by Kevin Hearne
“How can such a creature as a lifeleech exist?” Granuaile asked.
Leif grimaced. “I am uncertain. My only information derives directly from him and may be suspect. But to hear him tell it, he was an accident of alchemy—a byproduct of a sixteenth-century search for the philosopher’s stone. He represented a form of success, of course, but he drained to death the alchemist who created him, in the first few minutes of his newfound power. He is unique, which I suppose is a minor blessing, as there will be no others. Of more concern to us is that he is entirely in the confidence of Theophilus.”
I noticed that Leif had subtly cast this as an “us vs. them” scenario, when in fact he was with them. Or, if that was not entirely accurate, he was certainly not with us.
“Huh. How’d that happen?”
“I do not know. I am not in confidence with either of them. I am also unsure of Herr Drasche’s motivation regarding your pursuit and murder. He could not harbor an old antipathy for Druids, since he was born long after all Druids had disappeared from the earth save you—and he only heard of your existence recently. But it may simply be an issue of loyalty for him. His relationship with Theophilus has depths I cannot fathom.”
“Well, how about the obvious?” Granuaile asked. “Are they lovers?”
Leif blinked. “Oh. Well. I hadn’t considered that. Perhaps.”
“Aha!” Granuaile said, pointing at him, her face lit with victory. “So that means vampires do have balls! Ever since the last time we saw you in Thessalonika, I’ve been wondering about that!”
Leif flinched as if Granuaile had slapped him. “You have?”
I grinned, because I knew what she was up to. Leif had a peculiar squeamishness about vampire biology and refused to discuss it. If she could cause enough discomfort, he might decide to leave.
“Well, yeah,” she said, pressing the attack, “I mean, you’re basically animated dead tissue, right, so why would any system from your human life still work if it’s superfluous to the act of predation and converting blood to energy? I mean, I’m sure you’d have a vestigial sack dangling there, but there’s no reason to suppose your nuts would still be churning out babymakers and testosterone like a regular dude’s if that’s not going to get you a night’s supply of blood. But if Theophilus is sharing his sweet cadaver love with Werner, then I guess I was dead wrong about that, eh? Did you see what I did there? Hey! Where are you going?”
“Excuse me,” Leif called over his shoulder, suddenly in a hurry to exit the restaurant. He was already halfway to the door.
I laughed. “I told him to get out and he ignored me, but bring up his pop rocks and he can’t wait to leave. Good call.” I gave her a fist bump.
“Thanks. I hope I didn’t pounce too early.”
“Oh. We never got an answer, did we?” I doubted I’d ever learn the truth about vampires.
“No, but we got an incentive to get out of here. I don’t want to walk into an ambush outside, and I’m not anxious to confront something called an arcane lifeleech.”
“Neither am I, but we can’t go yet. We don’t have any money to pay for this fabulous food we’re not eating.”
Granuaile said, “We’ll feed you, Oberon, but in depressingly human-sized bites.”
The waiter stopped by to make sure everything was satisfactory, seeing that my monkfish remained undisturbed.
“Très délicieux,” I told him. He removed himself from our sight, only to be replaced by a large man in a black beret with hyper-aggressive muttonchops. They were imperial expansionist chops, threatening to leap from his face onto mine and colonize it for the glory of a fill-in-the-blank god and monarch.
“Monsieur O’Sullivan?” he growled.
“Oui.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a large roll of euros. He dropped it onto the table and hauled his muttonchops away before they could execute an airdrop and establish a beachhead on my jaw. Apparently that was all the welcome I would receive from the local pack.
“Hmm,” I said. “Taciturn.”
“Aloof,” Granuaile said.
“He was also in a hurry to leave, and that was a hint in itself. Let’s go.”
“Yes, let’s.”
Granuaile abandoned her earlier promise to feed him tiny bites and put her plate on the chair next to her for Oberon’s easy access. I peeled off some bills and left them on the table as Oberon hoovered up the turbot.
We picked up our camouflaged weapons and the belts and exited, Oberon lamenting the waste of my monkfish.
The Strait of Dover—or, from the French perspective, the Pas-de-Calais—beckoned to us in the dark. The Morrigan had promised us a way out if we could make it to Herne’s forest on the other side. Crossing the strait would leave us at our most vulnerable, and I seriously doubted Oberon’s ability to swim twenty-one miles unaided.
We waded out a short distance into the cold surf, where Granuaile gave me Scáthmhaide, stripped, and donated her clothing to the tide. After a quick kiss—truly quick this time—she shifted to a sea lion.
I cast night vision. “All right, let’s see what we can cook up. No matter what we do, we’re going to increase your drag. But if we try to hook up something lengthwise, that’s going to mess up your swimming motion. I think we’re best off hooking you up bandolier style.”
I asked Oberon to hold on to our weapons for us on the beach while I got Granuaile rigged. It would not do to lose them in the surf.
