Bad Timing Page 7

  “I had some unpleasant news from a mutual friend.”

  We all crowded round him and I took a minute to really look round.

  It felt like I’d just barrelled into a war room. It was dimly lit and filled with a massive oak table and black leather chairs. There was a screen on one wall and computer keyboards dotted about the table. Lyle was typing, Nicholas had his head in his hands and Green was on a mobile asking for ‘permission to speak freely’. Not good.

  I imagined the screen lighting up with a James Bond bad guy stroking a cat and laughing manically. Instead, when it came on, there was a map with an ominous red dotted line arching from the USA to the UK with a big red lettered countdown ticking away below it.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “The US are bombing us.” Nicholas motioned to the screen.

  “Why?”

  “They want to stop the infection. The UK and Ireland are the only places infected. They want to burn it out before it travels across the sea.” Lyle didn’t even look up from his typing.

  “Well, can you tell the Secretary of Defence that I have crucial information that he’s gonna wanna know. He’s got my number.” Green threw the phone across the room, which was saved by an artful catch from Nicholas.

  “What did they say?” Tate asked Green.

  “They’re moving forward regardless. They said that they’ll bomb England rather than here, though.”

  “But the effects will be felt here. The fall-out from a nuclear bomb that size will make all the humans here sick,” Lyle said.

  “It will decimate the Highlands,” Nicholas added.

  “And what about the people still fighting for their lives in England?” I could feel my nails digging into my palms as I clenched my fists.

  “Kill the few, save the many,” Green said, shrugging.

  “I kind of see their logic,” Lyle admitted as he stopped typing.

  Good grief, all this for nothing? Everyone in our sanctuary would die a slow poisoned death.

  “Could we evacuate?” Tate asked.

  “No,” replied Lyle, “no time.” He motioned to the countdown on the board. We had barely twenty four hours.

  “And where would we go? We couldn’t protect all the humans here, there are only five vampires,” Nicholas added.

  “Six vampires. Have you forgotten Josh so quickly?” I could feel the anger start to animate my limbs. I wanted to leap across the table and beat Nicholas until he was a stain on the floor.

  “Easy, tiger.” Lyle was suddenly by my side, his hand enclosing my fist.

  Green had backed up to the furthest wall.

  “Wait, does Josh have any contacts?” Tate asked him. Green didn’t answer; he was just staring at me. “Hey!” Tate yelled at him.

  Green snapped out of it. “Umm, yes, he might.”

  “I’ll fetch him.” And Nicholas was out of the room.

  I nodded to Jack and he followed Nicholas.

  Less than a minute ticked by in silence. Lyle’s hand was warm over mine, his thumb making gentle circles on my wrist. It was both calming and uncomfortable at the same time.

  I smelt Josh long before he entered the room, He smelt like everything I’d hunted before, everything I’d killed. He was no longer sun-kissed and smiling, he looked fearsome and strong. His nose twitched at the sight of Green, who still stood with his back to the wall.

  Nicholas had an arm around Josh’s shoulders and had given him the phone. Josh scanned the rest of us. He smiled at me, it was weak, but there was affection there. I wanted to smile back, but I couldn’t, looking at him as a vampire was too much. All my energy was being spent on not bursting into tears and ripping off Nicholas’s head. Jack lingered in the doorway guarding it.

  Josh tried to dial a number, but broke the phone in half; its insides tumbled from his hands. I’d been there. I knew the frustration that was lacing his thoughts, the horror starting to settle into his soul.

  But, he took a big breath and reached for another phone that he handed to Nicholas who then dialled the numbers. Josh spoke with someone for less than a minute then looked back up at us. He only looked at me. I was burning under that stare, like a cheap vampire in a Hammer House of Horrors movie that is set alight by the slightest rays of the dawning sun.

  “The weapon is at the Highfield Base, I’ve been there. The commanding officer is a guy called Mallock. He’s decent. If you get there in time and talk to him, he’ll stop it. I’m sure. They have no reports of survivors. If you show him evidence he’ll stop the bomb.”

