We’ll see.
(3)
Violin?
They never found her body, of course.
Burned, they said, along with so many others. Human and vampire. Charred to dust, blown away by the hot winds of an unforgiving desert.
I saw Lilith, very briefly, at the joint-use base. She wouldn’t even look at me.
Everybody needs somebody to blame.
Maybe she’s right to pin it on me. Violin wasn’t just looking for the scrambler. She came looking for me. She told me that much, and it’s all we ever got to have.
(4)
The name on the young man’s passport was Gerald Hopkins. He did not look at all like the person he had once been; no one he had ever known would be able to pick him out of a lineup. People who had known him last year couldn’t even do that. The face and fingerprints of Gerald Hopkins matched the computer records. No bells or alarms rang. The airport security officers in Germany did no more than an ordinary search of the man and his possessions before passing him through.
“Have a safe flight, Mr. Hopkins,” said a cheerful man at the gate.
“Thank you,” said Hopkins, but he was not smiling. He found his seat and buckled in and sat staring out the window for the entire flight. He did not fly first class.
When his plane landed in Canada there was no one to greet him. He hired a cab and, except for the name of his hotel, Hopkins said nothing at all on the drive. The hotel was a modest one, second or third tier. He checked in, locked his door, set his bags down and spent the next full day sleeping.
When he woke up, he stumbled into the bathroom and stood naked for half an hour under the hottest spray he could endure. His skin screamed and he screamed. But the spray was loud and the walls were sturdy and nobody reported it to the front desk.
Later, he ordered room service, and while he waited he looked out at the skyline of Montreal. His mind was a furnace.
When the porter knocked, he opened the door and stood looking at the floor while the young man set up a table and laid out the meal. Hopkins gave him some cash and locked the door again when he was gone.
The food was cold before Hopkins finally sat down to eat. He removed the metal cover to see how the steak had been cooked.
There was no steak. The plate was clean. But it was not empty.
Instead there was a folded piece of paper.
Hopkins rushed to the door and checked through the peephole, but the hall was empty. He parted the curtains, but he was on the ninth floor and there was no one down on the street that looked like police or military. No SWAT.
Cautiously he crept toward the table and the note.
He was sweating, heart hammering as he picked it up.
The sheet was a single piece of legal-size computer paper folded into a small square. Hopkins carefully unfolded it. Most of the sheet was given over to a printed list of charity organizations around the world, the majority of which were devoted to poverty, clean water, and other humanitarian causes in third-world countries. None of them were high profile. Nothing that would get headlines.
Below that was a printed list of forty-seven numbered accounts and the balances of each. He knew those account numbers by heart. The amounts in each were untouched.
And below that, written in a neat hand was a short note.
The road to redemption is paved with rocks.
There are no third chances.
Do it right.
Hopkins read the note over and over again. There were only two men powerful enough to have gotten this information and arranged its delivery. He had abandoned one, and he was sure the other wanted him dead.
And yet.
The note was unsigned.
But it was not Hugo Vox’s handwriting.
The young man clutched the note to his chest. The first sob nearly broke the world. The tears burned like acid. He slid out of his seat onto the carpeted floor.
And, in the silence of his cheap hotel room, Toys wept all through the night.
(5)
Hugo Vox was grinning as he entered his study in Verona. Everything had played out perfectly. The Red Order was in ruins, and good riddance to the self-important pricks. The Tariqa were being hunted with quiet vengeance by their own people. Although they had been inactive since their leaders were killed during the invasion of Baghdad, many of them had old blood on their hands, and all of them were clearly willing to continue the centuries-old insanity. The surviving members of that sect would feel a wrath greater than anything Islam had leveled against the West.
Payback, Vox mused happily, was a real bitch.
He regretted that the knights were done, or as close to done as made no difference. They were interesting as all hell. They were one of the things that pulled him into this. Vox knew that he was a sucker for something with a biblical spin. Vampires. Bloodsucking hit men for the Church. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Shame the real story didn’t get into the press. That would have been legendary. That would be books and movies. Maybe they’d have gotten Ron White to play him. Vox loved that guy, never missed his stand-up act. Looking at him was like looking in a mirror. Well, a younger mirror.
He turned on a single light, locked the door, and crossed to his computer. He had looked for Toys on the Net, using the resources that had once belonged to the Seven Kings, but he hadn’t found him. The kid was all the way off the grid.
Vox’s smile flickered when he thought of Toys and the last, hard words between them.
I hate you, Hugo. I wish you were already dead.
Had Toys really meant that?
Probably.
Fuck.
He switched on the computer, entered his passwords, and accessed his banking records. His wealth was so scattered and so well protected that it was almost impossible to calculate. Somewhere a hair’s breadth south of one hundred billion. Nothing to piss on.
Enough to rebuild the Seven Kings.
Or, maybe find the scattered remnants of the Upierczi.
Hell, maybe both.
If he was going to live forever, he might as well have some fun.
He was smiling as he tapped in his banking codes. The screen buzzed with an error message. Mistype, he figured, and tried again. And again.
“What the fuck?”
He switched to a different bank and tried to log in.
The same thing happened.
He tried seven more, his fingers trembling with panic. Nothing.
“Goddamn son of a bitch, what the f-?”
A voice behind him said, “You’re wasting your time, Hugo.”
Vox jumped and spun around in his seat. He had not seen the figure sitting quietly in the darkness of the far side of the study. Vox had not even sensed his presence. The figure was seated in a leather chair, legs crossed, body relaxed and casual, face completely hidden by shadows.
“God…” Vox gasped, and he felt as if a hand were suddenly clamped around his throat.
The figure reached to the lamp on the nearby table and switched it on. In the yellow glow of the low-wattage bulb he looked calm, his face without expression, the lenses of his tinted glasses reflecting Vox’s shocked and terrified face.
“Deacon… Holy Christ, how’d you… How’d you…?” He could not finish the sentence.
Mr. Church lifted something from his lap. A coded cell phone. A purple one. “I received this in the mail. From a mutual friend.” He tossed it onto the floor between them. “My friends in the industry constantly amaze me with what they can do with reverse engineering. Even to the point of turning a simple phone into a tracking device.”
“No…” breathed Vox. Sweat burst from his pores.
Church said nothing.
“Is Toys alive? Did you kill him?”
“What does it matter to you?”
Vox wiped an arm across his face. “You know it fucking well matters.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why does he matter to you, Hugo?” Church asked quietly.
Vox glared at him. “You wouldn’t understand.”