“Erika,” Sebastiano chided, “if Jared’s guidance is satisfactory to Rolf, the rest of us should have no complaint.”
“Says you, Yano,” Erika said and sniffed. “The guy could be leading us right into a trap, and we’d never know it. Do any of you even know him?”
Rolf halted then, turning back to look down at the girl, his eyebrows knitting together in a deep frown. She stopped in her tracks, and the others behind her, but she was not intimidated by him. Erika put her hands on her hips.
“Do you know him?” she asked Rolf, and though he was irked, he shook his head to say no. Then he turned and tapped Jared, to bring his attention to the matter at hand.
Jared stopped short. They were entering a narrow passage of ice, sloping gently downward until it became more and more difficult to walk. Their vampiric eyes could see clearly in the dark, but there was some light just the same. Daylight filtered weirdly up from somewhere ahead, though they were descending, and reflected, was refracted, off the ice to give increasing illumination.
“I don’t blame you for lacking faith,” Jared said, not bothering to whisper, in light of Erika’s loud voice, “but I have already told your chief marshall here that Hannibal is of my bloodline, descended from me, as it were. I can sense him not far ahead.”
He looked pointedly at Erika.
“And if there were no trap before,” Jared said sharply “you may rest assured that there will be one now.”
Rolf motioned, indicating that the conversation was over, and Jared turned back and continued to lead the group toward their final conflict with Hannibal. He was suddenly certain that Elissa was already dead, and only the lack of any blood on the ice calmed him.
“Well done,” Annelise said to Erika behind him. “Now Hannibal will be prepared for us.”
“So sue me,” she answered.
“Hannibal shall do more than that if . . .,” Carlos began, and Erika shot him the finger as Sebastiano shushed them all. But Jared had stopped again.
“Hannibal shall do nothing but die,” he said. “Our people have suffered enough this morning. I lost my brother and my father’s sister to this battle with Mulkerrin, and I might not have if Hannibal had fought for his people instead of against us.”
Jared turned back and continued to descend the slippery ice path. The incline became more and more steep, and soon the six of them were laying their hands palms open on the walls in order to stay on their feet. It worked for a while, and then, looking down, Jared saw that, though the path cut away until it was nearly impossible to keep from sliding down, it also ended about twenty-five feet ahead.
He turned to look at Rolf, who understood the unspoken question immediately, and nodded. Jared took his hands off the wall and surrendered his balance, sitting down hard on the ice and sliding down into the passage. At the bottom, he looked around, then motioned for the rest of them to come down. Which they did, sliding one by one. All but Erika, who transformed, instead, to mist and floated down. Rolf was certain she would have claimed it had something to do with her integrity.
At the bottom, they discovered the source of the light that had filtered weakly through the caves and that now lit the cavern in which they stood fairly well. It was a round opening, high above their heads, about five feet in diameter.
“That’s not natural,” Jared said quietly, still nervously scanning the room for Hannibal’s followers.
“It’s also brand new,” Erika said, and motioned toward a pile of ice and earth that was directly beneath the opening in the roof of the cave.
“Well, he’s gone then,” Annelise said, looking to Rolf for support.
“It looks like the showdown is cancelled,” Carlos agreed.
“Time for us to go, then?” Sebastiano asked Rolf, who was looking only at Jared, and who now shook his head no, slowly, his mind occupied. Finally, Jared turned to face them.
“He’s not gone,” Jared said. “He knows now that I can sense him, and he’s trying to block me out. But that, his shielding himself, is like a beacon to me. He’s close. Very close.”
“Oh, yes!” A familiar voice rang through the cavern. “Very close!”
Rolf and his comrades looked up, following the voice and saw a crowd of heads surrounding the hole above them. One leaned farther over into the hole, and the sunlight streaming down into the cave became a halo around his winter-white hair. At Rolf’s side, Carlos tensed as if he were about to change, and the mute turned quickly toward him, slapping his hands together with a loud crack to get the other vampire’s attention. Carlos looked at him, frustration coloring his face, but Rolf held up one hand as if to say, Be patient.
