Sundown, International: Duty & the Beast

by Cat Marsters

  “You’ve got great English. Where are you from, are you Czech?”

  “I was born in Hungary, but my father is Czech,” she said.

  “Cool. Do you speak Hungarian?”

  “Of course,” she said, with not a little scorn.

  Last time Finn had been in Hungary, it had been overrun by Ottomans. He tried out a phrase or two.

  Sofie blinked. “Er, ‘My, that’s an interesting weapons formation. I haven’t seen flaming torches for a long time’?”

  “Hey, I got it right!” Finn cheered. “Go me.” He saw her expression and grinned. “I was joking. I’m great with Hungarian. And Hungarians.” He gave her a wink. “What was it you wanted me to translate?”

  There was a slight pause. “Did you read my fax?”

  “Er.” Finn shifted uneasily in his seat, and the car wobbled. Well, that was what you got from a responsive chassis. “Fax…” He pictured it, half a dozen pages spread out and crinkling under the peachy bottom of Cherry or whoever she’d been. Crinkly paper she’d used to wipe up the mess they’d made while he was still far too dazed to notice.

  “Er, yeah. Well, that is to say… no. It got, sort of, er, mildly ruined.”

  “Ruined?”

  “Fax machines,” Finn said with a ‘what can you do?’ wave of his hand.

  She frowned but didn’t question him. “That’s a shame. All right then, I’ll explain.” She paused. “I’ll understand if it’s not something you want to do.”

  Finn overtook a Dutch lorry with an endless name printed on the side. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Sofie Angeletti uncrossed and recrossed her legs, looking uneasy. Since they were wonderfully slender legs in sheer stockings, tantalizingly sheathed in a pencil-skirt, he was a little distracted by the movement.

  “It’s an ancient script,” she said eventually. “At least, I think it is. It certainly doesn’t correspond to any modern languages.”

  “Have you checked them all?” That was an awful lot of languages to check, Finn thought.

  Her chin lifted and she said coolly, “Yes.”

  Finn gave her a sideways glance and smiled. Yeah, she probably had. She spoke Czech, English, and Hungarian flawlessly -- she probably had more than a smattering of other European languages, too. And she had the look of someone who had been force fed Latin from an early age.

  “I’ve looked at ancient languages too. I thought at first it might be some form of hieroglyph, but none of the symbols match any language I know of.”

  “Know a lot of ancient languages, do you?”

  Without taking her eyes off the road in front of her, Sofie said, “Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Linear B and hPhags-pa.”

  “hPhags-pa?” Finn repeated, hiding a smile. “You speak a language created by a Mongolian lama but only used for a hundred years and rarely outside of bureaucracy?”

  “Well, I can read it,” she said defiantly. “Sort of.”

  Finn smiled, but he didn’t say any more.

  “Anyway, it’s not any of those. Nor any other ancient language. The symbols have all the pattern and structure of a language, but they just don’t correspond to any language I can find.”

  “So you want me to identify it,” Finn said.

  “Yes. And translate it too, if you can.” She sighed. “It is of course possible that it’s not a language at all, just a random collection of symbols. But…”

  “But you think it is,” Finn said. “Fair enough.” She was clearly an intelligent woman who knew a lot about languages. She wouldn’t have dragged him out here if she didn’t think these symbols were important. “What’s it written on? That should give us some clue. A book? A tablet? A bandage on a mummy?”

  “You’re closer with the third one,” Sofie said.

  “Clothing? Well, that should help us figure out when and where it came --”

  “No,” Sofie interrupted. “Not the bandage. The mummy.”

  There was a silence while Finn digested this. “It’s written on a mummy?” A dried-up, desiccated, half-rotten mummy. Oh, lovely.

  “No. But it is on a corpse.”

  Chapter Two

  No matter how sterile Sofie knew the morgue was, it always stank like hell to her. The stench of death and decay, bodies rotting inside their freezers, under their layers of formaldehyde. She couldn’t stop her nose wrinkling as she held the door open for Dr. McCready.

