“Darker?” I said, half smiling. “How much darker can it get?”
“Vampires,” said Mr. Church.
“Ah shit,” I sighed. “I was kind of hoping we wouldn’t get back to that.”
“This is the real world,” said Lilith coldly, “and they are a part of it.”
“Are they supernatural? ’Cause that seems to be the big question.”
Violin moved to stand beside her mother. Her eyes looked haunted, and her mother touched her arm for a moment. Instead of reassuring her, the touch sparked an involuntary shiver. Lilith sighed.
“The Upierczi are monsters,” said Lilith, “and as twisted as they seem, they are a part of nature.”
“You know this for a fact?” asked Church, beating me to the punch.
Lilith nodded. “Arklight managed to obtain tissue samples from one-at a terrible cost, I might add. We did extensive testing. We ran a full metabolic panel-sodium, potassium, chloride, bicarbonate, BUN, magnesium, creatinine, and calcium. We did arterial blood gas to measure blood pH and bicarbonate levels. We did full blood count, Hematocrit, and MCV, ESR. We ran molecular profiles-protein electrophoresis, western blot, liver function. Everything. And we ran a full DNA. The Upierczi are genetically human, but they are not Homo sapiens and-”
“I hate like hell to interrupt this Discovery Channel episode, but can we get back to the actual point? The Red Order used the Upierczi as assassins. And-?”
Lilith nodded, accepting my rebuke. “The Upierczi are more than a match for the order of assassins, but their numbers have always been low. There were never many of them, thank God. They’ve tried to change that with breeding programs, however.”
There was a murmur of deep disgust among the women.
“The Red Order began this process. Capturing women, keeping them in pens, encouraging the Upierczi to rape them over and over again until they conceived. Most of the children were stillborn. Some few survived, and of those three quarters were normal babies that showed no significant trace of the Upierczi traits. Others were hybrids-dhampyrs-but attempts to raise and train them as Upierczi met with complete failure for the Order. A few-a handful-were born as Upierczi, and they kept their blasphemous bloodline alive.”
Lilith paused and wiped away a tear. Violin placed her hand on her mother’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, and Lilith reached up and briefly clasped her daughter’s hand. I was clearly missing something here, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was.
“For a long while the Upierczi tried another tactic. They kept the women who bore Upierczi children and forced them to produce child after child. This was not ultimately successful, so they tried another tactic. When a dhampyr was born, if it was female, she was kept and raised, and when she was old enough, she was raped and impregnated and forced to bear a child. This nearly always resulted in an Upierczi birth. For a while this seemed like the solution to their problems… but the vampires and their Red Order masters did not understand the nature of genetics. Not then, at least. Generation after generation of forced inbreeding did not expand the Upierczi-it nearly destroyed them. Children were born who were Upierczi, but who were mongoloid and severely retarded. Freakish births, a sharp rise in stillbirths. Lunacy, madness, a drop in physical abilities, reduced intelligence.” She took a steadying breath. “For a while it seemed as if their own attempt to breed a master race was going to result in the death of the entire species.”
“I met one of the knights,” I said. “There was nothing genetically weak about him. What changed? What happened?”
“The science of genetics happened,” said Mr. Church.
I looked at him.
“Gene therapy, artificial insemination, gene splicing. Rebreeding techniques. Science caught up to the needs of the Upierczi.” He turned to Lilith. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” she said, tears glistening in her eyes. “The Red Order hired the very best scientists. They spent tens of millions to fund radical genetic research and development. They created a ‘rebirth’ process in the 1980s, improving upon it every year. Not just new births, but therapy to fix genetic flaws in living members. Understand, Captain, the Upierczi are not immortal, but their lifespan is exceptionally long. Some are more than two centuries old. And there is one who is rumored to be three hundred and twenty years old. Grigor, the oldest and by far the most powerful of the Upierczi. He is the father of the new order of vampires. His genes-never tainted by inbreeding-became the alpha cell line in a course of gene therapy called Upier 531. It was developed by Dr. Dieter Hasbrouck. Now, the new wave of Upierczi is stronger, faster, more durable-and many will live as long as Grigor. Hasbrouck did extensive gene therapy. He amped up the wound repair system so the knights heal much more quickly, and they have a greatly enhanced ultraviolet light repair system as well. I believe it was an attempt to make them better able to tolerate sunlight, which weakens them, but instead he gave them virtual immunity to cancer and a resistance to radiation. If these bombs go off, any Upierczi not in the direct blast radius might actually survive. That,” she said, “is what we face.”
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed. My heart was pounding so hard that I wanted to scream. If Church hadn’t been standing right beside me, nodding as Lilith spoke, I doubted I would believe it. But his presence-the absolute solidity of everything that he was-made it all doubly real. Too real.
I licked my lips. They were dry as dust.
“You… left something out,” I said.
Lilith nodded, clearly expecting the question.
“You glossed right over the dhampyri. The hybrids. The ones who were forced to give birth to so many of the Upierczi. What happened to them?”
Lilith stared at me with bottomless dark eyes.
“I think you already know the answer to that, Captain Ledger.”
“The Mothers of the Fallen,” I breathed, and those words hurt my mouth. I swallowed a throatful of broken glass. “And… their children? The girls, the dhampyri? What happened to them?”
Violin had tears in her eyes, but her voice was fierce. “Our mothers escaped to save us.”
“Some escaped,” said Lilith sadly. “Most died. The rest… we dedicated ourselves to a single cause.”
“To destroy the monsters. The Upierczi, Nicodemus, the Red Order. All of them.”
I tried to say something. Anything.
All I could do was look into the eyes of these women. Lilith, Violin, each of them.
Violin stared at me, into me. So did Lilith. Looking for my reaction, for my true feelings.
But I simply could not speak.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
The Department of Military Sciences
Worldwide
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
For Rudy Sanchez it was like someone had driven a cold steel spike into his chest.
All of the display screens in the mobile computer center were filled with pages of ciphertext and meters showing progress on other sections of the two books. But the central display screen had a different image, a real-time feed from a button camera worn by Mr. Church. It was all there. The Mothers of the Fallen. Lilith and Violin. Joe.
The things Lilith said. The truths she shared.
Rudy wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. To continue watching and listening and understanding was far more than a job requirement, however. To turn away would be the worst kind of cowardice-the kind that refuses to hear the truth. The kind that refuses to care.