Chapter 4: Mission
My shield might render me invisible, but I never saw that as making me the most powerful vampire that ever existed. I was glad that Lydia would find in this Elisia a new toy to drool over.
At the same time, I felt uneasy about the newcomer.
Soon, Lydia was restless too. “What’s taking them so long?”
I could hear her frustration from my office across the hall from hers. I darted to her side before she broke another wooden desk by banging her hands down on it. “Calm down Lydia,” I soothed. “They said they’re close.”
“That was two days ago!” she snapped. “She’s just a little human teenager, how can they not get to her?”
I wasn’t surprised to see her so stressed. She’d talked up the potential recruit to Mac who heads up The System’s European operations, and wanted to deliver the new acquisition before he accused her of getting ahead of herself with every vision. I always said that I didn’t know why she wanted to impress him so much, but deep down, I was more than aware of her… crush on him.
I stopped feeling jealous over this half a century ago.
“Didn’t Darryl say something about the girl always being surrounded by others?” I recalled, massaging her shoulders to try and ease the tension. “They’re just taking precautions. If the girl’s never alone–”
“She has to be alone sometime!”
“You’re right. I’ll talk to Darryl–”
“No,” she cut me off angrily. “He’s my agent. I’ll talk to him.”
I straightened up and let her make the call. It was no use trying to pacify her when she was this wound up.
Unfortunately, Darryl said they’d made very little progress on Mission: Ellie since the last time Lydia spoke to him. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I heard Darryl apologise through the phone connection. “It’s like… she’s being watched.”
“Why would she be watched?” Her eyes narrowed, thinking.
“I don’t know boss, and here’s the other thing: we can’t get anywhere near her house. We weren’t going to follow her home, but last night we thought we had no choice and… That’s when we noticed the car following her – it’s always driving around after her. When I thought about it, I realised that it’s almost always outside her college when she’s there.”
“Are they vampires, the ones following her?” I asked.
“No. All humans.” He was silent for a moment. “They take turns to watch her.”
I asked another question because Lydia was deep in thought. “You say you can’t get near the house – what do you mean by that?”
“You’ll laugh at this Christian but… it feels like magic.”
“Magic?” Lydia and I said together. After exchanging a concerned glance, we simultaneously said, “We’re coming to Reading.” Hanging up the phone, Lydia shook her head at me. “No. This is my mission, I’m going.”
I frowned. She was almost pulling rank on me, even though she wasn’t my senior. Yes, she’d been working for The System longer than I had, but that didn’t mean she could boss me around.
“Both of us can’t leave HQ, you know that,” she said more reasonably when she noticed my tensed frame.
I run the place in her absence, and she in mine, so I let her go to Reading.
I thought I’d hear from her immediately and not three days later. I expected her to call me and tell me what she learned and not wait until she was back in London.
“Come with me,” was all she said when I next saw her. She came straight to my office after returning from Reading, uttered those words and left the room. I flitted to her side.
Following her to the sound-proof boardroom, the one where only Lydia, Mac and I had the authority to enter with whoever else we wished, I kept my curiosity to myself. Whenever we used this room, the discussions related to top-secret missions and anything we didn’t want the rest of the vampires in the office block to hear.
Once safe inside the boardroom, Lydia pivoted to face me and waited for the metal door behind me to close. I was used to speaking in this room, but I was always aware that the air molecules held all our secrets.
And they didn’t really feel all that trustworthy to me.
“What’s going on Lydia?”
While she was away, she hadn’t answered any of my calls or replied to my voicemails. Darryl assured me that she was fine so I didn’t worry about her safety. My curiosity about the secrecy the two of them maintained over this task would’ve heightened to new levels had I not been afraid of what she might learn in Berkshire
And now, as she opened her mouth to speak, my anxiety returned.
“Everything Darryl said was true,” she began. “The girl is always watched. Always followed. Never alone. And her house is surrounded by a powerful magical barrier. She seemed pretty oblivious to all this. Nonetheless, her bodyguards were ever-present shadows forcing us to keep our distance.”
“She’s under constant surveillance and she doesn’t know?”
“There’s a whole… team of them. It would arouse suspicion if we only eliminate a few members… we’d have to take out the whole group.”
“You’ve destroyed entire covens before–”
“There’s too many of them,” she cut me off coldly. “There’s a whole organisation. One I’d rather not alert about our interest in the girl. The organisation is very familiar to us, Christian. We probably know them better than any other.”
“The Council?” I blurted out, eyes widening.
Nodding, she said, “And they’re protecting their most powerful weapon. They’re playing a very dangerous game, keeping her in the dark about who she is.” Lydia shook her head, bewildered. “When I saw her mother picking her up from the local shopping centre, the way she treated the girl, it all made perfect sense.”
It was making sense to me and I really didn’t want it to.
“The mother was very familiar to us too,” she continued. “Well, is familiar, seen as she isn’t dead like we suspected.”
“The Slayer?” I choked out. When she nodded I shook my head. “The Slayer died 17 years ago,” I said robotically.
“In that case it must’ve been her ghost I saw then!” she snapped.
“Even if she fooled us,” I said slowly, “her daughter–”
“Is the next Slayer.” I was glad she cut me off. “This girl is Kim’s firstborn, I’m sure of it. That’s why they’re protecting her like this. Kim’s younger daughter, Heather, is only watched by one Council member at a time, instead of the many that are always around the other girl. Couple this with my vision… Of course the Slayer will make the most powerful vampire in history.”
“The Slayer is not meant to become a vampire,” I whispered, my head spinning.
“This one is,” she argued. “I saw it.”
“Your visions have been wrong before,” I argued back weakly. “They’re just–”
“Possible outcomes based on the occurrence of a certain string of events. If not tampered with, that’s how her future will play out.”
“Yes, but you’re attempting to tamper with it…”
“How? If I didn’t see her, she’d still become one of us, just created by someone else.”
“Really?” I wasn’t too sure about that. “I can see in your eyes that you’re yearning for your premonition to come true, for that girl to become a vampire. And you want her for your collection.”
“And why shouldn’t I?”
“Because…”
She waited but I couldn’t continue.
“If she is what I think she is, and becomes what I think she will, then we need her on our side, Christian.” She waved her arms in the air, exasperated.
“No we don’t,” I insisted but my voice was still too feeble.
“So we just let her go ahead and inherit her powers when she turns 18 in a few weeks? Wait for her to come after us? Destroy us? When we could so easily turn her against her bosses, The Council? Use th
eir Slayer against them? She’ll be our most powerful weapon. Or she’ll be theirs.”
It made sense now, why she came straight to me instead of reporting to Mac.
She wanted me to go to Reading.
She wanted me to finish what her premonition had started.