by Darren Shan
They caught up to the humans as they entered a ruined hospital that was still in operation, albeit only just. Canvas had been stretched across the holes in the roof and candles flickered everywhere. Larten could tell by the scents and sounds that there weren’t many people inside. He paused in the doorway and glanced at Arra.
“Are you sure this is safe?” he asked.
“Absolutely.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you recognize his scent?”
Larten sniffed the air, but it was thick with the stench of human blood. “Can you not just tell me?” he growled.
Before Arra could answer, a man said from within the darkness, “She doesn’t need to. Welcome, Larten. Greetings, Arra.”
A young vampire in a muddied blue suit stepped forward. He had blond hair and a delicate face, and was of slight build.
“Kurda Smahlt?” Larten said with surprise.
Kurda smiled and bowed to the General. “The one and only. Now come on in and make yourselves at home. I’m delighted to see you both.”
“Why?” Arra frowned—she had never been particularly friendly with Kurda.
“I need your spit,” Kurda said, and laughed at their bemused expressions.
Chapter
Thirteen
Kurda led the couple on a short tour of the makeshift hospital. There were fourteen patients, three nurses, and some volunteers. Conditions were squalid, with almost no medicine, hardly any bandages and few clean sheets. But every patient knew that they were fortunate. Berlin was full of the wounded and dying, people who couldn’t find any form of aid, even a ward as rough as this one.
“It’s chaotic at the moment,” Kurda said, rubbing spit into the wound of an unconscious woman. Most of her right arm was open and festering. His spit would work only limited good on an injury this serious, but he persevered. “Everyone knows the war is lost. Surrender is the only sensible option. But the Nazis won’t go easily. Thousands more will perish needlessly before the beast roars its last and is buried forever.”
“How long have you been here?” Larten asked, studying the people in the beds and cots.
“A few weeks,” Kurda said. “I came when I realized the end was nigh. Their leaders are wicked, warped creatures, but these are good, honest people deserving of help.”
“Why do you care?” Arra frowned. “Aren’t there human doctors who can look after them?”
“There will be soon,” Kurda nodded. “But as I said, it’s chaos now. The medics will arrive too late to save most of these patients.”
“Are you from this city?” Arra asked.
“No,” Kurda said.
“From Germany?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll ask again, why do you care?”
Kurda shrugged. “I like to help.”
“I thought you’d have been too busy trying to make peace with the vampaneze to waste time on humans,” Arra sniffed.
“Things have been quiet between the two clans during the war,” Kurda said. “Both have withdrawn, waiting for the conflict to end, eager not to get involved. There wasn’t much for me to do, so I thought I’d try to do some good here. I’ve been working wherever I could help. I spent a lot of time smuggling people out of Nazi-controlled territories, but in more recent times I’ve been focusing on casualties like these.”
“Who did you smuggle?” Larten asked. “Soldiers? Politicians?”
Kurda shook his head and stopped by a bed where a man in a doctor’s gown was wiping a child’s fevered brow. The man was pale and unhealthy looking, very thin, and his short hair looked as if it had been shaved to the bone in the near past. As he wiped sweat from the child’s eyes, Larten noticed a tattoo on the man’s arm, a series of letters and numbers.
“How is she doing, James?” Kurda whispered.
“Not good.” The man glanced around. “She’s fighting hard, but I think…” He sighed.
“This is James Ovo,” Kurda introduced them. “He has been with me for the last couple of months. He’s a good friend and a more than passable doctor.”
James snorted. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“This is not your profession of choice?” Larten asked.
“No,” James said. “I was an undertaker, like my father and grandfather. I hoped my sons would follow in our footsteps, but…” His face darkened and Kurda squeezed his shoulder.
“Have you heard of the death camps?” Kurda asked softly as they stepped away from the bed.
“Rumors,” Larten nodded. “I ignored them. One hears wild tales every time there is a war.”
“This time the tales are true,” Kurda said. “And I doubt if the rumors you heard came anywhere close to the truth.” He started to tell them about the camps, what happened to people like James Ovo and his doomed sons. Then he stopped. This wasn’t the time or place to talk of such horrors.
“Anyway,” Kurda said, “I hope you’ll help now that you’re here. I’ve been doing as much as I can, but my throat feels like it’s made of sandpaper. If you wouldn’t mind lending a mouthful or two of spit…”
“Why should we?” Arra asked. “This isn’t our war and these aren’t our people. What concern are they of ours?”
Kurda grimaced but didn’t argue. Arra wasn’t being insensitive. This was the way many vampires thought. They expected no help from humans in their own times of trouble and believed that humanity should therefore expect no help from the clan in theirs.
Larten, however, remembered the First World War and a night when he’d led a group of soldiers through the hell of no-man’s-land, back to their trench. He looked back on that as the start of his recovery. After killing so many innocents on the ship en route to Greenland, he had believed for a long time that he could never make amends. He still wasn’t sure that he could, but when he’d helped those soldiers, he’d felt for the first time as if there might be some small shimmer of hope for his soul. He hadn’t dedicated himself to good deeds from that night on—he wasn’t that sort of person—but now that an opportunity to help had presented itself, he seized it.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” Larten said quietly. As Arra stared at him, he shrugged. “Friends of another vampire’s are friends of mine.”
