Zachary gave a low chuckle.
‘Don’t miss your chance,’ Alex said. ‘You might not get another.’
‘My brother’s looking forward to meeting you,’ Lillith said. ‘He’s got plans for you.’ She whipped the sabre away from Alex’s chin and slid it back into its scabbard. Turning to the assault team vampires, she said, ‘Okay, load her up with the others.’
The assault leader pointed at Harry Rumble. ‘What about that one?’
Lillith surveyed Rumble with disdain. ‘Who is he?’
‘Just the VIA head in London.’
‘Really? How interesting. And you were about to give him the chop?’ She strolled casually over to Rumble, swaying her hips. He flinched away as she ran her fingers down his cheek. ‘Nice little bonus. Gabriel will be pleased. Fine, bring him along too.’
Alex and Rumble were hauled to their feet and dragged over to join the Supremos. The vampires in black prodded them with the swords towards the exit and marched them outside towards the Chinook. Its enormous rotors began to turn faster and the whine of its turbines rose to a roar as the pilot readied for lift-off.
‘Whatever you’re being paid to do this, I can triple it,’ Olympia Angelopolis pleaded with Lillith as she was bundled into the rear hatch of the helicopter.
‘I know you and your cronies have stashed away plenty during the last few years,’ Lillith said. ‘But we’re not interested in your money.’
‘I could rip her tongue out if you want,’ Zachary offered.
Lillith shook her head. ‘She’s going to need one for the little show we’re putting on.’
Alex and Rumble exchanged quizzical glances. Neither of them spoke. The vampires in black shoved the rest of the prisoners on board. Lillith gave them a mocking wave as the hatch was closing.
‘Bon voyage, Federation scumbags. Pretty soon you’re all going to wish you’d never been turned.’
The hatch clanged shut, the cargo hold went black. Moments later Alex felt a rising sensation as the big Chinook took off into the night.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Hours passed. Voices in the dark, vibrating space of the cargo hold.
‘Where are they taking us?’ Lerouge sounded agitated and fearful.
‘They must surely let us go,’ said Borowczyk.
‘It is an outrage.’ Goldmund’s voice. ‘An outrage, pure and simple.’
‘The question is, what do we do about it?’ Alex said. ‘We can’t just sit here.’
‘The field agent.’ Olympia Angelopolis’s voice muttered scornfully from the darkness. ‘And what exactly is it you propose to do? As you seem to have so many wonderful ideas as to how we should run our affairs.’
‘For a start, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to bribe these guys,’ Alex answered. ‘You can’t buy your way out of this one so easily.’
‘Then what, Alex?’ Rumble’s voice. He sounded subdued.
‘We have to fight.’
‘With what? They have swords. They might still have Nosferol bullets, too.’
Alex gave a snort. ‘Maybe Gabriel Stone’s right about us, Harry. Seems to me that with all this Federation bullshit, we’ve forgotten who we are. We’re vampires. Vampires fight. They don’t plead and beg.’
Rumble drew a breath. ‘Alex—’
‘You will please to remember whom you are addressing,’ Hassan said indignantly in his thick accent. ‘You are in the presence of Supremo Angelopolis.’
‘I know exactly whose presence I’m in,’ Alex said, and the conversation settled into a brooding silence. She could feel Harry Rumble frowning at her in the darkness.
The Chinook flew on and on. The night ticked slowly by. There was a landing that Alex guessed was for fuel, and then the chopper took off again. None of the prisoners spoke. Alex began counting the hours since she’d taken her last Solazal. Just before two in the afternoon, she remembered, which meant that the effect would start to wear off sometime in the early hours of the morning. She’d have bet that none of the others had taken any much later than that. None of them would survive the sunrise.
Gabriel Stone was forcing them to remember what it was like to live as real vampires. The thought almost made Alex smile.
As the hours ticked by, she knew that Harry Rumble and the Supremos had the dawn on their mind, too. Gaston Lerouge seemed especially nervous. Then, with still time to spare before the first rays of the sun began to lighten the sky, they felt the chopper begin another descent and then settle on solid ground. The rotors slowed and the hatchway opened abruptly. The same black-clad vampire guards who’d loaded them on board hauled them out one by one into the cold night air.
