Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (40 page)

Flicking my eyes upward, I saw a dark shape descending from over the top of the pillar, and I pivoted to my right and hacked through it, splitting the body in two. But the gambit served its purpose. During that crucial second or so, Theophilus moved with blinding speed and bowled me over, tackling me to the cobbled plaza stones and trapping my sword arm against my body. As soon as we hit the ground on my left side, he reared back, grabbed Fragarach by the blade, and ripped it out of my hand, uncaring about the deep cuts he received as a result. He tossed it away onto the steps of the Keats-Shelley House. I was unarmed, drained of energy, and unable to speak—he had me and he knew it. He grinned, feeling confident again, and held me down with a grip stronger than any iron bands I’ve seen.

Just to make that smile disappear again, I wanted to tell him Werner Drasche was dead, but I couldn’t.

“Well done, sir, well done,” he cooed at me. “Not good enough, but definitely a fine challenge. A worthy opponent. When the world’s nests hear that you killed so many but failed to kill me—even with the sun!—that will only add to my prestige. You’ve done me a favor in a way. But that doesn’t mean I won’t ram my fist through your skull right now.”

I didn’t have the strength to break free. When he lifted his hand away I wouldn’t be able to block his blow in time, or even if I did manage to get in the way it would be an utterly feeble attempt. So I drained my own energy to trigger the unbinding charm on my necklace once more, having no other weapons at my disposal. I nearly blacked out at the drain, but he did let go of my left arm to clutch at his precious turtleneck. He hissed, and then when the pain faded he raised his fist high and said, “Good night—hunh!”

His eyes bulged and he looked down at his right side, where a familiar stake had embedded itself underneath his arm. He dropped his fist to pull it out, but the unbinding had already begun, shredding him from the center out. The world’s oldest vampire gave a wet gurgling scream before he liquefied and splurted out through his fine clothing. The turtleneck didn’t save me from an overdose of gules but perhaps made it look like I had died too. I followed the path of where that stake must have come from and saw Granuaile standing off to the left, behind the pillar opposite mine, leaning heavily on her staff. Her clothes were covered in gore and she was favoring her left side, but apart from either deep bruising or perhaps some small fractures, she was all right. She gave me a lopsided grin. “Hey. You look like I feel. Don’t let me forget: We need to buy Luchta, like,
all
the beer for giving us those stakes.”

I wanted to shout at her to beware of the sniper, but I think she knew about him anyway, judging by the fact that she was already behind cover. I, however, wasn’t.

But the disadvantage to peering through one of those scopes is the very small field of vision. The sniper hadn’t seen Granuaile coming, and now he had taken his sights off me to search for who had just killed the boss. Or at least I surmised as much by the fact that I didn’t immediately die of a bullet to the brain. Flailing for a second in ancient vampire goo, I sat up with an effort and crawled back behind the pillar.

Owen wasn’t finished making a ruckus. Babington’s rooftop pavilion was on fire now—presumably ignited by the smoking corpses of the vampires caught in the brief rays of sunlight—and he used his brass-covered claws to burst through the wall as a bear and slide to the edge of the roof, where he shape-shifted to a red kite. I followed his progress as he arrowed across the piazza to a window in the terra-cotta building where Marko’s rifle muzzle poked out. He didn’t get there before Marko fired but rather just as he fired, knocking the muzzle down with his talons so that the bullet went
spaff
into Bernini’s fountain. I don’t know if Marko was aiming at Granuaile or me. He didn’t get a chance to shoot again after that. Owen disappeared into the building and I presume he took out all the gun-wielding lads one way or another, because he eventually emerged from the front entrance, dressed in one of their suits.

