Blood Cursed

by Alex Archer

  “I can handle it,” she insisted. “But what I’m about to handle isn’t fodder for the television show.”

  “I agree. Whatever is going on out at that dig site and in the Gypsy encampment has gone beyond mythical monsters.” He crunched a few more chips, then fell silent and became very still. “Do you think the monsters are human, Annja?”

  “I do think that. And I’ve called the police about Santos. Hopefully they’ll get out there and pick him up before he bleeds out. I want to make sure the plight of the Roma children gets some attention.”

  “If Santos was behind it,” Doug spoke slowly, working things out as he went, “that means he betrayed his own people.”

  “He didn’t seem like a very upstanding man to begin with.”

  “No, but his mother was nice. In an eerie, Gypsy, read-your-mind kind of way.”

  “I think she knew her son was up to no good, but didn’t have a clue how horrible it could be. I still don’t know the facts.”

  At that moment Luke wandered into the waiting room. His eyelids were drooping heavily and his smile wavered. “Painkillers,” he mumbled. “They’ve signed me out—payment’s all taken care of. And you are still one gorgeous woman.”

  “Let’s get you back to the hotel,” Doug said, catching the man’s arm over his shoulder and leading him outside to the rental. “Unless you want the gorgeous woman to help you?”

  “Just get him in the car,” Annja said.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING Luke took a phone call from a colleague in England while Annja excused herself to have a shower. She and Doug had slept on the floor last night after Luke had literally sprawled across the entire bed.

  Doug had left for the train station an hour ago. He’d emailed himself the footage he’d filmed on Luke’s iPad, but didn’t erase it, so Annja intended to scan it as soon as she dried off. Shrugging the towel over her body, she rubbed her hair, then combed it out, tugged on her underclothes and a T-shirt, then wrapped the towel around her waist and returned to the main room.

  “The university upset about the fire at the site?” she asked while shuffling through her backpack.

  A reasonably clean pair of black cargos were made less dusty with a smart snap. She pulled them up under the towel while Luke watched from his position as he leaned over the table. The Welshman didn’t take his eyes from her.

  Sliding onto the bed and leaning on one elbow she gestured to Luke’s work on the table in front of him. The skull was still wrapped in the plastic beside the microscope.

  “Luke?”

  “Uh, sorry.” He exhaled and riffled a hand through his hair. “Really sorry.”

  He exhaled again, and this time made a show of sorting the few items on the table before him: iPad, tweezers, lab slides. But before launching into what she hoped was an answer to her question about the fire, the man tilted his head and winced. “They weren’t pleased, but also understand that these sort of things are hazards of the profession. I’m to report back to work next Monday.”

  That cut their time much shorter than she’d thought. “You mentioned the blessing in the car. What was that about?”

  “Yes, the, uh, scribblings on the paper are actually Romani. Chester Rumshaven, a colleague of mine, interpreted it as ‘may the sun always shine.’ A blessing, he believes.”

  “Appropriate for one who would fear a vampire coming after them. But the vampire legend hasn’t always embraced the not being able to walk in daylight trope, has it?”

  “Exactly, so it’s baffling. Makes it difficult to date the skull preceding the twentieth century, that’s for sure. This adds fuel to the idea that it’s rather new.” He tapped the paper with the tip of a fine set of tweezers. “Perhaps five or six decades? Or who knows? It could have been planted a year ago before the floods. I’ve no means to test the paper for aging methods, and we have no proof the brick was originally placed in the skull’s mouth. The flooding moved the soil around the bones and completely destroyed the original placement.”

  “A plant? Someone might have engineered the whole thing? What better way to deflect suspicion from the real monsters than by tossing some false monsters into the mix,” she decided. “The Roma’s beliefs are so strong they would first believe in the mullo, especially if encouraged by someone they trust, like Santos. But we dug that out of the dirt. It was embedded. I’ve dug up pots that have been put in the ground to look like artifacts. A person can usually determine a plant from the real thing.”

  “I agree. Though with the flooding and all the movement in the earth, well—”

  “Santos knows. He has to. I shouldn’t have left him out there on the road. I need to question him further. I wonder if the police reached him in time to save his life. If Garin would have only been more forthcoming...”

  Luke turned on the chair and propped an elbow on the back of it, leaning toward her.

  “What’s our next move?”

  “I’m going to find Garin. I think he’ll lead me to the man behind the kidnappings. The skull was a diversion. The real danger is in Bracks.”

  “So...this is where my job ends,” Luke said, then hesitated. “I’m not sure how I can help you with your friend Garin. I’m an archaeologist. You, on the other hand, are something I’m not sure how to define.”

  “I’m an archaeologist who occasionally hosts a TV show about monsters.”

  “Yes, but you’re so much more, Annja. So much more.”

  She shrugged, not so much uncomfortable with his admiration as unsure. “The trail’s growing cold.”

  “Then you should get to it.” Luke reluctantly turned back to his work. “Or―” he looked over his shoulder at her “―I could call the university and get a reprieve. Come with you...?”

  Annja slid off the bed and walked over to Luke.

