Chapter Sixty-One
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:14 p.m.
When I came back to the living room, Ghost was standing over Krystos, growling right in the man’s face. Krystos cringed back as far as he could but he was trapped by a hundred pounds of furious canine.
“Down,” I snapped.
Ghost stopped growling but he held his ground, the hair standing stiff along his spine.
“Down!” I said again, but this time my tone was quiet. Ghost glared at me and uttered another low, threatening growl. There was no danger left anywhere else in the house. The growl was aimed at me.
“Down,” I repeated a third time, and after another moment of hesitation he lowered himself to the ground, but all of his muscles were tensed as if he was about to spring. I deliberately turned my back on him, the way a confident pack leader would. At the moment I wasn’t feeling all that confident. Dogs are smart, but when they’re hurt and confused their thinking can get dangerously skewed. From Ghost’s perspective, his pack leader was leading him into one painful situation after another.
Once more I squatted down in front of Krystos. I interrupted him in the middle of a prayer. His color was bad and he sat in a puddle of his own blood. I reached out and felt for Constantin’s pulse. He didn’t have one, and I felt a weird flash of irritation that he’d managed to duck out before we could have a meaningful chat.
Krystos watched me do it and read the news on my face. He closed his eyes for a moment and repeated the dead man’s name several times. Greasy sweat ran in rivulets down Krystos’s face.
I poked him on the forehead with a stiffened finger. “Pay attention, sparky.”
“I am praying for the dead!” he snapped.
“Did you pray for the people upstairs?” I snarled.
He faltered. “Yes. I… I mean that the others would have done this.”
“Before or after they tore out their fingernails?”
He looked at me with eyes that were glassy and bright. “They are the enemies of God!”
It was so hard not to yell back, to try and shout him down and make him understand that nobody’s God orders something like this. I wanted to make my case; I wanted to knock some sense into him. But-really, what would be the point? How could I ever make someone like him budge from an entrenched stance that was hundreds of years in the making and backed by a papal order? This wasn’t one of those debates where I could slide around to try to see things from his perspective. As the saying goes, that way lies madness.
The rage was hard to keep in its box, though. It burned in my mouth and in muscles, and it tingled like electricity in the dangerous tips of my fingers. When I trusted myself to speak normally, I asked, “Who told you I would be coming here?”
“I–I don’t know,” he said. “We got a call. My team was ordered to come here to do God’s work and-”
“Who made the call?”
“I don’t know.”
I searched his face for the lie but I think he was too scared to pull any new stunts on me, and unfortunately that meant that he was probably no more than a grunt. A foot soldier in a war that was out of step with reality and with my real mission. The nukes.
“How many more of you are there?”
His mouth tightened with either pride or defiance. “Enough.”
“Don’t get cute with me.”
“We are the Army of God,” he declared. “We will never stop hunting. We will never cease in our war.”
He said all that in awkward, broken English, but I got the point. I wasn’t impressed.
“All of this is because you want to rid the world of vampires?”
“No-not that. That is not our mission. We want to save the world from the Upierczi.”
“Upierczi? That’s another word for vampire, right? So, with all that’s going on in the world-wars, poverty, religious intolerance, disease-you ‘priests’ spend your time and resources hunting vamps?”
“Yes.”
“ Why? ” I demanded. “’Cause right now I’m thinking you psychopaths have done a lot more harm to the world. What makes you better than them?”
His face took on a contemptuous cast and with an imperious tone, he said, “We fight to save the world. They want to destroy it.”
“And how do they plan to do that?”
“They want to blow it up.”
I sat back on my heels and stared at him. Again he read my expression and he nodded.
“The Upierczi have hidden for centuries,” he said. “Now they are in the light. Now they attack openly. They have great weapons. Why else do you think they would reveal themselves to the world?”
“What do you mean by ‘great weapons’?”
“Great,” he repeated, letting me take the obvious definition from that.
Oh shit.
