“That’s what we’re doing,” Rudy said, starting the engine. “That many vampires getting together is worse than dangerous. Hop in with us. If you want to live.”
The man climbed aboard with alacrity and Cyn squashed in beside him, slamming the door as the truck took off.
“Right,” Cyn ordered.
“Pete Carlile,” said the man, offering his hand to Cyn.
“Cynthia Venolia. You can call me Cyn. And this is Rudy Meyer.”
“And this is what you do? Kill vampires? Like Blade?”
“I always preferred Buffy. Blade is a vampire, isn’t he?”
“He isn’t real,” Pete Carlile said cautiously, and across his body Cyn exchanged grins with Rudy.
“It’s okay,” Cyn assured him. “We get that. Shit, Rudy, look.”
Rudy slowed the truck just as a bunch of men spilled out of the alley beside them. They were fighting in eerie silence, with movements that went way beyond the speed of human fights. But among them, Cyn could make out the bright red hair of the vampire they’d been hunting all evening, the one who’d bitten Pete. Worse, it seemed to be an unequal fight, with their vampire among the majority.
“Fuck,” Rudy exclaimed. “We have to help.”
Cyn lunged over Pete and caught Rudy’s hand on the door. “They’re all vampires,” she said.
Rudy paused and looked at her. “All of them?”
“All of them.”
Rudy frowned. “What the hell are they fighting over? Scraps of human?”
“It’s happened before,” Cyn pointed out. “Three months ago. The so-called gang fights all over the city, remember?”
A vampire in the melee exploded into dust.
“Jesus Christ,” Pete whispered.
The red-haired vampire straightened and looked directly at the halted truck. He said something and another vampire turned to follow his gaze: a tall, fair being with a trilby hat pushed to the back of his head. Wild blue eyes seemed to cut through the glass and burn her.
“Drive!” she was able to get out, but Rudy had already slammed the truck in gear and they jolted off down the road.
As the oppressive vampire presence began to fade, Cyn released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“Shit, this is weird,” Pete observed.
“You’re telling me,” Rudy agreed.
You’re not even hunters. . . . “What if Elizabeth’s right?” Cyn said suddenly.
“Elizabeth?”
“Elizabeth Silk. Mrs. Sherlock. The British chick.”
“About what?”
“Everything. The vampire war caused by this Ancient your ancestor is meant to have staked. The ‘official’ vampire hunters. The different strengths and personalities of vampires. That blond one, with our target—he was strong, stronger than any I’ve ever felt.”
Cyn’s hand shook slightly as she dragged it through her tight curls, and she felt Rudy’s anxious glance.
“That redheaded bastard was right too,” she added, with a jerk of her head behind her. “We started this to do some good, to prevent what happened to you from happening to anyone else. But we really don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know why our target left Pete alive. We don’t know what side he’s on, or how the outcome of this war is going to affect humanity. Maybe we should find out before we go any farther.”
Finally, she turned and looked beyond Pete to Rudy’s profile. “Otherwise, we’re blundering about in the dark. And may well do more harm than good.”
Rudy’s mouth thinned to a hard, angry line. He cast her another quick glance, then looked back to the road. After a moment negotiating a sudden flood of traffic, he banished his frown.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Get in touch with those people who contacted you last year. The ‘official’ vampire hunters. E-mail Elizabeth; find out what she knows. Find out if there’re any other guys like you, and Pete here, who’ve survived vampire attacks. And once we have a bigger picture, we can work out what our next step should be.”
Pete nodded. “Sounds sensible.”
Cyn stared at him. “Who asked you?”
With time to kill at Glasgow airport, Elizabeth made use of the Internet facilities. There were a few more news stories about Adam Simon’s background, about earthquakes in general and the latest Peruvian one in particular, together with some intense speculation, but nothing new appeared to have come out of it all.
