Written in the Blood

by Stephen Lloyd Jones

  The instant Leah saw Soraya’s face, she knew what had happened.

  Tolvajok. Somehow they’d broken in at the top of the house, and were working their way down.

  Left hand holding Elias, Soraya had no way of using the shotgun grasped in her right. Instead she retreated, leading her charges back down the hall towards Leah. When she arrived outside the living room where her father and brother had died, she ushered the children through.

  Leah tried to call out, tried to warn the woman of what she was about to see, but she had no voice left. Behind her, a shadow rose up on the wall. It was an effort even to find the energy to look over her shoulder but she managed it, turning in time to see the thing that had once been Ivan Tóth lurch up the final stair. As she backed along the hall, she saw a second shape loom out of the darkness from the opposite direction.

  Another of the tanács: Krištof Joó. She had never liked the man. What she saw now, she liked even less.

  Tolvajok: behind her and in front. Leah struggled into the living room, blinking tears from her eyes, coughing smoke. To her right, she saw the children follow Soraya through the arch into the sun room.

  You failed them. You failed them all.

  But she wouldn’t. Not in this last task.

  Her pistol was loaded. She knew what she had to do.

  The brass caps of spent rounds twinkled on the floor. She saw Luca, lying on his back. The shattered corpses of A Kutya Herceg and the man she’d known as Jérôme.

  At the dining table Leah paused for breath, using one of the chairs to hold herself upright.

  Faces appeared in the doorway leading from the hall. Ivan Tóth came first. Krištof Joó followed. They were in an appalling state, faces hanging loose, mouths bloody, but the sight of her, so close, seemed to renew their energy.

  Leah hauled herself along the dining table, chair by chair by chair, towards the sun room’s entrance.

  Hisses of excitement. Horribly close.

  She staggered to the arch, and when she passed through it into the chamber beyond, she felt something give in her leg.

  Crashing across the floor, Leah slammed against one of the viewing windows, cracking her skull against the glass. The blow loosened an avalanche of sparks inside her head. She spun away from the pane. Glimpsed the first of the tolvajok step into the room, followed by a second.

  At the far end of the chamber, Soraya had opened the only door, revealing a cramped storage space and a narrow flight of stairs leading up. Ashen-faced, she pushed the children through.

  A third tolvaj slouched into the room, following Tóth and Joó.

  Soraya screamed out Leah’s name, beseeching her to hurry. But Leah had no movement in her right leg at all now, and no strength in her left.

  The door where her friend waited was five yards away, but it might as well have been five miles. She would never make it.

  She gestured to Soraya, used her pistol to demonstrate what she intended to do.

  The woman stared back, grimacing. She nodded, mouthed, I’m sorry.

  Leah smiled, watching as her friend closed the door and locked it behind her. ‘Me too,’ she said.

  Outside the windows, snowflakes spiralled and danced. The snow on the lawn glowed orange with reflected firelight.

  The final tolvaj stepped onto the viewing chamber’s floor. They came at her, all four, an inexorable mass of clutching, groping fingers.

  Keep fighting till you have nothing left.

  Her grandfather’s favourite phrase. Leah watched the horde shambling towards her, and realised that she had nothing left.

  CHAPTER 48

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  Using the barrel of his gun to push Hannah Wilde along, Jakab crunched through snow towards the bright lights of the chalet.

  A mountain wind gusted around them, fanning the flames at the front of the building and stirring the falling snowflakes into a blizzard of white.

  Tattered threads of smoke coiled from a broken window on the ground floor, nearest to where the fire burned. It offered the only route inside. How long they would be able to breathe in there, he did not know. But it didn’t really matter. He didn’t think he’d be coming out.

  How could he have lived so long without knowing the connection they shared? Without even suspecting? When he thought of what he had sacrificed while chasing a dream that could never be, he wanted to weep. But he was past tears; past caring. He just wanted this to end.

