chapter 22
Vienna Cazorla was rowing at dusk in the pond at Retiro Park when she first saw the vampire. It was summer in Madrid, and the evening air was cool, the water dark and motionless as her rowboat slowly edged across it. It was strange to be rowing alone, but then she felt strange.
Rowing was the only thing she had thought to do, the only thing that made sense. Vienna had rushed out of the hospital, feeling sick herself. She had been to see her brother, and now she wanted to do something that he should be doing with her. She was aching and wanted to act out the ache with her arms, using oars he should be using.
Carlos was dying. He was a National Guardsman and that had always been such a glorious thing; she had loved to see him in his dashing uniform, loved the chocolates he brought back from wherever he went. But he had been caught in a blast when terrorists in the north blew up a car next to a small bodega where he had been getting a take-out order of paella. Carlos had not even been on duty. It was chance alone that had struck him with chunks of concrete and fire and bashed in his skull. He lingered in the hospital in Madrid, maybe aware of his parents, maybe aware of Vienna. Maybe.
She had run from the hospital and rented a boat and furiously swept herself to the center, in the shadow of the Prado Museum, surrounded by trees and dying light.
The sound of tourists and picnicking families, the chirping of birds, the quiet stroke of the oars, all of it mocked her, normal and everyday, obscenely oblivious to her pain. Nothing was normal anymore.
She barely noticed the girl on the shore; with her eyes she swept over the spiky blond hair and the white coat and didn’t look again. Vienna may have been aware the girl was watching her, but maybe that was something she realized only later. Vienna swore angrily as she rowed. There was no one to talk to. Her parents were in their own world. Her friends at school—there really wasn’t such a thing at the moment, because school was over, and when she returned she’d be at a new place, at LaLaurie School for Girls, and the cast would change.
She missed Steven, the American she had known at Vogler Academy, her primary school in Switzerland. Steven was quiet, and he had always listened, but recently she had sent letters and he hadn’t failed to answer so much as failed to answer in any meaningful way. He was changing, and what had been silence in person had become a distant dryness on paper. No. There was no one left but her brother, and he was dying.
Vienna moored the boat as it grew dark and walked past the Prado, down thin Madrid streets, past restaurant owners beckoning tourists to dinner, the expensive menús del día around the park, and farther back, where the locals gathered and drank and ate, better menus and better prices.
She found herself in a small, cramped museum that had been a favorite of Carlos’s, one they had visited just before he headed north. She found herself wandering through the etchings of Goya, Los Caprichos, the capricious, the random, and evil. Garish faces and unhappy people, the accidents of life.
And then she found herself in front of The Resurrection of Lazarus. It was a painting in the style of El Greco, elongated figures and vibrant, garish color. Vienna had seen countless paintings on the subject, but it had been Carlos who had drawn her to this one: Jesus before the tomb, Lazarus the dead, standing barely inside behind the rolled-away stone. Lazarus was wrapped head to foot in white shrouds, and as he looked out, walking toward the beckoning Christ, his face was ghoulish and green, and full of horror. It was a painting that spoke of shock and blasphemy. Lazarus was risen, barely able to comprehend: Who has done this thing? You who are so powerful, why have you done this? Did the people who love me so know what they have done? What a curse it is to return to this world?
A minor Lazarus, but a shocking one.
“That is one unhappy dead man,” the person behind her said, in perfect Spanish, and that was when she met Elle.
Elle, whose eyes shone brilliantly and huge in a face of chalky white skin. Vienna found herself listening to her. Elle said, “I want to talk to you about your brother.”
It only took an hour. Elle led her to a quiet café where she told her what she had in mind. She did not hypnotize and yet she was hypnotic.
“We can save him,” Elle said, “but of course it’s forbidden, and all forbidden things have a price. There is a curse you must take on yourself in exchange for his.”
Anything. She would do anything.
“And one day, some day, we will ask a favor of you,” Elle said.
An inkling of the limits of her blasphemy flashed across Vienna’s mind. “You’re going to ask me to kill someone,” she said.
“Doesn’t have to be that,” Elle said in her curious casual way. “No, it will be a simple favor.”
“When can you help Carlos?” Vienna said.
“We can do it tonight,” Elle said.
“He won’t die?”
“He won’t,” Elle said, “not for a long time.”
“When will your request come?”
Elle reached under the table and took out a silver box, which she slid across the table, next to Vienna’s water glass. At her request, Vienna opened the box and saw inside, laid in black velvet, a shimmering green scarf. “The first one comes as soon as you say you’re in,” Elle said. “And that’s as simple as putting this little present on. The next request—we’ll let you know.”
Carlos recovered. He recovered fast, with a voracious appetite. He healed like no one the doctors had ever seen before. It was with joy that she bade him good-bye in the fall, he teasing her about her newfound accessory, which she never took off, ever.
And on the evening Vienna heard that the school across the lake had suffered a severe fire, she received her next instructions.
Elle provided Vienna with a target, always intended to be someone who could write and who could get in front of the students of LaLaurie. Elle had a handful of candidates—had even made sure Vienna roomed with one—but none of them was quite the perfect vessel for the Ultravox virus. Within hours of the fire, when it became clear that boys would be moving to LaLaurie, a stack of new dossiers landed in Elle’s lap. And when she came across Sid’s dossier Elle rejected all of the previous candidates. Sid studied vampires, had even read some vampire writing, and his head would already be seeded with keywords and phrases. He would be susceptible, even if only slightly more so, to the kind of subconscious suggestion that Ultravox planned to utilize. And he spent a great deal of time writing. Sid would be perfect. All that was left was for Vienna to watch for an opportunity.