  He rewarded her with another bright grin and a waft of that delicious scent, for a moment blocking the stench of the morgue. “Thank you, Detective.”

  He was being entirely too cheerful for someone who was supposed to be inspecting a corpse. Sofie tried not to breathe in too deeply, and led him to the next room where the body was ready and waiting.

  The morgue attendant was a young woman whose eyes traveled every inch of Finn’s body. He gave her a wink, which for some reason greatly irritated Sofie.

  “So when you say you want me to translate these symbols, do you want word-for-word, or just a general sort of sense of it?” he was asking as they went in. “‘Cause I know a lot of languages, but some of them don’t have exact --” He broke off as he saw the body.

  Sofie deliberately didn’t look. The thing creeped her out. She’d tried to work from photographs as much as possible, but pictures of a dead person weren’t much more comforting than the real thing.

  She knew what he saw though. The naked body of a woman, mid-twenties, short hair dyed a fake, punky shade of red. Her eyes were closed but they had been green. Her skin, before the ashy pallor of death crept over her, had been clear and pale.

  Now it was covered in those symbols. Symbols that pre-dated any language Sofie had ever heard of. Symbols that covered every inch of her body, from the soles of her feet to her scalp under that fake red hair.

  “…translations,” Dr. McCready finished, staring at the body in what seemed to be horror. Sofie might have laughed if she hadn’t been so revolted. Was this the same man who’d not missed a beat when she said the markings were on a dead body?

  “Whatever you can give me will be helpful,” she told him, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He was examining the symbols very intently, following them with his eyes, over the corpse’s arm, across her stomach, tracing patterns Sofie wouldn’t have expected.

  He read the symbols for several minutes, the only sound in the room her own careful breathing as she tried not to let the dead smell into her lungs.

  Then he looked up. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  That was the last thing she’d expected him to say. “I don’t see anyone laughing.”

  His eyes narrowed. All traces of the exuberant man who’d catapulted out of that plane like some mad laughing cavalier were gone. His mouth was set in a grim line. His cheekbones and the narrow line of his jaw stood out in sharp relief. He looked angry, disgusted, frightening.

  “Is there a vampire war going on here? Who’s the local Master?”

  Sofie blinked. “Uh, vampires?”

  His eyes flickered back toward the body. “Has anyone been to claim the body?”

  “No. We don’t know who she is --”

  “Where did she come from? Who found her?”

  He was firing questions fast now, his dark eyes spitting fire. Sofie forced herself to stay calm. “She was found by the river. A man with a small tourist boat noticed her. It was early morning, there was no one else about.”

  “Was she in the water?”

  “Yes --”

  He spun around and bent to look closely at the Y-shaped incision in the corpse’s torso. Apart from the writing, her body was in perfect condition, not bloated and rotten like a water body usually was. Just another mystery.

  “She didn’t drown,” Finn said.

  How did he know? “No, she was dead when she entered the water.”

  “Do you know what did kill her?”

  “No.” That was why reading the symbols was so important. “The autopsy was… inconclusive
. Doctor. Do you know what the symbols mean?”

  His head snapped up. His gaze met hers.

  “Yes,” he said. “They mean very bad things.”

  * * *

  He hustled her out of the morgue so fast her head spun. Gulping in huge lungfuls of air and being glad she could do so, Sofie turned to him. “What did you mean, very bad things?”

  “No time,” he said, starting down the street to his car. “We need to get away.”

  She’d have laughed but his whole manner was so serious. “How far away?”

  “Do you know anyone with a space rocket?”

  He really didn’t seem to be joking.

  “Look, how about I take you to your hotel, we can sit down, calm down and talk about this,” Sofie said as he grabbed her hand and yanked her after him. It had gone dark while they were inside and she found herself more spooked than she ought to be. “Doctor --”

  “I said, call me Finn,” he insisted, turning back to her, and at the same time bumping right into a woman who Sofie could swear hadn’t been there two seconds ago.