Alex looked around her. Moonlight shone on distant mountains and the high stone walls around them.
‘We’re in a castle,’ she whispered to Rumble.
They didn’t have much chance to talk as the guards grabbed them and separated them. Alex was shoved at sword-point through a barred doorway and down a narrow arched passage to a cell.
She breathed a sigh of relief. No windows. At least Stone hadn’t devised a little barbecue session when the sun came up in a few hours’ time. He clearly had other plans. The cell walls were about four feet thick, solid rock, and the steel door was too tough even for a vampire to get through. There was little else to do except hang around to find out what Stone’s plans might be.
Alex curled up in the corner of the cell, and the long wait began.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Bucharest, Romania
1.32 p.m. local time
The freezing rain was turning to sleet and the pavements outside the airport were gleaming and slippery. Joel’s spirits were sagging as he waited in a huddled queue for a taxicab. A rattling, grime-streaked Peugeot lurched up and he loaded his rucksack and the metal case in the back seat. The dashboard was littered with junk and the smell of the sickly air blasting through the vents didn’t help Joel’s stomach much. He’d almost been sick twice on the plane, but he’d eaten so little in the last twenty-four hours that he had nothing to throw up.
The driver jerked his head back at him and said something in Romanian. Joel pronounced ‘Gara de Nord’, the name of the city’s railway station, as best he could; the guy nodded and sped out of the airport to join the heavy traffic heading into Bucharest. They fell into a stumbling conversation, but Joel’s Romanian was even more rudimentary than the driver’s English. After a few minutes of pointless grouching about the shitty weather, the guy concentrated on swearing at other drivers and Joel slouched back and numbly watched the beat of the wipers. His hand rested on the case on the seat beside him.
He couldn’t believe he was doing this.
It was a wild ride through the city. Romanian drivers seemed to consider the rules of the road as only suggestions, and the taxi had several near misses as it hammered over the potholes and ruts on the way to the railway station. Bucharest must have been pretty once, but the architectural legacies of Ceauşescu’s harsh Communist regime stood like squatting concrete toads among the classical buildings and baroque facades. Stray dogs seemed to be everywhere, sauntering casually across the path of the speeding, honking traffic, in no hurry to get to the other side. Joel was glad when the taxi pulled up with a screech outside the columned entrance of the Gara de Nord Bucureşti.
He checked the train timetables – he had half an hour to wait. He found a quiet café inside the station and took a table in a corner. The coffee was stale, but at least the place was warm and dry and he could sit a while and think before he set out on the next leg of his journey. He unzipped the document pouch on the front of the rucksack and took out the page he’d torn from Dec’s friend’s atlas. He slid his coffee cup to one side to unfold it across the table.
The sick feeling in his stomach came rushing back worse than ever as he gazed at the ragged line of dried blood that ran across the paper. The fingerprints had turned crusty and brown. Some bits had flaked off and fallen onto the table when he’d unfolded it;
the sudden thought that they were crumbs of congealed vampire blood made him swipe them away with a frisson of horror.
He took another slurp of coffee and tried to focus his thoughts. The fact was, he still didn’t know exactly where he was going. Avoiding Kate Hawthorne’s blood, he traced his finger across the map for the hundredth time since yesterday, staring at names like Brasov, Târgu Frumos, Râmnicu. They meant nothing to him. As for the name he’d managed to force out of the doomed girl, there was no mention of it anywhere – not here on the atlas, not in his guidebook, not on any map he’d found online during his rushed research before leaving Britain. But it had to be here somewhere, among the horrible fingerprints that clustered around a zone of the Transylvanian Alps about a hundred and eighty miles to the northwest of Bucharest.
Had to be. He’d come too far to let himself be shaken by doubts. And so his best plan – right now his only plan – was to travel blind into the rough area marked in blood on the atlas page. When he got there, he could start asking questions and hope they led him somewhere.
