Librarian. Assassin. Vampire_Amber Fang_Book 3_Revenge

by Arthur Slade

  “Good luck, Amber Fang,” Sonya said. “From me and all the Fangers.”

  11

  Contact Made

  Thankfully, I could easily purchase a ticket by accessing funds my mother had left in an account several years ago. I went into the airport, feeling like my lime-green sweater and jeans were the perfect cover—none of my enemies would expect me to be dressed like a middle-aged librarian. The floors inside the airport were so clean they almost glistened, the sunlight coming in from a line of windows near the ceiling of the building. There were not that many people around, which I preferred—though sometimes it was easier to hide in a crowd. Either it was a slow time or it never got busy at this airport. I had no idea where Swedes would be travelling to. Disneyland? The Bahamas? The North Pole? The problem with Swedes is I didn’t have very many stereotypes, just that they were extraordinarily healthy. That’s a hard stereotype to joke about.

  I found an orange-cushioned chair to sit on and gathered a few of my thoughts. I hadn’t quite awakened from the nap. I decided it was best to not catalogue my aches, especially not the one in my heart.

  But ZARC now had full knowledge that I was in Sweden, so I had to get out of here. Even sitting in the airport made me feel like a target. I looked around for security cameras and spotted several along the ceiling. Could Hector hack into them? Maybe. I had no idea what the limits of his abilities were. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

  Well, a flight was the quickest way out of Sweden. A boat or train would take too long. I just had to hope I was far enough ahead of my enemies.

  I took out my phone and Athena showed me the time and the weather. I didn’t know where to go next, but knew I had to choose somewhere unexpected. I thought about Iceland—something about going to Hallgerdur’s home country would perhaps be outside of Hector’s algorithms. But it’s a small country, population wise, and quite homogenous, so that meant I’d be much easier to track. A trip back to the States would be just the ticket, except being in a plane for so many hours made me nervous. That would give them time to track me down and capture me once I landed. I just had to get out of here quickly, and yet not spend too much time in the air.

  Actually, what I wanted to do was find a cab and tour every morgue to be sure Dermot was dead. I needed to see his body, and I shivered at the thought of him lying on a cold table, alone. I got an even worse chill when I imagined ZARC finding him, taking a snapshot of his dead body and marking him off their kill list. Or they might even steal his body for some nefarious purpose. But hanging around hospitals and morgues that were most likely watched by ZARC agents was not a wise idea.

  I tapped my way back to the dark web, surprised at the speed of the operating system on the phone—not even a microsecond of delay. But Dermot hadn’t left any messages at Elysium. Then I cast about for places to visit and drew several blanks. Finally, I settled on roulette. I slipped in one of the earbuds, lifted the phone, and whispered to Athena, “Choose a country for me to fly to.”

  “I hear this city is beautiful this time of year,” she said.

  A night image of an exquisite parliament building on the Danube appeared. It was lit up with lights, a marvellous city spread out behind it: Budapest.

  It was perfect. A large city. A massive tourist influx. It would be so easy to hide there. Plus, I’d never been to Budapest. There would be a high contingent of English speakers, because of the tourism. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to thank Athena.

  So I did. “Thanks,” I whispered.

  “Anytime, Amber,” she said. “I’m here to support you.”

  Just hearing that made me feel safer. Athena was amazing! And gee, was I already anthropomorphizing an operating system on my phone? I’ll soon be one of those lonely people talking to Siri by candlelight on Friday nights.

  I booked a Brussels Air flight that had one stop before landing in Budapest. Then I downloaded my ticket and went through security. They apparently weren’t Twilight fans, because no one questioned my new name. I didn’t have a book with me, having left Life of Pi on the beach in Cuba, so I slept and awoke only as we were descending toward Budapest.

  The Budapest airport was jam-packed with tourists. My heart soared at the sight. I mean, I hate being so close to that many humans, but it was so much easier to hide. I always kept a hand near my face or looked down, in case the security cameras had some sort of facial recognition system

  I zipped through the airport—having no suitcase to pick up made that easy—and threw myself into the nearest shiny yellow taxi. “Take me to a medium-sized run-of-the-mill hotel,” I said.

