Written in the Blood Read online

  Sultés was silent for a while, considering her. ‘You know, the original building plans for this house refer to where we’re standing as the sun room. But I’ve always called it something else – the fainting chamber. Because so many of our visitors, when we reveal its secret, do exactly that.’

  He smiled, but little humour resided in his expression. His eyes were predatory.

  Such a dangerously compelling face, she thought. One moment his features communicated warmth, and the next they seemed as grave-cold and passionless as those of a corpse.

  She became aware of her chest rising and falling, and was certain he noticed it too: noticed, also, the flush rising on her cheeks.

  He was testing her; playing some kind of game.

  Her skin shivered.

  Sultés removed a small plastic remote from his pocket. He pressed a button and the floor beneath her feet switched from polished black to blazing white.

  It took her a moment to work out what had happened. Then, stomach abseiling away from her, lungs trapping a scream in her throat, Leah realised that the white light came not from the floor but beyond it, and that she stood on a glass divide suspended above hundreds of feet of empty space. A descending series of powerful spotlights shone up at her, set into the mountainside’s vertical face all the way down to the distant rocks below.

  The fainting chamber.

  She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

  All her life she’d been terrified of heights. Hers was not the usual, healthy fear present in most people; she had an almost fanatical aversion.

  The anchored safety of the living room waited only a few yards behind her, but it might as well have been located on a different continent. Her muscles had frozen. She felt a bead of sweat roll down the inside of her dress. ‘Please,’ she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘Turn it off. Get me out.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘Most people, when they see this for the first time, are a little shaken. But there’s a small minority who have a much stronger reaction. Strange, but I can always tell in advance how someone will react.’

  An inch of glass beneath her feet, and then . . . nothing. Leah heard Sultés’s heels click against the floor as he moved to her side. She cringed, wondering how much pressure it would take for the glass to crack, and for how long they would plummet if it shattered.

  ‘Are you insane,’ he asked, ‘to walk in here, into this last refuge of hosszú élet innocents, and ask for our help to repopulate the very society that spurned us, then tried to slaughter us?’

  She clenched her teeth, insisted to herself that she stood on a floor of granite, thousands of reassuring tonnes of it. ‘I don’t wish to be disrespectful,’ she hissed, ‘but you can hardly describe your father’s followers as innocents and expect much credibility.’

  ‘So you think the tanács—’

  Her eyelids were squeezed so tight she thought her eyeballs might burst. ‘I’m not here to make moral judgements on sentences passed down by the council. I’m not one of you, remember? Not one of them. Not one of anything, really.’

  ‘So why do you care?’

  ‘Please. Turn off the—’

  ‘Answer me. Why would you put yourself in danger like this? You’ve just admitted you’re not one of them. Not in their eyes, at least. You lost half your family to a hosszú élet madman. So why? Why do you care?’

  Leah ran her tongue around a mouth as dry as the pages of old books. ‘How could I not care?’ she whispered. ‘How could I stand aside – how could anyone stand aside – and watch an entire people disappear into oblivion? Balázs Jakab was a monster, but he never defined the hosszú életek race. I’ve heard the stories about your father. I’m sure half of them are falsehoods, and maybe you both have good reason to hate the people who cast you out. But when I was nine years old and I lost my father, and nearly my mother, some of those very people you despise took me in and looked after me, and they’re good people. Wonderful people.

  ‘As I grew older I learned about our history, of the contributions the hosszú életek have made. I can’t turn my back on that. No one with any shred of conscience could.’

  She stopped. Silence followed her words.

  Then: ‘Open your eyes.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Open them.’

  Shaking with dread, but knowing that if she failed, now, to do as he asked, she placed everything for which they’d worked in jeopardy, Leah managed to prise them open, and tried to block out the sight of that yawning white chasm beneath her feet.

  Luca Sultés watched her with eyes laced with violet. Unblinking.

  Like a snake, she thought. Beautiful, yet cold-blooded.

  ‘Who knows about this?’ he asked. ‘Who knows you were coming to see us?’

  She forced herself to maintain eye contact. ‘No one.’

  ‘The tanács—’

  ‘The tanács would have a fit if they knew.’

  ‘More than that, I suspect.’

  He began to laugh. A hearty, warming sound, as rich with humanity as any she had heard. Luca Sultés laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks.

  Later, after he had led her out of the chamber and poured her a glass of wine that she drained in almost one swallow, Leah returned to her place at the table. She had imagined she wouldn’t be hungry after his test, but when the serving staff reappeared and served the main course, she discovered she was ravenous.

  She studied Luca Sultés surreptitiously as she ate, and although she knew he was aware of her attention, she found herself unable to abandon her examination. Taking another sip from her wine, Leah asked, ‘So where do we go from here?’

  ‘Tomorrow I’m taking you on a trip.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To meet someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’ll find out. Someone better qualified than me to decide if what you ask is possible.’

  ‘And tonight?’

  ‘Tonight you stay here. As my guest.’

  She stared at him across the table. ‘If I refuse?’

  He returned her gaze. ‘That wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be safe to refuse, or it wouldn’t be safe to leave?’

  ‘Take your pick.’

