Department 19: Zero Hour Read Online Free Page A

his arms.
    When their laughter had subsided, Larissa took a half-step back, and looked at her boyfriend. Her vampire side, the part of herself that she hated, but which she knew he found guiltily, maddeningly attractive, was gone, pushed back down to where it lurked, waiting impatiently for release. What remained was a teenage girl: awkward, conflicted, increasingly unsure of the world around her, and her place in it.
    Almost a month had passed since she had challenged Cal Holmwood about the morality of what Blacklight and the other supernatural Departments actually did on a daily basis, had asked him to justify the murder of men and women who had, in the overwhelming majority of cases, never
asked
to be turned into vampires. The issue still gnawed at her insides, like an itch she was unable to scratch, but it was not the one that rose into her mind as she looked at her boyfriend.
That
was something else entirely; three words spoken by the Interim Director that she wished more than anything she had not overheard.
    Welcome back, Julian.
    Jamie’s open, honest face was still flushed red from both laughter and the exertion of their sparring session, and Larissa felt her heart quicken. Part of it was love, or something very close to it, but part was a feeling of guilt so hot and caustic that it was very close to shame. She was almost certain that her boyfriend’s father – the father he, and everyone else, thought was dead – was at that moment somewhere inside the Loop, most likely in one of the non-supernatural cells on Level H.
    And she hadn’t told Jamie about it.
    She had lain awake most nights since her return from America, turning it over and over in her mind. The man to whom Cal Holmwood had said those three fateful words had been secretly imprisoned in the depths of the NS9 base in Nevada, and had been hooded and bound for their journey to the Loop, so she could not say with any certainty what he looked or sounded like. But it would be a remarkable coincidence if another man named Julian had received both the treatment he had been subjected to in America and the greeting from the Interim Director she had overheard.
    Back,
Cal said.
Welcome
back
.
    If she was right, if the man who had flown across the Atlantic in the
Mina II
with her really
was
Julian Carpenter, then the ramifications were almost unthinkable. He was dead, or at least believed to be. What would it do to the Department if he turned up, alive and well?
    What would it do to Jamie?
    And what would it mean for
her
if he found out she’d known and kept quiet?
    “Do you ever think about it?” he asked, bringing her out of her thoughts and back into the bathroom. He was looking at her evenly, his eyes wide and clear.
    “Think about what?” she asked, although she was sure she knew.
    “What it would be like,” said Jamie, “if we were both turned. We could live forever. Together.”
    Anger flared up inside Larissa. She forced it back down, refusing to give into it, to hate him for even suggesting such a repellent idea.
    “No,” she said, her voice barely more than a growl. “I don’t ever think about that. And you shouldn’t either.”
    “Why not?” asked Jamie.
    “Because it’s never going to happen.”
    “No. I mean, why haven’t you ever thought about it?”
    Larissa narrowed her eyes. “Are you actively trying to make me angry?”
    “No,” he said. “I’m genuinely not. It’s a possibility, given what we do, and, since Zero Hour is only seven days away and we’re no closer to stopping it now than when Dracula was resurrected, it’s only going to become more likely. So why haven’t you thought about it?”
    Stay calm,
she told herself.
It’s not his fault. Stay calm.
    “If we survive what’s coming,” she said, her voice low and steady, “and if
this
, whatever it is that’s between us, survives as well, I want to live. And I don’t mean in some eternal freak show, Jamie; I mean a real, normal life. I want to grow up and I