Vampire Watchmen

Book 2: Samantha Carter

by Tim O'Rourke

Genres: Romance; Paranormal Romance; Time Travel Romance; Paranormal

Synopsis

'A definite 4 stars. I hugely recommend it to those who already love supernatural genres, go get reading!' - The Guardian The second addictive adventure in Tim O'Rourke's acclaimed Sammy Carter series It's been a year since Samantha Carter blasted back to 1888, barely escaping with her life. Now, returned to present-day London with only her nymphomaniac flatmate for company, she's starting to believe that everything - the blood-curdling vampires, her strange and sudden skills with a gun, even her mysterious lover Harry - was nothing but a dream. Just when Sammy is about to lose all hope that her friends and memories were real, it finally happens again. This time she's pulled back to a city she does not recognise: a London in the grip of a terrible plague, where death haunts the night and a deeper, darker threat lurks underground, waiting for its chance . . . Fighting side by side with her friends once again, Sammy encounters horrors beyond her imagining; yet what really terrifies her are the endless questions, one most of all: who is she really? Torn between the life she longs for and the life she can believe in, Sammy must decide whether she's brave enough to risk everything, even her heart . . . 'I don't think he could write a bad book if he tried at this point.' - Goodreads 'I need to read the sequel right now. I cannot wait for the release date!' - A Readers Review Blog 'Do not think you can just read this book . . . no, you cannot, you will live in it . . . you will fall into it and be a part of the story.' Delirium.blogspot.com Book Reviews

Release date: September 4, 2014

Publisher: Piatkus

Print pages: 304

Sample

They were monsters who preferred the night. For hundreds of years they had waited, becoming a part of the darkness that surrounded them. They lived below ground while the humans forged through history, creating lives, villages, towns then cities above. All the while the monsters bided their time, waiting for the moment they would go above ground. They roamed the darkness, their wide mouths full of teeth, each one a jagged point. White claws, razor-sharp. Eyes as black as the depths they hid in. They waited. They were patient.

But as time passed, some had been less so and they had crept from below ground and ventured into the world above. Here they had kept to the shadows, never venturing too far from their murky depths. They watched the humans from afar, still too timid to approach. The monsters fed on flesh, but it was always cold. They had yet to discover the true delights of warm flesh – of the hot sticky blood that surged through the veins of the living. So they fed on the dead and took what substance they could from them. They stole from graves, snatching bodies so as not to draw attention to themselves. And when there wasn’t enough flesh, or the risk of discovery by the humans was too great, they ate each other. Their Pale Liege told them their time was not yet. But it would come. One night they would at last know the delights of warm human flesh.

But deep within his withered soul the Pale Liege had a memory of a distant enemy, one who lived only to destroy him and his kind. His enemy lived above ground and wasn’t human. He walked in the light and the dark. But that darkness had to be absolute or he too would perish. The Pale Liege knew his enemy changed his skin in the light of the moon. If the humans discovered this, they would hunt him down. Yet the Skinturner cared for these humans – he wanted to protect them. That was the Skinturner’s weakness and that was what would kill him.

So it was better to wait in the darkness until there was enough flesh to feed his subjects.

“Hey! You!” I called up the stairs leading off the Underground platform and on to the concourse area. The man who had told me to mind the gap was now gone. I glanced at the curved wall of the station and read the name fixed there. Aldgate. How had I got here again?

I fought to remember the last few hours of my life. I would be lucky – I could barely recall the last year. It had passed in a haze and when I tried to look back it was like staring through a sheet of frosted glass. The images of what had taken place in 1888 were there, but only just visible. I had to struggle to picture the preacher, Harry, Louise and Zoe. With eyes closed, I concentrated on what I had done this morning.

I had been woken once again by the cries of joy coming from Sally’s room just down the hall from mine. I had rolled over, covering my head with my pillow, but the sound of her being shagged by the guy she had brought home last night jabbed at my eardrums like needlepoints. Why did she always get to have so much fun? I thought, ripping back my bedding. I guessed I’d had my fun back in 1888 with a cowboy named Harry. Just my luck I could barely remember it!

