Shadows of Falling Night (29 page)

There’s absolutely nothing on earth that burns fuel like cross-country skiing and cold weather,
Peter had said, dead serious.

Eric believed him, though climbing mountains in body armor and pack probably came a very close second. Peter had worked hard on getting the old skis in order too, and as they filed out he checked everyone’s bindings one last time before putting on his own.

Eric glanced up at the sky, then gave the surface a careful eyeball. It wasn’t snowing
now
though from the mealy smell in the air it might, but there were something like two feet on the ground, drifted in places. Slightly damp snow, the best kind to make a snowman out of. It would be impossible to get through on foot—not without snowshoes or skis. Impossible for people, at least. They’d squared away the cottage and locked the doors and left a couple of hundred euros on the mantelpiece;
small enough thanks for kindness that had almost certainly saved their lives. Saved them from a very bad death. Saved the kids too; he was starting to think it was really worthwhile to take risks to keep them from being raised to be the sort of person their mother was. For their own sakes, as well as to keep from unleashing two more monsters on the world.

“Okay,” he said, a verbal placeholder to get their attention. “Peter will be breaking trail. Then you, Cheba, then the kids, then me on the tail. Don’t talk unless you have to. Don’t waste any energy, ’cause we’re going to need it all. As long as we can, we’ll do forty minutes and then a ten-minute rest. Steady does it, we don’t work up too much of a sweat. We may need to go real quick at the end. Leon, Leila, if you can, ah,
tell
that anyone’s coming after us, sing out right away, okay?”

Because I’m sure as shit going to pay attention if I start feeling that prickling crawly feeling, too. Funny, it doesn’t help all that much now that I know it’s real, because now I’ll have to start wondering whether I’m really feeling it or just getting nervous.

They nodded. Peter dug in his sticks and slid off across the clearing with an economical-looking motion, skis slightly angled out, pushing off the inside edges like a skater getting started. Cheba followed, imitating him as best she could and touching her left pole lightly; the gouges in that shoulder must still hurt like hell, and the scabs would break any time she had to do anything strenuous with it. The children came next, moving smoothly in a way that showed they had done this before but still having to take more strides; there was just no way around the fact that their legs were shorter. Maybe that made the fact that one of the adults was sick and the other was clawed up and had never been on skis before yesterday a little less crucial, since they couldn’t have outpaced the children anyway. That was looking on the bright side. The darker side
was that they might need all the speed they could get if push came to shove.

“And speaking of pushing,
compadre
,” Eric muttered to himself. “
¡Vamanos!
”

Shove—slide, shove—slide, use the poles for balance and to keep the arms swinging. He’d done this before, there was a Nordic-style trail just above the ski basin that overhung Santa Fe and his ex-wife, Julia, had been an enthusiast; he’d gone along for her sake, and because it was a lot less monotonous than running on a treadmill at the gym. The problem was that he hadn’t done any for six years, since she left to find herself, and he hadn’t liked it enough to keep it up afterwards plus the negative associations. He was fit when he wasn’t sick and physically capable, but this used a particular set of muscles and they were going to make him pay.

Breathe in, hold it for the slightest second as he moved, breathe out. The cold damp air felt lousy, and then very slightly better as his body warmed up. Into the shade of the trees, mostly pretty big pines seventy or eighty feet high, clear of branches to above head height. Farther up they were as much white as green, last night’s fall clinging heavily to the boughs. Whenever the wind stirred them little torrents would fall down, landing with pattering thumps. There didn’t seem to be many birds, or much of anything else though they passed deer tracks, and a fleeting red streak up a tree might have been a European squirrel. And once what he was pretty sure were the marks of a raccoon, which would’ve been startling if someone hadn’t once told him they’d escaped from fur farms here long ago.

His muscles ached, and so did his joints and his neck and his head. Forty minutes, and he felt like it had been going on for hours.

“Halt,” he said, not too loud as they came to a convenient fallen tree, just the right height to sit on.

Peter was breathing about as hard as he was; breaking trail for the others was distinctly more effort than following. Eric might have felt guilty about that, if it had made any sense. As it was he just
wasn’t
in any shape to spell the better skier, and his more experienced senses were better employed at the rear, since he couldn’t be in two places at once. If someone was chasing them, they’d probably come up from behind. Cheba was looking a little gray, but had enough energy to keep the kids from skylarking—he didn’t expect her to complain until she fell over.

Going to be an interesting life with that one,
he thought as he unscrewed the top of the thermos. Then as he took the first sip:
Whoa, when did we decide she was going to be my own personal triumph of hope over experience? And she’ll certainly have something to say about that herself.

And:
Adrian, I hope you’re watching over us. Because we’re going to need it.

“Da ima okus govna!”
Adrian muttered.

“I have enough Polish to translate
that
,” Ellen said sympathetically.

“Croatian, actually, but it’s closely related,” Adrian said, spitting into the fluted marble of the sink.