In the meantime, authorities were pouring into the piazza, trying to reestablish order as a precursor to figuring out what had happened. The wail of sirens heralded the arrival of firemen and paramedics. Granuaile and I had no difficulty pretending to be traumatized victims, and neither did the Rabbi Yosef Bialik. Only five of the Hammers of God survived, but they had defeated the Hermetic Qabalists completely, and their beards looked like normal facial hair again. I noticed that all the silver knives had been removed from the body of the first Rosicrucian the Hammers had taken out. The rabbi floated the idea that maybe we should blame everything on the guys with the funny haircuts, and I nodded my approval.

“I have lost good friends tonight, but this was a true triumph over evil, yes? We will talk later. When you can talk.” Yes, we would. I owed him some Immortali-Tea for sure.

When Owen emerged from the building, he still had enough juice left in his brass knuckles to cast camouflage on the three of us and get us out of there. His jaw, I noticed, was misshapen, as I’d suspected. It was dislocated for sure and possibly broken like mine. We limped and grunted our way back to the grounds of the Villa Borghese and fell onto the grass once we felt Gaia’s presence again. I numbed the pain first so I could keep my head clear, then set about getting my jaw back into place and the bones and teeth bound together like old friends. Owen’s jaw was merely dislocated, and once he popped it back into place with an audible crunch, a river of profanity that had been dammed up all during the fight spewed forth. Granuaile likewise worked on her wounds, and once Owen wound down, we rested in silence and healed. After an hour I could talk again, albeit with a thick slur.

“Yay team,” I said.

“Damn,” Owen said. “I knew it wouldn’t last forever. But it was right peaceful there for a while, not having to listen to your yapping.”

F
ishing out my burner phone, I made a call and spoke past my bloodied lips and tongue. “Meet ush now at the Antico Caffè Greco by the piazza.” I thumbed off the call once I got an affirmative response.

“Who was that?” Granuaile asked.

“The ansher to what happensh next. Hungry?”

“Not while covered in blood. Maybe afterward.”

“I’m sure they will have a washroom.”

Charged up again, we camouflaged ourselves and walked back through the piazza, ignoring the barriers and surveying the damage. Babington’s suffered damage only to the rooftop pavilion; someone got up there with a fire extinguisher and saved the building. There was nothing but oily stains and empty clothes to mark the final deaths of the vampires—Owen confirmed that we had gotten them all. He hadn’t killed all the thralls but left them broken and, in one case, naked. He’d lost his stake on top of Babington’s somewhere and would have to look for it later. Mine had been found by the police on the steps and was being bagged as evidence. As soon as the officer put it down, I snatched it up, unseen, and shoved it underneath my jacket.

Normally there would be something of a wait to get into Caffè Greco, the legendary establishment where Keats and Shelley and many other artists and poets dined over the centuries. Its red and gold interior with vaulted ceilings fairly teemed with the ghosts of creative minds, and people lined up to park their buttocks where famous buttocks had lounged in days of yore. But on a freezing, snowy evening in Rome, it was almost deserted. We kept the camouflage on when we entered and shambled past the maître d’ to the restrooms where we could attempt to clean ourselves up somewhat. We could get our faces and hair clean, and Owen had stolen his clothing so he was in good shape there, but my clothes weren’t going to look decent again before they had gone a few rounds with industrial-sized containers of bleach. Better to unbind them and let them feed the earth.

“Ye look like ye killed a bus full o’ people, lad,” Owen said.

“Yesh, I do. But it’ll be okay. I think.”

We walked out together in camouflage, dropped it, then walked right back in again, entirely visible. Granuaile didn’t look bad at all, having managed to either clean or conceal most of the blood on her. I was the one who had to talk my way in. I explained in broken Italian to the alarmed maître d’ that my clothes weren’t stained with actual blood; it was corn syrup and food dye, thrown upon me by some damn animal-rights activists who’d targeted me for my leather jacket. I gave him fifty euros, courtesy of the pickpockets I’d run into yesterday, and we were seated with alacrity at a table for four.

“Our friend will be joining us shortly,” I explained.

We ordered espressos and sat in silence. We were exhausted, cut off from Gaia, and quietly trying to manage our pain. There was little else to say until our guest showed up.

