Written in the Blood Page 6

  He clambered upright. Felt a looseness to his right ankle. Held in a shriek of agony.

  The night opened its arms. And Izsák staggered into them.

  CHAPTER 5

  Calw, Germany

  Phone held to her ear, Hannah Wilde turned in circles, untethered, furious at the darkness in which she was trapped. A memory rushed at her, and for a moment she was back in the upstairs bedroom of Le Moulin Bellerose fifteen years earlier, twirling around in that cathedral of light, seeing its French windows hanging open and knowing that Jakab had been there, and had escaped with her daughter.

  This was worse.

  Back then she still had her sight. She had been capable of action, of pursuit. Now she was adrift in an ocean of midnight. It pressed on all sides. Mocked her.

  When the call connected, Leah’s phone switched to voicemail and Hannah wanted to scream with despair. ‘Leah, please call me,’ she begged. ‘As soon as you get this. Please.’

  Next she placed a call to Matthias Schachner, the Austrian who ran their security operation.

  He answered on the first ring. ‘Hannah, I’m so sorry. We’ve never had any trouble before.’

  ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘Mostly what I said in my message. Last time I saw her was yesterday afternoon. She went into town, came back. We had a chat and she seemed fine. No hint there was anything wrong. Her passport’s still here.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘She has others, Matt. We all do. What about her car?’

  ‘Gone. We’re searching for it. Nothing yet.’

  ‘Phone?’

  ‘It’s off. And we can’t trace it till she switches it back on.’

  ‘She probably won’t. She knows you’ll find her that way.’

  ‘Have you heard from her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where she’s gone?’

  She hesitated. ‘I can’t say. Not over the phone.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’

  Hannah terminated the call. She reached out for the countertop, needing something to anchor her. ‘A Kutya Herceg,’ she said. ‘What do we know about him?’

  ‘We know plenty,’ Gabriel replied. ‘But not much that’s recent, or really of any use. Not where he lives. Not even which part of the world to start looking.’

  ‘So how can Leah know, Gabe? How can she have figured it out?’

  ‘Because she’s smart, that’s why. She’s like her mother – she doesn’t play by the rules, and she doesn’t give up.’

  ‘What will he do to her?’

  ‘A Herceg’s a pretty savage character. But he’s not insane. He won’t act without reason. It’s not in his interest to harm Leah.’

  ‘It’s not just him, though, is it? It’s the rest of the kirekesztett. I’ve only ever met one of them. He slaughtered seven members of my family.’

  Silent, Gabriel snaked his arms around her.

  Who did she have to blame for this? Only herself. When she had learned, all those years ago, the truth of what she was – of what Leah was – the knowledge had almost crushed her. Up until then she had spent her life trying to discover more about the hosszú életek, with the sole purpose of using that knowledge to kill the one, Balázs Jakab, who hunted her.

  Through the research she’d carried out during those years of terror, she’d traced the origins of the hosszú életek back to earliest records of the Hungarian people. She’d learned of their extreme longevity, their low fertility, their ability to manipulate the very contours of their flesh, and heal themselves and others. The discovery that she was one of them felt too huge, too wrenching, to throw a leash around and tame.

  As a young mother, Hannah would have been happy to see every last one of the Long Lives burned in a pile. Then, of course, she met Gabriel, son of the hosszú életek leader, the Örökös Főnök, and her life grew more complicated still. She reined in her hatred of the hosszú életek people and focused it instead on Balázs Jakab alone, until it burned with a white heat. And then she burned him, inside the mill at Le Moulin Bellerose.

  Hannah had expected to die that afternoon in France; had expected the stench of her melting flesh to be the last thing she smelled, the flames and the horror of that scene the last thing she felt. She had wanted to survive so her daughter wouldn’t be alone. But she had been willing to give up her life to defeat Jakab; and, in a way, she had welcomed the prospect of death. Her journey had been too long, too brutal, and she yearned for the peace that death might bring.

