Carpathia

by Matt Forbeck

Dushko knew the instant Brody entered the hold. He'd been in the Smoke Room in the aft part of the Bridge Deck when some woman had started screaming on the deck below, and he'd been the first man out of the room to go see what had happened. That had procured him a bird's-eye view of the entire incident.

  He'd watched as the idiot had talked with the couple who had seen him do something horrible, and he'd wanted to leap down, grab the bloody little bastard, and wring his neck until his head fell off. If need be, he'd have slaughtered the couple as well and tossed all their bodies overboard to hide the evidence. The woman's screams hadn't gone unnoticed by others on the ship though, and he wasn't prepared to kill each and every person who'd stuck their nose out of the warmer parts of the ship to see what in hell was going on.

  So Dushko had held back and waited. He knew that Brody would get away. The only real question was if he'd kill the young couple as he left or not.

  Then the woman had recognized Brody somehow, and Dushko had buried his face in his hands. This was a disaster beyond any fears he'd had for this journey.

  All he'd wanted to do was transport as many of his kind as possible back to the Old Country to keep them from accidentally revealing their presence to the inquisitive people in the New World. Setting up the trip had been a monumental undertaking, but he had plenty of patience. He had pulled it off perfectly, and he had seen nothing but clear skies and easy seas ahead. And then the Titanic sank. He wondered if Brody had somehow managed to trigger the disaster himself. He would not have put it past the man. He had proven a total catastrophe from the first day that Dushko met him. If Elisabetta hadn't had a soft spot for him, Dushko would have ended the man long ago.

  He almost wanted to see the young couple down there pull out a stake and hammer it through the bastard's cold, dead heart. Instead, he'd gasped along with the woman when Brody had leaped off the back of the ship and disappeared.

  Dushko knew what Brody had done. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he'd transformed himself into a bat the instant he'd fallen out of sight. Such a small creature flapping through the night sky would be practically invisible, and he could easily wend his way around the ship until he found a safe place to land.

  Of course, with the woman's testimony as to Brody's identity, every staffer on the ship would soon be looking for him. There were only so many places even a man such as Brody could hide. Dushko picked out the most comfortable of those, went to it, and waited.

  He did not have to wait long.

  The hatch to the part of the deck that included cabins for steerage passengers opened, allowing a crack of light to slice through the darkness in the hold. The shadow of a man cut it off for an instant, and then the door creaked closed behind it again.

  Dushko launched himself at the figure that had entered the room and slammed it into the steel bulkhead beyond. The entire room seemed to ring like a gong from the impact. He knew Brody was as tough as they came. To top it off, if the body he had dumped off the ship was any indication, he had fed recently and would be full of life. To counter that, Dushko hit the man hard and fast and kept pummeling him.

  He rained blow after blow down on Brody, right up until the moment the man backhanded him across the room. He saw Brody tense up and get ready to deliver the attack, but he could do nothing to stop it. The younger man struck with blinding speed and the strength of a bull elephant. The blow would have killed an ordinary man, leaving him little more than a red paste sliding down the opposite wall.

  Dushko, though, hadn't been an ordinary man since long before Brody had been born. He scrambled to his feet just in time as Brody charged at him like a mad bull at a red cape. He then executed a veronica as well as any master matador, using his arm in place of a cape, and Brody smashed into the bulkhead behind him headfirst.

  While Brody lay stunned on the hold's steel floor, Dushko hauled him up into the air by his collar with one hand and clasped his other hand around the Irishman's throat. "I have put up with you for long enough, I think," Dushko said as he increased the pressure on Brody's throat. "How dare you risk exposing all of us? How dare you?"

  Dushko didn't get a response from Brody, nor did he expect one. All he wanted out of the man at that moment was for him to be dead. As he prepared to tear out Brody's throat, though, someone else hit him from behind with the force of a speeding car.

  The impact sent Dushko sprawling along the hold. He came to a halt when he smashed into a crate and crushed it, along with the coffin that lay hidden inside it. He lay there for a moment, covered in splinters and dirt, and tried to recover from the blow before whoever had attacked him came after him again.

  The attack he braced himself for never came. Instead, Elisabetta appeared above him, snarling like a rabid wolf. "You stay away from him," she said. "He is not yours, but mine!"

  Dushko gave her such a fierce stare that she took a step back, and he pushed himself to his feet with deliberate and slow grace. "He is a menace to us all," he said. "He will expose our true nature to the people on this ship, and then we will be in for the fight of our lives."

  "And would that be so bad?" She glanced over at Brody, but he was gone, having disappeared into a puff of mist that zipped off toward the hold's still-open door. "It would be the feast of our lives too!"

  Dushko sneered at her. "I have not grown so tired of life as you. When we return to the Old Country, you can leave us. Wander far away and implement your mad plans. I do not give a damn any more. But we are in a delicate situation on this ship. I will not permit you to destroy us all!"

  Elisabetta reached up and patted him on the cheek with a condescending hand. "Oh, my dear Dushko. What makes you think what we do is up to you?"