Impatiently, Elizabeth cleared the search and glanced again at the departure board. She should be researching Luk’s killings in Turkey, not his cousin’s rescues in Peru. Except there was no point; the Hungarian and Turkish hunters already knew more than she’d ever get from the Internet.
Instead, John Ramsay nagged at the fringes of her mind, even through the more overwhelming events in Peru and Turkey. She e-mailed him to say she was away but still contactable. And then tried to find references to his story in the news reports and blogs. She found the announcement of the attack easily enough, although, obviously, there was no mention of vampires killing his comrades. She had to look at much more esoteric sites to discover those kinds of rumors.
But what grabbed her attention—and nearly made her miss her flight—was the fact that the rumors were there. And not just John Ramsay’s experience. They seemed to grow out of earlier murmurings, from the time the vampire revolt first broke out, of some mysterious “third force” in the Afghan war that attacked both sides without partiality. And then came hints of the bizarre nature of those attacks. Elizabeth found translations of civilian Afghan accounts, and rumors purporting to come from American forces, of “weird,” “unholy,” and “ritual” attacks, and was left with the impression that in Afghanistan, at least, the vampire secret was jumping out of the bag. And it could only spread. Vampire hunters across the world would have their work cut out quelling it. However, they would undoubtedly make the effort: They considered concealment as important as vampire killing in their overall goal of saving humans from the undead.
As the last call for her flight penetrated her distracted mind, Elizabeth hastily shut down her laptop and shoved it into its case. She didn’t doubt that the hunters could deal with these rumors; they had a worldwide network of vast influence and almost limitless funding; and besides, sane, educated people simply didn’t believe in vampires.
However, as she grabbed her bags and dashed for the gate, it did strike her that perhaps the hunters should have a plan for dealing with this expanding knowledge. Surely the majority of people would never believe, but the numbers who did would grow. And that was what Saloman wanted.
“Elizabeth!”
Emerging from arrivals at Dalaman Airport, Elizabeth swerved in the direction of the familiar voice. István waved to her. One of the three Hungarian vampire hunters who’d become her good friends in the last year, István looked much as he always did, casually dressed in light trousers and a T-shirt, his light brown hair falling untidily across his high, intelligent forehead. Elizabeth had always thought it a quiet, sensitive face—like its owner, perhaps a little too serious, but she was used to seeing it light up with open pleasure whenever they met.
Her heart sank. Coming to take her bag, István certainly smiled, but there was something guarded about it. And though he kissed her on both cheeks as always, there seemed to be no warmth in the embrace.
They don’t trust me anymore. They need my help, but they don’t trust me.
Although she’d been prepared for it, had known in her heart it couldn’t be any other way now, she hadn’t expected it to hurt so much. In this weirdness that her life had become over the last year, she’d grown too reliant on their friendship.
“So you drew the short straw,” she said lightly as they made their way through a crowd of chained-up luggage trolleys and a very young man haggling with some tourists for coins to detach one.
“Hey, I’m a volunteer,” he protested.
As he pushed open the door of the termina
l building, a wall of heat seemed to hit her.
“So where are the others?” she asked, appreciating the uninterrupted blue of the sky, loving the warmth of the sun on her upturned face, even as she wished she were wearing fewer clothes.
István jerked his head to indicate direction. “Over there. In the hills.”
“Have you found him?”
“Luk? No, not yet. We pick up readings, but by the time we get there, he’s gone, and we have to start scanning all over again.”
Elizabeth frowned. “I thought you couldn’t get readings from an Ancient?” So far as she knew, the pocket-sized vampire detectors that had become standard equipment for today’s hunters had proved useless against Saloman, who, as the last of the pure-blooded Ancient race, had different body temperatures and biochemistry from modern hybrid vampires.
“We can now,” István said, with just a hint of satisfaction, so she knew he had probably had something to do with the discovery. She wondered what it meant for Saloman. Very little, probably, since they were telling her about it.
“So it’s definitely an Ancient, and it’s definitely Luk?”
