In two hours she’d be in Rome, and Deanna would take her chances from there.
Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport
Rome, Italy
The moment she exited baggage reclaim Deanna made her way to the airport shops located in the arrivals hall and purchased a small pair of scissors, a mirror, lipstick, toothpaste, toothbrush, and a pack of hair dye. She’d exchanged her currency for Euros but knew using one or more of her credit cards in the short future were unavoidable. She would put that off for as long as possible however, because once Cain tracked her to Italy, she’d have to leave again.
Entering the toilets, Deanna locked herself in a cubicle, opened the mirror on the toilet cistern, and began cutting at her hair. She didn’t wear it long, just shoulder length, but she’d been growing it for the last three months aiming for a more drastic alteration in appearance. Switching between short and shoulder length hair wasn’t a time consuming exercise, but the difference in hairstyle wasn’t so extreme therefore it could mean an easier identification. If she didn’t like this latest transformation, Deanna figured she could buy a wig.
Cutting her own hair had always been a clumsy exercise, but Deanna had to admit she liked the tousled style adorning her head after this latest work with scissors. She’d left the toilet seat up; happy most of her tresses coated the bowl. She scooped up the strands that had fluttered wide of the mark and deposited them in the toilet before flushing it. Not all of her dark hair disappeared, and she waited while the cistern replenished its water before depressing the handle once more.
She dumped the scissors and mirror in the trash, returned to the cubicle and put the lid down on the toilet. Sitting on the cold lid, Deanna opened the hair dye pack, squeezed the liquid into her hands, and rubbed it into her strands. Donning the plastic hood that came with the product, she waited. Forty-five minutes felt like a lifetime; more planes would have landed, more passengers would have disembarked, and maybe some of Cain’s mob loitered in the arrivals hall watching for a thin woman with brunette hair.
Deanna fought to stem the flood of tears. She couldn’t imagine the rest of her life would be consumed by running; fleeing from supernatural monsters that shouldn’t exist in the modern world. She couldn’t run forever, they’d catch her in time. She had a feeling Cain would kill her slowly and painfully. That manner of death scared her the most, and the imagery of her own demise persuaded Deanna to keep moving for as long as she could.
Checking her watch, Deanna noted the forty-five minutes had elapsed. She opened the cubicle door a fraction, relieved to see the toilet area deserted, and stepped to the washbasins lining the wall. She locked her handbag between her legs, leaned over one of the sinks, and scooped handfuls of water from the running faucet onto her head. The door opened as she scrubbed her scalp, and her fingers stopped their rapid movement over her head. Deanna could sense eyes studying her, and she hoped the woman only stared because of the oddity of a woman washing her hair in an airport toilet. A soft grunt of disbelief escaped the woman, one of the cubicle doors closed, and the sprinkled sound of urine splashing the bowl echoed into the room. Deanna breathed out hard, and hurried to wash the remaining dye from her hair. Using the hand dryer turned upwards, she dried her hair as best she could, and then returned to the relative sanctuary of a cubicle.
The woman vacated her stall, washed her hands, and then departed the room. Someone else entered and Deanna waited until a cubicle door had closed then been latched before she breathed again. Deanna checked her watch. She’d been in the toilets for over an hour now, and a sense of urgency pressed into her stomach. She checked the contents of her purse: passport, loads of ID and credit cards, cash stuffed into a different side pocket.
She stepped from the toilet and studied herself in the large mirror. Her scarlet hair shone upon her head, the overhead lighting amplifying its brilliant redness. She’d never been a redhead before, and forced a grin of appreciation. She looked good, with the exception of tired eyes and undernourished skin. Retrieving the toothbrush and paste from her bag, she cleaned her teeth; a simple chore that made her feel more revitalized than she had two minutes ago.
The airport’s arrivals hall hummed with life. Not wishing to draw attention, Deanna strode through the hall with her head high, mingling with departed passengers and relatives waiting for loved ones. No one challenged her; nobody seemed to notice as she passed through throngs of people towards the large exit doors.