  He pressed the gun into Hannah’s back with greater force. He knew that she heard the flames. Smelled the smoke. But she did not cry out, did not try to plead with him; she was far too stubborn for that. It was, he realised, a trait they shared. How strange, to suddenly consider it.

  Her boots crunched on glass shards and she came to a halt, coughing out smoke.

  ‘There’s a broken window in front of you,’ he told her. ‘It reaches all the way to the ground. You won’t cut yourself if you walk straight.’

  She tilted her head, listening to his voice: listening, perhaps, for other sounds, too. But he knew she wouldn’t try to attack him a second time – not now that he was expecting it.

  Hannah folded her arms across her chest and stepped through the wreckage into the room beyond. Jakab followed, pulling a penlight torch from his pocket.

  He switched it on, swabbing the beam left and right. A dark shape loomed in the smoke. He saw it was a snooker table, the balls on its surface glinting. On the far side of the room, a smashed door, hanging ajar. Smoke billowed through.

  Clamping the penlight in his teeth, grabbing Hannah by her collar, he pushed her through the shattered doorway, holding his breath and narrowing his eyes at the stinking grey cloud.

  She stumbled forward and he yanked her to the right. In the hazy light cast by the torch, dark shapes flittered like bats.

  The heat drew beads of sweat from his brow. He felt his heart begin to thump in his chest. Even now, fifteen years since his burning, fire still terrified him; he was gratified by his newfound ability to challenge it. Perhaps he had healed from that experience more fully than he’d known.

  Into a hallway, and he saw eyes peering down at him through the smoke. Jakab removed his hand from Hannah’s collar. Taking the penlight from his teeth, he played its beam over the walls.

  Masks. Hundreds of them. So many different kinds, from so many different places in the world.

  Even though he knew it must be a trick of the light, he thought he recognised, among them, the faces of the dead. And, as he stared at them, he began to remember names too.

  Nathaniel Wilde’s was the first face he saw. He’d killed Nate, hadn’t he? Had shot him with that old Luger pistol. But he hadn’t been himself at the time, he’d been someone else, someone called . . . Charles Meredith, that was it: the professor. Hanging beside Nate, Charles watched him with blank eyes through which nightmares curled. Jakab had killed him, too, hadn’t he? It disturbed him to realise he didn’t even remember how.

  He’d been Charles for a maddening short chapter in his life, but his memories of that time, although as hazy as the smoke thickening around him, were good. Until the end, of course, when the man’s wife had attacked him. Nicole Dubois had died as a result of their encounter. She stared down at him from the wall, eyes haemorrhaged, blood glittering on her cheeks.

  How he’d loved her. How difficult it was to see her again after so long.

  Earlier, he’d believed he was beyond tears. Now he found that wasn’t true.

  Next, he saw Nicole’s father, Eric Dubois, the big-hearted Frenchman from Carcassonne who had been his friend, had given him a job and had taught him a trade. Something had happened, something. He remembered cutting off Eric’s face, burying him in the woods. For what, though?

  There was his reason. Alice Dubois. A woman he had loved. A woman who’d plied him with drink and tried to kill him. Another episode of fire.

  But Alice hadn’t just been Eric’s wife. She’d been, Jakab now knew, something far more impo
rtant than that. She’d been his own daughter. He couldn’t have known it at the time. Even so, when he thought of the intimacy they’d shared, he felt his stomach heave with nausea and shame.

  On the hallway wall, his history stretched out before him.

  Past Alice, he saw Helene Richter, Carl Richter and Hans. Their dead eyes stared; their punctured faces gaped like broken jigsaws of skin and muscle and flesh.

  ‘You should have told me,’ he moaned. ‘You should have told me where she went.’

  He had not known that his child was growing in Anna Richter’s belly, had not known that he spilled the blood of his own child’s grandparents that night in Sopron. There had been so much blood; by the time he had finished with them, his hands were crimson with it.

