Written in the Blood

by Stephen Lloyd Jones

  The mountain wind shrieked, tried to tear her loose. Her wounded leg swayed useless under her. Blood poured off the toe of her boot like a waterfall, whipped into spray by the wind. The pain was brutal.

  Breath coming in staccato rasps, Leah leaned forward until her chest pressed tight against the bar. With excruciating slowness, she began to drag herself, hand over hand, along it. Beneath, she felt that hungry mouth opening wide in anticipation.

  She heard words tumbling from her lips, a repeated prayer – please don’t let me fall, please don’t let me fall.

  If she moved too quickly, she risked dislodging the support. If she moved too slowly, her weight would likely buckle it. Either outcome would see her spiralling down after the tolvajok into the waiting darkness.

  Halfway across now, and no way back. She could drag herself along, but she couldn’t turn around, couldn’t retreat. The metal support bowed beneath her. She could see the tip resting on the living-room floor lifting up. Grimacing, she pulled herself forward. Two yards to safety. One yard.

  She screamed again. Frustration and rage. Her hands were shaking so badly she hardly dared to raise them. Clenching her teeth, she willed her muscles to obey. Inches now.

  Leah reached out, felt the living room’s smooth wooden floor. She flung out her other arm. The curtain rail vibrated beneath her. And then it fell away.

  The world turned white.

  The brightness dazzled her, and for a moment she thought she had slipped, and in falling towards the rocks below her mind had acted to extinguish those final seconds of terror.

  But she wasn’t falling, not yet, and this was not a brightness from within her head. It came from without.

  She lifted her head to its source. There, through the archway, she saw two figures she had not expected to meet again in this life.

  The first, standing further back, arms crossed against her chest, was her mother.

  The second lingered a few feet away, in the archway itself. And while she did not recognise his face, she recognised his eyes.

  It could not be, but it was.

  It was Jakab.

  CHAPTER 50

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  He watched her through flat grey eyes, his expression impossible to read. In one hand he held a pistol.

  Leah moaned. Her mother had killed him, had burned him to a cinder at Le Moulin Bellerose. Yet somehow that couldn’t be true, because he was here, staring at her. Complete.

  She saw Jakab blink, and then something strange happened to his eyes. They seemed to shine. Specks of amethyst appeared, bright chips of jade. Moments later a shadow crossed his face, and those eyes grew lifeless once more.

  She wanted to call out to her mother, wanted to tell her that she didn’t face Jakab alone. But if Hannah heard her daughter’s voice she would doubtless run to it and, with no knowledge of the chasm in front of her, she would fall to her death.

  Leah’s grip slipped on the floor and she slid backwards, fingers squealing on the wood.

  Jakab moved closer, and now he knelt, placing the gun down beside him and reaching out. Breath spiralled from his mouth like smoke. ‘Take my hand.’

  How can this be? How can this be?

  She stared, tried to read his eyes, but they were as unknowable now as the time, all those years distant, he’d stolen her father’s face. Was he pretending to offer salvation only to pitch her to her death moments later? Did she even consider accepting help from this creature who had robbed her of so much?

  She slipped another few inches. Felt the void sucking at her. The wind shrieked, victorious.

  ‘Take my hand,’ he repeated. ‘I won’t let you fall.’

  Pointless to question the sanity of it. Leah reached out, and a moment later Jakab grabbed her.

  CHAPTER 51

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  Jakab seized her hand, and Leah clenched her teeth against a scream. Pain rushed up her arm. Exploded in her shoulder.

  She dangled there, staring into Jakab’s eyes, so close that she could see the pores of his skin, the spittle on his teeth, the beads of sweat like moon-kissed jewels studding his brow.

  He grinned, panting with the exertion of holding her, and she saw those glints of colour in his eyes rise to the surface once more, a panoply of twinkling minerals and precious stones.

  Was this why he had rescued her? So that he could suspend her over the brink, savouring the moment, forcing her to acknowledge the power he held over her before opening his fingers and watching her plummet to her death on the rocks below? His eyes, rich with vengeance, would be the last thing she saw before the void swallowed her.

