Cross

Book 1 Chapter VII - Dracula

Chapter 7 - Dracula

"I've told you a hundred times, but I'll try telling you once more," Moon said through gritted teeth. "I. Don't. Know. Who. He. Is."

Terror sighed. "You're sure about that?"

"Absolutely."

"Very well, then. I will find out another way."

~~~~

Terror and Grievous had left for Scotland, apparently to find someone called Lord Ruthven, so while they were away and Attykcca was is charge, Sébastien took the opportunity to do something he'd been thinking of doing since this whole mess started: waking Vlad. But first, he had to find some excuse to leave.

"You have to go to a... business meeting?" Attykcca repeated with a frown, clearly not quite understanding what he was talking about. "And what, pray tell, is a business meeting?"

"It's when you meet with a lot of really boring idiots who think they know everything about everything but really know nothing about anything, but who want to buy something you can sell them," Sébastien explained. "In this case, they want to buy one of the gun prototypes I've designed. They want to meet me in... St. Petersburg."

"Very well, then, you can go to your... business meeting."

That was easy, Sébastien thought as he left the office. Now I just have to hope she doesn't know where St. Petersburg is, or she might wonder why I'm going to Romania instead of Russia.

The castle was eerily quiet; unsurprising, since it had been undisturbed for sixty-six years. The floor, the chairs, the tables, the ornaments and Vlad's precious books were all covered with dust. Spiderwebs and their inhabitants hung from the ceiling, and whole doors had vanished beneath masses of cobwebs. The whole place was proof that even Vlad's idea of "housekeeping" (read: do absolutely no work to the place until part of the roof falls) was better than no housekeeping at all.

Sébastien headed towards the crypt, then remembered something and backtracked towards the wine cellar that now acted as a sort of refrigerator for blood. He was in and out in less time than it takes to tell. Castle Dracula had never been a pleasant place to visit, and now that its master was... indisposed, he felt almost like he was a stranger with no right to be there.

Once inside the crypt, the corridor that led to where Vlad was "sleeping" (a better term would be "suspended animation", to quote a science fiction series he had rather liked during the 1960's) led through rooms filled with stone tombs that contained the remains of their long-dead relatives. Sébastien wasted no time in scurrying past them.

You are the world's worst vampire, a voice in his head taunted him.

So I've been told, he replied, then wondered why he was basically arguing with himself.

Even though he knew what he would find (he helped put Vlad in that thing in the first place, after all), there was still something unpleasant about walking into a room with a stone coffin in the middle of it, a stone coffin which was hooked up to a machine, and knowing that your cousin was in there and he wasn't dead.

At least the machine had not malfunctioned. If that had happened, Vlad's mind would have stayed in suspended animation even though his body woke up, and he would have seen literally anything that was alive as a threat and attacked it.

"First, I open the coffin," Sébastien said to himself, suiting action to word by doing just that, and only just suppressing a screech of alarm.

The coffin was empty.

~~~~

"This is InGEN," Jackson explained as he, Dani, Steven, Gareth and Lacey walked down a corridor lined with doors. "It stands for Inter-Galactic Emergency Network. InGEN was started on a planet far, far away from Earth, to deal with the aliens that were attacking it. It spread to other planets, and now there's hardly a planet that doesn't have at least one base on it. Earth has three hundred and fifty-four bases.