“What peace?” Rafael Nieto finally spoke up, and the mere fact of his calm was enough to defuse George’s rage for a moment.
“Yes, yes, Austria,” George said and nodded, understanding Nieto’s implication. “But the shadows have nothing to do with that. Mulkerrin is their sworn enemy. They have vowed to destroy him, with or without your help.”
George gave a hmph to let them know exactly what he thought of their insane suspicions. Why, the very idea! And did they think he was stupid? A man of his age and reputation, his closeness to the shadows—well, he ought to know oughtn’t he?
But of course, he ought to know where Meaghan and Alex had gotten to as well. And now this news of Cody’s capture.
“And where does Rome fit into all this?” George asked. “Is anybody actually listening to the Vatican these days? If the Pope has got you guys all introspective, it’s because he wants you to forget that Mulkerrin was a priest once, not to mention all the Vatican busboys who ended up corpses in Venice.”
“The Pope,” Rafael Nieto said patiently, “has not contacted anyone. In fact, I’d guess right about now he’s hiding under his desk. Now, if we could get back to our subject, a moment ago you referred to the Shadow Justice System. That, dear Doctor, is exactly where all of this sudden mistrust is rooted. My Field Commander, Roberto Jimenez, is on record regarding his feelings toward shadows in general, and now his suspicions relating to the SJS chief marshal.”
Hannibal, George thought. So that’s what this is about.
“Now I understand,” he said and nodded. “You suspect Hannibal is up to no good, and you fear that Nueva and Gallagher’s disappearance bodes ill, perhaps indicates some conspiracy?”
He chuckled, and watched all three faces on his viewscreen frown at the act. The hell with them, he thought. They could indulge an old man.
“If Meaghan and Alex’s disappearance is cause for alarm, it is because of some harm which may have befallen them,” George said sharply, nostrils flared. “Not, certainly, because they have planned some insane insurrection at a time when their worst enemy walks the earth again. Talk about stupid! I’ll let you in on a little secret.”
Ah, he had their attention. Did he ever!
“Hannibal is a liar, a killer, and an incredibly intelligent creature with a network of operatives all his own. He is as vicious as the legends portray his kind to be, the antithesis of everything Meaghan and her team stand for.”
“But,” the President sputtered, “what were you thinking when—”
“We know Hannibal too well,” George said, though he was really speaking for the shadows, for he’d never actually met Hannibal. “The creature wanted the SJS job so that he would be above suspicion, and therefore, above punishment for his own misdeeds. He has pretended to be above reproach so that humanity will not demand his destruction. The position was intended to be, in a way, a prison for him. A way for us to keep an eye on him.”
“But how can you—” Julie Graham began.
“Rolf Sechs, the deputy chief?” George continued. “He and Cody and Nueva shared the same blood-father, as they say. He is one of them, and he is also Hannibal’s watchdog. Don’t worry, my friends. If Hannibal gets out of hand, Rolf will simply kill him, or die trying, and then you’ve got the rest of the SJS to keep the beast in check. Now, can we discuss what’s truly important here, like destroying Mulkerrin before his madness spreads any further, and perhaps what’s being done to find Meaghan and Alexandra?”
George Marcopoulos looked at his viewscreen and saw three of the most powerful individuals in the world looking back at him like cowed schoolchildren. Good! he thought. They were acting like fools, and here he was, nothing but an old sawbones, telling them what to do. A sudden memory nearly forced a smile onto his face, but he stifled the urge before they could see it. Still, the memory came, of younger days, laughing with his kids in front of the television set.
Damnit, Jim, he thought, I’m a doctor not a diplomat.
Who would have guessed?
St. Leonhard, Austria, European Union.