Through the café window he could see his train now winding its way into the station. He checked his watch, stuffed the page back into his rucksack, grabbed his stuff and went to catch his train.
The rolling hills, dramatic mountainscapes and sweeping pine forests weren’t enough to keep Joel awake as the train lurched and ground its way steadily northeastwards during the next few hours. When he awoke from his dark dreams it was nearly three in the afternoon and the train was slowing for its approach into the medieval town of Sighişoara. In the street outside the railway station he passed hot food vendors selling grilled meat and pastries, but still couldn’t bring himself to eat anything. The sky was pale grey and the rising wind had a cold, hard bite. He pulled up the collar of his jacket, shouldered his rucksack and clutched the precious metal case tightly under his arm as he wandered the town.
The old part of Sighişoara was a fortified medieval stronghold perched on a hill. The streets were cobbled and the towers and steeples of Orthodox churches dominated the skyline. He knew from his guidebook that at the height of the season the streets would be full of tourists eager to visit the ancient seat of Transylvanian royalty, former home of Vlad Dracul, father of the legendary Impaler. He passed a sign for a museum of torture, and then the abode of Vlad himself, now converted into a restaurant. Even here, as far as the modern world was concerned, things had moved on; legends that had once struck terror were now just tourism marketing gimmicks. It made him feel all the more foolish as he loitered uncomfortably about the half-empty street, eyeing each passerby as someone he could potentially collar and ask about the whereabouts of this ‘Vâlcanul’. How would he appear to them, this damp-sodden, wild-eyed guy who’d travelled all this way searching for vampires to kill? Like some kind of nut, most likely. He was beginning to think it himself.
Four times he was on the brink of approaching someone – and four times he shrank back at the last moment. In the end, hating and cursing himself for his stupidity, he gave up and walked away.
On the edge of the town was a minor road that snaked away and upwards through the pine forests. He walked desultorily for a mile, kicking stones and feeling the sleet work cold, damp fingers into his clothing. The sky was getting darker and the momentum that had driven him here was fading with the light. He was starting to descend rapidly into a state of gloomy despondency. His situation now struck him as completely absurd – coming to this place had been a terrible mistake.
He was still feeling that way when the pickup truck splashed by him on the road. Its one working brake light flared through the sleet, and it pulled over on the verge. The driver was alone, a bearded, chubby guy Joel instantly warmed to. The lived-in cab of the truck smelled of coffee and cigarettes and there was lively Romanian folk music zinging over the radio. A lift to nowhere seemed like an attractive proposition, and he climbed in.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Joel’s saviour’s name was Gheorghe. He seemed a man of easy ways, smiling and laughing constantly, and it was obviously of no concern to him at all that neither of them could understand anything the other was saying. The truck bounced and rattled its way up the winding mountain passes. Every so often the walls of the pine forest would drop away and Joel caught a glimpse of the dusky mountain landscape behind. The warmth of the heater blasted away the chill from his hands and feet, and he felt his resolve beginning to return like a spreading whisky glow inside him. After a while he even relaxed enough to tell a joke, some daft thing Sam Carter had had the office in an uproar with a while back. Gheorghe plainly didn’t understand a word but nonetheless found it so amusing he had to wipe tears from his ruddy cheeks. Then, in the chuckling pause that followed, Joel threw away his caution and tentatively asked about Vâlcanul.
And he knew right away he was on to something, because that was when Gheorghe suddenly clammed up tighter than if he’d been slapped. There was no more laughter, no more joking, and a deep silence fell over them. Any other time, Joel might have regretted killing the atmosphere of camaraderie they’d struck up – but his heart was racing and his hands trembling with excitement. He had no idea what road he was on, but he knew now that it was the right one.
It wasn’t long afterwards that the truck’s headlights picked out the mossy roof of a log house through the trees, then another, then the steeple of an old wooden church. Gheorghe seemed keen to continue alone, and the small village looked to Joel like a place where he could carry on his investigation. They parted amicably, almost apologetically, and Gheorghe took off up the road looking relieved.