Arra scowled, then sighed and worked a ball of phlegm up her throat. “Come on then, fool,” she barked at Kurda. “Show us where to gob!”
They toiled until midday, sheltered from the sun inside the gloominess of the building. James Ovo and a few of the volunteers went out early in the morning and returned with another handful of injured stragglers. A couple of the patients from the night before died, while one was deemed fit enough to be dismissed.
And so the work continued.
They finally rested on rough beds in a room in the basement. Kurda apologized for not being able to provide coffins but said he wasn’t fond of them and hardly ever slept in one.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Arra huffed, biting into a loaf of bread that one of the volunteers had given to her. When she saw that Larten wasn’t eating, she paused. “Not hungry?”
“We can thrive on blood, of which there is plenty,” he said. “The humans need food to survive, and of that there is little.”
Arra rolled her eyes. “I never knew you were so soft,” she grumbled, but she set her bread aside to be divided among the patients.
Kurda was smiling. “It’s good to see you. I thought, after Vampire Mountain, that you wouldn’t want to speak with me again.”
“Why?” Larten frowned.
“I told Vancha about your speeches, so I figured you might…” Kurda stopped and cleared his throat. “You knew that, right?”
“No,” Larten rumbled, glaring at the vampire, who’d suddenly turned a paler shade of white. But Larten couldn’t maintain the pretense, and after a few seconds he laughed. “You need not worry. I deserved my thrashing. I was all the fool that Vancha said I was, and maybe more. You did me a favor by telling him, and if you had not, someone else would have.”
“That’s a relief,” Kurda chuckled. His smile faded and he leaned forward. “Does that mean you no longer support Wester Flack and his drive for war?”
Larten pursed his lips. “I think that the vampaneze are a menace and we should deal with them before they rise against us. But whipping vampires up into a fury is not for me. If war comes, I will fight gladly. If I am asked for my opinion, I will speak out in favor of Wester and those who campaign with him. But I am through with speeches. I will leave those to the professionals.”
“Surely you can’t crave war,” Kurda groaned. “After everything you must have seen these past few years?”
“I have observed many wars over the decades,” Larten replied. “Sometimes, I admit, for sport, although that was long ago when I was young and even more foolish than I am now. This war is nastier than most, but they are all brutal at the core. That is the nature of warfare.”
“Yet you still believe in it?” Kurda pressed.
“It is sometimes necessary,” Larten said. “It is better to defend yourself against an enemy than cave in to them. The British, the French, and their allies have suffered, but this was a war they had to fight.”
“No,” Kurda grunted. “They could have negotiated, reasoned, sought peaceful solutions to their problems.”
“Reasoned with the Nazis?” Larten jeered. “You do not know these people if you think that they were ever open to reason.”
“The Nazis didn’t spring to power overnight,” Kurda argued. “If the people of other countries had paid more attention and dealt with Germany’s problems in the early 1920s, before the Nazis came to prominence…”
“That is easy to say now,” Larten noted. “But by the time people realized that the Nazis were a threat, it was too late for diplomacy.”
“I don’t agree,” Kurda said. “But even if that was true, it doesn’t change our circumstances. We know that the vampaneze are a threat, but they don’t currently scheme against us. We’re at peace with them and we should use that lull to secure the long-term security of both clans. This is our chance to stop the threat of war at its source and ensure that we never face what these humans have had to endure.”
Larten shook his head. “It sounds like a solid argument. But so does Wester’s. If we go to war while the vampaneze are weak, we can slaughter them all. If, on the other hand, we allow them to flourish, they will always be a threat. There can be no real truce since we both hate what the other clan stands for.”
“We can work on that,” Kurda insisted. “We might find we’re not so different if we sit down and talk.”
“But what if we find that we are?” Larten countered. “What if those talks make us realize that there can never be a union, if your search for peace proves to be the catalyst that drives the clans to war?”
Kurda frowned. “You’re a dangerous one, Crepsley. I see now why Wester tried to make you his spokesman. You have a sly tongue. I think you could convince me to change my opinions if you had long enough to work on me.”
“Maybe I will,” Larten smiled.
“You plan to stick around?” Kurda asked.
“No,” Arra cut in, then glanced at Larten. “We’re not staying, are we?”
“Actually, we are,” Larten said softly. “There are people to help and a doubter to convert.”
Arra blinked. “What about Randel Chayne?”
Larten considered that, then said firmly and with great satisfaction at being able to say such a thing after all these years, “Randel Chayne can damn well wait.”
Chapter
Fourteen
Larten and Arra stayed with Kurda for the remainder of the war in Europe, then for several months afterwards. While humans were celebrating the end of the hostilities and looking forward to a more hopeful future, the vampires were busy crisscrossing the continent, helping wherever they could. They went to places where human medics were slow to visit, areas where anarchy was rife and bullets still flew.
When they heard of the terrible bombs that had been dropped on two cities in Japan, they flitted East. There, in the ashen ruins of Hiroshima, Larten discovered a new breed of horror. His many decades had never prepared him for such total destruction. He and the others worked feverishly, as if caught in a nightmare. They couldn’t do much to ease the pain of those who had been burned and warped by the lethal bomb, but they did what little good that they could.
