They stared at him, and the room-perhaps the world-was utterly silent.
“You have been brought here to be the holy weapons of God on earth. Do you hunger? Then know why: you were meant to feast upon the blood of the pagan and the heretic and the infidel. Do you seek shelter in the darkness? Then understand this: the darkness is yours. Use it. Let it heal you and hide you. Become the darkness and let it become you.”
He stepped back from them and signaled to one of his monks who came hurrying over with Sir Guy’s sword laid ceremoniously across his folded arms. The monk knelt and offered the handle to Nicodemus, who drew it with a ringing rasp. The priest turned and held the sword aloft, letting firelight flicker along its wicked edge.
“This sword,” he intoned, his voice deep and grave, “has drunk the blood of countless enemies of God. In the service of the king of France, in the cause of the Knights Hospitaller, and in the war of shadows we have fought with the Saracen and the Jew and other enemies of Christ.”
He turned and offered it to Sir Guy. “My son, my friend, take your sword.”
Sir Guy’s trembling fingers closed around the handle of the weapon he had thought he would never hold again. The touch of it lent some power to his withered hand and he held it out toward the Upierczi. The tip dipped for a moment but it did not fall to the ground.
“Sir Guy, Grand Master and Scriptor of the Holy Red Order, defender of the faith, servant and soldier of God, I entreat you to bestow upon these sacred warriors the title and privileges of knights of Ordo Ruber. ”
Sir Guy flicked a surprised glance at Nicodemus. This was nothing they had ever agreed upon. This was unexpected and strange, and he knew that it was wrong.
And yet, Nicodemus stood there, eyes burning and mouth smiling.
“I…” began Sir Guy. But he could not endure that stare, that will. “Y-yes,” he gasped. “Yes.”
One by one the Upierczi came toward his chair and knelt before him, and one by one Sir Guy LaRoque touched their shoulders with the sword, blessing them in the name of Michael the Archangel.
When it was done, so was the last strength in Sir Guy’s arm. Nicodemus took it from him and handed the sword to a monk, who bowed out of the chamber.
Nicodemus ran a fingernail along Sir Guy’s cheek. “You have served me well for many years, my son.”
Sir Guy looked wearily up into his face, and his heart seemed to freeze. The old priest stood with his back to the Upierczi so that only the knight could see him. The priest’s eyes underwent that process of change which Sir Guy had seen before, the colors swirling and changing, but this time the process did not stop until all color was completely gone, leaving eyes with no color, no whites. Eyes that were totally black. And the face also changed. It was not the wrinkled countenance of a priest grown old in the service of his God and his church. This face was both younger and older, timeless, endless; and endlessly wrong. It was a mask of a bottomless corruption and deception. The nose was still long and hooked, but the nostrils were more like slits; the mouth was lipless and lined with scores of needle-sharp teeth. Even the skin was mottled to an ophidian texture like a diseased toad. Worst of all, Sir Guy knew this face. It was the face of all the evil in the world. The face of the trickster. The enemy of God.
He screamed.
Sir Guy screamed and screamed and screamed until spit and blood flew from his mouth.
The trickster laughed.
Then Father Nicodemus turned away, his face once more that of a wizened priest. He swept a hand toward the screaming man.
“My knights,” he said softly, “my Red Knights. Sir Guy offers up his blood as a sacrament to seal our new covenant. Show respect for his sacrifice. Quick, while he still cries out for God’s own mercy.”
The Red Knights smiled with their jagged mouths. Their eyes were filled with tears and the light of joy as they rushed forward to partake of God’s mercy.
Chapter Sixty-Three
On the Street
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:23 p.m.
Violin was on the move, getting closer to Joe Ledger, and finding terrible wreckage along the way. It annoyed and angered her that Ledger wasn’t taking her calls, but it also frightened her.
Oracle provided her with the locations of likely safe houses where Ledger might go to ground. She had gone to the first one too late. All she found were Ledger’s footprints in the blood of a living room awash with dreadful pain.
The Red Knights had left their signature on every inch of that small house.
Seeing the carnage, Violin had braced herself against the possibility that one of the mangled figures was Ledger, but neither was. An old man and his son. She could tell at least that much from their faces.
Standing in the living room, Violin considered pulling the old man down from the wall, but it would take more time than she had.
She ran out the back and got into the car she used while in Iran. The car appeared to be sedate and slow, but that was all exterior illusion. A much fiercer creature dwelt under the hood, and the suspension was rigged for high-speed pursuit and hairpin handling.
Even so, she stayed within legal limits as she navigated the traffic toward the second safe house. One run by the CIA. She passed it and saw nothing untoward. Around back there were two parked cars. She circled the block looking for backup and found it.
Violin parked her car in the shade thrown by a tall stuccoed warehouse. Across the street a pair of white vans sat in the shade. She recognized them. Not those specific vans, but the type. And she knew what they signified.
Sabbatarians.
