Written in the Blood (43 page)

C
HAPTER
47

Interlaken, Switzerland

W
hatever was behind the games room door slammed against it a second time. Another crack appeared in the wood, branching out from the first. Through it, Leah saw a slice of perfect darkness.

Smoke rolled from the grille of the vehicle lodged in the wreckage of the chalet’s main entrance. Flames licked up towards the ceiling.

Death, coming from both directions at once. If Soraya and the children remained inside the gun room, they would suffocate on smoke even before the fire claimed them.

Again, the games room door shuddered.

Eyes stinging, throat burning, Leah pulled herself to her feet, leaving a macabre blot on the stairs where her blood had soaked into the carpet. She had mere seconds now: seconds until the air grew too thick to breathe, seconds until whatever attacked the door managed to smash its way through.

She put weight on her injured leg. Felt something tear. Gasped. Felt blood begin to spurt once more from her damaged artery.

Limping to the security panel, shadows swimming at the edges of her vision, Leah typed in the code:
1 8 8 0
. She heard the mortices disengage with a clunk. The door swung open.

Soraya stood behind it, aiming a pistol-grip shotgun. Behind her, the children stood in a line.

‘We need to go,’ Leah said.

Soraya’s eyes swept over the devastation in the hall, and then they returned to Leah, taking in her shredded jeans, the blood. She raised the barrel of her weapon. ‘How do I know?’

Leah frowned, and then she understood: Soraya had no way of knowing whether she was friend or enemy. The woman stared, eyes black. A wrong move would see her finger tighten on the shotgun’s trigger.

The games room door splintered and Soraya cried out.

Leah spun around. Saw the door, hanging open now, the jamb smashed to pieces. In the doorway stood a creature so ungodly she wondered if loss of blood had incited her brain to weave hallucinations from the shadows.

But no hallucination could reek as badly as the thing that loomed before her. Waves of corruption rolled off it, a sweet-sour stench that mixed with the steam and the smoke and clung to Leah’s throat, her tongue.

The flesh of its face had sagged down its skull like the semi-liquid folds of a guttering candle, and where the skin had split it leaked a milky sap. Only when she saw the hair trailing down its spine, matted into greasy ropes and speckled with the carcasses of dead ticks and lice, did she finally recognise it: the
tolvaj
that had appeared in the restaurant that day back in Mürren. How visibly it had deteriorated since then. When its eyes found her, it grunted in triumph.

Soraya pushed Leah to one side. Ramming the barrels of her shotgun into the
tolvaj
’s mouth, she pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash lit up its eye sockets like a Halloween pumpkin, and the back of its head exploded in a dark and bloody gout. It pitched backwards into the darkness.

Choking on smoke, Soraya reloaded. ‘Watch that door!’ she shouted, darting back inside the gun room. When she reappeared she had Elias tucked under one arm. To the children, she urged, ‘Quick now, all of you. Follow me.’

Leah leaned against the wall, feeling like she might faint, trying not to breathe in a lungful of smoke. Shapes were moving inside the games room. It wouldn’t be long before they ventured out.

She tried to raise her pistol, but her strength had abandoned her. Instead, she whispered the names of the children as they passed, determined not to leave anyone behind. ‘
Dávid, Lícia, Tünde, Emánuel, Levi, Carina, Philipp, Pia, Alex
.’

One more child. She tried to think, tried to empty her head of pain and smoke. Soraya had reached the top of the stairs; she turned and shouted Leah’s name.

One more.

And then she realised: Soraya was holding Elias. There was no one left.

Leah lurched after them, limping in an awkward backwards gait, keeping her eyes on the door from which the
tolvaj
had emerged. But it was impossible to see anything now. The smoke was blinding. Asphyxiating.

Coughing, dragging in a breath of air that pricked her lungs like hot needles, her heel knocked against the first stair. She struggled up.

Something emerged from the smoke. A face that once had belonged to Ivan Tóth. Its eyes lit on her and, when it saw the children climbing the stairs, it revealed a set of blood-wet teeth.

The last of her energy was ebbing now, like rainwater draining through topsoil. Her right leg felt like a lump of wood strapped to her hip. She dragged it up the stairs behind her, leaving a bloody trail in her wake.

Soraya reached the first floor and hurried past the living-room doors. At the end of the hall she disappeared around the corner, towards the stairs leading up to the floor above. A moment later she reappeared.

The instant Leah saw Soraya’s face, she knew what had happened.

Tolvajok
. Somehow they’d broken in at the top of the house, and were working their way down.