  Jakab opened his mouth and she realised he was talking, even as he dangled her above that hungry darkness. ‘I know,’ he said, the lights in his eyes rising. Louder, now: ‘I know what you are.’

  She saw her own breath, a ragged cloud of white. Felt the sting of snowflakes boiling up from beneath, the sweat from her hand beginning to lubricate their grip. She heard the rush of mountain wind. Sensed the clamour of the darkness below.

  The tendons bulged in Jakab’s neck. And then he began to lift her. Leah rose an inch. Two, three. She managed to swing her free arm over the floor’s lip. Jakab pulled harder, and then her torso was over and she was writhing, eel-like, until she lay on her back, stunned, listening to her heart as it crashed in her ears.

  Jakab crouched on his haunches. Already he had retrieved his gun. He climbed to his feet, and then he held out a hand to her.

  Leah ignored it, rolling onto her front. She managed to raise herself on to all fours. Through sheer will, she dragged herself upright. Jakab withdrew his hand, mouth tightening.

  Waiting at the far end of the dining table stood Hannah. Earlier Leah had not dared to call out, fearful that her mother might rush towards her voice and topple out into the night. Now, she cried her name.

  ‘Leah?’ Hannah’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘There’s a drop. Stay where you are. I’m OK.’

  You’re bleeding from a wound that’s going to kill you. That’s if this monster from your past doesn’t do it first.

  Hardly OK.

  ‘Is he still here?’

  Leah opened her mouth, but Jakab interrupted. ‘Quite the reunion, don’t you think?’

  Hannah stiffened. It was a while before she spoke. Finally she said, ‘What now? What do you want from us?’

  Jakab glanced down at the gun he held. He laughed. ‘What do I want?’ His eyes moved back to Leah. She could feel them scuttling across her skin, like the legs of inquisitive locusts. ‘What do I want?’

  From the confusion in his expression, she sensed it was a hopeless question. He did not know. Years of hate and obsession had twisted and poisoned him, had wrung from him every surviving drop of humanity.

  And then, with a gasp, Leah realised something else: that this was no longer a reunion of three, not at all, but a gathering of four.

  Because the prickling sensation on her skin was not the crawl of Jakab’s eyes, but a warning transmitted by some half-grasped hosszú élet sense. It scoured her, shrinking her scalp, itching behind her eyes. Finally, she understood what it meant.

  In the doorway leading out into the hall, a stranger had appeared.

  The woman moved with a slow and terrible grace. She stepped around the fallen bodies and empty shell casings, careful not to dip the soles of her snakeskin boots into the blood pooling on the floor.

  Her beauty was matchless, face so elegantly crafted that she appeared ethereal; unreal. But while nature had clearly bestowed the gift of physical perfection, it had not breathed the warmth of humanity into its creation.

  Before her, Leah acknowledged, stood the immaculate nightmarish marriage of lélek tolvaj and hosszú élet.

  The woman’s eyes glimmered, only a few errant striations of green lacing that ebony stare. Her cheeks were flushed red, her wheat-blond hair dusted with melting snowflakes. In her hands she held her instruments of death: two enorm
ous pistols, so highly polished they looked as though they’d been forged from silver.

  Leah cast her eyes over to Jakab, and saw that he, likewise, was entranced – similarly gripped by that strange prickling sensation. His fingers twitched.

  Only one person this woman could be.

  ‘Where are they?’ Izsák’s daughter asked, and her voice was like syrup flowing over ice. She raised her silver pistols, revealing the midnight circles of their barrels. One of them pointed at the back of Hannah’s head. The other aimed at Jakab. ‘Where are they?’ she repeated, and this time Leah thought she heard a note of desperation in her words. ‘I won’t hesitate. I’ll kill all three of you right here, right now. Where are my babies? Where are my darlings?’

  So this was how it ended. To Leah’s left, the man who had killed her father. In front, the thing that would kill her mother. And, at her back, the waiting chasm of darkness that had consumed this creature’s brood.

