Brothers to the Death (The Saga of Larten Crepsley) (11 page)

“And if we never find proof?” Arra pressed.

Larten shrugged. “I will continue searching for Randel Chayne until I find him or until I die.”

“That sounds like a waste of time to me,” Arra sniffed.

Larten smiled tightly. “Many would have said
that Holly-Jane was wasting her time by clinging to life down here and suffering such indignities. But she died nobly in the end. Even if she had not, she would have been correct to stay true to her course, as I shall stay true to mine.”

With that, he led Arra out of the cramped tomb and climbed back to the world of man and war, to pursue the trail of what he now feared was only the ghost of Randel Chayne.

Larten searched doggedly for the next couple of years. He tried to act as if nothing had changed, but Arra knew that he was troubled. She hadn’t managed to get as close to him in their time together as she’d wished, and was sure they would part at the end of their term as mates. But she had come to understand him and could see that he was torn. He’d sworn himself to this path and was determined to see it through to the end. But at the same time he had the feeling that it was pointless. Nobody could be truly comfortable if they had to live with the possibility that they might be forced to chase shadows for hundreds of years.

Arra tried on many occasions to reason with Larten, to convince him to abandon his mission. “You don’t have to give up entirely,” she argued. “You can still keep an ear and an eye open. If he resurfaces, head after him again. It’s unlikely that he’d kill Alicia to hurt you, then disappear from your life forever. If he’s alive, he’ll come back to take another stab at you, like he did with Tanish Eul. That’s when you should hunt for him, not now.”

Larten knew that Arra was right, but he found it difficult to abandon his quest. He feared what Randel Chayne might do if he returned and struck when Larten was unprepared—he might target Arra, Wester, Gavner, or Seba. The General didn’t want to lose another loved one to the murderous vampaneze.

But he also wanted to carry on because he wasn’t sure what he would do if he stopped. Larten had found meaning in the search. He had never felt as focused as he did now. He had come to a simple, defining point of his life—he existed to find and kill Randel Chayne. He liked having no gray areas to worry about. If he gave up, he feared a return to the times when he’d thought that his life lacked direction.

Larten fought another two vampaneze, one of whom knew Randel Chayne but hadn’t seen him in
over a dozen years. The one who had known Randel was a hard, experienced warrior and treated Larten to his toughest test so far. He wounded the vampire seriously and almost opened Larten’s stomach with a swipe of his nails. Larten triumphed, but only barely, and Arra needed to stitch him together afterwards—their spit wasn’t strong enough to close all of his wounds.

Larten spent more than a month recovering before he took to the road again. When he did, he headed for Berlin. According to Holly-Jane Galinec, that had been one of Randel’s favorite cities. Larten hadn’t wished to travel there while the Nazis were in control, as he didn’t want to fall into their hands. But the tide of the war had turned. It was nearing its end and the Germans had been pressed back. They were only weeks away from ultimate defeat, maybe less, and Larten felt that now was as good a time as any to zone in on Berlin.

He wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, but part of his reason for going there now—as opposed to waiting a few months, until it was completely safe—was that he wanted to be present when the Nazis fell. He had no plans to gloat, but he would be grimly satisfied when he saw them surrender. They had put this
world through hell and he was delighted that they’d failed.

The vampires made good time, skirting the areas where fighting still raged, and arrived in Berlin on a dark, cloudy night. The city had changed drastically since Larten had last visited. It was a pale ghost of its former self, shredded by bombs and bullets. Wandering the pockmarked, dusty, bloodstained streets, Larten found it hard to believe that the city could ever recover from a leveling this severe. But he knew how resourceful humans were, how swiftly they bounced back from disaster and tragedy. He was sure this would be a thriving metropolis again within ten or twenty years.

In 1945 Berlin was a city of vicious dangers, but Larten and Arra walked the streets without fear, at home among the shadows, silent as they listened to the cries, screams, and gunfire that saturated the night. It was as if the great old city was dying, leaking corpses and rubble instead of blood.

Larten expected to see Desmond Tiny. He had been sighted a few times during the war, always where the fighting was thickest, cheerfully plodding through fields of blood and guts. But if he was present now, Larten saw no sign of the eternal meddler.

