Eric tuned out the rest; probably it was picturesque as hell in terms of small-town family sagas, but he didn’t have the free RAM to deal with it right now. He got a vague impression of a small wooden building, black in a clearing with smoke trickling up from a chimney to merge into the falling flakes. Fortunately it didn’t appear to be made of gingerbread.
“Grüss Gott,” the German called after them as Peter and Cheba helped him in. “Und Behüte dich Gott.”
Peter shut the door with his heel after he’d helped Eric in and eased him into a chair; fortunately someone had come out and got everything going before they arrived, and it wasn’t too uncomfortable.
“That means greet God and then may you have the help of God,” he said. “Personally, I’d like to put off meeting God just as long as I can.”
“It’s Eric who needs God’s help right now,” Cheba said. “And ours, first of all.”
They got him into bed. When Eric woke again he was wet with sweat but clearheaded, feeling weak and washed out but hungry. He wasn’t good to be winning any Ironman triathlons any time soon, but from the way he felt, things would get better from here on. They’d made his bed up in a single main room that evidently occupied most of the cottage, and there was a fire of pine logs burning in a fieldstone fireplace, drawing well but giving a spicy tang to the air that was like and unlike the piñon wood he’d grown up with. Under that was the slightly musty smell of a very old wooden house that was kept up but not lived in much recently, seeping out of the ancient timbers as they warmed.
The interior had much the same feeling, a few modern touches around the windows, but the rest mostly crude carving like being inside a cuckoo clock of the type he’d seen taking his nieces and nephews to the International Museum of Folk Art back in Santa Fe. Someone had done this with the simplest of tools, on long winter nights when he couldn’t work at his usual job.
Leon and Leila were playing in front of the fire, with some wooden toys that looked just as old but were carved in an entirely different style from the rest of the house, a monkey and some type of antelope and a rhinoceros. For a moment his mind wandered off wondering how they’d ended up here, but the cooking smells distracted him.
The door opened for a second and Cheba kicked it closed behind her; she had an armful of split pinewood that she emptied into the bin beside the fireplace, still favoring the left arm and shoulder where they’d been claw-raked.
“So, you are here again,” she said. “It is the afternoon of the day after the day we got here—it gets dark so quickly! Come, I will help you.”
“To hell with that, you got hurt worse than I did,” he grumbled. Then: “Okay, I won’t yell at you for a helping arm.”
One of the things that had been added to the cottage was a small but modern bathroom, and it was inexpressible relief to get clean and get dressed. That proved well within his capacities, as long as he took it slowly. Peter served dinner, which was thick German bread and butter, and a pot of a sort of casserole-like thing made with ham, potatoes, onions, canned cream of broccoli soup and cheese on top.
“Minnesota cuisine, the classic hotdish,” he said. “Minnesota cuisine minus the lutefisk.”
“What is this lutefisk?” Cheba asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Peter said. “Not before you eat. The people from the Gasthaus certainly left us a well-stocked kitchen, but I think they use this as a vacation cottage now; there’s a dozen pairs of cross-country skis up in the attic, and they’ve got a winter icebox. It makes me feel nostalgic. The back is covered with metal gauze but open to the outside to let in the cold, there were a few of those left in my hometown when I was a kid.”
“Don’t get too nostalgic,” Eric said dryly.
“Seriously, this whole area does remind me of home a bit. And there’s some damned odd stuff up in the attic bedrooms; somebody carved R. Hannay was here 1916 and who is this mysterious bugger v. Einem? on the rafters.”
“Why’s that odd?” Cheba said.
“Well, Hannay isn’t a German name; it’s Scottish, I think. And the language is English, in 1916. When England and Germany were at war—and back then virtually no one in a little place like this would have known English.”
He shook his head. “One of life’s mysteries and going to stay that way, I guess. Like some more immediate ones—why they didn’t turn us over to the cops, for starters.”
The twins had mopped their plates with slices of dark pumpernickel and started in on some strudel. Leon looked up:
“Oh, that’s because we told Greta what was gonna happen to you if they didn’t help. Greta is the cool old lady.”
