Sympathy for the Devil, she thought. Enough already.
“The werewolves,” Lon clarified, “why didn’t they—“
“His chosen must listen,” Ilecko whispered.
Lon gasped. “Valenkov can control them?”
Ilecko nodded.
“Really?” Lon looked around for someone to share his excitement. “So what was in there?”
“His wife,” Tildascow said. “Dead.”
“Who did this?” Lon asked Ilecko. “The villagers?”
Ilecko nodded, either at Lon, or one last goodbye to Lady Valenkov. Then headed back the way they came.
“Because she was a werewolf?” Lon asked.
“If they thought she was a wolf, they would have removed her head,” Ilecko said, never turning back.
“So, what—they just murdered her?”
“And then he killed them all.”
Six
Emory Inn
Atlanta
Jessica Tanner was naked and alone.
As faceless workers in yellow hazmat suits soaked the lounge in germicidal decon foam, one man had instructed her to strip. He never looked in her eyes, but he didn’t look at her flaccid breasts either. Of course not. Who could ever find these things interesting, who beside Richard? He took the clothes to be burned and left her shivering.
Naked and alone.
Her thoughts were like a ride at Disneyland, full of wild and wonderful things to visit. She actually thought that to herself, that her thoughts were exactly like a ride at Disneyland, and then there was the painful chattering of her teeth, what to do with Richard’s clothes and mail, her frozen tears, how to tell his parents, the plastic body bag they’d laid over his remains, the growing crowd of hazmat workers, and what time was it—the moon had to be rising soon, could Kenzie have left behind any infected survivors, and were they going to leave her here to freeze to death? And wouldn’t that be just fine?
“This way,” another man said, escorting her to an inflatable decontamination chamber they’d erected in the parking lot. She suffered the harsh pressure of the pneumatic shower while watching them watch her.
Now she realized why she didn’t recognize any of them. They weren’t CDC. They were military.
The shower relented, and she was directed through an opaque plastic tunnel, which was sealed to the vacuum-metalized guts of a van. Inside, a flimsy white robe sat on a sterile metal bench.
It was a short ride full of numbing sounds, but at least there was heat. She stared at her hands for the duration, fighting off vertigo.
The van stopped and she listened as they connected the airtight seal to her next destination. When the doors opened, the cloudy plastic tube obscured everything but the night sky. She passed through air transference and yet another shower before taking a long, descending elevator trip to arrive in another airlock and then, finally, a vacuum-sealed metal box with a few breathing holes in the ceiling for air recycling or purging: a cleanroom.
A hard cot covered in plastic was the only furniture. It sat facing the large observation mirror, just like the one Melissa Kenzie looked into as she transformed into a werewolf.
Sitting on that cot, minutes may have been seconds or hours. Several times she felt shocked awake by the sight of Richard’s gutted body.
This is not magic, he’d insisted. This is a virus, a biological entity we can quantify, study and attack. So damn sure of himself. And now she was left to answer for him.
“Doctor Tanner,” a voice blasted through the loudspeakers. She paused, wondering if it’d been in her imagination. “Doctor Tanner, can you hear me?”
“Who are you?”
“It’s Rebekkah Luft. You’re under quarantine with the Department of Homeland Security. The voice you are about to hear is Dr. Jonathan Drexler, from the DHS Science and Technology Directorate Biochem Division.”
The proverbial light bulb popped over her head. “Dr. Jonathan Drexler” was the only name on the leaked SCORN document, the report on the weaponized strain of smallpox. And yet no one among her colleagues had ever met him and he’d never appeared on any of her Google searches or professional inquiries. Richard, of course, had the wittiest turn of phrase, regarding Drexler as “the sasquatch of the scientific community.”
“Mrs. Tanner, we’re very sorry for your loss,” Drexler began. “I worked with your husband briefly and found him to be brilliant and personable.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. Of course Richard had worked with him.
“I wish we could have this conversation at a more appropriate time, but I’m afraid we’re in a dire rush. I’m going to read you the green code as per your security protocol—“
“You want Sorcerer,” she interrupted.