Her lip curled in cold contempt. Those maniacs should have died out years ago along with their blasphemous Inquisition. It offended Violin to her core that they continued to prosper and had even found some private source of funding in recent years. Their numbers were growing and the threat they represented was no joke.
She accessed Oracle.
“Oracle welcomes you, Violin.”
“Quick field update. Please mark this urgent and make sure my mother sees it right away.”
“Noted. Please proceed.”
Violin explained about the slaughter rendered by the Red Knights and the Sabbatarian strike team she was currently observing.
Instead of the placid computer voice responding to her update, a very similar but far more intimidating voice barked, “Do you have Captain Ledger under active surveillance?”
Violin froze and had to take a moment to find her own voice. She looked down at the small screen on her computer and saw a face that was as ageless and beautiful as it was stern and humorless. Black hair shot with snow white streaks, cat green eyes, a full-lipped mouth compressed into a stern line.
Lilith. Cold as the moon and equally remote. It was difficult enough speaking with Lilith on the phone, seeing her on the computer made Violin instantly feel like a naughty ten-year-old again.
“Hello, Mother,” said Violin, her voice immediately small and contrite.
“Don’t ‘Mother’ me. Answer the question, girl.”
“No, Mother. Ledger went into the wind after leaving his hotel, though I think I know where he is.”
One eyebrow arched high on Lilith’s forehead. “You ‘think’?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Why are you wasting time talking to me instead of verifying his location?”
“Because there is a Sabbatarian strike team positioned near-”
“Did I ask for an excuse as to why you can’t accomplish a simple task?”
Lilith’s tone was subzero. Colder even than usual.
“No, Mother, I-”
“And are you about to apologize instead of taking appropriate and immediate action? Is that the end result of everything I’ve taught you?”
“No, Mother, it’s just-”
“Do I need to send a trainee instead? Someone who understands how to follow a simple order?”
Violin took a deep, steadying breath. It was that or put her fis
t through the monitor’s screen.
“No, Mother, but-”
“Then follow your orders,” barked Lilith. “Rasouli gave Ledger a flash drive with information on where as many as seven nuclear bombs have been hidden. Four, at least, are in the Middle East. Find Ledger and get that drive. Is that order simple enough for you?”
“My God! Wait-how do you know what Rasouli gave-?”
“How do you think?” snapped her mother. “I used common sense and asked the right question of the right person.”
Ah, so that’s it, thought Violin. Mother spoke with St. Germaine.
No wonder she’s so angry. On a secret level, Violin was pleased to see her mother discomfited.
“Mother, I’m trying to understand why the Order sent a knight after Ledger. How could they have known about the flash drive?”
“I… don’t know,” said Lilith, her anger dropping down several notches. “That’s a good question, too.”
“On the other hand, this seems to confirm one of my theories-that Rasouli is not planning on accepting the role of Murshid.”
But the screen had already gone dark.
Violin clenched her teeth. She considered taking the computer outside and backing her car over it a few times. It might make her feel good. Instead, she turned off the engine and got out of the car.
She was dressed in a traditional Iranian chador and headscarf, which made her shapeless and faceless. The eye makeup she had applied would fool anyone. She took a net-covered cloth grocery sack from the back seat and began walking slowly across the street. Not directly toward the white vans, but at an angle so that she would have to pass them. They appeared deserted.
As she approached, she could hear the squawk of a walkie-talkie and the hushed voice of a man speaking awkward Persian with a European accent, though she could not make out the words. The man was inside the second van. From his tone, though, he sounded agitated, concerned. He kept repeating a word, or perhaps a name, and got no replies.
“ Krystos! Krystos! ”
Then the rear door of the van opened and four men stepped out. They were dressed in ordinary clothes, but they held their sports coats closed in the way men do when they are trying to conceal something. Violin had seen it a thousand times. It amused her.
She needed to be amused. It was that or let the memory of her conversation with her mother turn her into a screaming wreck.
The men saw her and paused. They said nothing to her but their eyes were on her as she walked past the van. They were only pretending to be Iranian, but their stares were frank and impudent by Muslim standards. Invasive and rude.
No way to treat a lady, she thought.
Violin let herself trip over a crack in the sidewalk. She stumbled and dropped the grocery bag. One of the men made a reflexive move to catch her.
And he died.
The other three men never saw the blade. All they were aware of was a flash of black cloth and the sparkle of sunlight on steel, and then the man who had reached to help the woman was sagging to his knees as a jet of impossibly bright red geysered from his throat. Violin gracefully sidestepped to avoid the spray.
The men were shocked, but they were professionals. Even without understanding what was happening they knew something was wrong, that this was an attack of some kind. They went for their guns.
And then Violin was among them.
Her chador flapped and popped like laundry on a clothesline. Her hands became a blur as she moved into the center of the group, a blade in each hand, her body twisting with a dancer’s grace. The steel wove patterns of light around her. Rubies of blood filled the air and splashed along the side of the van and on the front of the building. One gun cleared its holster but the hand holding it was no longer attached to its owner’s wrist.
The men had no time to scream.
