SNAP: New Talent (13 page)

I dropped the book and bolted out of the chair.  No!  Those were noises coming from outside, and coming louder and faster!  Elise came running in just as the door opened.  A demon said, “Turn out the light.  Get away from the window.”

Well, of course I was going to obey a demon when Jean-Louis was still somewhere out there.  I did use a little stealth.  I eased the edge of a curtain back just as the outside lights blazed on.  It was the pigs, they’d banded together and caught a demon in the Neutrality.  He was strong and he was fast, but there were about a dozen of the feral boars chasing him.  One of them had managed to gore the demon’s thigh which was streaming blood that looked black in the intense light. 

The others in the band went into blood-lust at the smell and attacked and attacked, screaming in ear-piercing fury.  The demon was putting up a good fight.  He wrestled his gun out and shot, killing one pig, but they just charged and overwhelmed him, gouging with their tusks and pounding with their sharp hooves.

One hooked his arm and his gun went flying, followed by his arm, torn off his body.

This whole scene wasn’t more that a few seconds long, because half-a-dozen demons flooded the terrace, shooting pigs left and right.  Four of the pigs fell and the rest fled into the woods, demons in pursuit.

I couldn’t look at what was left on the manicured front lawn.  It didn’t resemble a body, just blood, bones and tissue strewn about.  Two house demons came down with a tarp and body bag, but from what I’d seen, there wasn’t enough to put in the bag.

Elise pulled me away from the window.  “I’m turning the lamps back on.  Can I make you some tea?”

“Thank you, yes”

It would take more than a cup of tea to erase what was seared into my retinas.  Tonight was a sleeping pill night.

No, no it wasn’t!  Where was Jean-Louis?  If the pigs found that demon in the Neutrality, he might have been part of Jean-Louis’ escort party for Karoly and Bohdan.  No sleep, no rest, until I knew.

I pulled on the jeans and shirt I’d worn earlier, crammed my feet into flip-flops—let their well-bred eyes stare—and jammed down the stairs.  And discovered why you didn’t want to run down marble floors in flip-flops.  Luckily, I didn’t fall until I hit the bottom of the stairs, but when I turned toward the front of the castle, where the armory was, my foot slid sideways, the thong between my toes ripped out and my ankle hit the marble just seconds before my whole body landed on it. 

Oh, fudge, that hurt.  I screamed.  I screamed “Fudge!”  It wasn’t quite as satisfying, but it did bring help.

Sandor appeared and lifted me into a chair.  Another demon ran to get ice.  And Jean-Louis, oh God, it was Jean-Louis, was kneeling, my ankle in his beautiful hands, probing for broken bones.

That’s when I couldn’t hold back the tears.

“Hush, hush.  It will be all right.  I don’t think any bones are broken.  The doctor will check you.”

Jean-Louis waved the demon aside and carried me himself.  Then I noticed the blood.

“You’re hurt!”

“Huummff.”

“What happened?  Why is your shirt bloody?”

“Hush, don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry!” I squirmed around to see better and almost ended up back on the hard marble. “You come in all bloody and say ‘Don’t worry!’? “

“Stop squirming and be quiet!  I almost dropped you. It’s not my blood.”

Ahhh.  I kept my calm until he laid me on my bed.   Elise was fussing slightly, her mouth tight in her pale face.  She fluffed pillows up behind me, threw a light cover over me and went to get another cup of tea.  She wasn’t happy, but I didn’t know whether it was me or the pigs or Jean-Louis who had displeased her.

The doctor came in, probed around in the same spots Jean-Louis had, pronounced a nasty sprain, wrapped it, ordered more ice, left me a pain pill and went back to bed.  He’d come to stay for a couple of days while Nikoly was healing and clearly wanted to get back to his routine—life at the castle had more drama than he wanted.

So there I lay, in my bed with Jean-Louis pacing around.

“What happened?  If that’s not your blood, whose is it?”  The pain pill was kicking in and I was hard-pressed to keep up a head of anger.

“It’s Sandor’s.”

“Sandor’s! Oh no, was he the demon that the pigs tore apart?”  This was terrible news.  You don’t get friendly with demons, they’re just too reserved, but Sandor was with me a lot.  I’d come to rely on him and trust him. I’d almost seen him smile!

“No, that was Jancek.  He was a good soldier, but not as quick as some.”

