Redlaw - 01 (15 page)

“I don’t think you’re animals,” said Redlaw. “Frankly, I’ve never been able to make up my mind what you are. The best I can come up with is ‘people but not quite.’”

“Meaning less than people?”

“In some ways more.”

“Interesting,” said Illyria. “At any rate, you said when we last met that you would be coming back to find out what, if anything, I had discovered about the blood deliveries. You have not done so, and with the situation deteriorating as it is, I felt it best to seek you out instead.”

“Deteriorating? How bad are things actually getting?”

“Aren’t you aware? It is you lot who are stirring up the most trouble.”

“My lot? SHADE?”

“Humans in general. SHADE officers are carrying out what they are calling ‘pre-emptive strikes’—charging into SRAs, inflicting casualties and then pulling out again as quickly as possible. It’s either punishment or deterrence, nobody’s sure which, perhaps not even they themselves. Civilians, meanwhile, are taking matters into their own hands—not just Stokers, although they’re at the core of it. There are bands of them going about like paramilitaries. They cut through the SRA fences, plant fire bombs or else simply use stakes, whatever gets results. Naturally, vampires aren’t taking any of it lying down.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Beyond what I have seen for myself in Hackney?” She shrugged. “Half an hour pretending to drink tea in a café where there’s a television on. It isn’t difficult.”

“Nor, it seems, is leaving your Residential Area.”

“I come and go as I please. The boundary is hardly impenetrable, and looking as I do, no one has grounds to be suspicious.”

“Why stay in an SRA at all?”

“I have my reasons. Besides, would I be welcome among so-called normal people, if they knew what I was?”

“I suppose not,” Redlaw admitted. “So, what have you managed to learn about the causes of the rioting? Is the problem just that it’s cattle blood, or—”

At that moment, the night-shift ward sister popped her head round the door. She was a jovial West Indian, so fat her body seemed to be composed entirely of spheres.

“I thought I heard voices in here.” She wagged a stubby forefinger. “Mr Redlaw, you can’t be sitting up having guests at this hour. How you going to heal, if you don’t get your proper rest?”

Redlaw noted a sudden rigidity in Illyria’s body, as when a cat spies a mouse. He did the only thing he could, which was gesture at her and say, “Dr Strakosha isn’t a guest. She’s giving me an examination. Aren’t you, Dr Strakosha?”

Illyria hesitated. Then she turned and smiled at the nurse, without parting her lips.

The ward sister should have been mollified but wasn’t. Her gaze flicked to the surgical mask round Illyria’s neck, then to Illyria’s knee boots, then back to Illyria’s face.

“You a specialist?”

Illyria nodded, again making sure her lips stayed firmly together.

“Never heard of no specialist making patient calls at one in the morning.”

“It’s a private consultation,” Redlaw said. “She’s a... a personal friend of mine.”

The ward sister made little effort to hide her scepticism. “Personal friend, huh?” she said and sucked her teeth slurpily. “Yeah, and I’m Naomi Campbell.”

“It’s true, I assure you.” Redlaw wasn’t, he knew, the world’s greatest liar. He’d had almost no practice. “She’s seeing me as a favour.”

“Tell you what,” the ward sister said, “I’m going to my station and I’m sitting down at the computer and I’m checking to see if there’s a Dr Strakosha registered anywhere. And when I find there isn’t, which I will, I’m coming back here with security and I’m having you, lady, kicked out of this building on your skinny behind. Favour! Is that what they’re calling it these days? And you, Mr Redlaw. A SHADE officer. A man of faith. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

She was gone before Redlaw could remonstrate any further.

“Well, that’s torn it,” he said to Illyria. “You’ll have to leave.”

“Why?”

“She thinks you’re a prostitute, that’s why.” It would have been funny if it wasn’t so offensive.

“No, I meant why, when all I have to do is go after her and kill her?”

“Over my dead body,” Redlaw snarled.

