Shadows of Falling Night

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mitteleuropa

“It’s been dark a while now,” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Eric said, sternly suppressing an impulse to add: No shit, Sherlock.

The air had gotten a little warmer over the course of the day, which just made the dank cold more penetrating and the skiing harder, and now it was freezing again. They’d never seen the sun all day, just a brighter blur to the gray-white cloud southwards, and it had never gotten all that high either.

He looked over at the children; they were sitting on a low stone wall slumped against each other, with Cheba crouched in front of them coaxing them to take the last of the formerly hot and now luke-warm chocolate. Their skis stood against the wall beside the adults, and on the other side was open ground-pasture, he thought-and evenly spaced leafless trees that probably lined a road. Beyond was a knuckle of open ground cloaked in dwarf junipers, and a mile farther off, a broad brimming river. The lie of the land hid the actual bank, but he had a feeling that there was a town there, or at least a hamlet. He wanted to push them all on right away, but he made himself wait and even forced himself to stop looking at his phone for the time. Having the kids collapse into a groaning heap on the road wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

“How are you feeling?” the Minnesotan said.

“Like crap,” Eric said shortly; his energy level had hit the point where he had to mentally flog himself to keep moving some time ago. “And it won’t do any good in the whole God damned world to think about it.”

He’d keep going regardless of how he felt until he fell facedown and couldn’t move, because right now the alternative was that they all died, badly enough that it would be a relief by the time it happened.

He probably wasn’t important enough for the enemy to keep his personality around to torture for centuries, but that wasn’t really a very big consolation. A lot depended on how long it took the opposition to stop looking at the road out of the little town, and how quickly they traced them to the cabin and picked up the trail from there to the woods. He pulled out his tablet and checked the map-as long as he didn’t engage the cell phone function, there was little chance of anyone using it to track him, but it still made getting lost a lot harder. It was full dark now, without moon or stars, but fortunately there seemed to be a little reflected light on the underside of the clouds and the patches of snow on the ground helped.

“Okay, there is a town over there, Stepp-something-on-the-Danube. Let’s get-”

A sound came, faint in the distance but unmistakable. A long drawn sobbing howl, a little like a coyote’s but not much; cold and deep and infinitely malignant.

“Wolf,” Peter said. “Not much like the ones I heard on Grand Isle, but definitely a wolf.” A moment later: “Wolves, plural.”

The grinding misery of recent fever and all-too-present exhaustion had muffled Eric’s alertness. That, and the sweat that kept turning into cold beads under his clothing. Now some sort of bug seemed to be scuttling over his skin amid all that. He yanked out his coach gun.

“Go!” he barked. “Push it, and don’t stop.”

Peter swung across the waist-high stone wall. He and Cheba each took a child by the hand and started walking quickly across the field towards the road, despite sleepy mutters of protest. At least the kids were weren’t afraid of the dark, and saw in it like cats. Eric looked westward, the opposite direction from the infinitely distant and absolutely theoretical Vienna. Where the protecting sun had vanished. The ground of the meadow was awkward beneath his boots as he followed the others, snow thin and patchy and wet enough to clump. They’d been right to abandon the skis, but if they had to run the kids would have to be carried, and even a short slender eight-year-old was no joke. He wished desperately that he could reach up and swing down night vision, except of course that if he needed it the things that were after them could screw it up with a thought.

It was like the inside of a closet. By the time the leafless beech trees along the road loomed up like shapes of darkness in darkness, Leon and Leila were leading the two adults. Eric tried to keep looking in every direction at once; there wasn’t any sign of a car on the road.

There wouldn’t be, he thought, fighting not to let the breath rasp in his throat.

They trudged, and trudged and the apprehension built, rather than relaxing until he could taste stomach acids at the back of his throat. Something flitted through the air above him, or he thought it did, and that was almost a relief. It was gone by the time he could pay attention to it, and his heart beat so hard he could’ve sworn he felt the ribs flexing to its hammer.

“Center of the road,” he said. “Hell with traffic, fast as you can. I don’t think this bunch are going to be as restrained as the ones we met back in New Mexico.”

“Hungry,” Leon said suddenly. “They’re saying they’re hungry.”

“I wish Maman were here!” Leila said suddenly, then turned her head down and trudged again. “Or Papa.”

“I wish they were both here,” Leon said.

Vienna

Adrienne bared her teeth as she paced on the faded, priceless carpets; it was the instinctive gesture of a species that bit their prey, and paralyzed them by it too. Dmitri lolled in his chair, ostentatiously refusing to be intimidated.

