Clarke hadn’t wanted to do it but he owed Harry. For a good many things. And he wanted very badly to catch the maniac who had done this thing to Penny and too many other innocents. Harry had told him: ‘If I have her ashes – her pure ashes, not damaged or spoiled by burned linen or charcoal – then I’ll be able to talk to her any time I want to. And maybe she’ll remember something important.’ It had seemed logical at the time (if anything about the Necroscope could ever seem logical) and so Clarke had pulled strings. As the head of E-Branch he had that sort of power. But if he’d known the whole story of what had happened at the castle of Janos Ferenczy, in Transylvania, maybe he would have thought twice about it. And then not done it at all.
He certainly wouldn’t have gone along with it if Zek Föener had stood firm on her first . . . accusation? Or if not an accusation, a premonition at least.
Zek was a telepath and as loyal to the Necroscope as they came. In the Greek islands at the end of the Ferenczy business, she’d had occasion to try and contact Harry with her mind, during the course of which something had shocked her rigid. But it had been a while before she could tell Clarke what it was. They had been on the island of Rhodes at the time, less than a month ago, and their conversation was still fresh in his mind.
‘What is it, Zek?’ he’d said to her, when he could talk to her in private. ‘I saw that change come over your face when you contacted Harry. Is he in some sort of trouble?’
‘No – yes – I don’t know!’ she’d answered, fear and frustration audible in her every word, visible in her every move. Then she’d looked at him and it was that same, strange, disbelieving look he’d seen when she tried to contact Harry: as if she gazed on alien things, in a distant world beyond the times and places we know. And he remembered that indeed she had once been in just such a world, with Harry Keogh. A world of vampires!
‘Zek,’ he’d said then, ‘if there’s something I should know about Harry, it’s only fair that – ‘
‘ – Only fair to who?’ She had cut him off. To whom? To … what? And is it fair to him?’
At which Clarke had felt an icy chill in his blood. And: ‘I think you’d better explain,’ he’d said.
‘I can’t explain!’ she’d snapped at him. ‘Or maybe I can.’ And then the empty expression in her beautiful eyes had filled itself in a little, and her tone had become more reasonable, even pleading. ‘It’s just that every other mind I’ve touched in the last few days has seemed to be one of them! So maybe I’ve started to find them where . . . where there aren’t any? Where they can’t possibly be?’
And then he’d known for certain what she was trying to tell him. ‘You mean that when you contacted Harry, you sensed – ?’
‘Yes – yes!’ she’d snapped again. ‘But I could be mistaken. I mean, isn’t that what he’s doing at this very moment, going up against them? He’s close to vampires right now, even as we talk. It could be one of them I sensed. God, it has to be one of them . . .’
End of conversation, but it hadn’t been out of Clarke’s mind from that day to this. When it was time to leave the islands and come home again, he had asked Zek if she’d like to visit England, as a guest of E-Branch.
Her answer had been more or less what he expected: ‘You’re not fooling anyone, Darcy. And anyway I don’t like the idea that you would want to fool me, not after all of this. So I’ll tell you straight out: I detest the E-Branches, whether they’re Russian, British, whoever they belong to! No, not the espers themselves but the way they’re used, the fact that they need to be used at all. As for Harry: I won’t go against the Necroscope.’ And she’d given her head a very definite shake. ‘We were on different sides once before, Harry and me, and he gave me some good advice. “Never again go up against me or mine,” he said, and I never will. I’ve seen inside his mind, Darcy, and I know that when someone like Harry says something like that to you, you’d better listen to him. So if there are . . . problems, well, they’re your problems, not mine.’