Larten hardly slept while in Japan. Every time he tried, his head filled with the cries of the suffering and he was unable to block out the awful things that he’d seen. Even when he closed his eyes he saw them, faces stripped of everything that made them human, charred bodies floating in the putrid water of the rivers and streams, children choking on the poisoned air.
Larten felt old and tired when they departed, as if he was a man who had lived too long. The world had changed beyond recognition and he didn’t want to be part of this new, barbaric place. In his mind’s eye he was still a citizen of the nineteenth century, hailing from a period when war could be noble. This was the first time he had noted a cultural chasm between the people he’d known then and those of this modern era. He now understood why older vampires like Seba and Paris Skyle tried to withdraw from the human world entirely. It wasn’t just that vampires and humans were different. If you lived long enough, it began to seem as if you were part of a separate species.
Arra was eager to resume the hunt for Randel Chayne. She wanted to explore the world, hunt vampaneze, embrace the night. Though she hadn’t said anything, she felt they’d been wasting their time helping humans and was keen to return to proper vampire work.
Larten’s heart was no longer in his quest. He still wished to bring Alicia’s killer to justice, but the thought of searching for the elusive, probably deceased vampaneze for decades to come filled him with gloom. He had enjoyed being able to make an impact while helping Kurda. Life was easy when he had direct and pressing problems to solve. Part of him was sorry that the war had ended. He missed waking with a definite agenda, never needing to look any further ahead than the next few hours.
“Where will you go?” Kurda asked as they prepared to part ways.
“Wherever the vampaneze are,” Arra sniffed.
Larten said nothing and Kurda caught an uncertain look in the vampire’s eyes. “You could stay with me,” he offered.
“And help you make peace with our foes?” Arra laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Kurda said patiently. “I received a message from Vancha. He’s going to a wedding of a friend of ours. It will be a highly unusual ceremony. If you like, you can come. If nothing else, it would be a good opportunity for you to make your peace with Vancha.”
Larten wasn’t sure he wanted to face the Prince so soon after their fight. But it wasn’t a vampire’s way to run from his fears, so he nodded gruffly and said, “Very well. We will travel with you awhile longer. But tell me, what is so unusual about this wedding?”
Kurda grinned. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me!”
The wedding was scheduled to take place in a small, isolated cove. Larten, Kurda, and Arra arrived a few nights before the ceremony to find Vancha March and another vampire sitting alone in the middle of a beach, eating raw crabs.
Larten recognized the other vampire even from a distance and felt a stab of pleasure shoot through him. He almost broke into a trot, but that wouldn’t have been dignified, so he kept to the same deliberate pace and made sure he looked suitably serious.
Vancha heard them coming and rose to greet them. The other vampire’s senses weren’t as sharp and he carried on eating, poking bits of flesh out of the shells, swallowing them with evident disgust.
“I don’t understand how anyone can enjoy this,” the vampire grunted.
“Perhaps your senses would not be so dull if you ate more seafood,” Larten said drily.
The vampire jolted with surprise, then surged to his feet. “Larten!” he cried.
“It i
s good to see you again, Gavner,” Larten said politely, bowing to his ex-assistant.
Gavner Purl ignored the bow and hugged the orange-haired vampire. Larten looked startled. Then, with a shy smile, he patted Gavner’s back.
“I’ve missed you,” Gavner said, letting go and beaming.
“I do not know why,” Larten said. “I have not missed you.” But there was a twinkle to his eyes and Gavner knew that he was being teased.
Larten faced Vancha March and bowed again. “Sire,” he said quietly.
“Larten,” Vancha grunted, casting a critical eye over the General. “How are your ribs?”
“All healed.”
“I thought you’d still be hobbling after the beating I gave you.”
“I have sustained worse injuries stumbling down stairs,” Larten said.
Vancha scowled. “Be careful or I’ll knock you about again.”
“I had been drinking when we fought,” Larten said. “Sober, I do not think you would fare so well against me.”
Vancha’s eyes narrowed. Then he laughed and Larten chuckled too. The pair smiled at each other, their differences put behind them.
“No more nonsense about going to war with the vampaneze?” Vancha asked.
“Not for the time being,” Larten replied.
“Good.” Vancha bowed low to Arra. “Mistress Sails, it’s a pleasure as always. You grow more radiant with every passing night.”
“Save it for the fools who believe your flattery,” Arra sniffed.
“She likes me really,” Vancha said, nudging Gavner. “When she sees sense and abandons this orange-haired buffoon, she’ll be mine.”
“I’d rather mate with the frozen remains of Perta Vin-Grahl,” Arra said icily.
Vancha cackled and bid Kurda welcome, then the five vampires squatted around the remains of the crabs and spent the rest of the night catching up. They slept in a cave when the sun rose. Vancha sneaked out in the middle of the day and returned with a fresh load of live crabs, which he tipped onto the sleeping Gavner. When the young vampire shot awake, yelping as the crabs pinched him, Vancha laughed until his face turned as purple as the animal skins he always wore.