Blood of Angels (7 page)

As he reached the door, struggling into Saloman’s borrowed jacket, he heard Saloman say reprovingly, “Angyalka, I won’t allow you to imprison him, torture him,
or
kill him.”

“I’d have let him go in the morning,” she replied.

“Oh good,” István murmured to Elizabeth, understanding that he was meant to hear.

Elizabeth smiled and began to walk down the stairs. “You’ll notice she didn’t say which morning.”

“Yes, I did notice that. She really thinks I did this.”

“Too much coincidence.” Elizabeth glanced at István. “Saloman believes she wouldn’t have been mistaken about such a thing. There really was another hunter here.”

“They were all at Mihaela’s,” István said, frowning. “At least all the Hungarian ones. Maybe we have visitors. I’ll check tomorrow.”

“Check with who? Konrad?”

He met her gaze. Konrad had left the party before István. He could have been here. “But not in alliance with a vampire, surely,” István said aloud. “He’s made his position plain on that score often enough.”

Elizabeth shrugged. She looked exhausted. There were lines and shadows all around her eyes, her lips a tight line, and she seemed to be dragging one foot in front of the other. As they emerged into the first threat of light, István put his arm around her waist, and she leaned on him gratefully. Unexpectedly, her belly nudged him. Beneath the flowing red dress she wore, it was round and firm.

Startled, his gaze flew to her face.

“The car’s just here,” she said, opening the door of a black Jaguar with darkened windows.

Silently, István slid into the passenger seat. “Can you drive?” he asked.

“I’m pregnant, not drunk.”

“I get that. But I can see you’re shattered.”

“I can drive.” She started the car.

They were on the road bridge across the wide, still Danube before he said casually, “How pregnant?”

“Six months.”

He blinked. “That’s a well-kept secret.”

“It has to be.” Her eyes flickered to his face and back to the road. “No, of course not from Saloman, but you’re right, I shouldn’t be pregnant. Vampires don’t breed. Now. But apparently a thousand or so years ago, a few Ancient vampires did have children, one with a human man. I believe I’m the first human woman to bear the child of an Ancient.”

Her hands lifted and fell on the wheel. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “Only marginally more believable than you being unfaithful to
him
.”

“I never even looked at anyone but him. From the moment I met him.”

He smiled slightly. “I know.”

“We thought about pretending I’d been unfaithful, to give the child a chance, but we decided we have to be open if she’s to fulfill her destiny.”

“Which is?” István asked, fascinated.

Laughter caught in her throat. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Luk prophesied something big. Saloman believes she’ll have a huge part to play in bringing vampires and humans together, because she’ll be of both races. All I can think about right now is keeping her alive.”

“Don’t you keep well?” he asked. Pregnancy and birth were unfamiliar territory, but he knew enough to ask that much.

“I’ve been fine. It’s just—no one’s ever done this before. I never knew you could love a child before it’s born, but I do. I do. And if I lose her…if
we
lose her…”

“You won’t. You have Saloman, for God’s sake. And you’re a healer.”

She nodded, swallowing her unexpected surge of emotion. Pregnant women had hormones that in anyone else would probably have scared him into a taxi.

“The point is, this baby could be a focus for everyone, vampire and human, who’s opposed to Saloman’s regime, to the alliance between hunters and vampires, and the gradual integration of the two races. That’s why we’ve hidden it for so long.”

He frowned at her. “You’ve been doing this alone for six months?”

“Oh, I do the hospital checks and so on—though it might get interesting if the baby takes a year to be born. Ancient women carried their children for that long. Anyway, only you and Mihaela know. And Dmitriu and Maximilian. But I can’t hide it much longer.” Another quick, sliding glance at István. “I think that’s why Saloman wishes you success with this new instrument that’ll harness supernatural power. He wants to use it to protect our baby.”

István closed his mouth. “No pressure, then,” he murmured.

Elizabeth pulled into the street by his apartment door and unfastened her seat belt.

“No, don’t come up,” István protested. “Unless you can’t drive the rest of the way home.”

“I can drive,” she said again. “I’m just not sure you can walk.”

“I can get home.”

“You’ve done too much. You’re in pain, and you need help.”

