The rage was hard to keep in its box, though. It burned in my mouth and in muscles, and it tingled like electricity in the dangerous tips of my fingers. When I trusted myself to speak normally, I asked, “Who told you I would be coming here?”
“I–I don’t know,” he said. “We got a call. My team was ordered to come here to do God’s work and-”
“Who made the call?”
“I don’t know.”
I searched his face for the lie but I think he was too scared to pull any new stunts on me, and unfortunately that meant that he was probably no more than a grunt. A foot soldier in a war that was out of step with reality and with my real mission. The nukes.
“How many more of you are there?”
His mouth tightened with either pride or defiance. “Enough.”
“Don’t get cute with me.”
“We are the Army of God,” he declared. “We will never stop hunting. We will never cease in our war.”
He said all that in awkward, broken English, but I got the point. I wasn’t impressed.
“All of this is because you want to rid the world of vampires?”
“No-not that. That is not our mission. We want to save the world from the Upierczi.”
“Upierczi? That’s another word for vampire, right? So, with all that’s going on in the world-wars, poverty, religious intolerance, disease-you ‘priests’ spend your time and resources hunting vamps?”
“Yes.”
“ Why? ” I demanded. “’Cause right now I’m thinking you psychopaths have done a lot more harm to the world. What makes you better than them?”
His face took on a contemptuous cast and with an imperious tone, he said, “We fight to save the world. They want to destroy it.”
“And how do they plan to do that?”
“They want to blow it up.”
I sat back on my heels and stared at him. Again he read my expression and he nodded.
“The Upierczi have hidden for centuries,” he said. “Now they are in the light. Now they attack openly. They have great weapons. Why else do you think they would reveal themselves to the world?”
“What do you mean by ‘great weapons’?”
“Great,” he repeated, letting me take the obvious definition from that.
Oh shit.
“How do you know this? Are you working for Rasouli?”
He looked blank.
“Hugo Vox?”
Krystos shook his head. “I do not know these names.”
“Who sent you here?”
“A priest of our church. He will know what you have done here. He will call down the wrath of the Almighty on you.”
His accent was atrocious but his message was clear enough; but I wasn’t buying. I’m pretty sure I could handle myself against a priest.
“I’ll take my chances,” I told him, but he sneered.
“Father Nicodemus will lay waste to your world. He has promised this!”
That, I thought, was mighty damn interesting, and it made me wonder whose side Nicodemus was on. There was Nicodemus with the Seven Kings last year. Nicodemus with the Red Order, and now Nicodemus with the Sabbatarians who were clearly enemies of the knights employed by the Red Order.
Who in hell was Nicodemus?
I left the room once more to call this in to Church, but got Aunt Sallie.
“What the fuck are you still doing at that house?” she bellowed.
“Trading Pokemon cards with the vampire hunters.”
“Why are you calling?”
When I told her about Nicodemus, Auntie shut up for a moment, then said, very grudgingly, “Good work. Now get out of there.”
“I wish I could spend some more quality time with this clown to see what else I can get.”
“If wishes were horses,” she said.
“Yeah. Tell you what, Auntie, much as it sounds goofy to say out loud, I think we need to take a look at this from the vampire doomsday perspective. I’m starting to think that maybe the Red Knights have the nukes.”
“We will, but I doubt whether your friend Krystos had that right. Circe and Dr. Sanchez have forwarded the idea of a doomsday cult.”
“You don’t buy it, though?”
“Do you?”
“No, but my logic is kind of goofy.”
“Big surprise,” she said. “Tell me.”
I said, “Answer me something first. Circe dismissed the changing into bats stuff, and we know that bullets kill the knights, so that’s two bits of folklore down the crapper. But, what do the reports you’ve collected about the Red Knights and real-world vampires say about immortality? That’s supposed to be a real theme with vampires, right?”
“Nothing lives forever, but from what little we know about the Red Knights, they’re supposed to be exceptionally long-lived. Not necessarily immortal, but with lifespans far exceeding ordinary humans.”
“Okay, so they’re immortal-ish. Enough so for the sake of argument, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Then tell me why immortals would want to destroy the world. No way that makes sense.”
Aunt Sallie grunted. “This isn’t like you, Ledger. This is very clever thinking. Let me run it by Deacon and Dr. Hu. In the meantime, Deke wanted me to text you. We have a safe house location that has been triple verified. It’s close to where you are now, and Echo Team will meet you there in a few hours. It’s an apartment over a convenience store. Deacon knows the man who owns it.”
“One of his ‘friends in the industry’?”
“No, just an old friend. Jamsheed Mustapha is a good man. We’ve worked with him in the past. Good guy, so try not to get him killed.”
I let that pass. “What about Krystos?”
Auntie said, “That’s your call.”
She disconnected.
I still had the phone in my hand when I went back into the living room. Krystos looked at me with mingled hope and dread, but his mouth continually repeated a prayer of deliverance.
“Well,” I said, “turns out that it sucks to be you.”
I shot him through the heart.
Chapter Sixty-Two
CIA Safe House #11
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 1:18 p.m.
The gunshot made Ghost bark again, but it was a single sound. Loud and shocked and angry.
I ignored him as I watched Krystos slide slowly onto his side, eyes emptying of light, mouth hanging slack with his last prayers unfinished.
None of the thoughts inside my head were pretty ones. However, when I looked inside for self-recrimination I came up dry. That’s something I knew I should be worried about, and I was pretty sure that all of this was going to come back and bite me on the ass, at least in an emotional or psychological way. At the moment, though, I watched Krystos die and did not feel a single thing about it. Not for him or the six other Sabbatarians. They were ordained priests; they were official Holy Inquisitors acting on orders given by a pope centuries ago. They believed that what they were doing was right, that they were doing what they had to do to save the world.
From vampires.
Vampires with nukes.
I closed my eyes and imagined for a moment that I stood in a cool breeze that was scented with lilacs and honeysuckle and just a hint of salt water. I strained to hear the soft whisper of Grace speaking my name.
But there was nothing.
When I opened my eyes, though, it was only me and Ghost in a house filled with ugly death. Ghost looked at me and I couldn’t meet his eyes. I hung my head and told myself that the stinging in my eyes was from the gunpowder.
Yeah.
Before we left the house I dropped the magazines from the two nine millimeters and swapped bullets until I had a full magazine in one and a half-filled mag in my pocket. I took Nadja’s. 25 popgun, too, and the valise that was filled with stakes, hammers, garlic, and holy water. Who knows, maybe I’d really need them.