Heart of the Vampire (Vanderlind Castle)

by Gayla Twist

  Chapter 19

  First class really is such a better way to fly. It’s cleaner; the passengers are less crabby; the flight attendants actually smile; you don’t feel like your back is going to snap in half after the first twenty minutes. The first leg of my trip was Cleveland to Newark. It was less than a two-hour flight, and I felt like I’d barely had enough time to enjoy all the amenities of first class before we landed again. Newark to Munich, Germany, was the brutal leg of the trip. Eight hours of sitting until my butt went numb.

  I spent some time browsing through the guidebook. It appeared that Hungarian was a very complicated language more similar to Japanese in construction than to English. The Hungarians also had a song called “Gloomy Sunday” that was so sad that it was banned from being broadcast on the radio because suicides increased whenever it was played. The city had lots of gorgeous buildings that all looked like mansions or castles to me but were apparently just banks and office buildings and stuff. The Danube River divided the city in half, the west bank being Buda and the east bank being Pest. There was a very big castle on the Buda side of the city that I hoped I would get a chance to see, although I doubted it. Arriving on Thursday and leaving on Sunday didn’t leave time for anything beyond dealing with vampires.

  Each seat in first class had its own personal television. I had my choice of six different movies plus a ton of different TV programs. I started out watching some comedy that must have been in the theaters for less than a second and ended up watching a program on cloning.

  Clones are not the way they are presented in science fiction. Not even close. You are not guaranteed a duplicate of the original organism at all. You can clone a dog with spots and get another dog with spots, but the spots will be completely different, and the dog can act completely differently. A lot has to do with environment apparently. A couple of companies have tried offering pet-cloning services, but they found the public’s expectations to be very different than the actual clones. People just wanted their dead pet back and didn’t want to have to deal with raising another puppy in the exact same environment as the first one and still not get the same dog. The problem was, you could recreate an organism using the same DNA, but that didn’t guarantee you’d get the same personality or appearance. In other words, the same genetics didn’t mean the same soul.

  I began to think about cloning in terms of reincarnation. Was it similar? I knew I probably didn’t have the same DNA as Colette Gibson, but did I have the same soul? Was I just different from her because I was born during a different time period and raised differently and had different experiences?

  I knew that there were a ton of people who claimed to be the reincarnation of someone famous like Cleopatra or Napoleon or whoever, but there was only one Cleopatra, so she obviously couldn’t be reincarnated into all those people. So maybe each person only got a fraction of Cleopatra’s soul. Maybe each time a person dies, her soul can fracture so that numerous people can be the reincarnation of one person.

  I looked like Colette Gibson, and I had some dreams that were supposedly her memories, but I didn’t feel like her. It was true I felt connected to Jessie but not to Colette. Not really. Maybe I just got a fraction of Colette’s soul and there were other girls out there who would feel the same way if they met Jessie Vanderlind. And how would he feel about them? I felt a flash of jealousy for these hypothetical girls and then had to laugh at myself.

  And what about Colette? How would she feel about all of this? It was like that movie, Sleepless in Seattle. Tom Hanks feels this great connection with his wife the first time he reaches out and takes her hand, but later she dies. Then, a few years later, he feels the exact same connection with Meg Ryan when he reaches out and takes her hand. Just how many soul mates does the Tom Hanks character get? I knew the movie was supposed to be romantic and my mom really loved it, so I’d seen it a bunch, but I always ended up feeling bad for the first wife. Meg Ryan just sashays in to replace her, like she never existed. Maybe that’s how Colette would feel if she knew about Jessie and me. I loved him so much that I could only imagine how devastated Colette would have felt. It made me ache to think about it.

  Between the snacking and the entertainment and the comfortable chair, I wasn’t as mind-numbingly bored as I’d expected by the time we touched down in Munich. Then I thought I’d have two hours lounging around the airport until my next flight, but it turned out I had to go through security again for some stupid reason, and that soaked up most of my time. Before I knew it, I was back on another plane and headed for Budapest.

  I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do once I got off the plane. I had been so focused on deciding if I could really follow through with the whole thing that I hadn’t devoted much time to thinking how I would go through with the whole thing. Suddenly feeling a surge of panic, I delved back into the stack of papers Jessie had left me. There had to be some kind of instructions. Obviously, he didn’t expect me to just wander around the city looking for vampires. And Viggo had said something about a woman name Gloria finding me. Did he mean at the airport? I wish I had asked.

  I had been so weirded out by all the documents covering Jessie’s embalming and funeral preparations that I had completely overlooked a note directed to me. It was typed and had obviously been printed out on a printer, so that was probably what threw me off. It felt like a note from Jessie should be handwritten.

  My Dear Aurora,

  I’m including this note in case I don’t have an opportunity to give you this information in person before we leave. There are a few of my kind that are being quite stubborn about their stay in Tiburon, and I am trying to keep an eye on them. Please do not go outside after dark.

  A woman name Gloria will meet your flight. She will ask you for a letter from Viggo. Please do not go with anyone else. No matter who asks you or what they say. She must be named Gloria and she must ask for a letter from Viggo.

