Blood Eternal

by Marie Treanor

  “Because there is unrest in Istanbul that I cannot rely on my friends to deal with, and Budapest is where Luk will go. Ultimately.”

  “To fight you?”

  Saloman shrugged.

  “But he doesn’t remember who you are! Or even who he is.”

  “He does now.”

  The thin patience of his answers warned her not to press, but this was too important to leave. “You saw him,” she breathed.

  “I spoke to him. And now he’s remembering.”

  Elizabeth searched his veiled eyes, looking, as always, for the things he didn’t say. She thought she found some of them, and the ache in her heart intensified. “People are dying, Saloman,” she whispered. “We have to try to stop him.”

  “We can’t,” Saloman said flatly. “Chasing him will not stop him; he’ll always be one step ahead. All I can do is limit the damage in Istanbul. When he’s ready, he’ll come to Budapest for me.”

  “We have to try to stop him before he gets to Istanbul,” Mihaela said grimly, with emphasis on the “we.” “If that’s where he’s going. He’s killing all along the way.”

  “We do,” Elizabeth confirmed, reaching for his hand and pressing his fingers between her own. His eyes searched her face, looking, she hoped, for what she wanted him to understand: that here was another chance to work with the hunters as well as deal with his own problem.

  Saloman drew his hand free and rose to his feet. “Twenty-four hours,” he said. “And then I leave for Istanbul.”

  He walked out of the room with perfect grace, and without turning back. Mihaela lifted her brows in Elizabeth’s direction. “Hey, at least he tells you where he’s going.”

  “This is stupid,” Konrad muttered, pausing just outside the front door. Saloman’s hired car, a Mercedes with tinted windows, waited right in front of him with its engine running. Saloman himself sat in the driver’s seat, wearing sunglasses, his long, slender hands resting so comfortably on the lower part of the steering wheel that he looked as if he’d been used to driving for decades. “I still think we should take both the cars.”

  “He’ll be easier to keep track of this way,” Mihaela said.

  “He could kill us all like this and just walk away from the crash.”

  “He could,” István said judiciously, “kill us all at any time. There isn’t really much any of us could do to stop him. Besides, he wouldn’t kill Elizabeth.”

  “Not deliberately, perhaps,” Konrad muttered. “Can he even drive? Who the hell taught him?”

  “Some joyriding hooligans on a Budapest housing estate,” Elizabeth said with relish, brushing past him to open the front passenger door.

  “What a comfort you are to us all,” Mihaela marveled as she reached for the one behind.

  By late afternoon, when they halted in a small town to pick up some bottles of water and some pide—rather tasty Turkish pizza bread—familiarity had at least reached the point where István was prepared to take the front seat beside Saloman in order to stretch out his long legs.

  For a moment, after they all piled back into the car, Saloman didn’t move. They’d parked in the village square, under the shade of a large almond tree, and he appeared to be watching a group of men climbing the stairs into the mosque at the far end of the square.

  He said, “Luk is masking. I can no longer follow them.”

  The hunters exchanged glances. István said, “Are you out of range, perhaps?”

  Saloman turned his head. “Range is unimportant. Luk has remembered his skills, and they far surpass Dante’s feeble efforts. Luk will not be found until he chooses to be.”

  “But he must leave some kind of trail,” Mihaela interjected.

  “Of bodies? Perhaps. But he isn’t a fool.”

  “What the hell is he doing?” Konrad demanded, dragging his hand through his hair in frustration. Elizabeth leaned closer to Mihaela to avoid his threatening elbow. “Where is he going?”

  Saloman shrugged. “Gathering support so that he can enter Istanbul with a strong bodyguard. He knows you’re looking for him, knows you’ve already killed some of his followers. He wants peace to recruit—to gather strength as well as vampires.”

  “Can’t we stop him?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Not until he comes to us.”

  “But then he’ll be too strong!”

  Saloman turned his shades in her direction. “I’ve defeated him before.”

  Elizabeth drew in her breath, glancing around the uneasy hunters. “What do you want to do?” she asked them.

