by Ben Tripp
Rock killed the one on the roof about the same time that Min was strapping on her weapons up in the petit ouvrage. When Abingdon was dying, she was halfway down the hill from the fort. If she’d been any sooner, the three hundings that had been lying in wait would have pulled her apart. As it was, she saw them go over the wall a few seconds before she reached it herself. The Englishman was already dead. She remembered the value of caution, and so lived, throwing herself down behind the wall they’d just leapt over. She saw the things gather, sending signals with their eyes, their heads heavy and swaying on thick, bristling necks.
Min was soaked through already, only outdoors for forty seconds in a driving rain so cold it was like whips lashing her skin. She had to blink to keep her eyes clear. Seconds passed. Then, in a burst of muscular force, the monsters rushed the maison as one, hurling themselves through windows and doors. Fire leapt up everywhere at once. The hundings were blazing scarecrows of light in there, and Min knew there was no point rushing in after them. She wasn’t going to die in a fire. She was going to die in combat. It wasn’t just caution that held her back: she wanted a specific vampire. These dog-faced shape-shifters were nothing to her. Yeretyik was her quarry.
Min kept behind the wall and watched for a few seconds more. It was pandemonium in the house, every door and window alight with flames. The monsters were howling and screaming. She heard human voices upstairs. Min realized she had an opportunity to improve her armament: she had her own war hammer in hand, but it was of the wrong alloy. What she wanted was one of Abingdon’s specimens in the barn. She scanned the perimeter of the yard and saw no further creatures hidden in the shadows.
She threw herself across the wall and dodged inside the barn, ready for an attack. It was vacant and dry in there.
She found the hammers laid out on a workbench by the forge, eight beautiful silver weapons with wicked, flanged points, two fitted with handles. She took both of these and stepped back outside and the first hunding was just coming out of the house as she emerged from behind the bread truck. It was in flames, its flesh black, scored with rivulets of white and red. The rain was putting the fire out. Clouds of steam leapt up from its scorched hide.
Min took three strides, dropped one of the hammers, and with both hands swung the other up over her head and had the great satisfaction of looking directly into the hunding’s eyes as she brought the hammer down. It entered the monster’s neck at the base of its skull, severing the spinal cord, and there was a stench like vomit as the silver alloy ate into its flesh. The creature collapsed but was by no means dead. It was paralyzed.
There was a double explosion off to the side, coming from the cottage. Min wheeled around and it was Rock there with a shotgun in his hands. Min yanked her attention back to the house and saw another hunding fall limp and heavy through the window frame between living room and kitchen. Blood poured out of its chest in a stream the diameter of Min’s wrist. Rock ran to her side. Another of the things came crashing through what was left of the living room’s French doors, one of its arms on fire, but otherwise unhurt; Rock shot it in the head and Min charged forward and hammered it in the heart.
This put her close to the house when the next one emerged, its head framed in a mane of blazing curtain fabric. The thing did not see her but tore at the burning shroud around it. Min was mad with bloodlust by now and no longer cared if she lived or died. Only if the monster died.
She struck it in the rib cage with the hammer and broke the handle. The hammer remained in its chest. The monster swung its claws and hit her across the right side and sent her tumbling through the air. She felt her flesh part on the hard dirt as she landed. Min forced herself back into action, ignoring the pain coming from wounds so deep she could feel the coldness of the rain inside her muscles. She found the second hammer lying in a heap of Abingdon’s guts. She picked it up. There was the Englishman’s head, parted from his shoulders but still in the helmet, his face slack and doughy, looking up at the rain that fell on his open eyes. There was a powerful explosion inside the house that sent shards of glass and stone and wood whistling through the air and Min was thrown off her feet again.
Min heard more blasts from the shotgun, then looked up and saw a flaming planet falling from the sky. No. A hunding, its head a fireball, hurtling from an upstairs window. It hit the ground and she crawled toward it.
Rock was there first. He pressed his weapon to the crackling head and fired. Min tried to hammer the thing, but she couldn’t lift her arms. She fell down and let the rain mingle her blood with the monster’s, and all the blood flowed past her and ran down the yard toward the lane. She let it. It had been a good battle.
Sax was unconscious for half an hour. When he awoke, he was in the cottage, not the maison. It was no longer raining. He recognized the lamp over the dining room table. He was lying directly beneath it. He sat up, and his head flared with pain. It had taken quite a knock. He couldn’t remember anything about the final confrontation in the bedroom.
Emily’s face loomed into his vision. One mercy, Sax thought. She’s alive. Although he couldn’t remember exactly why, he had somehow thought she was dead. She smiled and touched his cheek. So she didn’t wish him dead or curse him for the disaster. Who else was still alive? Sax looked around, his every move sending pain through head and body.
Min sat on the table beside his legs, and Fra Giu stitched up several deep gashes in her side. The lowermost wound wasn’t yet sewn up and Sax could see a white rib in there. It made his gorge rise. He moved to get off the table. Emily tried to stop him, but he made it to an upright position. Rock was at the window over the sink with his glorious shotgun in his hands. Firelight flickered and leapt on his face from outside.
