Written in the Blood (6 page)

C
HAPTER
6

Interlaken, Switzerland

L
eah was still staring at A Kutya Herceg across the dining table, heart thumping in her ears, when the man who had ferried her to this mountain hideaway strode in through the room’s double doors, clutching her snub-nosed Ruger. ‘
Após! Állj!
’ he barked, gesturing at her host.

The old man spun around to face him. He raised a hand and jabbed it towards Leah. ‘
Ki kell dobnunk a boszorkányt a folyóba. Hátha lebeg!
’

Horrified, Leah glanced from one to the other. She pushed the chair back from the table and rose to her feet. Her grasp of Hungarian had improved over the years; now, her scalp prickled at his words.

We should throw this witch in the river and see if she floats.

For a moment, confused by the rush of events, Leah had thought her driver intended to rescue her from the old man’s wrath. Then the word he had used when he’d first appeared came back to her:
Após
.

Father.

It wasn’t her he had come to rescue at all. ‘He’s your father?’ she blurted, and instantly regretted it.

After a moment’s pause, the younger man turned to her. She could see the anger burning on his face. ‘You catch on fast.’

Leah’s host spat out another stream of Hungarian invective, his finger still hooked towards her.

‘
Elég, Após
,’ the younger man replied.
‘
Elég
.’

‘
Fiú—
’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘I will
deal
with this. I have questions of my own. If she doesn’t co-operate, you can have your turn.’

The two
kirekesztett
stared at each other, father and son. After what seemed like an eon of frozen time, the father relaxed his grip on the table. When he cast his eyes back at Leah, she saw murder lurking there – cold violence. With a swiftness that surprised her, he marched out of the room.

A Kutya Herceg’s son shut the door. ‘Sit down,’ he said. And, because of the way he looked at her, she complied without a word.

He pulled out the chair opposite and sat, placing her pistol on the table with a clatter. He spun it, trapped it with his hand, spun it again. The barrel ended up facing her. ‘Either you’re incredibly stupid, unbelievably arrogant, or monumentally naive. I’m trying to work out which.’ His eyes were dark, the last tints of colour fleeing to the outer edges of his irises.

‘Perhaps I’m all three.’

‘Lonely, too, I imagine. Am I right?’

The question jolted her. All of a sudden she felt horribly exposed by his gaze, as if with a single question he had peeled away her layers of armour and shone a light into the parts she tried to keep concealed.

‘You must be,’ he added. ‘Growing up in fear, the way you did. Never able to put your trust in people. Moving from place to place.’ He paused. ‘Watching your father die.’

She stiffened, and again his expression shifted, as if, having probed her with a barb, he now backed away to examine its effect.

Nodding thoughtfully, he continued. ‘Then you find out the truth of what you are. And what
is
that exactly, Leah? Some would say a monstrosity. A bastard half-breed. Neither fully one thing nor another. The
hosszú életek
may have welcomed you into their fold, but they don’t fully trust you, do they? You must sit awkwardly with them.’

‘What can you possibly know of that?’

‘You’d be surprised. But what I want to know now – what I insist upon knowing – is why you’re here tonight.’

‘I’m sure you heard what I told your father.’

‘I’d like to hear it directly, all the same.’ He spun the gun through another revolution, and even through her fear Leah cringed at the sound of the metal scratching a groove into the flawless mahogany slab.

He stared at her a moment longer, and she saw the violet striations once more begin to feather his eyes. Silent, he pushed the weapon with his fingertips. It slid across the table towards her. Leah caught it under her hand.

‘Come with me,’ he said, standing.

‘Where are we going?’

Ignoring her question, he disappeared through the arch beside the skeleton of
Ursus spelaeus
and into the unlit chamber beyond. The darkness gloved him in an instant.

The gun doesn’t make you safe. It’s a test. Nothing more.

