From The Ramparts they trailed a vampire bartender to a warehouse rave in Budapest’s run-down industrial district. They dragged him out to the car park at the rear of the building, the bartender’s eyes wide and rolling, his teeth grinding as Bliss pumped through his system, and he told them that a huge man with a child’s face had dropped a card as he left The Ramparts four nights ago. The card was for a vampire club near Matthias Church, a place the bartender had only ever heard whispered about. When he claimed to not remember the address, Turner applied a UV torch to the vampire’s hand. It burst into flame, jogging his memory.
Outside a beautiful gothic townhouse on Balta Köz, the five men sat in a jet-black car, watching. Anderson, the huge child-faced vampire who served as Alexandru’s right-hand man, had entered the building two hours earlier, apparently unaware that anyone was watching. A small gold plate by the door of the townhouse had been engraved with the words Tabula Rasa, which Carpenter thought appropriate for a club frequented by vampires.
A blank slate is exactly what it gives them, he thought. The freedom to leave behind the people they were before they were turned, and start again.
“Colonel,” said Paul Turner, in a low voice. Carpenter looked round, and saw Anderson emerging from the carved stone doorway. The tall, hunched vampire cast a quick look up and down the quiet street, then stepped casually into the air and disappeared.
Carpenter turned to Private Miller, who was seated in the back of the vehicle, cradling a sleek black laptop that was connected to a spy satellite that was in geo-synchronous orbit above them.
“Do you have the heat trail?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” responded the young Operator. “He’s heading north by northwest, sir.”
Six minutes after dawn the following morning, Julian ordered their car brought to a halt in front of the Molnár estate. Two ornate metal gates stood open, the first rays of sunlight glimmering on the wrought iron. The five men had strapped and clipped their body armour into place during the drive, and there was a heavy sense of anticipation inside the vehicle. Carpenter looked at his team, and decided against saying anything more to them. If they weren’t ready, then nothing he could say at this late stage would correct that. And if they were, he didn’t want to give them anything extra to think about. They would soon have more than enough to deal with; of that he was quite sure.
The estate’s main building, an enormous seventeenth-century country house, squatted on top of a long, shallow rise, its upper floors visible from the gate. The road that led from the open entrance wound left then right, through dense lines of neatly clipped trees, then led straight up the hill towards a wide gravelled drive in front of the house. The trees fell away on both sides and the five Blacklight Operators were confronted with a hundred yards of immaculate, featureless lawn, a vast open space that would have filled Carpenter with dread were it not for the pale yellow sunlight reflecting off the morning dew.
They crossed the lawns quickly, moving in a tight X-shaped formation; Carpenter in the middle, Turner and Frankenstein leading the way, the two Privates bringing up the rear. Their boots crunched across the gravel as they approached the home of the Molnár family, and then Turner pushed open the towering front door and the five men slipped silently into the house.
The smell was the first thing that hit them as they stepped on to the tiled marble floor of the atrium; a stench of rot so thick it felt as though you could have bitten into it. A dark haze of flies looped lazily in an open doorway at the rear of the atrium, and Carpenter led them towards it. Beyond the door was a large, spotlessly modern kitchen, big enough to have serviced a medium-sized restaurant. The smell intensified as they entered, waving the swarming flies away with their gloved hands. On a counter above one of the ovens, in a steel baking tray, was a leg of roast lamb. It was a virulent purple colour, and had swollen to almost double its size as the rot set in. The meat was leaking a milky fluid that was collecting in a thick pool in the tray, and maggots were swarming in wide crevices that had split open in the decaying flesh. Flies buzzed in a dense cloud above it, landing and taking off in a swirling pattern of shiny black bodies and translucent wings. Beside the tray stood bowls of black, liquidising potatoes and vegetables, and a tray of crystal champagne flutes, their contents now long since flat.
Private Miller gagged, as quietly as he could.
“How long?” asked Turner, his voice as calm as ever.
“This time of year?” replied Carpenter. “A week, at least.”
The five men stood in silence, regarding the spoiled food. The likely implications for those who had been intending to eat it did not need vocalising.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Carpenter.
The team moved back into the lobby, a beautiful, cavernous space, with blond wood walls and gleaming black and white marble tiles. Above them, a domed window let in the morning sun, lending the place a sense of peace and calm that couldn’t have been further from what the men were feeling.
In the dining room, they found the bodies.
It was more a hall than a room, a long oak-panelled hall, lined on one side by windows that overlooked the pale green grass of the lawns. A dark wood dining table sat in the middle of the room; mouldy bowls of bread sat on delicate serving plates in the middle of the surface, and gleaming water glasses and ornate silver cutlery stood expectantly in front of empty chairs.
A cavernous fireplace sat in the middle of the far wall, and arranged around it were a number of comfortable-looking armchairs, no doubt the setting for thousands of after-dinner brandies over the years, and it was around these chairs that the Molnár family and their servants had been arranged.
There were six bodies in all. A man in his late fifties or early sixties sat in one of the armchairs, his head thrown back and his throat torn out. On his knee had been placed a girl, no more than seven years old, whose slender, pale neck bore two circular puncture marks. No other torment had been visited upon her, as far as Carpenter could see, and he felt a rush of relief at the quick death she had received, a privilege that had not been afforded the rest of the household.
The men approached slowly, although it was immediately obvious that nothing lived in this room. Their boots crunched softly as they tracked through a huge oval of dried blood, and even Turner winced at the sound. Two servants, a butler and a maid, had been laid end to end on the floor, their heads next to each other, their dead eyes staring up at the ceiling above them. Their throats had been slashed so violently that they almost been decapitated. Carpenter forced himself to focus on the last two victims, a boy and a girl in their early twenties. They had died with their arms around each other, huddled into one of the armchairs. The boy’s face wore an expression of defiance that brought a savage joy to Carpenter’s heart.
Good for you, boy, he thought. Didn’t give them the satisfaction. Good for you.
The girl, whose arms were wrapped tight around the boy’s neck, had clearly possessed no such steel; her face was a mask of terror and utter, hopeless misery. She had been beautiful, her face a perfect narrow oval, her hair the colour of barley, her limbs long and slender. She was dressed in a ball gown made of a silver material that shimmered in the morning sunlight.
They had both been bled white. Below the girl’s shapely face a second mouth had been opened on her throat, a savage grin of torn skin. The boy’s hands had been removed, the stumps of his arms ragged and chewed by the teeth of God alone knew how many vampires. There was not a drop of blood on either of the bodies, and it turned Carpenter’s stomach to think about where such a huge volume of liquid had gone.
“Sir.”
It was Private