The Saga of Larten Crepsley 1-4. Darren Shan

have to think twice. I miss them so much, even all these years later.”

      “But I wasn’t as close to my family as you were to yours,” Larten said quietly.

      “All the same,” Wester sniffed, “they were your family. If I had a chance to see Ma again, to listen to Da grumbling about the weather, to fight over some stupid argument with Jon…”

      Wester fell silent. It was dawn outside. The two vampires sat in their room and watched the sun rising, the street outside coming into sharper focus.

      After a while, Larten sighed and stood. “I’m going out.”

      Wester nodded, asked no questions, and said nothing for a few minutes. Then, when he was sure that Larten had left the inn, he raised his voice slightly and said, “He’s gone.”

      In the room next to his came a muffled response from Seba. “Good.”

      Then the vampire master and his assistant lay back on their beds, separated by the thin wall, and stared anxiously at the ceiling, wondering where Larten would go and what he would find in the city of his long-lost youth.

      CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

      The city had changed vastly since Larten had fled from the factory. New factories had opened for business. Old houses had been torn down and rebuilt. There were whole streets and roads he didn’t remember at all.

      Yet much was as it had been, just a touch dirtier and dustier than before. The markets still existed, traders laying out their wares as they had when he was a child. Popular inns and taverns drew the same sort of rowdy customers. He passed familiar churches and government buildings.

      The silk factory was gone. That surprised Larten. He had never considered the possibility that it might have shut down or moved premises. When he first came to the building, he thought he had made a mistake and turned around slowly a few times, searching for the factory. When he realised that he had come to the right spot, he studied the structure in front of him. Some windows and doors had been replaced, a couple bricked up and a few more added. The sign over the main door had been changed. Larten could not read the new name, but he could tell by the smell that the place had been converted into an abattoir. That seemed appropriate to Larten, given the bloodshed he had experienced on his final day here.

      Larten thought of entering the building and asking about the silk factory and what had happened to it. But he decided it didn’t matter. It made no difference to him whether the owners had gone out of business or moved on.

      “I hope your ghost haunts this place,” Larten muttered beneath his breath, staring at the building and thinking of Traz. “I hope you became a tortured soul when I killed you, damned to remain trapped here forever. It’s all you deserve.”

      Larten spat on the pavement, then turned his back on the spot where the factory had stood and stormed away, pulling the collar of his coat up high, to shelter his neck as much as it could from the rays of the rising sun.

      Larten moved faster now, aware that he didn’t have much time. Even with his cap and coat, the light was starting to burn him. If he wanted to avoid a bad case of sunburn, he would have to conclude his business swiftly and get off the morning streets before the sun rose much higher. The midday world was no place for a creature of the night.

      Larten hurried through the old neighbourhood, familiar to him even after such a long hiatus. This part of the city hadn’t changed as much as other areas. The poor couldn’t afford to tear down and rebuild as freely as the wealthy, so they had to make do with what they had. Some old buildings had crumbled and were nothing but ruins, and a few new hovels had been constructed, but for the most part the borough had not been touched by the passage of time.

      When Larten came to the small, gloomy house that had once been his home, he felt his heart tighten and his eyes begin to water. Surprised by his reaction, he scowled and blinked away the tears. He almost turned and left without going any further, but he forced himself to skirt around to the yard at the back, so that he could not later accuse himself of fleeing from his painful memories.

      The pair of barrels stood as they always had, full of water, one for drinking, the other for washing. Larten entered the yard and angled towards the latter barrel. He was not afraid of being challenged. It was late morning and anyone who lived here should be at work. If that wasn’t the case and somebody was at home, he could simply claim to have stumbled into the wrong yard — all of the houses looked much the same from back here.

      Larten didn’t give much thought to the possibility that any of his family might still live here. It had been a long time. His parents had probably died, while his brothers and sisters would have almost certainly moved out to raise families of their own.

      Larten stood over the barrel and stared down at his reflection. He remembered the last time he had done this, how he had immersed his head then studied the patterns formed by the orange dye from his hair swirling in the water. Vur had been alive then. They had set off laughing for the factory, no idea of what lay ahead of them. If he could go back and warn those two boys of what they could expect from the rest of that day, would they believe him? Or would they dismiss him as a crank, certain that nothing so awful could happen to a pair of harmless, innocent boys?

      As Larten studied his melancholic expression, someone coughed inside the house and the back door began to open. Reacting instinctively, Larten leapt and grabbed hold of the wall to his left. He hauled himself up, then pounced on to the roof like a cat and spread himself flat. Edging forward, he studied the yard from a height, unseen and unnoticed.

      An elderly man stumbled out of the house and shuffled to the barrel of drinking water. He dipped in a mug, filled it, then drank slowly, hand trembling, drops spilling from the mug and dripping from his lips back into the barrel. When he was finished, he paused and looked up at the sky to check the weather.

      The man was Larten’s father.

      For a human of that time, Larten’s father was ancient. He had outlived virtually all of the people he had grown up with, Larten’s mother and several of his children too. His skin was wrinkled and stained with dark spots and patches. He was almost as skinny as a skeleton, and could not stand straight. His hair was long and untidily kept, caked with dirt. But despite its poor condition, it was a brilliant white colour. Traz’s dye had kept its sheen even after all these decades.