Written in the Blood

by Stephen Lloyd Jones

  She cried out, screaming her anger, driving on her attack yet finding no target for her thrusts, and then – then – she heard, or thought she heard, a sound from far beyond her, outside the circle of space she knew the Merénylő must inhabit.

  It came again, and she imagined he must hear it too, because the air moved once more, a breath of cold against the shuddering agony in her face. This time it was further away, as if her attacker had turned, and now she heard something strange, a wet sound, a plummeting sound, like an evisceration, an outpouring, and while she hadn’t heard a second voice announce its arrival she heard the violence that it brought, a meat-like ripping. Someone fell against her. She probed with her spare hand, felt the Merénylő, knew it must be him from his lack, even this close, of any identifying scent.

  Hannah plunged the knife into him. It entered his flesh with the softest of resistance, as if despite his calling his body comprised more of fat than muscle. She screamed again, cursing him, stabbing and cutting, driving the blade in and out, until he toppled away from her and she couldn’t use her knife any more, couldn’t use it in case she hit Gabriel by mistake.

  Whatever had arrived to save her had not spoken, had not announced itself with anything except the silent killing it brought.

  But now it did. And when it spoke, it opened a window in Hannah, opened a grave.

  ‘Hannah,’ it said, and its voice trembled with emotion.

  Its voice.

  Jakab’s voice.

  Her grip loosened on the knife. She heard it clatter to the floor.

  She swayed, untethered. Felt the blood pouring from her butchered face.

  Moaning, incredulous, she thrust her hands out in front of her, fingers splayed. She twisted left and right, felt the blood flying from her ruptured cheeks, heard it patter onto the linoleum floor like a sudden squall of rain.

  It can’t be. But it is.

  He’s dead. But he’s here.

  He’s back.

  CHAPTER 38

  Lake Como, Italy

  Enveloped in mist so thick she could barely see the surface of the lake, Leah ended the call with her mother and loosened her grip on the outboard’s throttle. The boat’s prow settled in the water and she canted her head to one side, listening intently for the sound of engines that would indicate either a pursuit or an approaching disaster in the form of another innocent vessel.

  The faces of the children pointed towards her, searching her expression for signs that the danger was over. She wished she could offer them that.

  At the front of the boat, Soraya still cradled one-year-old Elias. ‘Call Luca,’ she said. ‘It’s the only place we can go.’

  Leah nodded. She dialled his number, and when it began to ring she twisted the throttle, planting her feet as the boat once again picked up speed.

  He answered on the first ring. ‘Leah.’

  ‘I don’t have much time. We need help.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She swallowed, perilously close to crying. Refused to show her desperation to the young faces that studied her. ‘The tanács. We were ambushed, Luca. The Főnök is dead. Others, too.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘You don’t need to know. But I have the children with me. They need protection.’

  ‘Then bring them. Do you have transport?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘I’m working on it.’

  ‘How far away are you?’

  ‘Not far. A few hours.’

  ‘Leah—’

  ‘It’s OK. Soraya’s with me.’

  An expelled breath. ‘Is she hurt?’

  ‘No. She’s fine.’

  ‘You saved her.’

  ‘We saved each other. I’ve got to go.’

  Leah stuffed the phone into her pocket. Ahead, she saw a gap in the mist. She increased their speed and there, through a sliding curtain of grey, she recognised the stone-walled harbour of Menaggio.

  The moment their boat bumped up against the dock, Leah jumped out and tied up.

  On the lake, the mist seemed to be thinning. Not good news. Menaggio was one of the nearest towns to Villa del Osservatore; the tanács would almost certainly send one of their boats here.

  ‘I’m going to find transport,’ she told Soraya. ‘If I’m not back in two minutes, get them out.’

  Leah ran along the top of the harbour wall, eyes scanning the town’s small square. Even this late in the season, tourists swarmed like bees: holidaying couples, families with pushchairs, coach parties following tour guides.

  In the square itself, a car rally seemed to be in full flow. She saw polished rows of Volkswagen Beetles, Campers and Karmann Ghias. Leah slid into the crowd, allowing herself to be carried along towards the mass of enthusiasts chatting, laughing and drinking coffee as they hovered around their vehicles.

