“There’s no way,” he said, his voice trembling, “that the Director is going to agree to that.”

Valentin smiled. “Then nothing will have been lost, Mr Browning,” he said, his voice once again warm and friendly. “But I believe Major Turner possesses a far greater capacity to surprise than you might think.”

Jamie stared down at the bloody puddle, cold fury burning in his chest. The white paint that had been sprayed over the remains had bled pink at its edges, but was still wet; he guessed it was no more than five minutes old.

“It is the same,” said Qiang. “Night Stalkers.”

Jamie nodded, his mind pulsing with a single thought.

Too late.

The Surveillance alert that had brought them to this bleak industrial estate on the outskirts of Nottingham had been the first of their Patrol Respond; it had appeared on their van’s screen when they were twenty miles away, barely inside their allocated grid, and despite the heroic efforts of their driver, they had evidently not managed to cover the distance quickly enough.

A 999 call had been made by a security guard patrolling the roof of the warehouse that now rose above them, a giant red-brick cube plastered with signs warning would-be intruders of 24-HOUR CCTV MONITORING and GUARD DOGS ON PATROL. The man had seen a dark van pull into the vacant lot below, and three black-clad figures drag the limp shape of an elderly man out on to the cracked tarmac; he had rung the police as soon as he realised what he was witnessing.

Jamie looked around. There was no sign of the security guard, despite the amplified requests they had made for him to show himself; he had likely fled what had now become a murder scene. Ellison and Qiang were beside him, their visors raised, their faces pale; the three Operators had seen more horror than most, but there was something about the Night Stalker attacks that turned their stomachs. Jamie believed it was the calculated viciousness of the killings; traces of a powerful veterinary sedative had been found in the remains of every Night Stalker victim, and he had seen with his own eyes how the vampires met their end, executed in cold blood, on their knees and utterly helpless.

Five minutes, he thought. Five miles if they were doing sixty. Probably half that, at most.

Ellison looked at him. “What do you want—”

“Stay here,” interrupted Jamie. “I need to check something.”

She frowned. “Stay here? Where are you going?”

Jamie didn’t answer; his feet left the ground and he rocketed directly upwards, leaving his squad mates far below. A bank of grey cloud hung above him, filling the sky for dozens of miles in every direction; he stopped before he reached it, and floated easily in the cold night air. The urban sprawl of Nottingham stretched out below, taller and brighter in the town centre to the west, but dark and quiet directly beneath him; the men and women who worked in the warehouses and factories that filled this corner of the city were long gone.

He scanned the dark landscape, searching for the rumble of a van engine or the red pinpricks of brake lights. He could hear the distant hissing and screeching as a pair of cats faced off, and the steady bass percussion rising from an underground nightclub. He stretched his senses to their limits, feeling the pressure build in his head, and heard something.

It was faint, and getting fainter, but it was there.

An engine.

He squinted in the direction of the sound, scanning the maze of narrow streets for movement. For long, painful seconds, he saw nothing; then, at the furthest reach of his supernatural eyesight, a black shape moved across an intersection, little more than a mobile section of darkness.

Without taking his eyes off the van – if that was even what it was – Jamie spun in the air and rocketed towards it. The wind howled around him and the cold chilled his bones as he raced forward; without the protection of his visor, his eyes would have been streaming with tears. As he soared above the flat rooftops and empty car parks, he twisted the comms dial on his belt and opened a line to his squad mates.

“I see the van!” he shouted. “Follow my locator signal! Fast as you can!”

“We’re moving,” replied Ellison. “We’ve got you.”

Jamie left the line open, swooped lower, and felt a wave of savage excitement roll through him. Moving slowly along an access road below him, in what he guessed was an attempt to avoid drawing attention to itself, was a dark van.

I can see you, he thought.

He scanned the surrounding area and dropped lower. No more than two miles ahead, the access road merged on to a busy local thoroughfare, and beyond that his supernaturally sharp eyes picked out the wide illuminated lanes of a motorway.

Have to get them before they reach it.

Behind him, he heard the rumble of a second engine. He rotated in the air, and saw the van containing his squad mates hurtle round a corner and accelerate along the road beneath him. It was gaining quickly on the target vehicle, but, as he turned back, he realised that its driver had seen the new arrival too. Jamie swore heavily. He should have anticipated that, should have ordered his squad to centre on his position without using the main access road, but it was too late for that now; the Night Stalkers’ van had leapt forward and was racing towards the distant intersection.

Jamie hung in the air, momentarily unsure of what to do. Then an idea came to him, one that would not be found in any of Blacklight’s tactical instruction manuals, and he burst forward again, grinning behind his visor. He accelerated, descending towards the road that was now little more than a blur beneath him. The van was directly ahead, its brake lights acting like a homing beacon, its engine howling.

He pushed himself to fly even faster, and drew alongside the vehicle. The van’s driver, his face hidden by a balaclava, glanced out of the window and saw him; their eyes locked for the briefest of moments, before Jamie hurled himself sideways and slammed into the metal side of the van.

The impact was agonising; it drove the air out of him as pain exploded through his head. He flipped up and over, his limbs flailing out of control, as the van tilted on to two wheels then crashed on its side with a shower of sparks and a deafening screech of metal, and as he hurtled helplessly towards a brick wall that looked horribly solid, Jamie’s reeling mind formed a single thought.

This might not have been such a brilliant idea.

Jamie opened his eyes and saw Ellison and Qiang standing over him, a combination of concern and anger on their faces.

He lifted his head, felt a nauseating bolt of pain race up the back of his neck, and looked down at himself; he was lying at the base of the brick wall, his legs splayed, his shoulders flat on the pavement. One of his arms was folded beneath him, but the other …

Jamie’s head swam. His right arm was broken at the elbow, snapped almost all the way back on itself. He felt no pain, but knew it was only a matter of time until it arrived. His arm looked so violently wrong that he felt his gorge rise, and he fought back the urge to vomit.

“Don’t move,” said Ellison.

She crouched down beside him and tipped blood into his mouth from a plastic bottle. He swallowed the liquid hungrily, feeling the pain and disorientation disappear as heat bloomed behind his eyes, and watched with horrified fascination as his arm slowly un-broke: it folded out until it was straight, then the angular points of shattered bone beneath the sleeve of his uniform flattened out and disappeared. He kept drinking until the arm felt like new, then groaned, and sat up.

Behind his squad mates, the Night Stalkers’ van lay on its side, surrounded by a halo of spilled oil and shattered glass. Its passenger and rear doors were open, one of its back wheels was still spinning slowly, and Jamie realised he could not have been out for long.