“Not all of what was gonna happen,” Leila said, licking her fork. “We could tell she wouldn’t want kids talking about some of things they were going to do to you before they killed you.”
“Ah…Thanks,” Eric said; he felt a shivering chill that had nothing to do with any lingering plasmodium in his bloodstream. Because I don’t want to hear about them either.
“Sort of like that stuff Maman likes to do sometimes,” Leila said. “We could sort of see it ahead if you didn’t leave. That’s been happening lately. Just sometimes, you know? Seeing what’s going to happen.” She shook her head. “No, really what might happen, like sometimes in a video game, if you do one thing you get another? It seems like it’s easier right around this place.”
“It would’ve been like Maman having fun, but more gross,” Leon amplified. “And of course we didn’t want that to happen to you guys,” he finished with a beaming smile.
Definitely a chill in the air, Eric thought.
The kids had evidently been running around in the snow most of the day, and didn’t object when they were brought to the sleeping bags upstairs. When the three adults were sitting with coffee, Peter spoke:
“I did some scouting around here,” he said. At Eric’s raised eyebrow he grinned and waggled a reproving finger: “Hey, I may not be a deadly jarhead detective but I have done things that didn’t involve staring at books or computer screens. I run and ski cross-country, and I used to hunt deer with my dad when I was a teenager.”
Eric shrugged. “My turn to say sorry. What did you find?”
“It’s open pine forest mostly, a lot less undergrowth than I’m used to, and with clearings here and there. The thing is that we’re not all that far from the Danube cross-country, and it looks like good country for it.”
“Cross-country…Oh. You mean on skis? I think I could hack that with another night’s sleep, but what about Cheba and the kids?”
“The children have done a little of this thing with skis,” Cheba said. “I tried today with Peter showing me. I can do it if I must, and I must.”
Eric thought. And God, it’s a relief to be able to do that coherently.
“I wouldn’t go for it if we didn’t have your little gadgets, professor, but we do. They’ll look for us on the roads first and they’ll assume we could be hundreds of miles away by now. But we’ve stayed here as long as we can.”
His mind balanced distances and alternatives. Then he nodded: “If we can get to the river, we should be able to pick up some other form of transport, car, whatever. What’s the but, though? I can see there is one.”
Peter looked down at his hands spread on the table. “There are a lot of old bunkers scattered through these woods. I spotted four or five and I’m not an expert on that type of thing.”
Eric rubbed two fingers on his chin; they skritched on coarse black stubble, which made him remind himself to shave tomorrow morning. “This is Germany, home of the bunker.”
Peter’s expression was grim. “They’re old, but they’re not abandoned. Not completely. The doors and firing slits and ventilators have all been welded shut or plugged.”
“Thou, oh evil manifest and invasive, get thee gone,” Cheba swore in her Nahuatl-flavored Spanish. “I know why. She talked to me sometimes of their habits and customs. That is for the brujos to hide from the sun. The ones who
live beyond death and have no real bodies often make such hiding places all around the places they haunt. That way they can go far from their home, almost until dawn, and have a hole to jump in at the last minute.”
Eric hissed through his teeth. It made an unpleasant degree of sense; the main weakness of Shadowspawn who’d shed their bodies, the post-corporeals, was that they needed to hide during the daytime. If there was a network of cubbyholes like that spread around the place…then the limit wouldn’t have to include time to get back to home base.
“Can we make it to the Danube, or at least the inhabited area, in one day?” Eric asked. “So we’re not out in the countryside at sundown, when the little doggies come out to play?”
Peter shrugged and raised his hands. “I could, easy; I could do it by…oh, noon. But you’re sick, and you haven’t done much of this lately; Cheba’s hurt and she’s never done it before at all; and the kids are, well, kids. It’ll be close. I suppose it all depends on how fast they find our trail.”