“Is it over?” Sax croaked.
“We won on points,” Rock said.
Rock told his side of the story first: How he had been stuck in the cottage unable to help, pinned down because he knew he was asking for what Gheorghe got if he set foot outside. He’d heard the noise on the roof, killed that hunding, and after that he just kept shooting whenever he had the chance. Min told her part of the story almost backward, picking up from where she joined the fight with Rock and filling in what happened before that when prompted by Paolo. Sax noticed Fra Dinckel was not amongst them but that Nilu was lying on the couch in the living room. A big Welsh dresser had been pushed in front of the picture window there.
“Fra Dinckel, God rest him,” Paolo said, “one of those things came upstairs and it was covered in fire. It came straight to the bedroom. All of us were there, my brothers and Nilu, and the monster came in. Fra Dinckel took the oxygen tank and hit it in the head and he”—here Paolo acted out the action, throwing his weight back and forth, arms in front of him—“he run like this and crash into the monster and the air is coming out and they go down the stairs and the cylinder exploded, boom! And blew up the whole place. Big fire. But it also put some of the fire out, because of the push from the blast, you know?”
“And you got out that way? Because the fire was out?” Sax said.
“No, the fire was still very big. But the whole inside of the house fell down on the middle, do you know what I mean? The floors came down.”
Emily cut in with an explanation. “The bearing wall down the middle,” she said. “It collapsed, and the floors went like this”—here she made a level surface of her hands, then dropped them in the center—“so we just climbed out of the wreckage and we were already downstairs. Nilu was still in bed.”
“Ridiculous,” Sax said, as if they’d all been let down by this one stroke of relative good fortune.
“Yes,” Paolo said. “Poor Fra Dinckel. But he was a brave man. Now three of the hundings, they are still in the world but they are badly injured, one of them very much so. May be that we find them. Somebody finds them, not us. My people will come.”
“Has anyone,” Sax said, now that his brain was working again, “considere
d the possibility that there might still be two human-type vampires out there? That the hundings could yet regroup? We are by no means out of danger.”
“We were talking of that subject when you came awake,” Fra Giu said. “Our reinforcements are some hours of time away. But your niece tells to us that there is a fortress upon the hill.”
Sax had an idea. It was a mad idea, and he didn’t think it would work, but they were all dead if they didn’t do something quickly. Right now, the vampire’s forces were scattered and her current plans foiled. Before she had a new plan was the time to act. The SUV was still working, just a little worse for the wear what with all the explosions and hundings falling on it. But these were cosmetic considerations. Sax suggested they all drive on up to the fort and spend the time there, where it was chilly but absolutely impossible to break in. No danger of assault once inside. This suggestion was met with universal approval. Everyone was utterly dispirited. They had suffered defeat after defeat and only just barely scratched out a draw on this occasion, losing in the process Gheorghe, Abingdon, and Fra Dinckel. They had fought amongst themselves while the monsters were at the peak of their powers. They had lost everything. Even the ormolu clock, which lay smashed and blood-soaked in the dirt.
It would never cluck again.
They took relays out to the SUV. The rain was already frozen on the ground, and everything appeared to be coated in black glass. The ferocious clouds were lifting up over the dark hills. It was painfully cold, but the storm had passed. While they went back and forth from cottage to vehicle, Sax had the opportunity to speak to Rock alone concerning an additional aspect of his plan. He wanted to be discreet about it.
Rock saw the wisdom of Sax’s idea and agreed to it. He relayed the idea to Min, who was extremely stiff on one side but otherwise couldn’t have been readier. The entire party was crammed into the vehicle. Rock drove. Paolo was in the passenger seat, shotgun at the ready, with Fra Giu, Emily, and Min in the backseat; in the cargo area at the rear, Sax was cradling Nilu across his lap.
Nilu was semiconscious and hadn’t any idea what was going on. She seemed to think she was on a carnival ride at a Holi festival and all the colors were so beautiful. There would be shadowy figures moving in the colors, Sax knew.
The track to the fort was greasy and wet but the ground still frozen, and they made it up the hill without getting stuck. Everyone piled out as fast as they were able, Paolo and Fra Giu carrying Nilu, Emily supporting her uncle. They got the key into the lock on the big iron door and went inside the petit ouvrage. It would do. Not a pleasant place, but a safe one.
Min had previously made herself a kind of nest in the topmost room, the one with the machine-gun tower projecting from the peak of it. It was the room they entered with the key. Sax’s suggestion was well received: a little more discomfort was nothing compared to knowing they were safe from attack. Emily, limping heavily because of a cut under her big toe, sat on the skeleton of an old bunk bed that once supported a mattress. There were a couple of electric battery lanterns for light. Paolo and Fra Giu got Nilu arranged on a pile of sleeping bags.
It was then that the exterior door clanged shut again and the key grated in the lock. Paolo and Emily rushed to the door, Emily’s toe leaving crescents of blood behind her.
“Uncle Sax!” she shouted, and opened the tiny hatch set into the door at eye height.
“Sorry, dear girl,” Sax said through the hatch.
“What are you doing?” Emily already thought she knew. Sax only confirmed it.
