Written in the Blood (37 page)

C
HAPTER
39

Lake Como, Italy

I
zsák tracked the white Porsche Cayenne as he followed, two cars behind, the winding street clinging to Lake Como’s shore. He passed roadside trattorias squeezed between balconied apartment buildings, campaniles, high-sided walls with railed steps.

Ahead the road squeezed into a single lane, and Izsák resisted the temptation to sound his horn at the mopeds and delivery trucks cutting their way towards him.

The Cayenne began to climb as the route took them higher, curving up towards a wooded peninsula thrusting out into Como’s waters.

Abruptly the road widened into two lanes, leaving the clustered buildings behind. Izsák wound through a grove of cypresses, and as he neared the hump of the peninsula he saw a tall stone-built wall begin to flank the roadside nearest the lake. Now three cars in front, the Cayenne slowed as it approached a crenellated gatehouse built into the wall. It turned in, sweeping between tall iron gates.

Izsák glanced through the gatehouse as he passed. A grand drive terminated at the entrance to a huge villa complex perched upon the rock, replete with covered walkways, arched bridges and terraces that stepped down all the way to the water’s edge.

Villa del Osservatore.

He recognised it immediately, passing the entrance without slowing. A hundred yards further on, the villa’s twelve-foot perimeter wall receded from the road. Checking behind him, Izsák pulled his car over, scrubby plants snapping beneath the tyres. He stopped directly beside the wall and switched off the engine.

His vehicle wasn’t hidden here, but he wasn’t too concerned about that – if all went to plan, he’d be revealing himself soon enough. He grabbed a rifle case from the passenger seat and climbed out. Ducking down beside the car, he studied the top of the wall for cameras or motion-detecting equipment. He saw none.

Moving fast, he tossed the rifle case over, listening to it thump to the ground on the other side. After waiting for another pause in traffic, he clambered onto the roof of his car and leaped, grabbing the top of the wall and dragging himself over.

He landed in raked topsoil and threw himself flat. The rifle case lay a few yards away. Izsák crawled over to it and removed the weapon from inside. He snapped back its bolt and raised the scope to his eyes.

No one stood outside the villa. No guards patrolled its grounds. Outside the main entrance sat a cluster of three Range Rovers. Behind them, the Cayenne. Its engine was still running, but Izsák could not see its interior through the car’s tinted windows.

Rising to a crouch, he crept towards the thin line of trees screening him from the villa’s windows.

Off to his right, a flock of birds burst into the sky. Izsák turned in time to see another vehicle pass through the gates, this one a black van. It rolled along the drive, gravel popping from its tyres, and pulled up behind the Cayenne. Its engine died.

Izsák reached the tree nearest to the lawn and put his back against it. He took two breaths to calm himself, turned and dropped to one knee, lifting up the rifle scope.

The van’s door opened and a figure stepped out. When he saw who it was, the air punched from his lungs as if he had been struck. Izsák slid onto his backside, the rifle falling to the ground.

It was her.

It was Georgia.

Even though he hadn’t seen his daughter since the day he’d driven into Dawson City to pick up her birthday present, even though scores of winters and summers had come and gone since, his heart told him what his eyes saw, and then it broke in two inside his chest.

Her eyes were the same seaweed green. Her hair, even in the misty half-light of Como’s late afternoon, shone with captured sunlight. The baby fat had melted from her face in the intervening years, and in her fine bone structure and wide mouth he saw Lucy, his dead wife, and the sight brokered a pain in him that bent him double in the soft earth.

It isn’t her, you fool. Even if Georgia is in there somewhere, she’s been locked up alone for over eighty years. She’s a memory, now. You know it.

He shook his head, gasping. Curled his lip and bared his teeth. Tensed himself against the pain that flickered, snake-like, through his guts.

Don’t think about what you lost. Don’t think about what’s gone. You grieved for Lucy and Georgia both. Decades of grief. Do what you came here to do. Set her free.