The Palais was a property she’d bought through cut-outs when it came on the market in 2006 and the locally dominant Sorgách family owed the Brézés a favor; it was early 18th century but fully renovated down to the fortified sub-basement and escape tunnels and a small but well-equipped mortuary-style crematorium to deal with the empties. It was also conveniently located in the Josefstadt District of central Vienna, which put it outside the Ringstrasse but near the excellent hunting-grounds of the university and its tasty herds of students. The basic architecture was Baroque-Fischer von Erlach had been the architect, back around 1710-but this upper apartment had been redone in a more Classical style, pale plaster and Chinoiserie wallpaper and spindly graceful furniture with cream-silk upholstery.

Normally she quite liked it, but right now she had an impulse to throw a teapot through the Schönfeld painting of the 17th-century noblewoman stopping at an inn. And this was not the time of year she usually liked to visit Central Europe; it was around sundown, but you could barely tell.

I could have gone out nightwalking today at high noon and gotten nothing but a sunburn, she thought sourly; which was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. I was born in California, after all…

“Dale is taking care of it,” Dmitri said. “With the von Trupps, especially the older ones…well, my name is Russian. Yes, yes, that is obsolete thinking, merely human prejudice, but we are not speaking of Progressives here, Adrienne Juliyevna,” he said.

“A point,” she said grudgingly. “But only because it becomes increasingly annoying as my children approach the decisive point. It would be intolerable for them to reach Tbilisi! I will not be put in a position where I have to choose between alternatives of that sort!”

“Dale’s more likely to keep them under control.”

“More likely, not very likely. But the von Trupps do not love the Brézés. Particularly, as you say, the older generation…Great-grandfather spoiled a number of their schemes.”

Dmitri shrugged and spread his hands in an expressive gesture that an American would have thought of as Jewish, but which was actually simply the body language common in the old Romanov lands. She took the meaning: what can we do?

“You were the one who suggested that it was your children’s future luck thwarting us,” he said. “Logically, it would be protecting them at the same time.”

Adrienne snarled and hissed, but she was careful not to direct it at her associate-subordinate. That pointed it at Monica, as she came in with a tray of pastries and coffee.

“Eeek!”

She managed not to spill it, and put it down between the Shadowspawn before retreating behind Adrienne’s chair. Adrienne stuck her fork moodily into the sachertorte.

“The more I consider it, the more I think involving the Trupps was a mistake,” she said.

“Dale was much in favor. He thinks he can even keep your former lucies alive, as well as safeguarding the children. One of the lucies at least.”

“He has been strange since he killed Arnaud. That was done efficiently…but…I do need to get the children back, and I would very much like to reacquire Peter, if only long enough for a thorough probing of his mind, but…you will excuse me.”

He nodded and left. Monica breathed a sigh of relief. “Leon and Leila aren’t really in danger, are they, Doña?” she asked anxiously.

“I hope not, but this tit-for-tat is getting out of control; I intended it to preoccupy Adrian and distract him, but it is rebounding on me and his little gambit is rebounding on him…he should not have sent his retainers on such an unorthodox path. That bunch of von Trupps still think of themselves as werewolves in the classic sense. Too many hours spent with the Brothers Grimm in their impressionable years.”

Indecision wasn’t something she was comfortable with. “I will have to intervene…but I cannot locate my children more than approximately…”

She snapped her fingers. “I have it! I will focus on the von Trupps. There is nothing shielding them, that rural bunch are quite sloppy about it, and they are the immediate problem; to watch them is to solve the problem, or at least if they do not sight the children there is no immediate problem. I can…supervise from a distance, bend the probabilities if I must, blackpath anything those wood-dogs do.”

She checked her reserves; that musician yesterday had been the last full feeding, but the social whirl here in Vienna was strenuous. Hmmmm. Not quite full-up…

“When was the last time I fed on you? More than a nip to set the mood, I mean.”

“A week ago, about a quarter-pint,” Monica said. “I’m getting rather, umm, anxious for another, actually. I’m sure my red-cell count is fine.”

Withdrawal from feeding addiction was like that from heroin, only rather worse. Adrienne preferred to keep her regular lucies just on the verge of real suffering from it, as a training aid. And the begging and pleading was so charming…

“Come here, then.”

“Oh, goodie!” Monica said, with a slow smile.

“No games, I just need the blood for some Wreaking. Don’t pout, either.”