Leah picked up the Ruger. On her feet now, dismayed by a trembling in her limbs that made the floor feel as if it undulated beneath her, she followed.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and then dark shapes began to coalesce from the shadows. The chamber resembled one section of a quartered pie. Its curved wall, like the larger living space at her back, was constructed from floor-to-ceiling glass. Through it, across a dark canyon like a crack in the earth, she saw the three towering megaliths of the Bernese Alps, their snow-frosted summits suffused with a spectral glow. Studding the sky above those peaks, instead of the miser’s dusting of stars Leah might have witnessed from town, she saw a galaxy of twinkling lights, so many that it seemed as if a magician’s purse had been spilled across the heavens. Even as fearful as she was, their beauty awed her.

Her chaperon stood to her left, the floor beneath his feet like a slab of polished black glass. ‘They say there’re as many as four hundred billion stars in our galaxy,’ he murmured. ‘And our galaxy’s just one in perhaps five hundred billion others. That’s about seventy each for you, me and every other human who walks the earth.’

Unable to decide how to respond to an observation like that, Leah risked a question instead. ‘Will you tell me your name?’

Keeping his eyes on the night sky, he replied, ‘You can call me Luca. Luca Sultés.’

‘Is that your real name?’

‘It’s as good as any other.’

‘I seem to have upset your father.’

‘He has a long memory. And he’s not as trusting as I.’

‘You trust me, then?’

‘No. I don’t.’ Sultés turned towards her. ‘Why did you come, Leah? Why are you here?’

‘I told you. I want your help. Your father’s help.’

‘You want us to divulge the details of every
kirekesztett
woman alive who’s managed to scrape out an existence while avoiding the attentions of your
Merénylő
.’

At his mention of
Merénylő
, a word that referred to the
hosszú életek
leader’s assassin, a role that had existed for centuries, she shook her head. ‘He’s not my
Merénylő
. I’m a monstrosity, remember? A bastard half-breed.’

Sultés was silent for a while, considering her. ‘You know, the original building plans for this house refer to where we’re standing as the sun room. But I’ve always called it something else – the fainting chamber. Because so many of our visitors, when we reveal its secret, do exactly that.’

He smiled, but little humour resided in his expression. His eyes were predatory.

Such a dangerously compelling face, she thought. One moment his features communicated warmth, and the next they seemed as grave-cold and passionless as those of a corpse.

She became aware of her chest rising and falling, and was certain he noticed it too: noticed, also, the flush rising on her cheeks.

He was testing her; playing some kind of game.

Her skin shivered.

Sultés removed a small plastic remote from his pocket. He pressed a button and the floor beneath her feet switched from polished black to blazing white.

It took her a moment to work out what had happened. Then, stomach abseiling away from her, lungs trapping a scream in her throat, Leah realised that the white light came not
from
the floor but
beyond
it, and that she stood on a glass divide suspended above hundreds of feet of empty space. A descending series of powerful spotlights shone up at her, set into the mountainside’s vertical face all the way down to the distant rocks below.

The fainting chamber.

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

All her life she’d been terrified of heights. Hers was not the usual, healthy fear present in most people; she had an almost fanatical aversion.

The anchored safety of the living room waited only a few yards behind her, but it might as well have been located on a different continent. Her muscles had frozen. She felt a bead of sweat roll down the inside of her dress. ‘Please,’ she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘Turn it off. Get me out.’

‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘Most people, when they see this for the first time, are a little shaken. But there’s a small minority who have a much stronger reaction. Strange, but I can always tell in advance how someone will react.’

An inch of glass beneath her feet, and then . . .
nothing
. Leah heard Sultés’s heels click against the floor as he moved to her side. She cringed, wondering how much pressure it would take for the glass to crack, and for how long they would plummet if it shattered.

‘Are you insane,’ he asked, ‘to walk in here, into this last refuge of
hosszú élet
innocents, and ask for our help to repopulate the very society that spurned us, then tried to slaughter us?’

She clenched her teeth, insisted to herself that she stood on a floor of granite, thousands of reassuring tonnes of it. ‘I don’t wish to be disrespectful,’ she hissed, ‘but you can hardly describe your father’s followers as innocents and expect much credibility.’

