"He's getting worse," Henry leant against the isolation room with a mixture of sleep and dirt trailing down from his eyes.
Sirens wailed past outside, dimmed by the layers of walls and offices that kept this room from the rest of the world. They were looking for the detective, he guessed. Since Helen had called his department they'd heard nothing but noise from the streets. Shame they were looking in all the wrong places, though Helen wasn't about to help them.
Will was inside the glass-sheeted room, sprawled across one of the hospital beds that Bigfoot had bolted to the floor. The leather straps over his arms, legs, torso and neck strained and cracked as he arched his spine in agony. Ripples of colour spread over his exposed skin until his whole body disappeared in a veil of camouflage. A minute later, it had passed and Will coughed and cried back into human form.
The computer projections trailing over Helen's screen suggested that the virus was working its way from the outside in, burrowing through his body. Her initial doses of anti-biotics had prevented separate infection of the initial wounds but as she predicted, had proved utterly useless against the virus.
Most of his pain was stemming from the calcium deposits building up along all of Will's bones. His teeth, in particular, were literally growing, curving inwards as their tips sharpened to needle-like points. To achieve this, the virus was re-aligning his jaw which explained his need to chew and bite anything in reach.
Whenever she let her eyes wander over to the bed, Helen caught a glimpse of a sand creature rather than a frightened. Even his eyes had been slit by dark ovals and his iris's turned amber smudging out what little remained of him.
He was ravenous. In a couple of hours – morning at the latest, the IV bags would be useless. After that, they'd have to find something more substantial for him to eat to prevent his body sacrificing its integrity for the changes.
"The treatments aren't doing anything..." Henry pried himself from the glass, paced across the room, collapsed into his chair and buried his head, nestling into his arms. He had been injecting Will with Helen's blood to no effect. It was last time they were going to try as the result was always the same; instant loss of blood pressure, difficulty breathing, skin rash, increased anxiety, seizure, cardiac arrest.
"I am immune," Helen told him for the thousandth time. Henry believed her but could do little else but shake off an unwelcome yawn. "Bet my life Tesla is too. Neither of us are pure blood vampires so the solution must be somewhere in this mess." She was referring to the enormous string of her DNA the computer was trying to process. "But the code is huge. No chance of finding that kind of needle. I need years, not hours."
"You could cross check with bloodwork from the other five," Bigfoot suggested, struggling into a labcoat. The awkward garment nipped at his fur, dragging a few of his bandages free. "Look for common patterns."
Helen shook her head. "Those were stolen a long time ago. James and Nigel are dead, Nikola – if he comes back, will be gone for days and as for John, your guess is as good as mine."
"Stolen?"
Helen sighed. "Ancient history."
A quiet snore wafted through the lab, barely audible over the hum of a dozen machines. Henry was asleep. More accurately, he had passed out from sheer exhaustion. Helen waved Bigfoot over from the other end of the lab. The big man nodded as soon as Helen gestured to the scruffy bundle on the desk.
Helen rested her head on her palms, staring at the far wall. It wasn't just Will. Ashley was out there too, somewhere in the dark. Even Joe... all those years and now he was gone. She should have paid him more attention when he was a child, listened a little harder but she was always so busy. The work never ended. It never would. Not for her.
She returned to the computer screen, clogged with endless windows. As a scientist she knew that there was no chance that she could do this by herself in the time that Will had left. It irked her to admit it, but she needed Tesla.
*~*~*
Nikola looked as if he'd peered into the cosmos and torn out all of its secrets.
"René Barjavel would love to meet youuu-" he grimaced on the last word as John clenched down on him tighter, bending Tesla's wrist bones toward each other. "I'm just saying," Tesla continued, shaking off the pain, "you travelled back in time, killed your grandfather and lived to tell the tale. That's impressive."
Ashley's eyes had gone red and suddenly her gun was levelled between Tesla's eyes, daring him to go on with his taunting.
"Say it again," she jeered, terrified by the raw emotion threatening to break free. All of her guilt had finally seen a vehicle of release and she welcomed it.
