by Graham Brown
CHAPTER 9
CHRISTIAN WATCHED as Ida opened her large book of notes. He sensed she was still nervous but had accepted what he’d said as the truth. “Thank you for helping me.”
She looked sad, drained, but relieved. “I suppose it’s the least I could do. You did save my life.”
He nodded.
“Might make it easier if you tell me what you know about your own beginning.”
Part of him didn’t want to speak. His own memories were a vault sealed shut for centuries. But it was necessary.
“I was a Roman captain,” he said finally. “My name was Tiberius then. I’d spent ten years in the legion by the time we ended up in Germania, near the Black Forest. Our leaders were fools. The commander of our legion continued to attack even as the numbers and terrain went against us. He wanted glory. He wanted fame in Rome. We paid for it with our blood.”
“Amazing how little has changed in two thousand years,” she said.
“Eventually, I couldn’t let him order the men to useless deaths anymore. As the men retreated, I moved against him. Others defended him. They were comrades. I killed them to get at him, and then I ran him through.”
She sat quietly.
“I knew word of what I’d done would eventually reach Rome and I would be killed or put in the Coliseum as an example for anyone who might defy the wishes of the powerful. I feared for my parents, for my sisters. So I left and headed for the wilderness, intending to fight the Visigoths on my own until they slew me.”
“What happened?” she asked. “Was it one of them?”
“No,” he replied. “They’d had enough of us and were pulling back themselves. The field was left to the vultures and the dead. I decided to head north and see what was beyond the river. I assumed I would encounter some of the Goths sooner or later. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t see the sunrise again, but before I made it across the field, I was attacked. What I now know is one of the most powerful Nosferatu threw me to the ground and slit my throat. His name was Drakos. He offered to save me from the wound he’d inflicted.”
“By transforming you,” she guessed.
He nodded, thinking about that far-off night. “I ran from him the next day,” he said, “when my strength had recovered. I heard him calling after me. Heard his voice in my mind. He insisted I would seek him out sooner or later. He said those who are turned always come back to their masters.”
“Did you?”
“I swore to myself I wouldn’t,” he told her. “And for seventeen years, I wandered. But there was so much I couldn’t understand. Why do parts of this curse seem to make us stronger, while others make us weak? I can strike with the speed of a cobra. I have the strength of ten men. The ability to see into hearts and minds. To see through the night like a bird of prey. Yet, in the sunlight, I stumble like a drunk who can’t find his feet? At the sight of a cross, my eyes begin to fail, and my ears ring with pain.”
“I’ve read this,” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed it was anything but superstition. Not sure I believe it now.”
Christian understood. “I ran into others who’d been turned. Some of them had formed into clans, but they had no desire for civilization. They lingered on the borders of our world, in the wilderness and the lawless places, hunting in packs. Everyplace where one found war and death, the Nosferatu could be found feeding on the living in anonymity.”
Ida was watching him closely. Her eyes were wide, drinking in what he was saying. She was a scholar of history, learning a part that few knew. “So you went to this Drakos for answers?”
Christian nodded. “I found him in the remnants of a Roman city as the empire was crumbling. He explained that the others were scavengers, no better than vultures or rats. He insisted that he had a higher goal—the restoration of order. He told me he was once a member of the legion like I had been. He recalled a time when all the world trembled before Roman footsteps. He insisted it could be like that again. But only if we had an army of our own.”
“To fight the Church,” she noted. “So is that what began this war?”
Christian shook his head. “No. It had been going on for centuries. Maybe even forever. Undeclared and one-sided. Drake was determined to fight back. He wanted soldiers and warriors, like me. He wanted an army of Nosferatu that would refrain from the addiction and weakness that came with stealing life from others.
“We traveled together for centuries, slowly building up a group he called the Brethren. It wasn’t easy. To find one who would resist the addiction of the blood, you had to turn a hundred. Even those who fought it for years might succumb at any moment.”
“Sounds like a slow process,” she said. “But then, I suppose your friend Drakos has all the time he needs.”
Christian nodded. “One day, he’ll unleash what he’s been preparing. In the meantime, he stays hidden.”
“But you no longer hide with him,” she noted.
“We had a falling out,” he explained.
“Over what?”
“He destroyed someone I loved.”
“It’s been written that your kind feels nothing like love. Only hatred and pain and greed,” she replied.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “There are exceptions. There are a few of your kind with the gift to reach through the void and light our souls. I found one who could touch mine. Drake betrayed her to the Inquisition as a witch.”
She stared at him quietly. He decided he’d said enough.
“At any rate, he never gave you what you wanted,” she guessed.
“With Drake, it was always half truths. He gave me a few answers but never the most important one—where had we come from, why were we like this. Maybe he didn’t have it; maybe he didn’t know. But I believe the answers are out there. And the only group that seems to know more about us than we do is the Church. If they have the truth, perhaps there’s a way to end this.”