Panting, he crawled back to his rifle. Its barrel was slick with moisture from the ground on which it lay. He picked it up, heard the breath rasping in his throat, saw it misting in front of him. He closed his mouth. Raised the scope to his eyes. Saw her again. Saw her blur in front of him.

Biting back his frustration, Izsák lowered the rifle. Scoured the tears from his eyes. Lifted the weapon a third time.

All those years, searching. All for this. He’d hunted
lélek
tolvajok
across oceans and mountains, in locked warehouses and remote farmsteads.

He’d found a few. A nest, once, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Another, deep in the uninhabited heart of the Białowieża Forest, on the border of Poland and Belarus. He’d destroyed them both, nearly lost his life on each occasion. But he’d never found the
right
nest, never found Georgia. And now, so close that he could be at her side in under a minute should he choose, here she was.

He squinted down the scope. Placed her head between its crosshairs.

While he’d spent all those years searching, only ever with the intention of ending her life, he hadn’t expected that day to be this one.

Georgia gazed back along the drive to the gatehouse by the road. Sweeping it with her seaweed eyes, she turned and stared directly down the scope of his rifle, directly into his soul.

It was an illusion, of course; there was no way she could see him clearly from where she stood. But illusion or not, he felt his throat constricting in pride and in heartbreak at the beautiful shell his daughter had left behind.

His finger tightened on the trigger. He took a single breath. Emptied his lungs. Said goodbye.

A noise made him hesitate. A car door opening.

He lifted his eye from the scope, blinked, and saw the door of the Cayenne swing wide. A second
tolvaj
emerged from it, and Izsák could tell from its sunken eyes and hanging skin that the demise of this one’s host was near.

The creature was dressed outlandishly, clad in three-piece tweed and polished Oxford shoes. A yellow cravat was tied at its throat. Its hair – wormy dreadlocks, matted with grease and trailing down its spine – was crowned by a fedora decorated with a single jay feather. In one hand it clutched a cane of smooth black wood, topped by a flared python head.

Its strange outfit, signature, perhaps, of just how long this specimen had stalked the earth, spooled from Izsák a horror so absolute he almost turned and fled. In all his years he had not seen one as ancient as this, so obviously belonging to a world far older than his own.

It swept the villa’s grounds with eyes like focused swabs of darkness, and when Izsák felt its gaze pass over him he cringed away.

Holding its cane before it, the
tolvaj
limped towards Georgia, mouth open, crusted tongue poking from its lips like a segment of fire-blackened steak.

Izsák braced himself, hand slippery on the rifle’s barrel, finger trembling against the trigger.

Don’t let her down. Don’t abandon her. Do it now. Pull the trigger. NOW.

His smell preceded him as he approached, that wet-rot stink of corruption that signalled the end was coming. Ignoring it, closing her nose to its foulness, she went to him. When she kissed his mouth, she tasted blood and swallowed it. ‘Oh, my darling,’ she said. ‘Not you, too. We have to get you inside. Let me lead.’

He stiffened at her words, drawing himself taller. He did not like to be pitied.

‘No need,’ he replied, voice like birch twigs. ‘
No need . . . need.
’ He caught the whispery repetition of his words, the slurring, and his expression darkened further, angered by that betrayal of his condition. His tongue whipped out, and when it licked his lips it left a dark smear. ‘Are they here?’

She nodded. ‘We don’t have long. The journey’s exhausted them. I need to go inside, make sure that—’

With a wave of his hand he dismissed her. She watched him move around to the rear of the van, his cane scraping on the gravel, and then she turned towards the villa, where salvation waited.

Ivan Tóth sat at the head of the table in the villa’s banqueting room and surveyed the gathered
tanács
around him.

If only Joó, or someone else, had kept them out of the library, had spared them the sight of Catharina’s blood-drenched corpse. They appeared visibly shaken by what they had seen.

No coup had ever been achieved without bloodshed, and no undertaking such as this ever went strictly to plan. But the scene that had greeted the
tanács
had been so visceral, so shocking, it had stained their consciences and destroyed their resolve.

