by Graham Brown
“I know what you’re capable of,” Faust managed. “I know you can force me, so why would I fight? I also know that once you have what you’re looking for, you’ll kill me. Just don’t turn me into what you are. That’s all I ask.”
Drake almost seemed magnanimous. “And that I shall grant you, but first you must tell me all that you know about a weapon the Church calls the Dark Star of Power.”
Dr. Faust looked confused. “The Dark Star?” he shook his head. “It’s just an old myth, or perhaps a metaphor, but it’s certainly not real.”
“I beg to differ, Dr. Faust, and you’re going to help me find it.”
“How? I don’t know anything about it.”
“You’ll do what you’re trained to do,” Drake said. “Access records. Specifically, Vatican records and documents. You’ll search for me until you find its origin. Then you will bring the information to me.”
Faust listened and his mind began to whirl.
“I already see your thoughts turning to escape. To hiding in the Vatican or some other church. That will not avail you, unless you have no care for others.”
“What are you talking about?” Faust asked. “I wasn’t-“
Drake didn’t let him finish. “I’ll be taking your friend here as my captive. Perhaps I’ll even regale him with stories of his favorite artists, truths from the past the world has long since forgotten. But I won’t wait long. You will work quickly, ruthlessly and without deception or he will begin to suffer.”
Faust looked at Drake, he couldn’t imagine what would happen to Daimler if he didn’t comply, though he doubted it would be a pleasant end for either of them anyway. “I’ll do as you ask,” he said, nodding in agreement.
“Help him up,” Drake ordered. “We begin at once.”
As Faust bent down to assist Daimler, the main lights went dark and the secondary security lights come on. The room was now bathed in a dim glow.
Faust stood quickly, not sure what to make of it. In the dim lighting, he saw Drake pull his sword and whirl around. Apparently this wasn’t Drake’s doing. In fact, Drake seemed to be in a state of surprise, of shock, even fear. Yes, Faust thought, the King of the Undead is afraid.
Drake’s servants turned in lockstep with him. And the four of them stood gazing down the long, dark corridor. Something was out there. Something was coming for them.
Chapter 26
Drake waited in the soft glow of the emergency lighting, his eyes darting from left to right. Searching. Watching. Under normal conditions the dark would have only enhanced his vision, but he was still healing and it seemed as if a haze lay between him and anything beyond the room.
“Hunters?” One of the Drones asked. “Police?”
Drake shook his head. “No,” he said. “Something worse.”
The sound of boots hitting the marble floor could be heard coming down the hall. From the far end, a shadowy figure passed through one of the floor lights then back into the darkness, and then back into the light of another beam. Drake began to see, began to focus. It was a man in a long coat, running toward them all as if in slow motion passing through the dark and back into the light again.
“Christian,” he muttered.
In a blink of an eye, the battle was on. Christian rushed into the room swinging his sword, and the Drones charged at him as commanded by their master. Christian parried them away with ease, flinging one into the wall and another down the hall. The third attacker managed to stay in combat with him for a few seconds longer but was battered to the ground and then thrown into a priceless statue that stood near the center of the room.
It crashed to the ground, shattering on impact. The alarms sounded and the security doors began to drop. Drake moved first and quickest, diving under the hardened steel shutter. Christian was left with the Drones, Faust and Daimler.
Without their master to give them strength, the Drones drew back. Christian ignored them and raced to the door. He tried to force it, but it wouldn’t budge. He pounded his fist on the door like a hammer, but even with his supernatural strength there was no way to break it down.
“How do we open this?” he yelled at Faust.
“We don’t,” Faust said. “They can’t be opened from here. Only someone in the control room can release the locks.”
“The control room?” Kate was in the control room, as safe a place as Christian could think to put her. He cleared his mind.
Kate. I need your help. Find the controls. Open the doors.
Chapter 27
Kate was sitting in the dark, her eyes on the three guards Christian had subdued and tied up. None of them moved. Though one continued to stare at her.
She looked into his eyes, trying like Christian did to read the man’s thoughts. What she got was a wave of confusion and emotion. It was disorienting, disturbing. “Stop looking at me!” she ordered.
The guard looked away and Kate stood, feeling pensive. Moments later the alarms rang out. Christian had been afraid this might happen. He’d prearranged a meeting place in case they got split up. She stood, went to the door and moved out into the hall. It looked clear but something felt wrong.
She took a few steps when she thought she heard a voice.
Kate. I need help.
She looked back to the control room. They weren’t the guard’s thoughts. They were Christian’s.
Open the doors. I’m trapped. I need you to open the doors.
She rushed back inside the room and went to the control panel. Multiple lights were flashing. The schematic showed a group of doors closed on the third floor.
She grabbed one of the guards, heaved him up into the air and onto the seat, surprised at how easily he flew.
“Punch in the code,” she demanded. “Release the doors.”
He muttered something she couldn’t hear through the gag. She ripped it off.
“I can’t,” he said.
