Authors: Michele Drier
“Or do they?” I turned to Jean-Louis, then the Baron, looking for some answers because this didn’t make sense.
“No, the Huszars don’t have those aims. Their aim is to gain power, control and money. This looks like a product sample. Showing off a new weapons system to a potential buyer.” The Baron shook his head and hit the remote button, sending the newscasters into the void. “I, we, were afraid that something like this might happen. Once they contacted with the Chechens to do some of their daylight work, it’s a small step to contracting with all those thugs for nighttime work. The one saving grace is that they are the weapons themselves, so they can only do limited damage.
“But what a handy addition to have. I doubt that Al Qaeda, or whomever, is paying them very much. A little cash, you provide the food and bingo, the Huszars stage a raid and scare the populace into toeing the line.”
I shuddered. All those poor people in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Centuries of warfare, shifting tribal alliances, and now modern warfare, terrorists and vampires at large. What did they ever do to deserve this?
The Baron turned to Jean-Louis. “Take Sandor and a couple of demons. Go pick up Bela. Meet Karoly at the tunnel in the Neutrality and bring him in. We need to talk.”
Jean-Louis nodded and headed for the armory and all I could do was sit there making fish-faces with my mouth. I finally got my body to move and ran to the armory myself.
“Take me with you,” I begged as the demons loaded up Sig Sauers and filled magazines. Jean-Louis turned to me, astounded. “Are you kidding? You’re what most of the Huszar energy is focused on.”
“But they must have taken me off the agenda, if they’re putting themselves up as murder for hire with terrorists!”
“Don’t bet on it.” Jean Louis pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, picked up a coil of silver wire and handed it to one of the demons. “This is just an aside. They can’t make the money from these idiots that they can from you. Plus, hanging out with thugs, terrorists, rogue states, doesn’t get them the panache they want in the West. Even if they make a lot of money, they can’t flaunt it. They’d never make the A-list, probably not even in Kiev.”
“I still want to go. Maybe even more, if I’m still a target. I don’t want to be cowering behind some demon while you’re out there getting yourself killed!” My voice started to quaver.
That made him stop. “Are you worried that I might get killed?”
“Of course I am. Most of what you thought was an adrenaline hangover in Kiev was residual fear about you. If you get killed, I don’t want to be here any more.”
“Hummm, that’s sounding awfully like a suicide wish. I still won’t let you commit suicide, though.”
I stomped my foot and the gesture startled me. I hadn’t stomped my foot since I was five and my crummy sister wouldn’t give me my doll. “It’s not suicide, you big doofus, it’s the opposite. I worry less if I know what’s going on than I do if I have to
guess
what’s going on. It’s much scarier to sit and wait for news.”
He sighed. He sighed again and slapped the gloves on his leg. He sighed again and rolled his eyes at the demons, but they didn’t respond. Clearly, they weren’t picking sides in this lose-lose proposition.
He paced around the armory, ostensibly looking for weapons, but really looking for an answer that would shut me up. He didn’t find one.
He sighed. “All right. But, we’re only going to the end of the tunnel. We’re not going into the Neutrality. We’re just going to meet Karoly and bring him back. You can carry a knife and some wire. Two demons will be in front of you and one behind. Don’t get away from them. Oh, I hope I’m not going to be sorry.”
I looked up at him. Now that I was going, I was scared to death, but I meant what I’d said. No matter how scared, it was better than the stress of waiting to hear that he was dead. “You won’t be sorry, my love.” There, I’d said it in front of the demons. No matter how much I wanted to hold him now, that show of emotion wasn’t done.
There was a small door in a niche in the armory and as we headed through it and down a flight of narrow stairs, I was glad that I’d been SoCal dressed when Jean-Louis and I were in my apartment, before the summons from the Baron. I had on jeans and a shirt and grabbed a tailored leather jacket and a pair of soft-soled shoes as we’d headed out. Most of the time, I was barefoot in my own rooms, a California holdover that made Jean-Louis crazy, but, hey, we all had our idiosyncrasies.
He was a vampire and drank blood; I went barefoot.
Chapter Twenty-one
The staircase was some twenty steps down and then leveled off to a floor that sloped slightly downward. It was carved out of the stone heart of the mountains and lined with more paving stones. Although the air was damp and smelled old, the tunnel was dry.