No one else would have spoken to him like that. He wouldn’t have allowed it. Regarding her ruefully, he said, “I need sleep. As you do. If you have time tomorrow, I’ll welcome you with open arms.”

He snapped open his own belt and climbed painfully out of the car. Her hesitation scared him, redoubling his determination not to let her heal him tonight. Then she called a soft good night and drove away.

István began the long journey to his front door. And bed.

****

Angyalka watched him go with rather more calmness than she’d greeted his arrival after the explosion. How the hell had he got down here anyway? It didn’t matter. The important point was that she knew her comfort now was down to Elizabeth. The Awakener couldn’t heal grief or fury, but she could help a disordered mind to deal with them more clearly. She hadn’t needed to do that for Angyalka. And Angyalka wasn’t blind to what it had cost her on top of what she’d already done, what she already bore—more than Angyalka had ever imagined.

“Do you ever think of when you were human?” Angyalka said abruptly.

Saloman, who appeared from his expression to be communing telepathically with other vampires, sat down amid the rubble and replied, “I never was.”

“When you were alive, then,” she said impatiently.

“No, not much.”

It was disconcerting how he could do so many things at once, but Angyalka had got used to it. “Were you a good man?” she asked curiously, kneeling down beside him.

He shrugged. “Concepts of good change with the centuries. Like most of us, I was good in places. Good enough for my people to turn me, at any rate. Were you?”

“I don’t know. Since I didn’t leave behind anything that mattered, I never thought of it before.”

He glanced round at her, a flicker of curiosity in his dark, all-seeing eyes. “Then why now?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It just suddenly struck me that I wished I’d been a human like Elizabeth.”

Angyalka had long since given up toadying to Saloman. Since he always saw through it, there was no point. Yet now, without trying, she realized she couldn’t have said anything to make him happier. His hard eyes warmed and his lips curved into a smile that was almost tender. Elizabeth was more to him than his Awakener whom he’d spared for purposes of sex, more than a companion. She was his love, possibly his greatest love in an impossibly long existence.

“She is a special being,” he allowed, “with a rare gift that she uses all she can.” The smile began to die on his lips, but his gaze didn’t release her. “I’ve always valued you, Angyalka, but I’m beginning to think we don’t yet know the extent of your gifts.”

She didn’t want to think about that right now. So she said instead, “Why do you think he was here?”

“István? To talk to you about angels.”

Angyalka lifted the splintered piece of wood she’d been playing with and threw it at him. He caught it in one hand without even appearing to look at it.

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

“He talked to me about them first. At Maximilian’s. If he has another reason for being here, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I doubt it was to blow up a building with himself in it. And make no mistake, Angyalka, the whole building would have gone up if you hadn’t contained and dispersed the explosion.”

She nodded, shivering at the thought of what she could have lost.

“If you’d come to Maximilian’s, he wouldn’t have had to come here at all,” Saloman added.

She shrugged. “I can’t leave the club just now—too much trouble.”

“Let the hunters in. They’ll march the troublemakers straight down to the police station.”

“And then my cover’s blown. I have no license, they’ll close me down and haunt me for petty infringements of their pointless little laws. I’ll deal with it my own way.”

“By killing them?” Saloman enquired. “Not really an acceptable policy, Angyalka.”

So the bastard already knew about the dead thug.

“It wasn’t policy,” she retorted, standing up as Béla entered the club. “It was an exceptional circumstance. However, next time a gang of them tries to kill your new hunter pets, I’ll leave them to it.”

“Kill?” Saloman repeated, rising with her.

Béla stood just inside the door, staring around the carnage. At his back were several more vampires who’d come to help the cleanup operation. With a lot of effort, the club could be refitted and open the following evening. If she could get the materials in time.

“Kill,” she confirmed. “The hunter isn’t yet fit, which didn’t help, but at least one of them was out of control. The dead one. I’ve never seen such bloodlust in a human.” She shivered. “At least not since I wasn’t one.”

“Interesting,” Saloman said, picking his way back across the rubble toward the door. “See if you can find out who he was.”

“If I have a spare moment,” Angyalka said pleasantly and was rewarded with the upward curve of his lips. He’d still expect it to be done, though. Bastard.

