by Alex Archer
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 when 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.”
She fisted a ball of dough, sending a plume of flour into the air, and began to roll and knead.
“I wanted to give you this.” Luke pulled out the small plastic bag in which he’d placed the slip of paper with the blessing. “I think it only right I return it to you. And perhaps, with this blessing, you can take back your power.”
“Return it? What makes you believe it was once mine?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know the origin of this blessing, but like I said, you seem wise and will probably know what to do about it.”
The woman stopped punching the dough—Luke noticed her taut biceps and decided she was not a woman to mess with—and held out her hand for the item.
He left it in the bag, since her hands were covered with flour, and handed it to her.
“What is it?” She looked over it carefully, pressing the plastic to read the paper inside.
“It was tucked in the brick that was in the skull we unearthed.”
The woman hissed and almost dropped the bag. She narrowed her eyebrows and studied it closely before glancing toward the darkened living room.
Judging from the chill at the back of his neck, Luke suspected Santos was inside the room. So he was alive, then.
“Whoever put that in the brick wanted to lure the deceased into the sun. Or so that is what I and my colleagues guess. Sort of a sneaky blessing, if you will. As if to say, ‘I wish you brightness and light—and I also know that will be your death.’”
“And you’re going to take the skull back to London? What do you think it will tell you about us?”
“I, er...I’m not sure. Have you got something to hide?”
She kneaded faster, making no reply.
“I’m not investigating the mystery of the missing children. I am an archaeologist and I simply want to learn about the origin of the bones. Such information can tell me about who it was, and perhaps give some clue as to why someone believed it would rise again. The decedent may have had purperia or some sort of mental condition that indicated madness. It’s my job to answer questions like that. Otherwise, I’d have no reason to do what I do.”
“It’s time for you to leave,” the woman said, and gestured to the door.
“I, uh...” Luke stood from the chair, unable to come up with a good reason to stay and argue when the woman was obviously in pain and—hell, she was making food leftover following a funeral.
He nodded, and walked to the door. “I thought if you told your neighbors about the blessing, they may be reassured. Can you use it to convince the others in your camp that it’s all right? Nothing is going to harm them. Nothing mythical, anyway.”
“I said, go!”
Luke pushed open the screen door and stepped out into the sweltering noonday sun. Barging through a cloud of gnats, he spat them out of his mouth.
Now that had been odd. The woman’s entire body had tensed, and she’d gotten that look of recognition Luke sometimes saw when he taught students out in the field. A knowing look before they were sure what it was they had uncovered.
Had she recognized the blessing?
Landing at the edge of the property, he eyed the long dirt road that led toward town. Should have packed a hat and sunglasses. But he did have a cell phone. Annja was on her way to Liberec to catch the train, so he wouldn’t think to bother her. He didn’t have the number for a cab company in town, but he did have Siri.
* * *
MAMMA STALKED INTO the darkened room and flicked on the light near the green plaid sofa where her son lay. His eyes were open and he nursed a clove cigarette.
“What did he give you, Dai?” Santos asked in that drowsy tone she associated with him checking out on life. And drugs.
Ever since Mica’s and Laura’s deaths, he hadn’t been the same. And she didn’t know how to reach through his grief to pull him back to the surface. And earlier he’d come home limping, and bleeding through a bandage on his leg. She hated herself for allowing him to fall so far.
She bent and gripped him by the shirt. He protested with a shout that he was injured. She didn’t care anymore if she did hurt him. She’d had her suspicions when he hadn’t attended the funeral, and had set out the box of toys and clothing this morning. Toys that had belonged to Tomas, the boy who’d been buried. She had babysat for Tomas
on occasion, and he’d slept in Santos’s room when he’d had to stay overnight because his mother worked a night shift in town at the steel factory and the father was often out boozing it up with other women.
“What curse have you brought on our family, my son?”
* * *
AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of walking in the sweltering noon sun, Luke decided it had been a while since he’d made a trip to the local gym, or even lifted a weight that wasn’t a hunk of dirt with an artifact stuck in it. Curls of smoke from the factory at the edge of town that made pressed components for cars disappeared into the white sky. He estimated that he had another half hour to forty-five minutes of walking, unless he got lucky and someone drove by.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead with the stretched hem of his shirt, he paused, hand to his hip, and bowed his head from the hot sun. Had his thoughts been anywhere but drifting back to the night he’d spent with Annja, he might have heard the slow approach of the vehicle behind him in the distance.
He never even noticed when the truck pulled over, and a man got out and jumped on Luke’s back with an animal yell and fit his hands about his neck.
Chapter 18
Stumbling forward, Luke fell to his knees at the weedy roadside. Body swaying, he rolled to the side and back, managed to loosen the attacker’s hands from his neck. Instincts taking over, he rolled up into a crouch and lunged upward to stand face-to-face with Santos, who didn’t look much better than Luke felt. The man’s face dripped with sweat, and the dark shirt he wore was wet with perspiration.
Luke’s eyes fell to the dark stain on the man’s thigh. Santos had been wounded when fighting with Annja yesterday, and was still bleeding. If he had been bleeding since the fight, how in the hell had he been able to follow and jump him? Despite his own injury, Luke guessed he had the advantage in this duel.
Until Santos stretched an arm behind his back and drew out the katana.
At that moment, another vehicle drove up and skidded to a stop, stirring up a plume of dust around the men. Luke turned quickly, but his ankle twisted and he lost his balance. Before he could answer gravity’s call, his body was wrenched backward, and the cool edge of a steel blade cut up under his chin.