Joel sighed and made his way into the heart of the tiny hamlet. The temperature had dropped a couple of degrees while he’d been with Gheorghe, and he dug his hands deep in his pockets as he walked. Light from the rambling rows of log houses spilled out onto the unpaved road; he could smell the woodsmoke drifting from their chimneys. As he walked on, he heard the sound of hooves from out of the gloom, and moments later a horse-drawn carriage passed by in the opposite direction, carrying a load of firewood. Just a few miles from the tourist trade of Sighişoara, and a few hours from the modern city bustle of Bucharest, he was in a whole other world. The place was a time capsule.
Light and music drew him towards what seemed to be the village’s only bar. A few drinkers turned to stare at him and eyed his rucksack and case as he walked in, ducking to avoid the low beams. He didn’t feel up to beer, and paid a few lei for a coffee. While he sipped it, sitting on a stool at the bar, he caught the eye of the barman and dared to mention the name Vâlcanul again. All he got were a lot of strange looks, but that didn’t deter him. Feeling braver now, he left the bar and stopped the first people he met in the street outside, a pair of tiny elderly women who looked like sisters. In the faltering mixture of sign language and pidgin English he was developing, he asked them the same question. ‘Can you tell me where I can find a place called Vâlcanul?’
The women shot glances at one another and scurried on past him. Joel wasn’t sure whether they’d understood his attempt at communication and was heading further down the street to find someone else to ask when he was halted by a shout from behind him. He turned to see an old man hobbling with a stick towards him. The two ladies watched from a distance.
The old man had a shaggy mane of pure white hair, skin like tanned leather and no teeth. He spoke even less English than Gheorghe, but the wary glint in his eye gave a clear message. Why are you looking for Vâlcanul?
Then it really did exist. Joel was trying to formulate his next question when the old man grasped his arm with a bony hand of surprising power, waving his cane at one of the houses. He seemed to want him to come back there with him. Joel followed, wondering where this was leading.
A woman emerged from the finely crafted wooden door of the house, framed in the light from the hallway. She was in her fifties and bore a strong resemblance to the old man, but with black hair and a full set of strong white teeth – she was clearly his daughte
r. Her father spent a couple of moments jabbering at her in quick-fire Romanian, and she looked at Joel with concern.
‘You are American?’ she asked in English. Noticing his surprise, she added, ‘I am a teacher.’
‘I’m from Britain,’ Joel said. ‘I’m looking for—’
‘I know what you are looking for,’ the woman interrupted him. ‘Why do you wish to find this place?’
‘Can you tell me where it is?’
‘This is not a place you should go.’ She seemed unwilling to mention its name. ‘Nobody goes there. Nobody lives there any more.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Stay away from that place.’ She pointed at the case. ‘You are photographer, yes? Many beautiful pictures you can take here. No need to go to…to there.’
‘I’m not a photographer,’ Joel said. In the background, the old man was jabbing a gnarled finger up at the sky and muttering the same words over and over. ‘What’s he saying?’ Joel asked the woman.
‘The snows are coming early this year, and it will soon be night. My father is saying that it is not safe to travel up the mountain.’
Joel felt his eyes light up. ‘Then this Vâlcanul is further up the mountain?’ He turned to scan the dark horizon beyond the trees. ‘Which way?’
‘You must stay down here,’ the woman insisted. ‘Tomorrow the autobuz comes and will take you back to where you came from. You stay with us the night. We have a room and a bed.’ She smiled. ‘I make polenta with sheep’s cheese and sausage.’
‘It sounds delicious,’ he said, meaning it. ‘And I’m very grateful to you for your offer. But I really need to get to Vâlcanul.’
‘Then you will not come back,’ she said with a pained expression.
Joel thanked her as best he could, and she very reluctantly told him which road to follow out of the village and through the forest. Then, hardly able to keep from breaking into a run, he hefted his rucksack and started walking back down the street. There had to be someone around who could rent him a small truck or a cheap four-wheel drive.
Uprising Page 30
