Will walked out to meet the taxi at the gates. It was after midnight and the roads were empty so he heard the car approaching from some distance, saw its lights cutting between the trees, growing in intensity.
When the driver saw Will near the gate he looked nervous, pulling to a stop and lowering his window just enough to be heard.
“You order a taxi? What name is it?”
“Wyndham, heading for the city.”
The driver looked nonplussed, but gestured for Will to get in and closed his window again. “You should have waited up at the school instead of coming out in this – it’s minus seven now, getting colder all the time. Reckon it could reach twelve below tonight.”
“I prefer not to talk, if you don’t mind.”
“Suit yourself. Where are we heading?”
“Just drop me by the cathedral – it’s easier for me to walk from there.”
The driver shrugged, looking snubbed, and remained silent for the rest of the journey, only occasionally giving Will a glance in the rear-view mirror. When they reached the city, Will paid him, spoke to him, left him like a person trying to remember his night’s dreams.
No one was on the streets. When Will did hear voices, he turned into a street and found a church hall serving as a shelter for the night. Two people in padded jackets and woollen hats and scarves stood near the doors and smiled at Will as he passed.
One of them, a woman, gave him a little wave and said, “You’re out late.”
Will didn’t look homeless, he supposed, but even in his overcoat he probably looked underdressed for such a cold night. It was a speculative comment from the woman, not wanting to upset him, but trying to find out if he needed a place.
“I’m fine, thank you. I’m on my way somewhere.”
She smiled and said, “Take care.”
Will knew this wasn’t good though. The city’s homeless, its runaways and vagrants, would be taking shelter for the night in this and other places. He walked street after street, finding the doorways empty.
He walked down to the old warehouse district then, where he’d found Jex and so many previous victims, knowing that there at least fires could be started and kept, and that some homeless would prefer their own fire to taking shelter in the kind of place he’d just seen.
He could feel another wave of hunger, an emptiness so complete that he felt he was outside of himself. Something deep within him screamed for blood, his thoughts falling away one by one until the scream seemed the only thing left.
But Will had underestimated the power of the cold. No one, it seemed, had chosen to stay in the open this night. He passed the gutted warehouse where he’d found Jex, continued on to the river, found the doorway in which he’d first encountered Eloise.
And here, for the first time, he picked up a human scent – it made the hunger more intense, knowing he was so close to feeding it. He walked a little further and saw him there, an old man slumped with his bags in another doorway. Will’s hopes lifted and he moved quickly, but as soon as he got close he realised it was futile, that this old man had too little life left in him to satisfy Will’s need for more than a few days. It hardly seemed worth it for such a short respite.
Will approached him anyway. His face and hands were blue with cold. He looked up and saw Will and smiled, his eyes looking remarkably youthful, a striking contrast to the craggy face and white beard.
Will said, “You shouldn’t be out on a night like this. There’s a shelter not far from here.”
The man gave a little shake of his head and said in a voice that betrayed his old age, “I can’t get there tonight, son.”
“I’ll help you. You need to be somewhere warm.”
“You’re a good lad, but I’ve no time for shelters, not tonight.”
Will knew it to be true, that the old man was dying, that he would probably die even if Will carried him to the shelter. He crouched down and then sat on the step with him.
“You should get inside yourself. I’ll be OK.”
Will smiled and said, “I’ll just stay for a little while. I’m not cold. Are you from here?”
“Hereabouts. Family’s always lived here in the city or hereabouts.”
“What happened?”
As cold as he was, the old man gave a mischievous grin and made a half-hearted attempt to find something. Will saw it was a bottle of cheap brandy. He took the top off and held the bottle to the old man’s lips, letting him drink deep from it.
“You’re a good lad,” he said as Will put the bottle back. He spoke slowly, his voice weak at the edges. “Lost everything, me, a long time ago. This is what it comes to. No one else’s fault, only mine. That’s what it is. Yep, that’s what it is.”