“If that’s how it has to be...”

“It is. Why do you think I came up with that cock-and-bull ‘consultation’ story just now? To save that woman’s life. If I’d done anything but cover for you, you’d have pounced on her and ripped her heart out. And if you try it now, I will do everything I can to stop you.”

She eyed him loftily, and at the same time probingly. “Why do you care about her? You don’t know her. She’s no one.”

“She’s a human being. It’s my responsibility to protect her from your kind.”

“And not us from your kind?”

“That too.”

“You aren’t doing a very good job, on present evidence.”

“I’m stuck in this wretched hospital, aren’t I?” he said. “I want to be out there helping sort things out, believe me, but it’s not easy. I was trying to get myself dressed when you turned up and I wasn’t managing even that.”

“You need someone’s help, don’t you?”

“Why, you offering?” Redlaw asked facetiously.

“Yes, I am.”

It took him a moment to accept that she was sincere. “And what on earth would you want to do that for?”

“I’m not entirely sure, except that I have a feeling that together we may achieve more than either of us could alone. You will clearly have difficulty fending for yourself, with your arm the way it is. You need my aid, eh what.”

“And what would you be getting out of it in return?”

“If it’s at all possible to find a way of ending the hostilities between humans and Sunless before they escalate completely out of control, I must do so, and that would be markedly easier in the company of someone such as you. You can go places I can’t. You have contacts and resources that I don’t. It’s not something that I particularly desire, forming an alliance with a SHADE officer—John Redlaw, no less—but circumstances make it necessary.”

“It’d be no great source of joy for me either, I hope you realise.”

“That’s fine. As long as we both understand that it would be a marriage of convenience and nothing more. I speak strictly metaphorically, of course.”

“Of course,” said Redlaw. “A temporary coalition. A deal with the Devil, even.”

“For both of us. But we should hurry. It wouldn’t be good to run into security men—not good for
them
, that is.”

“I take your point. Pass me those trousers, and if you don’t mind, turn your back.”

“Won’t you have trouble getting them on with just one arm?”

“I’ll manage.”

“How about undoing those ties at the back of your nightdress?”

She thought she was being cute and sly, but as far as Redlaw was concerned she was simply being annoying.

“Turn. Your. Back.”

“Oh, very well.”

Several excruciating minutes later, Redlaw was dressed and hobbling down the fire staircase to the ground floor, accompanied by Illyria.

The central lobby heaved with people. One after another, ambulances decanted casualties and raced off to fetch more. A&E medics were busy performing triage, establishing the hierarchy of the injured. Mainly there were Sunless-inflicted wounds—claw marks, bites, abrasions—and burns resulting from incompetent use of homemade fire bombs by amateur arsonists. Groans and low, urgent conversations filled the air.

Redlaw and Illyria skirted the edge of the room, heading for the door. A man, seeing the white coat and mistaking Illyria for a real doctor, reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Please,” he demanded. His other hand clamped a bloodied cloth to the side of his head. “How much longer have I got to wait before I get seen?”

Illyria’s face contorted. Redlaw couldn’t tell whether she was affronted to have been latched on to like this by a human or her thirst had been aroused by the sight of the blood soaking the cloth. Either way, he needed to intervene, in case she was unable to control herself.

“It should be your turn any moment,” he said, unpicking the man’s fingers. “Just be patient.”

“I could have dealt with him,” Illyria muttered as Redlaw led her away.

“That’s exactly what I was afraid of,” he replied.

They had almost made it to the exit when somebody called out, “Captain!”

A uniformed SHADE officer numbered among the wounded. Redlaw recognised the face—a recent recruit who worked London’s north-east quadrant too—although the name eluded him. He was finding it increasingly hard to keep abreast of who was who among the junior ranks. All those twentysomethings had begun to look alike to him—the same smooth features, the same brightness about the eyes, the same hopeful air.

