Written in the Blood

by Stephen Lloyd Jones

  She didn’t think she would she see Elijah again in this life, and she had been careful not to ask for it in her prayer. That was not a request Hannah Wilde would have made, and Etienne was determined to follow her example. All she had asked was that Elijah be saved.

  Praying to a God she had never before considered might be as foolish as all her previous choices, but right now, in this half-frozen cell, it seemed like the only option left.

  Please, God, he’s so young. Elijah deserves a life. Do what you want with me. Please just give my baby a chance.

  For the last few hours, the hiss of the van’s tyres on the road had been a constant companion. But now the vehicle slowed, and abruptly she heard that hiss become a muted crunch of wheels rolling through snow

  The van seesawed. It slipped and climbed. Hannah’s head bounced on the side wall.

  ‘Smoke,’ she said, bracing Gabriel against her as the floor rocked beneath them. ‘Something’s burning out there.’ Her face grew taut, as if dark memories spooled inside her mind. ‘Remember what I said. Together, we can do this. But I need your help.’

  ‘I’m not sure I—’

  ‘Yes. You can. You have to.’

  ‘We don’t really know what he’s thinking,’ Etienne said, cringing at the pitiful tone in her voice, remembering the words of her prayer from moments earlier: I’ll give my life, I’ll give anything.

  ‘He’s a monster, Etienne. You know that as well as I do.’

  The van lurched to a halt and the engine died. She heard movement from the driver’s compartment. The floor tilted and the suspension creaked.

  Footsteps along the side of the vehicle, through collapsing snow.

  ‘Whatever happens, keep your thoughts on Elijah,’ Hannah whispered. ‘It’ll give you strength.’

  The back doors opened, revealing Jakab. If Etienne had been cold before, now her blood froze in her veins. The moment she glimpsed him, she knew that she would be unable to do what Hannah asked, would fail to become an instrument of her own redemption. A feeling of hopelessness and sorrow enveloped her, turning her limbs to lead.

  Death rode in Jakab’s eyes. Red-rimmed, they swept over the van’s occupants. He muttered to himself, crooning, the words too indistinct to decipher. In one hand he held a gun.

  Beyond the doors Etienne saw a vast night vista: silhouetted mountain peaks and sky. At first she thought it was raining, until a flurry of snowflakes blew inside, settling on the scarred plywood floor.

  ‘Out,’ Jakab said, gesturing at the two women. ‘Not him. He stays here.’

  Hannah turned her face towards his voice. ‘It’s too cold. He’ll freeze.’ On her lap, Gabriel stirred, curling himself into a tighter ball. She placed her hand on his forehead and stroked it back through his hair.

  In response Jakab racked the slide on his pistol. It was a brutal sound, unforgiving. ‘He stays.’

  Hannah closed her mouth and Etienne saw her considering her options. A moment later, with aching tenderness, she lifted Gabriel’s head from her lap and lowered it onto the tarp. She bent over him, kissed his face, whispered something into his ear. Then she slid herself towards the rear of the van until her legs dangled over the edge, and hopped down into snow.

  Jakab turned to Etienne. ‘Out.’

  She climbed to her feet, trembling as much from fear as from cold. Moving to the doors, she asked, as gently as she could, ‘What are you doing, Jakab?’

  He ignored the question, and she could tell from his expression that he could not have given her an answer. Madness and confusion swirled in his eyes; she guessed that only a fraction of what he saw belonged to this particular time and place.

  Etienne jumped down into the snow. Frozen air sluiced into her bones.

  In the distance, at the summit of a steep incline, a huge chalet complex clung to the mountainside, one corner hanging over a sheer precipice. Lights blazed from the upper levels.

  A fire was taking hold on the ground floor. Someone had driven a 4x4 straight through the building’s entrance.

  Jakab locked the van’s doors. ‘Start walking,’ he said, and when the words left his lips Hannah sprang at him, fingers curled into claws. They pitched over into snow and rolled, her hands scrabbling at his chest, Jakab’s gun spinning away from him. Somehow she ended up on top.