  Blinded, scarred by the memory of that day, tortured by the loss of her husband, she had survived, nevertheless, due to Gabriel and his mother. They had brought her, by degrees, back into this world. But what they recovered was a wretched creature, a broken thing.

  So many times, in the months that followed, Hannah asked herself whether she would have served Leah better by succumbing to the flames. She didn’t adapt easily to her loss of sight. Her role, for as long as she could remember, had been as protector to her family. Now she found herself dependent on its support. In some ways she felt she’d been left with the very worst of outcomes: a survivor, yes, but not as she would have wished. She remained as a burden, a shackle. At nine years old Leah found herself, within a matter of days, robbed of her father and left with a blind and emotionally fractured mother. How the girl had coped, Hannah would never know.

  And then, in the midst of all that, they found out the truth of what they were, discovered the awful reality – that they were actually a part of all this: not just part of the greater hosszú életek family either, but part of him, part of Jakab. Even now, it sickened her to consider it.

  Balázs Jakab. Balázs Lukács, as once he had been called. The murderer of her husband, her parents. So many others.

  Somewhere during his journey of blood, Hannah had learned, Jakab had supplanted one of her ancestors long enough to father a child. And on the heels of that revelation came the knowledge of its terrible consequence.

  Until her heritage was revealed, the hosszú életek had believed Gabriel was the last of their race. Even though the Irishman concealed it well, Hannah had glimpsed the awful bleakness he carried with him: no one with whom to share his life; no possibility of children; a lifespan that offered him nothing except the prolonged horror of watching his friends and loved ones dwindle away.

  And then all of that changed. Gabriel passed to Leah the distinction of being the world’s youngest, and for a time, in the months that followed, there arose a strange jubilation among those who heard of her existence.

  Hannah tried to keep secret the exact details of their heritage, but of course it eventually slipped out. And when it did, that jubilation – which had always been a fragile thing at best, a curious reaction to a stay of execution virtually meaningless in the greater scheme of things – fractured.

  Hannah and Leah were hosszú életek . . . and yet they were not. One half of their lineage was irrefutable: Jakab’s blood seethed in their veins. They were Balázs bastards, descendants of the very kirekesztett son who had triggered, with his crimes in Budapest, the outpouring of venom that, in part, led to the great hosszú életek cull.

  One half kirekesztett monster, and the other half? Peasant stock, in the eyes of many. To some, below even that. Balázs Jakab had mated with a simavér, a flat-blood commoner with no history, no claim on the world. It wasn’t even meant to be possible: their very existence challenged the veracity of some passages within the Könyve Vének, oldest and most revered of hosszú eletek texts, and source of all their laws.

  As the truth grew more widespread, it split the community in two: those who welcomed Hannah and her daughter, and those who sought to distance themselves.

  Hannah could not have cared less. Debating the quality and validity of a single family’s heritage while their numbers dwindled further each year struck her as insane. Proof, if any were needed, that the societal fractures preceding the hosszú életek’s last days had already begun to appear.

/>   Although adaptability, in the purely physical sense, was one of their greatest assets, for many it appeared, in the intellectual sense, to be a trait tragically lacking. While they could adapt the colour of their eyes and the contours of their flesh, they found it impossible to evolve their definition of what it meant to be hosszú élet.

  Again, Hannah could not have cared less: until, of course, she began to understand the implications for Leah. Without intervention, her daughter would cement her position as the last of them, destined for an old age of solitude and misery, an unthinkable final act to the tragedy that had haunted them for so long.

  Blinded by the fire in the mill, Hannah could no longer guard Leah’s physical safety. But there was something else she could offer the girl – something only she could provide – and it was a task to which she committed herself with all the conviction and single-mindedness of her former life.

  In her body, she knew, lay the possibility of redemption. Perhaps they would never learn the reason why Balázs Jakab’s kirekesztett blood had combined with simavér and borne fruit. Perhaps they did not need to know. But the chance of regeneration it offered them, however small, was undeniable.

