She was alone.

Marie got up from the sofa, crossed the square room, and started making tea. She didn’t want tea, but she needed to do something to occupy herself, even if only for a minute or two. She knew she was not going to be able to think about anything else until Jamie walked back through the airlock in one piece, a prospect she knew was many hours away, if it happened at all. She poured water into the teapot, filled a mug, and selected a biscuit from the small tin on the table. She carried them back to the sofa, her heart sick with worry, her head full of her son, and settled down to wait.

Her vigil had begun.

Seventy miles away, Marie’s son was sitting in the hold of the helicopter that had been designated Falcon 3, his helmet between his feet, his T-Bone and MP7 lying on his knees, trying his hardest not to treat this mission differently from all the others.

Focus, he told himself. Your objectives, your surroundings, your squad mates. Ignore the stakes, ignore the fact that it’s Dracula. Just do your job.

Objectively – which was how he was attempting to view it – the Operation was extremely straightforward. His colleagues, and the Operators of the other Departments waiting for them in France, had a far more complicated situation waiting for them: a large-scale battle with an enemy of unknown numbers and competence fought on unfamiliar and unreliable territory. The five members of the strike team had been tasked with destroying a single vampire.

That doesn’t really cover it, though, does it? whispered a voice in his head. You can’t really refer to Dracula as just ‘a single vampire’.

But he could. And not only could, but had to.

If he allowed Dracula’s legend, the first vampire’s prodigious power and viciousness, to loom in his mind, then fear would begin to creep in, and fear was something Jamie could not allow. He would respect their target, and treat him with appropriate caution, but that was all; if they did their job properly, he would die like any other vampire.

He looked around the dark hold. No more than one of the strike team had been permitted in any single vehicle, in case the fleet of helicopters was attacked before they reached Carcassonne, but he was still surrounded by his friends. Jack Williams was opposite him, his eyes closed, his face pale, and sitting next to Jack was Lizzy Ellison; her eyes were open, and fixed squarely on him.

Jamie smiled at his squad mate. He didn’t speak; he didn’t want to disturb the thirty or so Operators sitting around them who were currently in worlds of their own, preparing however they saw fit for what was coming. Many had their eyes closed like Jack, but others were staring straight ahead, up at the ceiling, or down at the floor. Most were gripping weapons as though their lives depended on them, which they soon would.

Ellison didn’t smile back at him. Her expression was calm and determined, its unspoken message clear.

You can do this. We can do this.

In his makeshift quarters at the centre of Field 1, Aleksandr Ovechkin got down on his knees and prayed for the first time in more than three decades.

He had been raised Russian Orthodox in the barren expanses of Chukotka, but his faith, inasmuch as it had ever existed, had been largely ground out of him by the Red Army instructors who had moulded his wide-eyed, seventeen-year-old self into a soldier. Whatever had remained had not survived his long career, first with the KGB – as it had still been known – and then with the SPC; reconciling the existence of God with the horrors he had seen perpetrated on innocent men and women, by the supernatural and by his fellow human beings, had proved impossible.

Nonetheless, he prayed.

Not for victory, however. He would not insult the Operators of the Multinational Force by suggesting the battle would be won or lost at the whim of something as ethereal as God’s favour; it would be won or lost as a result of their skill, and bravery, and heart. Instead, he prayed for those who would not survive the fighting that was about to begin, for the unknowing men and women whose lives could now be measured in hours and minutes. He prayed they would find peace in the darkness, that the universe might allow them to take some echo of pride with them at having fought well, on the side of good.

Ovechkin clasped his hands together and closed his eyes.

Our Father, he began. Who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name …

In the hold of Falcon 4, Larissa thought about what she had told Callum before she left Haven.

I’m coming back, she had said. When this is all over, I’m coming back.

She had meant it then, and was almost surprised to realise that she meant it even more determinedly now. Her return to Blacklight had brought forth the uneasy cocktail of emotions she had expected, not least nostalgia at the intense familiarity of the Loop itself. There had been guarded happiness at the prospect of seeing Kate and Matt, mainly because she hadn’t known whether they hated her for leaving or not, and palpable dread at the thought of seeing Jamie, even though the desperate, naïve part of herself that had believed all along that it would be OK had turned out to be right, more or less. There was a deep wellspring of anger inside her ex-boyfriend, and it was horribly obvious that at least some of it was directed at her, but Jamie was clearly working hard to contain it and at least attempt to understand why she had done what she did.

But even though the thing she had worried about most had not turned out to be as bad as she had feared, the endless corridors of the Loop, the black uniforms, and even the very faces of the people who had been her friends and colleagues, still transported her back to a place and time where she had felt trapped and alone and as if she had become a person she didn’t know, or like.

All of which meant that her motivations for the mission they were about to undertake differed slightly from the rest of the Operators in the hold of Falcon 4. On a macro level, she wanted Dracula stopped; she knew the fate of the world was largely resting with the Multinational Force, and she liked the world as it was. But when it was all over, if they were victorious, the survivors would go back to bases around the world and resume their careers inside the supernatural Departments.

She, on the other hand, would go back to Haven. It was the prospect that was keeping her focused on the task at hand, because if there was anything she was certain of, it was that she wanted to go home.

And Dracula was standing in her way.

In the command centre of the displaced persons camp, Bob Allen waited for Blacklight to arrive, his mind teeming with the dead.

When he had been promoted to Major, what seemed like a lifetime ago now, the NS9 Director at the time, a formidable former CIA spook named Alan Mathis, had invited him to his quarters to raise a celebratory glass. Over Scotch that was older than them, they had talked about the life they had committed themselves to, about the horrors they had seen and those that, inevitably, were still to come. Emboldened by whisky, Allen had eventually asked the Director how he dealt with it when those under his command were killed; Mathis had been legendarily cold, and there had been a widespread perception that the deaths of NS9 Operators didn’t affect him at all. The Director had drained his glass, set it down, and stared directly into Allen’s eyes.

“I’m glad that’s what they think,” he said. “Each and every death tears a piece from my heart, but what would be the good of me showing them that? Would they respect me more if I wailed and howled at every coffin? Would they follow my orders more faithfully if I existed in a state of perpetual mourning? Of course they wouldn’t. There is no time for grief, Major. My job is to take the blows, deal with them, and move forward. That is the burden of command, and you’ll come to understand it all too well.”