  Grasping handfuls of his hair, she smashed his head against the frozen ground. He bellowed, trying to knock her loose, but she wrestled out of reach. ‘Help me!’ she screamed. ‘Help me!’

  But Etienne could only watch.

  Hannah yanked Jakab’s head forward and slammed it down again. This time, instead of trying to throw her off, he enfolded her in a hug, trapping her arms to her sides.

  She struggled to get loose, and when she realised that wouldn’t work she went limp, falling against him. Her mouth pressed against his face, teeth bared.

  Jakab thrashed, and then he screamed. Hannah lifted her head, chin dark with blood. She spat a lump of his face into the snow. Her thumbs found his eyes. ‘ETIENNE!’

  The gun was so close. Just a few yards from her. And yet it might as well have been a continent away.

  Jakab’s fist swung around and met Hannah’s head just above her ear. It was a monstrous blow, connecting with a crack like a snapping tree branch, and sent her sprawling onto her back.

  For the space of a single breath she lay stunned. In the time it took her to recover and roll to her feet, Jakab had scrabbled away, leaving a deep trench in the snow.

  His fingers found the fallen pistol. Closed around it.

  Silent, blood running from his cheek in a black torrent, he rose, eyes blank holes of fury and hate.

  CHAPTER 46

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  One moment he was closing the doors to the back of the van, frustrated by the cold stiffening his fingers and cursing himself for not bringing any gloves, and the next the world had tipped and he was on his back, the breath knocked from his lungs, and Hannah Wilde was on top of him, scratching and clawing like a wildcat.

  She grabbed his hair and slammed his head into the earth – once, twice – and with each impact her face dissolved in two. He tried to shove her away but she twisted, serpent-quick. When he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, she loosened and he felt her jaw working against his face, and then a pain burst over him like boiling oil.

  He screamed, outraged. Saw her spit a chunk of his face into the snow. Heard her calling Etienne’s name, beseeching the woman for help.

  Jakab closed his hand into a fist and swung. The blow cracked against Hannah’s skull and sent her sprawling. He rolled in the snow, leaving gobs of black from his damaged face.

  He saw the gun and snatched it up, felt its weight and its contours in his fingers, as if it had been moulded just for him.

  With one hand pressed to the fleshy crater she had bitten out of him, Jakab climbed to his feet. Blood flowed between his fingers. He raised his weapon and pointed it at her, this woman who had caused him so much misery, so much loss.

  Even now, after he’d saved her from a Merénylő’s execution, she tried to destroy him. Even now.

  He had not known what he was going to do when he arrived here; the future had been an unscalable wall inside his head. For a short while during the drive, he had considered sparing Hannah’s life. Perhaps, by showing mercy, he would ingratiate himself with the young woman he had come to find. Now, as if that wall had crumbled to dust, he saw the foolishness of the thought for what it was.

  A single future beckoned him. A clear path.

  Decades of sorrow and loss, he had suffered. And all of them caused by this woman crouching in front of him with his blood on her lips.

  Jakab raised the gun, watched Hannah reach out her hands. Wretched, as blind to her destiny as abattoir fodder led by a slaughterman’s rope, she wandered into his sight line and presented herself for his vengeance.

  He didn’t even have to aim; all he needed to do was pull the trigger. And so, with in
expressible relief, Jakab did exactly that.

  Around him, the mountains roared. Perhaps they scorned him – perhaps that cymbal clash rolling amongst their peaks was mocking laughter – for in that hair-thin instant before he pulled the trigger, intent on expunging forever the trauma this broken creature had wrought, Etienne launched herself at him and knocked his hand away, the pistol round blasting harmlessly into the night.

  ‘Jakab, no!’ she shrieked. And now, as if those mocking mountain peaks desired to throw yet another obstacle across his path, the snowflakes whirled about them, a thickening vortex of white.

  ‘Out of my way!’ he roared, furious that Etienne should involve herself in this. He sidestepped her but she matched him, keeping her body between Hannah and his gun.

  ‘You don’t know what you do, Jakab!’ she cried. ‘Please! You don’t know what you do!’

  ‘Get out of my way!’

