Department 19: Zero Hour (65 page)

A chill barrelled through Frankenstein’s body. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Did you ever hear the rumours about a vampire who was cured?” asked Julian. “The one people called Adam?”

“I heard them,” said Frankenstein.

“Well, I found him,” said Julian. “I spent almost a year searching for him, after you told me what had happened to Marie, and I found him. He was living in this cabin in the middle of the California desert. We talked, but he drugged me and I had a vision. I saw Jamie, with red eyes and fangs. He looked at me and told me I was too late. It’s why I handed myself in to NS9, Frank. I had to know whether what I’d seen was the truth. And honestly, every minute I spent in a cell was worth it to know he was all right. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” said Frankenstein, trying not to let his relief appear in his voice. “I understand.”

“Then last night I had a nightmare. The worst I’ve ever had. I woke up screaming, if you can believe that. I was in our old house, and I could hear Marie singing to Jamie when he was little. And then he was on the ceiling, covered in blood, and his eyes were red.”

“It was a dream, Julian,” said Frankenstein.

“He told me I was too late,” said Julian. “In the dream. He told me again.”

“Coincidence,” said Frankenstein, hoping he sounded surer than he felt. “Your brain digging for the worst thing it could find.”

“Maybe,” said Julian. He didn’t sound remotely convinced. “You’ll look after him for me, won’t you? When you go after Dracula. You’ll remember what you swore?”

“Of course I will,” said Frankenstein, his voice catching. “I have never forgotten.”

“It makes it easier, you know?” said Julian. “Knowing that you’re looking out for him. I know how much you care about him.”

“I do,” said Frankenstein. “And I’ll do my best to protect him, like I always have.”

“I know you will,” said Julian. “That’s why you have to promise me something. One last favour, for old times’ sake.”

Frankenstein drained his coffee and frowned in his empty quarters. “What is it?”

“If you don’t stop Dracula,” said Julian. “If Zero Hour comes, and the two of you survive, I want you to promise that you’ll bring Jamie to see me.”

“Julian …”

“I know, Frank, just don’t say anything now, OK? Just think about it. Please? We both know what happens if Zero Hour isn’t stopped, so what harm could it do? Think about what it really means to protect him, to do what’s best for him.”

“I
am
thinking about that,” said Frankenstein, his voice sharper than he intended. “I always do.”

“Promise me,” said Julian.

“No,” said Frankenstein. “I will not promise. If we fail to stop Zero Hour, I’ll consider it. But I’m not giving you any guarantees, Julian. And I suggest you ask yourself whether you genuinely have
his
best interests at heart, or your own.”

“Fine,” said Julian, his voice suddenly as cold and heavy as a glacier. “I’ll do that.”

“All right,” said Frankenstein. He felt guilty for refusing to promise Julian what he had asked for, and angry with his old friend for putting him in a position where he had to. “I have to go, Julian. It was good to hear your voice.”

“Yours too,” said Julian, his voice now low and empty. “Good luck out there. Take care of my boy. Out.”

Frankenstein turned off the radio. He was overcome with a sudden desire to smash it to pieces against the wall, and found himself gripping it so tightly that the plastic began to creak. When the urge to destroy had passed, he put the radio back into the locker where it had lain dormant for so many months, and got up to make himself more coffee with trembling hands.

Jamie Carpenter nodded to the Operator behind the desk in the security station and walked quickly down the cellblock on Level H.

He knew from experience that his mother would already be able to hear his footsteps, and would most likely already have identified the smell of him; it was the aspect of vampirism, one that Larissa shared, that had always made him feel most uneasy. Knowing he was coming before they should have been able to felt weirdly like being able to see into the future.

Now, with his head pounding as he struggled to adjust to the sensory overload that came with being a vampire, he was mostly full of admiration at their ability to handle it without going completely crazy. It was as though a two-dimensional world had suddenly been opened up around him; he could hear the breathing of the Operator he had just passed, even though he could no longer see her, could read the printed letters on the notice at the end of the cellblock, even though it was still more than a hundred metres away, and could smell the mingled scents emanating from his mother’s cell with a clarity that was disarming.

There was the warm, bitter smell of old tea, the luxurious, pungent aroma of flowers, and the complicated, ethereal aroma of her living, breathing self. Much of it was a mystery to his newly transformed sense of smell, individual scents that seemed redolent of fear and trepidation, of determination and compassion. But shining out of the core of her, filling his nose and head and heart, was a pure, bright pillar of a single unmistakable emotion.

Love.

For him.

It bloomed out of the cell in a cloud so thick it ought to have been visible; it brought tears to Jamie’s eyes as he approached the cell, and a hot ball of shame into his chest.

I always took it for granted that she loved me,
he thought.
I knew, but I never
really
knew. I never really saw, until now.

Jamie’s heart suddenly blazed with fiery pride at the memory of rescuing his mother from the clutches of Alexandru Rusmanov. But in the same instant, a familiar voice in the back of his head, the one which had been so loud and insistent during the terrible days when she was missing, began to whisper its usual poisonous refrain.

You don’t deserve her love. You never have. You’re a bad son.

Jamie pushed the thought away, as far back and as deep as he could. There was truth in what it said, he knew there was, but he could not afford to dwell on it, not now. The orders for the Château Dauncy operation had beeped on to the screen of his console two minutes earlier, barely ten minutes after he had filed out of the Ops Room. He had read them and walked straight to the lift, even though he was desperate to know which of his friends would be going to France, and to find Frankenstein and explain what had happened to him in Romania.

He wanted his mother to be the first to know what he was about to be part of.

He owed her that much, and more.

Jamie took a deep breath, forced a smile, and stepped out in front of the cell. His mother was standing in the middle of the square room, staring at him with eyes that were wide and damp with tears, her hands over her mouth.