  ‘You want me to stay in the same house as your father? Someone who was threatening to kill me an hour ago? And that’s safe?’

  ‘You surprised him. He doesn’t like surprises. I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘I don’t have any of my things.’

  ‘They’ve already been collected from your hotel.’

  ‘A little presumptuous.’

  ‘You like to fence, don’t you?’ he replied, brow creasing with irritation.

  ‘I like to make my own decisions.’

  ‘Make one, then.’

  ‘OK.’ She took a breath, blew it out through her cheeks. ‘I’m going to have some more wine.’

  After dessert, after two sweet glasses of Tokaji, Leah, exhausted by the evening’s events, blood still singing in her veins from her experience in the sun room, was ready to retire.

  The woman who had helped to serve dinner appeared to convey her to her room. Luca Sultés wished her a restful sleep, before turning away to the window at his back. She glanced at her host once as she passed through the double doors into the hallway beyond. Eyes narrowed, he was staring out at the night-swathed mountains, as if searching the darkness. She wondered what he saw.

  Leah followed the maid up two winding staircases to the top of the house, arriving in another long hall. The walls here were hung with paintings. Those closest to her were watercolours, their subjects elusive and light, ethereal brushstrokes that seemed to celebrate all that was beautiful and pure. But as she progressed further along the hall the paintings, and their subjects, grew darker. Watery pastels evolved into savagely vivid oils. Scenes that appeared transcendental regressed into baroque depictions of violence and war: dramatic contrasts of darkness and light as practised by
Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio and others.

  At the far end of the hall, isolated from the other works and lit by a single wall spot, hung a painting that reminded Leah of something she had once seen in a Toronto art gallery: Massacre of the Innocents, by Rubens.

  It made her stomach tighten to look at what it depicted. Against a background of classical columns, a group of soldiers tore into a crowd of semi-clothed civilians. Swords were plunged into breasts; throats were slashed open; babies were dashed against stone steps. The eyes of the soldiers shone as they carried out their slaughter. The wounded and the dying slipped in blood, pulling others down on top of them. Leah could almost hear their screams.

  Was this how the hosszú életek remembered the genocide of the late nineteenth century? She shuddered to imagine what it must have been like. And also she wondered: had Luca Sultés – or his father – started this collection of art with the piece that hung before her now, beginning in horror and crawling steadily towards the light? Or had he begun where she had entered the hall, in celebration of beauty and hope, gradually descending into depravity, wading through years of blood to this final scene of butchery? She suspected the answer would not be the one she sought.

  The maid opened the door to Leah’s suite and encouraged her inside. The room was huge. A bed crowned with six white pillows stood against the near wall, beneath a stunning vaulted ceiling. The wide windows offered a view of the moon-touched mountains beyond. A door opened onto a sweeping balcony.

  Along one wall, a fireplace and a basket of logs. In a corner, a chair, table and reading lamp. On the chair rested her rucksack and motorcycle helmet. An alcove led to a marble-tiled en suite. A second door, in the opposite wall, appeared to grant access to the adjacent room. No key sat in its lock.

  The maid moved to the windows and began to pull the drapes.

  ‘That’s OK,’ Leah said. ‘I can manage.’

  The woman smiled her acquiescence, and when she raised her head Leah noticed her eyes for the first time: midnight blue, flecked with chocolate and almond. Hosszú élet eyes.

  She wondered what might compel a kirekesztett – when the opportunities of a blinkered world were so obviously ripe for harvest – to become subservient to another.

  Fear, she wondered? Isolation? The need to belong?

  ‘What’s your name?’ Leah asked, and immediately saw those arresting blue eyes dip to the floor.

  ‘Ede.’

  ‘How long have you been here, Ede?’

  The woman smiled again, eyes still lowered, and Leah recognised an uneasiness in her expression that pained her.

  What does she see when she looks at you? She sees Leah Wilde, bastard descendant of Balázs Jakab. Half hosszú élet and half not. Kirekesztett, by virtue of her birth. Twice damned, in truth, and yet by quirk of timing and fate accepted into that society denied to so many others.

  ‘Do you know why I’m here?’

  Ede pulled at her fingers, nodded.

  ‘Do you think I’ll succeed? Do you think he’ll let me talk to them?’

  A pause. ‘I would.’

  Leah watched her a moment longer. Then she stepped back, not wishing to prolong the woman’s discomfort. ‘Thank you for showing me up.’

  After Ede had bade her goodnight and closed the door, Leah moved to the windows. She stared out at the night – at the sky now obscured by cloud, at the glistening teeth of the Jungfrau, the Mönch and the Eiger.

  Snowflakes had begun to fall. Already the steeply receding lawn, flanked by dark forest to the west and by a sheer drop to the east, had turned white.

  Leah was about to move away from the window when she thought she saw a hint of movement at the edge of the trees. She stepped closer to the glass, feeling a prickle of something – some underdeveloped élet sense, perhaps – across her skin.

  There it was again. A black shape moving in deep shadow.

  Now she saw it move out of cover and on to the snow-covered lawn. This far away, she couldn’t tell what it was. It moved fluidly, but whether on two legs or four she did not know. On the opposite side of the lawn, from the lip of the precipice that fell away into darkness, another appeared.

