LITMIR.BIZ

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reached under his armpits, and dragged him backwards out of the van.

      His heels scraped uselessly across the ground as, despite the panic that was coursing through him, Max forced himself to look around, to see if there was something, anything he might be able to use to save himself from the fate he knew awaited him. He was being hauled across a barren, weed and pebble-strewn patch of wasteland, a place he didn’t recognise; he had no idea how long he had been unconscious, and therefore no idea how far he might have been taken from his home. A squat industrial building rose up before him, its windows barred and broken, its bricks crumbling and its paint flaking away; it looked long abandoned. Max strained his supernatural hearing, listening for a human voice, the sound of a car engine, anything that might suggest that help could be nearby.

      He heard nothing.

      “That’s far enough,” said a voice from behind him.

      The fingers digging into his armpits disappeared, and Max tumbled to the ground, unable to do anything to break his fall. His head connected sharply with the ground, sending a fresh bolt of pain through his battered system, and he let out a gasping sob as he was pushed over on to his back. The two men with the white wolves on their chests crowded over him, torches in their hands, and his vocal cords dragged themselves into life, galvanised by a terror that was almost overwhelming.

      “Please,” he said, his voice slurred. “Please don’t kill me. Please. It isn’t fair.”

      One of the men tilted his head to one side. “What’s not fair about it?”

      “It’s not my fault,” said Max. “Being a vampire. It’s not fair. Please …”

      “What do you drink?” asked the man.

      Max stared up at him. “What?”

      “You’re a vampire,” said the man. “So you need to drink blood. Where do you get it?”

      “Raw meat,” said Max. He felt tears well in his remaining eye. “Butchers. Stray dogs and cats.”

      “Is that right?” asked the man, and squatted down beside him, his eyes narrow behind his balaclava. “What about Suzanne Fields?”

      “Who?” asked Max.

      “Surely you remember her?” said the man. “Pretty blonde, nineteen years old. You attacked her when she was walking home through Bridgford Park, then you drank her dry and broke her neck when you were done. Divers found her a week ago, at the bottom of the river half a mile from your house.”

      “I don’t know anything about her,” said Max, his voice low. “I never hurt—”

      “Don’t give me that,” said the man. “It’s time to come clean, Max. Time to confess your sins. It’ll be better for your soul, if you still have one.”

      The nightmare burst into his mind: the blonde hair, the screams, the taste of blood in his mouth, the freezing water as he pushed her under the surface. He had suppressed it, buried it as deep as it would go, but it bubbled up when he was at his most vulnerable; she had haunted him every night since he killed her.

      “I didn’t mean it,” he whispered, and let out a low sob. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

      “That’s good,” said the man. “Admit what you did. Be a man about it.”

      “I never wanted to be a vampire,” said Max, the combination of pain and misery flooding through his mind threatening to unmoor it. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t. You have to believe me.”

      “I do believe you,” said the man. “But that doesn’t change what you did.”

      The tears spilled out of Max’s eye and rolled down his cheek, burning across the ruined flesh like acid.

      “What makes it OK for you to kill me?” he asked. “What gives you the right to sentence me to death?”

      “It’s got nothing to do with rights,” said the man. “This is a war. And in a war you don’t show mercy to your enemies.”

      The black-clad man drew a wooden stake from his belt and held it out; Max stared at it, overcome by horror at the realisation that his life was going to end in this place, far away from his friends and the people he loved.

      “Make your peace with whatever you believe in,” said the man. “You’ve outstayed your welcome in this world.”

      Max closed his eye. He saw the faces of his friends, and felt his heart ache at the thought of never seeing them again. But then, in the depths of his despair, he felt a momentary bloom of relief: he was glad they had never known what he had become, that he had never had to see the disappointment on their faces.

      Because he had told the truth to the man who was about to murder him: he did regret the girl in the park, as he regretted the four others he had killed. He had never meant to hurt any of them; he had lost himself in the hunger, and by the time he had remembered himself, they had been dead.

      He couldn’t change it now.

      Couldn’t change any of it.

      It was too late.

      

      Jamie sat back in his seat and stared at the screen that had been folded down from the ceiling of the van. The connection to the Surveillance Division was active; all that remained now was to wait for their first alert of the night to come through.

      “What’s your bet?” asked Lizzy Ellison, from her seat opposite him. “Domestic disturbance? False alarm?”

      “Domestic,” said Qiang. “They are always domestic now.”

      Jamie shrugged. “You never know,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and actually see a real vampire tonight.”

      “Steady on, sir,” said Ellison, smiling broadly at him. “Let’s not get carried away.”

      Qiang let out a grunt of laughter, a sound that never failed to amaze his squad leader. When he had first arrived at the Loop, the Chinese Operator had seemed more like a robot than an actual human being: utterly professional, precise, and not given to conversation beyond what was necessary for the Operation at hand. Now, more than six months later and following a concerted campaign by both Jamie and Ellison, Qiang was a markedly different person. He was still unlikely to ever win the award for most light-hearted member of the Department, but he was now capable of making a limited amount of small talk, of telling his squad mates about the family and friends that he had left behind in China, and, on extremely rare and joyous occasions, making small, bone-dry jokes.

      As the months after Zero Hour had lumbered slowly past, Jamie had come to see his squad as a lone beacon of stability in a world that was becoming ever more uncertain, and when he had thrown himself into his job in an attempt to escape the misery and chaos that had been threatening to drag him down, his squad mates had been right there beside him. Neither Ellison nor Qiang knew the truth about his father, or why he no longer spoke to Frankenstein, but they knew about Larissa; everyone in the Department did.

      Word of her departure had raced through the Loop, causing dismay among those who understood that Blacklight was weaker without her and relief among the many Operators who had never truly been comfortable with a vampire wearing the black uniform. In the first days after her disappearance, dozens of Jamie’s colleagues had asked him what had happened, if he had any idea where she might have gone, until his patience began to visibly wear thin and people realised that questioning him further would have been unwise.

      The only thing Ellison and Qiang had ever asked was whether he was all right. He had told them that he wasn’t, but that he didn’t want to talk about it, and they had left it at that. It had been

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