  He nodded and soon enough we were in the heart of Budapest. He stopped before an art nouveau hotel called the Liechtenstein Apartments. It was an old building, five floors high, and it looked like it might be a bit more expensive than I’d intended, but I could afford it. I paid the driver in Euros and got out, looking up at my new home. I honestly had no idea which quarter of the city I was in. And perhaps if I didn’t know, then ZARC wouldn’t be able to find me.

  Within a few minutes, I was in my room on the fifth floor. I threw myself down on the bed, stretching out on top of the red comforter. I’d check my wounds later. At least they hadn’t bled through any of my clothing—Sonya had obviously been paying attention in first aid classes. I succumbed to that horrible habit that so many humans had—I looked at my phone before going to sleep. The first place I went to was Elysium.

  There was a message waiting for me in the chatroom. It was titled: Urgent. My heart started to beat faster. “Dermot! Dermot! You bastard you’re alive!”

  I tapped on the message.

  Hello, Amber, it’s me, Agnes.

  That’s all it said. But there was a little chat box below it with a flashing cursor that waited for my reply. My heart sank like a submarine on fire. It took me several moments to work up the energy to chat back.

  Agnes? How did you find Elysium?

  I watched the cursor for a minute. Five minutes. Ten.

  I nearly threw the phone across the room, but worried that it might somehow hurt Athena. Anthropomorphism again!

  Then these words appeared: Found your Elysium room through an intermediary. What the hell did that mean? I have discovered your mother. I know where she is. She is not safe.

  Agnes had covertly slipped me the location of my mother last time I met her. Perhaps uniting me with my mother was an obsession of hers. Those Fangers would do anything for me.

  Is this really you, Agnes? I honestly had no idea who to trust. Where did we meet?

  In books. The answer came back immediately. But what did it mean? We hadn’t met in books. She’d first seen me in a warehouse in Oxford, and helped get me into a bookmobile that took us to Bromley library in Nottingham. So was she just being coy by saying books?

  What do you mean?

  We know each other through books. Books. Libraries. Sorry, the keys are not working. It’s an old phone. But books. Moving books.

  A bookmobile? I typed.

  Yes. You remember that. I don’t have much time. They’ll find me. And I’ll be imprisoned again. Maybe dead?

  Dead?

  Yes, the ZARC have me. I broke out of my room. But can’t escape this compound.

  What? What would they want with a librarian? Even a ninja librarian.

  We reached out to them. Bad move. Several librarians dead. They killed them. Killed them. Captured me.

  I could only imagine her crying as she typed this.

  Where are you?

  I am …

  The chat came up with that dot dot dot that meant someone was typing. I stared at the dot dot dot until I thought I’d go mad. Then I set the phone down.

  I picked it up a second later.

  Where? I texted again. Where!

  Neuschwan Eagles. East woods. CH. They are coming. Your mother in danger here. Oh, I must run.

  Then the chat box closed and disappeared. It was as if someone had wiped the whole con
versation from the dark web’s memory. Actually, perhaps the whole point of the dark web is that it had no memory.

  I clicked my way out of Elysium and immediately went back in. No new messages.

  Neuschwan Eagles. East woods. CH. Is what she’d written.

  Great. I had a fragment poem to use to hunt down my mother. To find Agnes and ZARC.

  I lay my head back on the pillow. Agnes was in danger, or at least felt she was. And she could be anywhere in the world. There was nothing I could do to help her right now. Even if I knew her exact location, I couldn’t get there fast enough to rescue her. I’d just have to hope she was exaggerating the threat.

  And, I also knew, I’d reached the end of my reserves. My mother had always told me ‘you think like crap when you’re overtired.’ She was right. A few hours of sleep would help me heal and get my brain back into proper thinking mode. I’d be able to solve my problems much faster then throwing myself at them in this exhausted state.