Béla, not unused to the presence of the vampire prince, still remembered to give a perfunctory dip of his head as Saloman passed him. But his anxious attention was all on Angyalka, scanning her for hurts. “What the hell happened?” he burst out.

“A lot less than is going to happen,” Angyalka said briskly. “We need all this cleared and the electrics repaired. We’ll need to order more glasses and crockery and check the cellar stocks to see if we can replace what’s been lost. Come on, guys, I want to reopen at seven tonight.”

Chapter Six

Mihaela had planned to take the day after the party as annual leave. Making love with Maximilian while Robbie was at school seemed to her the best cure for a hangover. And yet by nine o’clock she was making her bleary way to the pathology lab in the headquarters’ building.

Konrad stood just inside the door. In the center of the room, a human body lay on the table while Magda, one of the network’s pathologists, poked at it. In what had become a rare moment of connection, Mihaela met Konrad’s gaze, and they both grimaced.

“What have we got?” she asked.

“Come and see,” Magda invited.

Sighing, Mihaela followed Konrad to the table, ready to be lectured. Magda flourished her hand as if the body now showed them everything they needed to know. In a way, it did. White and shriveled, it had clearly been drained dry. An ugly wound in the victim’s throat told them how.

“Okay. Vampire attack,” Mihaela allowed. “Fledgling?”

“That’s what I assumed at first,” Magda said. “The wound looks like an out-of-control mess—except for the fact that there’s no blood spillage.”

She was right. The wound was clean of blood, and there were no stains on the body.

“Clothes?” Konrad asked.

Magda pointed to the smaller table against the wall. “Not a drop on them.”

“That’s weird.” Mihaela frowned. “I’d have said a group of starving fledglings might have licked up all the blood, but they’re unlikely to have sucked it out of his clothes as well.”

“Plus the body was found on the Széchenyi Bridge. It would have taken even a group of fledglings some time to drain a body like this and then clean it up—they’d have been seen.”

Mihaela dragged her gaze from the dead young man to Magda. “Meaning?”

“Meaning this was done very quickly by a strong vampire who just likes to make a mess. And hurt. There are no signs of blows, but the collarbone is crushed.”

“Fuck,” said Mihaela.

“Any other victims like this?” Konrad asked briskly.

“Not so far. Another victim was found at the same scene—I’ll show him to you, if you like?”

“No need,” Mihaela said hastily. “We trust your conclusions. Was the second victim in this state?”

“Not remotely. Apart from being dead. Normal vampire killing—careless, blood stains on his clothes and skin. The body wasn’t quite drained, just wasn’t enough blood left for him to survive. My guess is two different vampires: a young one with an older, much stronger companion.”

“And given the strength of the older,” Mihaela said slowly, “we have two deliberate killings. Two rogue vampires.”

Konrad curled his lip. “I knew it wouldn’t last.” He glanced back at the corpse. “Poor sods,” he muttered and strode away. Mihaela couldn’t argue with that.

****

When Elizabeth breezed into István’s flat like a blast of fresh air, it was already past midday.

In the living room, she turned to regard him as he eased onto the sofa. “I hope last night was worth it, because you look like shit.”

István smiled. “Actually it was. Though I’m damned if I know why.”

Everything ached. Each step was agony, and yet inexplicable energy surged through him. He’d wakened from fevered dreams of Angyalka, of fucking her more ways than were, he thought, physically possible, although he wouldn’t mind investigating. She still filled his mind, surrounded by reckless and not quite so reckless plans that he might just explore along with last night’s explosion.

He searched Elizabeth’s face for signs of tiredness and found only glowing health. As if she read his surprise, she said, “The strange thing about this baby is, it seems to give me energy while I sleep. In a crisis, the extra weight can be exhausting, yet after a good night’s sleep, I feel stronger than ever. So I can give you a good blast today.”

She sat down beside him and took his hand as she had done so often in the last six months. He’d grown to associate her touch not with unrequited love but with comfort, recovery, and simply feeling good.

He said evenly, “How good a blast?”

Again she scanned his face. “As good as you want. We’ve been pretty careful so far to merely amaze your doctors rather than alarm them. And I know you’ve deliberately limited our sessions for my sake. I’m not sure we need to consider either of these points anymore.”

“I won’t consider the doctors. If you
do
consider yourself and the baby.”

