Written in the Blood (32 page)

Jakab stalked towards her, shadow flowing up to the ceiling. ‘I didn’t want this,’ he whispered. ‘But we had agreement, you and I. You have an obligation to me.’

He knelt beside her. Wiped the blood from her mouth. ‘You can be Leah again, I know you can.’

She shrank from his touch. The pain in her jaw was needle-sharp. Tilting her head, she saw the Moses basket rocking, saw Elijah’s legs kicking and heard his cries.

If she did as he asked, she knew her life would end in this room. And what then for Elijah? Desire sated, Jakab would let her corpse grow cold on the floor, and he would walk away. She could not bear to think of what would happen after that. With the house locked up tight, with her guards dead, with no one to check on her son . . .

Etienne moaned. And then a monstrous idea jumped into her head, a thought so ruthless and dark she almost fled from the contemplation of it.

Hesitate, and you’ll die. And Elijah will die with you.

She thought of Leah and her mother, of all the love they’d shown her. Of all their kindnesses and reassurances and warmth.

The Moses basket began to rock more violently. Elijah began to shriek. His cries steeled her, stripping away the humanity she’d learned, reducing her to the woman she had been before.

Jakab pressed a hand to her forehead. ‘
Be
her,’ he hissed, and she felt a spike of pain, a blooming pressure behind her eyes.

‘I know where she is, Jakab.’

‘
Be her
.’

‘Are you listening?’ she asked, ignoring the pain. ‘Leah Wilde. I know where she is. Her mother, too.’

His face was a depraved mask. Lips curled into a sneer. Eyes creased into slits. Pores greasy with sweat. ‘You lie.’

‘I swear to you. Leah Wilde. The girl in the photograph. And the woman, Hannah. Hannah Wilde. I’ve met them, Jakab. Both of them.’

‘Hannah Wilde is
dead
.’

‘Dead?’ Etienne shook her head. ‘She’s not dead. Blind, yes. But not dead.’

‘Liar! Filthy
kurva
liar!’

‘No, I swear. I can prove it to you.’

His face was so close that even in the weak light spilling from the candle she could see the blood vessels swelling in his eyes. She could taste his breath on her tongue. An urgency to it.

‘Prove it how?’

‘There are cameras all over the house. Check the footage. I’ll show you.’

Jakab removed his hand from her face and retreated, sitting with his back against the very bookcase that hid the panic room beyond. Inches away from safety. That was all she had been.

‘If you’re lying . . .’ he said. ‘Show me.’

‘I will. And then—’

‘No tricks. No delays. Show me.’

Etienne nodded. She rose to her feet.

In the building’s ground-floor security office a television screen, quartered to show four separate images, provided a wash of blue light.

Etienne sat on a chair in front of the desk, Elijah held close. Beside her, Jakab stared at the screen. Most of the images showed static views inside the house. One of them focused on the street.

A silver Mercedes pulled up. The camera wasn’t of a high enough resolution to capture the driver, but a few moments later the car door opened and Leah Wilde climbed out.

Jakab jerked in his chair. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No.’ Leaning forward, he watched Leah approach the gate. She pressed the buzzer, looked up at the house.

A camera inside the ground-floor hall captured Jackson opening the door. Ushering Leah inside, he began to search her. She endured, arms outstretched. A few words were exchanged.

‘He
touched
her,’ Jakab whispered. ‘Did you see?’

Etienne watched in silence. She saw Jackson lead Leah deeper into the house. Another camera captured the girl as she climbed the staircase to the second floor. At the landing, she glanced directly into the lens.

‘Pause it,’ Jakab said. ‘Just there.’

She complied, pressing a button on the keyboard.

‘Full screen.’

Another button press, and Leah’s magnified image stared out at them. Etienne closed her eyes, shame seeping into her like poison. Grainy security footage or not, she could not meet the girl’s gaze.

Jakab reached out a hand to the screen, and his fingers brushed Leah’s cheek. Tears rolled from his bloodshot eyes. A sob escaped him. ‘She’s beautiful. Perfect.’ He wiped the tears from his cheeks. ‘Yet so fragile, don’t you think?’