“Back up.  Start at the beginning.  I saw you and Sandor leave the media room with Karoly and Bohdan...”

“Yes.  We picked up Vladmir and Jancek. When we got to the end of the tunnel, Sandor checked.  Everything seemed still so the two Huszars slipped away.  We were just heading back into the tunnel when an owl caught Sandor’s arm with a talon.  Sandor tore his arm away and grunted.  That was enough to alert a band of hunting pigs who screamed and charged.  Jancek started running towards the castle and the pigs followed.  I don’t know if he thought he could outrun them, or he did it as a decoy, to let the rest of us get safely away.”

I thought about the demon I’d watched on the lawn.  He was fighting for his life and bravely doing what he could.

“I watched the pigs tear Jancek apart.”  I shuddered. “It was horrible.  There wasn’t even enough of him...”

Jean-Louis nodded.  “I know.  Not only do the pigs kill, but they eat their prey.  They’re omnivores. We’ve had several people go missing with no trace.”

“But now the Huszars know about the tunnel!  They’re bound to come after you, us, attack us with no notice!”  If I hadn’t taken a pain pill, I’d have been hyperventilating by now.  Hysteria was just a breath away. 

“They don’t know about the tunnel.  We were seen by an owl.  Jancek was attacked by the feral pigs.  Those are just animals.  They can’t tell the Huszars what they saw or why they attacked.  If we’d been caught by a shapeshifter things would have been different, but by the time they got there, all they saw was a demon, probably on a recon mission, trying to get away from the pigs.  The Weres just left it alone.”

“So you weren’t hurt?”

“Only my ego!”  Jean-Louis’ tone was light but his face was outlined with worry.  “I let one of our best demons, one very close to me, get hurt tonight and another one get torn to pieces.  I’m not happy.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Even with the pain pill, every time I closed my eyes I saw Jancek being ripped apart and heard the victory squeals of the pigs.  It wasn’t a restful sleep.

Elise brought coffee and told me it was after 3 in the afternoon.  Jazz had called twice and Taras was impatiently waiting for a call back.  I threw my legs over the edge of the bed and was reminded about last night when my ankle throbbed in protest.

“Oh, crap, what am I going to do with this?”  I pointed at my swollen foot.

“You’re to stay off it as much as you can.  And I found a walking cane.  And see what else I found.”  Elise pointed to a pair of soft cotton drawstring pants that I’d used in a short-lived foray into yoga.  “These will fit loosely enough.  If you want to take a shower, I’ll rewrap your ankle when you’re done.”

In minutes, I was clean, wrapped, coffee-ed and behind my desk, with my foot up on a stool, my Bluetooth in my ear, Skype on my monitor and strings of email waiting to be answered.  I tackled Jazz first.

“Well, we’ve sure stirred up a wasp’s nest.”  Her voice was cheery, even though it was after midnight. “It’s not slopping over to the magazine yet, but the broadcast guys are running around squawking. “

“What’s gotten to them?”

“It’s the first show out of Kiev.  The clip on the party with the Azerbaijani people?  There’s a rumor going around that the U.S. State Department wants to talk to us.”

“The
STATE
Department!  Oh, lord, give me peace.  What right do they have to tell us what we can and can’t cover.”

“I don’t know exactly what they want to talk to us about, but I’ve given them the line.  ‘I’ll tell Ms. Gwenoch to get in touch with you as soon as possible.’  I’m sure they’ve already gone over your head and talked to the Baron.”

I sighed.  “Yeah, they probably have.   Luckily, he’s still asleep so I have some time to talk to Taras and a couple of other people before I talk to him.  What else?”

“Mira sent some absolutely sin-sexy pictures from the Rio beaches, warming up to summer. I’ve OK’d a lot of them, but I emailed you and Jean-Louis some that I think need photo-shopping.   The girls are beautiful, but we’ve got quite a bit of nipple.  Probably all right for the Portuguese edition, and some of the European editions, but I’m not sure they’ll go in the States.  And those are the ones where they’re wearing bikinis!”

 Her down-to-earth bubbly laugh came through the earbud and brightened my afternoon.  God, there were times when I missed this young woman, with her mixture of hipness and naïveté.  I fought a sudden rush of homesickness.

“Speaking of J-L, how are things in
that
department?”