Worse, the story that dreadful tableau had told was clear: the
F
ő
nök
had faced unassailable odds and, instead of cringing away from her fate, she had faced it with bravery and stoicism, even managing to kill her attackers before succumbing to her wounds.

With so many witnesses, word would inevitably leak out. It was the kind of last stand from which legends were built. And Tóth knew that unless he walked a very careful path, history would judge his own part in this poorly.

On the far wall, a portrait of Catharina seemed to watch him. Tóth had sat at this end of the table deliberately; he had not wanted the less stalwart members of his council to labour under those reproachful eyes.

He might not have control of this situation, but the
illusion
of control was more pressing than its reality. ‘Gentlemen, we have some decisions to make. And quickly. First we need to appoint a new head of the
Bels
ő
Ő
r
. I’ve placed Makovecz in temporary control. I’d like your thoughts.’

‘It’s an obvious solution,’ Horváth replied, eyes cold. ‘And one that hardly merits our time. What’s the situation in Calw?’

‘I expect an update from Calw shortly,’ he replied, ignoring the man’s tone.

‘And Leah Wilde? Where is she?’

‘We’ll have her very soon. And then we can announce what we’ve achieved today, before—’

‘What we’ve achieved?’ Horváth shook his head. ‘We haven’t achieved anything.
You’ve
achieved chaos and slaughter. Little else.’

‘We
voted
on this!’ he shouted, furious at the man’s accusations.

‘With guns to our heads, we voted,’ Horváth spat. ‘Is that the kind of legitimacy we can expect from now on?’

Tóth’s hands tightened into fists. With effort, he relaxed them. And then his phone started ringing. He cancelled the call. More bad news, he suspected. He wouldn’t receive it in front of these increasingly hostile eyes.

The illusion of control.

Standing, he nodded at Joó to take command, marched to the banqueting room’s doors and slammed through them.

The hallway was deserted. Ignoring the debris littering the library entrance, Tóth passed the staircase. He found the newly appointed head of his
Bels
ő
Ő
r
at the bottom.

Makovecz lay face down, mouth stretched into a silent scream, jaw hinged so wide that his teeth pressed against the marble. There was no blood. He appeared to have suffered no penetrating wound, no violence to his body.

‘He’s not dead,’ said a woman’s voice.

Tóth didn’t need to look up. The warmth poured from his body as suddenly as if someone had pulled a plug.

When he raised his head, he saw staring back at him a set of green eyes that were as beautiful as they were terrifying.

Hosszú élet
eyes, and yet not.

‘He won’t be quite the same, when he wakes,’ she continued. ‘But he’ll live on, in his own way. You’re Ivan Tóth.’

‘I am.’ His voice cracked as he confirmed it. He caught himself about to take a backwards step. It took every ounce of will to plant his feet. ‘You’re early. I wasn’t expecting you until—’

‘If anything, we’re late. Where are the children?’

He swallowed.

It would have been such an elegant solution. All their crises resolved in a single act. But Leah Wilde had spirited the
kirekesztett
infants away, and the man he’d been relying upon to destroy this last nest of
tolvajok
was lying dead in the villa’s library with a
déjnin
blade lodged inside his head.

The illusion of control.

He wanted to shield himself from her eyes, but such was their power that he floundered in front of them. ‘We’re rounding them up as I speak. I’ll have—’

The woman cocked her head to one side. ‘You’re lying,’ she said, as if his duplicity bothered her not at all; as if she made a simple observation, with no consequences. She strode over to him, extended a hand to his face and then, and
then –

– billowing wind in his head, a tearing, a stretching, a loosening, an opening. Doors slamming, shutters dropping. Monstrous, monstrous pain.

He couldn’t do it. Not here. Not like this.

Izsák lifted his cheek from the rifle. He wiped sweat from his eyes. Refocused. Outside the entrance to Villa del Osservatore, Georgia – or the thing riding Georgia’s bones – kissed the
tolvaj
that had emerged from the Cayenne. Then she walked towards the house.