“We think so.”
“And Dante?”
“Entered the country under his Grayson passport four weeks ago.”
“Shit.” Elizabeth swept her hand through her hair, tugging half of it loose from the elastic that bound it behind her head. “So all that effort in Budapest was for nothing.”
István shrugged. “We postponed it. And we saved Josh Alexander. The world must be grateful for that.”
True. After they’d rescued him from Dante and his vampire allies, Josh had bounced very quickly back into his movie-star life. Psychics 2, which he’d just finished filming when Elizabeth first met him, was hailed as another resounding success.
Elizabeth answered István’s hint of humor with a distracted smile. “Psychics 3 is now inevitable. Do we know whether Luk has killed Dante?”
“He’s left no body behind,” István replied, unlocking a grubby and unfamiliar car. “On the other hand, there are other vampire readings around the Ancient from time to time. The local vampires are clearly gathering around Luk. Whether or not one of those readings is Dante remains to be seen.”
After they’d gotten into the car and fastened their seat belts, István paused. “I don’t think Dante is our main problem anymore. Luk is. Revolt against Saloman has been simmering here for a while now, and Luk is the precise focus it needs to explode into the sort of war we really don’t want. He’s been awake three nights, and he’s fed a lot. How strong is he right now?” He looked directly at Elizabeth. “How strong was Saloman in that time?”
“You saw him. Strong enough to face down Zoltán and his cohorts in the farmhouse incident. Strong enough to kill other vampires with one hand.”
She didn’t bring up the bedroom scene, when István and Konrad had broken in to discover her naked in Saloman’s arms about to be seduced and bitten. The “seduced” part had been more than half accomplished, and even now the memory of it made her body flush hot. It might have been embarrassment. “But Saloman had drunk some of his killers’ blood,” she said hastily. “Luk can’t possibly. Which makes me think it can’t even be Luk! How the hell could Dante have awakened him? It would have to be Saloman, wouldn’t it?”
István started the car. “According to every source we have, Saloman killed him. It should have taken Saloman to revive him.” Pulling out of the car park, he glanced at her. “Only, why would he do that?”
“He didn’t,” Elizabeth said positively. “He’s in Peru.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Elizabeth stared at his profile. He was, she reflected, a handsome as well as a kind man. But it didn’t seem kind to churn her up like this. Although she’d been sure enough to try to buy a plane ticket to Peru, did she really know? Saloman hadn’t answered her messages, telepathic or otherwise. He’d certainly been in Peru before the earthquake, but according to last night’s news report, no one knew where he was now.
“Why would he waken Luk?” István repeated.
Because he never got over the guilt or the loneliness.
“He wouldn’t,” she said, pressing the back of her head into the seat. “Luk was insane and jealous of him. He wouldn’t waken an enemy.”
You want a keepsake of your enemy? she’d said to him about the sword that Luk had given him aeons ago.
I want the keepsake of my friend.
István sighed. “No, we couldn’t make sense of that either. Do you know of any other way to awaken an Ancient? Apart from his drinking the blood of his killer?”
Elizabeth blinked. “You’re asking me?”
István’s smile was twisted. “We’ve got the books. You’ve got the horse’s mouth.”
For a second longer she continued to stare at him blindly. Just like Dmitriu . . . I’m just an informant to them now.
Live with it, Elizabeth. You chose it.
It was dark by the time they caught up with the others. Under the amazingly bright, unpolluted night sky, alight with its millions of stars, the beauty of the deep, jagged hills would have deprived Elizabeth of breath had she not had so many other problems on her mind. As it was, she found it hard to look away.
After several phone calls and a long drive up steep hillsides that made her ears pop, István finally stopped the car in a roadside parking place with a water tap jutting out from the rock beside it.
“I think they’re quite close now,” he said comfortingly, just as his phone rang again. He answered it as he climbed out of the car, then listened while he locked the car and began to walk. Elizabeth trotted anxiously beside him until he said, “Good, we’re right behind you.”
