by Wilson, Eric
Only silence from within.
Another knock.
Nothing.
“Let’s go take a look,” Ariston said.
Barabbas barreled forward, and the door frame splintered.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Gina was afraid. And angry. Here she was, in the back of a car, speeding away from her birthplace. What was she to make of this?
Only minutes ago her mother had burst into the house—“Didn’t I tell you I’d be back?”—with urgency etched into her face. They were leaving, she’d explained. Immediately. Romania was in turmoil, a storm was approaching, and they had to flee. A new life would be theirs across the border, and beyond.
Gina suspected there was more to it than that, but what could she say?
She packed her things into a burlap sack, then tucked Treia under her arm. Her mother took away the dog and set him down on the street. He would make do, she said. He was a survivor, after all.
Though Gina trembled with indignation and grief, she knew protest was futile. Outside, Treia whined. He hobbled back for a view of Gina on the Dacia’s weather-cracked backseat, and Gina pressed her nose to the glass with eyes misting over.
Her mother said, “You stay down, angel. Out of sight.”
Nicoleta then slid into the front beside the Provocateur. He was stone-faced, wearing a threadbare suit jacket, with tufts of his wheat-colored hair curling from his cap. He pumped the gas pedal until the engine kicked over.
As the car accelerated, leaving Treia back on the walkway, Gina lifted her head and spotted Teo beneath the streetlamp.
He looked up. Waved.
She debated mouthing the words she’d always wanted to say to him, and yet over the years she’d learned that her desires were secondary, and so she tucked her head between her knees and closed her eyes. Even though one teardrop hit the floorboard at her feet, she never made a sound.
I’m sorry, Teo. Please . . . Save another kiss for me.
When she at last dared another peek, Gina glimpsed road signs pointing to Lipova. She was being uprooted. Torn from her home. Farmlands and plains were changing to hills and forests, and birds of prey patrolled the valley from high above.
Where was the Provocateur taking them?
Like the grinding of the vehicle’s gears, Gina felt something shift inside.
Next time, she decided—if there was a next time—she would not sit silently, docilely, obediently. Regardless of the consequences, she would let her feelings show. She would not be treated forever like a young girl.
The Akeldama Collectors swarmed through the humble dwelling, through the living and kitchen areas, the alcove, the windowless bedroom. Although olfactory markers stimulated their saliva glands, the place lacked the warmth of human inhabitants. Mother and child were gone.
Ariston swore in disbelief.
Where were they? On an errand? A visit to a friend?
He perused a handful of old mail and saw the family name of Murgoci. He wondered how hard it might be to track down others with that name.
“We missed them, didn’t we?” Megiste draped herself across the scarred wood of the kitchen table, arched her back, and moaned as though intoxicated by the scents. “I’m sooo disappointed, and after an entire day in the backs of trucks and old buses and that farmer’s smelly wagon.”
“I’m sure they’re close,” Barabbas said. His eyes were glued to her.
“You’re wrong. I’m telling you, they’ve taken flight.”
“How do you know?”
Megiste let her tunic slip from one shoulder, exposing the curve of her breast. With Helene at his side, Ariston tried to ignore the woman’s fluid gyrations—no use in stirring jealousies. He did notice, however, a shared look of disgust, a rare moment of alliance, between his wives Helene and Shelamzion. Shelamzion cupped a hand over demure Shalom’s eyes to shield her from this wanton display.
“I’m sooo very thirsty. Where will I drink next? Hmmm, Barabbas?”
“Megiste, enough of this,” Eros said. “How can you be sure that they’ve fled? There are clothes still here, cushions and blankets. Even food.”
“And that scent,” Ariston noted. “I’m sure they were here not long ago.”
“Oh, but nooo woman would pack up all her facial powders and per-fumes unless she intended to stay away for a while. Am I wrong?” The priestess lifted herself to her knees at the table’s edge, auburn curls framing high cheekbones. She traced two fingers down Barabbas’s beard. “And please, pretty please, no comments about my own lack of ornamentation. I will find a way to make do again.”