  It was over. All her mother’s years of work and sacrifice. The tanács had destroyed any chance of a future, and now this last lélek tolvaj would steal what remained.

  ‘They’re dead,’ Leah said, and when she realised how softly she had spoken, she raised her voice and said it again. ‘All of them. They’re dead. I killed them.’

  A flicker of fear crossed the woman’s face, followed by disbelief. ‘Liar.’

  ‘If you don’t believe me, take a look.’ With a flick of her head, she indicated the destroyed floor of the sun room behind her. ‘There won’t be much left of them. It’s quite a fall.’

  The woman’s eyes narrowed to slits. The barrels of her pistols trembled. ‘That’s not right,’ she said. ‘That’s not right.’

  Senseless to prolong what little time remained. Leah smiled, matching the woman’s arctic stare with one of her own. Goading her. ‘But it is right. They’re gone. All of your babies. All of your cursed darlings. Smashed on the rocks. Dead in the snow.’

  ‘If you killed them—’

  ‘Pulverised. Destroyed. Lost.’

  – ‘then I’ll kill you.’

  ‘No. You won’t.’

  Not Leah’s voice, that one. And when her eyes moved back to the doorway that had produced the tolvaj, she saw that they were no longer a reunion of three, nor a gathering of four, but a pitiable family reunion of five.

  Balázs Izsák stood in the doorway. He held a gun of his own, and he pointed it at what once had been his daughter.

  CHAPTER 52

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  Leah felt her throat tighten with emotion as she saw him standing there alone. He wore his years heavy tonight: eyes shadowed, skin as grey as the ash settling on the windows from the fires burning downstairs.

  Izsák stared at his daughter, so captured by her presence, so enthralled by her, that he seemed blind to the rest of them standing like islands in a sea of broken flesh.

  The woman turned her eyes towards him but her arms remained locked, guns still pointing at Jakab and Hannah. Her hair, lifted by the wind that blew through the broken floor, feathered around her face like spun gold. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘I know you.’

  Izsák shook his head. He held his gun at arm’s length, its barrel pointed at her heart. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘You don’t. But the little girl you stole knew me. Once.’

  Her eyes, as dark as polished meteorites, lost their focus for a moment, and then they cleared. ‘Georgia,’ she said, and when that name crossed her lips, Leah saw Izsák flinch as if he had been stung.

  ‘Her name was Georgia,’ the woman continued. ‘A long time ago now, but I remember. Dawson City. The cabin beside the forest. You . . . were her father.’

  A tear trembling on Izsák’s eyelashes broke free and cascaded down his cheek. It clung to his jaw for a moment before falling, jewel-bright. His voice cracked. ‘I am her father.’

  Downstairs, something exploded deep inside the fire’s raging heat, and the snow on the lawn became a lake of reflected flames, as if the house stood not on the edge of a mountain but on the slope of a volcano, and a river of lava flowed around them.

  Above, the lights flickered.

  The woman who once had been Georgia laughed. A hard, scornful sound. ‘Do you really think,’ she asked, ‘that after all this time, anything of your daughter remains?’

  Izsák’s hand was trembling so badly that Leah thought he might drop the gun. ‘Let me speak to her. Just once.’

  The woman swung the pistol she’d been aiming at Hannah until it pointed at his chest. ‘I’m not yours to command,’ she replied. ‘You know how this ends. I’m faster than you. All of you.’

  ‘Then you’ve won,’ he said. ‘So why not be gracious in victory? Let me hear her voice. Just once. It’s all I ask.’

  ‘It’s all you ask? She flicked the pistol towards Leah and Jakab. ‘Go and stand over there with the others.’

  ‘Let me talk to her.’

  ‘I won’t ask you again.’

  He stared, eyes unreadable, and she stared back. Neither of them moved.

  Beside her, Leah heard Jakab muttering. Eyes wide, face drained of colour, his mouth moved gently as he repeated his brother’s name, over and over. ‘Izsák . . . it’s Izsák . . . Izsák . . .’

  Another explosion shook the house, far louder than the first. A fraction of a second later, every light in A Kutya Herceg’s chalet winked out.

