BLOODSHIFT.

by GARFIELD REEVES-STEVENS.

For Mimi The end days are upon us. Who will triumph?

Who will die?

Helman: His blue, hunted eyes have seen too much horror. Now, what those eyes are about to see his mind won't be able to explain.

Adrienne: her kiss had the power to transform a man. Her will held the last chance to save a world.

The Father: He's the oldest and most awesome of the vampires. But no amount of good he'll perform in the future can atone for all the evil he's done in the past.

Diego: He's survived many centuries and absorbed much wisdom. The global havoc he's poised to set loose will be his greatest victory-and one beyond the realms of God or the Devil.

'Bloodshift contains the best elements of Robert Ludlum and Anne Rice. It is a fast-moving international adventure with a rational horror element served up with corkscrew plot twists and an unexpected ending. If you want something different and exciting in revisionist horror, Bloodshift is your book.'

-Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, author of Beastnights

Also by Garfield Reeves-Stevens in Pan Books Dark Matter (and with Judith Reeves-Stevens) Star Trek: Prime DirectiveTable of Contents

Prologue

For the first time in centuries, he had awakened from a dream.

The dream had spoken to him.

For a long time before they came for him. he stared up into the darkness of his nesting place and thought about what he had seen. It had been so long since the last time he had dreamt, that he despaired of ever knowing what the images had meant.

At first he had been moving through his house, among his familiars, yet they had not noticed him. He had watched them at their work. He knew that the things he watched them do were the things they actually did that day, as if he had left his resting place while his body slept.

And then he had been... elsewhere.

Those images were a blur of fog-shrouded billows. Nothing was in the proper order or place. Except for the feeling: release. After all these years, the salvation he thought would be forever denied him, shone from some distant horizon like the first hint of dawn.

Things would happen. Salvation.

"Dear God," he said as he stared into the darkness, "let it begin now."

And it did. Part One THE CONTRACT.

One.

The assassins were at the airport twenty minutes after the sun had set.

Three of them carried weapons of wood and plastic. They passed through the detectors of the inspection points quickly and calmly, as they had rehearsed.

The fourth, clothed in black and having no need for weapons, moved in the shadows of the tarmac, invisible in the darting headlight beams of the aircraft service vehicles.

He was older than the others, and his knowledge of the Ways far deeper: as he moved to his position in the darkness, he left no footprints in the light snow that covered the ground beneath him ...

England, Heathrow Airport, January 13 The director of Heathrow was in the control tower preparing to close down his airport.

The snow had come as forecast and the reports from the Ministry confirmed its growing intensity. In an hour at most, Heathrow would be unserviceable. Already, inbound flights had been diverted so his snow removal equipment could concentrate on the outbound flights. The director detested stranded hordes camping in his lobbies. He wanted everyone out.

Twenty-seven flights had been rescheduled to take off in the next forty-five minutes, most transatlantic or Europe- bound. He gave those flights priority. Buses and trains could handle the local traffic.

But still, he thought as he watched the snowfall speed and thicken in the shafts of airport signal tights, there were some passengers who wouldn't be going where they had planned that night.

The assassins were at his airport to ensure exactly that. For them, one passenger could not leave Heathrow. One passenger must be stopped. The threat must be neutralised.

In washrooms and storage rooms, weapons were assembled; special weapons capable of delivering the Final Death.

The threat would be neutralised. The order would continue. Alternatives were unthinkable.

The assassins began their sweep of Heathrow.

There was a new clerk at the Travellers' Aid booth. The regular clerk had phoned in ill but had arranged for a friend from the London office to fill in for her. The harried senior clerk had agreed to the arrangement, relieved. He did not remember seeing the new clerk at the London office, but knew that the staff there turned over rapidly.

The replacement clerk knew what to look for. She identified the first assassin by an improper line beneath a large, open trench-coat, a set to his mouth which she had been trained to recognise.

She excused herself to the couple she was serving, an older couple from Bonn whose children had not met them as planned, and lifted her phone.

A call was made to another phone in Heathrow. The diversion was begun.

Two men wearing blue British Airways stewards' blazers accompanied a woman in black along the wide corridors leading to the departure gates. One steward wheeled a hospital gurney, the coffin upon it draped in a tan, quilted movers' blanket.

It was quite irregular, but the woman was to accompany her husband's body back to New York in the lounge of a 747. The man had been wealthy. His devoted widow had purchased every lounge seat for the flight. It was the only way the airline officials would allow the coffin in the passenger section. Money had smoothed the irregularities, even to the borrowing of two blazers for the widow's companions.