Violin cut their faces and throats and mouths and eyes. She slashed tendons and muscle and bone and then she suddenly froze in the center of the storm of blood. The men collapsed around her, their many parts creating a grotesquely artistic pattern on the ground.
From the first cut to the last it took four seconds.
Violin stared dispassionately down at the carnage.
Four seconds.
Beneath her scarf her mouth twitched in disgust.
It should only have taken three.
She looked up and down the empty street, then opened the back door of the lead van and examined the interior. In the back, one side was given over to a large and clunky array of surveillance equipment that looked like it might have first seen service during the Cold War. The other side was a weapons rack, with pistols and automatic rifles in metal clips, rows of tapered stakes hanging in rings mounted to the inner wall, and a sack filled with pouches of garlic.
Violin sneered at the equipment.
“ Idiota. ”
She spat into the van and turned away. Then she ran for her car.
By the time she reached the safe house, though, Joe Ledger was gone.
She searched the house and read the complete story told by the dead. The tortured couple upstairs, the others, killed by stake and bullets.
Violin stood in the living room for a full minute, staring at the dead man who lay slumped by the wall, a bullet hole glistening red over his heart. She read that, too, and nodded her approval.
Then she went to the doorway and peered up and down the empty street.
Violin stepped back into the quiet, shadowy, bloody hallway. She pushed back her sleeve and tapped the face of her watch. The image of the clock vanished to be replaced with a blank screen. Violin pressed her thumb to it for a moment. When she removed it the screen glowed green for a moment. Violin tapped the small receiver bud she wore in her left ear.
“Oracle.”
“Oracle welcomes you, Violin.”
“Addition to mission report. A full Sabbatarian hit team tried to ambush Joseph Ledger. I eliminated the backup squad. Ledger took out the main squad.”
“Status of Captain Ledger?” asked the computer.
“Unknown. I need that list of probable safe houses and bolt-holes.”
“Processing.”
While she waited, Violin smiled because Joseph Ledger was still alive, but her smile was fragile because she had lost his trail. Worse still-much worse, in fact-was that she was treading on very dangerous ground. She had saved Ledger from a Red Knight, but in her report she had filed it as a “righteous kill,” Arklight phrasing for a necessary assassination. Killing a knight would never be questioned, not even by Lilith or the other Mothers.
This action, though, could possibly be construed as an act of war. Arklight was not currently at war with the Sabbatarians. This hit could not be labeled as “righteous.” A clever and devious mind could make a convincing argument that it was an attempt to save Ledger’s life. That put it into a different category entirely. That was blood obligation. That was sacred ground filled with thorns and deadfalls.
As she drove, Violin racked her brain-and her heart-for an answer to the question that she knew would be coming. She prayed for another of her “flashes,” but aside from the brief one this morning, there was nothing. It infuriated her. What was God’s plan in giving her a gift that was faulty, questionable, and distracting? The fact that the flash had happened at all was skewing her focus. Was she acting on behalf of her mission objectives, or was she trying to save the life of Joseph Ledger?
It should have been an easy question to answer. Everything she had ever done, everything she had ever learned, had been geared toward making the response automatic. The Mission was all.
All.
Violin gripped the wheel. The muscles in her jaw ached from clenching.
The Mission was all.
Right?
“God,” she breathed. Mother was going to be so angry.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Mustapha’s Daily Goods
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 3:01 p.m.
In my trade, confide
nce is built on a platform whose legs are made up of good intelligence, continuous training, proper equipment, and field support. I had a sick dog, a dead man’s gun, a stolen briefcase, a vampire hunter’s stake in my belt, and a cell phone; and I was walking down a street in Tehran less than a day after breaking three political prisoners out of jail. I was involved in several murders and had left sufficient physical evidence behind to convict me on enough charges to lock me up until I was a thousand years old. Or enough to have me put against a wall.
Oh, yeah, and there were seven rogue nukes and somehow vampires were tied up in that.
My life used to be a lot less complicated.
I didn’t need a safe house so much as I needed a nice quiet place to have a nervous breakdown.
We headed to the place Church assured me was genuinely safe. Ghost walked more slowly with every block, the fatigue catching up to him again. I stopped to pet him a couple of times, but he barely wagged his tail. I couldn’t tell if we were friends again or if the events of the day had driven some kind of wedge into our relationship. It’s like that with humans, and it can be that way with animals too.
When we reached the convenience store we walked past it and cut through an alley to the back where there was a small door beside a Dumpster. The store was the only open business in a district of warehouses that had been closed during the local economic troubles. The nearest residential area was blocks away, but there was a graveyard nearby and frequent mourners formed the basis of the store’s customers.
It was a very useful setup for a safe house.
A key was hidden behind a brick, tenth from the ground, fifth from the door. I unlocked the door and peered inside. No crowd of armed thugs was waiting to pounce on me, so I nudged Ghost inside with my shin, checked that the coast was clear, and hustled inside, pulling the door shut behind me. The door looked frail and rickety, but it moved heavily, hinting at a steel core hidden beneath layers of weathered wood.
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