Tuesday, June 6, 2000, 6.23 P.M.:
They had ridden in near complete silence as the miles ticked away on the odometer. The only thing Allison Vigeant and John Courage had learned about their driver was his name: Kurt Wagner. Beyond that, the man was silent. He seemed both frightened and fascinated by being in the same car as Courage, and it occurred to Allison that humans had become quite adept at picking the shadows out of the herd, which was ironic because the vampires had hidden among them for so many years. On the other hand, much to Wagner’s chagrin, his brother, the volunteer, had babbled continuously, until Courage finally ordered him to be silent, which he was.
Now, though, they had pulled to a stop in Saint Leonhard, at the foot of Mount Untersberg, with the Alps rising all around them and a cable car hanging in the air on the mountainside. This, apparently, was their destination, though Allison had held off asking the many questions sprinting across her mind. She was not comfortable with the Wagner brothers there.
As they got out of the car, with barely a few syllables to spare for the men, Courage set off toward the cable car at a brisk pace. Wagner’s tires turned up stones pulling away. Allison looked up toward the mountain.
Shit!
The cable car was not moving. Assuming they needed the car to get where they were going, and John’s direction certainly hinted that they did, they had finally run into a major obstacle. She followed him quickly and arrived at the car’s enclosed terminal several paces behind him. The door had shut, but even as she opened it, Allison could hear Courage yelling.
“. . . you’re dealing with!” he roared. “Do you have any idea what’s going on in Salzburg? If you don’t get this thing up and going, a lot more people will die!”
Two men, obviously the operators of the car, were on the receiving end of this tirade, and they looked completely overwhelmed, but not necessarily cooperative. Courage leaned forward, his eyes narrowing, and bared his fangs, hissing at them. His nose elongated slightly and his ears began to point.
The cable car was operational in seconds, and on its way down to them.
“What happened?” Allison whispered to him as the hum of the descending car filled the terminal.
“They’ve been shut down since the quake,” John whispered back, “expecting aftershocks.”
“You could have gone on without me,” she said.
“No,” he answered, a hand on her shoulder. “I need you for this, remember? And I have to conserve my strength for the battle; it would have been a huge drain to try to fly you up there.”
She nodded, and the car arrived. As they got in, John turned to snarl at the operators again.
“When we’re out, shut her down again,” he said. “We won’t be back this way.”
Then the doors were closing, they were moving up the mountainside, and reporter that she was, Allison couldn’t hold the questions back any longer.
“Why won’t we be back this way?” she asked.
But Courage took it the wrong way. His face fell, disappointed, and it was a moment before Allison understood. Her question had been motivated by innocent curiosity, but in it he had heard suspicion, and now that she thought of it, she had reason to be suspicious. After all, if she needed the cable car to ascend, she couldn’t conceive of a form of descent that would not require the car . . . unless she weren’t coming back. It was an awkward moment between them, but John seemed finally to decide to ignore the less palatable implications of her question.
“There is only one way in, but there are many ways out,” he said.
“In where?”
“Inside the mountain.”
Allison raised an eyebrow, then looked out the window of the rising cable car, at the peak high above. When she turned back to John, he read the question in her eyes.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said, and she laughed.
“Give me a break, John! My boyfriend is Bu
ffalo Bill! Man, get a grip, would you?”
Courage smiled and shook his head, but Allison felt a tightening in her chest as she thought of Will, trapped in that fortress. She shook it off, for the moment. They’d get him out. For now, her curiosity was getting the better of her.
“Well?” she asked.
John Courage joined her at the front of the cable car, looked up at the peak and put a hand on the glass.
“Inside that mountain,” he said softly, “is a king.”
It was only seven or eight minutes before they reached the top, and the view all around them was breathtaking. They were in high Alpine terrain, but the cold was not what Allison had imagined it would be. Still, it was early summer, and she didn’t want to think about being up on that mountain in January. From the cable car terminal, they hiked up the mountain to the top of a steep, dangerous-looking trail. To Allison’s surprise, there were still tourists on the mountain, as well as two employees who seemed quietly annoyed at having to baby-sit them. The employees didn’t bat an eye as she and Courage crested the hill.
