Kate sat back in her rough chair. Her body felt boneless, nerveless.
“What is it, then?”
The old man lifted a single finger with its long yellow nail. “The addiction to power, Doctor Neuman. The addiction to license. The addiction to the taste of violence without consequence. Did you bring a cure for that in your travel bag?”
Kate stared at him but no longer saw him. There was a long silence which she was only dimly aware of. If I stand up and run now I might make it to the door of the room. If I make it out the door, the others might not be waiting on the landing. If I make it out of the building . . . At that second she saw all of Romania as a giant black extension of the lightless pit she had spent the last six or seven hours in. A pit with sides too steep to climb; a pit with police and military and customs people and an air force, all following orders to find her and kill her. Beyond Romania she saw the reach of the strigoi like a long black arm, as boneless as a tentacle but with no end to its reach, and the hand on that arm had razor claws instead of fingernails. If I magically escaped with Joshua, how long would it be until I awoke in the night to find a stranger in black in my room . . . in my child's room? How many would they send after me? They would never stop. Never.
“What . . .” Kate stopped and cleared her throat. “What is going to happen to Father O'Rourke and me?”
The old man did not open his eyes again. His voice was vague, dreamy. “Tomorrow night you will be taken to a sacred place, you and the priest. The Family will be there. Young Vlad will be there. At the proper time, you and the priest will be impaled upon two stakes of gold. Then the new prince's uncle . . . Uncle Radu . . . our new leader in all things . . . will open your femoral artery.”
There was a ringing in Kate's ears and her vision clouded with dark spots.
“You will feed your child first,” whispered the old man. “And then you will feed the Family.”
For several minutes the old man did not appear to be breathing at all, but then the tortured rasping began again. He was asleep. Kate did not stir until the door opened. Radu Fortuna beckoned the strigoi named Ion into the room, her hands were bound in front of her, and she was taken immediately back to the pit in the basement of the clock tower.
O'Rourke was not there. She did not see him again that night. Whatever ceremony the strigoi held there in Sighisoara on that cold October midnight, they held it without Kate's presence or understanding.
Late in the unrelieved darkness of the next morning, they came for her.
Chapter Thirty-five
Kate had never been comfortable in the dark. As a child she had used a nightlight until she was ten years old; even as an adult she preferred a tiny plugin light in the bathroom or hallwayanything to lessen the darkness.
The pit was absolute darkness. The single 20watt bulb in the basement above her must have been turned off since not even the faintest glow crept around the cracks in the trapdoor. Even though it was dark up there, she sensed that one of the strigoi was up there. She could not hear him, but she felt a presence there. It was not reassuring.
It seemed like hours passed and Kate knew that sunrise must have come, but the darkness and stench and scrabbling did not change. At other times she felt that time was not moving at all, that it had been only minutes since she had been returned to the pit. The next minute she would be sure that the next day had already come and gone, that Joshua had already been initiated into the clan of blood drinkers.
No, it will be my blood he drinks first. I will be there.
Kate dozed only once and awoke with a rat creeping across her skirt and bare legs. She did not scream, but her body rippled with revulsion in the seconds after she had flung the thing across the pit. It screamed as it hit the walclass="underline"
By any sane measurement of mood, Kate knew, this should be the most despondent few hours of her life. Her realization that there could be no real escape for Joshua, O'Rourke, and her, that the strigois' reach was too long, their evil too powerful, should have sent her spiraling into hopelessness and despair.
It did not.
In those black hours in the pit, Kate found all of her external identity stripped away: honored scholar, doctor, respected researcher, wife, former wife, lover, mother. What remained had nothing to do with identity, with who she was, but everything to do with what she was.
Kate Neuman was a woman who was not about to go gently into that good night. She was not about to surrender the man she lovedthe realization that she loved Mike O'Rourke was like a light slowly growing brighter in the darknor the child she had sworn to protect. It did not matter that the strigois' power was almost beyond imagining. It did not matter that she had no secret weapon left after the old man's dismissal of her “miracle cure”; it did not matter that no new plan had occurred to her yet there in the lightless pit. She would think of something. And if she did not think of something, she would act without thinking in the faith that the mere fact of acting would change the set of variables.
So let the strigoi do their worst. Fuck them.
When they opened the trapdoor to take her away an eternity later, she was smiling.
Kate had not wept in the pit, but the sunlight outside, as weak and watery as it was, made her eyes brim over. She could not wipe them away because her hands were still tied. The plastic binding was the same, but they had secured her, arms in front of her after her interview with the old man the night before and not so tightly as to cut off circulation this time.
Ion and two smaller men, all of them wearing the kind of cheap, baggy suits which seemed the hallmark of Eastern Europe, led her outside to a waiting Mercedes. A second black car sat farther down the hill. The wind was cold and from the north. Radu Fortuna was standing in the middle of the street with his arms folded, looking quite pleased with himself.
Kate glanced at her watch. It was 1:40 P.m. The early afternoon offered the kind of ebbing light that warned of winter's approach. Am I really never going to see another season? Another sunrise? Are all of the experiences remaining to me to be suffered in the next twelve hours . . . and then nothing? Kate shook her head and pushed the thoughts away before they filled her chest with panic. She was pleased to feel that just underneath the fluttering surface of terror remained the iron core of resolve she had found in the darkness.
“I hope you sleeped . . . no, slept? . . . yes, slept well last night,” beamed Radu Fortuna.
Kate just stared at him. Suddenly her attention was drawn to four men walking up the cobblestone street from the direction of another stone tower beyond the grassy area. One of the men was Mike O'Rourke. Kate first saw that he was limping; then, as the four men drew closer, she realized that he was being supported by two of the strigoi guards. Even from thirty feet away she could see that his face was bruised, one eye was swollen shut, and his lips were puffy and discolored.
O'Rourke saw her, smiled through his swollen lips, and raised his bound hands in a salute. The guards opened the rear door to a second Mercedes and began shoving the ex-priest into the car. O'Rourke's gaze never left her.
“Mike!” she shouted, being restrained now by her own strigoi thugs. “I love you!”
O'Rourke was crammed in the backseat of the car, doors slammed, and the vehicle moved away, passing under the arched gateway of the Old City and out of sight down the steep and narrow street. Kate did not know if O'Rourke had heard her.