by Jon Land
Dracu closed his eyes, letting the pain of the sting consume him. As a boy, from the day he’d been herded with the others into the back of that box truck, he’d learned all about pain. Sometimes when he closed his eyes, feeling his body racked by spasms as the venom spread its magic treatment through him, he was struck by visions of a past he kept both close and faraway at the same time. Close because he needed to remember. Faraway because those years had stolen everything from him.
“Domnule,” a voice called over the intercom, shocking Dracu back to the present, his eyes jerking open. The pain had receded, replaced with the strangely soothing warmth of the venom spreading through his veins so he might continue to cheat death, just as life had cheated him. “The man has arrived and has been properly searched. He would not open the satchel he is carrying.”
“With good reason, I suspect,” Dracu said toward the terrarium’s wall-mounted speaker, feeling the equally familiar rush of euphoric pleasure spreading through him in the agony’s wake. “Bring him up.”
After returning the scorpion to its home and rolling his sleeve back down, Dracu moved back into his elegantly furnished study. He made sure his veil was in place and was waiting at the door when the heavy knock fell upon it. He touched the open button on the interior keypad and backed up so his guest could enter, accompanied by Armura.
“I trust you have it,” Dracu said to him.
“Right here,” said Henri Bernard.
FIFTY-ONE
HOIA-BACIU FOREST, ROMANIA
“Does he have to stay?” Bernard asked, eyeing Armura as he closed the door behind him.
“Why, is that a problem?”
Bernard seemed to have trouble taking his eyes off Armura’s massive frame and the mask covering the ravaged portion of his face.
“I suppose not.”
“Good.” Dracu caught Bernard’s gaze lingering too long on him. “Now, let’s get down to business.”
Bernard held up the thickly padded satchel for Dracu to see. “The pages are inside a specially sealed chamber. Most are in relatively good condition, given their age, but they’re still degraded overall and very sensitive to the elements and touch.”
“Any luck with the translation?”
“The woman was the ancient languages expert, not me. But I’m sure you’ll have no problem securing someone to handle that task.”
“That was your responsibility, Henri.”
“All men have their limitations.”
“Not all men,” Dracu noted. “And my orders were to provide a manuscript with translation. What good is it to me otherwise? Are we certain the manuscript is authentic, at the very least?”
“Scarlett Swan believed it was, and she’s the expert.”
“Then I’ll have my linguistics expert soon.”
Bernard’s brow rose and fell again. “You found her?”
“It wasn’t hard. I’m having her brought in at first light.”
“Then you won’t be needing me anymore.”
“You want to leave already?” With that, Dracu led Bernard across the floor to the terrarium. “Come,” he said, “don’t be afraid.”
Once inside, Bernard was transfixed by the various cages housing expertly recreated environments for the scorpions dwelling within them, his attention so focused that he failed to notice Armura join them.
“Beautiful, aren’t they, Henri?”
Bernard shrugged, stiffening when he glimpsed Armura standing just behind him. “I suppose that’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“True enough. You know what else is true? That these creatures have the ability to instill life as well as death. Call it a cruel irony of nature. Trust me, I know of this firsthand.” Dracu removed one of the lids and pointed to a scorpion nesting all by itself on a branch. “This is the deathstalker, the most deadly of any scorpion. Its stinger releases a neurotoxin that paralyzes the muscles, while it inflames the nerve endings. The result is unspeakable pain, while the victim is rendered utterly helpless prior to death. In the insect world, this allows the deathstalker to feast on his prey over the course of several days, even weeks.”
With that, Armura grabbed one of Bernard’s arms in his powerful grasp and jerked the other one inside the cage, straight for the deathstalker scorpion. The scorpion twisted toward the back of his hand, raising its deadly tail stinger into position before lashing it downward, digging the sharp tip in and clinging long enough to inject its deadly venom. Armura waited until the scorpion had retracted its stinger before jerking Bernard’s arm back out of the cage.
He was already shaking, his knees wobbling so much they banged into each other.
“It’s easier if you don’t struggle, Henri. Struggling only increases the pain and the time it takes to die.”
Henri Bernard’s eyes bulged. His mouth dropped. He started to scream but the sound dissolved into a horrible airless rasp. His knees locked. Agony stretched across his features, drawing a stream of tears from both eyes, as he collapsed to the floor.
“The scorpion didn’t kill you,” Dracu told him, “your greed did. You betrayed your own people. This is what you deserved. You didn’t really think I could let you walk out of here, did you? This is what happens when you make a deal with the devil.”
Bernard was making shallow, rasping noises now, struggling for every breath as his throat began to close, his face starting to darken to a purplish shade. The writhing turned to spasms that stilled slowly until he lay motionless on the floor for Armura to effortlessly scoop up.
“Too bad you weren’t a better linguist, Henri,” Dracu said over his corpse. “It would have kept you alive a bit longer.”