Replacing the phone in his pocket, he said, “They’ve got a reading.”
Elizabeth nodded, and as he strode away from the road toward a large, wooded area, she fell into step beside him. István reached into his backpack and withdrew a handful of lethally sharpened sticks. He passed three to Elizabeth, who took them with a murmur of thanks, stuck two in her jeans belt, and held on to the last.
The hunter mantle seemed to fall about her shoulders and enfold her. Her heart began to beat faster as she strained every sense to pick up the sounds and smells of danger. She welcomed the rising excitement like an old friend. A fight was something she could deal with now. God, she’d even missed it.
“Are they headed for a village?” she murmured. “How many?”
“Not sure. The others will have the details. But we think there are several.”
They found the others in a huddle near the edge of the wood—Konrad, Mihaela, and three Turkish hunters. Although they all glanced up as Elizabeth and István approached, there was little time for civilities or even greetings.
“They’re on the move,” Konrad said at once. “One Ancient, three other vampires. And they’re going uphill for some reason, away from the nearest village.”
“So what’s up there?” Elizabeth asked, crouching down by Konrad to examine a detection device she’d never seen before. Its main body resembled the usual vampire detectors, but from this one a number of spikes fanned outward. And as well as a small LED, it had a dial like a compass.
“Nothing,” Mihaela said discontentedly. “They must be traveling.”
One of the Turks said, “There is a vampire commune around ten miles east of here. A vampire could easily travel there over the mountains.”
“Gathering support?” Elizabeth suggested.
“It’s a long-standing commune,” the man explained. “Gives us little trouble. Occasionally it grows too large and we go in and clean it out. It re-forms around the older vampires, and operates more discreetly for the next few years. Your vampires will want to join with them.”
“Dante and Luk, plus a resilient commune that survives frequent attacks?” Mihaela murmured. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Konrad nodded. “We need to stop them before they reach this commune.”
“We can’t attack them in the mountains,” one of the Turks said. “A vampire has too much advantage there. Ideally, we should have trapped them in the cave and killed them as they broke out.”
“Too late for that. We didn’t find them in time.” Konrad drummed his fingers on his backpack. “Distraction. Is there some way we can persuade them to turn around and come back?”
“Do they know you’re here?” Elizabeth asked. “Are they running from you?”
“The wood should have masked us from the ordinary vampires. What Luk can sense is anyone’s guess.” Konrad cast her a glance. “Can Saloman sense through forest?”
“He can sense just about anywhere in the world if he has a connection to the subject,” Elizabeth said. “Luk has no connection, no knowledge of any of us, so he has no reason even to try. His—” She broke off, refocusing her gaze on Konrad while she drew in her breath. “I was wrong. There is a connection. You and I are descendants of Saloman’s killers; to vampires, we ‘read’ more strongly than other humans. In addition, my blood is partly Tsigana’s, his old lover’s.”
“I don’t see how that helps us,” Konrad objected. “If they’re running from us—”
“I don’t think they are. We need to make them come back for us.”
The others all turned to stare at her in the darkness. She could feel their eyes, even if she couldn’t see them.
“Attract them with an easy but powerful kill,” Elizabeth urged. “You and I break cover, Konrad, in different directions so that we seem alone and easier meat, and we wait for them to follow one or the other. Everyone else stays in the wood, tracking the vampires until it’s clear where they’re going; then we join up and trap them.”
There was silence. “It’s a plan,” Konrad said cautiously.
“It’s our only plan,” Mihaela said. “Let’s do it. Only . . .” Her head was turned toward Elizabeth.
Here it comes, the suspicion, the distrust.
“Can you kill Saloman’s cousin?” Mihaela asked baldly.
Oh, yes. Because I know what you don’t. That Luk died because he attacked Saloman, not the other way around. It makes him easier to hate.
Blood Eternal Page 5