John let go of Tesla as Ashley pushed the scientist down the tunnel, led by her loaded gun. He didn't say a word but managed to maintain a satisfied smirk.
"Ashley," John said quietly at first, left behind as his daughter marched Tesla off in a simmering rage. "Ashley!" he said more forcibly, staggering in pursuit. His body was falling apart, like smoke swelling over the ground at night, about to meet the rising sun. "You mustn't kill him. God I've wanted to in the past ... and present."
Ashley could feel her father over her shoulder. She didn't want to listen to him either. If he hadn't -Her grandfather was there, every time she closed her eyes. Seated behind his desk, scribbling intently at something. Then he would look up, kind eyes and a warm smile offering her a biscuit -
Her eyes opened. His were gone.
You had to give it to the man, Tesla knew his worth - when to push a person and when to lay off. Emotion was a complex thing, something he preferred to study from a distance as it had never been a friend to him.
"We need him," John moved slowly for her gun, but Ashley spun around to face him. Two tears broke, seconds from each other, and vanished along the curves of her cheeks.
John could see the bullet, barely more than a hint of silver in the dark tube.
The air felt thick as Ashley struggled to see through rivers of mascara. The darkness of the tunnel was suffocating and the poorly lit face of her pleading father was difficult to make out.
"But I don't need you," she choked.
John flinched.
Ashley's finger rolled over the trigger. Her heart pouring out with the bullet as it broke from the barrel with a whiff of smoke.
*~*~*
Young Joe Kavanaugh shivered at the shadow outside. With the lamp lights burning low, his tent was relatively dark compared with the moonlit evening. To the shadow, Joe was just a dark piece of cloth strung between metal rods, rippling in the wind.
The boy couldn't move – he barely breathed.
Something was very wrong with this humanesque form. Joe followed the profile of the hunched shadow with his eyes. Clothes of some description were hanging in shreds, flapping free, two arms were loose at its sides and at the end of each of its fingers were dark, slender shadows that looked awfully like claws.
He was already afraid of the desert. The older children of the group had told him stories of creatures that lived in the sand, invisible things that moved with the moon to hunt small children. Joe was no fool, the older children had made that last bit up for his benefit. What cemented Joe's limbs together were the echoes of their stories in those of the camel herders – monsters that ripped their animals apart, whispers in the evening hours around the ancient tombs...
He believed them all now.
There was nothing between him and the creature except the fragile cloth and his silence. Trembling, Joe watched on as it began to saunter away from his tent, apparently more interested in the Robinson's tent opposite and their large collection of small dogs.
He was about to collapse onto the floor when the wind kicked the baby's cradle, and the little girl cried.
The shadow stopped. Joe's breath froze. Crying and tears screamed out from the cot. The sand creature turned its head back toward Joe's tent, tilting it at the disturbance.
Joe sensed its eyes on him though he knew it was impossible. A moment later, the shadow began to move again but this time it didn't go away – it circled his tent. Joe's head followed the shadow, the rest of his body still itching to move. Once he caught a glimpse of it passing a small hole in the tent and it dawned on Joe that this thing was real and he didn't have long before it found the open flap.
Using the child's screaming as cover, he scurried across the tent floor, headed for the trunk beside his father's temporary desk. There were papers and things inside, but when he heaved open the lid it looked large enough for him to crawl into.
Kneeling inside, Joe lowered the lid of the trunk as the creature stepped through into the tent, sniffing the air.
*~*~*
"Did you see thiiis?" Bigfoot returned after putting Henry to bed, pulling up a chair to the desk where he found Henry's laptop open. The screen was littered with password cracking programs, some of them still dutifully prying into private servers. "He's hacking something."
"If it's got a government stamp on it, then I don't want to know."
"No," his hairy mitt buried the mouse, dragging it around until he'd tidied up the screen. "This – might be, no I think it iiiis. Tesla's files. You didn't say that he had a database..."
Helen rolled her eyes. "He doesn't own a phone but he manages a high-speed internet?"
