Written in the Blood (38 page)

Eye pressed to the scope, Izsák tracked her. One shot, that was all he needed. From here he had no chance of missing. The back of Georgia’s skull would erupt like a volcano, scattering blood and brain as if it were lava and ash, ending her suffering in a single, violent instant.

But to be this far away from her, to let her die like that without even seeing him . . . Izsák did not know if it were cowardice or genuine feeling, but he could not end her life that way.

I will. Just not like that. I will.

He watched his daughter disappear through the villa’s front entrance, wondering if he told himself a lie. He felt the strength draining from him. The rifle seemed as heavy as lead, tugging his arms towards the ground.

He shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts. Switching his attention to the
tolvaj
that remained outside, he watched it limp towards the back of the black van in which Georgia had arrived. It paused outside the rear doors. One hand still gripping the cane, it opened them.

Izsák saw the vehicle rock on its springs, as if something moved within.

They climbed out – first one, then a second, then a third, until four ungodly horrors stood on the gravel, so decrepit and bleached of colour he could not tell whether they’d once been male or female. The creature with the wormy hair and the blood-stained lips kissed each of their foreheads in turn. Together, they shambled towards the house.

Izsák watched them go inside. He thought of Lucy, his wife, remembered how they’d danced in the Ready Eat as jazz played on the radio, remembered their lovemaking at the cabin he had built in the Yukon. He thought of her eyes the day she had glimpsed the illustration inside the Eaton catalogue of the bright red bicycle with its shining silver bell. He thought of how she had beseeched him, as she died on the cold floor of their bedroom:
Find her. Find Georgia.

And Izsák
had
found her. He’d never given up.

Now, at the last, he could not back away from this. If his conscience refused to let him set Georgia free while he sheltered so far away, then he would do it up close instead.

Something else occurred to him, here, at the end. He found himself recalling the question that had troubled him so often as a boy:
What will happen to me?

So many years since that poisonous thought had sprung into his mind. He knew he would never consider it again. Perhaps that was something for which he could be grateful.

Pulling himself to his feet, slinging his rifle over his shoulder, Izsák left the cover of the trees and walked towards the villa.

Horváth stared across the table at Krištof Joó, knowing that the man had damned himself, wondering if he had damned them all.

Joó’s face was an oasis of calm: almost beatific, as if he had seen something wondrous in the violence visited upon the residents of Villa del Osservatore. It terrified him, that look.

‘Have faith,’ Joó said, and when Horváth realised the man addressed him he flinched in his seat.

‘That’s all we
can
have now.’

‘You sanctioned this. Don’t forget that.’

‘I didn’t sanction slaughter. None of us did.’

‘You thought we’d achieve this without bloodshed?’

Horváth heard a sound in the hallway behind him. The remaining five members of the
tanács
turned their heads to the door. He heard them gasp, heard their chair legs scrape.

He swivelled in his chair. Saw, standing in the doorway, a young woman who was not really a woman at all. Her eyes were
hosszú élet
and yet not, pupils receding into a darkness so absolute they sucked the marrow from his bones. He saw death waiting in her face; both his own, and that of everyone who shared this table.

A bluebottle looped into the room, its body so swollen that its wings struggled to keep it aloft. It circled the table, dipping and rising, arcing towards the mullioned windows where it battered itself against the glass.

Now, a stench of rotting meat, so thick and sweet it adhered like glue to the back of Horváth’s throat. Following on the heels of it, a creature from the earliest pages of
hosszú életek
history, something he had believed the world had lost forever.

He gagged.

Even hunched over its cane, the
tolvaj
reached almost to the height of the door. The flesh of its face, hanging from the bone in weeping folds, was bloated and ripe, eager to burst from the slightest of pressure. One patch, below its left cheek, had discoloured to the brown of rotting apples. Clotted blood clung to its chin.

It moved towards the table, cane clicking on the parquet floor, and Horváth saw that it led a larger group of shuffling
tolvajok
horrors. Their hosts appeared on the brink of death: baggy skin, toothless mouths, eyes like pouches of veined cheese.