  The two silhouettes converged, lining up in front of the house perhaps a hundred yards from the windows. Leah glanced around at the lights blazing in her room; she would be clearly illuminated to whoever or whatever lurked outside. Alarmed, she shielded herself behind a section of window frame. She reached out a hand and tested the balcony door. Locked.

  The mysterious shapes on the lawn were motionless now. While she couldn’t discern a particular outline to them, or even individual limbs, she sensed that they stared up at the house.

  Something seemed to spook them. As one, they bounded across the lawn into the cover of the trees, and Leah acknowledged that they couldn’t be human, couldn’t be human at all. But what kind of animals they were – what kind of thing – she could not begin to guess.

  She tested the door again, tried to shake it in its frame. It denied her attempts.

  Leah closed the curtains and undressed. After brushing her teeth, switching out the lights and slipping beneath the bed’s covers, she lay in the darkness, thinking. She recalled the strange collection of masks and clocks that had greeted her arrival; the increasingly macabre artworks hanging in the hallway outside. And then she began to consider the man in whose house she stayed.

  A Kutya Herceg.

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

  He was rumoured to have killed scores of Eleni over the years, the Crown-appointed organisation responsible for the genocide of 1880. But if the stories she’d heard were to be believed, he had turned on his fellow hosszú életek far earlier than that. Could she reconcile those tales with the man she had met tonight? It disturbed her to admit it, but yes, she could.

  And what of his son, Luca Sultés?

  Sultés defied any attempt at definition. Could she possibly begin to trust him in light of what she knew about his father? At the very least, could she try to forge a partnership with him, in pursuit of the goal to which she had devoted herself? She might have to.

  Leah turned onto her side and saw, through the shadows, the door that linked this room to the next. Light from the other side picked out its shape. She remembered she had not tested it to ensure it was locked. Too late now. She could feel sleep reaching for her. It had been a long day. Exhausting. Perhaps the start of a journey that would lead her to the place she needed to go. Perhaps one that would lead her somewhere immeasurably more dark.

  Time would tell. Time, always, would tell.

  Once, in the night, climbing up from a dream in which silhouettes of muscle and teeth pursued her through a forest as dark as the far side of the moon, she thought she heard something moving on the other side of the windows. A snuffling against the glass.

  She opened her eyes, still not fully awake, and in the moment before sleep claimed her once more, pulling her back to the tangled undergrowth of the forest and the chase, she thought she glimpsed, through a gap in the curtains, a blast of condensation against the window, the vapour of an expelled breath, and an eye, glimmering like an oily reflection, roving over her body as she lay prone beneath the sheets.

  CHAPTER 7

  Calw, Germany

  Hannah led the Örökös Főnök Catharina Maria-Magdalena Szöllösi and her entourage into the communal garden that lay behind the cluster of single-storey chalets. Wind stirred the fallen leaves, carrying autumnal scents of cyclamen and witch-hazel.

  The flower garden had been Gabriel’s idea. They had planted it within months of buying the land on which the centre now stood, choosing the plants together, deliberately selecting species known for their scent. At any time of year, Hannah could come out here and enjoy the fragrance of the blossoms: narcissus and lily of the valley in spring; jasmine, honeysuckle and lavender during the hot months of summer; in winter, through a pall of rich wood smoke, the dizzying scent of Daphne odora.
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  She remembered how, when she’d been a child, her father had visited the university physic garden in Oxford when he needed solace and some space for his thoughts. Usually this fragrant garden in Calw, with its myriad of fragrances and the soft music of its wind chimes, worked the same magic on Hannah. Not today.

  The lawn needed mowing. Blades of grass, like tangled hair, snatched at her feet as she walked her guests to the picnic table. Somewhere overhead, the distant drone of a light aircraft cut through the forest quiet. She heard her guests pulling seats away from the wooden table, slats creaking as they sat. The Főnök, she thought, faced her, flanked on either side by two tanács councilmen, Anton Golias and Oliver Lebeau. To her left, she heard Gabriel set down a tray of coffee.

  It was a myth, Hannah knew, that a person’s sense of smell grew any more acute once they lost their sight. But she had learned that hosszú életek senses were far more sensitive than those of simavér stock. Since the discovery of her heritage, and her subsequent education from Gabriel, Hannah had begun to develop those remaining senses beyond anything she could previously have imagined. Her hearing, to Gabriel’s amusement and delight, now surpassed his own. Her sense of smell had developed such that she could predict changes in the weather, often hours in advance. And, although she had not shared this last revelation with anyone, she thought she could sometimes detect the shifting emotions of the people around her. Whether that was due to smell alone – some subtle combination of hormones and sweat – or something she intuited, in part, from the cadence of their breathing, Hannah did not know. What she did know was this: along with the scent of cyclamen and witch-hazel drifting out of the forest, and the rich aroma of brewed coffee, she could clearly detect the Főnök and her councilmen, and the curiously conflicting emotions of love, distrust, fear and tension that seeped from their pores in an aromatic brew, sharp and bitter, malty and soft, too tightly embroidered to unpick and assign.