She was right, Ariston admitted to himself. The Murgoci mother and daughter were gone from here. He should’ve known it wouldn’t be this easy.
The search was still on, as it had been for ages.
Collectors down through the centuries had entrenched themselves in countries and cultures. Sniffing. Stalking. Ferreting out hosts and sources for blood. Many clusters dabbled in their own delights and pastimes, caught up in the snares they meant to set for others. Others, in territorial disputes, tore at each other’s throats.
But always, there were those committed to the cause.
Those Who Hunted.
Their ultimate prey: the Nistarim, the thirty-six who carried the world’s sorrows upon their backs. Three dozen men commissioned to protect the faithful, to hold up the weary, the widows, and the fatherless. Yet who was the leader of this ragtag crew? The Nazarene, as some claimed?
Bah. Ariston of Apamea had been there, in Jerusalem, as a man. Encoded in his memory, before the infiltration of any Collector, he’d heard the eyewitness accounts of the Nazarene’s death upon a tree—thus cursed by Mosaic Law, a victim of Roman torture. The Nazarene had died.
Ariston had also heard the rumors of an empty tomb.
In the Negev, Mendel had confirmed those rumors, and the Collector within had grudgingly accepted this reality, overriding Ariston’s limited recollections with his own knowledge of the Nazarene’s defiant act. Where others had given way to the grave, the Nazarene had bridged the Separation. He had risen up from his resting place.
The entire thing gave Ariston a headache.
Or was it the Collector who was now subjected to splitting pain?
Always this struggle . . . Two wills battling for dominance while relying on one another in twisted symbiosis.
At the moment, it was immaterial. The young girl was the issue. Brushed across her skin, the letter Tav had convinced Ariston she had some connection to the Nistarim.
And, by the sails of Sicily, he was not going down without a fight.
He whirled into action, delegating cleanup and guard duties to his own family and commanding the House of Eros to gather information from the locals. Barabbas was left to repair the front door.
“What about you, Ariston?” Megiste purred. “Come join the fun.”
“I’ve got my own task. When I return, I may need your help, so see to it that things are made right.”
He peered into the sky, where feathered silhouettes were blurred by the encroaching dusk. Though nonhuman hosts were at his disposal, he knew utilizing one was a tenuous affair. Not only would he be dependent on animal instincts and proclivities, he would face serious depletion upon return. Collectors who dared to partner a human host with animalistic tendencies—in the guise of a werewolf, for example—often faced the added threat of the creature’s capture or death. A time-consuming setback.
One the Akeldama Cluster knew well.
Eons ago, hadn’t they drowned in the sea while at the mercy of a herd of pigs? The Nazarene himself had overseen that little fiasco.
Yeshua . . . There it was again. That name.
Ariston rubbed his temples, miffed by this convergence of human memory and much broader undead experience. He thought of the Nazarene’s authority, as displayed there at the Sea of Kinneret and also in his abandoned grave. Perhaps Those Who Resist hoped to gain similar benefits through the in
take of his blood: power and regeneration, as well as protection against the forces that sought to destroy them.
Nazarene Blood.
Ariston thought of Salome, his daughter. She had suffered the consequences of attacking such a person—a dry husk, a withering corpse, and sent back as dust to the Restless Desert.
Bah. None of it was original, not one bit. Collectors knew all about such vicarious survival, tapping the life, the talents, and the memories. If anything, these thoughts only galvanized his zeal to destroy the Nistarim and the fools who aligned themselves with the one called the Nazarene.
Ariston pulled back his shoulders, stared into the firmament, and honed in on a raptor, a black kite with a forked, brown-tipped tail. Through visual coupling, he called the bird to himself and found it receptive, even eager. The kite circled lower on outstretched wings, its sharp whistle changing to staccato chirps.