Using two of the belts, I slung them diagonally so that they passed over a flipper on one side and under it on the other, forming an X. I buckled them on her back and asked her to roll over. She did, presenting her belly. I fetched Scáthmhaide from Oberon first and laid it cross-ways near the top of the X, just above her flippers—the theory being that she would not need to twist and flex right there as much as she would on her neck or her tail. At the two contact points with the belts, I bound the wood to the leather so that there was no possibility of detaching. I admired again the craftsmanship of Creidhne and the cleverness of Flidais: The bindings on Scáthmhaide were carved in and “solid-state,” immune to my cold iron aura. I didn’t know if Fragarach was like that or not, but I had always avoided touching the blade for fear of ruining the enchantments that made it so powerful. “Give that a try,” I said. “Can you swim okay like that?”
She heaved her bulk forward a bit awkwardly with the staff riding high on her chest and then dove into the waves. She disappeared for a full minute but then exploded out of the surf in front of me and soaked me in salt water.
“Very funny,” I said. Granuaile laughed, but as a sea lion it sounded like braying, and that made me laugh too and eased a bit of the tension I felt.
“All right. Let’s add on Fragarach and see what happens.” I hadn’t truly prepared it for a sea journey, but if we ever got to dry land again, I would pay plenty of attention to the blade and have Goibhniu give it some love. If nothing else, a gentle request to Ferris, the iron elemental, would allow me to pinpoint any problem areas and prevent developing rust.
I was just taking Fragarach from Oberon when his ears pricked up and he looked to the south.
I followed his gaze and saw a slim silhouette approaching. I triggered my magical sight and saw that the figure had an odd, churning aura in green and orange. He had magical power of some kind, but there wasn’t enough white in it to mark him as a god.
“
Stay here,” I said. “Be ready to go.”
Examining his clothing, I saw that it was composed of natural materials—cotton and silk, mostly. “Nah, I got this,” I said.
As I padded across the beach, I crafted a binding between the back of his suit jacket and the sand but didn’t energize it. I let it hang there, waiting for completion.
I dispelled magical sight to get a clear look at him. The moon conspired with the ambient light of Calais to provide some decent illumination, and night vision did the rest. He had on some of those slick ankle boots like Leif had been wearing, the kind with extra-long pointy toes. Not exactly beachwear. His suit was gray with a gray paisley waistcoat, and a silk cravat in an alarming soda-pop orange writhed around his neck, seemingly aware of its own hideousness.
It could be no other than Werner Drasche. I had to admit that Leif was right—he dressed like a dandy. But I think perhaps the idea behind the cravat was to distract from his face. His cheeks were entirely tattooed with alchemical symbols, the sort of squiggly signs that are reminiscent of astrology but based in elemental magic. They didn’t cross his nose or mouth, but they continued above his brow and onto his shaven scalp. I didn’t have time to examine them closely, but I’m sure they weren’t a random configuration; they were equations. Formulae. And they represented a binding to the elements of life, the way my tattoos were a binding to the earth. Leif had called them “odd cosmetic decisions,” but that was either an understatement or a failure to understand what they represented. Probably the latter: A vampire would have no need to understand alchemy.
I did not bother introducing myself. He knew who I was already. “Why are you looking for me?” I called while he was still twenty yards away.
He answered me in German. “Manche Leute muss man einfach umbringen,” he said, and then reached into his suit and pulled a Glock 20 from a shoulder holster. I energized the binding I’d made and watched him spread out his arms in a futile attempt to regain balance as he was yanked backward onto the beach and held there by his suit jacket. He held on to the gun, but he was spread-eagled now and unable to point it at me.
I was a little bit stunned at his stone-cold attitude; he’d simply announced his intention to kill me and pulled a gun.
If Leif had been telling the truth, this was the lad who’d arranged to have me shot. Whether or not it was true, he’d just tried to kill me himself. And he was trying again, albeit in a different way. Raising his bald head from the sand and baring his teeth, he tried to drain me. I felt the hit on my cold iron amulet; it pulled away from my chest as if someone were tugging on it.
My patience bid farewell. Though I would have much rather spoken with Herr Drasche in an attempt to learn more about Theophilus, he had now put us on a kill-or-be-killed footing three different times. Removing Fragarach from its scabbard, I charged with the intention of decapitating him, but then a sudden thought caused me to change my mind. Instead, I brought the blade down hard on his right arm between the wrist and elbow, severing it and spraying blood on the sand.
“Manchen Leuten muss man einfach ihre Hände abhacken,” I told him. He bellowed incoherently as I sheathed Fragarach and picked up his amputated hand. Making sure he could see me, I removed the Glock 20 from its grip and tossed it into the ocean. Admiring the simplicity of it, I shrugged and followed up by tossing his hand into the ocean too.
When Werner saw that, his roar went subhuman, and I felt through my tattoos that he was drawing energy from the earth—but not in the same way that I did. All the little microorganisms in the sand, any insects or small vertebrates nearby—he was draining them all since he couldn’t drain me. I pointed Fragarach at him and said, “Stop that, or you lose the other hand.” He stopped, taking loud gasps of breath between clenched teeth, but I noticed that his arm ceased squirting blood and a flicker of orange lit his eyes.