“Things are fine.  He’s, well we’ve all, been busy with the Kiev expansion.   Boy, we thought handling U.S. notables was nervy!  The oligarchs are something else.  They’re all nouveau-riche and this torrent of money has undone them.  They want to flaunt it, so they spend on women, houses, jewels, art, yachts...you name it.  And they want people to know about it, but they want to control the amount of information that goes out.

“We’re spending more time than we want to on salving egos and calming ruffled feathers.”

This was the truth, but Jazz didn’t need to know that a chunk of this calming and salving was for the Huszars.

She chuckled again.  “They probably never heard of a free press!”

I laughed too, but this cut close to the bone.  We operated as a U.S, media corporation, but in fact, the holding company was a closed family corporation registered in Liechtenstein and I didn’t know what their First Amendment, Hah!, regulations were.

I thanked her for the book, didn’t tell her what happened when I was reading it, and hung up.

Well, the U.S. State Department.  Taras was definitely next on my call list.

He’d gotten a call from the Ukraine First Ministry who’d been contacted by the Azerbaijan Ambassador who’d had a call from the Azerbaijani President.  The message was the same.  How did you get those videos?  Don’t use them again.  Don’t shoot any more pictures. 

The “or else” was implied.

He was a tad nervous, but he’d been doing business in this part of the world for many years.

“Do you think the threats are serious?”

I watched him tap a pencil as he thought.  “Serious?  Well, they’re pretty upset, but so far all the messages have been in diplomatic terms.  Nothing overt, like ‘I know where your children go to school’.  Of course, they do know, and they know that I know they know, so it doesn’t have to be said.”

“Do we need to do anything for you?” I  needed to back Taras with all that I had during this edgy time.

“No, my visibility and SNAP’s visibility in the world are enough to keep this level threat away.  We have plenty of other stuff, we don’t have to mess with the them.”

“How are you set for the next few days?”

“We’ve been getting feeds from the Baltic area and the Poles are tickled to have our coverage.  They have a growing fashion culture and want to get better ties to the West so are always sending us tips and clips.  And the first two issues of SNAP: The Magazine are pretty much laid out.”

We had a winner in Taras.  Capable, professional; experienced in his region.  The only worries I had in Kiev now were the holdovers from Leonid.

“Well, I understand from my U.S. assistant that the State Department wants to chat with us, so I’ll probably get an earful when I see the Baron.  I’ll let you know if we need to go any further.  Thanks so much for everything.”

The Baron. The State Department.  I couldn’t take this on while wearing yoga pants.  I hobbled over to the closet dressing area and, with Elise’s help, chose a long, loose gown that would cover most of the swelling, but wasn’t so long I’d trip if I had to walk.  Shoes were one shoe of a pair of Gucci flats. 

When Jean-Louis knocked on my door, he was surprised to see me up and ready.

“Do you think you should be on that foot?”  He looked rested and a low glimmer was back.  Well, of course he’d had more than eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and I’d had eight hours of being chased by feral pigs.

I stood up and he laughed. “No, you shouldn’t be up on that foot.  Why did I ask?  You never listen to me, but I don’t remember you being so short!”

“Hey Buster, where do you get off calling me short!”  I stood as tall as my five-foot-eight allowed.  “You know how tall I am.”

“I do, but I’m used to seeing you dressed for dinner wearing heels.  Those flats take you down a notch.”

I glared at him, turned to get the walking cane and found myself in his arms, not being held, being carried. 

“I don’t think you’ll need that,” he nodded at the cane, “but I’ll have a demon bring it down anyway.  The doctor told you to keep off that foot and the demons are ready to carry you wherever you need to go.  But for tonight, this pleasure is mine.”  His head came down to mine.  I wrapped my arms around his neck and met his mouth in a long kiss that made me go limp in his arms.

Chapter Twenty-four

Dinner was the four of us plus two men I didn’t know.

Jean-Louis settled me in a chair, pulled over an ottoman and introduced them as two of SNAP’s attorneys from London.

From London?  What was up?

Thank God, tonight’s conversation was in English.  I didn’t miss any of the ins and outs while they discussed the U.S. State Department.

This seemed ludicrous.  Why would the State Department be the least bit interested in a gossip show’s clip from some tiny country that wasn’t even a country until twenty or so years ago?

The word was oil.

Azerbaijan had oil resources and sat in the middle of a web of pipelines and refineries that provided oil to U.S. allies across Eastern Europe.