Stiletto (54 page)

“Don’t move,” it said. Odette frowned — she knew it from somewhere. Everyone else froze, and a look of absolute horror erupted on the blond man’s face.

“No!” the blond man shouted, absolutely aghast. “Not you! What are you doing here?”

“You, my friend, smell familiar,” said the voice. “Where do I know you from?” The owner of the voice stepped forward. It was Bishop Alrich, dressed in a gray suit. He wore no tie, and his free-flowing hair was now a light auburn, almost blond.

“It’s just some faggot in a suit,” snarled the thug with the knuckle-dusters.

“Yes, quite right,” said the blond man, rallying somewhat. “You take him, I’ll kill the Rook.” He drew a wicked-looking combat knife from inside his coat and moved toward the car. The thugs spread out before the Bishop, who stepped off the bank and dropped several meters to land smooth and unruffled.

“I won’t let you kill her,” said Odette to the blond man as he approached. Both spurs were unsheathed, and her knees were bent slightly, ready to move. To get at Rook Thomas, he’d have to climb in through the torn roof of the car. She set her mind.
If he comes in here, he’s getting the octopus venom.

“You couldn’t possibly stop me, Odette.”

“How do you know me?” she asked.
He’s not an Antagonist; they wouldn’t talk to me like this.

“I’m wounded that you don’t recognize me,” said the man. “But we’ll chat about that later. I really,
really
want to kill this woman right now.” His fist blurred out and cracked Odette on the side of her face before she could react. She staggered, and her back hit the jagged metal where the roof had been torn. Her knees buckled and she went down on the floor of the car. The blond man vaulted in through the hole in the roof easily, swinging his legs in like a farmer going over a fence.

“You
won’t,
” she said, and lunged at him, her spurs out. He dropped the knife and caught her wrists easily.

“You’re out of your league, Odette. But it sounds like I really need to hurry this up.” Outside the car, there were ominous sounds of thuds and tearing. A high, howling scream cut off into a wet gasp. He forced her wrists to the side and slammed his head into hers. The world flashed, and her legs went buttery.

I think I’m going to throw up,
she thought fuzzily. Now the man’s grip was the only thing holding her up, and he let her go. She felt herself slither into a puddle.
I can’t let him...
She reached out weakly with her arm, and he planted a foot pointedly on her wrist and forced it onto the floor. He bent over and picked up his knife.

“Finally,”
he said, and there was a terrible eagerness as he looked down on the Rook. And then the expression on his face changed. Odette made an effort and focused beyond him. Bishop Alrich was perched on the peeled-back portion of the roof. His hair, face, and clothes were bloody, and his hand was closed around the blond man’s throat.

“We should have a conversation,” said the Bishop. The blond man’s face twisted in frustration.

“Damn it! So close. Well, there’s always next time.” He shrugged, and Odette saw his eyes unfocus as he went limp in the Bishop’s hand. The knife dropped to the floor.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” remarked the Bishop.

“Before we begin, should Pawn Clements really be present?” asked Sir Henry. Felicity flushed and looked down at her feet. In the wood-paneled conference room, she was the only one standing. At one end of the table was the entire Court of the Checquy. She had been a trifle amused to note that they’d arrayed themselves in the positions of pieces on the chessboard, with the Lord and Lady flanked by the Bishops, who were flanked by the Chevs, who were flanked by the Rooks. Apparently, Rook Thomas was the Lady’s Rook. Felicity herself was standing against the wall behind Rook Thomas.

At the other end of the table were four representatives of the Broederschap. Odette looked very small between Marcel and Ernst. Marie, her hair a rich mahogany, was sitting on the other side of Ernst. The distance between the two parties was not great, but it seemed very significant at that moment.

“I requested that Pawn Clements join us,” said Rook Thomas. “I have absolute confidence in her discretion, and I believe that she can provide some important information.”