Horváth closed his eyes, but he couldn’t close his ears.

‘Gentlemen,’ the woman announced. ‘We need you.’

Izsák sprinted to the black van and pressed his back against it. The villa’s huge front door, into which Georgia and the rest of the
tolvajok
had disappeared, hung open and waiting. Perhaps forty windows looked onto the drive from this side of the building. Their panes were blank and dark.

Dropping to a crouch, he slid along the side of the van and paused beside a wheel arch. The Porsche Cayenne, parked ten yards closer to the building, offered him the next chance of cover. Beyond that, the line of black Range Rovers, and from there, the villa’s entrance.

He checked the rifle’s strap was tight against his shoulder. Surveying the grounds, he saw no movement to concern him.

In a running crouch, he closed the distance to the Cayenne and ducked down behind it. Sliding along its length, he paused when he heard the sound of a baby’s cries.

They came from inside the 4x4.

Izsák frowned, tried to block them out. He crept to the front of the vehicle and glanced out at the windows of the villa. Nothing moved.

As if sensing his closeness, the baby’s cries grew louder, more insistent. Izsák checked his weapon, tried to concentrate.

What was a baby doing in the car? He could think of only one reason, and it chilled his blood. Still he tried to ignore it, directing his thoughts to Georgia, to the creature that had taken her.

He was here for a single purpose. He didn’t have time for distractions.

Lucy’s face bloomed in his mind, and Izsák felt, for the first time in years, as if she watched him.

Clenching his jaw in frustration, he backtracked two paces until he was beside the Cayenne’s door. He swung it open just enough to allow him to lean inside.

Strapped into a car seat, face red with the exertion of crying, was a baby boy perhaps a few weeks old. Too young to serve as a
tolvaj
host, he’d been stolen even so. Izsák had never seen him before, but he recognised those eyes and knew who he must be.

Elijah, Etienne’s child.

He closed his eyes. Shook his head.

No. He wasn’t getting into this. He could come back later. Once he had found Georgia and ended her pain.

You might be dead later. And if you’re dead, you know what this child’s fate will be.

He did. It would be Georgia’s fate.

Lucy’s face appeared behind his eyes, silently pleading.

Izsák swore. He glanced through the Cayenne’s windscreen at the villa. Swore again, louder this time. Turned back, examining the car seat.

It sat on a moulded plastic base, fixed to retaining bars recessed into the vehicle’s back seat. He moved his hands over it, found a handle. Pulled. The baby seat popped free with a clunk, and Izsák lifted it out of the car. He shut the Cayenne’s door. Checked the house again.

At his feet, Elijah watched him in silence, his cries forgotten.

At the dining table in Villa del Osservatore’s conference room, Horváth had arrived at a place so beyond fear that its physical effects no longer seemed to trouble him.

He stared at Oliver Lebeau, opposite, the only other member of the
tanács
not to have been taken by a
tolvaj
.

Oliver had retreated somewhere deep. He stared, eyes unfocused, chest rising and falling in slow, measured breaths.

Joó remained at the top of the table, but it wasn’t really Joó. Not any more. The light of fanaticism had faded from the man’s eyes, replaced by a look of . . . what was that, exactly?

Around the table, the parquet floor resembled the aftermath of a battle fought in hell. Four bodies lay in twisted heaps, fingers clawed, backs arched. At least they had stopped moaning. Three of them had died already, relinquishing their grip on life moments after the
tolvajok
discarded them. Only one held on. Eyes closed, limbs drawn up against its body, its jaw worked soundlessly, chin scraping across the floor.

He saw commotion by the door. The woman was back. She carried a leather-bound book, or perhaps it was a diary; her thumb held its pages open and, rather than printed text, Horváth thought he saw handwriting.

The
tolvaj
with the weeping face and the wormy strangle of hair stood by the window, hunched over its cane. Apart from the woman, it was the only one not to have taken a new host.

She moved to its side, and Horváth saw she was smiling. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I know where they’ve gone.’

