Shadows of Falling Night (31 page)

There was a whirring sound and a
chunk
, and suddenly the salt of blood filled his eyes and nose and mouth, blinding and choking. Cheba was shrieking as she drew back for another roundhouse swing, but he could feel the weight of the wolf on him lurch as someone kicked it between the haunches, very hard. It was distracted—only for a second—but he used that to jam his right forearm up under its chin, locking the arm so that its lunge just pushed his shoulder back into the ground. The other hand stripped his knife out from the sheath under the tail of his parka, and he reared up to drive it home. There was a familiar soft, heavy resistance as it sank, and he ripped upward with the silver-threaded blade up and across in a convulsive heave to open the body cavity and cut the arteries.

Something flashed within his head, a silent scream of astonishment and mortal terror like some soundless blast of mental lightning.

And then there was…nothing. Sparkling in the night for the briefest instant, more sensed than seen, and then even the wetness of blood on his face and hands was gone. Even the scent of it, vanishing like a dream when you woke.

“I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t shoot, it was too close,” Peter was saying.

“Fuck that, let’s
go
,” Eric rasped, halfway between reason and a snarl. “Kicking it in the balls was a real good idea. The rest of them are coming, and even odds ain’t my choice here. Three on one just barely worked with Rin Tin von Hitler there.”

More howls broke out, as if to punctuate his words; the children’s bodies were tense and shaking a little as he helped pull them up. They all moved out at the fastest walk the little ones could manage, trying to control their breathing. Leon was hiccuping, and his sister had stifled a whimper before it quite began. Eric stuffed the coach gun inside his coat, and Cheba tried twice to wipe her machete before it sank in that
the blade was as clean as it had been the last time she oiled and sharpened it. Her first try at sheathing the tool/weapon nearly took off an ear.

“Careful with that,
querida,
” he said, and guided it home.

“They’re coming,” Leila said. “They’re changing, and they’re coming. They’re
angry
now. Not just hungry.”

“And they’ve got the whole damn night,” Peter said.

Cheba grinned in the darkness, a flash of white teeth. “Not so much, it is nearly midnight.”

“How time flies when you’re fighting for your life,” Peter said.

Okay,
Eric thought.
They can’t identify us with the Power. All they’ve got is their senses. Animal senses. Got to break trail somehow. Think, you dumb bastard! Right, let’s get into town and cover our smell with lots of other people and gasoline and stuff.

It wasn’t a very big town, though bigger than he’d first thought, denser and thicker built than an American settlement covering the same area, all low-rise except for church steeples but packed together. There were a lot of decorations up, but they didn’t seem particularly Christmasy, except the ones which
were
Christmas ornaments. There were a lot of evergreen wreaths, and as they approached the outskirts and moved over to the side of the road to give way to traffic, fireworks started bursting overhead. More and more of them as they walked into town, everyone and his dog out in the yard setting off rockets, plus some bigger official-looking ones from farther in. Enough bottles of champagne were being cracked to make him a little nervous about the fireworks even now. Some of the sky-rockets plunged into the clouds above and were just flashes of diffused light, though others burst in multicolored splendor lower down. There were Catherine wheels and Roman candles as well in the town square and in the park around the big building on the hill. The noise seemed slightly muffled for the first instant, then burst
through into his perceptions as if they were pricking a bubble of silence that had encased him.

A lot was going on. For some reason a laughing, cheering and rather beer-full crowd were pouring molten lead from a little teacup-sized holder into a big pot of water. In other places, doughnuts were being passed around and steaming drinks ladled out, and an enthusiastic band was playing “The Blue Danube” and people were waltzing.

His mind raced as he actually
recognized
someone.

“Hans! Hans Schenk!” he called, half shouting.

The German commando—ex-commando, now—looked around in surprise. He was a decade older than that night on the slopes of the Hindu Kush, and wearing some vaguely nautical-looking uniform, with a walrus mustache and much less hair on top of his head under the peaked cap. There was a lot more of him, too, but he still looked as strong as an ox, with thick wrists and shoulders to match the modest beer gut. He also had a semi-paralytic drunk’s arm looped over his shoulders, and some probable subordinates in sailor suits were trying to round up a few others and get them moving. The drunks were of both sexes and mostly middle-aged, and all looking as if they’d be very, very sorry tomorrow.

“Eric!” the other man blurted after an instant of blank surprise, and then dawning comprehension. “Eric Salvador! What the devil are you doing here? I thought you were a policeman, in that town of yours with the mountains and the opera!”

He spoke excellent English, accented but with the flatter, harder vowels of a North German rather than the ripe Schwarzenegger style of the locals.

“Hans, I don’t have time to explain and you wouldn’t believe me if I did. I’m here with these folks, and we need to get out of sight and out of
town right now, it’s a matter of life and death, and I swear we’re not in trouble with your authorities. Can you help me?”

The forty-something German froze for another instant or two, his eyes flicking to Cheba and Peter and then the children. “Life or death? Well, we’ve seen that before, you and I, no? Follow me.”

Two of the semi–sailor types picked up Leon and Leila, and the whole nautical-looking party plus several drunks pushed through the crowd. Despite the small absolute size of the place, they were managing to make enough noise to blend with the fireworks and the music into an overwhelming blur. That would probably mean they were hidden from sight and scent as well. It didn’t take long to get down to the docks, where something like an enormous, elongated white rectangular barge with a sharp prow was tied up; it had glassed-in observation areas and lots of windows as well. All in all, it looked like a medium-sized hotel reincarnated as a boat, which was probably exactly what it was.