  I moved toward him and Nicholas dropped his arm from Josh’s shoulders. “Thank you,” I said. I put my palms on Josh’s cheeks and kissed him. It was a soft touch that did nothing but hopefully meant everything.

  In that moment I was sure that he’d forgiven my wild fists from before that he knew that none of this mess was his fault. But just as his hand reached for my waist, Nicholas yanked him back.

  Quicker than I’d ever seen a vampire move, Josh struck Nicholas, his fist slamming into his sire’s gut and doubling him over. I would have had no intention of stepping between them, but I knew that Jack and Tate would and I didn’t want them to get hurt in the cross fire, so I pulled Nicholas back out of the way of a second punch. As I did Josh launched across the table at Green. He grabbed his friend’s shoulders and pulled him close, ready to bite through his neck. Green let out a shrill cry and I vaulted over the table, ducked down and swept Josh’s legs out from under him. He went down, but his grip was solid and he took Green down with him. As Josh started to get up, I grabbed Green’s foot and yanked him under and out of Josh’s grasp. Tate picked up Green in a rather embarrassing fireman’s lift and ran out of the room with him. I threw a look at Jack and he left with them. Lyle slammed the door shut behind them.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled at Josh. I kicked him back down and put my boot on his throat. He closed his eyes. The fight had left him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

  “Don’t be sorry, be better,” I said.

  Lyle knelt down and patted Josh’s chest, “Don’t worry, happens to us all at this stage.”

  “It didn’t happen to Jack,” Josh said. He was talking to Lyle, but staring straight up at me.

  “Different vampires have different reactions. Jack is quite a gentle soul really. I myself nearly killed a bus of nuns when I turned. It was only Tate and Philippe that stopped me.”

  That was a lie. A funny one, but still a lie. Lyle had been turned after he’d been shot in a duel. He, just like Jack, was at death’s door when he was transitioned to vampire and therefore missed this awkward adolescent crazy hunger and strength stage. He was just trying to make Josh feel better.

  Both vampires looked up at me.

  “Well, I won’t hold it against you. Everyone tries to kill Green,” I said.

  I took my boot away from his neck and held out a hand. Josh pulled himself up, but still held onto my hand as he did.

  When I looked behind me to see what Nicholas was doing, I found he was gone. The slippery devil must have managed to squeeze out with everyone else.

  “I think it’s pretty clear what we have to do.” Lyle clasped his hands behind his back and stared at me.

  “Where’s the nearest airfield from here?” I asked.

  “Too far away, you’d never get there and then fly over in time,” Lyle said.

  Just as I was about to erupt into another violent tantrum Lyle added, “But I did buy my own plane, which is fuelled and ready to go. It’s in a hanger across town.”

  “You bought a plane?” asked Josh.

  “Lyle is from a very rich family,” I explained.

  “Oh, Tate and Lyle, do you guys own the…”

  “No,” Lyle interrupted Josh.

  “I need to get going now.” I pushed past Josh and headed for the door.

  “Be careful.” In a quick, sweeping motion, Josh moved in front of me and hugged me, grinding
my ribs into his.

  “Always,” I whispered back. I had to be now that I had something I could lose.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “How old is Nicholas?” Tate asked, his eyes locked on mine. Lyle had filled him in on our earlier conversation.

  “I don’t know, seven hundred years maybe.”

  “Elders have to be over a thousand. Could he be that old?”

  “No, if he was that old, he’d be with them, not us.” I said the words but a part of me questioned them the moment they dripped off my lips. Had Ichabod just been yanking my crank with the whole Jesus line?

  Tate dropped his gaze as Lyle walked in to join us in the hanger, as we patiently waited for Green to prep the plane.

  “Josh is with Jack in his special room,” Tate whispered to me, “they’ll be safe.”

  “What are you two conspiring about?” Lyle asked, playfully echoing his brother’s previous question.

  “Nothing,” we both replied.