“Where is Commander Thomas?” Jared called up to the vampires clustered around the hole. Their forms blocked much of the sun from the cavern, and it had become significantly darker.
Hannibal did not answer, but Rolf sensed movement in the darkness around them and, glancing around, saw that his meager band of shadows was not alone in the cavern. Hannibal had escaped with a handful of his vampiric followers, and only now did Rolf realize that there were more heads outside the cavern than there ought to have been. Now, more of them slid wraithlike into the cavern from several openings, which must have led into other caves other icy tunnels. In moments, perhaps a dozen vampires Rolf had never seen before stood in a rough circle around the perimeter of the room. His own soldiers, the very few that were left, were on guard, ready to do battle though defeat was almost certain.
And Hannibal still had Elissa.
“Rolf!” she screamed, and then was cut off as the wind was knocked out of her. He looked up, ignoring the vampires in the cavern with them, as they didn’t seem to be moving in, and saw that his lover was alive. For the moment. Elissa Thomas grappled at air as her arms and upper torso hung down into the cavern, her lower half held tight by Hannibal’s followers.
Even with his enhanced senses, Rolf could not see Elissa’s face past the sunlight on her hair, just as he knew she could not see the fear, the concern, in his features, or that his brow was furrowed with frustration, or his hatred for Hannibal. But he could smell her terror. He knew that Elissa was not afraid of falling, of the drop into the cavern that awaited her if they let her go. Rolf knew that his lover feared precisely what he did: that she would not be dropped.
He glanced around, meeting the eyes of each of his people in turn: Carlos, angry and anxious to begin the battle, regardless of its outcome; Annelise, quietly resigned to their predicament; Jared, looking to Rolf for their next move, though Rolf was sure the much older vampire was more than capable of escaping the cavern himself; Sebastiano, looking old because he allowed it and terrified because he could not help it; and Erika, whose face was a mask of grim determination, confidence and faith in her leader, her friend—him.
Rolf looked once more at Jared, motioning for the other vampire to act in his place, to do what he could not, to speak.
“Hannibal!” Jared called loudly, his voice echoing off the icy walls of the cavern. “You know me now, boy. You know I am responsible for your creation. Release the human and do honorable battle alone against your accuser, as your ancestors did.”
There was a stunned pause, as all present took in a breath, with the exception of Elissa Thomas, whose hitched breathing became even louder. The sun had moved slightly, nearly overhead now, and its glare made the figures outside the hole more difficult to distinguish. It was clearer, though, how the hole had been made, torn through several feet of ice, dirt and snow by supernatural strength. The ice around its inner edge was sweating, melting, and Rolf took a moment to realize how long the arms must be that suspended Elissa so low through that hole.
And then Hannibal responded, not with a laugh, but with a horrible braying, which Rolf had never heard from him before. He’d expected a similar reaction, yet his last hopes crumbled as the butcher’s laughter slowed to snuffling giggles, then an amused dry chuckle, and finally, nothing.
And then: “Oh, please, dearest ancestor,
” Hannibal sneered, “do not attack my nobility, for surely you must see that it is far more profound than your own, or that of any of these, hmm, vegetarians? You seek to draw me out by invoking our ancestors, and yet you are obviously the weak link in my bloodline, the skeleton in the family closet.
“How dare you?!” Hannibal raged. “How dare you question my loyalty to our ancestry! I am the true heir to all that we are, all that we were and can be again. Why do I not meet Rolf Sechs in personal battle? Because I am not certain of victory, and in the unlikely event of my defeat my plans would be crushed. I would deliver to our kind their birthright: the blood of humans running like beer from the tap, the thrill of the hunt and the power of fear. I will not gamble that future merely because you taunt me.”
