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

built to an almost unbearable temperature. He floated in the air, letting the scent of the intruder fill his nostrils, tasting heat and blood and sweat. Then he swept silently forward, his jacket billowing out behind him, and descended the staircase like a bird of prey. He ignored the graffiti and destruction in the atria as he soared through them; his mind was burning solely with the prospect of vengeance. Within seconds, he was standing before the grand double doors that led into the ground-floor ballroom, the cavernous space where he had first encountered an agent of what would become known as Blacklight, where the chain of events that had led him to this moment had been set in slow, languorous motion.
    Valentin took a deep breath, then threw open the doors. They hit the walls of the atrium with a noise like coffin lids slamming shut, the impact reverberating through the thick stone of the old building. He stepped into the ballroom and took a quick glance around the room; the grand chandelier, beneath which thousands of men and women had twirled and spun, lay shattered across the black and white marble floor. Tiles had been torn up and hurled throughout the room, sticking out of the walls and ceiling like splinters in skin. The long bar that ran the length of the far wall had been tipped over and smashed, its bottles and glasses now little more than a carpet of twinkling wreckage spreading out across the broken tiles. Then he saw the two figures standing at the edge of the floor, and the damage to the room was forgotten.
    The vampires were embracing, frozen in the middle of what looked to Valentin’s experienced eye like an amateurish waltz. The woman was wearing a long ballgown dripping with jewellery that he immediately recognised; it had been taken from the collection in his dressing room on the fifth floor. The man was wearing a tuxedo that had been crafted for Valentin by Coco Chanel in her apartment on Rue Cambon, as Europe breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the Great War. They stared at him with wide eyes, with the guilty half-smiles of people who have been caught doing something they are not supposed to.
    “At last,” said the man, finding his voice first. “The traitor returns. I’m surprised you have the nerve to show your—”
    The last words the man ever spoke died in his throat as Valentin crossed the ballroom in a blur of navy blue and trailing red. The vampires, who had been happily desecrating his home for almost a month, didn’t have time to blink before he was upon them.
    Valentin closed a pale hand round the man’s neck, crushed his windpipe as though it was tissue paper, and threw him across the cavernous room. The vampire crashed into the panelled wall, sending an explosion of blood and splintered wood into the air, then slid to the floor, clutching weakly at his neck as his face turned rapidly purple. The woman’s eyes began to redden as her mouth yawned open, but before she could form a single syllable, Valentin shoved his hands through skin and muscle and took hold of her shoulder bones, his fingernails scraping across them like metal down a blackboard.
    Blood gushed out across the backs of his hands, soaking the cuffs of his shirt, as the woman threw back her head and screamed in agony. Valentin lifted her into the air, blood raining down on to his face and neck, and spread his arms wide. The woman came apart with a sound like a roll of paper being torn in half, huge and wet. She fell to the ground in two pieces, her eyes wide with shock as her insides spilled out across the black and white tiles.
    Valentin wiped blood from his own eyes and saw the woman’s heart lying in the centre of the steaming mess. He stamped it flat, and what was left of the vampire burst with a series of pitiful bangs and thuds. Valentin had already turned away, and was bearing down on the other stricken male vampire like the angel of death, a bloodstained vision from the depths of some terrible