  Past those three sightless faces, and now a brother loomed: Jani. All he remembered of Jani was a single image: the young man’s head breaking apart as Jakab shot him on the balcony in Pozsony. On the wall, Jani’s forehead smoked, the edges of the wound blackened and crisp.

  Jakab moaned again; he had not wanted to see that. And then he saw something even worse, and finally remembered the name that had eluded him.

  Erna.

  Why did he have to meet her like this? The bright young face she’d once possessed had gone. He saw instead how she’d appeared at the end: her cheek sunken, her eye destroyed, the wooden flights of a crossbow bolt emerging from its ruins.

  Erna Novak.

  He had bought her a ring. Had asked her to marry him.

  And then the tanács had sent out its hunters, and he’d lost her.

  All those faces watching him, tormenting him. He thought he saw a question lurking in their eyes. When he considered what it might be, he had to look away.

  Ahead, Jakab saw the outline of a staircase rising into darkness. He nudged Hannah on, warning her of its presence. She moved hesitantly, sweeping each foot in an arc before her, until she made contact with the bottom stair.

  Steadily, she began to climb. After fourteen steps they reached the first-floor hallway. Double doors to their right, hanging open. Jakab was about to push her past them when he saw a body lying on the floor. Shell casings. A pool of blood.

  Here. This was where he needed to go. This was where she would be. He shoved Hannah into the room, saw two more corpses on the floor. Both had lost their faces to gunfire. He wondered if they hung in the hall he’d left behind.

  Beyond the dead bodies, a huge window curved the length of the room. Snow and ash eddied outside. He saw the silhouette of a dining table. Against the far wall, a bizarre skeleton hanging from an iron rod. Next to it, a dark arch.

  And through that arch, Jakab saw something else.

  Something amazing.

  CHAPTER 49

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  In the last moments before the tolvajok reached her, even though her head felt light from lack of blood, even though her heart pumped what little remained so fiercely she thought it might tear itself apart, Leah sent her mind somewhere else.

  It tumbled through days and weeks and years, gifting her not with visions of horror or pain, but with memories of joy and love. She saw her father’s smile, his twinkling eyes. She heard his laughter. So long since Leah had seen him, but time had not abraded her memories. She wondered if he watched her now. She wondered if he waited for her.

  She thought of her grandfather, of Gabriel, of all the others she’d met and loved. And finally, she thought of her mother.

  If there remained in this world one person to whom Leah owed so much, it was Hannah Wilde. Her mother shone in her thoughts, glorious: warrior, teacher, friend. Even after everything Hannah had lost, she’d always retained her ability to look into her daughter’s soul and know the words Leah needed to hear.

  If her mother had taught her one lesson above all others, it was to believe.

  Believe in your strength. Believe in your power. Believe you can face the impossible. Believe that your spirit can endure.

  She knew what she had to do. And she was scared. Terrified. But she couldn’t let her mother down, not after everything Hannah had sacrificed.

  Leah took a step back. Her spine pressed against the drapes hanging beside one of the windows. In front of her, the creature wearing the body of Krištof Joó hissed. Its eyes were globes of darkness.

  Her legs trembled, the last threads of her energy dissolving away. She wrapped her arm around the curtain, determined to maintain her dignity, determined not to fall to her knees.

  Her heart was beating even faster now. Surely close to breaking. A yard of empty space separated her from the clutching hands of the tolvajok. She wanted to close her eyes. Instead, she tried to raise the gun.

  Couldn’t.

  But she didn’t need to. Not for this.

  The first time she’d been in this room with Luca, she’d nearly fainted away. Perhaps it was a tacit acknowledgement of her tendency to find danger, to gravitate towards self-destruction, but she’d been terrified of heights all her life.

  She stared at the glass floor of the sun room – a polished black face, like the entrance to another world.

  No time left, Leah.

  She aimed her gun and pulled the trigger. Seven shots, rupturing the air like cannon fire.

  Beneath her feet, the floor became a sea of ice. It cracked, splintering and popping, like the calving of an iceberg.