‘You never told me, and I never asked. But Leah and her mother: what were they to you? What links the three of you?’

He turned to her and his expression hardened. Moments later his attention returned to the screen. When he saw Leah’s eyes watching him, he covered his mouth with his hands and began to shake. ‘What did I do to you?’ he whispered. ‘Will you ever forgive me?
Can
you forgive me?’ To Etienne, he asked, ‘Can she?’

‘Why do you need her forgiveness? What did you do?’

Again his expression changed. Reaching out, he switched off the screen that displayed Leah’s face. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

C
HAPTER
32

Utah, USA

I
n death, the sightless eyes of the
tolvaj
host seemed filled with reproach. Clawed fingers clutched the armchair in which he had died, body lost inside a dust-caked Grizzlies jacket. Blood coagulated on his chin in streaks and lumps.

He had lost all his teeth towards the end. They lay in his lap, a scarlet-spattered collection.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll carry your memory.’

‘
As will we all
,’ scratched a voice from the dark. ‘
Not for long, though. No, not for long, for long. Dying
.’

She turned, saw the hairless creature in the next chair, a more recent abductee but almost as badly ravaged. Its eyes, as they watched her, were hard pale stones. No blame resided there. Only fear.

‘I won’t let it happen,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’

‘
Too late, I think, soon. Too late
.’

Its breath was laced with decay. She stroked its hand, felt the ridges and valleys formed by the veins beneath its skin. ‘I promise you.’

She stumbled through the house and found her way outside. The midday sun’s dry heat was a sharp contrast to the room’s cool shadows. Bending over, she vomited until her stomach was purged.

She took out her phone, dialled a number and heard a recorded message. ‘Call me,’ she muttered, and hung up.

She bowed her head and closed her eyes. Her phone rang.

‘Talk,’ he said, and she wondered how his voice could sound so close when she knew he was so far away.

‘He died.’ Her shoulders started shaking. She clutched her hair, pulled out a fistful. ‘We can’t wait any longer. We can’t.’

His voice, when it returned, was wretched. ‘The others?’

‘Exactly the same.’ She lifted her eyes to the sky. ‘What are you doing over there? What are either of you doing to prevent this?

‘We’re close.’

‘Close isn’t enough! He’s
dead
, do you understand? I had to look into his eyes and watch the life go out of them. Have you ever seen that? Do you know what that’s like? I need to move them.’

‘If we move them too early—’

‘If we don’t, they’re going to die anyway. They can’t survive on
simavér
any longer. While the pair of you saunter around Europe looking for meat, your children are
dying
.’

He hissed in a breath. ‘That was tasteless.’

‘I didn’t mean it.’ She collapsed into a crouch. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll do what you say, you know I will. But I think we have to come to you.’

‘Arrange a flight,’ he said, and his voice was cold.

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Then how will I know where—’

‘Charter a plane. Get to an airport. I’ll phone you back and tell you where you’re going.’

‘When? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like this, but wh—’

The line went dead.

She stared at the phone. Blinked.

Gritting her teeth, she staggered back inside the ranch.

C
HAPTER
33

London, England

L
it by flames flickering from a candelabra in Etienne’s drawing room, Jakab bent over her baby’s crib and traced his finger down Elijah’s cheek.

‘He’s a miracle,’ he whispered. ‘Those eyes. You must love him more than life.’

She would have responded had she known what to say. But Jakab seemed so unstable as he stood there, so unknowable, that she feared the wrong comment might incite him to further violence. Already he had committed two murderous acts this evening, and she knew they could not have been his first; the deaths of Jackson and Bartoli seemed not to weigh on him at all.

He turned to her. ‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘you’d better tell me everything.’

Etienne nodded. ‘I will. I’ll tell you. And then . . .’ She closed her mouth, horrified that she’d been about to press him. He raised an eyebrow, daring her to continue. She cringed. ‘I’ll tell you.’