With a new look disguising the fear writhing through her body, Deanna exited the airport’s arrivals hall and hoped to lose herself amid a city of almost three million people.
THREE
S. Orsola Malpighi University Hospital
Bologna, Italy
Night rushed in to surround the vehicle when he extinguished the headlights and coasted the rented Fiat to a stop outside the emergency exit to the rear of the building. He swallowed hard, fought to control the jackhammer rhythm of his heart, and stared through the windshield at the hospital’s darkened grounds. Lights from the main building pierced the blackness, and shrubbery in the landscaped gardens appeared as deeper shadows, but he saw no movement. The area outside the mortuary remained static, although he doubted his mortal vision would be able to distinguish shapes hiding in the gloom.
Applying the handbrake and cutting the engine, he waited two minutes then exited the vehicle.
His footfalls sounded disturbingly loud, echoing off the hospital wall, and he glanced over his shoulder into the thick abyss of night behind him. Loneliness crept into his anxiety, as if the surrounding darkness intensified his despondency. Three weeks ago he’d been married to his childhood sweetheart and living in a comfortable apartment in Mestre on the Italian mainland near Venice; he’d had a well-paid job—one of the most respected medical examiners in northern Italy—but now, Fabio Morani had nothing: his wife had kicked him out, his employers terminated his position, and all but two of his closest friends no longer wanted to know him.
Fabio leaned against the hospital’s cold brick wall and took a deep breath. Fear widened his eyes, but in the darkened surroundings all he saw was a world that had become more shocking than he’d ever thought possible. He’d seen the horrors of mankind often laid out on the slab in his mortuary, but the horrors of the supernatural world were even more terrifying.
The first vampire he ever saw had been murdered.
The beautiful female was found naked in a Venice hotel and Fabio performed the autopsy on her body. She’d died from excessive blood loss, the result of a large tear in her neck that had ruptured her carotid artery. She looked human, her internal organs had the same mass and composition as any other mortal person he’d worked on, but the fangs gave her away: protracted canine teeth that left Fabio in no doubt about the woman’s origins. He’d dissected the vampire last summer but had worked on her corpse for about four months, documenting every aspect of the body, its location of internal organs and skeletal structure, in addition to extracting DNA samples from tissue and blood. The results were startling. Fabio paid specific attention to the woman’s jaw and the composition of her fangs; the canals in the jawbone and ducts located near the parotid gland behind the ears that manufactured, stored, and secreted the creature’s venom.
The paper he wrote should have earned him and the hospital millions of United States dollars; it might even have won him the Nobel Prize for science. He had discovered the most astonishing example of human mutation, something that would turn the scientific world on its head. Fabio expected ridicule from certain sources, a degree of opposition towards his claim that vampires were no longer the figment of childhood nightmares or the imagination of writers and movie directors, but he also expected the world would see his findings as legitimate and non-fabricated.
He had no idea how harsh the backlash would be when he announced his claims.
His employer refused to publish the doctorate he’d written about vampires, using the deceased female as his subject. His wife warned him too.
The world had to know, however; Fabio felt it had become his duty.
Within eight hours of creating the website that contained his doctorate and the photographs he’d taken of the autopsy, Fabio lost his job. Two hours later his belongings were stuffed into a tatty suitcase and thrown onto the street, his front door locked by the woman he’d loved since the moment she’d entered his life almost three decades ago. She’d warned him; begged at times that he should focus on their relationship instead of his fantasies about vampires. She didn’t realize there was no longer such a thing as fantasy. Fabio hadn’t believed her threats when she said she’d leave him if he wouldn’t discontinue his foolishness, but how could the opportunity of a lifetime be foolish? She would never understand his work, just as he could never understand her actions.