  After all, the morning was still young.

  Chapter 17

  “In the 1950s the government forced sterilization on the Romani camps. It was a horrible thing. Women would go to their local clinics for a free checkup and come home unable to conceive. Very sad,” Luke said as they traveled west in Annja’s rental car toward Liberec.

  They had been planning to take the train to Berlin, meet up with Garin there, then hop a flight to London until Annja had called Garin’s estate in Berlin. His butler had told her the master of the house was currently in London. Luke was pleased to be heading straight home, skull in hand.

  The train didn’t leave for another four hours, so they took their time as they drove to the station in Liberec.

  “The Romanis have always been persecuted,” he continued. “They’re an easy mark. It’s obvious why they’ve been singled out now, in this incident.”

  “Singled out by vampires,” Annja commented. She steered sharply right to avoid a goose crossing the road.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen victim to the legend?” Luke’s eyes were concealed behind sunglasses. “Annja?”

  “I mean real vampires. Which I interpret as cruel people who kidnap children. And I have reason to guess they steal their blood and organs. That’s the worst kind of vampire, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, true. If we can prove to the Romanis that, indeed, it is men behind the missing children, then we could empower them. We need to do that for them, Annja.”

  “I have a feeling Mamma could change the thinking of the clan. If Santos were out of the picture, Mamma might be able to step up.”

  “Yes, and I want to help her do that.”

  “I need to track Bracks and ensure he’s put away for what he’s doing. I don’t have time to steer a Gypsy camp from their ingrained beliefs.”

  “I should have stayed behind. I’ve got four days still until I’m due back in London. I’ve got reasonable doubt the brick wasn’t originally in the skull’s mouth whe
n the person was buried. I need to talk to Mamma.”

  She admired the man’s conviction. This adventure had been the start of a long-lasting friendship.

  Navigating a hard right, she spun the car around the back tires. With laughter at Luke’s surprise, Annja sped back toward Chrastava to deliver the Romas a determined savior.

  * * *

  IF HE COULD get a bead on Bracks and take him out, then the matter would be done with. Or would it?

  Garin knew that Bracks was smart, but he hadn’t gotten where he was on his own. The man controlled a vast, worldwide network. And where a man worked with many, one or more couldn’t be trusted. Garin had learned that over the course of centuries.

  That he’d been in the same room with Bracks in Chrastava did not soothe his ego now. He bet Bracks was having a good laugh at having eluded him. And he guessed this operation had never intended to be an affront to him, like one of Bracks’s usual plays against him. It had been coincidental that he’d stumbled onto this mess. And he could use that to keep Bracks on his toes and guessing.

  But it was time he dealt with Bracks. Permanently. Shouldn’t be so difficult to erase the problem child and get on with business. And because it was proving such a pain in the ass, Garin knew he was dealing with something that ran much deeper than he’d first guessed. Something that nudged at his sense of justice and compassion.

  He did have compassion; it was somewhere, tangled with the hardness and distrust ingrained over the centuries.

  “Creed, why do you always get me in these messes?”

  But really, Annja wasn’t to blame for his headache this time. This was his mess. She was merely inextricably involved.

  I will take you down. She’d said that to him over the phone after putting two and two together and deciding that he was somehow allied with Bracks.

  He had no doubt that she would. Yet on the other hand, the woman knew he was a man without a traceable past. Would she leave him to fend off the authorities’ questions and investigations? Not that he couldn’t handle a little heat. But yes, he suspected she would hold good on her word.

  And that meant Garin had to stay one, or two, steps ahead of Annja Creed from here on out.

  A diversion seemed necessary. Did he know of any major archaeological digs looking for a superstar to heighten the appeal of their mission? Could he send her an anonymous juicy tidbit about a lost Mayan ruin that promised adventure and which would be right up her alley?

  “No,” he muttered, then smiled. “I’d hate to take her out of the game at this point. She could lead me to Bracks.”

  He just had to play nice and make her understand he was on her side.

  For now.

  * * *

  ANNJA DECIDED IT was best to leave Luke on his own to talk to Santos’s mother because she had left the woman with a less-than-stellar opinion of her. Surely, fighting her son hadn’t endeared her to the woman. And the entire Gypsy camp seemed to lift their hackles and send Annja the evil eye when she walked through.

  Where was Santos? Was he in jail, in the hospital or at the morgue? She had no idea.

  Back in town, she checked outgoing flights from Berlin to London. After mailing the skull from Liberec to her address, she booked coach for an evening flight, then drove to the train station. The train to Berlin didn’t leave for another two hours.

  With time on her hands, she vacillated on calling Roux. If anyone would have more of a clue than she did on Garin Braden’s whereabouts, the saucy old Frenchman would. Yet she snapped her cell phone shut after pushing the speed-dial number for Roux.

  Intuition told her this time around he wouldn’t know any more than she did. Garin was involved in dirty dealings, and though the two men had been known to partner in crime on occasions, this one felt too deep for Roux’s interests, which tended toward art and, always, women.

  But what the crime was, Annja still hadn’t a clue.