  To retrieve my casket, go to the special claims department at baggage claim. It will be heavy so pay a porter to help you clear it through customs. All the documents you need are in this packet. If anyone asks, you are bringing the body of your great grandfather back to Hungary because he wanted to be buried in the place of his birth.

  Please don’t be nervous and just trust that everything will be all right. You must destroy this note once you have finished reading it.

  All of My Love,

  J.A.V.

  I felt a little numb getting off the plane. It was like I was under water. Everything felt muffled. I had destroyed Jessie’s note by tearing it to pieces and flushing it down the first class toilet. He probably typed it instead of doing it by hand because he knew I was a sentimental idiot and would never get rid of something written by him. He was right. It was hard enough tearing the typed note. I read it at least two dozen times before getting out of my seat and then again four or five times in the bathroom. I was only finally able to flush it because I knew there was a line forming outside the door.

  Immigration was a bit nerve-wracking. I was prepared to answer that my name was Colette and I was there to bury my great grandfather, but all the guy behind the Plexiglas window asked me was, “Reason for traveling—business or pleasure?”

  I replied, “Pleasure,” and then tried not to giggle. It just sounded so absurd given the nature of my trip.

  I headed to baggage claim. My bags came out of the chute with the first round of luggage—another perk of flying first class. Usually my bag is one of the last ones on the belt. Then I looked for the Special Claims Department. The written Hungarian language did not make any kind of sense to me, but fortunately there were smaller signs in English, and I found the department without much trouble.

  I was just walking in the door and wondering what I would say when a man behind the only desk in the room looked up and said, “You are here for the coffin?”

  “Yes,” I stammered. “How did you know?”

  He gave a small shrug as if I looked like the kind of girl who would
pick up a coffin from baggage check. “You have the claim ticket?”

  “I... uh...” I didn’t have the claim ticket. Viggo hadn’t given me anything, and I doubted there was anything in the packet that Jessie had left for me. He wouldn’t have been able to get it before being checked in. “I have it here somewhere,” I told the man, and then I started vigorously rifling through all my papers.

  “It is okay. Don’t worry,” he told me, flapping a hand in my direction in a never-mind gesture. “It’s not a problem. I am sure you are not here trying to steal a body.”

  “Oh, good.” I sighed with relief. “I really have no idea what I did with it.”

  “You will need help for carrying through customs?” he asked. When I told him I did, he picked up the receiver to a phone sitting on his desk and made a call. “A porter will come help you, but he will be a minute.” He gestured toward an orange vinyl-covered chair. “Have a seat.”

  Eventually, a man wearing dirty blue coveralls showed up with a dolly and loaded a large wooden box onto it. I had assumed there would just be the coffin, but apparently it had been packed in pine for extra protection. “Enjoy your visit to Budapest,” the man from the Special Claims Department called after me in a cheerful voice. I knew he meant it to be friendly, but it was kind of a strange thing to say to a girl walking behind a coffin.

  Besides people staring at me for traveling with a corpse, customs went quite smoothly. I showed all the papers, Jessie’s passport, and mine. Both our books got stamped, and we were on our way. I really couldn’t believe how easily it all came together.

  On the other side of customs, there was a covered, open area that led outside, then a barrier and a gate. A large crowd of people was on the other side of the barrier waiting for arrivals from the various flights to walk through the gate. Behind the crowd was where cars idled while waiting to pick up passengers.

  “Aurora,” someone called from the crowd. I took a stumbling step, not sure if I should respond to my own name. I was, after all, traveling as Colette.

  “Where you go?” asked the man pushing the coffin as he bumped lightly into the back of me with the large pine box.

  “Uh... Someone is supposed to pick me up,” I explained, although I really didn’t know how much English he understood. He just nodded at me, looking impatient.

  “Aurora!” I heard the voice again. It was a man’s voice, so that wasn’t good. “I’m your ride,” the voice continued.

  I tried to see who was calling to me but couldn’t pick the voice out of the crowd. The porter bumped the coffin into the back of me again, shoving me toward the gate. He obviously had places to go and couldn’t waste all day helping a girl transport the remains of a loved one. I tried to step to one side, but he was very determined, and I was forced over the threshold into the crowd.

  A large, burly man in a black leather jacket and dark shades stepped out of the crowd and grabbed me by the arm. “Let’s go. I am your ride,” he said in choppy English, his breath reeking of onions.

  “No,” I said, trying to dig in my heels. “I’m supposed to wait for...”

  “Gloria. Yes, I know,” he told me, his breath nearly knocking me over. “Gloria could not make it. She is sick. She sent me.” He goose stepped me through the sea of people, the porter with the coffin crowding us from behind.

  Alarm bells started going off in my head. This wasn’t how Jessie wrote that things were going to happen. The burly man kept yanking me through the crowd. I was barely able to hold onto my luggage. “You have something you’re supposed to give me?” he asked.

  Okay, that was a little more reassuring. I tried to slow down to reach for the letter. “Yeah, I have a...”

  The large man was in no mood to stop and listen. “Just keep quiet and keep moving,” he growled.