“Their friends at the bottom must have radioed up not to bother us,” John said. “That’s good. Still, now that the car’s running again, it’s going to be almost impossible for them to keep these people up here.”
“I’m sure they’ll be happy to be rid of them,” Allison said, noting that the squabbling of the tourists was already getting results.
They started down the path, Allison stumbling from time to time, and came across a number of dead birds along their way.
“Ravens,” Courage told her. “According to the legend, the king sleeps in the heart of the mountain with one hundred of his most loyal soldiers, and when Europe needs him most and the ravens no longer fly at the summit he will return. Magic works strangely at times,” he said sadly, “but I didn’t expect it to kill the poor guys.”
Allison thought about the implications of those words, the suggestion that Courage at least knew a heck of a lot about magic and how this king had come to be under the mountain in the first place, and perhaps Courage had even been the one to put him there, to cast the spell about the ravens, whose death he now regretted.
Agh! There was so much she didn’t know, but she was certain he wasn’t about to tell her. They made their way along the face of the mountain, and their path grew more rough and narrow as they went, until finally it petered out altogether. Still, they went on, picking their way along a windblown ledge for a few minutes, with John holding Allison’s elbow to keep her confidence up, until they came upon a crevice in the mountainside. The ledge they were on continued on the other side, but they weren’t going that far.
“Fifth floor,” Courage joked, “cosmetics, lingerie, young miss. Going down!”
Allison wasn’t laughing.
“You’re kidding, right? You’ve got me climbing along a mountainside and now you want me to crawl into a crack in the ground?”
“What did you expect?” Courage asked sincerely. “An escalator?”
“Well, maybe a ladder at least,” she said weakly, looking upon the fissure with dread.
“For vampires?” he laughed. “Well, I’ll go you one better.”
John’s hands slid under her arms and lifted her from the ground. Allison shrieked and struggled until she saw that the ground was no longer under her. She berated him as he lowered her into the hole in the ground, afraid he would drop her, certain he would drop her. And when he was kneeling at the edge of the crack, his arms extended as far inside as possible, and while Allison was yelling “Don’t let go! Don’t let go,” that’s just what he did.
“Now, don’t move a muscle,” he ordered as she dropped mere inches, her feet landing on a rocky shelf in the darkness of the hole.
“You son of a bitch,” she snapped, angry and embarrassed. “You scared the daylights out of me.”
When John had lowered himself down, they began to work their way along a stone path that sloped gently into the mountain. In minutes, Allison felt blind, and the darkness had become total.
“I can’t see a blessed thing,” she said, scared though his hand held hers tightly.
“Are you sure you want to?” he asked, and Allison nodded.
John’s hand suddenly burst into flames, a torch of flesh, throwing flickering illumination around the cavern they’d found themselves in, and down into the blackness to their right. It looked like a nasty drop, and Allison realized why Courage had wanted her in the dark. Luckily heights were one thing she’d never had a problem with, and she did have him there to watch out for her should anything go wrong.
She noticed that up ahead a pile of huge stones lay in their path, effectively putting an end to the shelf they were walking on. She wondered what John would do about that, but he didn’t even seem to slow down as he neared the rocks.
Even with the light from John’s flaming hand, it was dark. Ghostly shapes flickered on the stone walls inside the crevice, and the world fell away into nothing only feet away.
Allison was afraid.
It was a difficult realization for her. After everything she’d been through in her life, she’d promised herself over and over that she’d never be afraid again. It was a promise she never kept. As a child, her parents had beaten her badly, for punishment rather than recreation, but it was still terrible abuse. Her mother had once broken her nose; blood had shot from her nostrils, and the old woman had actually hit her harder, as if that would stop the bleeding. She only thanked God that they hadn’t been pedophiles, or she might have killed herself one of the many times she considered it.
