Manitou Blood (27 page)

“What time is it?” I asked her.

“Six.”

“Six? Oh, wonderful. Almost three-and-a-half hours' sleep.”

“Yes, but now the sun is bright we can begin to search for the
strigoi
.”

Strigoi
. It was the crack of dawn and she wanted to go looking for
strigoi
. She placed a glass on the table beside me. “Would you like breakfast?” she asked me. “I have yogurt and honey and farina with dried apricots.”

“Oh, no. I'm fine, thanks. I make it a rule not to put anything solid into my mouth until I'm officially awake, and I'm not officially awake until noon.”

I picked up the glass and took a sip of tea. I'm not a tea person, as a rule. As far as I'm concerned, a drink should (a) wake you up or (b) nourish you or (c) knock you unconscious, which is why I stick to strong black coffee and Guinness and Jack Daniel's. Tea is just leafy water, and you can find leafy water in the woods.

Jenica looked pleased with herself. “I have looked through my father's library and found his book of all the
svarcolaci
. It was compiled by a special brotherhood of priests in the late 1700s, the Black Purifiers. In those days, vampires were spreading through Transylvania and Wallachia faster than a plague, and so the bishops of the Romanian Orthodox Church demanded a purge of every
svarcolaci
and
strigoi
and
moroi
.

“The Black Purifiers searched every cellar and every steeple, and they impaled every vampire they found, or beheaded them, or burned them alive; or else they sealed them up in caskets and sarcophagi. The book has the pictures and names of every known
svarcolaci
that they managed to track down.”

“That's terrific. Maybe you can give me a couple of minutes for my eyes to focus, and then I can take a look at it.”

“You would like more tea? It is bison grass tea. It is supposed to make men have the more virility.”

I peered short-sightedly into the depths of Jenica's cleavage and thought that the last thing I wanted right now was to have the more virility.

“I hate to be ungrateful,” I said, “but do you think there's any chance of some coffee?”

“Of course. Wash, and I will make you coffee. I have laid out towels.”

I limped into the Moorish bathroom and climbed into the shower. It had a baffling array of old-fashioned faucets, and I blasted myself three times with freezing cold water before I managed to adjust it to a heavy, tepid downpour, the kind where you have to hold your breath to stop yourself from drowning.

I was toweling myself dry when Jenica walked into the bathroom as unself-consciously as if we were married. “You would like cake?”

“No, no. Just coffee.”

“Always I used to think that it was not really true, about the
strigoi
in New York, even though my father was so sure.
Who would believe that it was true? Who would believe that we would have to hunt the
strigoi
, you and I?”

“We don't
have
to hunt them, you know. We could always barricade ourselves in and wait until they've gone away.”

“You are losing your nerve, Mr. Harry?”

“Of course not. I'm just saying that we're not actually
obliged
to go out looking for them. Nobody's going to think any the less of us if we don't.”

Jenica shook her head. “
We
will think less of us. Besides, the
strigoi
will never go away until they have drunk the last drop of human blood in the city. Then, this will only be a city of the night, and there will be no people here by day. It happened before, in Tirgu Mures, in Romania. It can happen here.”

The trouble was, I knew she was right. It seemed impossible that the most important city in the United States was being overrun by blood-sucking creatures from the Dark Ages. In fact, it seemed insane. But on September 11, 2001, New York's two tallest buildings had been brought down by a handful of nut jobs armed with nothing more than box cutters, and more than three thousand of its citizens killed, and on the evening of September 10, who could have imagined anything more insane than that?

It's always hard to believe that anybody can hate you that much, for no reason at all. Once I was dressed, I went through to the living room and found Jenica poring through her father's book. It was a very thin book, bound in cracked tan leather that had the texture of dried human skin, with some kind of mystic symbol on the front, an oval with an eye in the middle. On each page there was a finely rendered woodcut of a man's face, and a few paragraphs of dense handwritten text.

