Department 19: Zero Hour by Will Hill Read Free Book Online

was a hole in his memory, and the vampire wanted to know exactly how deep it went. He read the small numbers in the date window and felt his lips curl into a thin smile.
    It was two days later than he was expecting.
    Somehow, somewhere, he had lost forty-eight hours.
    The vampire dug his hands into the damp pockets of his coat and found a crumpled piece of paper in one of them. He pulled it out and unfolded it. Three words were scrawled on it, in a handwriting he didn’t recognise.

    For several long seconds, he merely stared at it. Then understanding flooded through him, as he realised what the words meant, and who had written them. He stuffed the note back into his pocket and buttoned his coat with fingers that were still numb.
    I have to tell them,
he thought.
They need to know that I found him. That there’s still a chance.
    The vampire known as Grey lifted himself easily off the ground, and flew steadily towards the distant light.

Valentin Rusmanov knew something was wrong the moment he touched down on the roof of his building.
    His home, which was not so much a house as an entire block of Central Park West reconfigured into a vast mansion, was equipped with a remarkable array of security systems: laser grids, pressure pads, motion-sensor cameras, decibel monitors, thermal evaluators. The small electronic panel that was resting in the inside pocket of his suit jacket should have begun to beep as soon as he landed on the tiled terrace between the roof gardens and the glass dome that topped the building, giving him thirty seconds to disarm the system before his home was locked down.
    Instead, there was nothing.
    Valentin took the panel from his pocket and had his suspicions instantly confirmed. Where there should have been a pattern of green blocks representing the various zones of the alarm system, there were only two words of glowing red text.
    SYSTEM FAILURE
    Valentin narrowed his eyes and felt his fangs slide smoothly down from his gums. He floated quickly across the roof, noting the dead blooms of jasmine and nightshade that hung limply in their marble pots, and found what he was expecting: the ornate double doors that controlled access to the roof, smashed to splinters. Valentin let out a low growl, and floated silently through the hole where they had stood.
    The staircase that led down from the roof opened on to one end of the corridor that ran the length of the top floor of the building, the floor which contained Valentin’s private suite of rooms. In the more than a century since he had taken ownership of the building, tens of thousands of guests had danced and drank and laughed and killed in its many rooms, at party after debauched party. But at every single event, each one thrown with the ancient vampire’s legendary style and generosity, there had been a single, non-negotiable rule.
    Nobody went to the top floor.
    Ever.
    That rule had evidently been broken in his absence. The corridor’s blood-red carpet was tracked with dirty footprints, and the pictures that had covered the long walls had been lifted from their hooks and smashed on the ground. Valentin surveyed the carnage, his heart accelerating in his chest. The corridor contained a mere fraction of his art collection, but had been home to several of his favourite pieces, including a Francis Bacon triptych that not even the most exhaustive record of the man’s works had ever listed. He floated slowly forward, trying to control the rage that was building within him, and gripped the handle of the door to his study. He took a deep breath before turning it, steeling himself for what he was sure he was going to see.
    The room had been destroyed.
    Valentin’s beautiful ornate desk, which had been carved from dark mahogany when the nineteenth century was still new, had been reduced to splinters and piled in the middle of the floor on top of a Persian rug that was now little more than lumps of coloured string. The shelves had been torn down from the walls,