He tossed the blood bag into the waste container; let the hotel staff think what they might. She could see how he fought not to gag at the taste, gray-faced amid the splendors of the bathroom that went with the Hotel Imperial’s suite. The sharp coppery metallic scent certainly didn’t smell very appetizing, but then warm blood didn’t attract either…for her. He’d shared the subjective experience of fresh blood with her telepathically, and…

Wow. Just wow. Just as good as being bitten, in its way. And when you throw love into the bargain…better still, love and sex into the bargain
…

“Here,” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Just a sip to clear your mouth.”

He looked up at her sharply, and she shook her head. “No, it’s not the addiction getting away from me. Just a
sip
, darling. I’m testing my blood regularly, don’t worry. Condition fully controlled.”

Having a monogamous relationship with her meant that Adrian had to use stored blood fairly often, particularly if he was Wreaking; there was a limit to how much she could donate. The way drinking the stuff made him miserable was a proof of love too, in its way. He kissed her palm, then took the hand and touched his lips to the inside of her wrist. That gave her a tingle, both because it was Adrian and then the sharp little sensation and—

“
Ah.
”

A wave of fire up her arm, cool and sultry-warm at the same time, and a tinge of blue around the edges of her sight. It was like the instant you tipped over into orgasm, but so
long
…

She made a whimpering sound as he lifted his lips from her skin, and they clung together for a while.

“God, that has got to be one of the
best
things in the world,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. A wink. “And the best cure for nausea…”

Ellen laughed. “Come on. You’ve got work to do.”

When he lay down on the bed he crossed his arms on his shoulders and closed his eyes. The relaxation that followed was beyond sleep; more still than death, despite the slow, shallow once-every-thirty-seconds breaths.

“And I’ll watch over you while you check on the kids and our friends,” she murmured, stroking his forehead. “Always.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mitteleuropa

“I
t’s been dark a while now,” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Eric said, sternly suppressing an impulse to add:
No shit, Sherlock
.

The air had gotten a little warmer over the course of the day, which just made the dank cold more penetrating and the skiing harder, and now it was freezing again. They’d never seen the sun all day, just a brighter blur to the gray-white cloud southwards, and it had never gotten all that high either.

He looked over at the children; they were sitting on a low stone wall slumped against each other, with Cheba crouched in front of them coaxing them to take the last of the formerly hot and now luke-warm chocolate. Their skis stood against the wall beside the adults, and on
the other side was open ground—pasture, he thought—and evenly spaced leafless trees that probably lined a road. Beyond was a knuckle of open ground cloaked in dwarf junipers, and a mile farther off, a broad brimming river. The lie of the land hid the actual bank, but he had a feeling that there was a town there, or at least a hamlet. He wanted to push them all on right away, but he made himself wait and even forced himself to stop looking at his phone for the time. Having the kids collapse into a groaning heap on the road wasn’t going to do anyone any good.

“How are you feeling?” the Minnesotan said.

“Like crap,” Eric said shortly; his energy level had hit the point where he had to mentally flog himself to keep moving some time ago. “And it won’t do any good in the whole God damned world to think about it.”

He’d keep going regardless of how he felt until he fell facedown and couldn’t move, because right now the alternative was that they all died, badly enough that it would be a relief by the time it happened.

He probably wasn’t important enough for the enemy to keep his personality around to torture for centuries, but that wasn’t really a very big consolation. A lot depended on how long it took the opposition to stop looking at the road out of the little town, and how quickly they traced them to the cabin and picked up the trail from there to the woods. He pulled out his tablet and checked the map—as long as he didn’t engage the cell phone function, there was little chance of anyone using it to track him, but it still made getting lost a lot harder. It was full dark now, without moon or stars, but fortunately there seemed to be a little reflected light on the underside of the clouds and the patches of snow on the ground helped.

“Okay, there is a town over there, Stepp-something-on-the-Danube. Let’s get—”

A sound came, faint in the distance but unmistakable. A long drawn sobbing howl, a little like a coyote’s but not much; cold and deep and infinitely malignant.

“Wolf,” Peter said. “Not much like the ones I heard on Grand Isle, but definitely a wolf.” A moment later: “Wolves, plural.”

The grinding misery of recent fever and all-too-present exhaustion had muffled Eric’s alertness. That, and the sweat that kept turning into cold beads under his clothing. Now some sort of bug seemed to be scuttling over his skin amid all that. He yanked out his coach gun.

“Go!” he barked. “Push it, and don’t stop.”

Peter swung across the waist-high stone wall. He and Cheba each took a child by the hand and started walking quickly across the field towards the road, despite sleepy mutters of protest. At least the kids were weren’t afraid of the dark, and saw in it like cats. Eric looked westward, the opposite direction from the infinitely distant and absolutely theoretical Vienna. Where the protecting sun had vanished. The ground of the meadow was awkward beneath his boots as he followed the others, snow thin and patchy and wet enough to clump. They’d been right to abandon the skis, but if they had to run the kids would have to be carried, and even a short slender eight-year-old was no joke. He wished desperately that he could reach up and swing down night vision, except of course that if he needed it the things that were after them could screw it up with a thought.

It was like the inside of a closet. By the time the leafless beech trees along the road loomed up like shapes of darkness in darkness, Leon and Leila were leading the two adults. Eric tried to keep looking in every direction at once; there wasn’t any sign of a car on the road.