“Not long,” Cheba said. “At night, they can run as wolves to catch our scent, fly as owls to see. They know we left the village, and they are hunters. The Power makes the forms they take, but the forms are real enough—real noses, real eyes.”
Real teeth, real claws, Eric thought, and sighed.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “But I got this nasty feeling it’s our best bet. Mierda.”
The sun was just over the horizon, making the clouds go pale in the east, and Eric felt both bloated and very slightly queasy from the enormous breakfast he’d crammed down—ham, scrambled eggs, French toast, pancakes, left-over pastries—and badly in need of another four hours’ sleep. A session of malaria was no joke. Cheba looked logy too, either from the pain keeping her awake or from the painkillers making her drowsy now. The kids were excited and looking forward to the day, but also a little sleepy—that was probably their Shadowspawn genes. Apparently the natural pattern for purebloods was to stay up most of the night, wake up in the middle of the afternoon and come fully active at sunset, whether they were nightwalking or not. The only one who looked fully ready to go was Peter, and Eric could sense tightly controlled anxiety in the other man. He didn’t blame him, either, with this party of infants and cripples at his ass and some pretty literal bogeymen hiding in the woods. It said something for him that he hadn’t found any occasion to suggest scouting ahead or something of that nature.
“These boots fit pretty well,” the Minnesotan said. “But they’re not our boots, and they’re old, obviously just left here when people moved up to better. I warmed them up and rubbed them with some wax and bent them as much as I could. If anyone’s feet start to hurt tell me right away.”
He’d checked everyone’s socks before they put the boots on too, making sure they were snug and smooth with no wrinkles. Eric appreciated that; if you took care of your gear, your gear took care of you. If you didn’t, it would always fail at the moment you needed it most, and one of the worst point failure sources were your feet. That had been true in both his jobs, and it was just as important here whether he was going to chase or be chased; plus Shadowspawn luck always hit your weakest point when it was operating against you. On Peter’s advice they’d eaten everything they could stuff down, and they were all carrying some food as well as the other essentials, and thermoses of hot sweet chocolate with a shot of brandy in each except the one for the kids.
There’s absolutely nothing on earth that burns fuel like cross-country skiing and cold weather, Peter had said, dead serious.
Eric believed him, though climbing mountains in body armor and pack probably came a very close second. Peter had worked hard on getting the old skis in order too, and as they filed out he checked everyone’s bindings one last time before putting on his own.
Eric glanced up at the sky, then gave the surface a careful eyeball. It wasn’t snowing now though from the mealy smell in the air it might, but there were something like two feet on the ground, drifted in places. Slightly damp snow, the best kind to make a snowman out of. It would be impossible to get through on foot—not without snowshoes or skis. Impossible for people, at least. They’d squared away the cottage and locked the doors and left a couple of hundred euros on the mantelpiece; small enough thanks for kindness that had almost certainly saved their lives. Saved them from a very bad death. Saved the kids too; he was starting to think it was really worthwhile to take risks to keep them from being raised to be the sort of person their mother was. For their own sakes, as well as to keep from unleashing two more monsters on the world.
“Okay,” he said, a verbal placeholder to get their attention. “Peter will be breaking trail. Then you, Cheba, then the kids, then me on the tail. Don’t talk unless you have to. Don’t waste any energy, ’cause we’re going to need it all. As long as we can, we’ll do forty minutes and then a ten-minute rest. Steady does it, we don’t work up too much of a sweat. We may need to go real quick at the end. Leon, Leila, if you can, ah, tell that anyone’s coming after us, sing out right away, okay?”
Because I’m sure as shit going to pay attention if I start feeling that prickling crawly feeling, too. Funny, it doesn’t help all that much now that I know it’s real, because now I’ll have to start wondering whether I’m really feeling it or just getting nervous.
