Written in the Blood (5 page)

He looked across the room at the cupboard. Far too heavy to move. Even if he had the strength, he had no time to heave it into position.

Rap-scuff.

The sound of the servant limping along the hall, dragging his game leg.

Rap-scuff. Rap-scuff.

Izsák opened his mouth to cry out, but his voice had left him. He breathed in half-sobs.

Rap-scuff.

Other side of the door now. Right outside.

The doorknob jangled. An experimental nudge of the wood against his spine. Izsák opened his arms and flattened his palms against the wall.

He heard a breathy whistling, and it took him a moment to realise that it was the sound of air rushing in and out of the man’s nostrils. So close.

Izsák shifted his position, pressing his shoulder into the door. He splayed his feet. Perhaps, locked in position that way, he might keep the door closed a fraction longer should the man attempt to burst inside.

The keyhole was just to the right of his head, a lozenge of empty space. Swallowing the bile in his throat, Izsák moved his head towards it. He placed his eye over the hole.

And saw another eye staring in at him.

A rasping voice floated through the crack between door and jamb. ‘
Some
people sayin’ they goin’ a take your papa up to the Citadella in the morning. That the palace wants it done right, with witnesses. Not hidden, the way you usually does things.
Some
people sayin’ they goin’ a bleed him out, right there. And let the woman who got raped watch it happen.
Some
people sayin’ there’s goin’ a be celebratin’ after. Drinking and dancing. This is just the first,
them
people say. The first one, what starts everything that follows. A sign to the rest of us faithful. Of the
burnin’
to come.’

‘Please,’ Izsák whispered. ‘Please stop.’ He couldn’t wrench his head away, couldn’t tear himself from the sight of that terrible blue eye. He knew that if this ghoul tried to force the door open, he would collapse to the floor, would curl himself into a ball and screw up his eyes and wait for whatever followed. He was too terrified to do anything else.

‘Orphan in the morning,’ gloated the voice. ‘You got your uncle a while longer. But they won’t let you stay with him. Oh, no. And once you’re on your own . . .’

The eye disappeared. The crippled servant slammed his weight against the wood. Izsák screamed, scrambling across the room to the window.

The door rolled open, a toothless maw, revealing nothing but an empty hallway and the
rap-scuff rap-scuff rap-scuff
of the servant’s feet as he slouched back towards the stairs.

Later, much later, lying in darkness in the canopy bed with the covers pulled up around his throat, Izsák thought of his father. And, even though he knew he shouldn’t, he thought of Lukács . . . or Jakab, as he’d now been renamed.

It didn’t seem possible that his brother could have done what everyone was saying. It had always been Jani who had frightened Izsák the most: Jani with his quick temper and quick fists.

Jakab had been a little strange, a little distant, but he had been mocked ruthlessly for most of his life: first by his older brother, later by those who came to visit the house in Gödöllö, and later still by the
hosszú életek
ladies he met at the
végzet
. Such unending abuse, Izsák thought, must leave its mark.

Jakab was out there, tonight, somewhere in the world. Like Izsák, he was alone too. And, locked up in an even darker place, their father. The Balázs family, scattered and broken. Izsák could not think on that for long. He knew his old life was over and that this – the press of his palms against the walls of his room, the taste of bile in his throat, the itch of the servant’s eye on his skin – was all that was left, but he ached for his life back at home nonetheless, ached for the return of his brothers, his father.

At some point, exhausted, while considering all that he had lost, Izsák found sleep. He woke once in the night, ripped from a dream where he was tied to a plank in a rotting cellar and teeth were biting him, gnawing on the flesh of his arms, his cheeks, his calves.

He snapped his eyes open, mouth parched, feeling the room slide around him. Just as Izsák remembered where he was, and what he was, and what they had all become, he heard the excited rasp of breathing close by his ear, the whistling of air through swollen sinuses, and smelled the sweet-sour stench of rotten gums. A pressure lay on his chest. Someone holding him against the mattress.

He clenched his eyes shut. Balled his fists.

‘
Not long now
,’ whispered the stiff and twisted creature who had intercepted him on the stairs. The servant’s face was so close that his lips wetted the boy’s ear when they moved. ‘
Your father in the morning. Then your rapist brother. Then your older brother. Then your uncle. Who does that leave, Izsák? Who?
’

The pressure on his chest slackened. Now he felt a cold finger touch his neck. It moved, drawing a line across his throat. ‘
All dead soon, little one. All the Long Lives burned in a pile. Bones and ashes. Bones and ashes. Then we take back our city
.’

‘
Miksa!
’ A woman’s voice, from the doorway. ‘Come away from there.’

Izsák opened his eyes and squinted across the room. Szilárd’s cook stood by the door, her red face and hanging chins illuminated by the lamp she held before her. When her eyes met his, he saw no warmth there; she appraised him like a mortician examining a cadaver.

The cook switched her attention to the crippled servant bent over the bed. ‘There’ll be a time,’ she said. ‘It isn’t now. Come away.’