“I do not taunt, child,” Jared said grimly. “The ancestors I refer to are those who existed in the beginning, before our legacy was perverted by those who instilled such repulsive traits in our kind. Come, now, and fight your speechless foe. Kill him if you can, or die with honor if that is your fate.”
“For the sake of our people,” Hannibal declared, “I cannot allow that to happen, just as I cannot suffer any vampire who stands against me to live. Any of you who wish to join me may do so now, may return to the glory of our kind and bathe in the blood of humanity.
“Come,” he urged Rolf’s comrades, “join me and be worshipped as a part of the new shadow kingdom. Or stay and die, as an act of mercy. For if I allow you to live, you will only be hunted down, alone and afraid, by humans without the courage to race the real vampires.”
Rolf’s mouth dropped open as he sensed the movement at his side, and as Sebastiano stepped slowly forward, he wished for the first time in decades that he had the power of speech. The Sicilian, his wrinkled face grave and white as his hair, refused to return the stares of his friends.
“A kingdom, you say?” Sebastiano asked. “Are you, then, the king of shadows, Hannibal?”
Hannibal leaned impossibly far into the hole above them, his white hair hanging straight down. He was face-to-face with Elissa now, but Rolf knew she dare not attempt anything, just as he would not make a move as long as she was Hannibal’s prisoner.
“Oh,” Hannibal hissed with a smile, “that I am. That, I most certainly am.”
“Then I kneel to you, shadow king,” Sebastiano began, but Erika rushed toward him, screaming as he knelt.
“Yano, no!” she cried and reached for his arm. “How can you do this?”
And Sebastiano, his apparent weakness as deceiving as her own, used his vampiric strength and Erika’s own momentum and hurled her toward the far wall, where her head met the ice with a terrible crack. Rolf spun toward him, and Hannibal’s shadows tightened their circle around the cavern, but did not attack. Rolf did not approach Sebastiano, who yet refused to meet his eyes, but instead went to Erika’s side. She was, of course, alive, but would take a few minutes of healing. He looked up into Hannibal’s smiling face, hanging there next to Elissa’s blood-streaked neck, but when he saw that her eyes were closed tightly, as if awaiting a blow, he simply moved back to where he had been standing, holding Erika up at his side.
“You followed me once before, Sebastiano,” Hannibal was saying. “You may follow me again. Come.”
And Sebastiano shifted his form into that of a bat, clearly an appeal to Hannibal’s sense of tradition, Rolf thought, and flew up and through the hole in the cavern’s ceiling, to disappear beyond the heads of the gathered shadows. Then, one by one, Hannibal’s other followers, who had remained in the cavern, transformed and followed him.
“Do something, Rolf,” Carlos hissed at him. “He’s going to kill that damn human anyway. My blood, she’s only human. Just because you fucked her, doesn’t mean—”
And then Rolf was standing over him, Carlos sprawled on the ice floor of the cavern wiping his fist across his mouth as bats escaped the chamber. Rolf wanted to hurt Carlos for his words, but knew that that would be playing by Hannibal’s rules. Erika was next to him then, and Annelise on the other side.
“Asshole,” Erika said to Carlos.
“If that’s how you feel,” Annelise added, “you ought to follow Sebastiano.”
Rolf merely shook his head, then turned his attention back to the ceiling of the cavern, where Hannibal hung side by side with Elissa, and the last of the white-haired vampire’s followers flew up and past them, out into the sunshine.
“Blasphemer,” Jared said suddenly beside him, and Rolf turned to see the hatred on his face, as if the words had been building within him and were only now bursting forth. Jared stepped forward, and Rolf tensed, prepared to stop him from going after Hannibal, but he needn’t have worried. Jared knew Elissa’s life was at stake—though Rolf had begun to realize that the stakes were much higher than one woman’s life.
“You are no king!” Jared barked at Hannibal, and his white-haired descendant merely smiled. “There is only one king of shadows, and even now he fights to protect all the people of this world from a terrible danger, not merely to further his own lustful ends. Only one king, and you will bow before him, or you will die!”
