The Cross Read Free Page A

Prague, not quite halfway to where she wanted to be and hoping that her call to Utz McCarthy was going to pay off.
    She didn’t have to wait much longer before a black BMW SUV peeled off from the growing traffic over the bridge and pulled up a few yards from where she was standing. She stepped away from the railing to meet it. The driver was alone. His door opened. He climbed out and walked towards her, grey-haired, tall and lean, not quite smiling, not quite frowning, wearing a long raincoat that billowed in the wind.
    At only eighty or so years of age Utz McCarthy was much younger than Alex, but he looked much older: compared to the twenty-nine years she’d spent as a human, he’d survived for over half a century before an unexpected encounter with a vampire had set him on a whole new course. Nowadays, he was a minor sectional official running the small and somewhat dingy Prague offices of the same organisation Alex belonged to: the global Vampire Federation. Part of Utz’s job was facilitating the movements of VIA agents like Alex.
    The last time they’d met face to face had been eighteen months earlier, when Harry Rumble, Alex’s boss at the Vampire Intelligence Agency Headquarters in London, had sent her out this way on a mission to check out reports of rogue vampire activity in the Czech city of Brno. As it had turned out, it had been a false alarm. No Federation regs were being contravened, the local vampires were behaving themselves and not turning unauthorised victims; no arrests or Nosferol terminations had been necessary and all had been well.
    Alex’s job wasn’t always so easy.
    Utz looked distraught. ‘Jesus, Alex, are you okay?’ he blurted out. ‘I can’t believe what I’ve been hearing. An attack on the Federation grand assembly? A fucking helicopter gunship , taking out the whole conference centre? Tell me it’s not true.’
    ‘I was there,’ Alex said coolly. ‘It’s true.’
    ‘But how could this happen ?’
    ‘It happened because we broke one of the cardinal rules of warfare,’ Alex said. ‘Never underestimate your enemy. When a rogue vampire like Gabriel Stone decides to mount a rebellion against an enemy he perceives as a threat to everything he believes in, he does it on a major scale. It’s a long story, Utz. The bottom line is that virtually the whole of the Federation top brass has been wiped out. Thanks to Stone’s rebels and the moles he had working for him inside VIA, we just became a leaderless army.’
    Utz gaped at her, visibly weakening at the knees. ‘ All of them? The Supremos?’
    She nodded. ‘Goldmund, Korentayer, Hassan, Borowczyk, Mushkavanhu. Not to mention our illustrious former Federation second-in-command, the late and much-lamented Gaston Lerouge. Stone executed them all. With a guillotine.’ She gave a dry smile. ‘Some style, that Gabriel. You’ve got to hand it to him.’
    ‘What about the Vampress?’ Utz croaked. He was referring to Supremo Olympia Angelopolis, the grand Matriarch of the whole Federation. ‘Surely not her as well?’
    Alex shrugged. ‘She might have got out. Things were kind of chaotic.’ She didn’t pretend to care any more than she did about Olympia’s fate.
    ‘This is unreal. You’ve got to be kidding me about this.’
    She looked at him. ‘You should know by now that I’m a very humourless person and I don’t dick about making jokes. Especially when I’ve been shot at with Nosferol bullets, kidnapped and incarcerated in a damp cell in some middle-of-nowhere castle in Romania and then almost guillotined myself.’
    And left behind the only man I’ve given a shit about in a hundred and thirteen years , she wanted to add. Left him to fend for himself in the wilderness, more alone and more terrified than he could ever have imagined. Making that stark, brutal choice had ripped her guts out: either let Joel die in her arms of the terrible wounds he’d suffered in the battle with Stone’s gang, or help him to survive,