  I lay back and said, “Please set yourself to do not disturb, Athena.”

  “I will, Amber,” she said. “Also, I have chosen a song for you. Have a lovely rest.”

  She began to softly play Johannes Brahms’s Lullaby.

  To my surprise, I fell asleep.

  12

  Wonderful World of

  Budapest was lovely in June. The city’s main attraction was the Parliament building that is Gothic Revival to the core, with a massive dome in the middle, spires, and parliament halls on either side. It put all other parliaments to shame. There are impressive bridges across the Danube, the river the Vikings loved so much and the Romans used to mark the boundaries of their empire. In fact, there were ancient Roman bath houses in the city that turned into discotheques at night. I discovered this when I walked by one that was in the open, full of people in bathing suits splashing around and dancing as if they were in a nightclub. The city was brimming with history.

  I had awakened at dark and walked the nightlife of Budapest. I felt safer then. No people or facial scanners were as likely to recognize my face. Despite being just a bit after midnight, the city was vibrant with nightlife. The air was still warm enough to make me sweat a little as I walked. I found that my brain always worked better while I was taking a stroll.

  I had the slightest limp from my leg wound, but worked my best to disguise it. Predators note weaknesses and soon circle in for the kill. I knew all about that.

  There were swarms of crowds and, oddly enough, most of them were going in and out of museums. The reason for this became clear where I overheard a British tourist in gaudy khaki shorts declare, “There is nothing more refreshing than the bracing joy of the night of the museums.” What that meant was that every museum in Budapest was open until 2 a.m.

  “Insanity,” I whispered. But my librarian heart thrilled at the idea and ideals behind these kinds of events. Public art for the masses. Who cares if some drunk vomited at the foot of Venus de Milo? At least they were looking at art.

  I skipped the Museum of Terror which documented the victims of Nazi and Communist regimes. Important, but I needed something a bit more uplifting. The Hungarian National Gallery was an impressive building with Roman columns, a dome (they liked their domes here!), and more paintings than you can shake a paintbrush at.

  But once I was inside, the crowds were thicker and—well, I do have a sensitive nose—smellier. Seeing such a wonderful display of paintings made me think of the underground bunker I’d visited in Antartica and all the paintings that had been destroyed when Hector blew the building to kingdom come. That reminded me of how I’d rescued my sister Patty from that compound. It had been the place I’d discovered that I had a sister—a branch of the family tree my mother had neglected to tell me about. My dear psychotic sister wasn’t so much interested in sister bonding—she was eagerly interested in yanking out my ovaries and the rest of my reproductive system and using them to get vampires back into the fertility game.

  But could I use my ovaries against them? I wondered if there was a way to fool my vampiric brethren into invading ZARC, creating enough of a distraction that I could rescue Mom. That is, if I could discover ZARC’s base from the crappy hints I’d been given.

  I thought about it. And thought about it. If I was Napoleon or Queen Zenobia, I’m sure a plan would pop fully formed into my brain.

  Too many intangibles. Getting other vampires involved was like inviting vipers to an already crammed snake pit. Besides, I couldn’t make any plans like that until I knew where ZARC and my mother were.

  A man cleared his throat next to me—in an aggravating manner. Apparently, I was staring too long at the painting of Lady in Violet by Pál Szinyei Merse. I gave the patron my “I’ll tear your throat out before I move from this spot” look. He quickly glanced down and shuffled around me.

  There was a commotion in the far end of the room, but far too many people were in the way for me to spot the source. A man yelled in English, “Hey, he’s got my phone.” Then someone screamed a high-pitched horror-film scream. “He pinched me!” Several people laughed. I glimpsed a man in black race down a stairwell at full speed, followed by two other smaller men all in black. Then the crowd closed in and it all calmed down. But the whole scene made me nervous. I didn’t like unexplained events.

  Obviously, the artwork wasn’t calming me down.