Then he moved to the intercom. The euphoria was just starting to peak, the scorpion venom pulsing through his veins and feeding the nutrients to his blood that were responsible for his very survival. The rush leaving the world before him awash in color suddenly brighter and sharper, the air itself turned thick enough to grasp in his hand. His senses enhanced to the point where he imagined he could feel the wind whistling through the mountain beyond and hear the lapping of the lake waters surrounding it.
“Alert the professor that I’m coming to see him,” he said toward the speaker.
FIFTY-TWO
THE CITATION
“I have your passport and other documents from Paddy here,” Alexander told Michael, handing them over while flying the Citation on autopilot the last stretch over Europe, approaching Romanian airspace.
“Pablo Garcia of Panama,” Michael said, after opening the passport. “Good thing I speak fluent Spanish.”
“You’ll need to change your hairstyle, and I have contact lenses with me, a beard, too.”
“I hope Scarlett gets the chance to see me wearing them.”
* * *
Paddy had also arranged for a vehicle, an Alfa Romeo sedan, to be left for them at Napoca Airport in the small city of Cluj-Napoca, a ninety-minute drive from the town of Bună Ziua. Hidden in a secret compartment in the trunk was a heavily stuffed duffel bag that Alexander unzipped and checked carefully, cataloguing its contents before returning the bag to its hiding place.
“For emergencies,” Alexander explained. “Our ticket home, if the shit hits the fan.”
They followed the directions already programmed into the car’s navigation system to Bună Ziua from which Scarlett Swan had placed her desperate call, the route dissolving into an endless series of side roads with Michael playing copilot. Alexander’s past had taken him all over Europe, but never to Romania, a fact that seemed to increase his discomfort even more.
They finally reached the village at dusk. Quaint would have been a polite way to describe the surroundings dominated by buildings laid out along and around a central square. But those buildings were refugees from another age and, by all appearances, little had been done to update them with the times. They were drab and dreary, finished in brown tones that looked even darker in the fading light. A few were clustered practically atop one another,
while others seemed to have entire sections of blocks to themselves, although Michael thought he detected the remnants of foundations and even some crumpled husks of buildings that had been razed or simply collapsed over time.
The bar matching the address Alexander had written down wouldn’t open for another hour and sat directly across from a bank, post office, and what looked like a municipal building. The village’s lone hotel, meanwhile, turned out to be located on its outskirts with a fine view of the surrounding mountains currently shrouded in fog. A stately building Michael took for a former residence of a local dignitary and easily the best maintained structure that they’d seen.
Bells jangled as Alexander and Michael entered, each toting a single light bag.
“Do you speak English?” Michael asked an older man standing behind a simple counter.
“Da. Yes. English. I am the hotel manager, Arsen Norocea,” the man said, stretching a hand out and shaking Michael’s enthusiastically when he took it. “You wish to stay with us? You wish a room?”
“Something with a view of the hotel’s front,” Alexander requested.
* * *
Alexander was adjusting the blinds of the simple, clean, and well-maintained room to make sure the positioning of the slats allowed a view out but not in. Michael mimicked his motions at a second window kitty-corner to that one, noticing a flower-rich memorial in a large plot of land across the road from the hotel. It looked like a war memorial of some kind, right down to the marble plaque Michael glimpsed just inside its grounds.
Michael was still staring when a knock fell on the door. Alexander moved to answer it, cracking it open to see who was there since the door wasn’t outfitted with a peephole.
“I just wanted to make sure you like the room,” Arsen Norocea said, through the crack, “and if you needed anything.”
Alexander was ready to close the door when Michael drew even with him and eased it all the way open. “As a matter of fact, there is. I have a question for you. What’s that garden across the street?”
“It used to be a crisma, a local eating and drinking establishment that wasn’t worth the communists bothering with. It burned to the ground many years ago. That’s a memorial to the victims.”
“Strange to memorialize such a tragedy,” Michael said, still gazing at the beautifully tended garden.
“This one had quite a story behind it, a virtual legend in these parts. About a hero who saved many lives. This would’ve been, let’s see, the late nineteen-fifties. The man wasn’t from around here.”
“It’s time, Michael,” Alexander said from the window, before Michael could question the hotel manager further.
FIFTY-THREE
VADJA, ROMANIA
Raven Khan watched the town nearest to the dig site for hours, until dusk had fallen, before driving in along the hard-packed dirt roads turned soggy by a recent rainstorm. Her scrutiny had revealed shops open for business with barely any customers, all of which closed hastily in advance of nightfall. A small police post was shuttered, and no one lingered in the streets any longer than was absolutely necessary. The same police detachment she’d run into at the dig site had come and gone, clearly dissatisfied with the level of cooperation. Raven would’ve bet that no one in the village had told them anything, perhaps not even opened their doors when they saw uniforms lurking outside.
But the oddest thing of all wasn’t what Raven saw, so much as what she didn’t see.
Children.
In the hours she stood or sat watching the town, she saw not a single boy or girl.
At dusk’s fall, she parked her SUV on the outskirts and walked into the center of town. She raised her hands into the air, making no effort to disguise her presence. Suddenly, doors were thrown open and windows jacked up, rifle barrels aimed at her from seemingly everywhere at once.
