Written in the Blood (45 page)

C
HAPTER
52

Interlaken, Switzerland

L
eah felt her throat tighten with emotion as she saw him standing there alone. He wore his years heavy tonight: eyes shadowed, skin as grey as the ash settling on the windows from the fires burning downstairs.

Izsák stared at his daughter, so captured by her presence, so enthralled by her, that he seemed blind to the rest of them standing like islands in a sea of broken flesh.

The woman turned her eyes towards him but her arms remained locked, guns still pointing at Jakab and Hannah. Her hair, lifted by the wind that blew through the broken floor, feathered around her face like spun gold. ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘I
know
you.’

Izsák shook his head. He held his gun at arm’s length, its barrel pointed at her heart. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘You don’t. But the little girl you stole knew me. Once.’

Her eyes, as dark as polished meteorites, lost their focus for a moment, and then they cleared. ‘Georgia,’ she said, and when that name crossed her lips, Leah saw Izsák flinch as if he had been stung.

‘Her name was Georgia,’ the woman continued. ‘A long time ago now, but I remember. Dawson City. The cabin beside the forest. You . . . were her father.’

A tear trembling on Izsák’s eyelashes broke free and cascaded down his cheek. It clung to his jaw for a moment before falling, jewel-bright. His voice cracked. ‘I
am
her father.’

Downstairs, something exploded deep inside the fire’s raging heat, and the snow on the lawn became a lake of reflected flames, as if the house stood not on the edge of a mountain but on the slope of a volcano, and a river of lava flowed around them.

Above, the lights flickered.

The woman who once had been Georgia laughed. A hard, scornful sound. ‘Do you really think,’ she asked, ‘that after all this time, anything of your daughter remains?’

Izsák’s hand was trembling so badly that Leah thought he might drop the gun. ‘Let me speak to her. Just once.’

The woman swung the pistol she’d been aiming at Hannah until it pointed at his chest. ‘I’m not yours to command,’ she replied. ‘You know how this ends. I’m faster than you. All of you.’

‘Then you’ve won,’ he said. ‘So why not be gracious in victory? Let me hear her voice. Just once. It’s all I ask.’

‘It’s all you
ask
? She flicked the pistol towards Leah and Jakab. ‘Go and stand over there with the others.’

‘Let me talk to her.’

‘I won’t ask you again.’

He stared, eyes unreadable, and she stared back. Neither of them moved.

Beside her, Leah heard Jakab muttering. Eyes wide, face drained of colour, his mouth moved gently as he repeated his brother’s name, over and over. ‘
Izsák . . . it’s Izsák . . . Izsák . . .
’

Another explosion shook the house, far louder than the first. A fraction of a second later, every light in A Kutya Herceg’s chalet winked out.

For a moment, they were plunged into darkness as impenetrable as an ocean trench. And then Leah witnessed a blossoming of furious light.

Silvery flashes of fire from the woman’s pistols. Answering gouts of crimson flame, like dragon’s breath, as Izsák returned fire.

The exchange burned phosphorus-bright images on Leah’s retina, so dazzling, so disorienting, it seemed to her as if two gods of the mountains clashed inside the room.

Guns flashed. Shadows hopped. Sparks danced.

Beads of blood defied gravity, hanging in the air like drops of dew caught in a web.

Holes appeared in cloth. Flesh burst. Barrels smoked.

And then, finally, the thunder receded, capering out into the night as if fleeing from the carnage it had wrought.

In the aftermath of that killing light, Leah’s eyes refused to register anything except the carnival of flashing colours that marked its departure. Her ears rang. The tang of gunpowder was sharp in her nose.

Slowly, those deftly weaving hues faded, and the room became a room once more.

Waiting for her, at its heart, was the most awful sight Leah had ever seen.

C
HAPTER
53

Interlaken, Switzerland

W
orse than seeing her father shot dead at Le Moulin Bellerose when she was nine years old; worse than seeing her grandfather’s corpse beside the track at Llyn Gwyr; worse than seeing Flóra – or what had once been Flóra – pounding her head against the window as she shrieked to be let in from the cold.