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  "You're not actually going to bed already, are you?" Abe took another sip of his whisky and slouched into his highbacked overstuffed chair.

  The first class lounge was subdued tonight. While the survivors of the Titanic might have cause for celebration, none of them could bear acting joyfully knowing so many of their fellow passengers on that ill-fated boat hadn't made it to share the moment with them. Instead, they seemed prepared to drown their sorrows in a series of toasts to lost family and friends, honoring their memories one after another.

  It seemed to Quin that they lived in this strange purgatory between what had happened and what would be. When they arrived in New York, their temporary respite would come to an end, and they would be forced to become part of the world again. He wanted to hold on to these horrible, numb moments, to treasure them for the short and fleeting amount of peace they allowed him and the other survivors to absorb the enormity of what had happened, and begin – at least in part – to come to their own terms with it.

  In the meantime, though, Lucy and he had stumbled upon some sort of mystery that his brain refused to let be. Tempting as it might be to slip into a drunken haze and forget about everything that had happened for the past few days, he couldn't help but want to determine what had happened with this strange Brody Murtagh whom Lucy had helped haul out of the frigid sea – only to see him voluntarily return himself to it. A quick glance at Lucy told him she was of the same mind.

  "Of course not," Lucy said. "How could I possibly sleep after what we witnessed out there?" She waved toward the aft end of the ship and the railing from which Brody had jumped.

  "I'm sure if you asked the ship's doctor, he'd be happy to give you something," Abe said. "I've noticed many of the ladies of the Titanic looking rather haggard during the daylight hours today, and a good number of them hustled off to their quarters with a dram of something from the good doctor to drag them off to dreamlands, I'm sure."

  Looking around, Quin realized that Abe must be right. The vast majority of the people sitting in the lounge with them were men, even despite the fact that this room was open to both genders while the Smoke Room was not. Knowing that many more women and children had escaped the Titanic than men, he would have expected the ratio to be reversed.

  "You
're a pig," Lucy said to Abe.

  Quin couldn't stifle the smile that her tone brought to his lips. Abe caught him and arched a mock eyebrow. "See, this is the sort of abuse you open yourself up to as her beau. Are you sure you want to put yourself in the path of such wretched wickedness."

  Quin blushed and found that he couldn't come up with a snappy answer that wouldn't embarrass him even further.

  "What?" Lucy took trumped-up offense at the remark.

  "Do you think our Mr Harker here has just met me for the first time?"

  "Touché," Abe said, a smile creasing his face. "But your answer to my question brings up another query. If we're not going to bed, then exactly what do you suggest we do to while away these tiresome hours?"

  "We need to get to the root of this," Lucy said. "Just because Captain Rostron is happy to sweep this under the rug until we disembark doesn't mean I am. I want to know what happened there. Who was that man that Brody Murtagh was carrying? What happened to him? And how exactly did the fellow get away?"

  "Is that what people call suicide these days?" Abe said. "'Getting away.' How quaint."

  "He didn't kill himself," Lucy said. "I'm sure of it."

  "We saw him, Luce," Quin said. He didn't want her to think he was siding with Abe against her, but he knew what he'd witnessed. "He leaped to his death. Even if he survived the fall into the water, we all know how long he'll survive out there in the freezing waters without any sort of aid at all."

  "He never even hit the water," she said. "I'm sure of it. Did you see the glint in his eyes just before he jumped off? That wasn't the look of a suicide. More like a magician about to pull off his greatest trick."

  "So you think it was some kind of illusion? That perhaps he wasn't really there?"

  "I can't say that for sure," she said. "The only thing I know is that Brody Murtagh knew exactly what he was doing when he leaped off that railing, and his plans didn't involve him taking his final bath in the icy Atlantic."

  "You think he's still on this ship." Quin marveled at her. In so many ways, she was a never-ending delight.

  Lucy leaned forward in her chair. "I'm sure of it. Where else could he have gone?"

  "Go on, Lucy," Abe said. "I'm enjoying this little intellectual exercise of yours. Tell us, where is he now?"

  "I don't know." Lucy stood up. "But I plan to find out – with or without the help of you two brave young gentlemen."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  "What in the devil's damned names are you doing here?" Elisabetta stormed across her first class quarters and stabbed a red-nailed finger straight at Brody's chest. "If Dushko discovers you here, he'll kill us both!"

  Brody gave her his best smirk, the one she found irresistible when she was in good spirits. At the moment, it would only infuriate her, he knew, but he didn't mind that. He wanted her as flush with excitement as he was from the fresh blood that flowed through his veins.

  "Don't you dare give me that look," she said. "You know all too well what you've done here, don't you? You forced my hand."

  Brody slouched down into the thick couch that sat against the room's outer wall. "Nice digs," he said. "A fellow could get used to these sorts of accommodations."

  Elisabetta growled at him. "Don't you dare think about getting comfortable here. This is my place, and I don't share well. You're going back down to the hold by dawn."