Her lips quirked. “Deal.” She drew in her breath. “I think we have a choice here. I can give you more of the same, bring you back to where you were yesterday, plus a little bit more, and we can build on that maybe twice a day now. Or…”

“Or what?” he urged.

“I’m not sure. You’re humming with energy, István. I can help you absorb that, use it to make you a lot healthier. But it might leave you exhausted tomorrow. You’ll need to sleep. A lot. I don’t know for how long. I don’t even know if you’ll need me again after that. I’ve never felt this in anyone before.”

István’s wild plans galloped through his head like stampeding horses. “And neither of these options will weaken you?”

“Not if you make me a cup of coffee.”

“Done. Then blast me, Elizabeth. Make me as strong as I can be, and to hell with tomorrow.”

****

When Angyalka, having done all the organizing she could, entered the gallery that afternoon, Justin, her assistant, was with a customer, talking up a very dark, mixed-media collage with vaguely Spanish overtones. Angyalka didn’t care for it and would be happy to see it sell.

She’d come down to use the gallery computer in peace and perhaps do a little research on the thug she’d killed last night. If it was quiet, she’d even release Justin to help with the work upstairs. The vampires had covered the glass-dome ceiling and windows at dawn, but even so, many of them couldn’t work in daytime. They just fell asleep and had to be hauled into the staff room out of the way.

The Gallery was lit largely by artificial means. A blind covered the glass half of the door, and a thick curtain blocked the window display from the gallery itself. However, there was always the danger of the door opening or a customer requesting something from the window, so Angyalka felt more comfortable hovering at the back of the shop where the till was in easy reach and still well away from possible sunlight sources.

A woman in a long, printed skirt and matching headband was gazing raptly at one of Maximilian’s less eye-catching seascapes. Angyalka suspected it had been painted during his self-imposed exile on the Scottish island where there had been no company but seagulls and occasionally visiting seals. It was dark, stormy, and yet spoke to her of
dullness
.

Angyalka approached the woman. “Do you need any help?” she asked politely.

The woman swung on her with such speed that Angyalka actually stepped back. And yet before she could lift her arms in self-defense, the woman’s mouth fell open in surprise. Only when it began to die away did Angyalka recognize the expression in her eyes had been pure fury.

“Oh, you startled me,” the woman said weakly with a quick, forced laugh. “Sorry. No, I’m fine, thank you,” she said. “I may come back later…” Already she was striding for the door, leaving Angyalka gazing after her in some bafflement.

Everyone seemed to be insane today. Or perhaps Angyalka was just jumpy.

At least Justin, an excellent salesman, appeared to be selling the collage. She let him close the deal before she sent him off upstairs and processed the payment herself.

The customer then left, a new picture heavier and a few thousand forints lighter. Satisfied, Angyalka turned her attention to the computer, rejuggling her finances to accommodate today’s massive outlays for the club’s refit.

Then she looked up the details of the woman who’d been with last night’s thug when she bought a picture here. Katalin Iranyi. And there was a phone number. On impulse, she called it.

“Good afternoon,” she said politely when a wan voice answered. “This is Angyalka from Angel Art. Am I speaking to Katalin?”

“Oh.” The woman sounded surprised, lured out of whatever lethargy she’d sunk into. “Yes, this is Katalin.”

“Sorry to bother you,” Angyalka improvised. “It’s just a rather valuable diamond earring was dropped here a couple of days ago—the day you made your purchase—and I was wondering if it was yours.”

“No.” The dullness was back in her voice. “It’s not mine. I don’t have any diamonds.”

“Yet,” Angyalka said archly. “You want to talk nicely to your boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” the woman snapped.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I assumed the man with you—”

“He was,” the woman interrupted. “I dumped him.”

Angyalka could have lost her there. There were definite signals of potential phone throwing, but Angyalka didn’t run a bar for nothing. She came up with just the right balance of surprise and sympathy to appeal to a brokenhearted woman whose emotions were still too raw for her to talk to anyone who really knew her.

The result was an interesting, though possibly irrelevant outpouring. Katalin Iranyi had dumped her boyfriend because he’d turned suddenly violent, picking on strangers in the street, on her friends, and even on Katalin herself yesterday afternoon. That was when she’d thrown him out.