  The move would bring her into conflict, once again, with some of the Könyve Vének’s strictures. To Hannah’s supporters those passages were virtually indecipherable, and contextually irrelevant besides. To her opponents they provided a banner of protest to rally behind: irrefutable proof that what she attempted was heresy. While so many busied themselves with the debate of its rights or wrongs, Hannah busied herself with the work itself.

  In the months that followed, she gathered around her a group of like-minded souls. Gabriel, naturally, was the first. Others soon followed. Their single intention: to use the miracle of Hannah’s blood to end the entropy and repopulate, bring new life.

  They had started here, in this very building deep inside Germany’s Black Forest. Together, they rejoiced at each new life they created, wept as Death snatched so many away. And slowly, over time, they realised that even with everything they had achieved, it would not be enough. They’d granted themselves, at best, a reprieve; a little light to banish for a time the shadows gathering in their future. It was a stuttering light, a smoky stump of a thing, and in her darker moments Hannah questioned whether what they had done had been any use at all. They had created new life, yes. But not enough. Tragically, perhaps all Hannah had helped to create was a new generation of grieving mothers.

  She had tried to withhold the awful truth of her failure from Leah, excusing her deceit as a desire to check and double-check what basic maths could have told her with a moment’s effort. Until now, she thought she had succeeded.

  In hindsight, Leah was far too intelligent, far too intrinsic a part of this, not to have grasped the stark reality. Perhaps, in compassion for her mother’s guilt, she had kept that knowledge to herself. But through her actions today she had revealed herself. She had lost patience with their lack of success, their slow decline, and she had gone to do something about it. Where that decision would now lead, Hannah could not begin to imagine.

  Wherever you are, Leah, please God be safe. I can’t lose you. Not you.

  She heard, from beyond the kitchenette’s windows, a sputtering and a popping of gravel: the wheels of heavy vehicles crunching over stones.

  Gabriel drew in a breath.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’ve got visitors,’ he replied. ‘Looks like it’s the tanács.’

  Hannah felt herself quail at his words.

  CHAPTER 6

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  Leah was still staring at A Kutya Herceg across the dining table, heart thumping in her ears, when the man who had ferried her to this mountain hideaway strode in through the room’s double doors, clutching her snub-nosed Ruger. ‘Após! Állj!’ he barked, gesturing at her host.

  The old man spun around to face him. He raised a hand and jabbed it towards Leah. ‘Ki kell dobnunk a boszorkányt a folyóba. Hátha lebeg!’

  Horrified, Leah glanced from one to the other. She pushed the chair back from the table and rose to her feet. Her grasp of Hungarian had improved over the years; now, her scalp prickled at his words.

  We should throw this witch in the river and see if she floats.

  For a moment, confused by the rush of events, Leah had thought her driver intended to rescue her from the old man’s wrath. Then the word he had used when he’d first appeared came back to her: Após.

  Father.

  It wasn’t her he had come to rescue at all. ‘He’s your father?’ she blurted, and instantly regretted it.

  After a moment’s pause, the younger man turned to her. She could see the anger burning on his face. ‘You catch on fast.’

  Leah’s host spat out another stream of Hungarian invective, his finger still hooked towards her.

  ‘Elég, Após,’ the younger man replied. ‘Elég.’

  ‘Fiú—’

  ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘I will deal with this. I have questions of my own. If she doesn’t co-operate, you can have your turn.’

  The two kirekesztett stared at each other, father and son. After what seemed like an eon of frozen time, the father relaxed his grip on the table. When he cast his eyes back at Leah, she saw murder lurking there – cold violence. With a swiftness that surprised her, he marched out of the room.

  A Kutya Herceg’s son shut the door. ‘Sit down,’ he said. And, because of the way he looked at her, she complied without a word.