By the time those talons reached him, the Collector had emerged as a shimmying haze. He rose. Took possession of his temporary vessel.
Looking down through avian eyes, he saw the plump human frame of Ariston, wilted and lifeless, propped against the back wall of the house. Even now, vacant from his host, he felt the tug of Ariston’s hereditary memories and inclinations. The longer a Collector maintained possession of a host, the weightier such things became.
It was not uncommon for a Collector to seek relief by switching to a temporary host, sometimes even for days or weeks at a time. To do so, however, was a risk. The temporary host might dilute and confuse the Collector’s mind-set. If, for example, he spent time in a stray dog, he might come back to his human host with a tendency to scratch himself in public or to lounge for hours of mindless inactivity. More troublesome, he might find that the original host had become resistant to his return.
I must do what’s necessary. I have to find the girl and her mother.
The black kite lifted on powerful pinions. Effortless in flight, it rode the breezes above Cuvin’s patchwork fields while the Collector began his search.
North of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
The driver downshifted. “You haven’t told her yet, have you, Nikki?”
“I will,” Nicoleta said. “When the time’s right.”
Into the night, Gina had been fighting off sleep. The rattling engine made eavesdropping difficult, but the conversation up front was becoming more agitated.
“You know that whole ‘ignorance is bliss’ thing?” the Provocateur said. “It’s a crock. If you keep her in the dark, that’s right where those things’ll find her. Your superstitions won’t be worth squat. They’ll track her down, and I’ve already seen what they can do. They’ll suck her dry.”
“Not where we’re going,” Nicoleta said.
Where? Gina touched the fresh scar on her neck. What things?
“I don’t even wanna know where,” the man said. “Safer that way. I’ll drop you in the forest near the Ukrainian border. My friends from Kiev will meet you on the other side, then hide you away for a couple of nights. They’ll help you find menial jobs and learn the language. Soon you’ll blend right in. From there, you’re on your own.”
“No one’s going to find us.”
“There is one other possibility, you know. I could go with you.”
“And draw more attention our direction? No,” Nicoleta said, “we already discussed this. And to be honest, I’m not sure I can trust you ever again.”
His tone softened. “You’re trusting me now.”
“For one night, that’s all.”
“Which,” he said, “is how all this trouble started in the first place.”
“Shush, Cal. Just drive.”
The Provocateur turned toward Nicoleta with a censoring expression, and in the dash’s glow his green eyes reflected gold. She breathed an apology. He turned his attention back to the road as a string of lights indicated passage through a town.
Cal . . .
So that was his name.
Gina studied the man’s strong profile. What did they mean, that one night had started all this trouble? Could Cal be her father? Had her mother lied about her husband’s death?
Yet these suspicions didn’t seem to mesh with the Provocateur’s age. He was ten years older than Gina, at the most.
“Here,” Nicoleta said. “It has to be done.”
The man braked, turned off the headlights, whipped down an embankment.
Gina held her breath. Had they heard her thoughts?
Cal pulled beneath overlapping branches of evergreen, switched off the engine, then without a word climbed out and came around to Gina’s side.
He was opening her door, allowing in a rush of alpine air. He was looming over her, exhaling the crisp scent of mint gum. He was tying one of her blouses around her forearm. Her mother was twisting around and handing him the dagger from the black walnut chess set. She was nodding, mouthing for him to proceed.
A sense of panic. “Mamica?”
“You’ve sinned, Gina. You kissed that boy and allowed lust into your heart.”
“Teodor? But it was only—”
“Sorry. You gotta sit still.” The cap shaded Cal’s face.
It was pointless to argue against such fanaticism. In her mother’s mind, the world was an evil place, a battle arena, and even children were vulnerable to sin’s wretched blackness. Better to cut away the gangrene. To spare the soul.
The part Gina dreaded most was the disorientation that followed these episodes, the way the knife seemed to slice away memories and leave gaping wounds in her mind.
