The Cross Read Free

doing, he was on his feet and staggering away through the snow.
    Behind him, the first glittering rays of sunlight peeped over the mountains. He felt it like a nuclear blast on his back. He screamed and ran harder, bolting through the trees like a wild animal instinctively impelled to survive at all cost, suddenly possessed with a speed and power that he’d never known in his thirty years of human life. All he knew was that he must find shadow. Must seek out darkness. The searing light was quickly gaining ground.
    He looked up, shielding his eyes from the pain. The sunrise gleamed on the castle turrets and ramparts high above. The ancient fortress offered all kinds of dark spaces where he could hide away – but he knew that, even endowed with incredible physical strength as he was, he had no hope of scaling the mountainside and reaching it in time.
    He was going to burn.
    But there was a chance. The foot of the mountain was just thirty yards away; and as Joel ran he saw the dark recess in the rocks. Let it be what it looks like , he prayed. He slipped on an icy rock and went sprawling in the snow. A sunbeam cut between the naked trees and slashed across his outflung hand like a laser. The skin sizzled and he smelled burning. He screamed again. Scrambled to his feet and hurled himself towards the cave entrance.
    The cave was deep and low. Bent double, crawling desperately on his knees, he wished like he’d never wished for anything before that the terrible light couldn’t reach him there. The shaft tightened as it deepened, and it took all his strength to force his body through. Then, with a surge of relief that made him cry out, he realised it was opening up again, into a wide crooked fissure that ran diagonally upwards into the bowels of the mountain. A pitch-black sanctuary where the sun hadn’t penetrated for a billion years.
    Joel snuggled deep into the darkness. For a few moments, the fierce joy of survival burned intensely through him and he couldn’t stop grinning. He’d done it. He was safe from the hateful sun. He’d survived. He’d won.
    No, Joel , said another voice in his mind. You lost. You failed miserably.
    He closed his eyes as his ecstasy suddenly gave way to revolted self-loathing. He’d had his chance to end it, right here, right now. But not even the steeliest resolve he could muster up stood the remotest chance against the vampire’s all-conquering urge to survive. Not now, not ever. He was doomed to go on like this for the rest of eternity.
    As the sun rose over the snowy forest and mountains and began its arc across the sky, Joel remained in the darkness of the cave, thinking of only one thing. He was going to return home and destroy the woman who had done this to him. Her and all her kind.
    Send them all back to hell where they – and now he – belonged.

Chapter Two
    Prague
    Alex Bishop stood alone at the railing of the bridge, the wind in her hair. Beyond the river and all around her, the city lights were fading with the coming of the dawn. The rising sun glittered off cathedral domes and glassy high-rise towers and cast a diffused golden streak across the water. She could feel its warmth on her face. If it hadn’t been for the last remaining Solazal photosensitivity neutraliser pill that she’d managed to retrieve from the castle before her escape from Romania, she’d hardly have been standing here to welcome the sunrise. As for any other vampire, it would have been a straight choice between frazzle and hide. Nobody ever voluntarily opted for the former.
    She sighed to herself as she gazed out across the cityscape. So much had happened in the last few days that even her ultra-sharp vampire mind was reeling from it. None of it was good. All through the night she’d been making her way as best she could from the snowy wilds of Romania. A stolen farm truck had got her as far as a desolate country railway station, where she’d hitched a ride on a freight carriage. Now here she was in