Luchov blanched under the Necroscope’s scrutiny and panted that much faster. He prayed that the steel wall would absorb him safely within itself, maybe to expel him in the cell next door, away from this . . . man? For Luchov had faced a vampire before, and even the thought of it was terrifying! Finally he forced out words. ‘Why are you here?’
Harry’s gaze was unwavering. He watched the yellow veins pulsing rapidly under the scar-tissue skin of Luchov’s seared skull, and answered, ‘Oh, you know why well enough, Viktor. I’m here because of what E-Branch told you or caused you to be told: that I’m obliged to abandon this world, and in order to do so must use the Perchorsk Gate. But no big deal. Why, I should have thought you’d all be glad to see the last of me!’
‘Oh, we would! We would!’ Luchov eagerly agreed, nodding until droplets of sweat flew. ‘It’s just that . . . that . . .’
Harry inclined his head a little on one side and smiled his awful smile again. ‘Go on.’
But Luchov had already said too much. ‘If what you say is true,’ he babbled, trying to change the subject, ‘that as yet you’ve . . . harmed no one … I mean . . .’
‘Are you asking me not to harm you?’ Harry deliberately yawned, politely hiding the indelicate gape behind his hand – but not before he’d let the Russian glimpse the length and serrated edges of his teeth, and not without displaying the hand’s talons. ‘What, for the sake of my reputation? Every esper in Europe and possibly even further afield baying for my blood, but I have to be a good boy? Fair’s fair, Viktor. Now, why don’t you just tell me what E-Branch told your lot, and what they’ve asked you to do? Oh yes, and what measure – what permanent solution – there could possibly be to this Frankenstein monster you’ve created here at Perchorsk?’
‘But I can’t . . . daren’t tell you any of those things,’ Luchov whined, cringing against the steel wall.
‘So despite all you’ve been through, you’re still a true, brainwashed son of Mother Russia, eh?’ Harry grimaced and gave a mocking snort.
‘No.’ Luchov shook his head. ‘Just a man, a member of the human race.’
‘But one who believes everything people tell him, right?’
‘What my eyes tell me, certainly.’
The Necroscope’s patience was at an end. He leaned closer still, grabbed Luchov’s wrist in a steel claw and hissed, ‘You argue well, Viktor. Perhaps you really should have been one of the Wamphyri!’
And at last the Projekt Direktor could see his worst nightmare taking shape before his eyes, the metamorphosis of a man into a potential plague, and knew that he might all too easily become the next carrier. But he still had a card left to play. ‘You . . . you defy every scientific principle,’ he babbled. ‘You come and go in that weird way of yours. But did you think I had forgotten? Did you think I wouldn’t remember and take precautions? Better go now, Harry, before they burst in through that door there and burn you to a crisp!’
‘What?’ Harry let go of him, jerked himself back away from him.
Luchov snatched back the covers of his bed and showed the Necroscope the button attached to the steel frame. The button which he had pressed – how long ago? – and whose tiny red light was flashing even now. And Harry knew that however unwittingly, still he’d been betrayed by his own vampire.
For this was a failure of his dark side. The Thing within him had wanted to be seen, to take ascendancy, to do this thing its own way and frighten the answers out of Luchov. Yes, and then possibly to kill him! If Harry had fought it down, then he might simply have plucked the answers right out of the scientist’s mind. But too late for that now.
Not too late to fight back, however, and drive the hidden Thing to ground, beat it back into subservience. He did so, and Luchov saw that he was just a man again. Sobbing, the Russian said, ‘I thought … I thought . . . that you would kill me!’