  Tugging out her laptop, she jacked into the train station’s Wi-Fi using an app to go online from where she sat in the parking lot. Her initial search for mullo only verified the information Luke had given her. When she added “kidnapped children” to the search, it brought up an article completely unrelated to mythical vampires.

  “Voodoo?”

  One article detailed a particularly grisly murder a few years ago in London. An eight-year-old boy’s body had been found in the Thames, his arms and legs cut off and organs removed. Missing for over three months, he had eventually been traced to a Romani family from Bulgaria.

  “Do I have a connection?” she muttered, scanning the article, and finding it lacking in detail and links to further information. It merely stated those few facts, and that the authorities were looking into it. No perpetrators had been charged as of the date on the article, which was two and a half years ago. No follow-up articles were found.

  “Disappointing,” she muttered of the lack of information.

  One link took her to a man who claimed to be the son of a voodoo witch doctor, and confirmed the use of children in rituals because the young were thought to have pure souls. That helped to answer her question as to why children would be taken as opposed to adults.

  She closed her eyes against the image of a child, alone, tied up and beaten. To not know what would happen to him, all alone and away from the safety of his family. It was too horrible, and she shook her head to clear it.

  Yet another article, dating back a few years, tracked missing Nigerian children to a trafficking ring in London that had been loosely linked to voodoo rituals.

  Missing organs and copious amounts of blood, Annja read. The suspects were never arrested. The bodies had been found in the Thames, and one had been disposed of in a trash bag in a dumpsite near Kew Gardens. The identity of only three children had been verified and matched to dental records, though other body parts could not be matched. They suspect dozens of children could have been murdered.

  She sat back in the seat, closing her eyes. The soft strains of Czechoslovakian folk music over the radio didn’t quell her disturbing thoughts. That a human being could have the capacity to harm a child sickened her. But she knew it happened all over the world, from pornography, to trafficking and prostitution, and now this. Organs may have been harvested from innocent children for bizarre voodoo rituals, and blood drained from them, as well.

  “Real-life vampires indeed,” she said.

  And for once she wished Doug’s image of the fanged and caped monster had been more real and they’d been mistaken about the missing children. Just a vampire risen from the grave to scare everyone, folks. Your children are safe.

  But that particular mythical monster didn’t exist, and human ones did.

  This information and the white cooler that had led Garin to London on Bracks’s trail had to be related to the missing Romani children. As Santos had claimed, the traffickers had used the legend of a mullo to distract from the real crime. Made a macabre kind of sense. It would easily explain away the missing children if the Romani believed the lie. They would never go to the authorities, because to claim such superstitious nonsense would see them laughed at.

  Bracks walked away clean from the kidnappings and any connected macabre crimes.

  “Clever. Too clever.”

  Someone must have alerted Bracks about the skull. Daisy’s bragging, possibly. Someone, Santos or Bracks, had known it would work as a diversion. Santos and Garin had both mentioned a man named Canov. She scribbled the name down on her field notebook.

  Such a cover story had only net them a child or two from the Roma camp. Bracks could hardly operate a trafficking operation with such a poor source. It didn’t add up. But then, Annja decided the authorities would have a better handle of the criminal aspects of this case. She had no evidence to call London and report the possibility that Bracks was involved in child trafficking.


  Garin could help her with that.

  Annja pulled out the cell phone again and dialed Roux’s number.

  “Hello, Annja,” Roux said, answering on the first ring. “What are we going to do about Garin?”

  * * *

  MAMMA GREETED LUKE with reserve. The woman wore a flour-dusted apron and gestured for him to sit at the kitchen table where she had six plump balls of dough sitting on strewn flour. His mother had always been a bread baker, and he inhaled the aroma of yeast and flour as if an addict sinking into a field of opium poppies.

  Beside the door sat a box of toys and children’s clothing. It drew Luke’s eye because he hadn’t seen a child in the home or been aware that Mamma had a grandchild.

  “If I’m disturbing you, I can return at another time,” he offered. Annja had dropped him off here. He wasn’t sure how to get back to town, except to walk the few miles, which shouldn’t be a problem. So he expected to accomplish what he could while he was here. “Rosemary bread?”

  “Leftover from the funeral,” she said coldly. “Not many had the stomach to eat following the service, and I can’t let all this dough go to waste.”

  “Are you expecting a guest?” he said, glancing at the box near the door.

  “No,” she answered abruptly, and continued kneading the dough.

  “Must be selling some old things, then.”

  The family of the deceased sold all the dead’s property because to keep an item would prove bad luck—and possibly lure the mullo.

  “What have you come here for, Mr. Spencer? And where is that archaeologist who thinks she can go after my son with a sword?”

  “Er, Annja has other business that’s taken her out of town. Your son went after her with his sword. She was only acting in self-defense.”

  He caught the woman’s frown and winced. Had to be cautious of the evil eye in these parts.

  “She is not natural,” the woman said. “And now...” She lifted her chin and stared through the archway that led to a darkened room. Luke thought he caught the scent of incense burning. “Speak what you’ve come to say, then leave as quickly as you arrived. I’ve work to do, as you can see.”