This time she knew he was lying, and despite the sick feeling it gave her, she pried into his mind once again. Tell me. Tell me the code!
“D…L…W…4971,” he blurted out.
She pushed him back to the floor and despite the fact that he was much larger than her, the guard scampered away, afraid.
She punched in the code. The alarms stopped instantly. The lights stopped flashing.
On the panel she found an intercom switch. “The doors should be open,” she shouted.
Christian replied over the small speaker this time. “Drake’s here,” he shouted. “Run, Kate. Run!”
Kate stood up and bolted out the door only to find Drake himself standing in the hall.
“Agent Pfeiffer, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore,” she replied. “I’ve been forced into retirement.”
He stepped toward her, but she moved with great speed herself, lunging for the wall, grabbing a fire hose form its hanger and spinning the valve.
Drake charged but was a fraction too late. The jet of water blasted into his chest and knocked him to the ground, with the hose on full blast she sent Drake sliding twenty yards down the hall, dropped the fire hose and sprinted for the door.
As she passed Drake, he grasped for her legs, but she hopped over his out stretched hands and continued to run.
She banged through the exit doors and raced down two flights of stairs. She came out into the basement, one level below where she wanted to be.
“Damn!”
She turned to go back up, but the door above flew open and Drake came rushing in.
She turned and ran the length of the basement looking for another stairway, elevator shaft or a window. She broke through a locked door and came to a room where a vast treasure of art was stored on mobile racks.
She searched through it for a way out. The area was cavernous, and to her horror, it was a dead end.
She had to go back. She turned around, but it was too late; Drake had entered the room. With her heart pounding she stopped in her tracks and crouched down.
“I know you�
��re in here, Kate.”
She didn’t respond. She could see his feet and the tip of the sword in his hands.
“I can feel you,” he added, searching for her. “Not as well as you can feel me. But then I burn brighter than you, don’t I?”
Still, she held silent. If he would just go far enough toward the other side of the room she would make a break for the exit.
He continued to speak as he walked slowly, picking through the racks. “I know what you are. I know you’re a changeling, caught up in the Half-Life. I hate to tell you, but the worst is yet to come. Why don’t you let me help you?”
You can’t help me, she thought.
“Oh, but I can,” he said, suddenly turning her way.
Damn.
“And I would help you, because I also know how special you are.”
She decided it was time to engage. She thought about a section in the far corner of the room. She saw Drake’s feet turn. Next she thought about Christian. She sensed an uptick in the rate of Drake’s dead heart.
Drake was afraid. He didn’t want to be caught down here anymore than she did. It’s a dead end.
Christian is coming. I released the doors.
“Christian is taking Faust to safety,” Drake corrected. “An inconvenience for me. A death sentence for you.”
He continued moving, sliding the racks this way and that, pushing through and coming closer.
“You’re the first changeling Christian has created in a while,” he said. “You should know that. But he didn’t tell you that. Nor did he say why he created you, did he? And now he’s left you here to die.”
Kate closed her eyes and tried to let the tension leave her. She didn’t move or breathe. She tried to make her mind a blank slate. It didn’t matter. Drake kept talking and moving closer.
“He’s using you.”
Kate tried to keep her mind quiet, but it was no use. She thought back to her first meeting with Christian, to the moment in the swamp when he saved her, to their exchange in the freight car on the train. Even in New York when she’d attacked him, he’d never done anything to harm her.
No, she thought. You’re lying. But even that thought betrayed her.
Drake plunged his sword through the racks, and it burst through the back of a painting and gashed her arm. Her response was instant and surprising even to her. She hit the racks in front of her with all her might, knocking them off their tracks. They collapsed fast, falling like dominoes, burying Drake and giving her the chance she needed.
She darted past him and this time ran up the stairs and onto the ground floor. Seconds later, she broke out into the evening air at the back of the museum by the loading docks.
She was instantly hit with multiple Taser weapons. Her body stiffened like a statue, and she crashed onto the cement as thousands of volts rushed through her body.
Lying there she heard a voice, “Drug her this time.”
It can’t be, Kate thought, as the needle punctured her arm and some kind of anesthetic began coursing through her body. Ashley!
The world blurred around her, but it didn’t go black. She heard a van pull up, the doors slide open.
“Get her inside,” Ashley shouted. “The jet is ready. We’re taking her back to the States.”
A hand grabbed the back of Kate’s hair and lifted her head. “Nick told us about Faust. And we followed you right to him. I thought you’d be smarter than that. Turns out I was wrong.”
Ashley dropped Kate’s limp head, and three male agents picked her up and tossed her into the back of the van. Within seconds they were speeding off into Friday night Amsterdam traffic.
With her hands bound and her body weak, it was all Kate could do to stay awake. As the van moved along she tried to listen in but only caught fragments of conversation up front. They were speeding now, weaving through traffic beneath the orange halogen street lamps. The light came down through the windows and hit Kate’s eyes in a hypnotic kaleidoscope of color.
And then, Kate sensed something approaching. Coming on fast.