Sconces every few feet lined the walls, for the days when the world was lit only by fire. This was now, though, and the tunnel was wired for electricity in addition to the heavy, powerful flashlights carried by a couple of the demons. When I looked closely at the flashlights, I realized they had heavy silver switches and belt hooks and doubled as weapons.
We didn’t make much noise. Jean-Louis had made sure none of us jingled. All weapons were holstered or otherwise secured and we all wore silent shoes. He’d told me that he didn’t think the Huszars knew about the tunnel, but none of the Kandeskys took any chances.
The shapeshifters roaming the Neutrality above us had keen hearing and the night birds, particularly the owls who called these woods their own, could hear a mole in its den. The owls weren’t part of the Huszars, but when an owl alerted to some sound, the shapeshifters, usually werewolves, paid attention.
We walked, silently but quickly, for what felt like twenty minutes when I realized the floor was now slightly sloping up. After another five minutes, we came to a second set of stairs, leading up into a well of darkness. Sandor motioned us to stay at the bottom, the lights and flashlights were snapped off, and he headed up. When he got to the top, I could hear a creaky sound, like an unoiled door opening, a breeze of fresh air trickled in and the darkness wasn’t quite so dark.
Jean-Louis headed up, followed by another demon. I was itching to go up those stairs, so when Sandor and Jean-Louis were no longer at the top, I climbed up. I got to the top and stuck my head out just as a crashing, smashing sound came tearing through the underbrush. Yelps and brutish grunts echoed off the trees, but no voices...and no trace of Sandor or Jean-Louis. I started to climb out when something grabbed my leg from behind and dragged me down, not caring if I hit the steps or not, and a hand slapped across my mouth.
I hit the stones at the bottom of the stairs so hard I was winded. Then I felt, I don’t think I consciously heard, a demon. “Do not say a word. Do not make a sound. There is danger.”
So I huddled at the foot of the stairs, unable to see in the pitch black, hearing only crashes from above and, once again, not knowing if Jean-Louis was dead or alive—or captured by the Huszars.
Some minutes later, the creak sounded again, feet quickly and quietly rushed down the stairs and a demon said “Let’s go”. I was unceremoniously picked up and carried, fast enough that I felt air flying by, and suddenly we were at the other set of stairs. The flashlights flicked back on and I saw Sandor, demons, Jean-Louis, Karoly and someone I didn’t know.
An unseen hand pulled a well-oiled door open and light from the Baron’s armory flooded the top of the stairs. We climbed up and out, again Sandor in the lead, and now I got my first good look at the newcomer. He looked faintly Asian, maybe Slavic, with wide-set black eyes in a darkish face; taller and slimmer than the other Slavs I met in Kiev.
His hand, when he reached out to shake mine, was finer-boned and his skin cool. I got the impression that he stopped himself from clicking his heels together and bowing. “Hello, I am Bohdan, from Ukraine. You must be Miss Maxie. I have heard much about you.”
Wow, he had more manners that all the other Huszars put together. I’d have to ask Jean-Louis about him.
I nodded, he smiled, Jean-Louis waved his hand in a “wagons, ho!” gesture and we were herded back into the media room, where Pen, the Baron, Milos and two Kandeskys I didn’t know were chatting while the talking heads on the TV sets silently mouthed the day’s horrors.
“Welcome Karoly.” The Baron indicated some chairs. “And I see you’ve brought Bohdan. How are you old friend? I don’t see much of you these days.”
“No sir. Leonid is watching me. I even participate in the attack on Miss Maxie and Jean-Louis in Kiev to divert any suspicion.”
Bohdan may have come from a mannered background, but English wasn’t his first, second or probably even third language. The Baron switched to what I thought was Russian and one of the demons leaned over to translate for me.
It seemed that Matthais was getting frustrated at his attempts to kidnap me, so he starting branching out. Opening our SNAP bureau in Kiev gave him an opportunity to orchestrate a grab and blame the Chechens or some other Mafia-style group. When Jean-Louis and Nikoly managed to deflect the grab, Matthias thought, correctly, that he had a mole in his Kiev staff. He recalled some of the Huszars and Bohdan was now right where the Kandeskys wanted him, just across the Neutrality.