“Behold the Erzherzogin Cecilie,” Hans said. “Management had a flash of inspiration and thought a Christmas and New Year’s tour would be just the thing. Bloody fools, and bloody dangerous, and it’s three-quarters empty because most of the people who could afford a ticket realize that.”

He took a closer look at the five of them as they went up the gangplank, then swore in German. “You weren’t joking, were you?”

“Not even a bit,” Eric said.

“Please tell me that you have documents,” Hans said. “Even these days, that makes things a lot easier here.”

“Valid passports, Hans.” Eric started to go on, then felt himself doing a slow buckle at the knees. “Got to get out of here,” he mumbled. “Got to
go
.”

“Let’s get you to bed,” the German said, guiding them to a couch.
“God in Heaven knows we’ve got plenty of empty staterooms. Though I hope you don’t mind heading for Vienna, because that’s where we are going.”

Eric Salvador didn’t precisely lose consciousness, but he did lose most interest in his surroundings. Far and faint and muffled, the wolves howled. He supposed that sometimes the luck had to be crazy good, as well as crazy bad.

Vienna

Adrian Brézé blinked awake.

“Extraordinary,” he said softly, his face turning northwestward. “They were not there to the eyes of the Power. To be unable to detect my own children, the strongest blood linkage of all…”

“Where are they?” Ellen asked, snuggling into his shoulder.

“On the Danube, and heading this way, assuming they are on the boat, and that it is safe. They will be here soon. Before the ceremony for Arnaud.”

“That’s wonderful!” she said.

“Yes,” he said. Then, slowly: “But that was…perhaps too easy. As if I were pushing with the wind at my back. I had to be careful not to make myself too obvious…though that section of the von Trupps are not exactly highly skilled. Still, their instincts are keen enough.”

“Luck? You were
luckier
than you expected?”

“Exactly.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Vienna

“H
ere they come!” Ellen said.

It was a cold sunset hour, with the streetlamps blurred streaks through what couldn’t quite make up its mind to be fog, a light drizzle of very cold rain, or sleet. She was a little surprised at how eager she was. Leon and Leila were cute kids, but she was even more eager to see Peter—who’d become a close friend during their common captivity on Ranch Sangre—and Cheba, though the younger girl was sort of prickly and difficult sometimes. And she was glad to see Eric’s battered and slightly sinister face too. Adrian was wonderful, but you needed people besides your sweetie. People you didn’t despise and hate and fear, that is.

“They were virtually here, and still I could not sense them. Then
ping
and they were there again,” Adrian said, still a little bemused by it; it must be like someone being able to switch his vision on and off.

Peter’s little technological marvels were all switched off, of course, since it would never do to have the Council’s Shadowspawn confronted with an open and blatant contradiction between what they could see and what they could sense. They would find out eventually, but the trick had to be protected as long as possible.

“The wonders of modern technology,” Ellen said, holding his arm as they stood just outside the doorway of the hotel, occasional cold drops flicking into their faces under the awning. “Shadowspawn tend to get kind of dependent on their special abilities. I’m all for cutting them off and giving them a bit of a glimpse about how us peasants live. Nothing personal, darling.”

He smiled a little wryly: “Objectively speaking, I approve and agree entirely. My
emotions
feel as if the ground has vanished from beneath my feet, or as if I’d gone blind.”

Ellen laughed. She was feeling a little bubbly anyway, now that the children and their friends had arrived safely—though there was a certain irony in using the word
safe
in this context. The limousine they’d dispatched for the trio of adults and the two children pulled up in front of the Hotel Imperial, which was a 19th-century neo-Italian Renaissance pile on the Ringstrasse, originally the Prince of Württemberg’s Viennese pied-à-terre, topped with a stone balustrade and allegorical animal figures from the prince’s heraldic arms. Two doormen in top hats and pearl-gray suits dashed forward to hold umbrellas.

Ellen hugged Peter and Eric; she gave Cheba a handshake. Contrary to seriously time-lagged but still widely believed folklore, Mexicans were actually a little more reticent about that sort of contact outside a very close circle than Anglo-Americans, who’d gone from hugging nobody to
hugging everybody over the past century. Adrian gave both the men a firm handshake, actually bowed over Cheba’s hand and kissed it—he had the sort of looks and air that could carry that off—and stooped to exchange the oddly formal-looking French kiss on both cheeks with his children.

“My friends, I am in your debt,” he said; she noticed again that his diction had gotten a little more formal even in English since they arrived in Europe and started hanging out with the older Brézés.

The men nodded; Cheba gave a feral grin. “You
are
in my debt now,
jefe
,” she said. “And I like it much better that way.”

“How are you?” Ellen said to the children, who’d always seemed to like her…hopefully not in a culinary sense.

Though she wasn’t entirely sure how much they’d known of what happened on their mother’s estate. She knew that they knew that Shadowspawn drank human blood, at least; evidently it was usual to start them on small sips a few years before puberty, which was when the Power really kicked in along with the surge of hormones—she supposed that had evolved to keep children from being too uncontrollable. Adrienne had called it the
latent period
, and she’d heard Adrian use the same term.

They yawned and beamed at her at the same time. “We had all sorts of adventures, and then a fun ride on the boat,” Leon said. “Were you there, Papa? I thought you were.”

“I was watching,” Adrian confirmed. “And helping as I could.”

The three who’d shepherded the children shared a glance, and small nods. Those turned to looks of alarm when Leila added:

“
Maman
was there too, I think.”

“Sometimes I could hear pieces of ice hitting the hull outside my room on the boat! It was all pretty cool, like that story we read,
The Sea Wolf
.
Things could get really dull at
Maman’s
place, and this trip was a lot more fun.”