Wanting to be gone before Sally slunk into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed hot and her eyes half shut with a look of dreamy satisfaction in them, I headed for the shower. Once I was dressed I left the flat. I wandered the streets of London, pretending to be interested in the same old sights I had seen a thousand times before. I smoked one cigarette after another, flicking the smouldering butts into the gutters that were swollen with rain. As I had walked, collar of my coat turned up, my blond hair soaked black, I had tried yet again to bring to mind the events that had taken place in Colorado. Had I really become a member of a group – pack – of skin-turning werewolves who hunted down vampires? Had I really caught a vampire myself? It seemed all too incredible; no wonder my brain had tried to block it out. If it hadn’t then perhaps I would have gone mad. Perhaps I’d already lost my mind? I’d spent the last year of my life living like a zombie, sitting in lectures at uni and gazing out of the window, wondering if I would ever travel back in time again and meet up with the friends I had made there. But would I even recognise them again?

Now I realised that as my mind had turned to vampires and the friends I had made in 1888, I had found myself once again standing outside Aldgate Tube Station. It seemed to pull me to it every time I left my flat, like it reached out with a set of invisible arms and dragged me. But there had been something special about today. The station had pulled me towards it for a reason. Exactly one year had passed since I had stepped on to a train and gone back in time. One year since a faceless stranger had wrapped his arms about me, enclosing me just like the station itself. That stranger had sent me to 1888. But why, and who was he? And was he the same man I had just been chasing? I opened my eyes and looked at the platform edge. Then it came to me. I had followed him into the station. He had caught my eye outside. I closed my eyes again, pressing my fingertips against my temples. Had he thrown something at me? I could see coins clicking against the pavement at my feet. The French francs I now held in my hand, perhaps? Had I been to Paris recently? Could I have forgotten that too? But the French used the euro now. Had they come from another time, just like the man who had thrown them? So many questions racing along the corridors of my mind but I was unable to find the answer to one of them.

I opened my eyes again, looking at the platform edge. I could remember myself teetering, arms pinwheeling as if I was going to fall on to the tracks beneath the wheels of an approaching train. He had pushed me. I had felt the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades. But he had changed his mind at the very last moment, pulling me back instead of pushing me under.

I placed the francs back into my coat pocket and raced up the stairs, taking two at a time. The sound of the leather soles of my boots echoed off the curved walls of the Underground Station. The coins jingled in my pocket. I glanced down at the desolate platform as the empty train slowly rattled into the tunnel. My brain felt like a fucking knot. The platform had been full of passengers. I had fought my way through them as I had gone after that man. There had been so many squeezed on to the platform I’d nearly been knocked into the path of the approaching train. But I was sure now he had saved me, gripped me by the back of the neck, yanking me away as I teetered on the edge. All of that had happened in a blink of an eye, so where had all the hundreds of passengers gone? How had they vacated the station so quickly? They hadn’t boarded the train, as that would have left the station empty. With a sinking feeling in my heart, I knew it wasn’t the other passengers who had gone – it was me who had vanished. Fearing I had lost time once again, I rushed on to the concourse. Just like the platforms beneath me the concourse was deserted. The gates on the barrier line were open. There was no ticket collector tonight. With my heart thumping in my chest, I walked slowly forward.

“Hello?”

There was no answer, just the sound of the wind howling through the wide-open entrance at the front of the station. What looked like flakes of dust swirled inside, covering the floor with white, like snow. Raising one hand up before my eyes, I peered out into the night as I passed slowly through the open barrier line. I couldn’t see any traffic – taxis or night buses – pass by outside. With my arm still raised before me, I glanced at my watch. It was 7:10 p.m. Commuter time. The only thing was, there were no commuters. There were no buses or taxis to take them home – nothing. Just the sound of the baying wind and what looked like dust swirling through the air at the front of the station. With my heart still pounding and my stomach clenched tight, I made my way to the entrance. Just as I reached it, a sudden gust of wind blew hard into the station, spraying my face and hands with the white dust. I turned away, covering my eyes, nose and mouth with my hands. As I stood hunched against the blast, I heard a sound. At first I thought it was the howl and roar of the wind that made my skin prickle with gooseflesh, but it wasn’t. The sound was too shrill – too agonising. The noise I could hear was the sound of hundreds of people crying out in pain. My fear was that if I dared to check back over my shoulder, I would find that I had somehow fallen into the depths of hell, where those who had never seen the light were now being tormented in utter darkness.

The moans and groans of despair circled me, gripping my heart, as if squeezing the life from it. In my mind’s eye, I could see an ocean of people writhing against each other, their limbs entangled like a giant knot of human flesh. Each of them was desperate to be free of their own personal torment. I took my hands from my face and opened my eyes. At once I wished that I could close them again, but couldn’t. I staggered backwards, stifling a scream by forcing my fist into my mouth. The hideous images my mind had conjured up now seemed like the illustrations from a fairy-tale compared to what confronted me.