A translator whispering in my ear lost some of the nuances, but the gist was that the Kandeskys were mounting a big disinformation blitz. They moved up the inaugural broadcast from Kiev, and ran clips of me at the parties for the Kirov Ballet. They also shot a party for the daughter of the Azerbaijan president, an incredibly lavish affair paid for by the Baku oil money, and cobbled together a story introducing the new celebs.
Of course this was new, even if the parties were several days earlier, because no one had seen them before. And for damn sure the Azerbaijians, Ukrainians and other oil-soaked oligarchs on the edges of the Caspian Sea didn’t want their faces in the media. They were media-smart enough to not complain, but a lot of the footage was the back of swarthy men and beautiful women holding their hands in front of their faces.
No matter, we had a great voice-over, giving a short history of the area, an estimate of the petrodollars flowing into the countries, long shots of the gorgeous women shopping on Rodeo Drive and Boul’St. Germaine and miles of tinted-window limos.
Upshot was, the Kiev bureau was up and running, I was back in the States and Bohdan was off the hook for letting me get away.
Now came the strategy. Bohdan was all for bringing in more and more of the disaffected younger Huszar acolytes.
“We’re tired to live in Dark Ages. We see what lifes the rich peoples live. We want to live that way. Hunting, killing, all the violence is not good way to live. We need to be friends, colleagues with our neighbors, with Kandeskys. You help us find the right way, please.” Bohdan struggled through this short speech in English, I guess wanting to make sure I understood how deep his feelings were.
In Hungarian, Karoly brought the Baron and Jean-Louis up to date on Matthais’ latest orders. It seemed the head of the Huszar family was succumbing to a form of megalomania, ordering his vampires to further and further depredations.
If the younger family members wanted more money, well Matthais would find a way to bring some in. He had a commodity that he could charge for—murder squads. Their kind of killing didn’t leave any forensic traces. There wasn’t a big outlay for weaponry. Movement across international borders was easy and efficient because the vampires didn’t recognize borders. And it all happened at night, when there were fewer nosy witnesses.
“You’re right, Baron, the raid in Afghanistan was a sales pitch. Matthais figured if the squad could make it work there, with all the troops around, it would work anywhere. And it was a big success. He’s already getting orders in from other places in the Middle East and Africa.” Karoly sat back, his hand across his eyes. “It will never be a big scale weapon, there just aren’t enough of us...them. It does terrify people, though. We, vampires, are the stuff that nightmares are made of. This is right down the terrorist’s alley.”
He turned to me. “Don’t think that you’re off the hook. This little business is just a sideline. There’s never going to be enough money in it. He’s still zeroing in on you as his ticket to the international big time.”
Karoly’s eyes swept the table. “And Baron, Pen, Jean-Louis, you know that Matthais’ ultimate goal is to eliminate you and all your family.”
Jean-Louis looked grim. His eyes were black and flat, reflecting no light, he was translucent and his skin just draped over his skull like thin silk. “Yes, I know. And I know why.”
Chapter Twenty-two
The room was so still I could hear my heart pounding.
It must have been loud because Jean-Louis looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged back. I know that the sound of hearts pumping blood through a regular’s cardiovascular system was a dangerous attraction to vampires, so I willed myself to be silent.
Willing my heart to slow though, didn’t even put a parking brake on my mind. It was racing in circles, getting me nowhere.
What did he know? Whatever it was, it was enough for Matthais to want to wipe out the entire Kandesky family. He was willing to declare war, and kill off much of his own family to win.
Jean-Louis stood. “That’s land I don’t want to plow tonight. He and I and the Baron know what hatred Matthais bears us. We will have to solve that another night. It is not a secret I can share, and has no bearing on what we must do to stop him from his current madness.
“Come, Sandor and I will accompany you back.”
This time I didn’t beg to go. I’d had enough of that tunnel and, frankly, Jean-Louis scared me when he was in this state.
I headed up to my apartment. To wait. To worry until I heard him at my door, safe again.
I couldn’t go to bed until I knew, so I curled up by the fireplace with a new mystery that Jazz had sent. Something, some noise was working its way into the plot of the mystery and I knew it didn’t belong. Like an old theater when somebody mixed up the movie reels. Growls, low-pitched snarls? In a New York high-rise?