Read Online Redlaw - 01 by James Lovegrove - Free Book Online

cross?” one of them said.
    “It stays,” Redlaw replied. “Or do you really want to hold it?”
    They all, in unison, shook their heads.
    “Thought not. Now, take me to your leader. Oh, and whichever of you’s keeping an eye on my stuff, look after it. I’ll be wanting it back in the same condition. You’ll be sorry if it isn’t.”
    They led him up the cloacal staircase, eleven flights to the top. The vampires trod blithely—many of them barefoot—through the globs of faecal matter that had piled up on the steps. Redlaw placed his feet with care and fought to keep from gagging.
    He was ushered into a flat with low ceilings and poky little rooms. Its redeeming architectural feature was a covered balcony overlooking the darkened SRA to the bright parts of the city beyond. The London where Redlaw lived was, through the gauzy rain, a thing of dazzle and distance, as shimmeringly unattainable as Atlantis.
    The female Sunless stood on the balcony, silhouetted against the glow of the skyline. Redlaw was prodded to join her. The access door, whose window panel was lined with several thicknesses of newspaper, closed behind him. A key clicked.
    He was aware that he was at close quarters with a vampire, in a limited space, and he’d been deprived of an exit route. There were no other balconies within leaping distance. In fact, his only way off the balcony was a sheer drop of some hundred feet straight to the ground.
    Well done, Redlaw. Another fine mess you’ve got yourself into, you tactical genius, you .
    The woman turned.
    She was—and Redlaw could not hide his surprise—striking. Pale-skinned, yes, but she lacked the greasy pallor common to the Sunless, and her eyes were not scarlet, just dark. Dark like a starless night. There was, too, none of the familiar slouchy cadaverousness about her. She held herself straight. She had presence. Her hair was thick, glossy and black as ink. Her features were fine, not feral. Even her clothing—jeans, tailored jacket, a blouse, knee boots—was a cut above the shabby vampire average. Not brand new, to be sure, but in good condition and showing signs of having been laundered not so long ago.
    She smiled at his confusion.
    “You’re asking yourself, ‘What is this?’” she said. “‘I do not recognise this. What am I looking at?’ Oh, John Redlaw. Captain in the Night Brigade, valiant vanquisher of the undead, who believes he has seen everything there is to see—how discomfiting it must be for you to learn that there is more than you thought you knew.”
    “A name,” Redlaw said, clawing back some of his composure. “I’ll take a name, for starters.”
    “My name, old bean? What use would that be to you? I’m nothing more than vampire filth, am I not?”
    “You seem to have a very low opinion of me.”
    “How shocking, when you people have such a high opinion of my kind.”
    “You prey on us. You kill us for our blood. You can see how we might have formed the view that you’re not very nice,” said Redlaw.
    She grinned, and her fangs were the sharpest and most even that Redlaw could recall ever laying eyes on. Not a tangled snaggle of teeth but a neat array, like spears in a rack or knives in a drawer.
    This wasn’t Sunless. This was something else, a whole other order of the species, a different class.
    “I am,” she said, “Illyria Strakosha. And the answer to the question your eyes are asking, and your stumbling tongue is not, is that I am a vampire but not merely that. I share many of the traits and characteristics of my vampire cousins, but I am of a special bloodline, as it were. There are few of us. Very few.”
    “Shtriga.” It had swum up from the depths of memory. “But shtrigas are—”
    “A myth? And vampires aren’t?”
    “I take your point.”
    “And before you say it, no, we do not feed on the blood of infants. That is a myth. A scurrilous slander that was put about by certain vampires to foster resentment against us. Hatred of the