  “We can’t take his word,” Konrad snapped. “We have to look.”

  “Where?” Saloman asked mildly.

  “Where you lost the trail would be a good start.”

  “In what way,” Saloman asked with interest, “would it be a good start?”

  Konrad scowled. “You promised us twenty-four hours.”

  Saloman straightened and started the car. “The scenery is very pretty. You’ll enjoy it.”

  For the next two hours, Saloman appeared to turn himself into their tour guide. Elizabeth, convinced he began the game to make the point that they were wasting their time, suspected he soon started to enjoy it. His stark pointing out of beauty spots and famous views grew richer with stories and names from the past and histories that she was sure never made it into books.

  At first stunned, even suspicious, the hunters didn’t seem able to stop themselves from asking questions, and as they fell under his spell, Elizabeth felt an emotion akin to pride in all of them. Even when the light faded and darkness fell, and they could no longer make out with any clarity the mountain peaks or dry riverbeds that inspired him, still they listened and questioned.

  And then Saloman stopped the car. There appeared to be no reason for it, on a winding road between villages, with no view to speak of, no houses to be suspicious of. Saloman gazed out of his side window, and some distance from the road, across scrubby ground, Elizabeth could just make out a few uneven shapes, perhaps a camp of caravans and tents.

  “Gypsies?” Elizabeth hazarded.

  “Or itinerant workers. Once.”

  “Once?”

  Saloman opened his door. “The only life there is the animals.”

  Peering into the gloom, Elizabeth caught the faint movement of a goat and some horses standing tethered in the shade of a large bush. She had a bad feeling. “Maybe they’re away working,” she tried, as she got out of the car.

  “In the dark?” Mihaela said, following Saloman across the road.

  “Eating, then.”

  Saloman said, “It smells of death. If you prefer, I will look.”

  “We don’t prefer,” Konrad said tightly.

  There was no one left alive. The vampires had been on a spree, draining and dropping the bodies where they found them. A caravan had been turned on its side, perhaps to empty out its terrified occupants, who now lay sprawled and grotesquely bloodless around it. A tent had half fallen in someone’s struggle to escape. A couple had been dropped contemptuously one on top of the other.

  It wasn’t gory, because very little blood had been wasted, and yet somehow that seemed to add to the horror of the scene. The whole camp stank of rotting corpses. Flies buzzed around them, and the air, redolent with death, seemed to hang still and heavy and eerie.

  Quelling her rebellious stomach, Elizabeth watched Saloman picking his way through the carnage, looking inside caravans and tents, lifting wrecked doors, discarded clothing, and even other bodies in order to gaze on the faces of the dead. Their pale skin seemed almost to glow in the darkness. For an instant, she saw him through the hunters’ eyes, a tall, beautiful angel of death moving gracefully, callously, among the victims of his kind.

  Her throat constricted with the fear that always came with recognition of his sheer alienness. She couldn’t help but share the hunters’ horror, the outrage that held them tense and ready to lash out.

  “And you tried to tell me there is good in these creatures.�
� Mihaela’s husky voice almost choked. “For God’s sake, where is the good in this?”

  Saloman, having pulled a body free of the fallen caravan, rose to his feet. He didn’t look at Mihaela or Elizabeth, just at the white, rotting corpse. He said, “It is hard to envisage any circumstances in which this could be construed as good.”

  “Like a certain farmhouse near Bistriţa?” Mihaela said harshly.

  That wasn’t fair. Zoltán and his followers had committed those crimes in the farmhouse. The only life Saloman had taken was that of a woman already damaged beyond recovery by Zoltán’s vampires. But Elizabeth’s defense of him died in her throat unspoken, repressed by the current horror, or perhaps by the knowledge that whatever she said now would sound like an excuse.

  “Yes,” said Saloman briefly.

  Konrad spun away. “Tell Mustafa,” he ordered, marching back toward the car. István already had his phone in his hand.

  Elizabeth said low, “The hunter network will arrange the burial.”

