Larissa Kinley stood in the open doors of the Loop’s hangar, watching the last of the sunlight crawl across the grass to the west. Once it had climbed over the double fences and rippled away into the thick forest that surrounded the Department 19 base, she stepped out on to the tarmac, and breathed fresh air.
There were many bad things about being a vampire, but the worst of them, the very worst, was the simple fact that for the better part of each day, she could not go outside. Being a Blacklight Operator helped, as the vast majority of their work was done under cover of darkness, and it was not unusual for her to fulfil the oldest vampire cliché, of sleeping all day and emerging after the sun had gone down.
But there were moments, a great many of them in the years since she had been turned, when she longed for the feel of the sun on her skin, for the scents and smells of the day, so different to those of the night, to fill her nostrils and transport her, away from the darkness and the shadows. She had come to terms with the fact that she was never going to experience those things again, but that did not stop her yearning for them.
She had said goodbye to Jamie in the Ops Room almost four hours earlier, and she could still not shake the nagging feeling that their parting had been significant. Partly it was the fact that he had gone to Paris on the most important mission of his life, and decided not to take her with him, but there was more to it than that; he had been on missions without her before, and she without him, and never had she felt the need to so explicitly ask him to come back to her as she had in the Ops Room.
There was no guarantee that Frankenstein was alive, that Jamie and his team would be able to find him if he was, or that there would be any danger attached to doing so; she knew it was extremely likely that he would return home empty-handed, an eventuality she was attempting to prepare herself for. But there was something in the pit of her stomach, something gnawing and clawing, that told her that her boyfriend was in enormous danger.
She would worry about him until he returned; that much she knew. In the meantime, there was someone else who required her attention, someone whom she had seen walking towards the distant perimeter fence half an hour earlier, someone she had been prevented from following by the slow passage of the setting sun. But now the sun was gone.
Larissa soared into the air, feeling with a rush of excitement how effortless it had become for her to do so. She rose slowly towards the hologram that shielded the Loop from view from above, marvelling at the liquid complexity of the image when seen up close.
The field of suspended particles that the image was projected on to was barely a centimetre thick, but the hologrammatic image appeared to rise and fall with the tops of trees and the dark drops of clearings. It was a marvel of technology that Larissa resolved to ask Matt about at some point; she knew he would already have a full understanding of how the effect was achieved, and it would delight him to be able to pass the information on to her.
From her high vantage point, Larissa’s razor-sharp eyes picked out the tiny figure of Kate Randall, sitting alone in the rose garden at the far edge of the base.
She swooped through the air, the open sky around her, the soft wind rippling through her hair; it was a sensation of pure joy, and although she would not wish the curse of vampirism on anyone, this was the one aspect of being turned that she would have loved to share with somebody, even just for a few minutes. She banked and spun and looped as she flew across the wide compound, towards the circular garden; her progress was silent, and Kate didn’t look up until Larissa dropped soundlessly on to the bench beside her, and said hello.
“Jesus!” shouted Kate, leaping to her feet. “You scared the crap out of me!”
“Sorry,” replied Larissa, grinning at her friend. “Completely accidental, I promise.”
Kate stared at the vampire girl, trying hard to keep a straight face, and failing miserably. She shook her head in what she hoped was a stern fashion, and smiled back at Larissa.
“So,” said Larissa. “I saw you head out here about an hour ago. I’m guessing it didn’t go well with Shaun?”
Kate looked exaggeratedly around. “Do you see him here?”
“No,” said Larissa.
“Me neither,” said Kate. “That’s how well it went.”
She sat back down on the bench beside her friend and sighed, deeply. “He’s blaming me for what happened with the Paris mission,” she said. “He thinks Jamie would have taken him if he and I weren’t together.”
“That’s bullshit,” said Larissa.
“Is it?” asked Kate. “Jamie said he didn’t take him because he wanted to know there’d be someone to look after me if something happens to him in Paris. Maybe he would have taken Shaun if we weren’t seeing each other.”
“You can’t know that, though,” said Larissa. “Jamie and Shaun haven’t exactly seen eye to eye. He still might have left him behind.”
“Might,” replied Kate. “Might not. Like you say, we don’t know. So I can’t tell Shaun that his being with me didn’t hurt his chances, because I don’t know that’s true.”