When he did, Owen was the first to spot him. “Fecking hell?” he said, then he began to speak the unbinding for vampires. I saw that a tall, pale Viking with straight blond hair approached, dressed in a modern Italian suit.

“No, no!” I said, clapping a hand over his mouth. “Thash who we’re waiting for!”

Leif Helgarson halted, because he’d heard what I said, and held up his hands to show that he was harmless, but Owen slapped my hand away and growled, “Gerroff me, ye poxy cock!”

“All right, jush lisshen to him. He’sh gonna keep your Grove shafe.”

“Fine. But give me your stake just in case,” he said. “He’d better fecking behave.” I handed it over, and he laid it on the table in plain view as a warning.

“Atticus, what’s going on?” Granuaile said. “I thought you hated him.”

“Not as much as I hate the thought of a never-ending war.” I waved Leif over. “Shometimes a deal with the devil is better than an eternity of righteous shuffering.”

“Good evening to you all,” he said formally, pulling out his chair and seating himself. “I am grateful for the invitation to join you. Congratulations on your victory against the Druids’ oldest enemy.”

“Thank you,” I said. Granuaile and Owen just stared at him in silence, their muscles tense and ready to lash out.

“I have the document you requested, Atticus,” Leif said. “It is in my coat pocket.” His eyes latched on to Owen. “I am going to remove it very slowly.”

“Aye. Ye take your fecking time with that,” Owen said.

Leif’s pale hand crept slowly toward his jacket pocket, and Owen’s grip on the stake tightened. The hand disappeared, the faint rasp of fingers against paper could be heard, and then a single folded sheet emerged in his hand. He extended it to me.

“If you will, Atticus.”

I took it from him and unfolded it, as Leif crossed his arms across his body, where Granuaile and Owen could see them. They relaxed infinitesimally.

“Thish ish a treaty,” I told them. “To be shigned by the four of ush if you are willing.”

“I’ll donate me bollocks to charity first,” Owen said.

“You’re not required to shign it,” I said. “Just lisshen.” Looking at the text, I became daunted. My jaw and tongue were in no shape to read this well. “Granuaile? Would you mind?” I offered the paper to her and she snatched it from me without looking, keeping her eyes on Leif.

“You stay super fucking still,” she told him.

“As you command,” he said.

Her eyes dropped to the contract and scanned it while Owen remained on guard.

“It says we’re to help him eliminate competitors among the vampire leadership,” she said.

“We will give addreshes to the Hammersh of God,” I explained. “We don’t have to do it ourshelves.”

“And you have already completed most of the work with your efforts to date,” Leif added. “I anticipate few if any obstacles at this point. I am, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest vampire in the world now.”

Granuaile continued, “It says that from now on, vampires may not occupy any part of North America west of the Rocky Mountains.”

“And?” I prompted.

“…And Poland.” Granuaile looked up at me.

“I do try to keep my promishesh.”

Leif pointed out, “The detailed language beneath says that vampires are to be given a month to evacuate those territories. After that, they may be unbound or staked on sight.”

Owen growled, “What do we have to give up for that?”

Granuaile dropped her eyes back down to the paper. “Everywhere else we have a truce. Live and let be undead, I guess. We don’t unbind vampires on sight; they don’t attack us. The war is over. Each side is allowed to defend itself in the case of physical attack.”

“Bah. That’s ripe for abuse. Kill a lad and then say he attacked ye and it was self-defense.”

Granuaile nodded once to acknowledge that and kept reading. “The vampires agree to maintain their population in the allowed territories in keeping with the Accords of Rome, which specifies one vampire per one hundred thousand humans.” She looked up at the ceiling, considering. “If you subtract the population of just Poland and the West Coast, that means a significant net reduction of vampires worldwide.”

“It’s all shite,” Owen said.

“Your Grove will be shafe, Owen,” I said. “Even when they are bound someday.”