The lucy sat beside her on the couch, leaning backward across her lap and embracing her, nestling her face into the Shadowspawn’s shoulder, bending her chin back to present the neck. Her aura trembled and her heart began to race, stimulating the predator’s reflexes even though Adrienne wasn’t particularly hungry right now-it was better to feed before you did any serious work if you didn’t want to kill the victim that time, because Power-depletion meant you might lose control. Adrienne licked the taut skin-a pureblood’s saliva was antiseptic and promoted clotting when exposed to air, and besides that it was fun. Then she clamped a hand to the base of the human’s head and curled back her lips to present the micro-serrations in the inside of her incisors; fangs would have been totally impractical, of course.

“Bite me, please,” Monica breathed, muffled and tense.

“You asked for it,” she said, and struck.

Her growl mixed with the lucy’s moan; the first mouthful was always incredibly sweet, like a wine-and-cocaine cocktail…in this case a nice fruity Beaujolais Nouveau. Her victim’s mind opened like a flower at the rush of pleasure.

“No, no, take more,” she murmured as Adrienne withdrew and pressed a finger to the small wound.

“Later. Have some sachertorte. I’m going to be hungry when I come around, and you are the ultimate comfort food.”

Mitteleuropa

They had to get somewhere with lights and people. He could see a faint glow in that direction, northeastward, but that was because everything else was so damn dark. There was an odd flicker to it, too. After ten minutes the figures ahead of him slowed, so that he nearly ran into them with his head swiveling backward. His mind felt as if it were encased in a sheath of hard flexible glass at the bottom of the sea, and he knew that it was pressure on the Wreakings Adrian Brézé had implanted there; panic and despair beat at it, emotions not his own but ready to flood his mind like a tide race through a canyon to make him run and run like a witless beast until the teeth closed. His amulets were all warm against the skin under his clothes, just short of pain. The blackness buzzed and throbbed with malign intent, like a million hair-fine tentacles swarming and probing from all directions.

“Keep moving,” he said.

“Los niños can’t,” Cheba said.

“Carry them,” Eric said, and she and Peter each took one; he needed to stay free to fight as long as possible.

He hated to say it, and not just because of the way Cheba gasped when Leila was boosted up piggyback and the weight came on her injured shoulder. Fairly soon he’d have to spell her or she’d collapse, and the thought of going into action with a kid riding on his back was just what was needed to make this nightmare complete. They moved down the road at a slow jog. Over the crest, and now it was downhill, which helped a bit. The air was thick but not actually foggy, and the lights ahead were much brighter; he could make out streetlights and windows. Nothing very tall, it wasn’t a city and there weren’t any skyscrapers. The biggest structure was some sort of old-looking white stucco mansion on a hill, with modest-sized floodlights in the grounds, but the whole thing was definitely three steps up from the nowhereville they’d stayed the night before last. And there were still Christmas decorations up, and now he could hear noise like revelry at the end of an infinite tunnel-

— and big wings cut the air overhead. Just a rustle and a flash of pale feathers, but the children squealed in alarm. He pivoted, arm flung out and aiming entirely by instinct. The muzzle flash from the twin barrels blinded him for a second, and most of the silvered shot pattered into the boughs of the trees as the muzzle whipped upward. Twigs rained down, but a long white barn owl feather did too…until it vanished with a subliminal sparkle. There was a crashing and then a thump somewhere out there in the dark, accompanied by a feral squall of anger and fear. Eric thumbed open the coach gun as he jogged on, ignoring the ache in his abused wrist and grinning a little as he shook the spent cartridges out and replaced them with two more from his left pocket.

That had sounded awfully like what you’d get if someone turned from a bird into a human being in midair without really meaning to, and then fell thirty feet through a big beech tree until they hit the ground. The grin turned to a snarl as a wolf howled again, this time shockingly near; whoever it was, whatever it was, was thoroughly pissed off. And others answered it, a pack, not right on top of them but not all that far away either. He snapped the gun closed by jerking upward, the hard metallic click obscurely comforting.

“He’s saying I’m hurt, Mommy, and come and eat, come and eat, eat, eat,” Leon said, his voice high and quavering.

Wait a minute, Eric thought. The bastard is thinking like a wolf as much as a man right now. And wolves are pretty much a dog with attitude. Werewolves especially, I guess.

Aloud he gasped out: “Faster. Just for a bit, as fast as you can. Then when I give the word, kids in the center and us facing out.”

“It’ll attack,” Peter rasped.

“We want him to. Got…to finish this one…before the others get here. Before he gets ahead and blocks us. Making him do what we want, not what he would want to do if he was thinking about it.”

Tactics, and his detective’s feeling for the psychology of macho asshole perps. And if he was wrong and they failed, they’d be overrun and ripped to pieces. A lumbering dash, the fall of their feet and the sobbing of their breath loud in the night. The ants were crawling on his skin, all right, and it felt tight enough to split under their little sharp feet.