  He pulled out the chair opposite and sat, placing her pistol on the table with a clatter. He spun it, trapped it with his hand, spun it again. The barrel ended up facing her. ‘Either you’re incredibly stupid, unbelievably arrogant, or monumentally naive. I’m trying to work out which.’ His eyes were dark, the last tints of colour fleeing to the outer edges of his irises.

  ‘Perhaps I’m all three.’

  ‘Lonely, too, I imagine. Am I right?’

  The question jolted her. All of a sudden she felt horribly exposed by his gaze, as if with a single question he had peeled away her layers of armour and shone a light into the parts she tried to keep concealed.

  ‘You must be,’ he added. ‘Growing up in fear, the way you did. Never able to put your trust in people. Moving from place to place.’ He paused. ‘Watching your father die.’

  She stiffened, and again his expression shifted, as if, having probed her with a barb, he now backed away to examine its effect.

  Nodding thoughtfully, he continued. ‘Then you find out the truth of what you are. And what is that exactly, Leah? Some would say a monstrosity. A bastard half-breed. Neither fully one thing nor another. The hosszú életek may have welcomed you into their fold, but they don’t fully trust you, do they? You must sit awkwardly with them.’

  ‘What can you possibly know of that?’

  ‘You’d be surprised. But what I want to know now – what I insist upon knowing – is why you’re here tonight.’

  ‘I’m sure you heard what I told your father.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it directly, all the same.’ He spun the gun through another revolution, and even through her fear Leah cringed at the sound of the metal scratching a groove into the flawless mahogany slab.

  He stared at her a moment longer, and she saw the violet striations once more begin to feather his eyes. Silent, he pushed the weapon with his fingertips. It slid across the table towards her. Leah caught it under her hand.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said, standing.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Ignoring her question, he disappeared through the arch beside the skeleton of Ursus spelaeus and into the unlit chamber beyond. The darkness gloved him in an instant.

  The gun doesn’t make you safe. It’s a test. Nothing more.

  Leah picked up the Ruger. On her feet now, dismayed by a trembling in her limbs that made the floor feel as if it undulated beneath her, she followed.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and
then dark shapes began to coalesce from the shadows. The chamber resembled one section of a quartered pie. Its curved wall, like the larger living space at her back, was constructed from floor-to-ceiling glass. Through it, across a dark canyon like a crack in the earth, she saw the three towering megaliths of the Bernese Alps, their snow-frosted summits suffused with a spectral glow. Studding the sky above those peaks, instead of the miser’s dusting of stars Leah might have witnessed from town, she saw a galaxy of twinkling lights, so many that it seemed as if a magician’s purse had been spilled across the heavens. Even as fearful as she was, their beauty awed her.

  Her chaperon stood to her left, the floor beneath his feet like a slab of polished black glass. ‘They say there’re as many as four hundred billion stars in our galaxy,’ he murmured. ‘And our galaxy’s just one in perhaps five hundred billion others. That’s about seventy each for you, me and every other human who walks the earth.’

  Unable to decide how to respond to an observation like that, Leah risked a question instead. ‘Will you tell me your name?’

  Keeping his eyes on the night sky, he replied, ‘You can call me Luca. Luca Sultés.’

  ‘Is that your real name?’

  ‘It’s as good as any other.’

  ‘I seem to have upset your father.’

  ‘He has a long memory. And he’s not as trusting as I.’

  ‘You trust me, then?’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ Sultés turned towards her. ‘Why did you come, Leah? Why are you here?’

  ‘I told you. I want your help. Your father’s help.’

  ‘You want us to divulge the details of every kirekesztett woman alive who’s managed to scrape out an existence while avoiding the attentions of your Merénylő.’

  At his mention of Merénylő, a word that referred to the hosszú életek leader’s assassin, a role that had existed for centuries, she shook her head. ‘He’s not my Merénylő. I’m a monstrosity, remember? A bastard half-breed.’