“So what’s he going to do?”
“I don’t know,” said Kate, softly. “He said he needs time to think about things. One of my two closest friends in the world is out there on some crazy redemption crusade, but he needs time to think about things. Ridiculous.”
She saw the look on Larissa’s face change as she mentioned Jamie’s mission, saw the worry that she was barely managing to conceal burst to the surface, and felt a stab of pain in her chest. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure Jamie’s fine, Larissa. I’m certain of it. He was born to do this; you know how good an Operator he is.”
“I know,” said Larissa, fiercely. “I’m so proud of him, even though I hate his stupid guts right now for not letting me go with him and look after him. And I know how important Frankenstein was to him; I totally get it. I just wish he’d let me help.”
“They’re just boys,” said Kate. “Him and Shaun both. They don’t know how to let anyone help them, much less ask for it.”
The two girls sat in silence for a moment, looking at the roses in the fading light of the evening. Eventually, Kate spoke again.
“Do you believe him?” she asked.
“Believe who?” replied Larissa.
“Jamie,” said Kate. “Do you think he was really trying to protect us, or do you think he just didn’t want to take us with him?”
“I have to believe that what he told us was the truth,” replied Larissa. “The alternative is just too awful. You know?”
Kate nodded her head.
“Do you believe him?” asked Larissa. “Do you think he meant what he said?”
“I do,” Kate replied, firmly. “I think it was stupid, and arrogant, but I think he meant it.”
“Do you think they’ll find him?” asked Larissa. “Frankenstein, I mean.”
“I don’t think there’s anything to find,” replied Kate. “I would never tell Jamie this, because I know how desperately he wants to believe, but I think he’s dead. I think he’s been dead for three months.”
“Me too,” sighed Larissa. “It means so much to Jamie; he sees it as this miraculous chance to make up for what happened, and I’m scared it’s just going to crush him all over again. But I guess we’ll know when they get back, one way or the other.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Kate, then smiled at Larissa. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Do you want to get something to eat? It might take our minds off all this doom and gloom.”
“Sounds like a plan,” replied Larissa, standing up.
Kate did the same, and the two girls walked slowly down the wooden path that ran through the heart of the memorial garden. As they passed through the gate, Kate did something that surprised herself; she reached out and took Larissa’s hand. She had never done so before; she had held hands with her girlfriends on Lindisfarne all the time, thinking less than nothing of it, but never with Larissa.
The muscles in the vampire girl’s neck and shoulders twitched, and for a second, her hand lay limply in Kate’s grasp. Then she slowly laced her fingers with her friend’s, as they walked towards the low rise of the Loop’s central dome.
They were three-quarters of the way across the wide grass field when Larissa smelt something on the still evening air. It didn’t smell bad, not exactly; it smelt huge, as though she was only able to perceive a small corner of some gigantic whole. Her eyes flickered red, involuntarily; Kate saw them, and stopped.
“What is it?” she asked. There was concern in her voice; she knew that Larissa’s senses were many times more acute than her own, and knew that her life had been saved, on more than one occasion, by taking the vampire’s instincts seriously.
“I don’t know,” said Larissa, pulling free from Kate’s hand. “Something big. It’s coming, though, whatever it is. Coming fast.”
A sound became audible behind them, a fluttering sound like the wings of a thousand birds. As the two girls looked at each other, their eyes widening with fear, a ragged shadow crept across them, plunging them into darkness. They turned and looked in the direction it was coming from, and Kate made a small involuntary sound deep in her throat, a tiny gasp of utterly unbridled fear.
“Run,” growled Larissa, her eyes bursting into deep, swirling crimson. “Sound the alarm.”
“What about you?” cried Kate. “I can’t leave you here.”
“There’s no time,” said Larissa. “Run, Kate. Go now!”
Kate turned and sprinted for the open doors of the hangar, shouting at the top of her lungs as she went. The shadow rolled across the grass, keeping pace with her; it was ragged, and shifting, and impossibly wide.
Larissa stood alone in the middle of the grass, her eyes fixed on what was approaching. Her eyes burned in the darkness as she pulled the radio from her belt, typed four numbers on its small keypad and pressed it to her ear.