Harnessed Angels: The Quickening Page 9

  Chapter Sixteen

  After the flight, there was another long drive that ended at a League compound, which Mathias told her was nicknamed 'Wormwood'. The compound, he revealed, was located halfway between Kiev and Chernobyl and sat atop an underground excavation site. The buildings were a combination of Ukrainian ornamentation and modern laboratory.

  “Athos will know this place the second he sees it inside your head,” he explained as he took Sara on a tour below ground while they waited for their rooms to be readied.

  “How long has the excavation been ongoing?” she asked. Although the equipment was state-of-the-art and eliminated the need for human helpers, it appeared painstakingly slow.

  “Thirty or so years,” Mathias answered and ushered her into a cataloguing room to show her some of the most recent discoveries. “With interruptions during the regime change, and other times when the risk of exposure was too high.”

  “And yet there were humans on the plane?”

  “Highly compensated,” he said. “And very attached to their family members comfortably housed inside League strongholds.”

  Sara’s brows arched and her mouth pursed into a surprised O.

  “It isn’t as ominous as it sounds,” he offered and redirected her attention to the display in front of them.

  Ten bronze plates were lined on the countertop. All of them were rimmed with symbols, the first eight different from one another and from the last two. The final two plates were stamped with the same symbol that marked Sara’s shoulder. Of these two, one was significantly lighter and only three-quarters the size of the other nine. Sara paced alongside the countertop. Picking up the smaller of the two plates, she turned to Mathias.

  “What was the name of the vampire who turned you?” Sara asked.

  “He went by two names. The first was Vourdalak—“

  “Vourdalak means vampire,” Sara corrected him as she resumed her pacing.

  “Yes, but he used it as a sort of surname or clan name,” Mathias continued.

  “And the other first born, did they use it?” she asked. Mathias gave an unknowing shrug of his shoulders. “And the first name?”

  “Kreelo.”

  Sara stared at the plate in her hand and then looked at Mathias. “Doesn’t that mean wing in many of the Slavic languages?”

  “Depending on how you divide it up, it means a lot of things in a lot of different languages,” Mathias answered in a flat tone.

  Her temper flared. He could at least willingly indulge these questions!

  Seeing the pink flush that covered Sara’s skin, Mathias took the plate from her and tried to lead her to the door. “You’re hungry and it’s starting to show,” he said, his tone growing more indulgent. “Let’s see if our rooms are ready. You’ll be able to feed in private.”

  She shook her head and jerked free of his hold on her elbow. “Were any other smaller plates found? Ones that matched the other eight?” she asked.

  “No, just these ten.”

  Sara’s interrogation became more rapid fire as she asked him how the plates were found and their ages.

  “Together,” Mathias answered. “Wrapped in animal furs, and they are around five thousand years old.”

  “That’s too old for this area,” she protested, then realized she sounded like her father at Mount Pecaya when he discovered the fragment.

  “Most of the artifacts we are finding would re-write the archaeological history of this region, Sara,” Mathias agreed. “But history already doesn’t account for vampires outside of folklore, so anything we do would re-write history.”

  “What do you think about these two plates?” She handed the plates without difficulty to Mathias, although the larger of the two would have required both hands and considerable strain a week ago. The smaller was no heavier than a modern silver serving platter.

  “Our biology is much more my area of expertise,” Mathias answered and a sultry smile played across his lips as he handed the plates back to her.

  “Okay, let me tell you what I think—“

  “On the way back to our rooms?” he interrupted and slid an arm around her waist. Her hair was pulled to one side and he planted a kiss on her exposed neck.

  Sara tried to ignore the hot flash of desire that sparked through her whenever his lips touched her body. Still, she let him lead her from the room while she offered her theory.

  “You see,” she began. “It’s a place setting for ten. Nine of whom could bear the heavy weight of those plates—“

  “Men?”

  Sara snorted at his question but forgave his chauvinism as he nibbled softly at her earlobe. “Not necessarily,” she corrected him. “Nine vampires and one human, who was either a female or quite young.”

  “Let’s make her a woman,” Mathias teased. “With nine lovers.”

  “No,” Sara shook her head vehemently. “She was linked to one of the nine, that’s why the symbol is repeated. They had the same symbol, just as you and I do.”

  Sara brought Mathias to a halt and turned so that she could look directly at him. “Did Kreelo have the mark?”

  He shrugged and continued guiding her down a hallway. At the end of the hallway there was a wide set of doors and he pushed them open to reveal the private suite of rooms that had been prepared for them. “I only knew him for a few days,” Mathias answered. “He was destroyed soon after turning me. He knew his hunters and seemed to want something preserved—the tablet, I know that, it was still whole when he gave it to me—but something else, too. I never found out.”

  “Was he deformed?” Sara asked.

  She watched Mathias walk into a small galley kitchen and pull a black bottle from the refrigerator. He unscrewed the metal cap, put the microwave on low and began slowly heating the bottle’s contents. Sara felt a twinge in her stomach and wondered what it would taste like. On the plane, after she had officially joined the mile-high club, Mathias explained the enhanced plasmas and blood products that League scientists had developed. Supercharged drinks, they kept feedings to a minimum and eliminated the need to feed directly from humans. But, as with regular blood, there were storage requirements and supply issues.