  “I’m sorry --” Finn began, and then sort of froze. He and the woman stared at each other.

  No. Finn stared. She glared.

  “Excuse me,” Sofie began, starting to move past her, but Finn’s hand tightened on her wrist.

  “You smell of death, Elf,” said the woman. In the dim glow of the nearest street light Sofie could see puckered scars marring one high cheekbone. Her eyes were dark, and not just in color. There was something about her that disconcerted Sofie. The instinct that had shot her up the ranks of the police department was telling her in no uncertain terms that this woman was dangerous. Very dangerous.

  “That’d be the vampire in there,” Finn gestured to the morgue. Neither he nor the woman took their eyes off each other, and not for the first time that day, Sofie felt a flare of jealousy, carefully concealed as irritation.

  The woman’s nostrils flared. “So she is dead, then?” There was resignation in her regal tones.

  Finn nodded.

  “You know her?” Sofie asked. They still hadn’t been able to find any way of identifying the body.

  The scarred woman flicked her gaze to Sofie. She didn’t seem impressed, but she nodded. Her face was still, impassive, but there was grief in her voice. “She was my Childe.”

  There was something in the emphasis placed on the last word that gave Sofie pause. No, this woman didn’t look old enough to have an adult daughter, not by a long shot. And no, there was absolutely no physical resemblance between the pale dead woman and the bronzed goddess standing before her. That kid had been a punk who rarely saw the light of day; this woman looked like Egyptian royalty.

  But Sofie believed the relationship.

  “I’m sorry,” Finn said, and his wary tone had changed to deep compassion. Evidently he understood what she’d meant. “I’m so sorry.”

  The woman inclined her chin in a regal half-nod. “Can I see her?”

  Sofie nodded, professionalism coming to the surface again. “We need someone to identify the -- her.”

  They turned, and she led the way back into the morgue. Finn was still holding her wrist, although his grip had relaxed a little now, and his hand slid down to clasp hers. Sofie supposed she ought to have minded, but his hand was warm, dry, reassuring, and even if he was crazy he didn’t exude the danger the scarred woman did.

  He smelled so reassuring.

  She meant to ask what he’d meant by calling the dead woman a vampire -- was it some new street gang she hadn’t heard of? -- when something behind her made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

  Finn and the woman noticed it too. Both went very still, the woman eerily so, like a statue. Sofie turned slowly, listening hard, hearing nothing, taking her hand from Finn’s to minimize the distraction.

  She could smell the danger.

  All of a sudden, the scarred woman let out a hiss exactly like a cat, and then she just… vanished. Like a cartoon character, moving so fast she left a shadow in the air. Sofie knew it was crazy, but she could see where the woman had been.

  “We need to go,” Finn said in a low, tight voice. “We need to get out of here.”

  “But --”

  “Now,” he said, and right then Sofie felt a sense of overwhelming horror swoop down on her, crawl up her spine, slide into some primal part of her brain and whisper, “He’s behind you.”

  She ran.

  Chapter Three

  Finn grabbed her hand as they ran. Sofie Angeletti didn’t seem like the sort of woman who needed someone to take care of her, but in all honesty he wasn’t doing it to reassure her.

  He was grateful when she squeezed his fingers.

  They leapt into the E-type and Finn started to pray that it’d start up. Then he caught himself -- praying to the Elfking, are you mad, boy? -- and stopped. The car started anyway, and he roared down the street in contravention of all traffic laws. Sofie didn’t seem to care. She was twisted around in her seat, staring back like a child at the shadow flying through the streets in the direction the vampire had disappeared.

  He swung the car around, and drove fast in the opposite direction.

  “What the hell was that?” Sofie said when they were a few streets away, still driving far too fast.

  “The Elfking,” Finn said, fear and awe coursing through him in equal measure. The freaking Elfking! Lord of all, to thee we pray. He hadn’t seriously believed the guy actually existed. Well, he’d believed it, but he hadn’t believed the prophesy.

  Not really, anyway.