  "If I do that, Dushko will kill me, and you'll have attacked him for nothing. Do you really want that?"

  Elisabetta opened her mouth to launch into a tirade against Brody. Her fangs had extended from the rest of her teeth, an involuntary reaction to the fury building in her. Brody braced himself for a tongue lashing – maybe even a full-out attack – but instead of diving at him, Elisabetta closed her mouth, spun about, and fell down onto the couch next to him with a heartfelt sigh.

  "Why, Brody?" she said, looking up at him past her thick eyelashes. "Why do you do this? Why can't you just play nice with Dushko? Just until we get to Fiume?"

  Brody snorted, then put a gentle arm around her and let her snuggle up into his shoulder. "For one, we're not headed for Fiume any more. Our next stop is New York City, and you can bet they'll herd us all off the ship while they get everything sorted with all those waterlogged souls from the Titanic."

  "But we'll be back at sea in no time at all."

  "What? In a few days? A week?"

  Elisabetta frowned. "When you've lived as long as I have, weeks pass like hours do for the young."

  "Either way, it's too long. The plan's finished. Most of the people down in the hold didn't want to get on the ship in the first place. Dushko tricked or blackmailed them into going along with his little 'back to the homeland' plan. Once we get to New York, they'll scatter like cockroaches from a light. He'll never get them all back on the ship again."

  Elisabetta's frown deepened. She looked older than Brody had ever seen her. "Dushko thinks we're at a crucial juncture. There are too many of us now. We've been too careless. If we don't leave America soon, we're going to be found out, and then all hell will break loose."

  Brody sat up. "If it's going to happen, then let's make it go down on our terms. Why wait for the world to discover us and hunt us down like vermin? Stand up and strike first, I say. Bring the battle to them before they even know they're in a fight. Then we'll see who hunts who."

  A hesitant smile warmed Elisabetta's lips. "You always did talk a good game."

  "I'll do more than talk," Brody said. "I'll lead the whole bloody revolution."

  Elisabetta's smile widened. "Very well," she said, "you can share my resting place tonight. But such largesse comes with a price."

  Brody crossed his arms over his chest. "If you're going to charge me with being a good little dog for Dushko, forget it. The price is too high."

  She ran a cool hand along his cheek and spoke low and soft into his ear. "Nothing of the sort, my sweet. I was thinking of asking you to surrender something a great deal more entertaining – and intimate."

  Brody's head swam, the way it always had since the first time they'd met. A lusty smile curled his lips. "I may have overfed myself," he said, thinking back to the men he'd murdered earlier. "I think I have plenty to share."

  "Excellent." Elisabetta grinned as she threw a leg over Brody and straddled his lap. "I've been holding back too long, I'm afraid, trying to keep a low profile the way Dushko demands."

  "Doesn't that bother you?" Brody arched his head back, exposing a long, warm section of his neck. He could feel his stolen pulse still pounding there. "That sort of discipline always puts me on edge."

  Elisabetta nodded as she lowered her fangs to Brody's jugular. "I'm absolutely starving."

  The first time Elisabetta bit him, Brody had screamed in terror and pain. It had taken him a while, but he'd learned to anticipate the thrilling sensation it sent through his body rather than fear it. He gave himself over to her control willingly and wholly.

  With both of them so consumed by the feeding, neither of them heard the gentle knock at the door that Elisabetta had left partially open when she'd stormed in. They didn't see the steward who'd been roped into helping out with the ship-wide headcount until he'd stepped into the room and caught them in their horrifying act.

  The embarrassed "Whoa, pardon me," that erupted from the steward – who thought he'd interrupted them in the middle of a sexual act – got their attention.

  Startled Elisabetta sprang off of Brody's body, blood still streaming down his neck and from her fangs and lips. The steward goggled at her.

  "Dear God, miss," he said. "What's happened to you?"

  Then he caught a glimpse of the ruin she'd made of Brody's throat. Brody clamped a whitened hand over the wound and tried to stand up, to offer some sort of explanation for what the man had seen. Dizzy from the loss of blood, he swayed and fell back to the couch in what he knew must seem like crumpling to his death.

  The steward opened his mouth and screamed. The horrible noise still erupting fro
m his throat, he spun on his heel and sprinted from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Without even a glance backward, Elisabetta raced after the man. Groggy as she was from the feeding, she fumbled with the door for a moment before flinging it open. Then she was gone, leaving the door wide open behind her.

  Brody pushed himself to his feet. After steeling himself for an instant, he staggered toward the door and after Elisabetta and the hapless steward. When he reached the corridor though, he couldn't see a trace of either one.

  Brody cursed to himself and held his neck tighter, hoping the wound would seal itself fast. He couldn't see a single way that this incident could finish without more bloodshed, but that didn't mean it couldn't end well, at least for him. He hadn't wanted to be discovered – exposed to the world, as it was – in this exact way, but as he'd told Elisabetta just moments before, if they were going to be found out, he was determined to own the moment.