  “Here. A consistent reminder of what’s at stake.” Lyle picked up my wrist and carefully strapped a digital watch to it. It was counting down to the bomb in big red neon figures of doom.

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “Keep your wits about you; intelligence can be just as lethal as brawn.”

  “I’m not the brains here, Lyle. That’s your job. I’m just the gun you point at things you want dead.”

  Lyle huffed and shook his head, his blonde hair falling across his eyes as he did. “You’re not a gun, gorgeous you’re a weapon of mass destruction.”

  I smiled, “Then you better wield me carefully.”

  “Always.”

  “I’m calling Eddie.” Tate looked over at Lyle.

  “You won’t need to, he’ll already know, remember?”

  “Who the hell is Eddie?” I asked

  “He’s hard to explain.” Lyle shrugged.

  “He’s in the US? Does he have access? Can he stop what they’re going to do without us?”

  “Not really, he’s twelve years old.”

  My eyebrows shot up so quick they practically merged into my hairline, “Why would you call a twelve year old?”

  “He’s not really twelve, in fact he’s older than you, Brit.” Tate put a hand on my shoulder. Some really awful history was about to land square on them, and I knew Tate was trying to lend me his strength.

  “Eddie is Edward. He was a prince, heir to the throne; his uncle was Richard the Third.”

  “You know, Richard, the humpback king.” Lyle did a very convincing impression of a Quasimodo.

  “He was turned!” Nicholas yelled, as he appeared out of the shadows; that bastard had been eavesdropping on us the whole time.

  “Tolliver turned him. He was going to die and Toll didn’t want to lose Eddie’s gifts. The other prince remained human though, grew up and all that.” Tate didn’t look very convinced by his own words.

  “What the hell am I missing here? Who the hell is Tolliver? What gifts?”

  “Tolliver was mine and Phillippe’s friend. Way back before any of you were even born. We were called upon by the Elders to rescue the two princes from the Tower of London.” Nicholas said all this as if it was something I already knew, that he was simply giving my slow memory a gentle shove.

  “They were the princes in the tower?” I had read about them years ago. Both went missing, both had been presumed dead. Their Uncle Richard was supposed to be caretaking the throne for them, but had gotten used to ruling. He’d locked them in the tower for their ‘own good’. And they had never come out, or so we were led to believe.

  “Yes, revenants had seized the tower, and we four went in to save them. Tolliver discovered that the elder of the two, Edward, had psychic gifts. He took both boys away with him. Philippe told the Elders that they were dead. Toll travelled with them to the New World, to keep them safe.”

  “Four?” Lyle asked.

  “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is that I now know that Philippe helped Tolliver turn the prince and that you all have been conspiring against me.” He whispered that last part, sounding more hurt than angry.

  “It’s not like that. Toll needed help and we were the only ones he trusted with his secrets.” Tate tried to reach out to Nicholas, but was batted away.

  That was how Lyle had known to create this place. He had a creepy little royal boy with visions tucked away in the States. What an awesome addition to our band of merry misfits. For some reason, in my imagination Eddie looked just like the boy from The Addams Family. I’d never seen a child vampire before. It was against the law to turn one so young. Tolliver would have been hunted down for that, but of course no one knew that the princes had survived in the first place.

  “Okay, we’ll go to the States, plead our case with the Elders there and…”

  “Are you insane?” I interrupted Nicholas’s attempt at irony.

  “Brit is right. The plan is to get there and stop the nuclear attack at the base itself. Green has identified where we need to go. He even has another contact, just in case this Mallock doesn’t play ball. You land, kill anyone at the base that gets in our way…”

  I interrupted Lyle’s attempt at brutality. “We don’t kill anyone.”

  “What do you suggest?” asked Tate.

  “We go, we speak with Mallock, tell him that there are people still alive in the UK, still fighting. We explain about our bases in Ireland and the Highlands.”

  “And what if they do not want to listen?” Nicholas cocked his head and narrowed his already beady eyes.

  “Then we start killing.”