C
HAPTER
40

Calw, Germany

I
n the chalet’s kitchenette, Jakab stood opposite Hannah Wilde and felt the floor beneath him shift, as if this tiny dwelling had cast off its mooring ropes and rose on a cresting wave of memories and pain.

It broke over him, a frothing, churning sea of images and sound, so vivid he had to close his eyes against it and hold his breath. Faces long dead; words spoken and heard; professions of love and regret and hate; episodes of intimacy as painful to recall as those characterised by violence.

And now, a final image: Hannah Wilde, inside the watermill at Le Moulin Bellerose, trapped in the machinery’s teeth and crying out her daughter’s name.

Even then she hadn’t surrendered to him, striking a match and casting them into flames instead.

His body might have healed, but he had not survived that inferno untouched. When he recalled how once he’d had such conviction, such purpose, such
strength
, it made him weep. She had stolen all of that – had burned it from him as if she had cauterised a wound.

All this time she’d been alive. All this time he’d lived in ignorance of the reality that he shared this world with her still. And now here she was, and here he was, as if fate had conspired to pitch them together one last time.

It was difficult to look at her for long, but he forced himself, and saw, even through the mask of blood she wore, that he wasn’t the only one changed by the events of that day. Etienne had told him how the fire had blinded Hannah, and in a way that was another thing she’d stolen from him: he would never even see in her eyes the awareness of his vengeance.

‘Why?’ he asked, listening to his voice, ensuring that it did not crack or hitch and reveal the emotions that boiled in him. ‘Why did you submit us to that?’

Hannah wiped away the blood the
Merénylő
had unleashed from her face. Beneath, the flow had already stopped. The sides of her wounds were puckered and angry, but closed. She dropped to her knees, embracing the man slumped on the floor.

‘You would have killed her,’ she whispered.

Jakab’s mouth dropped open. ‘Leah?’ he asked. ‘I would have
loved
her.’

‘It would have ended just the same.’

So far he had managed to hold his fury in check, but when he heard those words it
exploded
in him, and it took all his willpower not to lunge forward and rip the life from her right now, right here, before she could wound him with any more of her poison.

How
dare
she accuse him of that? How
dare
she tell
him
what might have been, if not for her interference that day?

He started to approach, saw that she tensed her shoulders in readiness for his wrath, trying to keep herself between him and the man she held.

The sight of her, so wretched like this, made him tremble not with the thrill of victory but with a tooth-cracking rage. This was not the Hannah Wilde of old. Killing this pitiable creature would be an act not just of vengeance but mercy.

From somewhere in the kitchenette a phone began to ring. He tried to ignore it, but when it continued to trill at him he looked away from her and noticed it lying on the countertop.

Jakab picked it up. He saw the name flashing on its screen and felt a lifting in his stomach, a lightness.

He glanced back at Hannah. Perhaps
this
was the reason fate had thrown them back together. Even though his memories of her, all these years later, were startlingly bright in his mind, he had forgotten the exact cadence of her voice, its weight. Now he would use it to his advantage.

Backing out into the hall, ready to cover the mouthpiece should she cry out a warning, he answered the call. In a perfect imitation of Hannah Wilde’s tone, he spoke the name of the girl he thought he’d lost forever.

‘Listen carefully,’ Leah said, and when he heard her, heard her maturity and her strength, he felt as insubstantial as a feather. ‘You don’t have much time,’ the girl continued. ‘The
tanács
– they found out. I’m so sorry. They found out, and it’s all my fault.’

Her voice broke, and Jakab found himself offering soothing sounds, a language without words. Just as well. In the space of seconds his world had fractured anew. He needed time to recover.

‘I’m OK,’ Leah said. ‘I have the children and they’re fine, I’m fine. But they’ll be coming for you soon. You need to get out, right now. Find Gabe and run.’

‘Where to?’ he asked. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ll give you the address,’ she said. And she told him. ‘I might be out of touch for a while, but I’ll see you soon. Go. Don’t wait. They might already be there.’