The break-in at the hospital had been calculated and swift. Felipe, his one-time colleague who remained one of his only friends, had called Fabio with the distressful news that the corpse of the female vampire had been stolen. Fabio should have known they’d arrive to retrieve one of their own, but he never thought they’d find the body so quickly. He never imagined they’d call his cell phone within twenty-four hours of the website’s creation. The male voice on the other end of the connection spoke in perfect Italian with a tone serious enough to convince Fabio of his precarious situation. The vampire had ordered him to close down the website detailing the autopsy and for Fabio to denounce all claims that vampires were real. He’d been given two hours to comply. Fabio had been raised to always stand by what he believed in, so one and a half hours later Fabio found himself on the run. The website remained active, he knew they monitored it hoping to trace his whereabouts, but he wouldn’t give in until the world knew the truth.
The sounds of Bologna drifted to him on the chill night air: the soft rumble of traffic and the muffled blast of a car horn; sometimes he thought he could hear the murmur of conversations or the blare of a television set. The hospital grounds remained quiet, but they also remained dark—a blackness that caused a sense of foreboding to seep into his emotions. They were out there, and Fabio knew they were hunting him.
He saw his first living vampire three weeks ago: less than a day after he’d lost his job, his house, and his wife of twenty-six years.
He’d been standing on a street corner one hundred yards from his home in Mestre when the two Alfa Romeo cars pulled up adjacent his property. He’d almost stepped from the alcove in which he’d been waiting for a glimpse of his estranged wife, but a peculiar sense of self-preservation locked his legs and forced him to lean further into the shop doorway. The vampire’s suits were as dark as their sunglasses; he didn’t see any indication that they were armed, and guessed they didn’t need to be. He’d wanted to move from the recess when the vampires knocked on his front door but his muscles didn’t comply; he wanted to sprint across the street shouting and screaming when his wife answered and the vampires pushed her back into the property. His legs remained rooted to the shop’s concrete tread, as if the rubber soles of his shoes had melted and fused him with the step.
Seeing the vampires did not scare him because Fabio already knew they existed—what terrified him most was the fact they’d called at his home address in the middle of the afternoon with a sun blazing in a cloudless sky. Films and books told him vampires turned to dust in daylight; reality told him otherwise. He had stood in the doorway for ten minutes in the knowledge that if he had called on his wife and attempted to reconcile with her five minutes before he’d planned, he would have been dead. The vampires had come for him, of that he was certain. During those ten minutes, grief wrapped him tighter than on the night his wife had kicked him out. He’d cried and pleaded on their doorstep for an hour that evening before she called the cops to remove him. A night on the Mestre streets hadn’t damped his resolve, and he’d returned that day three weeks ago to try and salvage something from the mess his life had become. When the ten minutes elapsed and the vampires left and bundled something into the back of the lead car, he knew she was dead. If they hadn’t tossed her lifeless body onto the back seats, Fabio knew she would be dead soon and they’d be tossing her corpse somewhere secluded. He entered the shop in a hurry when the Alfa Romeo’s raced from the scene, but didn’t dare return to his house. Not even now, three weeks later, could he explain the sense of knowing that had slipped around him that day; a strange feeling of emptiness that swelled in his chest with each breath he took. He’d withdrawn a large portion of his savings half an hour after seeing his first living vampires, and hadn’t returned to Mestre since that day.
Not only was he now on the run from supernatural beings, but Fabio suspected the cops were looking for him too.
Fabio swallowed hard, and the sound seemed abnormally loud inside his head.
His wristwatch beeped twice, indicating midnight had come. The witching hour: the transfer of one day to the next, the time when witches and demons—vampires and werewolves too, no doubt—were at their strongest. If anything, it seemed an apt time to be standing outside a mortuary about to view the victim of a vampire.
The emergency exit to his right clicked open, its sharp noise causing Fabio to flinch in fright. Subtle light spilled from the corridor onto the concrete at Fabio’s feet but he made no effort to enter the building. Luigi had been clear with his instructions. A rolled-up newspaper was wedged between door and frame, and Fabio listened to Luigi’s hurried footsteps as his old friend vacated the hallway as quickly as he could. Fabio had called Luigi earlier in the day, asking if the old man could hide him for a few days. Fabio hated placing his former mentor in such a predicament, but things had become desperate. Luigi refused to harbor his student but the information he’d relayed to Fabio seemed almost too good to be true.