  The plane dominated the hanger. It was fat and terrifying and I hated the thought of climbing into its big metal belly and leaving my new home so soon after I’d found it. But if I didn’t, my new home would wither and die.

  “Britannia! Wait!”

  I turned to see Xyla jogging up to me. She had her hair scraped back in to a severe looking, cheek-lifting pony tail and her white coat was looking a little grimy.

  “I’m kind of busy.”

  “I have something for you.”

  A gift? Maybe she wasn’t that bad after all. Xyla rustled in her top coat pocket and brought out a long velvet pouch. Jewellery, this could be awkward! “What is it?”

  She opened the pouch and produced a syringe with a reddish liquid in. “It’s kind of an experiment, so only use it if you have to.”

  I took the syringe and sniffed it. It had a faint aroma of decaying blood. “Food?”

  “No, and it’s only to be used on you. I isolated the original zombie infection from your blood. It would seem that your antibodies have already worked it from your body. This is a dose of infection.”

  “You want me to infect myself?”

  I must have looked mad because she took a step back from me, “No! No, this has been engineered specifically for you. It will momentarily give you the abilities you had as a Zombie Vampire hybrid. I’m not sure for how long, but it should allow you to control the zombies around you until your body burns it off.”

  I turned the syringe around in my hand. Do I trust her? For all I knew it was a sedative that would leave me vulnerable at the wrong moment, or an acid that would burn my arm off.

  “Thanks,” I muttered back and pocketed the syringe.

  “It’ll only work for you, okay, don’t go injecting anyone else.”

  “What if I injected Nicholas with it?”

  “No! It was made from your blood alone. We don’t know if it would kill him or turn him into a Vambie. And, I get the impression that he shouldn’t be given zombie telepathic powers. I don’t trust him.”

  Ironic, I really didn’t trust her; but Lyle did, so maybe she wasn’t selling me a death sentence.

  “You know, you kind of remind me of Emma Watson, you know from Harry Potter,” she said, smiling at me.

  “Thank you.” Perhaps I could trust her; she seemed to have good taste.

  “Oh, it was an observation, not a compli
ment.” She grinned.

  “We’re ready to go!” Green yelled from the cockpit.

  I turned to leave, but Xyla grabbed my arm. “Seriously, Lyle needs you. We all need you. Stay safe.”

  I nodded at her. I zipped up my flight suit and joined two men that had both done me previous bodily harm in a giant flying metal death trap. Awesome. Thank goodness Tate was with me this time.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I gently pulled the clasp on my new watch then strapped it tighter to my wrist. The decreasing digital number on the front glowed in the dim light of the plane. The numbers were ticking away. The bomb itself might as well have been strapped to my arm. I wanted to press the reset button. To stop this new threat in its tracks without the bother of having to fight again. But, life isn’t like that, well my life anyway. There was always going to be one more last fight, one more call to arms before I could rest. I’d forgotten how tiring this was. To lumber from one confrontation to the next. There was a time that I sought out the fight. It wasn’t that long ago that England wasn’t just my home ground, but my hunting ground. And before that, I was an instrument that the Elders wielded, telling me that my kills were for the greater good; but I hadn’t really been listening back then and now suspected that anything they had told me were probably half-truths anyway.

  “Brianna, I need to talk to you.” Nicholas edged toward me, eyes downcast and his hands nestled in the pockets of his slim grey jeans.

  “I need to throw you out of this plane, but Lyle wants me to work with you. We don’t always get what we want now, do we?” I let my stare fall passively on him, forcing my face to be expressionless.

  “Since when do you take orders from Lyle?”

  “Seriously?” My eyes widened. “Are you actually trying to goad me into chucking you out of this plane?” I unbelted myself and stood before him, hands on hips.

  “No!” he put his hands up, “Good God, no. I was just…”

  “Trying to turn me against Lyle? I guess your cunning plan to turn him and Tate against me didn’t work out so well, so now you’re trying another tactic.”

  Nicholas shook his head, his brown hair covering his eyes. “Everything I do is wrong. I just can’t do anything right with you, can I?”