behind her? Her gaze went past his thick neck to the front of the bus, its lights illuminating the dead body of the driver — oozing its last remaining life as its owner stared glassily out to nowhere.
Dragging herself back up as quickly as she could, Lucy turned back to Boris. ‘Wait,’ she said feebly, her hands cut up once more, the taste of blood on her lip.
‘Nobody around to save you,’ Boris growled, his eyes red, a sadistic smile on his face. ‘If I’m going to miss the most important night of my eternal life, you’d better make it worth my while.’ He grabbed her collar, helping her to her feet and a good few inches off the ground.
Swinging the boot wildly, she connected with the big vampire’s knee, hoping to bring him down, but it made no impact. There was a noise from above. Boris’s brother Benjamin was up on the roof of the bus, prowling around as the passengers on the top deck cowered in their seats below him.
She was running out of air. Moving her hand as forcefully as she could, she chopped at Boris’s throat, a move taught in her basic self-defence classes at work.
Boris staggered back, dropping Lucy, but there was no time for celebration. Boris was a half-step on his heels before he lunged forward again, and Benjamin was down off the bus in a flash.
‘Hey,’ came a voice from the bus. The teenage boys poured out of the door, huddling together for safety in numbers, but there, nonetheless. ‘Leave her alone.’
Benjamin turned to face the boys, bedecked in grubby tracksuits, their heads sporting the same regimented close cuts with what looked like wet fringe tips. Normally her heart sank at the sight of their type, but it soared briefly.
‘Oh, Jesus, fuck. What’s wrong wi ‘yer fucking teeth, mate?’ another asked.
‘Get out of here,’ Lucy called.
‘Kill them,’ Boris hissed, but his brother hesitated, flashing his brother a look of weary disdain for a second. More people poured out of the bus, following the lead of the boys. No. This wasn’t what she wanted. They wanted her, not these other people, and she doubted they’d offer more mercy to the new arrivals than Benjamin’s arched eyebrow.
‘Leave her alone,’ the group of half-cut women shouted in unison, moving around the two vampires to join her, doing the thing women instinctively did in a nightclub when they wanted to protect one of their own.
Boris turned to look at his brother, unsure how to proceed.
‘Oh shit,’ one kid said, pointing behind Lucy. ‘There’s another one. Toothy motherfucker.’
Adam ambled into view with a disconcerting nonchalance, strolling through the night as though he’d run into them by chance.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, addressing the Brothers Bloom. ‘I think it’s probably wise if everyone walks away from this.’
Benjamin smiled. ‘You think we’re going to get scared of a bunch of civilians, old man?’
‘No,’ Adam replied, flashing his own grin in return. ‘And the chances are you’d take me, maybe her, too. Hell, you might end up with a veritable buffet. But you can be damn sure we’d kill at least one of you in the effort. And you would spend the rest of eternity alone, half of a missing whole.’
‘I don’t know,’ Lucy said, chancing an arm. ‘Strikes me Boris would be no substantial loss to the world. Benjamin? What say you?’
Boris whipped back round to her, snarling, but Benjamin crossed the gap to hold him back. ‘Let’s go,’ he said in a low voice, and the snarl dropped off Boris’s face. The brother was the dominant one, no matter how crazed Boris was.
A flash of anger crossed Boris’s face, turning to a sneer. ‘Prichádza tma,’ he said. ‘You do not know what’s coming. After tonight, nothing will be the same.’
Within a breath, they were gone. Lucy couldn’t even work out where they’d gone, let alone how they’d gotten there.
A collective sigh of relief went around the crowd. They stared at each other, trying to work out what the hell had happened, and how they’d summoned the collective bravery.
‘Thank you,’ Lucy said. ‘You saved my life.’
One woman regarded her cautiously, her eye going between Lucy and Adam, a look of disgust on her face. ‘Might not have done if I knew you were wi’ one’r them.’
‘I’m not… He’s not… I…’ was about as much as Lucy could manage in response.
‘No,’ Adam whispered, seeing the driver splashed across the road in the path of the bus’s headlights.
He rushed to what remained of her, followed by Lucy. Everyone else hung back.
Lucy felt for a pulse, but it was obvious there was no point. The woman’s face was ash grey, eyes staring out at nothing; her moth-eaten uniform was covered in her blood.
‘Why did that man say that?’ one of the other passengers said, an elderly man whose last remaining hairs came from his nose and ears.
‘Say what?’ Lucy asked.
‘Prichádza tma,’ he replied. His voice was thick with an Eastern European accent. ‘Why would he say that?’
‘That’s not the first time I’ve heard it,’ Lucy said. She turned to Adam. ‘Do you know what that means?’
Adam said nothing.
The old man frowned. ‘It means, literally, darkness comes. But that is not so… precise. It is more… the coming dark. But it is not the darkness of light and dark. Of night and day. It means the darkness brought about by…’ he struggled with the words, glancing around at the eyes on him. ‘I am sorry. I am being foolish. Ignore me.’
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘Where are you from, sir?’
‘Piešťany,’ he replied. ‘Slovakia.’
Adam chuckled. ‘I know it.’
The man’s face lit up briefly. ‘You do?’
‘It’s been a long time. I never learned the language. I was there for a few years. It was Hungary, back then.’
The man looked confused. ‘But…’
‘Never mind,’ Adam said. ‘Tell me about the saying.’
