Unhallowed Shadows Read online

  “Damned creatures”, said the wounded man, irritably.

  “Indeed”, said Erica, again in Russian. “We do need him, though, so try to keep him alive. May I see Dimitri now?” she asked them, but the answer came from a voice behind her.

  “Of course you may see me, Erica, my child”.

  Erica turned towards the voice and saw Dimitri: a tall, fairly slim, blond man in his fifties with a face covered behind a beard and tow kindly blue eyes. He was standing between two burly guards, who had their hands on the grip of their pistols. Disregarding their presence, Erica ran towards Dimitri and hugged him. The man embraced her as well, clearly relieved.

  “Warm as always”, he murmured and gestured to his guards that everything was all right. “Apologies, dearest, but your appearance has changed quite a bit. For a second, I feared you were one of them now. You look so pale!” he told her.

  Erica looked at him, pretending to be scared, and answered in a cracked and trembling voice:

  “All these days they were holding me in some basement, they were starving and torturing me all the time… I cannot tell you how many days I have gone without a single bite or how much blood I’ve lost… My faith alone is keeping me standing…”

  In order to emphasize her words, she pulled away from Dimitri and placed her palm on the wall. The truth was that she did feel a slight exhaustion. Subtly affecting Dimitri’s mind, so that the man thought that her body was warm, as if she were living, proved far more taxing than she would have expected. The guards grabbed Travis from the floor and Dimitri instructed them as to where they should take him. A maid appeared tentatively behind one of the doors in the corridor and Dimitri immediately ordered her to bring to his study as much food as she could. Then he approached Erica to help her walk, but she pushed him away lightly, taking a few slow steps on her own.

  “Proud, just like your father!” he told her, with a slight smile.

  He led her to his study, at the end of the corridor. He opened the heavy, wooden, twin doors, revealing a room whose walls were covered end to end by bookcases, heavy with masterfully bound tomes. At the center there was a desk, also heavy with books, while a traditional typing machine stood on top. Dimitri nodded towards a leather armchair, inviting her to sit down and began clearing his desk from the various objects there, making room for the food which arrived shortly thereafter. Once the maid was done serving the food, he sent her away and closed the door.

  “Eat, eat!” he urged Erica and sat on a chair close to her.

  She looked at the food laid before here, picked a cut of pork leg and began chewing at it hungrily.

  “Other vampires have come with us. They are expecting us to return soon”, she told him with her mouth full.

  “Do you know their exact position?”

  “They’re hiding at the edge of the forest, next to your gardens… However… there are several of them. Perhaps it would be better for us to flee”, she suggested, with a halting voice, as she was drinking large gulps of wine to help the food go down.

  “Nonsense. A few vampires won’t trouble us. My men are trained to face such situations. I shall dispatch them immediately”, he announced, his pride clearly heard in his voice.

  He took a small radio from his pocket and relayed to his men the information he had gotten from Erica.

  “Erica, you’re safe here”, he continued. “I want you to understand this. I do not know what these monsters did to you, but I want you to believe me. I love you as if you were my own daughter. I’ve been a friend of your family for decades”.

  “They’re dead, uncle”, Erica told him plainly and coldly, putting down her food while she filled her glass with wine, which she drank in one go. “My mother has been dead for many years and now my father is gone. I know you want to keep me safe. I know you love me very much”, she continued and her voice had begun to tremble, “and I love you too very, very much, and that’s why this is so difficult for me. I’ll take you up on that offer to provide me with food, uncle. Thank you and please know that I have no other choice”.

  Dimitri’s instinct led him to get up and take a couple of steps back, reaching again for his radio, but it was too late. Erica leaped from her seat with incredible speed, grabbed him by the arms as if he were weightless and slammed him against one of the bookcases, throwing down a great many books. Wasting no time, she bit him on the neck and began sucking his blood. Soon, she was holding a corpse, which she dropped to the floor. She returned to her seat, took one of the towels they had brought her and began wiping her face, as tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Lucas’ study was strewn with papers and open books, piled one on top of the other. He was standing in front of a bookcase, holding another open book in his hands. His eyes were rapidly scanning one page after the other, seeking a specific passage he had read some years ago.

  “We have brought from your house the books you requested”, said a voice from the entrance to the study.

  He glanced towards the direction of the door and saw two men holding a massive box in their hands. He gestured for them to leave it in one corner and turned again his attention to the book he was holding.

  “Apologies, sir, but I must ask you… How are these books going to help us locate Travis? You are very fortunate that we cannot contact the master, for you know fully well the consequences for losing the hacker. You’d wish you had died in that fire at the church where we found you”.

  Once again Lucas raised his eyes from the book he had been reading and looked at the man who had addressed him. He was a vampire, merely a century old, a youngling, and yet he had the nerve to tell him what he should and shouldn’t be doing. He felt a wave of anger threatening to erupt, but he managed to control it. He considered simply ignoring the insult, but on the other hand he was a firm believer in the need to show respect to one’s elders; hence that youngling needed a lesson in humility.

  “Someone killed one of the Arians and then wrapped him up and sent him as a present to his people. The marks on his body made it perfectly clear that he had been killed by a vampire. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t feel overly concerned about one of our kin offing a meatsack; unfortunately, we are in league with these… people. They think the deed was the work of the Chinese and they want us to help them”. The man who had insulted him tried to speak again and cut him short, but Lucas simply ignored him and went on: “The problem, though, is that the Chinese had absolutely nothing to do with it. They wouldn’t have dared, knowing that the whole lot is under my protection. Therefore, you shall go and meet with them, find out if they have any more information and you will identify the one who did this. I have the impression that it was the work of the same one who abducted your precious hacker”.