At an intersection, the van was struck with tremendous force from the side. It rolled twice. One door flew off and side was torn open like a tin can, leaving jagged, twisted metal protruding everywhere.
When the van came to a stop the only sounds were grunts and groans from the injured agents and a strange hissing from the radiator.
Kate peered around the van, her eyes foggy, her vision unclear. Ashley lay unmoving in what was left of the passenger seat. The driver was trying to release his seat belt but was in so much pain he couldn’t reach it.
Kate tried to break free of her restraints, but in her drugged state she lacked the strength. Suddenly, the back doors of the van were ripped open. A distorted image appeared: a man reaching in for her. He broke the restraints with ease and lifted Kate from the wreckage.
“Christian?” she said, as the image blurred in and out of focus.
The man carried her to another car, placed her down in the passenger seat and then got into the driver’s side. As she looked over, the image cleared.
“We haven’t been properly introduced,” the bearded man said. “My name is Artimous.”
“You work for Drake,” she muttered, sensing his evil.
“I do,” he said putting the car into gear. “And soon, you will too.”
Chapter 28
A few blocks from the Amsterdam Central Train Station, Christian Hannover walked through a sea of bicycles all chained up together. He moved slowly as rain emptied from the dark clouds above. It had been coming down for a day and a half. Pedestrians everywhere ran for cover, ducking quickly in and out of doorways and jumping into cabs. The city was very environmentally green with a lot of foot and bicycle traffic, but on days like this, few were out and about and the bike racks were packed with thousands of unused machines.
At the moment, Christian felt as forlorn as those machines. Empty and unwanted. He’d spent the last forty-eight hours searching every corner of the city for Kate. But she was gone. He’d told her to run. He’d felt her fleeing, but then what?
With everything that happened, he’d hoped she would escape. But she’d never showed at the rendezvous, and if she was still in the city, he would have felt her. He would have been able to hone in on her.
In a rack beside the unused bikes, he saw a newspaper. Its headline read: American FBI Agents Critically Injured in Crash.
He plucked the paper from the box and read all he needed to. It wasn’t Kate – it was Ashley Blackburn and her partners, operating this time without any permission from the host country or Interpol. A big scandal was erupting, but the darker news to him was the eyewitness report of a bystander. It read that a bearded man had crashed his car into the van deliberately and had then pulled a woman from the back. A woman who matched Kate’s description exactly.
There could be no doubt now, Kate was in Drake’s hands. Where would he take her? There was really no way to know. Drake was incredibly wealthy, he had financial and personal resources that ran deep in both the human world and the world of the Fallen. By now she could be anywhere.
If she was still alive he would crack her mind and learn all she could about Christian. She was tough, but it wouldn’t matter for long. Soon enough Drake would know what she knew. And that would endanger everything.
He glanced at his watch. It was quarter to five. Time to go.
He entered the train station to the sound of the public address system announcing in a metallic and reverberating sound that the five o’clock express train was leaving momentarily.
“We don’t want to miss the train,” Faust said, as Christian walked up to him.
“No,” Christian said. “But I have a call to make first.”
He dialed a number on his satellite phone. It was almost midnight across the pond. Ida answered on the first ring.
Her voice was warm as usual. “It’s about time you called in, Sonny. You send a text that says, ‘Hide in the church and don’t com
e out,’ and then you don’t explain. I’ve been waiting on the apocalypse for two days.”
“Kate’s gone,” Christian said explaining his text. “Until this moment I wasn’t sure, but I’m certain now that Drake has her. That means he knows everything. Including where I live and who you are. He probably also knows you have the journal and that it might contain information about this Dark Star, so you stay put in that church.”
“Damn,” Ida said. “I’m sorry to hear that. She seemed like a decent woman.”
“I doubt she’s dead,” he replied. “Drake’s not that stupid. But she’s not going to be able to hold out against him for long.”
“Are you going to go after her?”
“If I had the slightest clue where he’s taken her I would. But I have no idea. And I have a bad feeling she’s going to become a bargaining chip sooner rather than later. So I’m going to need something to trade for her.”
“I guess I’ll stay put then,” Ida replied sadly. “Although the preacher’s going to think I’m crazy requesting sanctuary at this point.”
“Maybe you should go on a vacation,” he suggested. “I’m not sure the West Harlem Baptist church is going to keep you secure.”
“No place safer,” she insisted. “First of all, I’m never alone. And second of all, it’s real easy to spot any of your sun deprived kind up here. You guys stand out like a sore thumb, if you know what I mean.”
“Not all vampires are white, Ida. And none of us sparkle, no matter what you’ve heard.”
“Black, white, red, yellow, it doesn’t matter. You all have that same pasty, pale, I need-a-mega-dose-of-vitamins look to you. Trust me.”
“I’ll take that as an insult,” he said. “But good to know. Are you sure they’re going to let you stay?”
“They think I’m crazy,” she said. “But I made a donation from one of your slush funds and that seemed to smooth over the whole idea. The pastor even makes me coffee every morning.”