Will looked at the old man and saw that a single tear had formed and rolled down his frozen cheek. His eyes appeared lost in some distant memory, perhaps of when life had still been full of hope for him, perhaps of the things he had lost along the way.
Will reached out and took his hand, which was as cold as his own. Just as a baby’s would, the old man’s fingers closed round Will’s.
“You’re as cold as me, lad. You should get going.”
“I’m not cold.” Will looked him in the eye and said, “Can I tell you a secret?” The old man didn’t answer, but gave the slightest nod. “I’m nearly eight hundred years old. I’m un … I’m a vampire, but I’m also the Earl of Mercia by right, and you are no less my duty than all your ancestors were before you.”
“I don’t understand you, lad.”
Will realised he hadn’t made sense, and that his identity hardly mattered to this man anyway, not now.
“You don’t need to understand, but what I want you to know is that this isn’t the end, there is more beyond. This life is not the end of it.”
The old man probably thought Will no more than a teenager with strange ideas, but he had heard his words and whatever he thought of the speaker, he sounded hopeful as he said, “You think so?”
“I do.” Will stared into his eyes, capturing him now. “Think about when you were happy, think back, your childhood, some sunny afternoon. Can you see it?”
There again, there appeared the slightest nod, and the old man smiled a little and his eyes, locked on to that faraway vision, sparkled with life, and remained like that a few minutes longer. Then for a moment his grip tightened round Will’s hand before slowly releasing it as the last vestiges of life slipped away.
Will sat for a little while, thinking on the mystery of the life that had just ended before him, of all those that had come and gone before it. For a moment, his mind drifted back to a childhood afternoon of his own, but dream as he might, the cold would not claim him.
He stood again and looked about him. Such an emptiness, within and without. Nothing would come of this night to offer him sustenance, he knew that for certain. Dejected, he walked back the way he’d come and in through the city walls.
The Whole Earth was in total darkness, including those parts of the living quarters above that looked out on to the street. He thought of Chris and Rachel asleep inside, wondering whether they slept well, whether Chris’s loyalty even mattered now that the focus was at Marland.
Will walked on, the floodlit cathedral spire ahead of him, its lights hazy in the frosty air. He let himself in by the side door and walked slowly up the nave, taking a seat in the front pew before the altar.
He felt at peace there, and though it didn’t nourish him the way being with Eloise did, being here in this church at least tempered his hunger, enough to make it bearable for the time being. It held him fast, this place, and offered him hope.
And as he sat there beneath the illuminated dust that had so entranced Eloise, he thought back on what he’d told the old man. He’d told him there was something else, something beyond this life, and he had to believe it – had he not seen spirits? Had he not seen the spirit of his own brother, a familiarity which could not have been faked by any sorcerer?
Yet he could take no comfort from such a thought if it was true that he’d dispossessed his victims of their souls, of their very ability to experience anything beyond the lives they had led. It was a regret compounded by the knowledge that most of his victims had hardly lived the fullest or richest of lives in the first place.
Will stood up quickly, as if swift movement could help him escape such thoughts, and headed towards the crypt. He had said it to Fairburn and he believed it to be true – he would know if he carried the souls of others within him. If their souls had been imprisoned, if it was not merely another of Wyndham’s tricks, then they had been imprisoned elsewhere, some place beyond his power.
Perhaps they would be released when Will uncovered his destiny, when he found Lorcan Labraid. But that thought too filled him with frustration. A notebook, a meeting with Asmund, riddles and confusions and nothing since. Where was Asmund’s master? Where were the guides? Why could he not hear the call of Lorcan Labraid?
He lifted the stone between the tombs and descended, and when he reached his own chambers, he toured each of the rooms as if returning after a long absence – the pool, the empty chamber with the partly buried casket, the main room with his furniture and chests.
He opened one of the chests and took out Jex’s notebook, then sat back in his chair and turned through the pages, stopping at each garbled line of prophecy. He wanted to understand, but most of all, he wanted to dream, to drift away into some sunlit afternoon as he had helped the old man to do. Only Will’s sunlit afternoon was not in the past, nor in any future he could hope for.