Bigfoot ignored Helen. "He's working out of various organisations. Engineering companies, museums, libraries, the FBI..."
"Well, they did start confiscating his work a while back. What is Henry doing moseying around in there?" she rolled her chair over for a better look. Literally hundreds of windows were open, all of them in relation to vampire history – everything from ancient texts, supposed locations of artefacts, famous researchers and professors right up to the Underworld original movie script. "What a mess..."
"Looks like Henry's started to filter through some of it, listing it in order of relevance and difficulty to acquire."
Helen raised her eyebrows. That sounded like Henry to her. "What tops it?" she asked, as Bigfoot minimised a dozen useless windows and killed a security warning. Helen checked her watch. They had three hours until Will recovered from the sedative.
"Something his crackers haven't gotten into yet."
Helen tilted her head, a curious smile forming just under her lips. "p1g30N..." she whispered, typing over Bigfoot's shoulder. The line went green and dozens of pages loaded onto the screen. "He never changes."
Bigfoot mumbled for a while, skimming pages of text until he came upon a curious entry. It contained a dozen or so scanned images torn out from an old book. The typeset was clunky and the pictures barely more than smudged etchings. Helen remembered a time when that was considered swish.
"...three separate uprisings in a single reign finally forced the pharaohs to abandon their beloved cities." It began. "Six of the royal family lay dead, slain in the streets and temples until finally Ramesses XI was cornered in a library with three of his scribes. The unfinished letter to the priests of Amun was never sent. It pleaded mercy, but the peoples of the land had no mercy left in them from decades of invasion and starvation. They left an ankh through his neck and conquered the land in the name of the gods and their people. Ramesses took his final breaths bleeding into the cold stone of the palace at Thebes with the vacant eyes of his scribe staring back.
"Those that escaped travelled north along the river and then east into the barbarian world. They followed the Silk Road, vanishing into the safety of foreign mountains. The second wave were too late to make their way on foot. Hunters, keen to seize on bounties, picked off straggling royals, driving spears through their hearts and dragging their corpses back into the cities for show.
"Frightened, the last of them crossed the desert on foot until they fell into the sea. Two ships set sail but only one made it to be reunited.
"The groups met each other in the Indian Himalayas and settled once again, building the city of Bhalassam with the remainder of their wealth. It was a last stand, a memory of all that they had once been. But the two-hundred room palace was empty and later turned into a great vault for their knowledge. Surrounding it were streets of houses and temples, also empty save the forty-five survivors. Perhaps it was their hope that the scale of their city would frighten off attackers like a ruffle of colourful feathers at a predator.
"Around their city they built six towers and capped their pyramidal tops in polished marble. Every morning they shone like the evening stars, inviting their kind to join them in isolation and safety.
"One ship had been lost during this evacuation. The wind took it through the islands and across an even greater ocean. Injured from several vicious storms, they drifted in circles until even their resilient bodies were skeletons for a beating heart.
"Finally, years later, they reached the shore of a new world. Frightening cliffs hugged the ocean, splintered into the water as they crawled up the beach. Beyond this they found a dense jungle of creatures as ferocious as themselves. Eventually they happened upon a city, built out of the solid river rock. It shone in the afternoon – a pyramid of gold as beautiful as they remembered their own. As they approached, six more cities flickered into view, each one as brilliant as the next. Thinking that they had found their ancestors, the once-rulers of Egypt wove their way through the mountains and followed the river to the first and most beautiful city."
"Does this story have a point?"Helen interrupted Bigfoot's reading. "Because we're pushed for time here..." Tesla had always been a history buff. Even at college. If he wasn't trying to kill them all with bolts of lightning then he could be found with his nose in an antiquity book.
Bigfoot scrolled through the battered pages, some of which had sections missing. "Weeell... there's this;
"Eventually they returned across the sea to India where they found their brethren and the city of Bhalasaam under attack. A wave of humans had hunted the others, determined on their destruction. Fearing the worst, a core group escaped, travelling back to the new world seeking sanctuary there. And thus began the final stand – the Sanctuary of the Moon."