  Saloman nodded once.

  “Why?” Elizabeth said helplessly. “If, as you say, Luk’s memory is returning, and he’s hiding from you, why leave this open carnage behind him? Is he really that insane?”

  Saloman gazed upward at the sky, almost as if he hoped to find an answer there. “Sanity is relative. I think he’s warning the hunters. And greeting me.”

  “Like Leith?” Mihaela blurted. Leith, Scotland, where, last October, the corpses of four young men had been discovered with their throats torn and their blood drained.

  “Yes,” Saloman said again, indifferently. “Like Leith.”

  “Was Zoltán insane too?” Mihaela snapped.

  “No. It was I who killed the men in Leith, and they were not innocent.”

  Speechless, Mihaela stared from him to Elizabeth. “Jesus Christ,” she whispered at last, and, turning, she all but ran across the ground toward the car.

  “Somehow,” said Saloman, “I think you’re back in the front seat.”

  She stepped nearer to him and slid her hand into his. “If they don’t drive off without us.”

  “Oh, they won’t do that. They still think I can find Luk. I can’t.”

  Something in his voice alerted her, causing her to stare at him through the darkness. “And if you could,” she whispered, “would you?”

  He said nothing, just began to walk after the others.

  “Saloman.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “Saloman, why did you leave them at the cottage? Why did you come back to the villa?”

  “Blood and sex. I wanted to make love to you.”

  The smell, the horror behind them, all made this the wrong place. “You didn’t,” she managed.

  “I’m still here. Unfortunately, so are the hunters, and I believe the sight of me fucking their friend among this carnage would ruin my chances of détente forever. I can’t imagine it would do me much good with you either.”

  “Saloman—”

  “I really don’t know where they are,” he interrupted. “They’re probably headed for Istanbul, but they won’t hang around long enough to be caught.”

  Elizabeth released his hand. She felt cold.

  As Saloman had predicted, all three hunters were huddled symbolically in the backseat. Elizabeth climbed in and fastened her belt. Saloman sat beside her, close enough to touch, yet distant enough to be on the other side of the world. He looked in his rearview mirror at the hunters. “Where to?”

  “Do you know which road they took out of here?”

  “This one.”

  “Then follow it; see if you can pick up any more trails.”

  Please, God, no more like this one.

  Saloman started the car and drove on up the hill. Without any instruction from the hunters he avoided the fork in the road that led into the next village, and turned east. No one asked, but inexplicably the mood began to alter to one of hope, as if they imagined Saloman had picked up a trail after all.

  But Saloman, it seemed, was still finding places of interest. As they passed a road sign, István said, “This is where they had the earthquake last winter.”

  Earthquake. Impulsively, Elizabeth turned to Saloman. The huge fact of Peru had gotten lost. She’d never even mentioned it to him. And now she didn’t know what to say, how to tell him she’d been going to run to him because she was so proud of him, that what he had done there had been so wonderful and she missed him so badly it was like not breathing. . . .

  His gaze never left the road. But his lips quirked slightly, almost forming a smile, as if he knew.

  “I don’t remember that,” Mihaela said. The hunters tended to be single-minded, almost blinkered. Very often, major news passed them by, because they lived in a different twilight world. “Was it a bad one?”

  “Bad enough. Wrecked a few villages, I think.”

  “Bad,” Mihaela agreed. “This must be one of them.”

  The village looked like a large building site. Many houses at various stages of completion had risen out of the rubble that still scattered the entire area. They surrounded a mosque that was still under construction. The minaret was built, though, and the inevitable loudspeakers clung to lampposts and new buildings, ready to pipe the call to prayer all around the village and nearby countryside. Although it was late, a few people still sat on their front steps, enjoying the cool of the night, watching their children play in the street or in their yards among the hens and goats.

  A woman sitting outside her shop waved to them, beckoning, ever ready to seek out business, however meager.

  “Ice cream?” Elizabeth suggested, with more levity than generosity.