There was a moment of silence. They were probably contemplating their psychological scenarios, reviewing their strategies of interrogation. They hardly needed her; they could always storm the CDC’s computers or enlist her heads of research to piece together the data, but—
“We need to know if you have a solution for keeping the bacteria alive long enough for effective dispersion.”
Jessica was silent for a long moment. “If we have it?”
“Yes,” Drexler said.
Someday you’re going to have to believe in me, Jess.
Richard hadn’t given Sorcerer to the military. He hadn’t even told them they had it.
He hadn’t been using her. He must have…
He must have just foolishly loved her. The big arrogant idiot.
“Dr. Tanner, I’m sure you understand our predicament. We won’t be able to find a cure before—“
“You can have it,” she blurted. “It’s yours.”
Seven
Castle Valenkov
Transylvania
1:20 a.m. Eastern European Time
Lon had comprehensively studied Transylvania’s castles for profiles on his website, but none of them were quite like this one. Castle Valenkov had a distinct French Gothic influence, a more modern architecture than Bran or Poenari Castle, with far superior masonry. He couldn’t wait to cross-reference the stonework. And the deeds, the ownership—where could this place have come from? How could he have missed it in his studies? Sure, they were deep in the mountains, but in this day and age, could something this big go unnoticed?
The world only knows what the Internet tells them. Those words were written by one Magister Lon Toller, and never were they more true. Lon smiled and shook his head.
They retraced their steps by flashlight and crossed through the grand hall, past the main entrance, to enter the eastern tower. The ground floor was dedicated to a hexagonal library lined with giraffe-high satinwood bookcases, each stuffed with rows and rows and rows of books. One fixture had been replaced with a glass case displaying special books and documents. Lon didn’t recognize anything, but he took note of a series of bamboo slats with handwritten Chinese text.
More bookshelves divided the floor into private reading nooks with cherry leather seats and handcrafted tables. A reading desk, stacked with a filing pile of books, sat at the base of a spiral staircase.
Ilecko immediately knew which bookcase led to the hidden stairwell.
He pulled a trigger behind a book on a lower row, and then put his shoulder into pushing the invisibly segmented shelves. A section of the bookcase rotated on an axis hidden beneath the floor, revealing a short, narrow tunnel leading to infinite blackness.
Ominous, and yet so deliciously inviting! Lon cracked his knuckles, trying to channel patience as Ilecko crammed into the stairwell and motioned for them to follow.
The descent was slow and, eventually, excruciating. The darkness between Mantle and Jaguar felt like it was closing in on Lon’s throat. Time and moisture had made the narrow stairs weak enough to crumble, so they were forced to take slow, vigilant steps. Their breathing grew thick and loud.
“How much farther?” he asked.
“Breathe through your mouth,” Tildascow responded, not at a
ll answering his question. And yet, when he did as she said, the knots in his chest loosened. If she ever wanted to give up being an FBI assassin, she could have a great career as a snarky but sage grandmother.
They finally reached the bottom, where Ilecko lit a wall-mounted gas lamp that threw a dim glow over the team. A narrow passage led to a heavy wooden door, which was once locked by a sliding bolt retrofitted with modern steel. Like all of the others in the castle, the lock had been destroyed—but this time someone had broken out, not in. The anchors had been torn from the stone walls.
The cellar was wide and round, matching the diameter of the castle’s eastern tower. Lon thought it was probably built as a dungeon, but the Valenkovs had converted it into a workshop, part study and part laboratory. Far more cluttered than the ostentatious library above, this was obviously the place where the Valenkovs rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
Ancient books and sour chemicals mixed with a more pungent version of the estate’s native scent to make the air feel gummy. No electricity down here, but the gas lamps on the walls had seen a lot of use.
Every inch of wall space was covered with drawings and notes, and Lon couldn’t consume them fast enough.
Breathe, Lon.