  But the writing on the dead vampire. The cold prickle at the back of his neck. The shadow in the street…

  He is awake.

  “Elfking? I don’t know this word. What does it mean?”

  “It means,” Finn swerved ruthlessly onto a motorway, narrowly avoiding a rusty van, “he’s the king of the Elves.”

  King of the Elves, king of the Elves! Legendary ruler, leader, god of all, saved the Elves from total annihilation by the vampires, then buggered off and died somewhere. To rise again when he is needed -- well, like anyone really believed that. It had been thousands of years ago, and millions of Elves had perished needlessly at the hands of the vampires and the Fae, and where was the Elfking? Happily slumbering away in his secret realm, that’s where.

  “Elves?” Sofie frowned. “Is this like the vampires? Some sort of street gang?”

  Street gang? He frowned. He could have sworn there was something paranormal about Detective Angeletti. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, but he’d felt it when he’d taken her hand. She wasn’t human, oh no.

  Not to mention that if she had been, she’d almost certainly have made a pass at him by now. Finn couldn’t help being a little offended by her lack of interest -- until he’d realized what she was. Or wasn’t. Maybe she just had lots of self-control. Well, anyway, safer this way, he figured. They had work to do. Things could get dangerous.

  He needed to warn people. Lots of people. Call Lapland and let them know. There was an Elf colony in the Australian outback, they needed to be warned. Finn himself felt a desperate, overpowering urge to just get away from the danger. His ears might be docked, his magic limited to a few healing spells, but he was still an Elf. And the Elfking would know that.

  Somehow, Finn didn’t think the fabled warrior was here to protect his people any more.

  And the vampires. He supposed he should send the news through Sundown, Inc. -- they’d know who the current vampire Masters were.

  Vampire Masters…

  The vampire in Prague had said the dead vamp was her Childe. That made her a Master. A female Master with bronze skin and holy-water scars?

  “Oh my God,” he said out loud. “I just met Masika!”

  “Who?” Sofie said.

  “Masika! Egyptian vampire, oldest female Master in the world! She killed the oldest. Nasty piece of work. Things have been easier since she went. Mind you, Masika? Not one to
tangle with. She kills other vampires for a living.”

  “An assassin?” Sofie said.

  “Yep. Well, not just vampires, she kills all sorts. Whatever she’s paid for. And I just met her -- me, an Elf! How cool is that?”

  “Er,” Sofie said. A measure of reproach crept into her voice. “I don’t think assassins are very cool. These gang wars get messy, lots of people get killed.”

  “Well, believe me, sweetheart, if we don’t put out a mayday, the Elfking’ll make your gang wars look like a Sunday school picnic.”

  He drove on, away from the city, glad the E-type’s engine had been tuned to go faster than anything else on the road. Certainly faster than anything the police had. They were halfway to the German border before Sofie said, “Where are we going?”

  “Away,” Finn said, driving a little faster.

  “Away from what?”

  “The Elfking. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Yes, but not understanding,” she muttered.

  “We need to get a long way from anywhere there might be vampires. Of course, we’re in central Europe so we’re pretty much buggered. But,” he added, glancing at a road sign, “Dresden should be safe.”

  “Dresden? We’re leaving the country?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of yes,” Sofie said. “Dr. McCready. This has gone far enough --”

  “No, Detective. It hasn’t gone nearly far enough.”

  “Let me out of this car right now.”

  “We’re traveling at a hundred miles an hour.”

  “So you’re breaking the speed limit as well as kidnapping an officer --”

  “I’m saving your life.”

  “I’m quite capable of looking after myself,” she scoffed.

  “Against the Elfking? No one is.”

  “You cannot take me out of the country against my will --”

  “Look, you want to jump out of this car right now, go right ahead,” Finn snapped at her, and she looked surprised at his tone. “I don’t know what you are, but most paranormals can survive a hit like that. But you won’t -- and I’m deadly serious here -- you won’t survive if the Elfking catches up with you. Especially if he smells vampire all over you. And he will.”