The authorities had taken her away from them. She was an only child, and then she’d been set adrift in the foster care system, some of whose chosen parental replacements were no better than her originals. But finally she had found a home with Rory and Carole Vigeant. When she’d gone undercover for CNN, in an elaborate ruse that included the very public termination of her job, she had used names from her past. Terry and Shaughnessy had been the last names of two foster families that she had particularly liked, so she became Terri Shaughnessy. Later, when she was working her way into the circle of volunteers, people who willingly gave up their blood and their lives to the Defiant Ones, she had been Tracey Sacco—her birth name, which she hated.
The Defiant Ones—what a joke. She had originally thought they were some kind of death cult, and they turned out to be vampires. Some were as evil as legend claimed. Others, unfortunate victims of an ancient, insane church conspiracy. She had watched a woman she knew be ravaged by Hannibal, who had raped her, held her captive, and was now a “respected” member of the shadow community. Then, later, she had met Will Cody, Peter Octavian and the rest, watched them fight for their lives, and fallen in love with Will.
And now she was following another vampire, one she barely knew, into the bowels of the Alps, where supposedly a hundred powerful vampires slept, and she would have to give her blood willingly to one of them in order to wake them up, to loose them upon an unsuspecting world. In order to do that, she had to put all of her faith in a man who wouldn’t even tell her his real name . . . but then, she’d never been terribly forthcoming with her own. But what frightened her the most was that not far away, her lover’s life, and thousands, perhaps millions, more, depended on their success.
Trust me, he says. As if she had a choice.
“There are two ways to do this,” John said as they stopped short at the stone blockade across their path. “Hard and fast, or easy but slow. And we can’t be wasting time. Step back a few yards, Allison, and lean against the wall. I’m afraid it’s going to be dark in here for a minute or so. Whatever you do, don’t move.”
She didn’t argue as John’s flaming hand returned to normal. He took a deep breath, and she thought for the first time about the strain such a sustained combination of forms might cause . . . and then she couldn’t hear him breathing anymore. In fact, though she wasn’t about to move forward in the dark to test her theory, she didn’t think he
was even there, in front of her, anymore.
“John?” she called, and sure enough, there was no answer. It didn’t occur to her that there were many forms he could take in which he couldn’t answer. What did occur to her was that she did not hear rocks being moved, thrown over the side, stones grinding out of the way. The nothingness, which stretched out, away from the wall for several yards and then fell away into nothing, began to coalesce into something tangible. The lack of substance, the knowledge that there was nothing in front of her, and so much mountain above her, began to make Allison feel claustrophobic. And worse, she became disoriented, her center of gravity moving forward, her equilibrium unbalanced as if she actually wanted to go to the edge of the ledge, and past it, as if that were, somehow, right.
Once before she’d felt something like it, standing on one of the observation decks of the Empire State Building in New York City. But it had been a beautiful sunny day then, and she’d been with the Vigeants, her adoptive parents. Her body had felt strange, “funny,” she’d said, but she hadn’t been afraid then, hadn’t been alone in the dark.
“John? John!” she yelled, slamming her back against the wall, bending over slightly to counter the magnetic draw the edge, the danger of it, held for her body. Could he possibly have brought her down here only to leave her?
No. That’s idiotic. What purpose would it serve? And besides, she knew he was good, could sense it in him.
But then where was he?
Her eyes searched around her, frantically trying to pierce the darkness, trying to force her brain to access some hidden reserve, to see . . .
And then there came a roar, loud but muffled, as if it were beyond the stone barricade, and a terrible crashing, scraping, plowing sound as something shattered that barricade, tearing it down, sending stones ricocheting off the opposite wall, over the cavern, only to knock and skitter their way down into . . . whatever was down there. Allison automatically flung her arms up to protect herself and was glad she did when several small stone shards hit her and a good-size chunk of rock slammed into her shoulder, throwing her to the ground.
Angel Souls and Devil Hearts Page 14