They nodded. Peter dug in his sticks and slid off across the clearing with an economical-looking motion, skis slightly angled out, pushing off the inside edges like a skater getting started. Cheba followed, imitating him as best she could and touching her left pole lightly; the gouges in that shoulder must still hurt like hell, and the scabs would break any time she had to do anything strenuous with it. The children came next, moving smoothly in a way that showed they had done this before but still having to take more strides; there was just no way around the fact that their legs were shorter. Maybe that made the fact that one of the adults was sick and the other was clawed up and had never been on skis before yesterday a little less crucial, since they couldn’t have outpaced the children anyway. That was looking on the bright side. The darker side was that they might need all the speed they could get if push came to shove.
“And speaking of pushing, compadre,” Eric muttered to himself. “¡Vamanos!”
Shove—slide, shove—slide, use the poles for balance and to keep the arms swinging. He’d done this before, there was a Nordic-style trail just above the ski basin that overhung Santa Fe and his ex-wife, Julia, had been an enthusiast; he’d gone along for her sake, and because it was a lot less monotonous than running on a treadmill at the gym. The problem was that he hadn’t done any for six years, since she left to find herself, and he hadn’t liked it enough to keep it up afterwards plus the negative associations. He was fit when he wasn’t sick and physically capable, but this used a particular set of muscles and they were going to make him pay.
Breathe in, hold it for the slightest second as he moved, breathe out. The cold damp air felt lousy, and then very slightly better as his body warmed up. Into the shade of the trees, mostly pretty big pines seventy or eighty feet high, clear of branches to above head height. Farther up they were as much white as green, last night’s fall clinging heavily to the boughs. Whenever the wind stirred them little torrents would fall down, landing with pattering thumps. There didn’t seem to be many birds, or much of anything else though they passed deer tracks, and a fleeting red streak up a tree might have been a European squirrel. And once what he was pretty sure were the marks of a raccoon, which would’ve been startling if someone hadn’t once told him they’d escaped from fur farms here long ago.
His muscles ached, and so did his joints and his neck and his head. Forty minutes, and he felt like it had been going on for hours.
“Halt,” he said, not too loud as they came to a convenient fallen tree, just the right height to sit on.
Peter was breathing about as hard as he was; breaking trail for the others was distinctly more effort than following. Eric might have felt guilty about that, if it h
ad made any sense. As it was he just wasn’t in any shape to spell the better skier, and his more experienced senses were better employed at the rear, since he couldn’t be in two places at once. If someone was chasing them, they’d probably come up from behind. Cheba was looking a little gray, but had enough energy to keep the kids from skylarking—he didn’t expect her to complain until she fell over.
Going to be an interesting life with that one, he thought as he unscrewed the top of the thermos. Then as he took the first sip: Whoa, when did we decide she was going to be my own personal triumph of hope over experience? And she’ll certainly have something to say about that herself.
And: Adrian, I hope you’re watching over us. Because we’re going to need it.
“Da ima okus govna!” Adrian muttered.
“I have enough Polish to translate that,” Ellen said sympathetically.
“Croatian, actually, but it’s closely related,” Adrian said, spitting into the fluted marble of the sink.
He tossed the blood bag into the waste container; let the hotel staff think what they might. She could see how he fought not to gag at the taste, gray-faced amid the splendors of the bathroom that went with the Hotel Imperial’s suite. The sharp coppery metallic scent certainly didn’t smell very appetizing, but then warm blood didn’t attract either…for her. He’d shared the subjective experience of fresh blood with her telepathically, and…
Wow. Just wow. Just as good as being bitten, in its way. And when you throw love into the bargain…better still, love and sex into the bargain…
“Here,” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Just a sip to clear your mouth.”
He looked up at her sharply, and she shook her head. “No, it’s not the addiction getting away from me. Just a sip, darling. I’m testing my blood regularly, don’t worry. Condition fully controlled.”
Having a monogamous relationship with her meant that Adrian had to use stored blood fairly often, particularly if he was Wreaking; there was a limit to how much she could donate. The way drinking the stuff made him miserable was a proof of love too, in its way. He kissed her palm, then took the hand and touched his lips to the inside of her wrist. That gave her a tingle, both because it was Adrian and then the sharp little sensation and—
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