“Very well, then,” said Sir Henry. “Let us proceed.” As one, the Court looked across to the members of the Broederschap. “Graaf van Suchtlen, earlier this evening, an attack occurred. Bishop Alrich observed that it was very specifically targeted at a member of this Court. The leader of the attackers, who has apparently lapsed into a state of catatonia, seemed to know Miss Leliefeld. A Checquy driver with no history of any unnatural abilities suffers a convulsion and vents a chemical weapon out of his skin — a weapon that appears to affect everyone except Miss Leliefeld. And the body parts of the attackers that our people managed to gather up, well, they show evidence of... alterations.” His face, which had been serious before, now looked distinctly stern — almost merciless. “This all combines to form a very troubling scenario. We require an explanation. A true and complete explanation. Otherwise, this is going to go to a very, very ugly place.”

The graaf’s face was expressionless, but he made a movement with his shoulder, like someone shifting to stretch a sore muscle. Everyone tensed, except for Lady Farrier, who rolled her eyes. The atmosphere in the room was icy, and all the occupants of the room, as if by agreement, had their hands flat on the table in front of them. All of them, that is, except Felicity, who had her hands clenched at her sides, and Marcel, who was making notes on some writing paper and seemed quite unaware of any tension.

Felicity wondered anxiously if she was going to be witness to the first executive-level battle since the last time the Americans came for dinner.

“Very well,” said the graaf finally. Just saying that seemed to have robbed him of his strength, because there was a pause sufficiently long that Marcel even looked up from his notes.

“Ernst,” said Rook Thomas reprovingly.

“I apologize. This is difficult. I am ashamed.” Odette looked up at him, startled. “I had hoped that we could resolve this trouble without ever revealing it to the Checquy, but we have failed.” He sighed. “For the past several months, we have been the subject of attacks, horrible attacks upon our facilities and our people. There have been deaths, mutilations, and sabotage.”

“Why on earth didn’t you tell us about this?” asked Chevalier Eckhart. “We could have come to your assistance, even in Europe. Who are these attackers? Do you know?”

“Oh yes,” said Ernst, and his voice shook with rage. “We know who they are. Among ourselves, we refer to them as the Antagonists, but in truth they are us. They are a splinter faction of the Broederschap.”

“Oh, bloody hell!” exclaimed Rook Thomas in disgust. Everyone stared at her in surprise. The Rook seemed enraged, and she looked up at the ceiling with her mouth twisted. “What is wrong with you people?” It was not immediately apparent to whom she was speaking. She shook her head and, with a visible effort, calmed herself down. “Go on,” she said coldly.

“It is the most shameful part, knowing that it is our own family members and colleagues who are responsible for this,” said Ernst hesitantly.

“And dare we ask why they are doing this?” asked Lady Farrier. “What is the cause of this schism?”

“You, of course,” said Ernst.

“Of course,” said Farrier flatly.

“When I announced that the Broederschap would be joining forces with the Checquy, there were some protestations.”

“Did you tell them about the pension plan?” asked Chevalier Whibley. “It’s index-linked.” He realized everyone was looking at him. “My apologies.”

“He didn’t tell them anything,” said Odette darkly. “Just that it would be happening.” Grootvader Ernst shot her a look, but she was staring down at her hands and didn’t notice.

“And it
will
be happening,” said Grootvader Ernst.

“Grootvader Ernst is accustomed to people doing what he tells them to,” said Odette.

“Yes.” He nodded. There was a long pause, but no more information was forthcoming. Apparently, he felt that everything had been said that needed to be said. People did what he told them to. He had told them to join the Checquy, and so they would. Odette diplomatically closed her eyes before she rolled them. Then she opened them again.

“There was quite a bit of shock when the announcement was made,” she said. “We were informed that one of the heads of the Broederschap had been killed.” She didn’t add that he had been killed by the Checquy, but everyone was thinking it. “Then we were told that Grootvader Ernst had made peace with the Gruwels — I’m sorry, with your organization. Then we were told that we would be merging with this organization. All of this information was communicated over the course of five minutes.”

“Oh, I said it nicer than that!” snapped Ernst.

“Not much nicer!” snapped back Odette. “We’ve lived in secret for centuries, Grootvader, petrified that the Checquy would track us down and finish the job they’d started in 1677. And then suddenly you expect us to move in with them! Of
course
people were going to react.”