They sat quietly for a moment.
He’d told her the truth about himself, and she hadn’t scoffed or judged him or shut down because it was too much to take in. He sensed a type of strength he’d encountered in few others.
“I’m not sure what to think,” she said. “If you’re making this up, it’s one hell of a story. Either way, I’ll tell you what I know.”
She turned to a section near the middle of the thick journal. “Last summer, I found reference to a group of men, once priests, who gave up their vows to rid the earth of the scourge in the fifth century. They went by boat to Malta to destroy that which should not have come into being. They were never heard from again.”
Christian thought back. “I’ve never heard of any Nosferatu setting foot on Malta. It was always a fortress of the Church. Are you sure these men went there?”
She turned the page. “Yes, though I don’t think they stayed there. I found only one other reference to them. It called them crusaders of the light, but if they were crusaders in the strictest sense, they were going the wrong way. Out from Malta and into Spain and France.”
He wondered if Malta had been the original base of the Ignis Purgata. Certainly, the soldiers from there were known for their strength and zeal.
“If there’s nothing else referencing them, I can’t see how that helps me.”
“Relax, sonny,” she said. “I’m just getting warmed up.”
He gave some ground. “By all means.”
“A few months later, I found part of a scroll in a French library that was once owned by Louis the Fifteenth. It made references to the Fallen. Louis was begging the Church for help to eradicate the infestation. I’m pretty sure they’re talking about you and your kind. Now, it might be a leap, but if the French reference is connected with the Maltese one, and this ‘coming into being’ stuff, it tells me that you’re probably right. The Church knows where you came from, or at least they think they do.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I worked backward from there,” she said. “Eventually, I found reference to a fou
rth-century journal from an Egyptian monk of the Coptic Church. It is said to contain a group of letters sent to the office of the Holy Father, St. Julius the First, who was the Pope from 337 to 352. According to tradition, they were returned with a scathing rebuke, but kept in the monastery because all papal communications were considered sacred.”
“What do they say?”
She shook her head. “Their text isn’t described in detail, but the papers are known as the ‘pleadings of the corrupter,’ not the one who takes men’s souls, but the one who changes them.”
Christian sat up taller.
“Mean something to you?”
“Our own myth,” he said. “When people don’t know the answers, they guess, they make up stories. In that way, the Nosferatu are no different. The term corruptor refers to the one who began our lineage. Our legend—if you want to call it that—talked always of an original corruptor. The head of the pyramid. A dark Adam who had already fallen at the moment of creation. To me, it never seemed any more likely to be real than the Garden of Eden itself.”
“Well,” she said, “from the look of things, you share that myth with the Catholic Church.”
Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. “What happened to these letters?”
“As I understand it, they were held in Egypt for a long time. Protected within the monastery, even treasured. Sixteen hundred years later, World War Two arrived. Rommel and the Afrika Corps were about to overrun Egypt. Fearing the letters would be destroyed, they were moved.”
“Where?”
“To the belly of the beast,” she said. “Germany.”
His eyebrows went up.
“At the time, things looked bleak,” she pointed out. “France, with the largest army in all of Europe, had crumbled before the Nazi onslaught in six weeks. England was being bombed into rubble. It seemed likely that Hitler would win the whole war in a matter of months. With that in mind, these papers were sent to Germany for safekeeping.”
“Makes sense,” he said.
She nodded. “Three years later, with the tables now fully turned and the Allies obliterating Germany from the air, a communiqué was received in Washington through an emissary of the Catholic Church. It begged President Roosevelt to spare Cologne Cathedral at almost any cost. It claimed there were items hidden there that were crucial to the world’s heritage—and even perhaps its spiritual survival.”
“Spiritual survival?”
She nodded. “One day later, orders came down simultaneously from FDR and Winston Churchill to their respective military commanders, directing them to avoid hitting the cathedral at any cost. As I understand it, a few bombs did hit the structure by accident. But by the end of the war, when the rest of the city was smoldering in ruins, the cathedral stood relatively untouched.”
Christian took a deep breath. He’d been in Germany in 1945. He’d even been in Cologne. Could he really have been that close to the answers and not known it?
“You think the items they were trying to protect were the letters from this Egyptian monk?”
She placed her notes down. “I can’t be sure,” she said. “Who knows what treasures the Church has hidden? But most are just that—treasures, artifacts, inert remnants of the world’s past. Whatever this communiqué referred to, it was forward-looking, something that the church believed would affect the future.”
Christian had never considered that. “A prophetic document?”
She nodded.
“You think it could be related to the Fallen?”
She smiled. The kindly smile of an older aunt. “The real question is, do you?”
Christian felt like he was grasping at straws, but what else did he have to hold on to. He wasn’t sure what he’d find there, but he knew, somehow, he had to find a way into the cathedral in Cologne, a place his kind never went.