The General had decided to seek shelter—day was
coming—when Arra touched his arm. “Look,” she said, pointing at a group of people crossing a mound of bricks and timber in the distance.

Larten studied the people but couldn’t see how they were different from the many other refugees he had spotted over the course of the night.

“The one carrying the woman and child,” Arra prodded him.

Larten squinted but couldn’t get a fix on their faces. “My eyes are not as good as yours,” he said. “Who is it?”

“You’ll find out soon,” Arra smirked, and smugly set off ahead of him. She was always pleased when she scored points over a man, even if he was her mate.

They trailed the group across the rubble and closed in on them. Larten was able to make out their features as they drew nearer, but the man carrying the woman and child had his back turned to them. Larten guessed by the way he carried the pair so easily that he was a vampire, but he didn’t know who it might be. Not Gavner—he wasn’t broad—and certainly not Vancha March. He thought it might be Mika Ver Leth, but he couldn’t be sure.

They caught up to the humans as they entered a ruined hospital that was still in operation, albeit only
just. Canvas had been stretched across the holes in the roof and candles flickered everywhere. Larten could tell by the scents and sounds that there weren’t many people inside. He paused in the doorway and glanced at Arra.

“Are you sure this is safe?” he asked.

“Absolutely.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you recognize his scent?”

Larten sniffed the air, but it was thick with the stench of human blood. “Can you not just tell me?” he growled.

Before Arra could answer, a man said from within the darkness, “She doesn’t need to. Welcome, Larten. Greetings, Arra.”

A young vampire in a muddied blue suit stepped forward. He had blond hair and a delicate face, and was of slight build.

“Kurda Smahlt?” Larten said with surprise.

Kurda smiled and bowed to the General. “The one and only. Now come on in and make yourselves at home. I’m delighted to see you both.”

“Why?” Arra frowned—she had never been particularly friendly with Kurda.

“I need your spit,” Kurda said, and laughed at their bemused expressions.

Kurda led the couple on a short tour of the makeshift hospital. There were fourteen patients, three nurses, and some volunteers. Conditions were squalid, with almost no medicine, hardly any bandages and few clean sheets. But every patient knew that they were fortunate. Berlin was full of the wounded and dying, people who couldn’t find any form of aid, even a ward as rough as this one.

“It’s chaotic at the moment,” Kurda said, rubbing spit into the wound of an unconscious woman. Most of her right arm was open and festering. His spit would work only limited good on an injury this serious, but he persevered. “Everyone knows the war is
lost. Surrender is the only sensible option. But the Nazis won’t go easily. Thousands more will perish needlessly before the beast roars its last and is buried forever.”

“How long have you been here?” Larten asked, studying the people in the beds and cots.

“A few weeks,” Kurda said. “I came when I realized the end was nigh. Their leaders are wicked, warped creatures, but these are good, honest people deserving of help.”

“Why do you care?” Arra frowned. “Aren’t there human doctors who can look after them?”

“There will be soon,” Kurda nodded. “But as I said, it’s chaos now. The medics will arrive too late to save most of these patients.”

“Are you from this city?” Arra asked.

“No,” Kurda said.

“From Germany?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll ask again, why do you care?”

Kurda shrugged. “I like to help.”

“I thought you’d have been too busy trying to make peace with the vampaneze to waste time on humans,” Arra sniffed.

“Things have been quiet between the two clans
during the war,” Kurda said. “Both have withdrawn, waiting for the conflict to end, eager not to get involved. There wasn’t much for me to do, so I thought I’d try to do some good here. I’ve been working wherever I could help. I spent a lot of time smuggling people out of Nazi-controlled territories, but in more recent times I’ve been focusing on casualties like these.”

“Who did you smuggle?” Larten asked. “Soldiers? Politicians?”

Kurda shook his head and stopped by a bed where a man in a doctor’s gown was wiping a child’s fevered brow. The man was pale and unhealthy looking, very thin, and his short hair looked as if it had been shaved to the bone in the near past. As he wiped sweat from the child’s eyes, Larten noticed a tattoo on the man’s arm, a series of letters and numbers.