  In a bay closest to this corner of the square, she saw an old split-screen VW bus. Wearing British plates, it sat low to the ground on polished chrome alloys. The driver’s door was open. A man in his fifties sat behind the wheel, nursing a Styrofoam cup of tea. His ears were pierced with rows of silver rings, and a cluster of feathered pendants hung from leather cords around his neck. Eyes closed, his lips moved in silent accompaniment to the music playing on the bus’s stereo.

  Leah studied his face as she drew closer, and then she crouched down beside the vehicle, head bowed.

  A long time since she’d done this. And always, before, in privacy and with the luxury of time. She concentrated, drowned out the sounds of the square, and waited for the pain to hit.

  A minute later, face smarting as if she’d been punched, she rose to her feet, leaned into the van and shook the driver by his shoulder.

  His eyes snapped open, and when he saw her face his jaw dropped and he poured the cup of tea into his lap. Blanching, he groped for words, finding none to help him.

  ‘I need your van,’ she said, although it didn’t sound like her voice.

  He stared down into his lap at the spilled tea. When he found her eyes again he lurched upright, almost as if he were having a heart attack. He slid away from her onto the passenger seat. ‘Which . . . which year?’ he asked. When she didn’t reply, he swallowed, adding, ‘You don’t look any older, so that’s a clue. Aren’t we meant to – I don’t know – avoid each other?’

  Leah stared at him, uncomprehending. And then she thought she understood. ‘You’re probably right,’ she replied. ‘I don’t have time to explain, but you need to leave. Now.’

  He scrambled out. ‘Should I say the same thing? Next time?’

  Leah slid behind the wheel of the bus, turned the key, heard its air-cooled engine splutter to life. ‘Yeah, you definitely should.’

  The man nodded. Something seemed to occur to him. ‘Don’t forget about the clutch,’ he told her. ‘It sticks, remember?’

  Waving an acknowledgement, Leah edged the camper van out of the square and nosed through the throng of tourists to the harbour edge where she’d tied the boat.

  When she saw Soraya, she sounded the horn and waved.

  CHAPTER 39

  Lake Como, Italy

  Izsák tracked the white Porsche Cayenne as he followed, two cars behind, the winding street clinging to Lake Como’s shore. He passed roadside trattorias squeezed between balconied apartment buildings, campaniles, high-sided walls with railed steps.

  Ahead the road squeezed into a single lane, and Izsák resisted the temptation to sound his horn at the mopeds and delivery trucks cutting their way towards him.

  The Cayenne began to climb as the route took them higher, curving up towards a wooded peninsula thrusting out into Como’s waters.

  Abruptly the road widened into two lanes, leaving the clustered buildings behind. Izsák wound through a grove of cypresses, and as he neared the hump of the peninsula he saw a tall stone-built wall begin to flank the roadside nearest the lake. Now three cars in front, the Cayenne slowed as it approached a crenellated gatehouse built into the wall. It turned in, swe
eping between tall iron gates.

  Izsák glanced through the gatehouse as he passed. A grand drive terminated at the entrance to a huge villa complex perched upon the rock, replete with covered walkways, arched bridges and terraces that stepped down all the way to the water’s edge.

  Villa del Osservatore.

  He recognised it immediately, passing the entrance without slowing. A hundred yards further on, the villa’s twelve-foot perimeter wall receded from the road. Checking behind him, Izsák pulled his car over, scrubby plants snapping beneath the tyres. He stopped directly beside the wall and switched off the engine.

  His vehicle wasn’t hidden here, but he wasn’t too concerned about that – if all went to plan, he’d be revealing himself soon enough. He grabbed a rifle case from the passenger seat and climbed out. Ducking down beside the car, he studied the top of the wall for cameras or motion-detecting equipment. He saw none.

  Moving fast, he tossed the rifle case over, listening to it thump to the ground on the other side. After waiting for another pause in traffic, he clambered onto the roof of his car and leaped, grabbing the top of the wall and dragging himself over.