Dropping his head, hissing with frustration, the ghoul bared his teeth. He scraped across the floor to join the cook. Together, they stared at him in the smoky light, then moved away along the hall.

Izsák lay rigid, tears sliding down his cheeks, listening to the
rap-scuff
of the servant’s feet as the man dragged himself to the staircase.

Heart juddering so violently he feared it might tear itself loose, he climbed out of the bed, padded across the floorboards and eased the door shut. He dressed quickly in the darkness, only daring to light a candle once he had pulled on his boots. Opening the cupboard, he looked down at the collection of belongings he had brought from Gödöllö: a few clothes, a small suitcase, a box of metal soldiers, a silver hairbrush that had belonged to his mother.

Izsák slipped the hairbrush into the pocket of his coat. He added a single metal soldier. From under his pillow he retrieved a leather purse of coins. He blew out the candle, shook off the molten wax and tucked the stub into another pocket. Tiptoeing back to the door, he paused there, listening for any clue that would indicate his visitors had returned. He wanted to bend to the keyhole and check that the passageway was clear, but it was too dark to see, and he was too frightened by the idea of that pale blue eye blinking at him from the other side.

Hand on the knob, Izsák eased the door open. Cool air pressed at him. He stepped into the hall, finding with his boot the narrow rug that would smother the sound of his footfalls. Keeping inside its border, he moved towards the stairs, shoulders bunched, arms stretched out before him.

At the top of the staircase his hand found the smooth wood of the banister. Izsák remembered the ghoul polishing it, thought he could feel the residue the creature had left, greasy beneath his fingers. He knew it was his imagination, but he couldn’t dismiss it.

The second stair creaked under his weight. The fifth. The ninth.

Down to the first-floor landing. A stained-glass window rippled with the moon-cast reflections of the Danube, ghostly greens and blues. Below the window, a side table displayed a model of a river schooner. He skirted it, wary of tangling himself in its rigging and dragging it to the floor. Down the next flight. Another step groaned, an empty stomach sound in the stillness. Creeping down the final set of stairs, Izsák halted in the ground-floor hall.

Somewhere, a clock ticked: Szilárd’s study. A pop of collapsing embers from the cook’s fire at the back of the house. He should take some food. But the possibility of meeting the woman again, now that she had revealed her intentions, was too dreadful to contemplate. Instead he turned right and slipped into the room where he had discovered the
déjnin
knives. Navigating by touch, he found the drawer and slid it open, wincing at the squeak of its wooden runners. He felt inside for the bundle of rags, removed one of the blades and returned to the entrance hall, tucking the knife into his belt.

Szilárd’s study lay to his right, its door hanging wide. Someone had extinguished the candles of the gilt girandoles on the desk; the room was draped in shadow. He knew he would find writing paper and one of Szilárd’s fountain pens in the desk’s drawers. Perhaps he should write his uncle an explanation of what he’d seen: the house wasn’t safe; the staff were on the brink of revolt.

His uncle had always treated his servants well, with far more affection than Izsák’s father had shown his own household. What had changed?

Everything’s changed. Everything. It’s not just this house that isn’t safe. Nowhere is.

He should leave a note. But what could he say? He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to pen more than a hysterical sentence or two. Anything he wrote would read like the paranoid scribbling of a child, yet could he abandon the one man who had offered him sanctuary, without leaving a warning of what was coming?

Somewhere above, a floorboard squealed. Izsák stiffened. He felt his bowels flutter. When he heard someone stirring deeper inside the house, he lost his grip on the last tattered edges of his self-control. He lunged for the front door and snatched at the handle.

The door rattled against its deadbolts, monstrously loud. Crying out, feeling for the cold metal runners, he snapped the bolts free, yanked the door open and fled outside.

Down the steps. Across the moonlit courtyard. Towards the arched entrance gates.

They were locked.

Izsák gripped the bars. He shook them in frustration, sick with fear. Glancing over his shoulder, he peered up at the house. Its blank windows stared back at him.

The gates rose a full twelve feet, topped by spikes like sharpened arrowheads. Izsák hauled himself up, finding footholds in the latticework. They swayed back and forth, hinges screaming. He lost his footing, nearly fell. Wrapped his limbs around the bars.

Over the top. You have to go over the top.

How many people must he have woken by now? The servants would be pulling on clothes, grabbing cudgels. They’d assume he was a thief. Perhaps they would recognise him before they attacked. Perhaps they would split his skull regardless.

He heard a shout from inside the house, a window being raised. Wanted to close his eyes and freeze. Moaned and pulled himself higher instead. Rolled over the arrowheads at the top of the gate. Sliced his hand. Gashed his stomach.

And then he was on the other side, swinging free in the moonlight. A shape appeared in the doorway. It clutched something, long and slim. Izsák knew what it was. He opened his fingers and let go of the bars. Felt himself falling. The road rushed up and slapped him. His elbow cracked on stone.

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.

C
HAPTER
5

Calw, Germany

P
hone 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.