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

their contents smashed and scattered; next to the broken remnants of a pair of Chinese terracotta warriors lay the deflated corpses of three basketballs and the shattered glass of the tank they had floated in. His armchair had been shredded, its beautiful navy blue leather torn and hacked beyond repair, its stuffing spilling out like intestines. And spray-painted across the walls and ceiling, in a dozen different colours, was a single word.

    For almost a minute, Valentin didn’t move; he was frozen to the spot by the scale and frenzy of the invasion, his eyes wide, his face pale, the initial shock and outrage already evolving in the pit of his stomach into a boiling, howling fury beyond anything he could remember.
    Something in the centre of what was left of his desk caught his eye: a narrow sliver of dark pink. Valentin forced his body into action, floated across the room, and picked it up with his long fingers. It was a Bliss cigarette, one of many that had sat in an ornate rosewood box on his desk, and had miraculously survived the ransacking. Valentin placed it between his lips, found a match, and lit it, dragging the smoke deeply into his lungs. The potent mixture of tobacco, heroin and human blood thundered into his system, and he felt an ethereal calm settle over him.
    You should have expected this
, he told himself.
Valeri was here the day before you left. You should have known there would be a price to be paid for what you did.
    Valentin finished the cigarette and ground it beneath the heel of his shoe. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t sure what he should do next. His first instinct was to bellow for Lamberton, the butler who had served him faultlessly for almost a century. But Lamberton was gone, his heart torn from his chest by Valentin’s own hand, punishment for an act of stupidity that had threatened to blacken his master’s name along with his own. It was a misjudgement that still made Valentin furious with disappointment; Lamberton’s affection for his master had been exploited by the traitor Richard Brennan, and his determination not to trouble Valentin with the problem had left the ancient vampire with no choice but to destroy his oldest companion.
    I have not yet forgiven you,
he thought, as he floated back out into the corridor,
for what you made me do.
    Valentin felt a stab of pain in his heart as he looked at the priceless treasures that now lay in tatters; the accumulated wonders of a long life destroyed for reasons no grander than malice and spite. He flew slowly down the corridor towards the round atrium at the centre of the floor; there were identical spaces on each level of his home, the five above ground and the two below. All were flanked by two elevator shafts and opened on to the central staircase, the grand, sweeping column of marble and carved wood that Valentin thought of as the spine of the house.
    He was greeted in the atrium by another deluge of spray-painted insults, and the twisted, broken remains of the Alexander Calder mobile that had hung from the ceiling since Valentin had liberated it from an SS Colonel fleeing for South America in 1945. The mobile’s beautiful, delicate wings had been pulled down and torn apart, the broken shards strewn across the floor. Valentin stared at them, and realised he could not go downstairs; he knew what he would find, and the prospect of floating through the ruins of his life filled him with a despair so profound it was almost physical.
    Then something drifted through the silent atrium, carried up from below on the faintest current of air, and his eyes flooded a dreadful crimson-black. It would have been undetectable to anyone without Valentin’s supernatural senses, but to him it was as strong and clear as the beam of a lighthouse.
    It was the scent of a vampire.
    Still here,
he thought, and felt his body physically tremble with anticipation.
Whoever did this. They’re still here.
    The heat in Valentin’s eyes