  He landed in raked topsoil and threw himself flat. The rifle case lay a few yards away. Izsák crawled over to it and removed the weapon from inside. He snapped back its bolt and raised the scope to his eyes.

  No one stood outside the villa. No guards patrolled its grounds. Outside the main entrance sat a cluster of three Range Rovers. Behind them, the Cayenne. Its engine was still running, but Izsák could not see its interior through the car’s tinted windows.

  Rising to a crouch, he crept towards the thin line of trees screening him from the villa’s windows.

  Off to his right, a flock of birds burst into the sky. Izsák turned in time to see another vehicle pass through the gates, this one a black van. It rolled along the drive, gravel popping from its tyres, and pulled up behind the Cayenne. Its engine died.

  Izsák reached the tree nearest to the lawn and put his back against it. He took two breaths to calm himself, turned and dropped to one knee, lifting up the rifle scope.

  The van’s door opened and a figure stepped out. When he saw who it was, the air punched from his lungs as if he had been struck. Izsák slid onto his backside, the rifle falling to the ground.

  It was her.

  It was Georgia.

  Even though he hadn’t seen his daughter since the day he’d driven into Dawson City to pick up her birthday present, even though scores of winters and summers had come and gone since, his heart told him what his eyes saw, and then it broke in two inside his chest.

  Her eyes were the same seaweed green. Her hair, even in the misty half-light of Como’s late afternoon, shone with captured sunlight. The baby fat had melted from her face in the intervening years, and in her fine bone structure and wide mouth he saw Lucy, his dead wife, and the sight brokered a pain in him that bent him double in the soft earth.

  It isn’t her, you fool. Even if Georgia is in there somewhere, she’s been locked up alone for over eighty years. She’s a memory, now. You know it.

  He shook his head, gasping. Curled his lip and bared his teeth. Tensed himself against the pain that flickered, snake-like, through his guts.

  Don’t think about what you lost. Don’t think about what’s gone. You grieved for Lucy and Georgia both. Decades of grief. Do what you came here to do. Set her free.

  Panting, he crawled back to his rifle. Its barrel was slick with moisture from the ground on which it lay. He picked it up, heard the breath rasping in his throat, saw it misting in front of him. He closed his mouth. Raised the scope to his eyes. Saw her again. Saw her blur in front of him.

  Biting back his frustration, Izsák lowered the rifle. Scoured the tears from his eyes. Lifted the weapon a third time.

  All those years, searching. All for this. He’d hunted lélek tolvajok across oceans and mountains, in locked warehouses and remote farmsteads.

  He’d found a few. A nest, once, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Another, deep in the uninhabited heart of the Białowieża Forest, on the border of Poland and Belarus. He’d destroyed them both, nearly lost his life on each occasion. But he’d never found the right nest, never found Georgia. And now, so close that he could be at her side in under a minute should he choose, here she was.

  He squinted down the scope. Placed her head between its crosshairs.

  While he’d spent all those years searching, only ever with the intention of ending her life, he hadn’t expected that day to be this one.

  Georgia gazed back along the drive to the gatehouse by the road. Sweeping it with her seaweed eyes, she turned and stared directly down the scope of his rifle, directly into his soul.

  It was an illusion, of course; there was no way she could see him clearly from where she stood. But illusion or not, he felt his throat constricting in pride and in heartbreak at the beautiful shell his daughter had left behind.

  His finger tightened on the trigger. He took a single breath. Emptied his lungs. Said goodbye.

  A noise made him hesitate. A car door opening.

  He lifted his eye from the scope, blinked, and saw the door of the Cayenne swing wide. A second tolvaj emerged from it, and Izsák could tell from its sunken eyes and hanging skin that the demise of this one’s host was near.

  The creature was dressed outlandishly, clad in three-piece tweed and polished Oxford shoes. A yellow cravat was tied at its throat. Its hair – wormy dreadlocks, matted with grease and trailing down its spine – was crowned by a fedora decorated with a single jay feather. In one hand it clutched a cane of smooth black wood, topped by a flared python head.