"So that'd be a no," Helen pushed off the ground and rolled her chair back to her own desk. "As usual, Nikola's living his life in the past – the ancient past. So he's looking for Vampires ... what a surprise. Fascinating as his hobbies are, they don't help Will."
Bigfoot kept reading, figuring that Henry had a good reason for his efforts.
*~*~*
"You missed..." Tesla sounded distinctly disappointed as John flashed away from Ashley's bullet, disappearing in a rip of time only to rematerialise behind Tesla.
John crumpled to the ground in pain. His body could not take much more of this.
Tesla stepped aside, displeased with the idea of himself as a shield. It was so demeaning. "You think another dose of that stuff will help you?" he asked John, who was still heaving, coughing up blood onto the gravel. "If it doesn't kill you, it'll transform you into something unpleasant..."
"He-l-en didn't thi-nk so," he replied, bending his knee up to his chin. He took a few deep breaths and then returned to his feet, trying not to sway.
Ashley was still in shock. She'd been that angry with the world that she had taken a shot at her own father.
"Helen's learnt a lot in the last century," quipped Nikola, circling John menacingly.
John ignored him, waiting for Tesla to pass before stepping toward Ashley, placing a gentle hand on her cheek. She didn't recoil. It was as if the world had stopped and she was all alone in a moment long passed.
"Ashley," he cupped her face until he found her eyes. "You need to prepare the blood as it was done the first time, over a hundred years ago. The instructions are in your grandfather's journal but you must hurry. You're all I've got in the world," he wiped another tear from her face, finally seeing his daughter stare back at him.
Tesla's eyes flicked to Ashley's jacket. Beneath its crinkled surface he could make out the line of a book. The book. For nearly a century he'd wondered where that had gotten to.
"I'm sorry, for the way everything happened," John continued. "But we don't know each other, not really. You never would have helped me if I hadn't –"
She didn't say anything.
"Shame about Will..." Tesla trailed off, deliberately breaking the silence.
Ashley blinked, awakening from her trance. "What?" she leant around her father.
"Pure vampire blood; the only known cure for what these bastardised creatures give you. It's a very small vial though – a single sample, only enough for one of them I should think..." he smiled at John, whose face had fallen.
"Nikola..." he whispered, realising the game's end. It had been well played.
"Your father or your lover? Tough choice. I'd off them both –"
"He's not my lover," Ashley snapped. "Are you telling the truth? Is this," she broke free of her father and withdrew vial 42 from her jacket, "going to save Will?"
Her father's eyes followed the vial and its red liquid sloshing inside.
Tesla nodded. "I am certain of it. And that is no light word for a man of my profession."
"Ashley... Please." John blocked her vision of Tesla and his promises. "I am your father."
"We're immune," Tesla spread his arms. "John, Helen, me – the answer is in that vial."
"She'll know..." Ashley retreated slightly. "If I take this back to the lab she'll recognise it. She'll work it out like you did and then – I don't know if I can..." It would be so much easier to save her father in secret but Will – he was there, screaming in her head. If she hadn't of gone to Egypt chasing that stupid tip off then none of this would have happened.
"Blame it on your father," Tesla instructed. "He'll be dead soon any-"
"SHUT UP!" John screamed, launching himself as best he could at Tesla's throat.
"What's wrong John," Tesla hopped easily out of the way, "Helen's blood not good enough anymore?"
John hit the gravel, grazing his hands. "It doesn't work. I don't know why," he growled, getting back to his feet.
"He's going to die either way, Ashley." He turned to John, "Maybe Helen's not giving you the real stuff anymore. It must be a terrible drain, a leech like you-"
John caught Tesla's coat, jolting it toward him. Nikola tried to escape, but he was dragged into John's range with a squeak. He was a slippery creature, sliding through John's hands but not out of his grip.
The scientist snarled, his features tinting into a concrete grey.
"Don't push me John, you won't like what comes out..." Tesla said, his eyes going black.
John squeezed his throat harder, "How about we see for ourselves?"