  For a moment, they were plunged into darkness as impenetrable as an ocean trench. And then Leah witnessed a blossoming of furious light.

  Silvery flashes of fire from the woman’s pistols. Answering gouts of crimson flame, like dragon’s breath, as Izsák returned fire.

  The exchange burned phosphorus-bright images on Leah’s retina, so dazzling, so disorienting, it seemed to her as if two gods of the mountains clashed inside the room.

  Guns flashed. Shadows hopped. Sparks danced.

  Beads of blood defied gravity, hanging in the air like drops of dew caught in a web.

  Holes appeared in cloth. Flesh burst. Barrels smoked.

  And then, finally, the thunder receded, capering out into the night as if fleeing from the carnage it had wrought.

  In the aftermath of that killing light, Leah’s eyes refused to register anything except the carnival of flashing colours that marked its departure. Her ears rang. The tang of gunpowder was sharp in her nose.

  Slowly, those deftly weaving hues faded, and the room became a room once more.

  Waiting for her, at its heart, was the most awful sight Leah had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 53

  Interlaken, Switzerland

  Worse than seeing her father shot dead at Le Moulin Bellerose when she was nine years old; worse than seeing her grandfather’s corpse beside the track at Llyn Gwyr; worse than seeing Flóra – or what had once been Flóra – pounding her head against the window as she shrieked to be let in from the cold.

  In the doorway, where the firelight grew steadily brighter, Izsák lay on his back, torso ripped open by the eviscerating volley from Georgia’s guns.

  Georgia lay by the window. Bullets had torn through her chest and neck.

  Harrowing as those images were, Leah saw it all in a blink.

  Because in the very centre of the room, thrashing and convulsing like a wounded spider, curling in on itself one moment only to extend its limbs and flail about the next, was her mother.

  And yet not.

  Hannah Wilde writhed, a jagged shape of wheeling arms and coiling muscles. Her jaw worked savagely, teeth snapping together, face a knot of panic and confusion.

  She went left, crashed into the table. Grabbed onto chairs, feet splashing in blood. Rearing upright she spun in a half-circle, raised her hands to protect her face, lunged around again. And then she stiffened, head canted to one side, chest heaving, nostrils flaring.

  Leah felt the breath go out of her as she realised what had happened.

  Somehow, even as Izsák’s guns consumed her, Georgia had cannoned into Hannah. That
fleeting contact had allowed the tolvaj to abandon its dying host and transition across. And what had once been her mother was now something else entirely, something impossible to evict.

  Leah glanced across at Jakab.

  He still held his gun. Whatever reason he might have had for killing her mother, he had ten times the reason now. Yet his weapon remained pointed at the floor. His eyes brimmed with a curious mixture of pity and fascination.

  After all that her mother had achieved, after all the battles Hannah had fought, to be taken like this at the end – to have her own body stolen from her – seemed a betrayal of everything she had given to the world.

  With the remaining tolvajok dwindling inside the corpses of their frozen tanács hosts, there had been a chance – a slim chance – that all was not lost. The children had been saved. And with Hannah still alive, the work, feasibly, could have continued.

  But now, with her mother taken by this abomination that fed on the lives of others, that journey would end in failure. The power to save the hosszú életek resided in Hannah Wilde alone. Years earlier, when the programme they’d established in Calw had begun to falter – when they’d started to realise that despite all they were doing, it might not be enough – Leah had asked to be tested. What she’d discovered had devastated her.

  She was barren. Unable, not only to conceive, but to offer even a source of viable eggs to their family of hosszú élet surrogates.

  You know what you have to do.

  She did. But it was hard, even so.

  She would never be a mother; she would only ever be a daughter.

  Leah stared at the thrashing silhouette. Backlit by the glow of flames rising in the hall, it presented a hellish sight.

  You know.

  She tried to focus, tried to think of a memory that would sustain her: a perfect snapshot of her mother’s love. She had a million from which to choose, a lifetime’s worth. But the one that rose in her mind, and, even now, brought a devastated smile to her lips, was the night on her grandfather’s farm when the calf had been born.