This was to be Luigi’s one and only favor to his long-time friend, and that made Fabio realize just how alone he had become.
Fabio waited five minutes just as Luigi had requested, pulled open the emergency exit, and stepped into the hospital. He kicked the newspaper to one side and allowed the door to snap shut behind him.
Grateful to be away from a dense darkness he now knew hid the sinister and macabre, a subtle sense of relief edged into his emotions. The corridor stretched in front of him, and overhead lighting glinted off the cleansed, tiled walls. His footsteps seemed to echo in the thin passage as Fabio inched along the wall; fearful another member of staff might venture down into the morgue and find him.
Fabio paused for a short moment outside the main door to the morgue, straining his hearing to pick out sounds filtering through the hospital above. He heard nothing. Fabio wished he could have seen Luigi, to have shaken his hand and asked him how the years were treating him. Luigi was scared for his life and Fabio understood that, but he had a feeling he’d never see the old man again and that caused a flood of sadness to wash through him.
Gripping the handle to the doors, Fabio pulled them open and stepped inside.
Soft lighting dispelled darkness and the fluorescent glare echoed off the morgue’s disinfected concrete floor. The sharp tang of sterilizing agents hung in the air, and Fabio breathed through his mouth to condense the smell. A shiver traversed his body and he hugged himself tighter. A bank of steel cabinets lined the far wall and even though he’d spent years working in one of these rooms, he wondered what kind of deaths had befallen the people hidden in the drawers: natural causes, automobile accidents, suicide—vampire bite.
Luigi had already prepped the body and the woman lay naked on a cadaver dissection table in the middle of the room. Overhead lighting reflected off her figure: an emaciated corpse, skin a pasty whiteness. The outline of the lady’s skeleton pressed against the taut flesh; ribs forming lines along her chest, collar bones prominent at the shoulder line. Her sunken abdomen made the hips curve upwards at a greater angle, legs appearing fragile with a lack of muscle support. The cadaver reminded Fabio of starvation victims paraded on television in an effort to press upon mankind’s better nature in the hope of a mo
netary donation. The woman’s eyelids were open, the eyeballs residing loosely in vacuous sockets. Her cheekbones jutted outwards to distort the face, ashen lips peeled back over clenched teeth. The woman’s dark hair flowed around a gaunt countenance, her tresses seeming to be the only part of the cadaver displaying the life that had once resided within.
Fabio reached down and grabbed the woman’s left shoulder, then rolled the cadaver over. The tight skin of her back bulged where it wrapped around her ribs and spine, the pasty flesh free from any blemishes or marks. No blood had settled in the woman’s body when she’d perished: the corpse had been sucked dry.
He rolled the dead body onto its back again.
Reaching into the inside pocket of his coat, Fabio retrieved a small digital camera and began taking photographs of the victim. He made sure every morbid detail of the lady’s emaciated body was displayed in the images.
Crouching beside the metal table, he closely documented the vampire bite, expecting the wound to be two neat puncture holes in the neck; the reality was far more gruesome. The throat had been torn open, a ragged slit in a line where the carotid artery was located. The rent edges were peeled back, the pale flesh hard with the absence of blood. Flakes of dried life-fluid, no doubt overspill from the vampire’s feed, coated the wound’s edges.
Leaning forward, Fabio pulled his keys from the pocket of his jeans. A small penknife hung on the ring, and he opened the blade. Inspecting the lesion, Fabio inserted the blade into the wound, and pushed some loose skin aside. He moved the penknife, its cutting edge sliding into a hole located near the upper edge of the bite. Fabio reasoned that if the woman and vampire were standing face-to-face, the hole in which his penknife entered would be the puncture wound of the creature’s left fang. Sliding the blade clear, he searched through the tangled mess of dried muscle and tissue, located the second puncture hole, and pushed the knife into the opening.
Monsters and Mortals - Blood War Trilogy Book II Page 3