In the doorway, where the firelight grew steadily brighter, Izsák lay on his back, torso ripped open by the eviscerating volley from Georgia’s guns.

Georgia lay by the window. Bullets had torn through her chest and neck.

Harrowing as those images were, Leah saw it all in a blink.

Because in the very centre of the room, thrashing and convulsing like a wounded spider, curling in on itself one moment only to extend its limbs and flail about the next, was her mother.

And yet not.

Hannah Wilde writhed, a jagged shape of wheeling arms and coiling muscles. Her jaw worked savagely, teeth snapping together, face a knot of panic and confusion.

She went left, crashed into the table. Grabbed onto chairs, feet splashing in blood. Rearing upright she spun in a half-circle, raised her hands to protect her face, lunged around again. And then she stiffened, head canted to one side, chest heaving, nostrils flaring.

Leah felt the breath go out of her as she realised what had happened.

Somehow, even as Izsák’s guns consumed her, Georgia had cannoned into Hannah. That fleeting contact had allowed the
tolvaj
to abandon its dying host and transition across. And what had once been her mother was now something else entirely, something impossible to evict.

Leah glanced across at Jakab.

He still held his gun. Whatever reason he might have had for killing her mother, he had ten times the reason now. Yet his weapon remained pointed at the floor. His eyes brimmed with a curious mixture of pity and fascination.

After all that her mother had achieved, after all the battles Hannah had fought, to be taken like this at the end – to have her own body stolen from her – seemed a betrayal of everything she had given to the world.

With the remaining
tolvajok
dwindling inside the corpses of their frozen
tanács
hosts, there had been a chance – a slim chance – that all was not lost. The children had been saved. And with Hannah still alive, the work, feasibly, could have continued.

But now, with her mother taken by this abomination that fed on the lives of others, that journey would end in failure. The power to save the
hosszú életek
resided in Hannah Wilde alone. Years earlier, when the programme they’d established in Calw had begun to falter – when they’d started to realise that despite all they were doing, it might not be enough – Leah had asked to be tested. What she’d discovered had devastated her.

She was barren. Unable, not only to conceive, but to offer even a source of viable eggs to their family of
hosszú élet
surrogates.

You know what you have to do.

She did. But it was hard, even so.

She would never be a mother; she would only ever be a daughter.

Leah stared at the thrashing silhouette. Backlit by the glow of flames rising in the hall, it presented a hellish sight.

You know.

She tried to focus, tried to think of a memory that would sustain her: a perfect snapshot of her mother’s love. She had a million from which to choose, a lifetime’s worth. But the one that rose in her mind, and, even now, brought a devastated smile to her lips, was the night on her grandfather’s farm when the calf had been born.

They’d walked together to the barn, Leah holding her mother’s hand, Hannah lighting their way with a torch. They found the Ayrshire lying on her side, in obvious distress. Her water sac had ruptured and was hanging outside her vulva, steaming on the cold night air. But they could see no sign of the calf.

Hannah stripped down to her vest, and at a sink in the corner of the barn she washed her right arm all the way up to the shoulder. After pushing her hand deep inside the Ayrshire, she explained that one of the calf’s forelegs was turned back on itself.

By now, the agony of the pregnant cow had reduced Leah to tears. Sitting on the straw, she watched Hannah grasp around inside it, sweating and straining, until she managed to pull out both the calf’s forelegs and attach a set of birthing chains. Steadily she began to pull, until the steaming, mucus-slick newborn erupted onto the cowshed floor.

It lay unmoving. Working quickly, with the Ayrshire twisting her head back to watch, Hannah cleaned the calf’s face of fluid and tickled its nose to stimulate breathing. But its chest remained still.

Leah knew what that meant and began to sob, but her mother bent her face to the creature’s own, covered one of its nostrils and blew air into the other.

And then, suddenly, it kicked out and breathed.

Hannah scooted backwards. She crawled over to Leah and they sat there, laughing and crying, watching the exhausted mother greet the shaky newborn they would later name Henrietta.

Even then, Hannah had been a bringer of life. Even then.