CHAPTER 10
KATE PFEIFFER sat at a computer desk in a neatly organized office that had once been the spare bedroom in her house. She ignored the pile of mail to her left and the Christmas decorations that were still hanging a couple of months after they should have been taken down.
Home for twenty-four hours, she’d had dinner, played with her son, and even washed dishes with her mom, enjoying a moment of the regular world for a change. But as soon as Calvin went to bed, Kate had retired to her office and begun checking e-mails, looking for any kind of update on the case.
A message from Billy Ray looked promising. She clicked the link and waited as a YouTube video began to play.
At first, all she could see was a dark, jumpy image with lots of noise. A few seconds later, she realized the noise was club music and the grainy image was a picture of people moving on a dance floor.
Suddenly, the image became shaky again. A crash of glass overrode the sound of the music, and the camera jerked around, catching something for a split second as it dropped from above and disappeared into the crowd.
“Did you see that?” a voice said. “Some dude just fell through the roof.”
Muffled noises and random curses came next and then nothing but the backs of people’s heads as the amateur cameraman tried to hold the phone up high enough to see over the crowd.
“He’s dead,” someone said. “He’s got to be.”
A murmur went through the crowd, and then a lurid, piercing scream rang out. Even on the bad audio of the phone, it gave Kate chills. The crowd began to push back, bumping and jostling the cameraman/phone operator.
A new set of screams rang out, and the crowd parted. A figure appeared, running across the floor with what looked like a knife in his hand.
“You seeing this?”
“That guy came through the roof.”
“This is off the hook!”
The figure with the knife disappeared. Moments later, gunfire rang out. A room-wide panic hit, and the video ended.
She looked back at the note Billy Ray had posted on the e-mail: Our suspect on YouTube.
The action looked exactly like what had been described by the eyewitness accounts, though they would have to do some work to prove it. She watched it again, trying to get a look at the suspect’s face. There was something odd about the way he moved. When pausing the video and going frame by frame, the short video was even stranger. The suspect was blurry even as those around him appeared relatively clear.
She put it down to the strobe lights and the chaotic movement of the crowd and the cheap camera-phone. But it was definitely bizarre.
The door to her office opened and Kate turned.
Her mother stood there.
“I thought you’d gone home,” Kate said.
“I wonder if we could talk.”
Kate didn’t want to talk right now. She wanted to go through the video one more time, maybe ten more times if necessary. She wanted to call Billy Ray and have him get the video over to the techs who could take it apart and enhance it.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” her mother said, cutting off any attempt to postpone the argument.
“Do what, Mother?”
“Watch you run around the world and ignore your son.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Oh please, let’s not have this argument tonight.”
“If I weren’t here, you’d have to be,” her mom said. “I’m enabling you, and one day, you’re going to hate me for it.”
Kate could feel the anger rising up inside her. She kept quiet, the only technique she’d learned that could keep this from becoming a full-fledged shouting match.
“He’s already lost his father,” her mom said, firing the most painful bullet in her arsenal. “Do you really want him to grow up without you?”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “I’m doing the best I can. I have a job to do, an important job.”
“More important than raising your son?”
“Stop it!” Kate snapped.
“Lower your voice.”
The fury was uncontrollable now. “Don’t come in here and pick a fight with me
and then tell me to lower my damn voice. Calvin doesn’t have a father because someone murdered him. It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t some unfortunate circumstance—it was murder. My job is to find people who do the same thing to other families, and stop them. And I’m damn good at it.”
“I’m not saying you’re not good at it,” her mother pleaded, “just that maybe someone else might be better suited for the job.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
Her mom huffed as if her statement was not meant to sound the way it did. “You know what I mean; maybe you should let someone else take the reins for a while.”
Kate shook her head. She almost launched into a tirade about how all her mom ever did was bake cookies and work for the PTA, and how could she possibly understand anything above such a trivial level? But she didn’t want to hurt her mother. She just wanted support and understanding—two things that never seemed to come.
“What do I have to say to get through to you?” she pleaded. “This is my career. After what happened to Mark, how can you not understand why it’s so important to me?”
Her mother didn’t respond. In her passive-aggressive way, she just moved to a new subject rather than answer a question that would require some honesty. “I know they offered you a desk job. You could take it, and at least you’d be in town.”
A desk job. It sounds like purgatory.
She glanced back at the screen and the frozen image of the half-visible suspect running out of the building. Guys like this were out there, dangerous and hidden. She damn well wasn’t going to sit at a desk and look for tax evaders or embezzlers while violent killers were running around.
“You weren’t here when Mark died,” her mother added. “That’s not your fault. But you are choosing not to be here while Cal grows up.”
Kate felt like she might break in half, like she was being attacked from all sides for doing the best she could. Why the hell couldn’t anyone see that?
“I cannot do this right now,” she said. “If you don’t want to watch Cal, that’s fine. Just let me know. I’ll find someone else, but I’m not having this discussion for the hundredth time. Not tonight.”