“Now!”

Dogs can’t resist chasing something that runs, especially when they smell fear. Let the wolf rule the man. Let the man go apeshit because he can’t stand to lose face or let the others laugh at him. C’mon, do the wrong thing, you son of a whore! Make that son of a bitch!

“Now, stop!”

He knew he stank of raw terror, and he suspected the others did too; having these things chase you through the night was an ultimate fear built right in, and something deep down knew those weren’t just wolves. Perhaps this was the irrational source of the fear and hate wolves had always aroused, the way the ancient masters had used their forms to hunt men.

The children went down and huddled on the ground, clutching each other. The three adults made a protective triangle; there was a shing as Cheba’s machete came out. He couldn’t see six feet, but he could hear paws rutching on the wet pavement with its patches of snow. Then he could see, see the glowing yellow eyes above the snarling muzzle; the nightwalker had been careless to leave them like that. He fired just as the eyes lifted in the killing leap, then clubbed blindly with the silvered steel barrels, flailing into the strobing afterimages that the twin streaks of fire drew across his vision. Metal cracked against bone, thudded into something like hard upholstery.

Weight slammed into him and he went over on his back, tensing his muscles as he fell so it wouldn’t knock the wind out of him. A hundred and eighty pounds of wolf tried to anyway. He got his hands up just in time, the fingers locking in fur over muscle that felt like living metal. Slaver sprayed to his face, and the harsh animal musk and stink filled his nose, and the blank yellow eyes were like windows into a world of fire. There was a flash of fangs amid a sound like baseball bats being slammed together or God’s own castanets as the great jaws snapped close enough that the hot wind of it fanned his chin. Blunt-clawed paws scrabbled at him, and he could feel his grip slipping.

There was a whirring sound and a chunk, and suddenly the salt of blood filled his eyes and nose and mouth, blinding and choking. Cheba was shrieking as she drew back for another roundhouse swing, but he could feel the weight of the wolf on him lurch as someone kicked it between the haunches, very hard. It was distracted-only for a second-but he used that to jam his right forearm up under its chin, locking the arm so that its lunge just pushed his shoulder back into the ground. The other hand stripped his knife out from the sheath under the tail of his parka, and he reared up to drive it home. There was a familiar soft, heavy resistance as it sank, and he ripped upward with the silver-threaded blade up and across in a convulsive heave to open the body cavity and cut the arteries.

Something flashed within his head, a silent scream of astonishment and mortal terror like some soundless blast of mental lightning.

And then there was…nothing. Sparkling in the night for the briefest instant, more sensed than seen, and then even the wetness of blood on his face and hands was gone. Even the scent of it, vanishing like a dream when you woke.

“I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t shoot, it was too close,” Peter was saying.

“Fuck that, let’s go,” Eric rasped, halfway between reason and a snarl. “Kicking it in the balls was a real good idea. The rest of them are coming, and even odds ain’t my choice here. Three on one just barely worked with Rin Tin von Hitler there.”

More howls broke out, as if to punctuate his words; the children’s bodies were tense and shaking a little as he helped pull them up. They all moved out at the fastest walk the little ones could manage, trying to control their breathing. Leon was hiccuping, and his sister had stifled a whimper before it quite began. Eric stuffed the coach gun inside his coat, and Cheba tried twice to wipe her machete before it sank in that the blade was as clean as it had been the last time she oiled and sharpened it. Her first try at sheathing the tool/weapon nearly took off an ear.

“Careful with that, querida,” he said, and guided it home.

“They’re coming,” Leila said. “They’re changing, and they’re coming. They’re angry now. Not just hungry.”

“And they’ve got the whole damn night,” Peter said.

Cheba grinned in the darkness, a flash of white teeth. “Not so much, it is nearly midnight.”

“How time flies when you’re fighting for your life,” Peter said.

Okay, Eric thought. They can’t identify us with the Power. All they’ve got is their senses. Animal senses. Got to break trail somehow. Think, you dumb bastard! Right, let’s get into town and cover our smell with lots of other people and gasoline and stuff.