  If she wouldn’t move, if she wanted to sacrifice herself like this, then he wouldn’t stop her. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  ‘She’s your blood, Jakab!’ Etienne shouted. ‘Don’t you understand? She’s part of you! Család! Hannah is family!’

  He stumbled.

  The words were like a whisk inside his brain.

  No sense. They made no sense. He grimaced, shook his head, tried to clear it. In front of him, Hannah’s face shimmered, as if glimpsed through water. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘That’s not right.’

  It wasn’t Hannah now, though, was it? It was someone else, or the vaguest hint of someone else. Someone he had loved, once.

  He heard something pop inside his head, like a seal breaking, and a rushing sound like a vacuum being filled, as if his ears were equalising from an imbalance of pressure.

  It dizzied him.

  ‘Yes,’ Etienne said, her voice insistent. ‘Think, Jakab. Look at her, look at Hannah and think. You know it’s true. You must.’

  He did look at her. But was it Hannah Wilde he saw in front of him? Or was it the other one? The girl he’d loved all those years ago.

  He couldn’t even remember her name any more. When, he caught himself wondering, had he started to forget?

  ‘It can’t be,’ he whispered. That inrushing draught carried nightmare images, scenes of slaughter. He heard screams. Tasted blood. ‘It can’t BE!’

  He wanted that voice to stop, needed to silence it, needed to slow this down before it all spun away from him. His thoughts were too fractured to put in any kind of order.

  ‘But it can,’ Etienne said. ‘It is. And you have a chance, now, Jakab. You have a chance to—’

  He closed his eyes, or thought he did, and then the mountains were roaring at him once more, their laughter or their accusations rolling like thunder, and when he opened his eyes Etienne, instead of standing in front him, was lying prone in the snow, and Hannah was screaming and he was sinking to his knees, fingers throbbing from the recoil of his gun.

  ‘What have I done?’ he murmured, lifting his face to the night. ‘What have I done?’

  Jakab watched Hannah drop to all fours. She crawled, fingers feeling blindly, until she came across Etienne’s legs. Moaning, she worked her way up the woman’s body, until she found the solitary chest wound that steamed in the frigid air.

  ‘Animal,’ she hissed. Then, with a vitriol that stung him more than he could have imagined, she said it again, louder. ‘You animal.’

  Jakab stared. He didn’t even remember shooting Etienne, but he was the only one holding a weapon. The fingers of his right hand tingled.

  ‘I just wanted her to stop,’ he moaned. ‘I just . . .’

  And then another thought occurred to him, a question. It was too terrible to voice at first, but he must. He had to understand.

  Staring at Hannah, trying to hold back those images of violence and pain lest they sweep him away entirely, he asked, ‘Is it true?’

  Ignoring him, she moved her fingers to Etienne’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.

  ‘Is it true?’ he screamed.

  Hannah lifted her head towards him. Her breath frosted on the air. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It’s true.’

  Etienne spasmed. Her leg kicked and she coughed, staining the snow beside her.

  Jakab turned away. He could not look at Hannah; could not look, either, at the evidence of what he’d wrought. The gun was heavy in his hand.

  He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t accept any air into his lungs.

  Up ahead, the chalet, where he’d come to find Leah, twinkled like a Christmas bauble. Something bad had happened there, and something bad was probably still happening inside. Footprints, or hoof prints, marked the snow all over the lawn. He saw the shapes of dead animals scattered everywhere about. Broken windows . . . and flames.

  Fire crackled around the silhouette of a large 4x4 lodged in the building’s main entrance. Despite the altitude and the cold mountain air, it would not take long to spread.

  The flames captivated him, at once both beautiful and terrifying. They seemed fitting, in a way. He had lost Hannah Wilde to fire. Now, at the end, it reunited them.

  So many questions unanswered. But perhaps that was for the best. The memories pressed at him, wrapping him in shackles and strangling him with their chains. He turned back to Hannah, raised the gun. ‘Get up,’ he told her.

  CHAPTER 47

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  Whatever was behind the games room door slammed against it a second time. Another crack appeared in the wood, branching out from the first. Through it, Leah saw a slice of perfect darkness.

