The men wore nondescript clothes — black shoes, pants, and sweatshirts, but they also wore turbans with scarves covering the lower halves of their faces. The turbans were loose and wrapped in the same fashion. I’ve been in the Middle East enough to know that there are a lot of methods of wrapping a turban and that each method usually denoted a different ethnic or religious group. A Sikh’s turban and one worn by an Afghani village headman are entirely different. These guys, though, didn’t fit any group catalogued in my head.
This whole thing appeared to be a weird kind of religious ritual and that matched no part of my mission objectives. The gathered men stared at the blood and bones with absolute intensity, wide-eyed, as if they expected something miraculous to happen.
They watched.
I watched.
Not a goddamn thing happened.
So far no one spotted me, and since the odds were ten to one I was thinking about the many benefits of running away. The woman was beyond help, and none of this made a lick of sense, so I backed out of the entrance corridor and crept a dozen yards down the walkway to call Mr. Church.
Chap. 6
I described everything I’d seen.
“Cowboy,” he replied, “verify that there are two skeletons. Describe their clothing.”
I did. I expected him to tell me to bag it and call this in to the locals.
“Captain,” said Church very tersely, “listen to me very closely. The two skeletons are the remains of Red Knights. Confirm understanding.”
I think I actually staggered. I remember the wall slapping me in the back.
Red Knights.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
I’d encountered Red Knights before. Fought them. Killed some of them. Watched them slaughter some of my team.
They almost killed me.
It came close.
So close.
The Red Knights were genetic aberrations. Monsters. Not entirely human. They are the descendants of a freakish schism in the evolution of our species. Like Homo sapiens idaltu and Homo floresiensis, these were members of a race of cousins to Homo sapiens.
They’re proper scientific designation appears in no medical or scientific textbook. It exists, as far as I know, in only three places — the archives of the Department of Military Sciences, in the secret traditions of the Red Order, and in the bloody history of the covert group called Arklight.
That scientific name?
Homo vampiri upierczi.
Vampires.
No, these weren’t pasty-faced noblemen in opera cloaks. They couldn’t turn into bats and they weren’t in any way supernatural. These bastards — the Upierczi, as they called themselves — were all too real. Relatives of humanity but set apart. First as slaves of the Church and assassins for the Red Order, later as their own self-governing shadow kingdom.
The world doesn’t know about them. The truth of what they are, the fact of their existence, is buried beneath layers of false histories, folklore, myths, lies, and legends.
Last year the DMS teamed up with Arklight to bring them down. It was not a war of our choosing. They started the game and were playing by some nasty rules. If they’d won…?
Well, if they’d won, I wouldn’t be here up to my ankles in shit beneath Paris because there wouldn’t be a Paris. There wouldn’t be much of anything left except a wasteland suffering through an unending nuclear winter.
The fact that the two Red Knights down here with me were dead — and had been dead for a long time — was no fucking comfort at all.
When I could speak I said, “Any idea who the guys with the turbans are?”
But even as I asked it, I think I knew. Church confirmed it, though.
“Hashashin.”
Yeah. Fuck me.
The Red Knights were killers for the Red Order, an illegal and unsanctioned group operating on behalf of Christianity. They were formed during the Crusades. Their enemies — and in many sick and twisted ways their co-conspirators — were the Hashashin, a sect of superb killers formed in 1080, before the First Crusade. The Anglicized version of their name is assassin.
You can see why I was sweating bullets.
One of me, ten world-class assassins. The bones of two vampires.
“What the hell have I stepped into here?” I demanded.
“Something that should have been entirely past tense,” said Church, and there was definitely sadness in his voice. “It was a mistake not to have cleaned up the leavings.”
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Church admit to a mistake before. Rather than humanizing him, it gave me the chills.
“I’m wide open to suggestions,” I said. “As long as they don’t involve me going back in there. I’d like to see the cavalry come riding in pretty damn soon.”
“Is now fast enough?”
It was not Church speaking in my ear. Or Bug.
The voice came from behind me.
There are very, very few people who can sneak up on me.
But she….
Yeah, she manages to do it all the time.
And despite everything, I was smiling as I turned around.
She stood there. Lean, fox-faced, with erect posture and the slightly splay-footed stance you see in ballet dancers. Thick auburn hair pulled back into a pony tail. Black form-fitting fatigues. Lots of weapons.
I said, “Hello, Violin.”
She said, “Hello, Joseph.”
Chap. 7
Violin beckoned for me to follow her down the tunnel, away from the rusted door and the room filled with killers and death. I was happy to follow.
In the shadows, as we stood precariously on a one-brick-wide ledge, she grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me into a ferocious kiss. It was immediate and scalding, and it filled all the dark spaces — inside my head and here in the tunnels — with fireworks.
Then she pushed me back. I wobbled unsteadily and her strong grip kept me on the ledge.
I said, “Wow.”
She said, “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
Violin shrugged. “My mother sent me.”
I told her about the routine scut work for Interpol.
She looked past me to where the dirty light splashed down over the metal door. “Do you know what’s in there?”
“Some,” I said and told her what I saw. “What do you know about it?”
Violin’s eyes are difficult to read at the best of times. I saw shadows flit and dance. Eventually she said, “A long time ago, when I was a little girl, my mother came down here.”
“Your mother? Lilith? Why?”
It was a dumb question to which I already knew the answer.
But Violin answered anyway. “Hunting monsters.”
She didn’t have to explain. The women of Arklight were survivors of the hell that was life in the Shadow Kingdom of the Upierczi. The vampires were all male. In order to breed, they stole women. The tales I heard about the immense suffering of women trapped in the underground breeding pens still gives me nightmares. Lilith had been a prisoner for twenty years. She had ultimately led a rebellion and took more than thirty women with her to freedom. Some of the women left their babies behind, unable to bring themselves to suckle the children of rape. Others brought their children out.
Violin had been born in captivity. Now she, like her mother, was a practiced hunter and killer. Part of Arklight.
I’ve had a long, bad life, and I’ve suffered some terrible tragedies. But when I think about what Lilith and the other women endured, I am humbled. And I’m also filled with a dark red, murderous rage. Together, Violin and I had vented some of that rage when we stopped the rise of the Red Knights. But, like most wars fought against a concept rather than a nationality, the struggle continues.