The second assassin was impressed with the obviousness of it. They had been searching for a face, a nervous figure sneaking out of England; instead they had found an object leaving in plain sight.

The coffin was an appropriate attempt appreciated by the second assassin. He made the proper signals. The two others joined him. They moved toward the stewards, the widow, and their target hiding in the coffin.

The gurney rolled by the Travellers' Aid booth.

The first assassin saw the slight nod pass between the clerk and the widow and knew he had been identified. If the assassins continued they would have the stewards in front of them, the clerk behind. Pincered.

The first assassin slowed his pace. The clerk opened a drawer and reached inside. Her eyes locked with his.

He spun to face her, lifting the crossbow from under his coat. The clerk raised her gun.

The assassin felt relief at the sight of the gun. It meant their true nature hadn't been revealed. He tightened his finger on the release.

The clerk dived behind her desk.

The crossbow's bolt ripped through the air above the desk. The man from Bonn was impaled on the wall beside it.

His twitching feet just brushing the floor.

The silence of the diversion and the attack was finally broken by the old woman's scream. Then by the hiss of silenced gunshots.

The widow had fired her weapon through her coat pocket. The first and third assassins were both hit and spun off balance. The third assassin's crossbow fired blindly into the ceiling.

The second assassin released his bolt. The widow's throat was pierced. She gurgled softly as she collapsed, clutching at the coffin's blanket, dragging it with her to the floor.

The two assassins who had been shot by the widow were standing, hurriedly recocking their weapons. One steward advanced on them.

The second assassin saw the Travellers' Aid clerk rise from behind her desk. Blood from the old man has splashed over her, plastering her hair to the side of her face. She raised her weapon toward the second assassin.

He attacked.

Two bullets tore through him before he was upon her, ripping at her unprotected throat with his hands.

The old woman screamed louder as the clerk's body was thrown to the ground, neck arteries broken and spurting.

For one brief moment, the assassin realised that more people should be screaming, but the long corridor leading to the departure gates was deserted. He didn't have time to consider the implications. He saw what the attacking steward held in his hands and knew that their nature had been revealed. Totally.

While the second steward wheeled the coffin away, the other approached the reloading assassins with a billy club, its end sharpened to a deadly point.

The third assassin, his reloading not completed, threw his crossbow at the attacking steward and leapt.

The steward ducked below the crossbow and thrust forward. The club sank into his attacker's chest, the momentum of the impaled body wrenching it from the steward's hands.

Weaponless, the steward turned to face the first assassin.

The stock of the crossbow swung faster than the steward could sense, biting him off his feet as the impact shattered his temple.

The steward's body crumpled. The impaled assassin slowly crawled to the entrance of a washroom. A white, thick fluid smeared the floor behind him.

The two other assassins took aim on the second steward racing away with the coffin.

Then the reason for the empty corridors became obvious.

Six British soldiers appeared at the end of the corridor. Four carried Sterling submachine guns. Two carried crossbows.

The steward halted. He hadn't known of the soldiers' presence. He looked nervously behind at the two assassins, then again at the soldiers.

For a moment, there was silence in the corridor.

The moment ended when a metal outside door burst off its hinges and the fourth assassin, clothed in black, hurtled through the air at the steward.

His black-gloved hands twisted the steward's head one hundred and eighty degrees. The crack echoed down the corridor.

The fourth assassin turned to the coffin.

The soldiers with crossbows released their bolts.

One flew wild. The other struck its target at the waist, sinking to its vanes.

The fourth assassin ripped the bolt from his flesh and held it like a dagger above his head. He tore open the coffin lid and brought the bolt down in a blur of awesome speed.

The bolt splintered.

The coffin was empty.

The assassin in black screamed in deafening rage and flung the coffin and gurney fifteen feet to smash on the far corridor wall.

The Sterlings erupted in a murderous volley.

As if molten, the assassin in black rushed through the doorway he had burst open. The two other assassins followed, running wildly, countless bullets tearing through them in explosions of cloth and flesh.

Unable to believe that they had seen two men withstand such bombardment, the soldiers ran to the door and shone a flashlight down the metal staircase that led to the tarmac.

There were no bodies heaped upon it.

Through the mist of the soldiers' breath in the winter's night air, smears of white liquid glinted in the light on the stairs, but the snow before them was smooth and unbroken, and stretched undisturbed into the darkness.

Two.

The British officer with the phone listened intently to the soldier's report from Heathrow.

His eyes were fixed on the small patch of white over the throat of the man who sat across from his desk. In the half- light of his office, the patch of white seemed to glow.