  Smoke rolled from the grille of the vehicle lodged in the wreckage of the chalet’s main entrance. Flames licked up towards the ceiling.

  Death, coming from both directions at once. If Soraya and the children remained inside the gun room, they would suffocate on smoke even before the fire claimed them.

  Again, the games room door shuddered.

  Eyes stinging, throat burning, Leah pulled herself to her feet, leaving a macabre blot on the stairs where her blood had soaked into the carpet. She had mere seconds now: seconds until the air grew too thick to breathe, seconds until whatever attacked the door managed to smash its way through.

  She put weight on her injured leg. Felt something tear. Gasped. Felt blood begin to spurt once more from her damaged artery.

  Limping to the security panel, shadows swimming at the edges of her vision, Leah typed in the code: 1 8 8 0. She heard the mortices disengage with a clunk. The door swung open.

  Soraya stood behind it, aiming a pistol-grip shotgun. Behind her, the children stood in a line.

  ‘We need to go,’ Leah said.

  Soraya’s eyes swept over the devastation in the hall, and then they returned to Leah, taking in her shredded jeans, the blood. She raised the barrel of her weapon. ‘How do I know?’

  Leah frowned, and then she understood: Soraya had no way of knowing whether she was friend or enemy. The woman stared, eyes black. A wrong move would see her finger tighten on the shotgun’s trigger.

  The games room door splintered and Soraya cried out.

  Leah spun around. Saw the door, hanging open now, the jamb smashed to pieces. In the doorway stood a creature so ungodly she wondered if loss of blood had incited her brain to weave hallucinations from the shadows.

  But no hallucination could reek as badly as the thing that loomed before her. Waves of corruption rolled off it, a sweet-sour stench that mixed with the steam and the smoke and clung to Leah’s throat, her tongue.

  The flesh of its face had sagged down its skull like the semi-liquid folds of a guttering candle, and where the skin had split it leaked a milky sap. Only when she saw the hair trailing down its spine, matted into greasy ropes and speckled with the carcasses of dead ticks and lice, did she finally recognise it: the tolvaj that had appeared in the restaurant that day back in Mürren. How visibly it had deteriorated since then. When its eyes found her, it grunted in triumph.

  Soraya pushed Leah to one side. Rammi
ng the barrels of her shotgun into the tolvaj’s mouth, she pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash lit up its eye sockets like a Halloween pumpkin, and the back of its head exploded in a dark and bloody gout. It pitched backwards into the darkness.

  Choking on smoke, Soraya reloaded. ‘Watch that door!’ she shouted, darting back inside the gun room. When she reappeared she had Elias tucked under one arm. To the children, she urged, ‘Quick now, all of you. Follow me.’

  Leah leaned against the wall, feeling like she might faint, trying not to breathe in a lungful of smoke. Shapes were moving inside the games room. It wouldn’t be long before they ventured out.

  She tried to raise her pistol, but her strength had abandoned her. Instead, she whispered the names of the children as they passed, determined not to leave anyone behind. ‘Dávid, Lícia, Tünde, Emánuel, Levi, Carina, Philipp, Pia, Alex.’

  One more child. She tried to think, tried to empty her head of pain and smoke. Soraya had reached the top of the stairs; she turned and shouted Leah’s name.

  One more.

  And then she realised: Soraya was holding Elias. There was no one left.

  Leah lurched after them, limping in an awkward backwards gait, keeping her eyes on the door from which the tolvaj had emerged. But it was impossible to see anything now. The smoke was blinding. Asphyxiating.

  Coughing, dragging in a breath of air that pricked her lungs like hot needles, her heel knocked against the first stair. She struggled up.

  Something emerged from the smoke. A face that once had belonged to Ivan Tóth. Its eyes lit on her and, when it saw the children climbing the stairs, it revealed a set of blood-wet teeth.

  The last of her energy was ebbing now, like rainwater draining through topsoil. Her right leg felt like a lump of wood strapped to her hip. She dragged it up the stairs behind her, leaving a bloody trail in her wake.

  Soraya reached the first floor and hurried past the living-room doors. At the end of the hall she disappeared around the corner, towards the stairs leading up to the floor above. A moment later she reappeared.