“Captain, sir, it’s you,” the young man said. His hand rested gingerly in his lap, wrist puffy, either sprained or broken. “You’re okay. I heard you were at death’s door.”

Redlaw decided to ignore him. He pushed Illyria on towards the door.

“Captain?” said the shady, perplexed. “Captain, what’s up? Why are you—?”

Then Redlaw and Illyria were outside, in the chilly spring night air, and Redlaw could hear the junior officer saying to the person next to him, “See that? One of the top men in my quadrant. Just waltzed out without a word. He’s got a reputation for being standoffish, but honestly! That’s plain rude.”

“You hurt the poor chap’s feelings,” said Illyria.

“I’ll get over it and so will he,” said Redlaw. “It’s a pain that he spotted me. My boss is going to find out sooner than I’d hoped that I’ve done a bunk, and when she learns I was in the company of some unidentified female, she’s going to get very inquisitive indeed.”

“Does it matter to her if you’re no longer in hospital?”

“Very much so,” said Redlaw, “seeing as I’m not actually formally on the SHADE payroll right now.”

“What the deuce do you mean?”

“I mean I’m on suspension and I’m supposed to be lying in that bed upstairs re-evaluating my life and career.”

“In other words, this is making you a fugitive,” said Illyria.

“After a fashion.”

She looked at him askance. “But you’re John Redlaw, the quintessence of a Night Brigade man. What’s happened to you? How can things have gone so awry?”

“I don’t know. They just have. Taxi!”

A black cab had pulled up at the hospital entrance to let out an intern who’d been summoned from home to cope with the rush. Redlaw hailed it, and was then faced with the unpleasant task of hunching over and climbing in. Illyria offered him a hand, but he waved it away and managed by himself, with arthritic delicacy and stiffness.

“Where to, guv?” the cabbie asked.

“Ealing,” said Redlaw, and gave the address of his flat.

“Why there?” said Illyria as she settled in beside him in the back.

“I need to arm myself. I’m not doing anything ’til I’ve got some weaponry on me.”

“Don’t like being around me without a stake handy?”

“That has some bearing on it.”

London was not London that night, not London as Redlaw understood it. It had become a city of insomniacs; an eerie, transformed place where the horizon was lit up by the glow of a dozen major fires, and whole areas were cordoned off by police and SHADE officers, and lights shone in most windows, and there wasn’t a single street where people weren’t gathered on the pavement in huddles or someone wasn’t running somewhere or away from something. Sirens were an almost constant refrain, whooping and dopplering, the sounds playing hide and seek among the buildings. Helicopters—police and media—jackhammered overhead.

“Been ruddy pandemonium, it has,” the cabbie said over his shoulder. “From sundown on. Yesterday night wasn’t much to laugh about, but this...” He clucked his tongue. “The wife told me not to go out. Said she had a feeling it would get messy. Woman’s intuition. Turns out she was right. But I said to her, ‘What am I going to do, luv? Stay at home and not earn a penny? Cabs still ran during the Blitz,’ I said, ‘and this ain’t the Blitz. Not quite. Not yet.’ Oh, will you look at that. More bleedin’ looters.”

Some youths had smashed a mobile phone shop window and were scurrying off with armfuls of goods. An alarm bell shrilled in vain.

“I’d give them a smack round the earhole, the lot of ’em, if I had the chance,” the cabbie said. “Little tossers, pardon my language, missus. Not as bad as vampires but near as. Vamps, now, they’re just trouble and have been from the start. Why couldn’t they have stayed put? That’s what I want to know. In their own countries, I mean. Up ’til twenty years ago we didn’t even know they existed! They were just, you know, Dracula, Christopher Lee, virgins in floaty dresses and that. Now they’re flippin’
everywhere
. What was so wrong with lurking in secret in East Europe or wherever? That not good enough for them? Better prospects overseas? Thought they’d have an easier time of it in soft-touch Britain? Hah!”

“Perhaps they had to leave,” said Illyria, “to escape persecution.”