His first thought was,
She knows.

His second was,
Of course she knows, you idiot. Did you think she wouldn’t be able to tell you’d changed?

“Oh no,” said Marie, her voice tiny. “Oh, Jamie. What happened?”

“It’s all right, Mum,” he said, his voice wavering wildly, then ran his ID card down the sensor on the barrier. The UV wall disappeared and he stepped into the cell. “I’m all right.”

“Was it her?” asked Marie. “Did Larissa do this to you?”

Jamie’s eyes widened with surprise. “No,” he said. “God, no. Of course not. She wouldn’t—”

“Tell me the truth, Jamie,” said Marie, her eyes narrowing and flickering red.

“I am, Mum,” he said. “This is the last thing she ever wanted, honestly it is. She’s heartbroken.”

He felt tears rise into the corners of his eyes and blinked them away, furiously. But his mother saw them, and the red glow died instantly in her own; she swept forward, her feet above the ground, and wrapped him in a hug so tight he could barely breathe.

“What a mess,” she whispered. “What an awful mess this is. What are we going to do?”

Jamie gently prised her arms from around him, and smiled with as much conviction as he could muster. “It’ll be OK,” he said. “For us, and for everyone else like us. Matt found something in America that’s going to make it all OK.”

“A cure?” asked Marie, her eyes lighting up with hope.

Jamie shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “But he’s hopeful that it will be soon. Then this will all just be a bad memory, Mum.”

Marie nodded. He could see in her eyes that she was trying her hardest to believe him.

“Have you thought this through, Jamie?” she asked. “Have you really thought about what it means?”

“I haven’t really had a chance to think about anything,” he said. “It only happened last night. But I’ve been dating a vampire for six months, Mum. I know all about it.”

“No,” said Marie, and shook her head. “You don’t. And if Larissa was here she’d tell you the same thing. You can’t know unless it happens to you.”

“It
has
happened to me,” he said, softly.

“You’ll never see the sun again,” she said, her voice quiet and full of sorrow. “Never again. Never feel it on your skin. Never watch a sunrise, or a sunset.”

“I know, Mum.”

“And you have to drink blood. Every day, whether you want to or not. You can’t imagine how awful that is.”

“I know,” he repeated. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because part of me is worried that you think this is some kind of grand adventure,” she said, her tone suddenly deadly serious. “Some exciting game that you can play until your friend comes up with some magic pill and we all go back to normal. But that’s not the truth, Jamie. It’s a curse, a bloody curse, and there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it.”

Jamie stared at her for a long moment, his heart beating rapidly in his chest.

“I’m sorry,” she said, eventually. “I know how hard this is, and I didn’t mean to shout. But you have to accept that I know what I’m talking about.”

“I do,” he said, his voice low. “I really do, Mum.”

She looked at him and nodded. Then her face crumpled, and she lowered her head as she began to cry.

Jamie stood helplessly for a long moment, staring at his mother as her shoulders trembled and her chest heaved. Then he stepped forward and pulled her tightly against him.

“It’s OK,’ he whispered. “Don’t cry, Mum. It’ll be OK.”

She didn’t respond, but her arms wrapped round his waist.

“Seriously,” he said. “You’re going to set me off. And I can’t cry in my uniform, Mum. Everyone will take the piss.”

His mother raised her head and gave him the smallest of sad smiles. “It’s just not fair, Jamie,” she said, her voice cracking. “Why did this happen to us? What did we do to deserve any of it?”

“Nothing,” said Jamie, firmly. “We didn’t do anything. None of this is our fault. It’s not Dad’s fault either. Bad things happen.”

“They do,” said Marie. “They really do. I’m so proud of you, Jamie. You know that, don’t you?”

A huge lump leapt into his throat. “Yeah,” he managed. “I know, Mum.”

“Do you want tea?”

Jamie smiled. Tea was his mother’s first line of defence against whatever the world had to throw at her, an almost automatic response.

“Yes, please,” he said. “I’d love a tea.”

She let go of him, nodded, and set about laying out cups and saucers. As the kettle began to boil, she looked over at him with a small smile on her face.

“Have you flown yet?” she asked.

Jamie smiled. “Not yet, Mum. I was only turned twelve hours ago.”

“There’s no point denying what you are,” said Marie. “That’s what Valentin told me. You might as well enjoy one of the few good things about it. Give it a try.”

Jamie’s smile widened, then his face furrowed into a mask of concentration.

“It’s not like any other kind of movement,” said Marie, watching him carefully. “Not like walking or running or jumping. You have to sort of think yourself into the air.”

“OK,” said Jamie. He focused on the ground beneath his boots, trying to imagine separating from it, trying to force his body to do something impossible. His legs started to tremble with effort, the muscles vibrating beneath his skin. Sweat began to bead on his forehead, and a dull ache settled into his neck and shoulders. He was on the verge of giving up when something clicked in his mind, some switch that had been dormant his entire life; he rose an unsteady few centimetres from the ground and hung there, his arms flailing redundantly for balance at his sides. He felt heat spill into his eyes as they widened with delight, and he grinned at his mother, who was watching him with a mixture of pride and profound sadness. Her expression broke his concentration and he dropped back to the ground.

“I did it,” he said. “You saw that, right? I totally did it.”

Marie nodded, then spun elegantly through the air, smiling widely at him.

“It’s like that, is it?” he asked, grinning up at her.

She shrugged with fake nonchalance, her smile widening even further.

Jamie reached into his mind and found the switch; it was far easier now he knew it was there, knew what to feel for. He bore down on it and this time he shot up into the air, his body flipping forward, out of control. Marie swooped down, took hold of his arms, and righted him; they hung in the air of her cell, mother and son grinning at each other like schoolchildren.