  “I did not see his body before death and all that remained after was ashes,” Mathias answered and handed her a coffee mug into which he had poured the thick, clay-brown liquid.

  She took a tentative sip, then looked up at Mathias in surprise. “It tastes like hot chocolate.”

  “Modern conveniences,” Mathias quipped. “Flavored, but thicker.” He watched her drinking from the cup while he pondered her question. “Why do you want to know if he was deformed?” he asked as she finished the mug.

  Sara thought of her maternal grandmother. The woman had been confined to a wheelchair most of her adult life, several of her vertebrae naturally fused. X-rays revealed further abnormalities, particularly in the area of her pectoral girdle. Sara’s mother had confessed, in the months before her death, that Sara’s conception had been an accident, that—when faced with the knowledge of her family’s history of genetic abnormalities—she had vowed never to have children.

  Sara avoided Mathias’s gaze and shrugged. “Just wondering, I thought it might be a possibility.”

  Mathias took the cup from Sara and gestured to a set of sliding screens. “The bed’s just over there.” Sara arched an eyebrow at him and he threw his hands up in mock protest. “Honestly, I was only suggesting you relax for a while. Your father should be here in a few hours and I have a meeting to attend.”

  “Can you tell me what it is about?” she asked, half-expecting him to provide her with one of his impassive stares.

  “We are coordinating a response to Athos, trying to figure out how many rogue vampires he has taken with him. He seems to have been planning something big for a long time—he wants our race to come out of the shadows, even if it means that he will first have to wage war against the League.”

  “His existence is that of a general,” Sara said flatly.
“He thrives on war.”

  She wanted to point out that she had a vested interest in that meeting but she rolled her shoulders and kissed him on the lips before he left. When he was gone, she crawled under the down comforter. But rest was not on her mind. Eyes closed, she began a silent inventory of her body. While he was crawling around inside her, Athos had discovered something. She was sure of it. Beneath the cover, she began to shake as she remembered the cold slither of his presence against her organs. Still, nothing appeared extraordinary during her self-examination and she finally fell into a fitful sleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Athos visited Sara in her sleep, warred with her until he drove her from the bed to wander the empty suite. The rooms looked no more lived in than they had two weeks ago when she and Mathias first arrived. Restless, she walked over to the intercom and pressed the button.

  “Yes, Ms. Xavier, do you need anything?” a polite voice inquired.

  Sara considered asking where Mathias was but rejected the idea. He was undoubtedly in what she sneeringly referred to as the 'war room'. She asked, instead, where her father was.

  “He is in the excavation site. Shall I page him for you?”

  “No. Thank you,” Sara answered and switched off the intercom.

  She pressed another small button and a panel slid back to reveal a television. The screen instantly blinked to life. The channel was still set to global news and she listened to the latest reports on the mystery illness spreading through Asia. One week into the epidemic, scientists everywhere were confounded. The best description of the illness had been provided by a reporter, who said that the victims appeared to be dying from a hemorrhagic fever, only without the fever. There was profuse bleeding from every orifice—an internal meltdown—but the victims were otherwise without symptoms. The fatality rate was 100% and over a thousand deaths had been certified in the first week. Terror gripped the country and the Chinese government, believing the original carrier was a Westerner, had threatened to arrest and execute any foreigners coming into the country. A special alert had been issued for a young man in his twenties, red-haired and traveling on an Irish passport.

  The cause was not unknown to the League. Mathias had not only demonstrated the technique to her using a young pig, but had taught her how to bleed humans and other animals without touching them. Athos and his rogue vampires, cut off from the League’s supply of the blood replacement, were the agents of this new disease—the 'Red Death', as the press was calling it.

  It was not, Sara learned, the first time that vampires had cloaked their feeding under the guise of an unknown illness. The last time, in the mid-1300s, had been the catalyst that formed the League and led to restrictions being placed on the creation of new vampires.

  Over the last two weeks, Sara and her father had received a crash course in League history. There were nine houses—she had scoffed inwardly when they told her this, but had not corrected them, not yet. Each house was headed by the oldest vampire that could trace his—for all the house leaders currently were men—bloodline to one of the nine firstborn. For the Ninth House, that was Mathias. For the first, Ptah governed.

  Of course, Sara mused, as she switched the television off, the silly fools were overlooking something—the Tenth House. Ten plates, ten firstborn, nine who were immortal and one who wasn’t. But she wasn’t ready to reveal her insight. There were too many things she had to come to terms with first.

  And one more mystery to solve. She had been working on the mystery for the last two weeks, usually while she was alone in the suite she shared with Mathias, particularly when she was locked in one of her dreams with Athos.

  She had been unsuccessful in concealing the dreams from Mathias. Her refusal to talk to him about them, or allow anyone in the suite to babysit her while he was attending to League business, was driving a wedge between them—one that was almost as wide as the wedge caused by his refusing to share blood with her.