“I expected a reaction, but not this madness.” The two of them stared at each other, and Felicity was caught by their resemblance. They might be separated by multiple generations, but there was no doubt that they were related.

“And who are these rebels, these Antagonists?” asked Chevalier Eckhart. “What resources do they have to command?”

“There are five of them,” said Marcel, who’d returned to his notes. “Only five now. But they are dangerous.”

“It was surprising, at least to me,” said Ernst. “I had anticipated trouble from the older members of the Broederschap, those most set in their ways. There are still a few who have been with us since the very beginning, who remember the Isle of Wight and the Checquy. If anyone could be expected to hold on to their hatred, I thought it would be them. But it was not that way at all. Rather, it was the younger people, the apprentices, who would not countenance peace.”

“I
knew
there were people missing from the files you gave us!” exclaimed Rook Thomas triumphantly. “There was a gap in the demographics, from age nineteen to twenty-six.”

“Wait, so the five are your friends?” Felicity burst out incredulously. “The ones from the photos? Your boyfriend?” Everyone stared at Felicity, but her eyes were on Odette, who looked back for a moment and then nodded slightly. “
You
told me they died!” Felicity said accusingly to Marcel. He glanced up from his notes and gave a little shrug.

“They were angry,” said Odette brokenly. “So angry.”

*

Paranoia formed a crucial component of every Grafter’s makeup. Like twenty-twenty vision or a tolerance for gluten, if you weren’t born with it, it was implanted in you at an early age. And the cause of this paranoia was the Checquy.

When the Broederschap troops marched onto the Isle of Wight in 1677, they had anticipated that there would be no real challenges. The closest they had ever come to an inexplicable phenomenon was a regenerative pig they’d stumbled across, and even that was dead after they had tried to see just how regenerative it was.

As a result, when the operatives of His Majesty’s Supernatural Secret Service exhibited abilities on the battlefield that made absolutely no sense at all, the Broederschap was shaken to its core. During the campaign, the Grafters captured prisoners and snatched corpses. They frantically dissected them, and what they found (or failed to find) defied even the Broederschap’s understanding of science and, indeed, of logic.

The small portion of the Grafters who escaped the purge never felt truly safe. Always in the backs of their minds (and at the beginning of the agenda for every meeting they ever held) was the knowledge that the Checquy was out there, lurking, on their strange gray island.

And so the Grafters kept very much to themselves. If they amassed too much power or wealth or gained any prominence at all, they might catch the eye of the Checquy or some equivalent body. Rather than placing all their eggs in one basket, the Broederschap established chapter houses throughout Europe: in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Marseille, Hamburg — large cities where they would be lost amidst the population. After a century or two, they also built chapter houses in Belgium and returned circumspectly to their homeland.

Security was always paramount. But despite their scattered distribution across Europe, the Grafters were not isolated from one another. Like many scientists and academics, they thrived on constant collaboration, and information and research results were shared as a matter of course. Younger members acted as couriers, traveling to visit relations and colleagues and carrying materials and heavily encrypted documents within their bodies.

With the advent of telephony and then, much later, the Internet, the Grafters developed ways to take advantage of these new technologies without putting themselves at risk. Certain trusted flunkies were packed full of complex communications equipment and acted as the ultimate secretaries. However, lacking flunkies, the younger members of the brotherhood were obliged to improvise, and one of Odette’s friends had come up with designs that allowed animals to fill the flunky roles.

And so Odette had been sitting in her studio in Roeselare, Belgium, listening to the voices of her closest friends come out of the mouths of five members of the lizard family and a tortoise.

“This is insane,” said Saskia’s voice. “Graaf Ernst has lost his mind if he is honestly thinking there could be peace between us and the Gruwels! He is betraying us, betraying the generations that have worked and died to give us what we have today!”

It was startling to hear such rage in Saskia’s normally gentle voice, and it didn’t help that it was coming from the passionless face of a tortoise. Saskia, who lived by the seaside in Marseille and could breathe underwater and created beautiful perfumed butterflies with wings like flowers. Saskia, who had taken Odette shopping in Paris for her first gown and taught her to dance.