“How is she doing, James?” Kurda whispered.

“Not good.” The man glanced around. “She’s fighting hard, but I think…” He sighed.

“This is James Ovo,” Kurda introduced them. “He has been with me for the last couple of months. He’s a good friend and a more than passable doctor.”

James snorted. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“This is not your profession of choice?” Larten asked.

“No,” James said. “I was an undertaker, like my father and grandfather. I hoped my sons would follow in our footsteps, but…” His face darkened and Kurda squeezed his shoulder.

“Have you heard of the death camps?” Kurda asked softly as they stepped away from the bed.

“Rumors,” Larten nodded. “I ignored them. One hears wild tales every time there is a war.”

“This time the tales are true,” Kurda said. “And I doubt if the rumors you heard came anywhere close to the truth.” He started to tell them about the camps, what happened to people like James Ovo and his doomed sons. Then he stopped. This wasn’t the time or place to talk of such horrors.

“Anyway,” Kurda said, “I hope you’ll help now that you’re here. I’ve been doing as much as I can, but my throat feels like it’s made of sandpaper. If you wouldn’t mind lending a mouthful or two of spit…”

“Why should we?” Arra asked. “This isn’t our war and these aren’t our people. What concern are they of ours?”

Kurda grimaced but didn’t argue. Arra wasn’t being insensitive. This was the way many vampires thought. They expected no help from humans in their own times of trouble and believed that humanity
should therefore expect no help from the clan in theirs.

Larten, however, remembered the First World War and a night when he’d led a group of soldiers through the hell of no-man’s-land, back to their trench. He looked back on that as the start of his recovery. After killing so many innocents on the ship en route to Greenland, he had believed for a long time that he could never make amends. He still wasn’t sure that he could, but when he’d helped those soldiers, he’d felt for the first time as if there might be some small shimmer of hope for his soul. He hadn’t dedicated himself to good deeds from that night on—he wasn’t that sort of person—but now that an opportunity to help had presented itself, he seized it.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” Larten said quietly. As Arra stared at him, he shrugged. “Friends of another vampire’s are friends of mine.”

Arra scowled, then sighed and worked a ball of phlegm up her throat. “Come on then, fool,” she barked at Kurda. “Show us where to gob!”

They toiled until midday, sheltered from the sun inside the gloominess of the building. James Ovo and a few of the volunteers went out early in the morning
and returned with another handful of injured stragglers. A couple of the patients from the night before died, while one was deemed fit enough to be dismissed.

And so the work continued.

They finally rested on rough beds in a room in the basement. Kurda apologized for not being able to provide coffins but said he wasn’t fond of them and hardly ever slept in one.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Arra huffed, biting into a loaf of bread that one of the volunteers had given to her. When she saw that Larten wasn’t eating, she paused. “Not hungry?”

“We can thrive on blood, of which there is plenty,” he said. “The humans need food to survive, and of that there is little.”

Arra rolled her eyes. “I never knew you were so soft,” she grumbled, but she set her bread aside to be divided among the patients.

Kurda was smiling. “It’s good to see you. I thought, after Vampire Mountain, that you wouldn’t want to speak with me again.”

“Why?” Larten frowned.

“I told Vancha about your speeches, so I figured you might…” Kurda stopped and cleared his throat. “You knew that, right?”

“No,” Larten rumbled, glaring at the vampire, who’d suddenly turned a paler shade of white. But Larten couldn’t maintain the pretense, and after a few seconds he laughed. “You need not worry. I deserved my thrashing. I was all the fool that Vancha said I was, and maybe more. You did me a favor by telling him, and if you had not, someone else would have.”

“That’s a relief,” Kurda chuckled. His smile faded and he leaned forward. “Does that mean you no longer support Wester Flack and his drive for war?”

Larten pursed his lips. “I think that the vampaneze are a menace and we should deal with them before they rise against us. But whipping vampires up into a fury is not for me. If war comes, I will fight gladly. If I am asked for my opinion, I will speak out in favor of Wester and those who campaign with him. But I am through with speeches. I will leave those to the professionals.”