“Now that you’re disarmed,” I said in German, “I’m curious. You wish to kill me but appear to know very little about what I can do. It leads me to speculate on your source of information. Since your source obviously left out some critical details regarding my abilities, perhaps he or she was less than honest regarding other things as well. Now, I will freely tell you that I was informed of your existence less than thirty minutes ago. This intelligence came from a vampire named Leif Helgarson.”
Werner Drasche cursed creatively and I smiled.
“Ah, yes. We have both been played, you and I. Leif expected me to kill you before I could learn of his role in sending you after me. Am I correct in thinking your removal would allow him to get closer to Theophilus?”
The lifeleech considered, then nodded.
“And he warned me of your coming in order to gain a measure of my trust. But I have had occasion to learn that Mr. Helgarson does nothing that does not serve his own self-interest. Any information he provides that appears to help you actually helps him. And the same goes for his services. Now that you have had occasion to learn the same lesson in a very painful way,” I said, flicking a finger at his stump, “perhaps you and I can part without loss of life or further injury. Perhaps we can even find your hand. If I retrieve it, can you reattach it and heal?”
Drasche nodded. “I have done it before.”
“Then, seeing as we are both victims of another’s machinations, I propose a gentleman’s agreement. First, we shall forgive each other our trespasses. Second, I will provide your severed limb so that you can be whole again. And third, henceforth we shall not trouble each other or conspire to do so with others. Live and let live in peace. Agreed?”
Werner Drasche needed little time to weigh the advantages of this.
“Agreed,” he said. “Though I can speak only for myself and not for Theophilus.”
“Understood,” I said. “Your loyalty to him is admirable, though I would point out that right now Leif Helgarson is a far greater threat to Theophilus than I am. And a far greater threat to you, I might add. But act or not on this information as you will. It is not my business. Our business together is easily concluded, and I am happy that we could find some ground on which to agree.”
Yeah. A misunderstanding. Going to see if I can give this guy a hand.
Binding like to like—skin to skin—I created a bond between Drasche’s left hand and his right, which floated somewhere in the nearby tide. The binding found a target in the waves, and the right hand flew out of the water with a crab already attached to the trailing muscle tissue. Once Drasche was giving himself a low five, I dissolved the binding and shooed the crab away.
“There you go, sir,” I said. “I am a man of my word. Give me a moment to grant us both some space, and I will release you from the sand. I hope that if we ever meet again, we can do so amicably and partake of something potable. May harmony find you.”
Werner Drasche said nothing as I took my leave; he just fixed me with a glare of stone and watched me go. Once I reached the spot where Oberon waited, I dissolved the binding on Werner’s suit jacket. He sat up and cradled his stump, holding his hand next to it. I switched to the magical spectrum and saw the lifeleech swell with stolen energy, his arm suffused with the white light of magic. It took him less than a minute to complete the operation. I saw him hold up the hand and flex the fingers as if it hadn’t been dinner for a crab in the recent past.
That was more than a little scary. He healed far faster than I did—faster than vampires and werewolves too. And it was entirely at the expense of other living creatures nearby. By all rights, I should have killed him for the abomination he was. But that was a moral path through deep woods that kept spiraling in on itself until there were no more abominations to kill but myself. Maybe Werner Drasche would give me another reason to kill him in the future—a reason that hadn’t been conveniently provided by Leif Helgarson. I could not expect a second confrontation with him to be so easily won as the first. But let that so
ng be sung when it would: For now, refusing to be a pawn in Leif’s power games would suffice to keep me happy.
The arcane lifeleech stood, brushed himself off, and nodded once at me before turning toward the lights of Calais. I expected he would give Leif a little bit of trouble or, at minimum, speak some poison into the ear of Theophilus, and that would be satisfying as well.
Silhouettes rushed out of the city to meet Herr Drasche, and I saw by their gray auras and the red lights in their heads and chests that they were vampires. Werner Drasche was definitely not a neutral figure; he was an enemy to whom I’d shown mercy. Three of them remained with Drasche, but two passed him and ran in my direction—further evidence that his circle of acquaintances knew very little about me.
I unbound both vampires before they could get close. They melted messily into the sand. I was not neutral either.
Yeah, buddy. I waded out to Granuaile and bound Fragarach on top of Scáthmhaide, then tied the holster of throwing knives on top of that. If we’re going to drown our sorrows in the literal sense, let’s get it over with.
Chapter 18
The first hundred yards or so was largely an effort on Oberon’s part to properly express how cold the water was.
He was pretty slow in the water and I wasn’t much faster; sea otters typically chase down sea urchins, which tend to have the top speed of a snail, so speed wasn’t at a premium. But Granuaile’s staff, sticking out horizontally from where we’d bound it, performed a valuable service: Oberon was able to drape his forelegs over it and keep his head above water and kick with his back legs. I did the same on the other side, and together we were able to make about ten miles per hour. Two hours wouldn’t be so bad, I figured, if no one messed with us, but that was far too much to hope for.