  His telling me to keep quiet really let me know I was in trouble. When a baby is sleeping and someone asks you to keep quiet, you lower your voice, but when someone is dragging you through a crowd toward a car and orders you to keep quiet, that’s the time to make a fuss. The burly man obviously wanted to draw as little attention to us as possible. I had the exact opposite plan.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted, seriously digging in my heels. “I don’t know you, and I’m not going with you! Leave me alone!”

  He tried to clamp his hand over my mouth, but I wasn’t tolerating that. I bit down hard until I tasted blood. “You bitch!” he yelped, shoving me away, hard.

  I stumbled several steps and went down sharply on one knee. People cleared out of my path, but most of them were trying not to look at me or get involved. I guess no one likes a fuss at the airport.

  One woman stepped forward to help me up. “Are you all right?” she asked. She was petite but apparently very strong because she practically hauled me to my feet.

  My knee was throbbing, but I said, “I’m fine, but I don’t know that man, and he won’t leave me alone.”

  The burly man was tending to his wound and shooting daggers with his eyes in my direction. He was wrapping a handkerchief around his bleeding hand.

  “You are Miss Gibson?” the woman asked. “Colette Gibson?”

  “Uh... yes.”

  “I am Gloria,” she said with barely a trace of any accent. “You have a letter from Viggo for me?”

  “You’re Gloria? Then who’s that guy?” I jerked my head toward the man. “He said you were sick.”

  “No, just delayed,” she told me. “Probably by his friends. Is that Mr. Vanderlind behind you?” I had to assume she meant Jessie in the box.

  “Yes, that’s Jessie.”

  Gloria whistled at the sullen porter who was just standing there as if nothing of interest was going on. She shouted some orders at him in Hungarian and then flipped him a coin, which went spinning right past my head. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure she’d just tossed him a solid gold Krugerrand. The porter caught the coin, stared at it a second in disbelief, and then answered her something in the affirmative, a broad smile breaking across his face.

  Turning to me, Gloria grabbed one of my bags and said, “We have to go. Very quickly. I have a car waiting.”

  We were too late. The burly man saw what was happening and came lunging toward us, shouting something in Hungarian. I knew we didn’t stand a chance if we tried to run. Not without a good head start, at least. The large man was coming straight for me, reaching for something in his breast pocket, which I had to assume was a gun. I stepped decisively forward and struck him in the eye with the palm heel of my hand. It was a solid hit, which he hadn’t been expecting. He reeled backwards. While he was unguarded, I kicked him hard, right where it counts. The big man crashed to the ground like a giant redwood, people barely having time to scramble out of his way.

  I turned to look at Gloria. She raised both her well-crafted eyebrows. “I’m impressed,” she said.

  “My mom thinks every girl should know self defense,” I told her. “But he’s not going to be down for long. Where’s your car?”

  Chapter 20

  Two seconds later, I was in the passenger’s seat of a black sports car. I had my bags in my lap. I wasn’t going to waste time trying to get them in the trunk. Gloria stomped on the gas, and with a squeal of tires, we were on our way out of the airport.

  “Who the hell was that guy?” I asked, twisting in my seat to see what he was doing, but he’d already disappeared into the crowd.

  “Mafia, probably,” Gloria said with a nonchalant sniff.

  “Mafia?” I gulped. “You’re kidding.”

  She shrugged again. “If you wish me to be kidding then I am kidding.”

  “What the hell does the Mob want with me?”

  “I’m sure he is just a paid man. To kill you or kidnap you. There is no reason to worry,” she said. I wondered what Gloria considered a good reason to worry.

  “Do you think he’ll follow us?” I asked, craning my head around the other way to see if there were any suspicious cars behind us.


  “Of course, he will follow,” she said, as if it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. “If he wants to earn his money, he will follow. But don’t worry.” A smile broke across her face. “This car is very fast, and I enjoy driving.”

  As we raced along, I had a better chance to get a look at Gloria. She had straight black hair that was cropped at her chin and a row of thick bangs, also cut straight giving her face a very geometrical shape. Her eyebrows were black and very thin. She was actually quite pretty with delicate features and a Cupid’s bow mouth that, instead of being lacquered in dark red like I would have expected, she’d highlighted with a pale pink.

  Abruptly pulling off the main road, Gloria drove down a dirt road that ran almost parallel to the one we had just been on. There was nothing but farmland around us and the skeletal remains of an abandoned barn.

  She directed the sports car into the mouth of the barn. Once the shadows fell over us, she put the car in park. I really hadn’t expected her to stop. “What’s going on?” I asked, scrambling at my seatbelt and wondering if I’d put my trust in the wrong person. There was nothing around us but vacant fields. I wouldn’t even know where to run.

  Gloria lifted a finger in the air to quiet me. She was looking intently out the driver’s side window toward the road. We sat there in silence for what must have been close to a minute. Several cars drove past, but none of them caught Gloria’s attention. Finally, a black sedan went zipping past at an excessive rate of speed. Nodding to herself, Gloria turned to look at me. “Do you have the letter?” she asked. “The one from Viggo? I would like to read it now.”