  For a single frozen moment, the floor held, and then the glass slab she’d imagined as the entrance to another world became another world, one that was infinitely more dark than this.

  Shrieking with rage, the tolvajok plunged down into it. Leah felt the floor beneath her own feet disintegrate. Pistol tumbling from her fingers, she fell.

  Weightless, her stomach lifted into her throat. A brutal wind blasted her.

  The drape tightened around her arm like a tourniquet and suddenly she was dangling over the brink. A flurry of snowflakes erupted out of the darkness, stinging her cheeks.

  Below her, the five black shapes of the tolvajok tumbled into the abyss, flailing like broken marionettes. With a dull whump they hit the first rocks jutting from the cliff face and ricocheted off into darkness. Awaiting them, a fall of three hundred feet before they met the jagged snow-covered landscape below.

  Leah managed to grasp the curtain with her other hand. Its fabric was attached to the rail by circlets of steel stitched into the cloth. But while the curtain would hold her weight, the rail itself would not. Already, she saw one of its fixtures pulling loose.

  Where the glass floor had met the wall, only a single horizontal retaining strut remained. Leah swung onto it, but because the viewing window remained intact she couldn’t balance there and, even if that had been possible, her legs would no longer support her weight.

  Clinging to the curtain, she saw, above her, the first of the railing’s fixtures pop loose. She dipped a few inches. Held her breath.

  A foot to her right, a vertical strut divided two of the window panels. On the other side of that, another curtain, flapping like a shackled wraith. If only she could get to it, it could support half her weight.

  And then what? Even if she managed that, the only way out of this chamber was either via the archway at her back or the door in the far wall. Both meant crossing yards of empty space. It would have been a daunting leap even without her injuries. With her wounded leg, it was impossible.

  She rappelled sideways, bloodied jeans smearing the window glass. Reached for the second curtain. Missed. Felt her grip loosen. Dropped another foot towards death before she managed to anchor herself. Snowflakes lashed her face like nipping teeth.

  Above, another railing fixture began to work loose.

  This time, Leah used every last shred of energy to grip the curtain with her left hand before rappelling across and reaching out with her right. She grabbed the second drape just in time.

  The last two retaining bolts popped loose from the wall and the first rail crashed onto her head. It bounced away and the curtain
tightened around her arm.

  Leah clung to the second drape with both hands. It held. But now there was nowhere else to go. Glancing down, she saw the rail swinging loose below her, connected by the strip of curtain wound around her arm. She sank her teeth into the fabric, biting down with all her strength as she shrugged herself out of its folds. Slowly, she began to reel it up.

  The curtain still supporting her trembled. Looking up, she saw the first of its three fixtures beginning to buckle. Plaster rained down on her face. She felt her hands numbing. Wondered whether they would give out before the brackets.

  If she bridged the gap across the floor with the broken rail, maybe she could drag herself across it. But to avoid the risk of it plunging into the abyss while she placed it, she would have to slide down the curtain until she hung at floor height.

  A fixture above her popped loose. The second bracket began to bend. Leah loosened her grip and dropped another foot closer towards death.

  Blood ran down her forehead and into her eyes. The world swam.

  Teeth clenched, she rested one end of the rail on the lip of the support encasing the window at floor height. She eased the rest of it out across the gap. It wasn’t going to be long enough. The metal was greasy in her fingers. She was going to drop it.

  But somehow, she didn’t. The far end clanged down on the living-room floor. It reached, just. A hand’s span of grace.

  Above, the second bracket popped loose from the wall. The bar began to bend outwards, dangling her further over the void.

  She had seconds now. Gripping the curtain in both hands, she lowered herself down it until she felt the cold pressure of the lifeline between her legs. It bowed a few inches, the ends lifting in a grin.

  The final wall bracket surrendered with a pop and the remaining curtain rail tore loose. She screamed as it plummeted past her. Letting go of the drape just in time, she grabbed onto the bar in front. Both hands now. Beneath her, empty space and glittering rocks. A long fall to a violent death.