“How do you know this? Are you working for Rasouli?”
He looked blank.
“Hugo Vox?”
Krystos shook his head. “I do not know these names.”
“Who sent you here?”
“A priest of our church. He will know what you have done here. He will call down the wrath of the Almighty on you.”
His accent was atrocious but his message was clear enough; but I wasn’t buying. I’m pretty sure I could handle myself against a priest.
“I’ll take my chances,” I told him, but he sneered.
“Father Nicodemus will lay waste to your world. He has promised this!”
That, I thought, was mighty damn interesting, and it made me wonder whose side Nicodemus was on. There was Nicodemus with the Seven Kings last year. Nicodemus with the Red Order, and now Nicodemus with the Sabbatarians who were clearly enemies of the knights employed by the Red Order.
Who in hell was Nicodemus?
I left the room once more to call this in to Church, but got Aunt Sallie.
“What the fuck are you still doing at that house?” she bellowed.
“Trading Pokemon cards with the vampire hunters.”
“Why are you calling?”
When I told her about Nicodemus, Auntie shut up for a moment, then said, very grudgingly, “Good work. Now get out of there.”
“I wish I could spend some more quality time with this clown to see what else I can get.”
“If wishes were horses,” she said.
“Yeah. Tell you what, Auntie, much as it sounds goofy to say out loud, I think we need to take a look at this from the vampire doomsday perspective. I’m starting to think that maybe the Red Knights have the nukes.”
“We will, but I doubt whether your friend Krystos had that right. Circe and Dr. Sanchez have forwarded the idea of a doomsday cult.”
“You don’t buy it, though?”
“Do you?”
“No, but my logic is kind of goofy.”
“Big surprise,” she said. “Tell me.”
I said, “Answer me something first. Circe dismissed the changing into bats stuff, and we know that bullets kill the knights, so that’s two bits of folklore down the crapper. But, what do the reports you’ve collected about the Red Knights and real-world vampires say about immortality? That’s supposed to be a real theme with vampires, right?”
“Nothing lives forever, but from what little we know about the Red Knights, they’re supposed to be exceptionally long-lived. Not necessarily immortal, but with lifespans far exceeding ordinary humans.”
“Okay, so they’re immortal-ish. Enough so for the sake of argument, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then tell me why immortals would want to destroy the world. No way that makes sense.”
Aunt Sallie grunted. “This isn’t like you, Ledger. This is very clever thinking. Let me run it by Deacon and Dr. Hu. In the meantime, Deke wanted me to text you. We have a safe house location that has been triple verified. It’s close to where you are now, and Echo Team will meet you there in a few hours. It’s an apartment over a convenience store. Deaco
n knows the man who owns it.”
“One of his ‘friends in the industry’?”
“No, just an old friend. Jamsheed Mustapha is a good man. We’ve worked with him in the past. Good guy, so try not to get him killed.”
I let that pass. “What about Krystos?”
Auntie said, “That’s your call.”
She disconnected.
I still had the phone in my hand when I went back into the living room. Krystos looked at me with mingled hope and dread, but his mouth continually repeated a prayer of deliverance.
“Well,” I said, “turns out that it sucks to be you.”
I shot him through the heart.
Chapter Sixty-Two
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:18 p.m.
The gunshot made Ghost bark again, but it was a single sound. Loud and shocked and angry.
I ignored him as I watched Krystos slide slowly onto his side, eyes emptying of light, mouth hanging slack with his last prayers unfinished.
None of the thoughts inside my head were pretty ones. However, when I looked inside for self-recrimination I came up dry. That’s something I knew I should be worried about, and I was pretty sure that all of this was going to come back and bite me on the ass, at least in an emotional or psychological way. At the moment, though, I watched Krystos die and did not feel a single thing about it. Not for him or the six other Sabbatarians. They were ordained priests; they were official Holy Inquisitors acting on orders given by a pope centuries ago. They believed that what they were doing was right, that they were doing what they had to do to save the world.