‘So you think the
tanács—
’

Her eyelids were squeezed so tight she thought her eyeballs might burst. ‘I’m not here to make moral judgements on sentences passed down by the council. I’m not one of you, remember? Not one of them. Not one of anything, really.’

‘So why do you care?’

‘Please. Turn off the—’

‘Answer me. Why would you put yourself in danger like this? You’ve just admitted you’re not one of them. Not in their eyes, at least. You lost half your family to a
hosszú élet
madman. So why? Why do you care?’

Leah ran her tongue around a mouth as dry as the pages of old books. ‘How could I not care?’ she whispered. ‘How could I stand aside – how could
anyone
stand aside – and watch an entire people disappear into oblivion? Balázs Jakab was a monster, but he never defined the
hosszú életek
race. I’ve heard the stories about your father. I’m sure half of them are falsehoods, and maybe you both have good reason to hate the people who cast you out. But when I was nine years old and I lost my father, and nearly my mother, some of those very people you despise took me in and looked after me, and they’re good people. Wonderful people.

‘As I grew older I learned about our history, of the contributions the
hosszú életek
have made. I can’t turn my back on that. No one with any shred of conscience could.’

She stopped. Silence followed her words.

Then: ‘Open your eyes.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Open them.’

Shaking with dread, but knowing that if she failed, now, to do as he asked, she placed everything for which they’d worked in jeopardy, Leah managed to prise them open, and tried to block out the sight of that yawning white chasm beneath her feet.

Luca Sultés watched her with eyes laced with violet. Unblinking.

Like a snake, she thought. Beautiful, yet cold-blooded.

‘Who knows about this?’ he asked. ‘Who knows you were coming to see us?’

She forced herself to maintain eye contact. ‘No one.’

‘The
tanács—
’

‘The
tanács
would have a fit if they knew.’

‘More than that, I suspect.’

He began to laugh. A hearty, warming sound, as rich with humanity as any she had heard. Luca Sultés laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks.

Later, after he had led her out of the chamber and poured her a glass of wine that she drained in almost one swallow, Leah returned to her place at the table. She had imagined she wouldn’t be hungry after his test, but when the serving staff reappeared and served the main course, she discovered she was ravenous.

She studied Luca Sultés surreptitiously as she ate, and although she knew he was aware of her attention, she found herself unable to abandon her examination. Taking another sip from her wine, Leah asked, ‘So where do we go from here?’

‘Tomorrow I’m taking you on a trip.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To meet someone.’

‘Who?’

‘You’ll find out. Someone better qualified than me to decide if what you ask is possible.’

‘And tonight?’

‘Tonight you stay here. As my guest.’

She stared at him across the table. ‘If I refuse?’

He returned her gaze. ‘That wouldn’t be safe.’

‘It wouldn’t be safe to refuse, or it wouldn’t be safe to leave?’

‘Take your pick.’

‘You want me to stay in the same house as your father? Someone who was threatening to kill me an hour ago? And that’s safe?’

‘You surprised him. He doesn’t like surprises. I’ll talk to him.’

‘I don’t have any of my things.’

‘They’ve already been collected from your hotel.’

‘A little presumptuous.’

‘You like to fence, don’t you?’ he replied, brow creasing with irritation.

‘I like to make my own decisions.’

‘Make one, then.’

‘OK.’ She took a breath, blew it out through her cheeks. ‘I’m going to have some more wine.’

After dessert, after two sweet glasses of Tokaji, Leah, exhausted by the evening’s events, blood still singing in her veins from her experience in the sun room, was ready to retire.

The woman who had helped to serve dinner appeared to convey her to her room. Luca Sultés wished her a restful sleep, before turning away to the window at his back. She glanced at her host once as she passed through the double doors into the hallway beyond. Eyes narrowed, he was staring out at the night-swathed mountains, as if searching the darkness. She wondered what he saw.