Left hand holding Elias, Soraya had no way of using the shotgun grasped in her right. Instead she retreated, leading her charges back down the hall towards Leah. When she arrived outside the living room where her father and brother had died, she ushered the children through.

Leah tried to call out, tried to warn the woman of what she was about to see, but she had no voice left. Behind her, a shadow rose up on the wall. It was an effort even to find the energy to look over her shoulder but she managed it, turning in time to see the thing that had once been Ivan Tóth lurch up the final stair. As she backed along the hall, she saw a second shape loom out of the darkness from the opposite direction.

Another of the
tanács
: Krištof Joó. She had never liked the man. What she saw now, she liked even less.

Tolvajok
: behind her and in front. Leah struggled into the living room, blinking tears from her eyes, coughing smoke. To her right, she saw the children follow Soraya through the arch into the sun room.

You failed them. You failed them all.

But she wouldn’t. Not in this last task.

Her pistol was loaded. She knew what she had to do.

The brass caps of spent rounds twinkled on the floor. She saw Luca, lying on his back. The shattered corpses of A Kutya Herceg and the man she’d known as Jérôme.

At the dining table Leah paused for breath, using one of the chairs to hold herself upright.

Faces appeared in the doorway leading from the hall. Ivan Tóth came first. Krištof Joó followed. They were in an appalling state, faces hanging loose, mouths bloody, but the sight of her, so close, seemed to renew their energy.

Leah hauled herself along the dining table, chair by chair by chair, towards the sun room’s entrance.

Hisses of excitement. Horribly close.

She staggered to the arch, and when she passed through it into the chamber beyond, she felt something give in her leg.

Crashing across the floor, Leah slammed against one of the viewing windows, cracking her skull against the glass. The blow loosened an avalanche of sparks inside her head. She spun away from the pane. Glimpsed the first of the
tolvajok
step into the room, followed by a second.

At the far end of the chamber, Soraya had opened the only door, revealing a cramped storage space and a narrow flight of stairs leading up. Ashen-faced, she pushed the children through.

A third
tolvaj
slouched into the room, following Tóth and Joó.

Soraya screamed out Leah’s name, beseeching her to hurry. But Leah had no movement in her right leg at all now, and no strength in her left.

The door where her friend waited was five yards away, but it might as well have been five miles. She would never make it.

She gestured to Soraya, used her pistol to demonstrate what she intended to do.

The woman stared back, grimacing. She nodded, mouthed,
I’m sorry
.

Leah smiled, watching as her friend closed the door and locked it behind her. ‘Me too,’ she said.

Outside the windows, snowflakes spiralled and danced. The snow on the lawn glowed orange with reflected firelight.

The final
tolvaj
stepped onto the viewing chamber’s floor. They came at her, all four, an inexorable mass of clutching, groping fingers.

Keep fighting till you have nothing left.

Her grandfather’s favourite phrase. Leah watched the horde shambling towards her, and realised that she
had
nothing left.

C
HAPTER
48

Interlaken, Switzerland

U
sing the barrel of his gun to push Hannah Wilde along, Jakab crunched through snow towards the bright lights of the chalet.

A mountain wind gusted around them, fanning the flames at the front of the building and stirring the falling snowflakes into a blizzard of white.

Tattered threads of smoke coiled from a broken window on the ground floor, nearest to where the fire burned. It offered the only route inside. How long they would be able to breathe in there, he did not know. But it didn’t really matter. He didn’t think he’d be coming out.

How could he have lived so long without knowing the connection they shared? Without even suspecting? When he thought of what he had sacrificed while chasing a dream that could never be, he wanted to weep. But he was past tears; past caring. He just wanted this to end.

He pressed the gun into Hannah’s back with greater force. He knew that she heard the flames. Smelled the smoke. But she did not cry out, did not try to plead with him; she was far too stubborn for that. It was, he realised, a trait they shared. How strange, to suddenly consider it.

Her boots crunched on glass shards and she came to a halt, coughing out smoke.

‘There’s a broken window in front of you,’ he told her. ‘It reaches all the way to the ground. You won’t cut yourself if you walk straight.’

She tilted her head, listening to his voice: listening, perhaps, for other sounds, too. But he knew she wouldn’t try to attack him a second time – not now that he was expecting it.

Hannah folded her arms across her chest and stepped through the wreckage into the room beyond. Jakab followed, pulling a penlight torch from his pocket.

He switched it on, swabbing the beam left and right. A dark shape loomed in the smoke. He saw it was a snooker table, the balls on its surface glinting. On the far side of the room, a smashed door, hanging ajar. Smoke billowed through.