From vampires.
Vampires with nukes.
I closed my eyes and imagined for a moment that I stood in a cool breeze that was scented with lilacs and honeysuckle and just a hint of salt water. I strained to hear the soft whisper of Grace speaking my name.
But there was nothing.
When I opened my eyes, though, it was only me and Ghost in a house filled with ugly death. Ghost looked at me and I couldn’t meet his eyes. I hung my head and told myself that the stinging in my eyes was from the gunpowder.
Yeah.
Before we left the house I dropped the magazines from the two nine millimeters and swapped bullets until I had a full magazine in one and a half-filled mag in my pocket. I took Nadja’s. 25 popgun, too, and the valise that was filled with stakes, hammers, garlic, and holy water. Who knows, maybe I’d really need them.
Lingering in the doorway to the hall, I glanced down at the dead man and spat on the floor by his shoes.
“That’s for Taraneh and Arastoo Mouradipour, you piece of shit,” I said quietly. And although it was true, I felt a hollow place in my chest. I’d just shot an unarmed man, a man who was injured and bound, and I’d made a joke about it as I pulled the trigger. It made me feel like a piece of shit.
My phone rang again. No ID. I didn’t answer. Instead I headed toward the door, clicking my tongue for Ghost. After a moment I heard nails clicking on the floorboards.
Ghost followed right at my heel.
We went out the back.
There were two cars out back. I debated taking one, but there was no time to do a proper search for trackers or other bugs, and I already had enough problems.
I did rummage around, though. I found half a chicken sandwich on flatbread and gave that to Ghost, who didn’t even bother to sniff. He attacked it as if it was trying to escape. As he ate, he cut me some hard looks, letting me know that we still had some issues to work out.
The first car had nothing else in it.
In the second I found a locked briefcase under a blanket on the rear seat. The locks were good and the case was reinforced. No time to jimmy it now, so I decided to take that with me. I popped the trunk and stood staring for a ten count at a full-blown arsenal. Six AK-47s with bundles of magazines held together by heavy-duty rubber bands, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and a small duffle bag of 1980’s-era Russian hand grenades. The underside of the trunk lid was rigged with slots for a dozen of the stakes and four hammers. These guys were serious about this. I took some party favors and slammed the trunk.
Ghost finished his sandwich and looked up for more.
“Sorry, kiddo, but that’s all I have.”
His look of disgust eloquently showed how deeply disappointed he was in me. Man’s best friend indeed.
There was nothing else to find.
“Let’s go,” I said softly.
We did not exactly run, but we walked mighty damned briskly away from there.
Interlude Eight
Krak des Chevaliers
June 1203 C.E.
Sir Guy LaRoque stared at death.
And death, in its many forms, stared back at him. The big stone fireplace blazed and threw its dancing light across the floor, and yet the shadows of the vast hall were not chased back. Rather they recoiled like some dark serpent, ready to strike the unwary.
Monks had brought a chair for Sir Guy and helped him into it, lifting his legs onto cushions and tucking a rug around his spindly limbs. The knight felt empty, like a suit of clothes stuffed with straw and sticks. No longer a vital man, not yet a corpse. Tottering in the gloom of a cancer that was consuming him from the inside out.
The figure closest to him was both death and life in Sir Guy’s mind. Father Nicodemus, wizened but unyielding. He had been old when Sir Guy was a boy, but the man had not changed. Not a line, not a day. In his cups, Sir Guy comforted himself with the thought that it was God’s own grace that touched this man with a lighter hand, sparing him so that Nicodemus could serve heaven on earth. Sir Guy needed drink to believe it then, and now, sober and loitering at the edge of the grave, he knew that it was sophistry of the weakest kind. In truth, he did not know how to think about the old priest. To do so conjured dreams, and his nights were already troubled.
“You have done so very well, my son,” murmured the priest. “You have served Almighty God with a fealty and a zeal unmatched by any in the Red Order.”