“We’re just popping off to Germany,” he said. “Back tomorrow evening, but don’t wait up for us.”
Paolo rapped the door with the flat of his hand. “Let me go as well.”
“I’m sorry, no,” Sax said. “I have grown very fond of you, young man, and I will not see your life thrown away with all the others because of my blind incompetence.”
Paolo hung his head. There was a finality in the old man’s voice that wasn’t something argument would change.
“Go with God,” Paolo said.
17
* * *
France
It was an hour and twenty minutes later when they heard the heavy thud of rotor blades beating the frigid air outside, and Paolo and Fra Giu began bundling Nilu up for the journey to the hospital. The Ordine dei Cavalieri Sacri dei Teutonici e dei Fiamminghi, Special Branch, was an hour early, and not a minute too soon. As the helicopter powered down above them on the hilltop, Emily banged on the door to let them know the fort was occupied. After all, the order would only have landed there because it was the most open ground. It could otherwise be hours before they even realized the petit ouvrage existed.
Uncle Sax, while a bastard, was not a fool, Emily was pleased to note. He’d left the key in the other side of the door. It creaked around and the door shuddered open and the brethren got Nilu into a fireman’s lift. Just then a long white hand came through the door and caught Emily by the front of her shirt.
“Only you,” the vampire said, and pulled her outside with the ease of a child selecting a doll from a toy cupboard.
The door banged shut behind her, and a minute later the helicopter was rising into the night again, clattering away eastward, toward Germany.
18
* * *
Germany
The castle gates were open. Sax had suspected they would be. If the vampire’s minions destroyed them, there was no need for security. Nobody else was trying to get in. But if they failed, and Sax and his people survived to reach Mordstein, the fiend didn’t want them running around loose. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the expert in antiques. She could easily slaughter them in her lair.
Sax, Min, and Rock went inside.
It was like walking through a dark city deserted in the predawn hours. The ground was flagged with stone, and walls of the same stone rose up on all sides, five times the height of a man, so that there was never much sunlight in its maze of damp streets. The only light came from Rock’s flashlight and occasional industrial-style fixtures bolted into the walls at knee level to illuminate the paths. They walked beneath the pointed arch of the gatehouse, then found a small square of open space, its margin of high walls pierced with slits for archers at the top and fringed with a roof of blue slate. Narrow stairs rose steeply up the walls on both sides, unprotected by railings, connecting the square below with the uppermost battlements that overlooked the cliffs. Sax couldn’t have mounted those stairs if his life depended on it. Too high, too steep, and too narrow. The flights ascended in opposing directions so that a right-handed attacker coming up would always have his sword arm against the wall, regardless of which side he took.
“Where the men?” Min asked, pausing to inspect the battlements above them.
“I don’t think she’d have guards about the place, do you?” Sax said. “What would the point be?”
“But people must come up here sometimes,” Rock said. “Curiosity seekers and whatnot.”
“Think about it,” Sax snapped, and kept on marching.
“Right. Duh,” Rock said, after a pause. “She eats them.”
They passed beneath a second Gothic arch, this one carved with serpents and armored men. It adorned an inner gatehouse, with the iron fangs of the portcullis jutting down from the underside of the arch. Sax remembered the vicious gateway of spears he and Gander had faced in the château long ago. If there were traps, this time he would walk straight into them. Beyond the bastion of high walls before them was the tall wedge of the keep, bristling with spires. Atop the tallest one, the thick cylindrical tower that was older than the rest of the fort, was the red helicopter. Its rotor blades drooped around it like the wings of a sulking dragon.
“She’s home,” said Sax, indicating the aircraft.
Sax wondered if the vampire was watching them. If she had her hands on the controls of hidden mechanisms to crush them. She m
ight have anything installed in this lofty prison: trapdoors in the floor to precipitate them a thousand feet to their destruction on the rocks below, or great piles of stone to dump into the narrow streets of the castle upon their heads, or simply a pair of massive gates like the portcullis that could be dropped at either end of one of these passages so that they would be trapped there and would die of exposure in a day or two.
“Cameras,” Rock said, and indicated a small box mounted on an arm up under the eaves of one of the walls. It was thirty feet above their heads.
“How very modern,” Sax said between his teeth. If he was going to die—and with every step they took, it became more certain—he was, just this once, going to behave with dignity. The absolute shame and humiliation he’d suffered back at the farm, while it did not qualify as suffering in the same ghastly way that Gheorghe or that ululating young monk had experienced it, was almost the worst thing Sax had ever experienced in his life. He had never quite seen the power of shame before. His entire existence, all seventy-odd years of it, Sax had courted disgrace. Yet he had never gotten used to the agony that came along with meeting it. He would rather die than be humiliated. He knew that now.
They passed along a series of short alleys that turned each time to the right, again putting an invader at a disadvantage with his sword; Sax realized if the plan was symmetrical, the castle’s keep stood at the center of what was essentially a gigantic swastika. He returned to his inward brooding. Rock and Min were watching for trouble—leave them to it. Better if he could enjoy the onset of senility while he still had the chance, lost in his self-loathing for the last time.
