissa skirted the cluster of relaxing vampires, strode across the wide strip of gravel in front of the house, then stopped as someone called her name from the darkness. She turned to see Callum stroll round the side of the house, a guitar in one hand, a six-pack of beer in the other, an easy smile on his handsome, bearded face. She returned his smile; the tall, softly spoken Texan had arrived two weeks after her recruitment trip to New York, and they had quickly become close. He had been turned against his will by a girl he met in a bar on the outskirts of Dallas, and was a gentle, hard-working soul who would never hurt a fly; he was exactly the sort of person she had founded Haven for.
“Hey,” said Callum. “Beer?”
“Not right now,” said Larissa. “How’s your day been?”
“Good,” said Callum. “I’ve been helping Pete Conran tar his roof. Messy business. Fun, though.”
Larissa’s smile widened. “You’ve got a strange idea of what fun is.”
“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