‘Piešťany is a wonderful city, full of heritage and culture and history. But darkness, also. Myths. Legends. I think maybe you know of some of these.’
Adam nodded. Everyone from the bus listened with wrapt attention, even the gang of boys, making this probably the longest they’d ever concentrated on anything.
The old man looked around at them, slightly embarrassed, as though about to admit to some terrible secret. ‘There is a legend,’ he said.
‘The Countess Bathory,’ Adam said.
The man crossed himself.
‘Where do I know that name from?’ one of the pissed women asked.
‘You might know her as Countess Dracula,’ Adam said.
‘Oh,’ the woman replied, shaking her head. This was a bit much to take in when you were half cut, Lucy imagined.
Adam frowned. ‘Countess Bathory was no demon. She was no vampire. She was a madwoman, rich enough to indulge her cruelty. Some think her crime was being a powerful woman when men would allow no such thing.’
‘My town is steeped in her legend,’ the old man said. ‘The castle; it looms. We played as children in its walls, got chased off by elders. But there was a legend, that when they walled Bathory in at Cachtice Castle, she put a blood curse, saying she would return when the world would be ready to bow to her.’
‘Witchcraft?’ Lucy said, looking at Adam. ‘Elle wouldn’t?’
‘She’s dead,’ Adam said, coldly.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Lucy said.
‘The fuck yous talking about?’ one of the young lads said. Sensing an opportunity to get away from there, he turned to his friends. ‘Come on, let’s fuck off.’
‘We can’t leave until the police come,’ a woman said. None of them seemed drunk anymore. Her words had precisely zero effect on the kids, who pulled their hoods up, hunched their shoulders, and headed off toward town.
‘Shit,’ Lucy said. ‘Has anyone called 999?’
‘I’ll do it,’ one of the other women said, fishing out her mobile. It occurred to Lucy it was a miracle none of this had been filmed. Christ, this many people, there’d usually be multiple angles. She knew well enough driving an ambulance for a living that the best way to find the scene of an accident was to look for the cluster of people looking at the damn thing through their screens.
‘We should get out of here,’ Lucy said in what she hoped was a low voice to Adam.
‘You can’t leave,’ said the same indignant woman as before. ‘This is because of you.’
‘You want to try to stop us?’ Adam growled.
The woman shrank back.
‘Look,’ Lucy said, ‘you might not believe us, but there are lot more lives at stake here. We have to go.’
The indignant woman demurred.
‘We’ll stay here, talk to the police,’ another woman said, the subtext being we’ll tell them all about you and your weird toothy boyfriend.
They crossed the road, leaving a group of disgruntled people behind to tend to the murder scene until the police arrived. By the grumbles Lucy could hear across the street, it was dawning on those heading into town for a night on the tiles that they were no longer likely to get it.
Adam walked one step behind her. ‘You said things with Elle might not be as they seem,’ he said, his voice slipping briefly into a vaguely southern American twang.
‘You’ll see,’ Lucy replied. ‘Keep an eye out. I saw Marcus and his date, too. They looked like they were heading for the house.’
‘And you didn’t think to come to my house, as agreed?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I fully intended to, but…’
‘There was a pull?’
She frowned, but gave no other answer. ‘How did you find me?’
‘We are connected now,’ he said. ‘It will always be easy to find you.’
She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that, but also didn’t mind it, either. They walked in silence toward the witches’ house, Lucy sure the Blooms would jump out at her.
‘What can you tell me about Bathory?’ she said, if for no other reason than to break the silence.
‘Myth. Legend. She bathed nightly in baths of virgin blood, luring peasants up from the village and brutally murdering them, or so the story goes.’
‘Sounds delightful.’
‘People have tried to tie her to our legend for centuries. She became a kind of symbol for some among us.’
‘You went looking for her?’
He said nothing.
‘Wait,’ she said, the thread of memory connecting dots she hadn’t seen before. ‘Your house, there’s a portrait hanging on the wall, extremely old.’
‘That’s her,’ he said.
‘And you just happened to have gone to her hometown in Slovenia? Or Hungary. What was it? Night time vineyard tours, or were you searching for a legend?’
He frowned. ‘I was young once,’ he said. ‘As I learned more about who I was, I sought the roots of our kind. Her legend springs from the same part of the world as our legend. The timing fit. But when I got there I found mostly rumours, conflagrations of superstitions. A backward people scared of every shadow, thinking every part of their world some occult conspiracy. I left doubting all of it.’
She turned back toward Elle’s house. ‘Did you ever find them?’ she asked.
‘Find what?’
‘The roots of your kind.’
‘No.’
She frowned. ‘That’s the connection to Cain, right? He was a scholar of her and her history?’
‘He had a lot of the same questions as I did, but it was more than that.’
‘So you were part of the Darkness cult, once?’
He frowned, his brow furrowing in the dark. ‘For a while there, I was the cult.’
‘But no more?’
‘No more.’
They walked the rest of the way in silence, the sounds of the party escaping whatever spell held them away from the real world, until they reached the barrier. As they walked through it Adam shuddered, his teeth coming out. Once they were on the other side, stood in the street looking up at the full-on party raging in Elle’s house, he had regained his composure.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess they’re not dead after all.’
They watched it for a second. ‘How do we get inside?’ Lucy asked, not sure she wanted an answer to that question, knowing there was no other option than to go inside and end this.
Adam shrugged. ‘I never received an invitation, but I guess we could go knock on the door.’