“Here is your coffee,” said Jenica, and passed me a tiny blue porcelain cup that she must have burgled from a doll's house. I peered into it and it was only a third full. But it had a rich nutty aroma, and when I tipped it back and swallowed
it, I felt as if I had instantly grown a thick black beard, and I was quite surprised when I didn't start talking like James Earl Jones.

“Perhaps soon your Singing Rock will give you the name of your Vampire Gatherer,” said Jenica.

“I guess I could try asking him, although I doubt if he will. I think there's a strong possibility that he might have given it to me already and I just haven't realized it, and he's kind of huffy about doing things twice.”

Jenica said, “It is most important for us to have this name. We need to know which of the
svarcolaci
we are looking for, because a different ritual is necessary to dismiss each one of them. This ritual is what you would call the disenchantment, and it is supposed to force the
svarcolaci
to return to their coffins and to seal them up until they are summoned again.”

I peered at the page she was pointing at, although I couldn't understand any of the words, let alone pronounce them. “
Ci, ii dracul cu dracoaica, striga cu strigoiul, deochiu cu deochitorul, pocitura cu pocitorul, potca cu potcoiul
. . . .”

But then I looked more closely at the woodcut. It depicted a man, smiling, with his eyes closed. Around his face was a decorative border of toads and dragonflies and tiny flowers. Although the man's face was different, and the border was different, the design bore a strikingly close resemblance to the medallion that I had taken from Ted Busch. I wedged my hand into my back pants pocket and dragged the medallion out.

“Here,” I told Jenica, holding it up. “I took this from the young guy I was telling you about last night.”

Jenica held it in her hand, and peered at it closely. Then she looked at me with those dark, liquid eyes as if I was the village idiot. “Why did you not show me this before?” she demanded.

“I don't know. I forgot about it.”

“How could you forget about it? This is one of the
svarcolaci
.”

“Well, I know that
now
.”

She turned it over. “The inscription on the back, this is a kind of protection.
From vampires and from a home with vampires, from those who cast the evil eye, keep me safe
.”

“The poor guy said that it was given to him by a Russian-looking girl.”

“Hmnh,” said Jenica, dismissively. “I would be sure that she was Romanian, probably, and she was the
strigoica
who infected him. You see, she would have given him the medallion to keep him safe from other vampires who wanted to cut his throat and drink his blood. She must have liked him, and wanted him to become
strigoi
like her, one of her lovers.”

“How about the face?”

“We have to look through the book.”

I stood close beside her as she carefully turned each page. There were over eighty
svarcolaci
and most of them were very similar—handsome, in a Slavic way, thin-faced and pointy-nosed, although some were very swarthy-looking and some were sporting huge moustaches and enormous beards. Maybe they'd been drinking Jenica's coffee. Each
svarcolaci
, however, had a different decorative border drawn around his face—everything from songbirds to razors to mulberry leaves.

“Here,” said Jenica, suddenly. “This, I am thinking, is our Vampire Gatherer.”

I was thinking that she was right. The man in the woodcut was wearing a striped turban wound around his head, and one elaborate earring, but it was definitely the same man whose likeness was embossed on Ted Busch's medallion. The border was the same, too—snakes intertwined with each other, and stars. His expression was grim, as if he were seriously pissed that we had discovered him.

The name below the picture was
Vasile Lup
. Jenica immediately covered it with her hand and said, “Do not read
this out loud. This could be the name that your spirit guide was warning you about.”

“My lips are sealed, believe me.”

Jenica took her hand away and began to translate. “His name means The Wolf. It says here that he was a cousin of Vlad Tepes, known as Vlad the Impaler, or Draculea.”

“You're kidding me. Draculea as in
Dracula?
”

“Well, of course. But Draculea himself was only a man of very extreme cruelty, the
voivode
of Wallachia.”

“The what of where?”

“He was like a prince, in the southern part of Romania. But he was never a vampire.”