Sir Guy said nothing. He had so little energy that breathing was a herculean task that required all of his powers. Father Nicodemus patted him on the shoulder and his slender fingers lingered to stroke the dying knight’s neck where it was exposed above the soiled collar of the Hospitaller doublet. It was so strange a thing, a pretense of tenderness that felt like a violative caress.
Then the priest took a few steps forward and held his arms wide as if to embrace the other deathly figures who stood in silent stillness.
Three men. They stood in a row, shoulder to shoulder, like brothers. Hollow faces that gave them a starved appearance. Thin-lipped mouths like knife slashes. Three shapes that pretended to be men. Three creatures Sir Guy had brought here from different parts of Europe and Asia. From Newburgh, from the Carpathian Mountains, and from a destroyed town in Turkey. They shared no common language, no sameness of culture, no drop of familial blood. And yet they were cut like poisoned fruit from the same blighted tree. Slender, pale as wax, with dark hair and eyes that burned like red coals. And teeth. Christ Jesus and all His saints, those dreadful teeth. Even after all this time that was the thing that continued to haunt Sir Guy, awake or asleep. Teeth like dogs. Like wolves.
Nicodemus spoke a word and it hung burning in the air.
“Upierczi.”
Three pairs of red eyes widened, filling with fear, filling with wonder.
“The children of shadows,” Nicodemus said to them. “Yes-I know you. Born of cold wombs, shunned and hated. Slaves to a hunger that you have been told is an affront to God. Reviled and condemned. Excommunicated and driven out to hunt in the night.”
Three pairs of red eyes studied him. It was the only thing about them that moved, shifting slowly to follow Nicodemus as he paced across the burning expanse of the fireplace.
“The Upierczi have been called monsters, sons of Judas. Pariah. Demons.” He stopped and fixed them with his own stare and it was dark
er and more fell than theirs. “But that is not what you are. Not demons. Not creations of Satan or fiends from the pit.”
They watched him. Sir Guy watched them as they studied the priest. Now there was uncertainty on their faces.
“When Sir Guy asked you to come with him, he promised safety. He promised you a place where you would be free, and be protected. He extended the arm of the church to you, offering to bless and sanctify you, to forgive you your sins and let you walk once more in the light that shines from the face of Jesus Christ.”
They watched. One of them bowed his head and began softly to weep tears of blood.
Father Nicodemus stalked over to him and used one clawlike finger to lift the creature’s chin. “Listen to me, child of shadows,” he murmured in a gentler tone than Sir Guy had ever heard him use. “The Lord God has not forgotten you. You have not fallen out of His favor. You have not been barred from the grace of heaven.” He leaned close and licked the bloody tear from the weeping monster’s cheek. “God made you!” he whispered. He reached out his hands to touch the other two creatures, tracing lines across their wax white cheeks. “God is all and He makes all things and He made you. Therefore you are God’s creations. Whoever tells you otherwise is a heretic and will burn in hell.”
The silent creatures said nothing.
“I know what you feel, my children,” continued the priest. “I, of all who walk upon the earth, understand the fires that burn in your hearts and the need in the pit of your stomach. You kill because you cannot prevent yourself. A power greater than your own will compels you to hunt, to tear open the flesh of your prey, to bathe your face and lips and tongue in the heat of the blood. And afterward you revile yourself because this is against God. This is what you have been told. Yet what does Deuteronomy chapter twelve, verse twenty-three say? ‘The blood is the life!’ Did not Jesus shed his blood to redeem all? Does not His blood wash the world of its sins? Does the wine of communion not become blood as it touches the lips of each Christian?” He pulled them all closer still, and Sir Guy had to strain to hear. “You are not sinners, my children. You are merely lost. All your lives you have been seeking to understand why God would strike you with so heavy a hand and force you into a life of sin. I tell you now that God has not shaped you to be monsters or sinners. God has forged you into weapons.”
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