I was no longer at the entrance of Aldgate Tube Station. It had vanished. I was on Aldgate High Street. How could I be so sure? St Botolph Church was still standing, although it looked kinda different to the church I passed daily on my way to uni, older, and although it still had a tall tower, it was now built from wood, rather than the white and grey stone I remembered. There was a graveyard which was now so vast the gravestones protruded into the road at the front and sides of the church where buses and taxis should pass by. But there were no real roads, not like the ones I had walked across daily in London. These were covered with dirt and stone. What looked like rotting food and excrement flowed in the gutters. I covered my nose at the vile stench, although it wasn’t the smell of the filth and dirt that made me want to gag. It was the sea of rotting corpses covering the road that stank so much. And just like in my mind the decaying corpses were entangled together in a mass of spoiling flesh. The faces of the dead were bloated: purple, black and blue. Lips puffed until they had cracked, revealing black gums beneath. Eyes rolled back in hollow sockets. There were men, women and children. Whatever had killed them had not discriminated between the sexes, the young or the old.

The white dust continued to swirl all about me, and I was grateful when it gusted so thick on the wind that it blocked the hideous view of the dead stretching away in the direction of the church. There was another sound I could hear, like metal being scraped across earth. It was digging. I made my way amongst and over the mountainous trail of rotting corpses, in the direction of the church and the sound of shovelling. It was night, but the sky glowed with an eerie orange tinge. Then, through the dust and the smoke, I could see fires burning ahead of me. Flames licked from a giant mound in the graveyard at the front of the church. I inched my way forward, a sweet smell like that of slow-cooking pork going some way to block out the stench of rotting flesh. Suddenly I stopped and looked ahead, blinking and rubbing smoke from my eyes. This was so fucked up. I could see what looked like four giant Wombles digging in the graveyard. Their faces were long and pointed, brown in colour and leathery-looking. These creatures wore long dark robes that billowed about them like giant wings. Two of the monsters dug at the ground with shovels, another drove long wooden stakes into the chests of the corpses and the last carried the dead and placed them into the fire that raged. I peered through my cold fingers again, my legs growing weak as I realised what it was these strange-looking creatures were doing. They weren’t burying the dead, they were digging them up, driving pointed wooden stakes into their black withered hearts, then incinerating them. I looked up into the night sky, my stomach knotting with revulsion, realising it wasn’t white flakes of dust that swirled all around me, but the smouldering ash from the corpses the creatures were throwing into the fire.

I wanted to be free of this nightmare. I wanted to wake up back in Aldgate Tube Station. I wanted to be in my flat, listening to Sally scream with orgasmic delight. Anything had to be better than the sound of those shovels scraping across earth, the rip of dead flesh as those stakes were skewered into the hearts of the dead and the crackling of burning corpses. I turned to flee towards the station that was no longer there. My head was telling me that it would be waiting for me, although my heart was telling me that it hadn’t been built yet, that the London Underground wouldn’t be constructed for another two hundred years and when they did dig the tunnels out in 1876 the ground would be almost impenetrable because of all the corpses buried in deep pits. But how did I know this? I had never been one for history at school. I had spent most of my time staring out of the classroom window fantasising about the existence of vampires. And if I wasn’t doing that I was clock-watching, counting down the minutes until I could slip away to the furthest reaches of the school yard and smoke a cigarette. What I wouldn’t do for a smoke right now. I drove my hand into my coat pocket, but there were no pockets. I wasn’t wearing a coat. I was wearing a long black flowing gown with a hood, just like those creatures. There was a noise, like the fluttering of wings. Startled, I looked up. One of those creatures with the Womble-like faces was now standing before me.

My hand instinctively slipped beneath my robes, where my fingers found a series of long sharpened wooden stakes that hung from a leather belt around my waist. Before my heart had even a chance to beat, one of those stakes was in my fist and aiming straight into the pointed face of the creature that now loomed before me. The creature was just as quick to respond, and had gripped my wrist tight with one gloved hand. It was then as I stared into its strange face I realised it wasn’t made of flesh at all, but leather. It had large black eyes, the size of small saucers. What I saw before me was a mask of some kind, which had been stitched together.

“Who are you?” I breathed, trying to wrestle my wrist free.

Whoever was hidden beh. . .