“But this guy
was?
”

“That's right.” Jenica's fingers traced along the thick black lines of Romanian script. “It says here, ‘Late in September 1457 when he was hunting in the mountains for wild boar'—well, I shall say ‘The Wolf' each time, instead of his real name—‘The Wolf became hopelessly lost, and he was forced to spend several nights sleeping in the forest. Each night as soon as it grew dark he was approached by swarms of
strigoica
.' These were the female vampires who were always looking for male lovers, so that they could turn them into
strigoi
.

“ ‘There were too many
strigoica
and The Wolf's efforts to keep them at bay were hopeless. He became one of the undead himself. When he eventually found his way back to Draculea's castle he would say nothing of what had happened to him, although after his return from the forest he was never seen abroad during the day and he became very secretive in his behavior.' ”

“That doesn't surprise me. I think I'd be pretty secretive if I was dead.”

Jenica frowned at me. She was so serious about all of this
strigoi
stuff that it was hard not to believe that it was all true—even though,
hello?
we were talking about Dracula
here, and real live dead people who were five-and-a-half centuries old.

“ ‘The Wolf began to gather around him some of Draculea's many disaffected courtiers with the intention of assassinating Draculea and taking over as
voivode
.' In those days, you see, assassination was the usual way to seize power, even amongst sons and brothers. ‘But Draculea had many spies and discovered what The Wolf was plotting. When The Wolf was dragged from his bed, and exposed to daylight, Draculea immediately realized that he was one of the undead. He ordered him to be impaled on a high pole, which was the usual way in which he dealt with traitors and liars and people who displeased him. On one occasion Draculea had impaled three thousand people in a single day. The pole was blunt and very well oiled, so that The Wolf would not immediately die of shock, and it was pushed into The Wolf's buttocks until it came out of his mouth. It was then erected in the shadow of the castle walls, so that The Wolf would not be incinerated by the rays of the sun, and would suffer great agony for days on end.' ”

I was tempted to say something about right royal pains in the ass, but decided against it.

Jenica turned the page. “ ‘However Draculea's mistress, Lenuta, who had once been The Wolf's wife, and had been forcibly taken by Draculea, took pity on him. She shone her hand mirror from the battlements so that the rays of the sun set him on fire, and cremated him to ashes, and so delivered him from his pain. The Wolf thus became a dead vampire, or a
svarcolaci.
Draculea discovered what his mistress had done, and had her stomach cut open, so that everybody could see where he had been. The Wolf had to wait many years to take his revenge on Draculea, but eventually did so. On the second night of the Battle of Bucharest in December 1476, five
strigoi
entered Draculea's tent. They slit his throat and drank his blood, and then they cut off his
head and mounted it on a pole, so that the victorious Turks would discover it in the morning, when the sun rose.”

“Well, that's not exactly bedtime reading, is it? Does it say how The Wolf was caught by the priests?”

“Only briefly,” said Jenica. “In 1767 the Black Purifiers tracked down The Wolf and his nest of
strigoi
to a house near Borsa in Transylvania. The priests diverted a stream so that the house was surrounded on all sides by running water, which vampires are unable to cross, and then they tore the house down so that the vampires were exposed to sunlight.” The Wolf, of course, could not be killed, but it says here that “he was wound around with a mile of silver wire and then he was shut up in an iron casket lined with silver, which was sealed with wax made from melted church candles mixed with crushed garlic. Or rather—”

Jenica frowned, and read the words again.

“Something wrong?” I asked her.

“I do not completely understand this. It does not actually say that The Wolf himself was bound with silver wire and shut up in a silver-lined casket. If you translate the words literally, they mean ‘
his perfect picture
.' Or maybe ‘
his exact likeness
' would be more accurate.”

“Well,” I suggested, “he was a spirit, wasn't he, rather than a walking dead person? And spirits can assume all kinds of really strange shapes. When Singing Rock brought him into my apartment, he was all stretched out—more like a shadow than a person. Maybe the priests were trying to say that whatever shape he was, it was definitely him.
His exact likeness
.”