Clamping the penlight in his teeth, grabbing Hannah by her collar, he pushed her through the shattered doorway, holding his breath and narrowing his eyes at the stinking grey cloud.

She stumbled forward and he yanked her to the right. In the hazy light cast by the torch, dark shapes flittered like bats.

The heat drew beads of sweat from his brow. He felt his heart begin to thump in his chest. Even now, fifteen years since his burning, fire still terrified him; he was gratified by his newfound ability to challenge it. Perhaps he had healed from that experience more fully than he’d known.

Into a hallway, and he saw eyes peering down at him through the smoke. Jakab removed his hand from Hannah’s collar. Taking the penlight from his teeth, he played its beam over the walls.

Masks. Hundreds of them. So many different kinds, from so many different places in the world.

Even though he knew it must be a trick of the light, he thought he recognised, among them, the faces of the dead. And, as he stared at them, he began to remember names too.

Nathaniel Wilde’s was the first face he saw. He’d killed Nate, hadn’t he? Had shot him with that old Luger pistol. But he hadn’t been himself at the time, he’d been someone else, someone called . . . Charles Meredith, that was it: the professor. Hanging beside Nate, Charles watched him with blank eyes through which nightmares curled. Jakab had killed him, too, hadn’t he? It disturbed him to realise he didn’t even remember how.

He’d been Charles for a maddening short chapter in his life, but his memories of that time, although as hazy as the smoke thickening around him, were good. Until the end, of course, when the man’s wife had attacked him. Nicole Dubois had died as a result of their encounter. She stared down at him from the wall, eyes haemorrhaged, blood glittering on her cheeks.

How he’d loved her. How difficult it was to see her again after so long.

Earlier, he’d believed he was beyond tears. Now he found that wasn’t true.

Next, he saw Nicole’s father, Eric Dubois, the big-hearted Frenchman from Carcassonne who had been his friend, had given him a job and had taught him a trade. Something had happened, something. He remembered cutting off Eric’s face, burying him in the woods. For what, though?

There was his reason. Alice Dubois. A woman he had loved. A woman who’d plied him with drink and tried to kill him. Another episode of fire.

But Alice hadn’t just been Eric’s wife. She’d been, Jakab now knew, something far more important than that. She’d been his own daughter. He couldn’t have known it at the time. Even so, when he thought of the intimacy they’d shared, he felt his stomach heave with nausea and shame.

On the hallway wall, his history stretched out before him.

Past Alice, he saw Helene Richter, Carl Richter and Hans. Their dead eyes stared; their punctured faces gaped like broken jigsaws of skin and muscle and flesh.

‘You should have told me,’ he moaned. ‘You should have told me where she went.’

He had not known that his child was growing in Anna Richter’s belly, had not known that he spilled the blood of his own child’s grandparents that night in Sopron. There had been so
much
blood; by the time he had finished with them, his hands were crimson with it.

Past those three sightless faces, and now a brother loomed: Jani. All he remembered of Jani was a single image: the young man’s head breaking apart as Jakab shot him on the balcony in Pozsony. On the wall, Jani’s forehead smoked, the edges of the wound blackened and crisp.

Jakab moaned again; he had not wanted to see that. And then he saw something even worse, and finally remembered the name that had eluded him.

Erna.

Why did he have to meet her like this? The bright young face she’d once possessed had gone. He saw instead how she’d appeared at the end: her cheek sunken, her eye destroyed, the wooden flights of a crossbow bolt emerging from its ruins.

Erna Novak.

He had bought her a ring. Had asked her to marry him.

And then the
tanács
had sent out its hunters, and he’d lost her.

All those faces watching him, tormenting him. He thought he saw a question lurking in their eyes. When he considered what it might be, he had to look away.

Ahead, Jakab saw the outline of a staircase rising into darkness. He nudged Hannah on, warning her of its presence. She moved hesitantly, sweeping each foot in an arc before her, until she made contact with the bottom stair.

Steadily, she began to climb. After fourteen steps they reached the first-floor hallway. Double doors to their right, hanging open. Jakab was about to push her past them when he saw a body lying on the floor. Shell casings. A pool of blood.

Here. This was where he needed to go. This was where she would be. He shoved Hannah into the room, saw two more corpses on the floor. Both had lost their faces to gunfire. He wondered if they hung in the hall he’d left behind.

Beyond the dead bodies, a huge window curved the length of the room. Snow and ash eddied outside. He saw the silhouette of a dining table. Against the far wall, a bizarre skeleton hanging from an iron rod. Next to it, a dark arch.

And through that arch, Jakab saw something else.

Something amazing.