  Sara was curled up on the couch, still pouting over his frequent denials, when he came through the door. His gaze immediately swept over her, searching for any signs that she had experienced another visit from Athos. He saw the dark circles beneath her eyes, the pale tint to her skin and the way she wrapped her arms around herself to shake the Roman’s chill from her body.

  Mathias went into the kitchen and retrieved the drink she had started to heat but forgotten. He handed the mug to her. “Your father wants to see both of us immediately, but you should feed first, you look… unwell.”

  She was unwell and she had been trying to hide it from him, from everyone around her. Her father, at least, was easy to fool. He still had very little knowledge of the vampire physiology. Whenever she became ill around him, she shrugged it off as the subsiding effects of her recent conversion.

  “I’ll be fine,” she assured Mathias.

  “When?”

  She finished the drink and set the mug down on an end table. “Soon,” she promised. “Where is he at?”

  “In the pits,” Mathias answered and put his arm around her shoulders. “Does he ever leave them?”

  “Only to play chess with Ilona,” Sara said and managed a weak smile. She wasn’t sure, but she thought one of the compound’s few female vampires was smitten with her father—who looked twice the woman’s age but was almost a dozen centuries her junior.

  At the sight of Sara smiling, Mathias pulled her to him and planted a kiss along the bridge of her nose. “You haven’t been smiling enough,” he said, his embrace tightening. He let go of her long enough to cup her face and kiss her softly across the lips. “I’m sorry this has been so hard on you.”

  He kissed her mouth a second time, deeper, and she had to gently push him away.

  “You said he wants us immediately,” she reminded him as she tamped down her own need to have Mathias sweep her up and carry her into the bedroom, to find the solace in her new existence that only he could provide.

  “It had better be good, then” he growled. “Or I’ll have Ilona working twenty-four-hour shifts—in Siberia—as his punishment.”

  “You’ll do no such thing!” she admonished him with a laugh as they stepped into one of the small elevators that lead to the excavation level.

  At the dig site, they were handed hard hats with flashlights attached. When Mathias asked what the hats were for, they were told that Dr. Xavier was down one of the excavation shafts. Mathias cast a worried glance at Sara, his protective instincts kicking in.

  “Dr. Xavier isn’t supposed to be in the shafts,” he reminded the man waiting to lead them. “What is so important, in such immediate need of being seen that Sa—” The quick swivel of Sara’s head in his direction and her angry stare stopped his question mid-sentence. “Why can’t Dr. Xavier bring his discovery to us?”

  “Too big. Just follow me and you’ll see.” The man had grown impatient, had forgotten that he was talking to a House leader. All around them, the workers were craning to hear what had been discovered—what was being concealed.

  Mathias reached out with his big, heavy hand to catch the retreating figure but Sara blocked him. Turning to him, she switched on the flashlight to his hardhat and then her own. “You can go first and make sure it’s all safe for little Sara,” she half teased and gave him a push toward the shaft’s entrance.

  As they crawled through the passage, their guide described the work that had gone on that week, how the geological sonar had suggested a natural cavern two hundred or so feet beyond the most recently opened underground chamber.

  “We just cut through the last of the bedrock today,” the guide said as he crawled onto the cavern’s floor. “All the other House Leaders are here,” he added while he helped first Mathias and then Sara to their feet.

  The last of his words fell on deaf ears. Mathias and Sara were staring at the center of the chamber, where Jefferson Xavier and the eight other House Leaders ringed a statute.

  “It is a statue, isn’t it?” Mathias asked, echoing Sara’s though
ts.

  “I don’t think so,” she said and stepped within an arm’s length of the object. An almost overwhelming need to touch it possessed her but she stayed her hand. “There’s no base, no pedestal,” she pointed out.

  The material was a milky white with a high level of translucence and an iridescent play of colors beneath its surface. Even more breathtaking were the two figures locked in their stony embrace. A woman, small in stature, no more than five and a half feet, was enfolded in the winged embrace of a man. But the wings were without the detail of feathers. They looked more like the leathery membrane of a bat’s wing. Sara bent down to take a closer look, her father handing her an eye loupe. She didn’t need it with her new sight, but took it from him anyway.

  “I think the small striations are fossilized hairs,” he said.

  “Not old enough for fossilization,” Sara said as she examined the surface of the wings. Damned if it doesn’t look like a soft covering of hair, though. She straightened and handed the loupe back to her father.

  “That’s yesterday’s science,” Jefferson grunted and handed the loupe to Mathias. “I no longer believe anything I haven’t proven to myself!”

  Sara moved closer, still careful not to touch the two figures melded together. The woman’s hand appeared to be holding a lumpy mass and was, itself, partially enclosed by both of the man’s hands. Sara saw the shallow indentation in the man’s chest and she took a startled step back, where she bumped into Mathias.

  “She’s holding his…” Sara stammered, too horrified to finish her sentence.

  “His heart,” Mathias finished. He turned Sara to him, forced her to look into his eyes. “You know what this is?”