What? Was he speaking of Charlemagne?
He must be, Rolf told himself. The former emperor now returned to life, to leadership, Charlemagne must have been the king of shadows to whom Jared referred. But Rolf wasn’t certain he would bow to anyone.
“What are you going to do now?” Carlos called up to Hannibal.
“You’ve obviously got us outnumbered,” Annelise said, “but you don’t need the woman.”
“Let her go, Hannibal!” Erika demanded. “Whatever you have planned for us, she’s not part of it.”
“Planned for you?” Hannibal smiled down at them, and the sun had moved farther across the sly above, so that the glare no longer clouded their enhanced vision. Though shadowed, Hannibal’s face made his intentions quite clear, though his words told another story.
“I have nothing planned for you,” Hannibal insisted. “In fact, I intend to leave you all right here.”
“This is far from over, blood-child!” Jared yelled, his patience long since disappeared, and Hannibal’s placating tone only making him angrier.
The smile disappeared from Hannibal’s lips.
“Au contraire, mon père,” he breathed, “for all of you, it is, most certainly, over.”
His right hand, elongated into a terrible razor-sharp claw, flashed out faster even than the other vampires’ eyes could truly follow, and Elissa Thomas’s scream had just begun when it lost its vigor. Her uniform, and her flesh beneath, was torn open from crotch to collarbone, and in the stunned half second before Rolf and the others could react, they were showered by her blood, pelted by wet, pink flesh and what had once been the vital organs of a woman.
With a wordless roar, Rolf was off the ground, transforming mid-leap into a blood-smeared eagle, speeding for the opening in the cavern. His senses were focused on Hannibal’s withdrawing face, on Elissa’s dangling corpse, dead before her viscera hit the ice below, yet he knew without seeing or hearing them that Jared, Erika and the others were right behind him.
Beyond Hannibal, Rolf could see a line of bats across the sunny sky, a picture that nature should never have allowed as the self-proclaimed vampire king’s followers escaped . . . And then Elissa’s corpse was falling, and he was hurtling straight toward her, and though he knew in his mind she was dead, his heart screamed at him to catch her, and the frightened, pleading stare of her dead eyes nearly stopped him cold.
He changed again, into something not quite a man and not quite an eagle, and he did his best to break her fall. Erika was right behind him, and as he fell with his dead lover in his arms, Rolf bore her down as well. The others moved out of the way of the falling corpse and the two shadows trying to slow its descent, toward the edges of the cavern, and by the time they started up after Hannibal again, only his single form remained outlined against the sunny sky. He held something in his hand, but in the glare, none of t
hem could see what it was.
“When muscle will not suffice,” Hannibal called down to them, and wings grew from his back, his body hunched over, becoming an ugly crimson color, and he took flight, a rough, snarling scream completing the thought as he sped away: “. . . technology shall triumph!”
Carlos and Annelise led the charge up through the hole in the ceiling, Jared right behind them, but too late, as the entire cavern, and ice caves and tunnels a quarter mile in every direction, were vaporized in a flash of thermite.
20
Salzburg, Austria, European Union.
Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 10:23 A.M.:
Liam Mulkerrin had no idea what he had called from the depths of Hell. He had opened the portal in a moment of panic when he’d thought a particularly harsh blow from Charlemagne was going to penetrate his force shield. He had reached out blindly with his magic and flipped a mental switch that had, due to the frequency of its use, replaced a long, spoken spell that had once been required for the creation of such portals. His mind had sought something vicious enough to destroy Charlemagne and his troops, and it seemed as though the creatures on the other side of the portal had reached out to him as well.
Yet he had no idea what they were. Not that it mattered now, as Charlemagne’s warriors, so much more advanced than the vampires Mulkerrin had faced before, were forced to break away their attack to defend themselves against the new arrivals. Black and blood-red, the creatures were paper-thin but incredibly strong, and their insubstantial wings kept them aloft as they attacked, outnumbering Charlemagne’s forces three to one.
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