You know what you have to do.

What was the value of one life, against the future of a race?

Hannah had given life not just to Leah, but to all the children who sheltered here tonight, and countless others, far and wide.

Now it was Leah’s turn.

Grimacing against the pain in her wounded leg, determined not to let it fail her here at the end, feeling her heart begin to race in anticipation of the fate she went to embrace, Leah limped towards the creature that had taken refuge in her mother’s form, and offered herself instead.

C
HAPTER
54

Interlaken, Switzerland

I
n a room that seemed to exude darkness and death, it was the most beautiful sight he had ever witnessed. His life had been so empty of moments like this, and now, despite the swirling smoke and the ash and the blood, it seemed to brim with them.

Leah Wilde struggled towards her mother and she seemed to
shine
: purity personified, leaving Jakab an awestruck observer of the girl’s sacrifice.

So many unusual things he had encountered in these last few minutes; he struggled to make much sense of them. He’d seen Izsák, for a start. The arrival of his younger brother had opened a door in Jakab’s heart that offered him glimpses of memories blissfully free of pain.

And then he’d looked at the woman his brother had come here to kill, and the curtain of revelation lifted higher, and he realised that a
family
gathered here in the arms of these mountains. A broken family, but a family nonetheless.
His
family.

Then the lightning came, and the thunder, and that family of five became three, and now it became two.

For years he’d pursued Hannah Wilde; at first because of love – misplaced love, admittedly, rotten love – and later because of hate. But he hadn’t known the truth, of course, hadn’t known. He’d pursued Leah Wilde as well, although that search had borne no fruit until now.

When Jakab thought of the lives he had ruined in pursuit of these two fierce and perfect women, his legs nearly buckled beneath him.

Earlier, he had passed through that hall of masks, had seen the faces of those he’d killed, and had forced himself to meet their eyes, every one:
Balázs Jani
;
Hans Richter
;
Carl Richter
;
Helene Richte
r
;
Eric Dubois
;
Charles Meredith
;
Nicole Meredith
;
Nathaniel Wilde
;
Etienne
.

And then, of course, there was the last name. Or, in many ways, the first. The girl who had died not by his hand, but had died because of him all the same.

Erna Novak.

Little more than a wisp of memory now, a dream cast into the sky. As ephemeral as rising steam. A fading face. A name.

Earlier, before the
tolvaj
had taken her, Hannah Wilde had asked him a single question:
What do you want?

He had imagined he wanted a hundred things; a thousand. But really, even though he had not spoken his answer aloud, he found he only wanted one.

I want this to end.

Now, as Jakab watched Leah limp towards her mother, as he marvelled at the young woman to whom he was related by an unravelling trail of string, which wound through generations and geography and the ceaseless marching boots of time, he realised that he wanted something else, too.

I want to atone.

He couldn’t, of course. Nothing he did now could atone fully for what he had done. But he could do one thing. Just one.

He had to be quick. Not only because Leah was a handful of steps from her mother, but because if he delayed too long he might lose his nerve, and if he allowed that to happen, if he allowed Leah to sacrifice herself while he was saved, he would be twice damned. Eternally so.

Silent, he moved to Leah’s side. Reached out and gripped her arm.

She turned, face as white as freshly poured milk.

Jakab shook his head. And then he offered her the gun.

In her eyes, he saw his own face reflected.

Leah blinked, her mouth dropping open, and he yearned to hold her and say goodbye. But of course he didn’t deserve that. And he knew she would never grant it.

Leah took the pistol off him and turned it over in her hands, studying it as if it were a piece of alien machinery beamed here from another world.

She looked back up.

‘Don’t mourn me,’ he said. Because it was a joke, a sick joke, and because – at the end – he needed a little dark humour to sustain him.

‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t miss, either.’

‘No chance of that.’

Jakab grinned. Perhaps she was not quite purity personified, after all. He would have liked to get to know her, this strange relative of his.

He turned towards Hannah Wilde and closed his mind to what coiled inside her. She was Hannah. Just Hannah.

His Hannah.

Jakab opened his arms and went to meet her.