And she did. Everything she’d seen, every conversation she’d had, everything she’d managed to piece together. She knew she held the key to only a fraction of Hannah and Leah Wilde’s history. The two had never mentioned this man, and throughout all the hours of Etienne’s acquaintance with Jakab he’d never spoken of the reason for his obsession. She had no idea at all what thread linked the three together.

But
he
knew. And the longer she talked, the more animated he became. Jakab’s face was a canvas of shifting emotions. He laughed, tears shining on his cheeks, and then his expression darkened and he clasped his shoulders, baring his teeth. Occasionally he would spring to his feet and she thought he was going to attack her. But then he’d retreat to Elijah’s Moses basket, and the sight of her sleeping baby seemed to calm him.

Outside, the wind railed, pressing its face to the windows and howling its dismay. Ghost breath twined down the chimney, rocking the flames of the candles. The door to the drawing room swung gently.

‘Where is Hannah now?’ he asked.

Etienne didn’t have a definite answer to that, but she had a good idea, and she told him, heart breaking at this latest betrayal, persuading herself there was time, should she survive, to put this right and warn the woman and her daughter of what was coming.

She was still talking when she noticed it: a vague note of putrescence in the air, an odour of bloated meat, sick-sweet. Casting her eyes past Jakab’s head, staring into the slab of darkness revealed by the swinging door, she thought she caught sight of something. A glimmer of movement.

Jakab stiffened, and Etienne realised that he sensed it too. He turned just as a buzzing bluebottle looped out of that rectangular chasm. The fly arced around the room, heavy and slow, wings chattering as they strained to keep it aloft. Rising up, it flew over the candelabra, shadow flitting across the ceiling like a rat.

In the doorway a figure loomed: tall, almost seven feet in height. In its hand it gripped a walking cane, and between its fingers Etienne saw the scales of a silver python’s head, the serpent’s eyes picked out in gold.

Triggered by that graveyard stink, a memory surfaced: the night, all those years ago, that a nightmare had visited Tansik House, spiriting the boy János away. As the recollection grew clearer, she understood what stood before her. The knowledge pierced her heart.

The
lélek
tolvaj
raised its head and sniffed. The stench of decay was now so ripe in the room – so thick – that Etienne felt her throat closing in protest, her bile rising.

It took a step towards them and the candlelight revealed more of its horror. Its eyes were recessed so deeply it seemed to regard them from scooped-out sockets. The flesh of its face was thick and glutinous, sagging from the skull to which it was attached. Its hat, a fedora with a single jay feather, covered a wormy straggle of dirty blond hair, matted with grease, that reached all the way down its back.

Without doubt, the creature was in desperate need of a new host.

In front of her, Jakab stared, his jaw slackening. She’d never seen fear on his face before but she saw it now, and felt it herself. A terrible, smothering terror, bowing her with its intensity and flushing her limbs of strength. ‘Oh, what have you done, Jakab?’ she moaned. ‘What have you brought on us?’

The
tolvaj
tapped its cane against the floor, the hammer strikes like a punctuation to its thoughts. At the sound, two flies shook themselves loose from its clothing and spiralled towards the ceiling, where they buzzed and looped.

Their visitor swept the room with its gaze, face puckering. Spying the Moses basket, its mouth opened and it drew in a rattling breath.

Etienne tried to force herself forward. Tried to make her legs move and intercept it, even though she knew her attempt would be futile. She felt a pressure on her arm, discovered that Jakab had retreated to her side.

He gripped her, knuckles white. ‘Don’t,’ he hissed. ‘Be still.’

She tried to shrug him off, but it was a feeble protest; she didn’t really want to intervene. It was what shocked her most of all. Even though Elijah lay alone in his crib, her terror consumed her so completely that she could only watch, paralysed, as the
tolvaj
approached.

When it looked down into the Moses basket it seemed to grow in stature, chest swelling, shoulders filling. It dropped its cane to the floor and its jaw hung open like a hound’s. Saliva glistened on its teeth.

‘
What we need
,’ it whispered. ‘
Young, but what we need, we need
.’

It reached its hands into the crib and Etienne screamed.