His eyes fell first on a section dedicated to theoretical origins of lycanthropy, where Valenkov had compiled accounts from the ancient Greek writings of Petronius, the sixteenth-century Swedish author Olaus Magnus, and the medieval chronicles of Gervase of Tilsbury, along with related lore about Native American Skinwalkers, shapeshifting spells of witchcraft, and demonic tales of the Roman Catholic Church.
All the same research! The same reference materials! Yes!!
The notes were arranged in a thematic cascade and often accompanied by sketches, photographs, flowcharts, or diagrams. Thick stacks of weathered documents were piled on the floor, along with journals and files and books associated with the topics covered on the wall above them. The entire rear section was dedicated to both supernatural- and scientific-based research for potential cures. Exorcism. Surgery. Arcane medicines crafted from nigh-mythical ingredients. Voodoo, black magic, more witchcraft. So many of the same references Lon had used for his own website, “ofwolvesandmen.com.”
Lon wondered if Valenkov had ever seen his site.
Could he have read my lycanthropy thesis?
An excited chuckle burst from his throat. Thankfully, nobody noticed.
“He was trying to find his own cure,” Tildascow said. She was investigating the chamber’s centerpiece, a wooden worktable blanketed with deep piles of handwritten journals, occult references, and science and medical texts. Mostly Romanian, with scatterings of English, Greek, and—interesting—Chinese. Her eyes moved in a robotic manner, like they were recording rather than reading.
“Trying hard,” Mantle said. He was looking straight up at images on the ceiling: geometric diagrams, mechanically drawn to precision. A spiral divided by right angles, a cone of pentagrams progressing in size, and a variety of triangles divided by smaller triangles with identical ratios.
Wow wow wow! Lon wondered what the diagrams meant to Valenkov. Did the pentagram hold some kind of mathematical or scientific relevance beyond its traditional occult implications? He couldn’t wait to research the images.
Deeper into the workshop, the research topics shifted to hard science: sketched studies of werewolves and their evolving forms under the moon’s phases; calendars marked with lunar calculations; physical maps of greater Transylvania annotated with landmarks and dates spanning back to the 1400s; and dozens of complex molecular formulae scarred by revision scratchings, including chemical diagrams of silver alloyed with palladium, rhodium, and indium.
Valenkov had also dedicated wall space to advanced mathematics and geometry. Here was the classic pentagram within the pentagon and circle, labeled as the “Golden Pentagram.” And the cone of progressive pentagrams, the “Lute of Pythagoras.” More geometric formulas and a series of mind-boggling mathematical equations under the title “Golden Ratio.” Those notes spilled over to a copy of the logarithmic spiral on the ceiling, the “Golden Spiral.” Beneath that, Valenkov had juxtaposed large, colorful photographs of a galaxy, a winter storm, and a seashell, all of which were natural re-creations of the same pattern as the Golden Spiral.
Above all of the mathematical research, Valenkov had posted a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, from Trattato della Pittura:
Non sai tu che la nostra anima è composta di armonia, ed armonia non s’ingenera se non in istanti, ne’ quali le proporzionalità degliobietti si fan vedere o udire?
It was Italian, not Romanian. Lon had almost flunked ninth grade Italian, but it wasn’t a hard translation:
Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony, and that harmony is only produced when proportions of things are seen or heard simultaneously?
The space on the floor beneath these notes wasn’t dedicated to math, but to music. Valenkov had custom-built a wooden soundbox with dozens of strings stretched across its surfboard length. It rested on a frame for adjustable inclination, causing Lon to tilt his head and wonder if you could lie on top of it and play the strings so the box vibrates into your chest. A sketched study of the design lay partially unfurled beneath a nearby desk.
An assortment of recording equipment surrounded the instrument, including a vintage phonograph, a reel-to-reel, and a digital audio tape deck. He even had an iPod and a massive, expensive-looking pair of headphones, both disconnected from a missing laptop. The electronics were plugged into a strip retrofitted into the wall, probably leading to the power cables far above.
