A video started up, time-stamped in the corner five years ago. A facility very much like the one downstairs, brightly-lit, a sequence of three steel tables. On each one: a redheaded girl in a white gown…her feet up in gynecological stirrups. The camera didn’t show what happened below the waist, the filming done from their heads, but two doctors moved down the line, speculums flashing silver, examining each girl thoroughly.
Jake felt his gorge rise and swallowed it down.
The shot changed, now showing a sequence of boys in a white room, their hands held out in front of them, brows knit in concentration, as little tiny curls of flames sputtered and then failed in their palms.
“The idea,” Dr. Talbot began, as the video played silently on the screen, “was to manufacture supernaturally strong soldiers for the war that’s to come. It began with breeding the mages: LC stands for Liam’s Children. They are all his, his and his wife’s. Purebred mages raised and honed for battle. The one who calls herself Ruby Russell was the only one with any promise, and she escaped five years ago. Breeding mages, it turns out, is much trickier than it looks.
“We experimented with the blood serum after that. It was Valerian’s, and it didn’t always work. Some people it burned. It wasn’t until we had Vlad awake, had his blood, had perfected the medicine, that we were able to give it to you, and Adela, and the rest of your team.
“But even that is not a perfect solution,” he said, smile rueful as he watched the screen. “The old way, it seems, is still the best: a vampire warrior with his Familiars. I know that what we’re doing is morally unsound. But when you consider the threat we’re facing…”
He stopped the video, exited it, and pulled up another. This one showed the same desert landscape from the still photos Jake had been shown, the footage shaky and handheld, most likely from a cellphone. There was a scream. The shot bounced around, and then an image became clear: a man held another man by the head…and was eating his face.
Jake tried to sit up higher, and grunted in pain.
Dr. Talbot paused the video and turned to him, fear shining in his eyes. “We don’t understand it fully, yet, but Vlad calls it The Absence. His Uncle’s legacy. It consumes, and it spreads. And it serves its master: Romulus.
“The first King of Rome is trying to wake up,” he said. “He will destroy everything as we understand it. Vlad put him in the ground before, and he’s our only hope of stopping him now.
“If Nikita Baskin, and Sasha Kashnikov, and Ruby Russell refuse to help us? Fine. We’ll find others who will.” His mouth became a tight, firm line. “I still hold up stupid hope that Vlad might be able to bring his brother to heel, because we’re going to need all hands on deck for this, Major.”
He stared at Jake. “So. Will you help?”
And what choice did he have?
Jake lifted his hand up and down once, a kind of nod. Inwardly, panic gripped his insides like a vise.
Dr. Talbot smiled. “Very good. Get some rest. You’ll need it.”
He switched the TV back to the satellite feed. It was on TCM, an old black-and-white movie.
It took Jake a moment to recognize it, but when he did, the bottom dropped out of his stomach.
Dracula.
47
He dreamed of his mother’s gods.
The All-Father, croaking ravens perched on his shoulders. Thor, every footstep another peal of thunder. Loki, alight with flames, laughing, laughing, as the world crumbled to ash around him. He dreamed of heaving seas, and serpent’s coils, and Balder, tears streaming from his face, clawing his way, alone, from the wreckage.
He dreamed of Ragnarok.
He dreamed of a cock’s crow, a loud bugling, heralding the breaking of the world. The call to the heroes…but he wasn’t one of those, was he?
And then he dreamed of his mother, her touch cool and soft on his face, her smile gentle, lit by the low-burning fire in the grate. “Did you have a bad dream, my little baby?” She reached to the table beside the bed and took up the little bell, folded his small hand around it. “You can always ring it when you need me. I’ll always hear it.”
But Val remembered that his mother was dead, and he opened his eyes with a gasp.
He lay on his back, staring up at the high stone ceiling strung with wires and bare bulbs. Tears slid slowly from the corners of his eyes, slipping into his ears, cold and uncomfortable. Pain pulsed through him, spreading outward from his slow-beating heart. He felt the bones and sinews knitting slowly back together; felt the coolness of air on parts of his body that should have been covered with skin. He could only move a little, and that was brought up short by the cuffs at both wrists and ankles.
“He’s awake,” a voice said.
A shadow fell over Val, and his brother appeared above him. His hair hung loose down his shoulders, silky soft, the only soft part of him. His face was its usual stony mask, revealing nothing. He stared down at Val as if he was an exhibit in a museum, and not his flesh and blood.
“You failed,” he said.
Val licked dry lips with an equally dry tongue. “Don’t I always?”
“You could have chosen to fight alongside me. But you chose to fight me, instead, like always. Do you really hate me that much?”
“Yes,” Val said, just for the satisfaction of saying. For the tiny gratification of watching the corners of Vlad’s mouth flex downward.
Vlad nodded, and sighed. “They won’t execute you.”
“Too valuable for that, huh?”
“But I will punish you.”
Val forced a laugh, hollow and hysterical. It hurt to laugh; it hurt to breathe. “What will you do, oh noble crusader? Impale me on one of your pikes? Add me to your forest? Or will you do what the sultan’s son did, and bend me over a table while I scream for Mother–”
“That’s enough.”
“I’ve been punished my whole life. What can you do to me?”
Vlad studied him a long moment. Then nodded, and lifted his head to glance at the technician who stood on the other side of the table. “Bring the collar.”
No, Val thought, insides shriveling. But with fake bravado, he said, “Are you that petty that you’d torture me because you didn’t get your way? Some prince you are – that’s what you’ve always done, isn’t it? You hurt the people who offend you.” The last he spit out as gloved hands snapped the collar around his neck, its cool weight spiraling his panic up, and up. Someone plugged something into it, a cord of some time. Val snuck a glance to the side and saw a machine that looked like a giant car battery, trailing lines that went up onto the table…and hooked into his cuffs.
“Some crusader you are,” he snarled at Vlad. “You couldn’t even save your own family.”
Vlad moved quick, a hand like a vise clamped on Val’s jaw before he could duck away. “And what would you have done? Compromise? There is no compromise with this evil. You’ve never understood that. Until you do, there can be no compromise between us, either.” He released Val and stepped back.
Val took a deep breath…that quickly turned into short, sharp pants. “Sometimes compromise is the only way to stay alive.” He’d meant to growl it, but it came out a whimper instead.
“And that’s what you want? That’s what you care about? Living?”
“Yes. If you’d ever allowed yourself to enjoy anything in life, if you–”
“My job is to protect my people.”
“Vlad–”
A low hum started up, and he felt the first hair-raising prickle of electricity.
“I did it to protect you all those years ago, you understand that, don’t you?” Val asked, desperate now, chest heaving in a way that tugged the pain into something sharp and bloody. “They would have cut out your heart and burned it. They would have done you like they did Father, and Mircea.”
Vlad didn’t respond.
“I just want to be loose. I’ll leave, and you won’t see me ever again.”
“When you’re ready to be sensible, we’ll talk again.”
“Vlad…”
Vlad looked at the technician, and nodded.
“No, Vlad, please…” He thrashed against his bonds, and he felt something in his shoulder give and start to bleed. “I’m your brother! Vlad, I’m your brother!”
The technician flipped the toggle, and his pleas turned to screams.
Vlad turned away. That was all he could see, through the pain and blue-white arcs of electricity that filled his mind: Vlad turning away. Again. Like always.
THE END