It wasn’t a very big town, though bigger than he’d first thought, denser and thicker built than an American settlement covering the same area, all low-rise except for church steeples but packed together. There were a lot of decorations up, but they didn’t seem particularly Christmasy, except the ones which were Christmas ornaments. There were a lot of evergreen wreaths, and as they approached the outskirts and moved over to the side of the road to give way to traffic, fireworks started bursting overhead. More and more of them as they walked into town, everyone and his dog out in the yard setting off rockets, plus some bigger official-looking ones from farther in. Enough bottles of champagne were being cracked to make him a little nervous about the fireworks even now. Some of the sky-rockets plunged into the clouds above and were just flashes of diffused light, though others burst in multicolored splendor lower down. There were Catherine wheels and Roman candles as well in the town square and in the park around the big building on the hill. The noise seemed slightly muffled for the first instant, then burst through into his perceptions as if they were pricking a bubble of silence that had encased him.

A lot was going on. For some reason a laughing, cheering and rather beer-full crowd were pouring molten lead from a little teacup-sized holder into a big pot of water. In other places, doughnuts were being passed around and steaming drinks ladled out, and an enthusiastic band was playing “The Blue Danube” and people were waltzing.

His mind raced as he actually recognized someone.

“Hans! Hans Schenk!” he called, half shouting.

The German commando-ex-commando, now-looked around in surprise. He was a decade older than that night on the slopes of the Hindu Kush, and wearing some vaguely nautical-looking uniform, with a walrus mustache and much less hair on top of his head under the peaked cap. There was a lot more of him, too, but he still looked as strong as an ox, with thick wrists and shoulders to match the modest beer gut. He also had a semi-paralytic drunk’s arm looped over his shoulders, and some probable subordinates in sailor suits were trying to round up a few others and get them moving. The drunks were of both sexes and mostly middle-aged, and all looking as if they’d be very, very sorry tomorrow.

“Eric!” the other man blurted after an instant of blank surprise, and then dawning comprehension. “Eric Salvador! What the devil are you doing here? I thought you were a policeman, in that town of yours with the mountains and the opera!”

He spoke excellent English, accented but with the flatter, harder vowels of a North German rather than the ripe Schwarzenegger style of the locals.

“Hans, I don’t have time to explain and you wouldn’t believe me if I did. I’m here with these folks, and we need to get out of sight and out of town right now, it’s a matter of life and death, and I swear we’re not in trouble with your authorities. Can you help me?”

The forty-something German froze for another instant or two, his eyes flicking to Cheba and Peter and then the children. “Life or death? Well, we’ve seen that before, you and I, no? Follow me.”

Two of the semi-sailor types picked up Leon and Leila, and the whole nautical-looking party plus several drunks pushed through the crowd. Despite the small absolute size of the place, they were managing to make enough noise to blend with the fireworks and the music into an overwhelming blur. That would probably mean they were hidden from sight and scent as well. It didn’t take long to get down to the docks, where something like an enormous, elongated white rectangular barge with a sharp prow was tied up; it had glassed-in observation areas and lots of windows as well. All in all, it looked like a medium-sized hotel reincarnated as a boat, which was probably exactly what it was.

“Behold the Erzherzogin Cecilie,” Hans said. “Management had a flash of inspiration and thought a Christmas and New Year’s tour would be just the thing. Bloody fools, and bloody dangerous, and it’s three-quarters empty because most of the people who could afford a ticket realize that.”

He took a closer look at the five of them as they went up the gangplank, then swore in German. “You weren’t joking, were you?”

“Not even a bit,” Eric said.

“Please tell me that you have documents,” Hans said. “Even these days, that makes things a lot easier here.”

“Valid passports, Hans.” Eric started to go on, then felt himself doing a slow buckle at the knees. “Got to get out of here,” he mumbled. “Got to go.”

“Let’s get you to bed,” the German said, guiding them to a couch. “God in Heaven knows we’ve got plenty of empty staterooms. Though I hope you don’t mind heading for Vienna, because that’s where we are going.”

Eric Salvador didn’t precisely lose consciousness, but he did lose most interest in his surroundings. Far and faint and muffled, the wolves howled. He supposed that sometimes the luck had to be crazy good, as well as crazy bad.

Vienna

Adrian Brézé blinked awake.

“Extraordinary,” he said softly, his face turning northwestward. “They were not there to the eyes of the Power. To be unable to detect my own children, the strongest blood linkage of all…”

“Where are they?” Ellen asked, snuggling into his shoulder.

“On the Danube, and heading this way, assuming they are on the boat, and that it is safe. They will be here soon. Before the ceremony for Arnaud.”

“That’s wonderful!” she said.

“Yes,” he said. Then, slowly: “But that was…perhaps too easy. As if I were pushing with the wind at my back. I had to be careful not to make myself too obvious…though that section of the von Trupps are not exactly highly skilled. Still, their instincts are keen enough.”

“Luck? You were luckier than you expected?”

“Exactly.”