Jakab breathed, composed himself. ‘I love you.’

‘I love you too,’ Leah replied, and then she was gone.

He pocketed the phone. Her words might have been meant for another, but they had the quality of sunlight nonetheless. He went back into the kitchenette, found Hannah. ‘Get up.’

She rose to her feet, helping Gabriel to stand. ‘Where are you taking us?’

‘To a reunion,’ he said. And, because he wanted to scare her, he pressed the tip of his knife to her neck.

The pain behind his eyes was back. Somewhere inside it, dark thoughts were beginning to flower.

The road led them from Menaggio to the town of Porlezza on the shore of neighbouring Lake Lugano, and from there Leah followed it to the border where they crossed into Switzerland.

The sun, as it began to set, was a glorious ball of fire in the heavens, as if it knew that tonight would bring an end for some, and wanted to mark their passing with a final display.

The old VW bus, its engine chugging steadily, lifted them over the first humps of the southern Alps, eating up a winding grey strip of road. They encountered the first snow, patchy at first, thickening until it lay unbroken across the landscape, a field of crystals blushed mauve by the sun’s last rays.

Leah noticed her breath beginning to mist and turned on the van’s heaters, grateful for the warm air that began to huff from their grilles. Behind her, the children sat in silence, squeezed on to the VW’s bench seats and clustered on the floor.

Beside Leah, Soraya stared out of the window, clutching Elias on her lap. ‘I can’t stop thinking about her.’

‘Flóra?’

The woman nodded. ‘I don’t know how she did that. I don’t know how she handed over her child without any thought for herself.’

Leah thought of her mother, how time and again Hannah had placed herself in danger to protect her family, and thought she knew.

‘Do you think she’s alive?’ Soraya asked. ‘Do you think any of them are?’

The question had consumed Leah ever since she’d spoken to her mother to warn her of what was coming. What would the
tanács
do to those who remained? ‘There’s nothing to be gained from their deaths,’ she said.

But it wasn’t really an answer.

‘What about Catharina?’

‘It was a coup, Soraya.’

Leah intended to say more, intended to try and offer some kind of reassurance, but the words were trapped in her throat. She knew enough
hosszú életek
history to understand that Catharina’s future looked bleak.

To the west, the last red sliver of sun disappeared behind a mountain peak, and when the glitter sheen on the snow winked out, like a million tiny eyes closing at once, Leah felt a coldness steal over her that the van’s heaters could not displace, as if the dying of the light augured horrors from which there could be no reprieve.

From the alcove beneath the dashboard, her phone began to trill. She scooped it up.

Odd, but even before she glanced down at the name that glowed on its screen, she knew who it would be. Returning her eyes to the road, she activated the phone and crooked it into her shoulder.

‘It’s me,’ he said, and then he paused. ‘You’re driving.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Are you alone?’

‘No.’

The line crackled and chirruped, and for a moment she thought she’d lost him. Twelve months had rolled by since Balázs Izsák had saved her life at Llyn Gwyr. Twelve months since she had discovered their connection: that not only was he the brother of the man who had brought her so much loss, but also her relative. An uncle, of sorts. Blood.

At first, it had been a revelation too overwhelming to process. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone. Not the
Főnök
, and certainly not her mother. It wasn’t that she wanted to keep Izsák a secret. She simply hadn’t worked out how to talk about him in a way she thought anyone would understand.

Although Leah hadn’t seen him since, they had spoken on the phone, each conversation stretching longer than the last. As much silence had filled those early calls as words, but gradually she had come to know him. And she could tell now, from the strain in his voice, that something momentous had happened.

Then it struck her. ‘You found her,’ she breathed. ‘You found your daughter.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you . . .’

‘No. Not yet, but I will.’ He paused. ‘They had a baby with them, Leah. I think it’s Etienne’s son.’

‘Elijah?’ Leah’s stomach plummeted away. ‘Where is he now?’

‘Right beside me.’

‘And Etienne?’

‘Just what I was about to ask you.’