“Ah, Lucian,” she whispered and used his tattered shirt as a compression bandage. “Ah, Lucian . . .”
“Tired,” whispered Lucian. “Ma simt obosit.”
“We'll rest here,” she whispered, cradling him and stroking his brow with her free hand. She felt him nod against her. The armored car was almost above them now. She smelled the diesel stink of its exhaust.
“Babe,” whispered Lucian, his voice urgent, “I forgot to tell you something.”
“It's all right,” crooned Kate, holding the crude bandage in place. The bundle was soaked with his blood and she could hear the bubbling. It was what they had called a sucking chest wound in the emergency room. Only the most immediate and extensive care could save someone with a sucking chest wound. “It's all right,” she whispered, rocking him.
“Good,” said Lucian in a relieved voice, and died.
She felt him go. She felt the energy and consciousness and spark go out of him like air from a ripped balloon. If she had been religious, she would have thought that she felt his soul leave him.
Kate knew CPR. She knew mouthtomouth. She knew a dozen hightech resuscitation techniques and a dozen basic ones. She knew that none of them would help Lucian now. She set her fingers on his eyelids, closed them, kissed them, and lowered him gently to the moss of the riverbank.
The armored car was chugging back and forth along the highway like some smelly dragon. Another vehicle had joined it and there were shouts back and forth. The searchlight swept the river thirty yards below, then twenty yards above where she crouched. Kate realized that the smashed Dacia was under a slight overhang of a boulder here and that they must have left a trail of tattered rubber and smashed metal for two hundred feet down the highway but evidently no major sign of where they went off the road.
It would not take them long. The searchlight was sweeping in a frenzied arc now and more voices were shouting up and down the highway.
Kate touched Lucian's cooling hand a final time and moved away along the riverbank, staying under the trees, freezing when footsteps pounded or searchlights stabbed through the bare branches. Two hundred yards upstream she stopped, gasping, and then pushed out into the water. The river was only four or five feet deep here but it was very fast and very, very cold. Kate gasped and kept wading, her shoes sliding across smooth rocks on the river bottom.
There were shouts from downstream and searchlights converged on the wreck of the Dacia. If Kate slipped now, the current would take her downstream to the light in seconds. She did not slip. By the time she reached the far side of the river, her legs were numb and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She ignored it and clawed toward the shallows.
More searchlights flicked across the river now. One slid over her just as she pulled herself from the water. It moved back immediately as if feeling for her, but she was crawling through the high reeds and mud toward the trees. There was an infinity of forest on this side of the water, stretching a half a mile or more between the river and the black hills. All dark. No roads here. No lights.
The sound of shots came across the water. They were shooting at her. Kate ignored it, stood, and staggered into the woods. There was just enough starlight there for her to check her watch. It was still working. It was ten twenty-seven.
She could see light far up the canyon, but the citadel was still two or three miles away according to Lucian. Staying deep within the protective screen of trees, Kate turned north and began walking.
Chapter Thirty-eight
1T took Kate an hour to walk to the lights, and the lights were only another village, not the citadel itself. She stayed in the trees, looked across the river at the tiny village busy with military traffic, police, and spotlighted roadblocks, and thought: Lucian mentioned this place . . . Capalineni. The citadel should be less than a mile north. But the river twisted under a bridge beyond the village, the highway ran along the west side of the river beyond that point, and the surrounding bluffs hid the citadel from sight. Kate could see an orange glow against the low clouds, but it seemed impossibly distant, impossibly high.
She glanced at her watch: 11:34. She would never travel that mile and climb that mountain in time. Lucian had said that there were steps switchbacking up the mountain crag to the citadel1400 steps. Kate tried to convert that to feet and height. A thousand feet above the river? At least. Exhausted, she leaned against a tree and concentrated on not weeping.
There was a shuffling, snorting sound to her left and Kate froze, then crouched with her fists clenched. She had no weapon, only the old binoculars strung around her neck. The sound came again and Kate slipped forward through the trees.
In a meadow between the river and the forested hillside, a single Gypsy wagon sat alone. A small campfire had burned down to embers. Beyond the wagon, a white horse cropped the dry grass. It was a huge horse with hooves as big as Kate's head. It lifted its head, made a whoofing noise like a sneeze, and began grazing again. The sound of its massive teeth crunching grass was very clear in the cold night air. There was no other sound.
Yes, thought Kate.
She circled around through the trees, staying low and setting her feet with care. Occasionally bullhorn sounds or the sound of shouts would drift across the river from the village. Once Kate froze into immobility as a black helicopter roared down the canyon just above the river, going from south to north. Then the machine was out of sight around the bluff and Kate began stalking the horse again. Her heart pounded as she moved out of the shelter of the trees and slid through the high grass.
The white horse raised its head and watched her with curious eyes.
“Shhh,” Kate whispered uselessly as she came up next to the horse, keeping it between the quiet Gypsy wagon and herself. “Shhh.” She patted its neck and noticed that its rope halter was tied to a longer rope staked down eight or ten feet closer to the wagon. “Shit,” she breathed to herself.
The stake had been driven deep. Kate crouched, could not free it, shifted her position, put her back into it, and pulled the long peg free. The horse moved away slightly, eyes wide at her exertions. Kate coiled the rope and hurried to the animal, patting its neck and whispering reassurances.
A hand fell on Kate's shoulder while a knife blade came around to her throat. A cracked voice whispered something in a language neither Romanian nor English. Kate blinked as the blade moved away. She turned.
The Gypsy woman may have been Kate's age but she looked twenty years older. Even in the dim light, Kate could see the wrinkles, the sagging cheeks, and the missing teeth. She and the woman were dressed alike in black skirt and dark sweater. The knife the woman held was barely larger than a dagger, but it had felt very sharp against Kate's neck.
“You. . . American woman?” said the Gypsy. Her voice seemed far too loud to Kate. Trucks moved toward the highway bridge behind her. “You come in Romania with Voivoda Cioaba?”
Kate felt her knees go weak. “Yes,” she whispered back.
“Come with preot? Priest?”
Kate nodded.
The woman grabbed Kate's sweater, bunched it in her strong fist, shoved Kate backward in the grass, and brought the knife up to Kate's face. “You mother of strigoi.” The last word was a hiss.
Kate moved her head slowly back and forth an inch from the tip of the knife. “I hate the strigoi. I came to destroy them. “
The woman squinted at her.