Raven stopped and left her hands in the air, rotating her frame about the square so everyone aiming at her could see she wasn’t armed. This as men toting hunting rifles and shotguns poured out, doors slamming in their wake. Seconds later, she was surrounded, the hammers of the guns pulled back with fingers coiled over two dozen triggers.
“I’ve come here in peace because we have the same enemy,” she said, loud enough for all to hear. “Black Scorpion, and I can help you.”
* * *
She listened to the tale of what had happened from several of the town leaders inside what she took to be the square’s lone municipal building. The terror evoked by the masked man, calling himself Black Scorpion, who came in search of the dig site massacre’s lone survivor, a female archaeologist. How he had killed the town elder and then, when the townspeople proved unable to give up his quarry, how he had collected the children and young women into a bus and driven off.
Raven felt suddenly chilled, thoughts of the unthinkable scene inside the cargo hold of the Lucretia Maru returning, along with the deeper-seated memories that haunted her dreams. She stopped the narrative not once for questions, soaking it in and trying to process it all at once.
“You said a boy was with this woman in the mountains, a boy who escaped the dig site with her.”
The men nodded sullenly. “His grandfather was the elder killed by this devil.”
“I’d like to speak to this boy,” Raven continued.
“That will be difficult.”
* * *
Ilie’s mother spoke enough English to serve as interpreter for Raven so she might learn everything she could. Initially, though, the boy refused to cooperate, shaking his head adamantly and signing something just as forcefully when his mother pressed him.
“He says he does not trust you,” Ilie’s mother interpreted. “He says you could be one of them, a spy.”
“The killers of his grandfather.”
The woman nodded.
“Ask him if he saw any women with them.”
Ilie’s mother did just that and the boy replied rapidly, his gaze softening a bit, enough.
“The woman you helped was important to you.”
The boy read her lips and nodded.
“I want to help her, too. But before I can do that, you need to help me.”
Ilie nodded again. Then, signing rapidly, the boy provided a chilling depiction of the massacre of the dig team, the power of his gestures seeming to increase the impact of the horrible event he’d witnessed. He explained, through his mother, how the woman saved his life in the camp and then how they fled into the mountains together. He smashed his fist into his hand repeatedly when he got to the part about the veiled man dressed all in black killing his grandfather, tears welling in his eyes.
Raven was already back on her feet, looking at the boy and wishing there was something she could say that might comfort him. She moved her eyes from him to the four men, meeting their taut, bitter stares one at a time. She imagined each had watched their children stolen right out from under them, some perhaps no older than the little girl hugging her mother’s corpse aboard the freighter.
“I’m going to get your children back for you,” Raven promised, as if reading their minds. “I’m going to bring them home. Just tell me where to find them.”
The villagers looked at each other. “Nobody knows.”
“But you must have thoughts, suspicions.”
“We have stories of an area in the Black Forest where people have ventured, but never returned. Maybe it was Black Scorpion and maybe it wasn’t. We’ll never know what they found, because nobody ever saw them again.”
“Just tell me where they went, and I promise you’ll see me again.”
* * *
Raven was still trembling when she returned to her SUV. She was dizzy, sweating, felt her heart hammering against her chest and held her eyes closed in an attempt to compose herself. She thought she’d managed that task and drove off, only to find herself both weak and dizzy another twenty miles down the road. A wave of fatigue swept over her so strong and sudden that she started nodding off at the wheel and found a place to pull
off the road in the night to rest for a time.
Sleep, though, claimed her as soon as she closed her eyes, a deep restless sleep dominated by the most vivid dream she’d ever had. First the villagers she’d just left were surrounding her in a circle, staring at her in silence. Then the deaf boy began speaking, warning her, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure because his words didn’t register and he was talking out loud, not signing.
Then the villagers were gone and she heard a woman screaming, a toddler crying, the cries morphing into her own within the dream. The village gone now, the cargo hold of the Lucretia Maru replacing it. Then there was blood soaking her, drenching her, drowning her.
Raven snapped alert with a start, breathing heavily and tasting the same blood she’d smelled because she had bitten her own lip. Felt her heart begin to settle and a clammy chill replace the heat rush that had soaked her shirt with sweat. She cleared her throat and forced herself to take several deep breaths with the window slid down to compose herself, then gulped down one of the bottles of water she’d brought along.
Raven tucked it back into the cup holder in the console when she spotted her cell phone lying on the passenger seat, somehow shed during the dream that must’ve left her shifting wildly about. She groped for it and pressed out a number with a finger that was still shaking.
“Ismael,” she said simply, after Saltuk picked up.
“Where are you, Raven?” he asked, voice piqued with concern.
“Where I am doesn’t matter,” she told him. “Who I am and where I came from matters. That’s why I’m calling. I think I’m going crazy, losing my mind. It’s time for you to tell me the truth Talu never did about how I ended up in that orphanage.”