“Demetrius studied many years for cure for his father,” Ilecko said. He was examining a chemistry set that looked like it’d been stolen from the set of Frankenstein. All of the lab equipment looked antique, except for anachronistic touches like a calculator and modern centrifuges and microscopes.
“And the western world wouldn’t help,” Lon said. “They didn’t believe in werewolves. I understand his frustration.”
“That don’t mean you try to kill the world,” Mantle said. “You send a videotape of yourself turnin’ into a werewolf. That’d get some attention.”
“You think we have the resources to respond to every weird video we get?” Tildascow asked. “We couldn’t have found Bin Laden if we’d been looking for Bigfoot.”
“Demetrius is smart man,” Ilecko said, in a tone both matter-of-fact and threatening. “Very smart man.”
“Not questioning that,” Tildascow agreed, flipping through the journals at her mechanical pace.
Lon wanted to dive into those diaries, but he also wanted to go back to Valenkov’s masterwork sketches, especially the—
He tripped and ate shit into a bookcase thick with hand-labeled journals. He managed to keep himself and the bookcase upright and he held up his hands: No harm done. Everyone went back to their investigations.
He’d stumbled over a pair of heavy iron manacles, which were fastened to the wall by thick chains. Werewolf restraints! Valenkov must have used them to imprison himself during moonlight hours.
They’d been broken open.
“What’s all this about meditation?” Tildascow asked Ilecko. “Samadhi and Qigong?” She was examining the books on Valenkov’s reading table.
“He prepares. For that when his father died, he would be in control,” Ilecko said. “He swore there would be no more.”
“Something changed his mind.”
“The villagers,” Lon suggested. “They attacked the castle.”
“Maybe they live in fear too long,” Ilecko said, still occupied by the flasks. “Maybe they want the werewolf to end forever.”
Lon waited for Ilecko to continue, but he didn’t. Asking wouldn’t help, so he went back to those sketches.
There were precision pencil works on modern manufactured paper, intermingled with charcoals, brushworks and silverpoints on parchment and vellum and other materials Lon didn’t recognize. M
any of them were ancient, maybe even hundreds of years old. Each one was a masterwork.
The most prominent image was some kind of scraped charcoal on aged parchment. It was placed in a position of honor, perhaps the only thing tacked to the wall that wasn’t overlapped by something else. But it would have struck Lon like a snakebite if only one detail was visible from beneath a stack: the eyes.
It was a lifelike drawing of a beautiful woman, probably in her thirties, with mischievous eyebrows and thick black hair loosely pulled beneath a babushka. The textures and tones cast her so vibrantly that Lon could see the wide-eyed child from her past and the crow’s feet in her future.
And her eyes! Pale and shallow, with a demonic sparkle that was both enticing and merciless, like she could thrust a shiv into your belly without breaking a long, luxurious kiss.
She was a goddess. A Gypsy goddess.
A Gypsy—
Could this be the Gypsy? The one who cursed the Valenkovs?
Lon backed away from the drawing… but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she had him harpooned.
Please don’t curse me, Gypsy goddess. I didn’t mean to stare at you.
He took another step back and bumped into Mantle, who pointed at his feet as if to remind him that they existed.
“This is interesting stuff,” Tildascow finally said to Ilecko. “It might be of help the CDC, but how is it going to help us find him?”
“It is not here.” Ilecko hadn’t found what he was looking for in the flasks. “We must go to the mausoleum.”
Mantle and Lon spoke at the same time: “The what?”
Eight
Manhattan
January 1
5:56 p.m.
Moonrise
As the moon crested the northeast horizon over Harlem, the season’s first snow kissed the streets of Manhattan.
A million citizens were still on the island, half as many as the night before. They barricaded their homes, businesses, or churches; they whispered goodbyes and bargained with their divinities.
Despite the mandatory curfew, up to sixty thousand people still roamed the streets. The biggest crowds were massed at the exits. A few, like Elizabeth Golden, shrewdly abandoned hopes for escape and fled home for safety. But there were plenty of looters and rioters and malcontents, making the streets perilous long before the wolves arrived.
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