Larissa nodded. “Please.”
Kate pulled her console from her belt, unlocked it, and scrolled to the chip location programme. She searched for Jamie’s name, and pressed his ID number with her thumb. The console vibrated in her hand as it worked, then fell still as the results appeared.
“He’s somewhere in Kent,” said Kate. “A village called Brenchley.”
“Shit,” said Larissa, and grimaced. “That can’t be good.”
“Why?” asked Kate. “What’s in Brenchley?”
Larissa shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Thank you, Kate. I’ll see you later.”
“Larissa, wait—”
But the vampire girl had already turned and flown through the hangar doors at the end of the corridor. Kate momentarily considered following her, but she knew how fast her friend was; Larissa would likely be several miles away already, and accelerating. Instead, she stared at the yellow and black striped doors, her heart suddenly full of worry.
Larissa flew south-east, the wind whipping her hair back, her stomach churning with nervousness that felt increasingly close to panic.
It had been wrong to leave Kate standing in the Level 0 corridor without an explanation, but she had not been able to help it; the news that Jamie was in Brenchley, the location of his childhood home, had sent an awful chill running up her spine. That her boyfriend had left the Loop with Frankenstein without telling her was cause enough for concern; it was clearly a private matter, and private matters involving the monster and the Carpenter family were rarely sources of light and happiness. The fact that Frankenstein had returned home alone had deepened her unease, especially after she had seen the thunderous look on the monster’s face as he strode through the hangar, and the results of Kate’s chip search had been the final straw; she needed to see her boyfriend immediately. Not least because a voice in the back of her head, the one she hated and tried her hardest to ignore, was whispering that whatever was happening with Jamie was very likely related to the secret that she had made the decision to keep from him.
It’s not fair, she thought, as she urged herself ever faster through the night air. I was going to tell him. I was literally on my way to tell him.
But the voice in her head was unsympathetic.
You could have told him a hundred times, it whispered. That you didn’t is nobody’s fault but your own.
The dark countryside swept past below, dotted with yellow lights from roads and buildings, from which Larissa’s supernaturally powerful ears made out snatches of conversation and the occasional bar of music. Her console was in her hand, and she was following its GPS reader towards the small village where Jamie and his parents had lived before the supernatural had intruded on their lives. Although the truth was that Julian Carpenter had opened the door to it, unbeknownst to his family.
Eighteen miles. Should be there in a couple of minutes.
She shivered. Her altitude and speed were making the climate-control system of her uniform work overtime to keep her warm, but she knew the shudder had nothing to do with the temperature; it was the result of her growing certainty that, no matter how fast she pushed herself towards her boyfriend, it was already too late.
Larissa swooped down until she was barely clearing the tops of the trees, and headed straight towards the red dot at the centre of her console’s screen. An empty country road stretched out beneath her and she followed its slowly winding curves, slowing her speed as she banked left and right. Up ahead, a small cluster of houses appeared, set back from the road and surrounded by a dark landscape of fields and woods. The red dot stopped moving, but she would have known she was close to Jamie without its assistance; she had picked up his unmistakable scent floating on the gentle night breeze.
She zeroed in on it, a potent combination of both her boyfriend’s distinctive smell and something that bloomed from the centre of her being: familiarity, connection, and love, as clear and bright as a beacon. The road swept away to the right, and just before the bend stood a house, a large, slightly rambling pile of old bricks with an angular tiled roof, a long garden at the back and a front lawn leading down to a towering oak tree that extended far out over the road.
Sitting on one of its highest branches, staring down at the old house, was Jamie.
She brought herself to a halt, floating easily in the air, and stared at her boyfriend. He was pale, which was not unusual, but his skin looked almost grey, apart from around his eyes, where it was red. She felt her heart thump in her chest; she wanted to go to him, to cross the space between them and wrap him in her arms, but she didn’t dare.
She was not yet sure exactly what she was dealing with.
“Hey,” she said, cautiously.
Jamie forced the tiniest smile she had ever seen him produce. “Hey,” he said. “How did you find me?”
“Kate ran your chip for me,” said Larissa. “I was worried about you, Jamie.”
He nodded his head, and returned his gaze to the house. She floated where she was, unsure of what to do and hating the feeling.
“This was where he was,” said Jamie, eventually, his voice low. “Alexandru. The night it happened, he was in this tree with his followers. I heard him laugh, but I couldn’t see anything. It was dark and everything was covered in shadows.”
“There wasn’t anything you could have done,” said Larissa. “He’d have killed you without a second thought.”
Jamie stretched out an arm and pointed down at the house. “You see that window? The big one?” Larissa followed the path of his finger and nodded. “That’s where I was,” he continued. “I was looking through that window because I heard Dad’s car pull into the drive and I was so excited that he was home. I was always so pleased to see him.”
“Of course,” she said. “You were just a kid.”
Jamie nodded again, and fell silent. After a seemingly endless moment, Larissa forced herself to speak.
“What’s going on, Jamie?” she asked. “Where did you and Frankenstein go this afternoon?”
He raised his head, and Larissa felt her stomach lurch at the sight of the empty expression on his face.
“He took me to see my dad,” he said, his voice low and halting. “He’s still alive. After everything that’s happened, after all this shit, he’s still alive. There’s a cottage in Norfolk, where we used to go and visit my nan. That’s where Frankenstein took me. That’s where he is.”
Larissa stared helplessly at her boyfriend. “Jamie …”
“He hugged me. Can you believe that? Just hugged me, like nothing had happened. I was nearly sick.”
“What happened to him? Where has he been?”
Jamie shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I told him I never want to see him again. Told Frankenstein the same thing.”
Larissa grimaced. This was exactly what she had dreaded, every time she closed her eyes at the end of another day in which she had failed to tell her boyfriend what she had overheard.
“Why?” she asked. “What did Frankenstein do?”
“He knew, Larissa,” said Jamie. “He knew Dad didn’t die, that he was still alive the whole time. He was sending him emails, for Christ’s sake, giving him updates on me and Mum. How could he do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Larissa, her voice low. “I presume he thought it was for the best. He would never hurt you, Jamie, not on purpose. You must know that.”
“I don’t know anything any more,” said Jamie. “I can’t trust anyone apart from you and Kate and Matt. And my mum. My poor mum, Larissa. What am I supposed to tell her about all this?”
Larissa stared at him. She had no answer to his question.
“She thinks he’s dead too,” said Jamie. “She mourned him. We mourned him. It’ll destroy her if I tell her.”