“It was so sudden. I never knew he could behave that way, but I’m not stupid. I couldn’t put up with that, could I? If he did it once, it’s in his nature.”

“Of course you did the right thing,” Angyalka soothed. From benevolence, she dropped in a few more reasons for Katalin not to miss the bastard—since he wasn’t coming back—and thanked her for her time.

After which she Googled the name she’d put together from Katalin’s story: Bruno Geller. He appeared to be a law student who once got his name in the local newspaper for charity work. No doubt charity workers lost their tempers and beat their girlfriends as often as any other group of people, but together with Katalin’s story of the abruptness of Bruno’s change, something began to feel
wrong
.

Angyalka frowned at the computer, wondering whom she knew who could possibly hack into nonpublic-university and police records. Saloman, she was sure, but she was damned if she’d ask him. Besides, he was tracking down the vampire who’d planted last night’s bomb.

Dmitriu? She wouldn’t put it past the sneaky old devil—after all, he’d covered his tracks and made his life pretty damned comfortable in the computer age, from the obscure Romanian village near Saloman’s tomb to Budapest with Saloman on the rise. The trouble was, he’d tell Saloman, and she wanted to do this on her own.

The outside door opened, admitting a menacing beam of daylight across the front of the shop. Angyalka watched it suspiciously until the door closed it out again, after which she raised her gaze to the man walking toward her.

Everything inside her jolted. The world seemed to tilt. The hunter István continued to advance. She wasn’t dreaming. She had to believe her eyes, but her other senses had picked up nothing.

Now they did. She could smell his strong hunter blood, hear it pulsing through his veins. Her own stolen blood seemed to have left her head altogether, making her too dizzy to stand. And he just stood there, shoving the hair off his forehead and smiling.

“Sorry,” he said without much pretense at sincerity. “I was trying out a new gadget. Thought I’d see if it worked.”

She closed her mouth, which was when she realized it had fallen open.
Must have been attractive.

“Gadget?” she repeated faintly.

“It disrupts the air around it, lowering the temperature, interfering with brain-wave patterns, the lot.”

She stared up at him. “But I didn’t even
smell
you until you were a foot away! That has nothing to do with temperature or brainwaves! Not yours, anyway…”

“Well, I’m not long out of the shower,” he said mildly.

She eyed him with suspicion yet wasn’t even angry when she glimpsed the spark of humor in his eyes.

He said, “To be honest, you’d adjust to that. You’d no warning to look for my smell because you didn’t sense me any other way. Do me a favor? You wear it and see if it affects my detector.”

She frowned. “Am I not angry with you?” she asked, accepting the palm-sized square box he held out to her.

“Yes, but you know you have no reason. I didn’t bomb your club. How’s the cleanup?” He brought another instrument from his pocket, the little vampire-detection unit she’d found in his jacket last night.

“Done. We’re refitting. Should be open for business tonight.”

He blinked, gazing at her for a moment rather than at his detector. “That was quick.”

“Vampires and humans working together in perfect harmony,” she mocked. “If imperfect knowledge. And no, they’re not allowed to eat my human workers.”

“No fighting, no biting. I remember.” His gaze dropped to the detector, which was vibrating slightly in his hand. He stepped back a few paces and grinned. “It works on you too,” he said. “Provided I’m not too close.”

“
How
does it work?” she asked, turning the box over in her hand.

“I’ll tell you one day when you have trouble sleeping.” He reached over and casually took it from her. His warm fingers brushed her palm, and little electric tingles rippled up to her wrist and arm. Perhaps it was the instrument upsetting her brainwaves.

As he straightened, he caught sight of the newspaper page on the computer screen with Bruno Geller’s picture.

“Research,” he observed. “I couldn’t even discover his name. No one’s reported the fight.”

“You mean you can get into the police files?”

“We have an arrangement with the police,” he said, stepping around the counter.

She pushed the keyboard toward him. “Do it now. Find out if they’ve ever had anything on Bruno Geller.”

She was a vampire. She could read a hell of a lot faster than he could type, and yet somehow he was on the site, on several different sites, and she hadn’t seen the passwords he’d used to get on any of them.

“Nothing,” he said tonelessly.