She bit her lip as the blade drew a scarlet line across her arm.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Borsa, Romania
Swooping through a mountain pass, the cluster leader sighted the town of Borsa below. These concentrations of modern lights still impressed him, white diamonds and red rubies, dazzling in the darkness. He lifted a wing tip, slid down a thermal, and leveled out over frost-speckled treetops.
He screeched. He empathized with the bird’s exhaustion, its hunger. Above keen eyes, its black plumage was stiff with cold.
Still operating with the residue of Ariston’s intellect, the lead Collector had delivered instructions throughout the night, while relying also on the kite’s instinctive behaviors. The bird resisted him once, stopping for roadside carrion—strips of flesh from a rotting fox, as well as some live grasshoppers—then mounted up again to resume pursuit of the Dacia that now threaded through the center of Borsa.
Mother and daughter were in there. And a fair-skinned man at the wheel. Their faces matched those he’d found floating through the prefect’s blood.
Only the girl bore the letter, though.
Initially, from high above Cuvin, the Collector had spotted the lone vehicle fleeing southeast toward Lipova. Calling upon his memory of local maps, he’d cut over the hills, past the medieval fortress of Soimos, and intercepted the car as it threaded along the Mures River. Although he struggled to match its prolonged straightaway speeds, he was able to cut distances while it negotiated curves and steep drop-offs. It was one of only a few traveling this late, save the sporadic gypsy caravan.
His goal: determine their final destination.
Though a skilled predator, his feathered host was not equipped to take on a trio of healthy humans. The cluster leader would have to gather the other Collectors, then return for a quick strike—to rip the limbs from man, woman, and child, in an effort to learn more about the Concealed Ones.
On the far side of town, the Dacia slid away toward the east, where slopes of trees formed a corridor of darkness. Time for him to close the gap.
Instead, the black kite slowed and began a spiraling descent.
No, the Collector directed. Don’t stop. Keep following that red car.
The weary bird continued downward toward Borsa’s perches and residual heat. The Collector plied the creature’s will with promises of fresh flesh ahead, but soon he’d lost sight of his prey beyond the spire
of an Orthodox church.
Keep going. You need food, don’t you? A little bit further.
The kite lifted its short, black beak, emitted a whistle, then caught an upward draft that was swirling through the town. For now, it would remain compliant.
The car, however, was nowhere to be seen.
The Collector’s frustration came out as a shrill shriek. His eyes roved over the landscape—the ribbon of road, forested peaks, patches of snow. He beat at the wind, racing along the lonely highway for kilometer upon kilometer.
Nothing, nothing.
At last, the bird revolted and cut back in the direction of town.
Had the car outdistanced him? Where could it have gone?
Dawn’s glow crept over the timberline and gave the Collector his first clue. The moment the tire tracks leaped into shadowed relief, he flattened his wings and dove. Flakes of red paint against a stump suggested that the vehicle had eluded him beneath this copse of trees. A stained, rumpled cloth fluttered from a nearby bush.
The black kite couldn’t resist.
It lighted on the foliage and tore into the still-tacky material, extracting what little energy it could from blood-soaked cotton. To the Collector’s surprise, myriad images and voices washed over him . . .
Mentions of Kiev.
A striking, raven-haired mother.
A young lady bleeding out her sins.
This was Gina’s shirt? Why had it been left here?
There’d be time for riddle solving later. Most likely, the car had backtracked through town and angled north toward the border, meaning Ariston would have to act now or his quarry would vanish into Ukraine.
The kite, however, was uncooperative. It flapped heavy wings and found roost in a spruce tree’s upper boughs.
Wait. No, you can’t do this. I need to rally the others.
The bird of prey aired its feathers. Started to close its eyes.
Frantic, the cluster leader scanned gaps in the branches. He required visual coupling to switch to another host, and he saw nothing but nocturnal creatures settling and the movement of insects along the forest floor. What could he accomplish through a carpenter ant? Only something larger, quicker, could help him get to—