  But unexpectedly, Mihaela laughed in the backseat—a breathless, slightly sardonic sound. “Hell, yes. Ice cream is always good.”

  Without comment, Saloman stopped the car. Although his face expressed no more than patience, Elizabeth sensed a certain tension in him that she associated with excitement. Before she could ask him if he knew the place, he opened his door and got out.

  “Merhaba,” the woman at the shop greeted them, smiling.

  “Merhaba.” Elizabeth indicated the freezer that stood under the awning outside her shop. Although she’d picked up very few words of Turkish, she managed to make the transaction without resorting to Mihaela, who spoke the language fluently. By the time they began to eat the ices, Saloman was strolling back along the road toward the crossroads, where the half-built mosque was disgorging the faithful.

  “Where’s he going?” Mihaela asked uneasily. “Shit, he’s not—” She broke off, but the unspoken words still hung in the air: He’s not going to bite someone, is he?

  A young boy, maybe ten years old, came out of the mosque with his father, looking bored while the adults stopped and talked. He began to move toward Saloman, who was wandering around apparently admiring the building work.

  Without a word, Mihaela strode down the road, instantly in hunter mode. As the men followed, Elizabeth swore under her breath and went too, if only to try to prevent a scene. She could have told them, if only they’d waited to hear, that Saloman did not feed from children. The adults he certainly regarded as fair game, but he wouldn’t kill them.

  Once, this fact, that he wouldn’t kill them, hadn’t mattered much to Elizabeth. The biting, the drinking, the invasion of another body, had appalled her regardless of whether it led ultimately to death. Somewhere along the line, that view had gotten lost. Possibly when biting and blood drinking had become associated for her with sex, with love.

  Perhaps Mihaela was right: She was losing herself and her principles, slowly but surely condoning everything he did because, whatever that was, she couldn’t stop loving him. Was that slavery?

  The boy and Saloman stood in the shadow of the mosque as they approached. The boy’s smile was so wide it threatened to split his face, and he was chattering away as if Saloman were his oldest friend. She heard Saloman ask a question in Turkish, which the boy answered in another fast-firing stream before tak
ing Saloman’s hand and giving it a tug. Using his other hand, the boy waved it around the entire village, still talking and grinning.

  Mihaela stopped suddenly, and Konrad walked into her heels. She looked so mesmerized that Elizabeth said, “What? What is it?”

  Before Mihaela could answer, the man who seemed to be the boy’s father came hurrying over, and Elizabeth tensed, expecting an argument of some kind. But the man went straight up to Saloman and embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. His voice was loud in obvious welcome, and Saloman seemed to be hushing him, excusing himself almost.

  The man stood back, arms wide, still smiling, but understanding. He spoke to his son, who objected vociferously and then sighed. Turning back to Saloman, he carried the vampire’s hand to his lips and then his forehead.

  “Jesus Christ,” Konrad breathed in clear disgust. “They’ve just finished praying! Can’t they sense what he is?”

  “Oh, they know what he is,” Mihaela said unsteadily. “He’s their savior. He’s been here before—last winter before the earthquake came.”

  Elizabeth stared at her, mirroring, no doubt, the gawping of the other hunters.

  Mihaela said, “That’s what they’re remembering and talking about, the boy and his father. Saloman persuaded them to leave before it happened, hired vans and cars to ferry the villagers down to the town, which was barely touched by the shock. Their homes were destroyed, but he seems to have done something about helping them rebuild. Supplied men and materials, I think. I didn’t quite catch that bit. But there’s no doubt he’s their hero. They’d be organizing a feast for him right now, with the entire village present, except he’s refusing. He says he just came to make sure things were going well for them.”

  Of course he did. It made perfect sense. Had he come that winter because he’d sensed the earthquake? Or had he come to pay his respects at the tomb of the cousin he’d killed? It didn’t matter. He’d saved them, without any of the publicity surrounding his Peruvian rescue, which made her think it had been spur-of-the-moment.

  “I don’t believe that,” Konrad protested. “The woman at the shop didn’t bat an eyelid when he passed her.”