  I suddenly felt surrounded by the crowds—a sardine in a tin can of culture. So I pushed and pulled my way out of the influx of art-goers, burst outside, and took a few deep breaths the moment I was several steps away from the building. I wandered for a bit, catching my breath, wishing I had Dermot to complain to.

  Just thinking of him made my heart hurt.

  Even walking was becoming too much for me. So I found an outdoor cafe, sat at a table, and ordered a tall, dark coffee. I soon discovered that they knew how to do coffee in Hungary. I assumed that was something to do with their winters. Or maybe they were just that much more classy than us Americans. The Europeans generally did seem to understand coffee better than us. Perhaps it was steeped in their culture.

  I could almost forgive myself for using that pun.

  Anyway, the back burner of my brain was still percolating with questions like: How would I find ZARC? Or Mom? Or Agnes? But it was becoming clear that I couldn’t solve the puzzles just by throwing my brain directly at it.

  So with coffee in hand, humanity swirling around me, I took my phone out.

  First, I went to Elysium and discovered there were no new messages. Which was a double disappointment. I still expected a message from Dermot—well, I had to have hope right? But there was no way I could imagine him surviving an explosion that took out the whole floor. Yet, those people who lost their family members on flight MH 370 still believed impossibly that their loved ones were alive. There was something very human about that.

  I had to remind myself that I wasn’t human.

  To take my mind off of those thoughts, I recalled my little fragment of hints that Agnes had given me.

  Neuschwan Eagles. East woods. CH.

  It had to be a location. But where the hell were the East Woods? Or the Eagle East Woods. And the first word—if I was even spelling it correctly—looked German. Or Bavarian … And finally, what could CH stand for?

  So I did what any secret assassin would do when confronted with a problem like that. I googled it.

  There are a lot of junior baseball teams with the name East Woods Eagles. There’s also Mrs. Eastwood’s fifth grade class whom she called “the eagles of science.” Cute! But not helpful. So no leads there. I did get the feeling that I was missing an important clue.

  “More coffee?” asked my male server. He was in his twenties, with a thin, tanned face. I didn’t look at his neck because I wasn’t hungry. I nodded, and he filled my cup, then said, “There is so much to see. So much life here.”

  He motioned toward the open square where a multitude of humans were interacting—living, breathing, laughing. And here I was s
taring at my phone. His tone hadn’t sounded judgemental.

  “There is,” I said. “So much life. Thank you.”

  I would look around at Budapest once I’d solved this little puzzle.

  I entered the word: Neuschawn. And Google immediately regurgitated the words Schloss Neuschwanstein. Or as further reading showed me, Castle Neuschwanstein. It was a white, many-spired castle on a rugged, green hill in Bavaria, Germany. It looked so familiar to me, but I couldn’t recall reading about it. I guess I spent too much time dreaming about living in Dracula’s castle. The familiarity hit home when I read that this castle had been the basis for the palace in the opening of every Disney movie and TV show.

  I’m a sucker for Disney movies. It’s a weakness. I even like their version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Castle Neuschwanstein was an impressive piece of 19th-century architecture, built by Ludwig II, king of Bavaria—who was also known as Mad King Ludwig. He had to be insane to spend so much on a castle long after the medieval ages were over.

  But there was something romantic about that. An idealist. Trying to hold onto the past.

  I love idealists. Their blood tastes more innocent.

  That’s actually one of Mom’s jokes.

  I continued to search images of the castle. It was incredibly impressive, even in photographs. But there was no way ZARC was in that Castle Neuschwanstein. Over fifty million people have walked through the castle since it was opened to the public. You can’t hide a multinational arms-dealing organization in the wide open like that.

  Eagles. East Woods. CH.

  And my frog brain, being a jumpy untrustworthy creature, got stuck on Mrs. Eastwood’s class and I couldn’t get past it until I remembered something. Eastwood. I was reminded that my mother had forced me to watch every one of his movies. Over and over and over again. He was handsome, of course, but I didn’t totally understand her obsession. Was it because he played violent characters yet in real life was a vegan? She liked that contradiction? Eastwood. Eagles.