  Its strange outfit, signature, perhaps, of just how long this specimen had stalked the earth, spooled from Izsák a horror so absolute he almost turned and fled. In all his years he had not seen one as ancient as this, so obviously belonging to a world far older than his own.

  It swept the villa’s grounds with eyes like focused swabs of darkness, and when Izsák felt its gaze pass over him he cringed away.

  Holding its cane before it, the tolvaj limped towards Georgia, mouth open, crusted tongue poking from its lips like a segment of fire-blackened steak.

  Izsák braced himself, hand slippery on the rifle’s barrel, finger trembling against the trigger.

  Don’t let her down. Don’t abandon her. Do it now. Pull the trigger. NOW.

  His smell preceded him as he approached, that wet-rot stink of corruption that signalled the end was coming. Ignoring it, closing her nose to its foulness, she went to him. When she kissed his mouth, she tasted blood and swallowed it. ‘Oh, my darling,’ she said. ‘Not you, too. We have to get you inside. Let me lead.’

  He stiffened at her words, drawing himself taller. He did not like to be pitied.

  ‘No need,’ he replied, voice like birch twigs. ‘No need . . . need.’ He caught the whispery repetition of his words, the slurring, and his expression darkened further, angered by that betrayal of his condition. His tongue whipped out, and when it licked his lips it left a dark smear. ‘Are they here?’

  She nodded. ‘We don’t have long. The journey’s exhausted them. I need to go inside, make sure that—’

  With a wave of his hand he dismissed her. She watched him move around to the rear of the van, his cane scraping on the gravel, and then she turned towards the villa, where salvation waited.

  Ivan Tóth sat at the head of the table in the villa’s banqueting room and surveyed the gathered tanács around him.

  If only Joó, or someone else, had kept them out of the library, had spared them the sight of Catharina’s blood-drenched corpse. They appeared visibly shaken by what they had seen.

  No coup had ever been achieved without bloodshed, and no undertaking such as this ever went strictly to plan. But the scene that had greeted the tanács had been so visceral, so shocking, it had stained their consciences and destroyed their resolve.

  Worse, the story that dreadful tableau had told was c
lear: the Főnök had faced unassailable odds and, instead of cringing away from her fate, she had faced it with bravery and stoicism, even managing to kill her attackers before succumbing to her wounds.

  With so many witnesses, word would inevitably leak out. It was the kind of last stand from which legends were built. And Tóth knew that unless he walked a very careful path, history would judge his own part in this poorly.

  On the far wall, a portrait of Catharina seemed to watch him. Tóth had sat at this end of the table deliberately; he had not wanted the less stalwart members of his council to labour under those reproachful eyes.

  He might not have control of this situation, but the illusion of control was more pressing than its reality. ‘Gentlemen, we have some decisions to make. And quickly. First we need to appoint a new head of the Belső Őr. I’ve placed Makovecz in temporary control. I’d like your thoughts.’

  ‘It’s an obvious solution,’ Horváth replied, eyes cold. ‘And one that hardly merits our time. What’s the situation in Calw?’

  ‘I expect an update from Calw shortly,’ he replied, ignoring the man’s tone.

  ‘And Leah Wilde? Where is she?’

  ‘We’ll have her very soon. And then we can announce what we’ve achieved today, before—’

  ‘What we’ve achieved?’ Horváth shook his head. ‘We haven’t achieved anything. You’ve achieved chaos and slaughter. Little else.’

  ‘We voted on this!’ he shouted, furious at the man’s accusations.

  ‘With guns to our heads, we voted,’ Horváth spat. ‘Is that the kind of legitimacy we can expect from now on?’

  Tóth’s hands tightened into fists. With effort, he relaxed them. And then his phone started ringing. He cancelled the call. More bad news, he suspected. He wouldn’t receive it in front of these increasingly hostile eyes.

  The illusion of control.

  Standing, he nodded at Joó to take command, marched to the banqueting room’s doors and slammed through them.

  The hallway was deserted. Ignoring the debris littering the library entrance, Tóth passed the staircase. He found the newly appointed head of his Belső Őr at the bottom.