  He stopped talking and turned his attention once more to his book, considering this conversation over. The young vampire tried a couple of times to speak up and complain, but his comrade next to him discreetly pulled at his sleeve, gesturing for him to stop talking and together they exited the study.

  Alone again, finally, Lucas focused on his books. Several hours passed without further interruption and eventually, after a methodical search, he found the book he was looking for. It had been written by an explorer and detailed peculiar myths of various cultures. He kept flipping pages until he got to the one that interested him. It was part of a chapter comprising a mere two pages, and pertained to ancient Babylon, being one of the smallest parts of this volume. On the left page there was a picture of a blackened ancient papyrus, but only four lines along the end of the text survived. The right page contained the author’s attempt to translate the text, along with a couple of theories as to who the text might refer two, but that was quite unnecessary, as Lucas understood the language perfectly well. The text was written in a Babylonian dialect, yet the signature at the bottom of the page, although barely discernable, was a capital Greek letter, “A”. He had seen the same signature before, at a time long lost in the past, before he became a vampire. It belo
nged to an advisor to Naram-Sin, whom the latter always met alone. The letters exchanged between the two men were always kept well secured. Only once had Lucas managed to see one of these letters and that was when he noticed for the first time the particular signature.

  When Naram-Sin and Lucas became vampires, this advisor disappeared. Naturally, Lucas thought that at some point the man died as the years went by. In early 1900 he saw that particular signature again, this time in a historical book on ancient Greece, as it had been used by a Greek philosopher and inventor who went by the name of “Archytas” and had lived around 400 BC. Lucas’ curiosity was piqued, but no matter how insistent he was, Naram-Sin refused to provide him with answers, therefore he never found out whether there was a chance that man still existed, as a vampire. He began researching the issue of this philosopher on his own but, no matter how carefully he looked, the information he managed to collect were limited. A book written on Archytas by another Greek philosopher, Aristotle, sadly did not survive the passage of time.

  Archytas became an obsession for Lucas, who spent almost a hundred years seeking further knowledge on the philosopher. He managed to track down various references to his life, as well as passages on the inventions he was said to have created and, the more he found one, the more he was left with the impression that Archytas was a genius and, frankly, quite mad. He had made sketches of mechanical pigeons at a time when flight hadn’t even crossed the mind of the human race. He had been elected general seven times in row and never been defeated in battle. At the same time, he displayed uncanny skill in matters of economics and mathematics and in fact he had managed to provide proof on one of the unsolvable mathematical riddles of his time. The last years of his life, however, appeared to have been shrouded by an odd and sudden paranoia. There were texts attributed to him that made absolutely no sense, they merely comprised rows of letters and numbers with no trace of logic in them. Archytas was left destitute and the city wherein he resided, which he had developed to an amazing degree, cast him out. Officially, he was said to have starved to death on the streets of Athens, while rumors had it that he had committed suicide.

  The book Lucas had been holding in his hands made no connection between the signature in the text and Archytas. Such a connection would have been impossible, after all, since the text had been uncovered in Babylon, centuries before the birth of the Greek philosopher and inventor. What was even more curious, to Lucas, was the fact that the text already displayed signs of that madness that took over Archytas during the end of his life:

  Blood and fire everywhere, in the kingdom of terror.

  A queen, a warrior pure and true

  shall drown in the blood of sinners

  and at last the Garden shall spring anew.

  Despite Lucas’ efforts, he had failed to decipher the meaning of this particular passage, either the kingdom or the pure warrior Archytas was referring to or even if it was indeed Archytas the one who had written this text. And yet a bigger surprise had been in store for him when, a few days ago, on the arms of Erica, he saw the tattoos of the pure warriors of the Order of the Silver Sun. “Could it be that after all these years, Naram-Sin had found that pure warrior?” Lucas wondered and continued seeking information from the books spread before him.

  The voice of her fiancé was coming from the speaker of her cell phone and, as she used to say to her girlfriends, “really frayed her nerves”. She was waiting impatiently for the annoying chatter to cease, without really paying attention to what this so irksome voice was actually saying; after all, she had heard it all before: the man had the annoying habit of calling her every single day for the exact same reasons. The moment the call ended she sighed with relief and got out of the house where they were staying. She locked the door behind her and pressed the remote control hanging from her keychain to open the garage door, while in her other hand she was still holding her phone, mumbling irritably:

  “Be careful, Marilda, even now that it’s broad daylight and you’re going to meet your friends! There’s a financial crisis going on and people with our status should be doubly mindful!” She was giving her voice a squeaking tone, imitating that of her fiancé. “I am careful, darling”, she said mockingly to the device in her hand, “I’m off to fuck your best friend; he’ll take really good care of me. Asshole!”

  Before long, she had gotten in her car and was driving towards downtown Athens, rather impatiently, focusing on the impending rendezvous and trying to completely forget about her fiancé. The route from their house in the suburbs to downtown Athens was fairly simple. A few hundred yards off their walled community was the highway, which lead directly to the city center. Within a few minutes she had excited the highway and was driving along the avenue that would lead her to the five-star hotels dotting the largest square of Athens, directly across one of the royal palaces. Faced with the usual bottleneck ahead, she pressed her hand on the honk and immediately turned to a sideway, before she, too, became stuck in the traffic. She had taken this particular route several times, especially during these last months, following her engagement. She wanted to get a feeling of freedom, to find some release from the asphyxiating pressure of that relationship, as she liked to excuse her behavior to herself. She stepped on the gas, seeing the traffic lights up ahead turn orange, confident that she could make it. She did make it, but she also run into the front end of a car which had begun to move from the intersection on her left, a mere second earlier that it should have. The impact made the airbags on her expensive car deploy and her head hit the one in front of her. Her irritation quickly overcame her surprise and, disregarding the slight dizziness from the crash she got off her car and launched a tirade against the other driver, who had already gotten off his vehicle.

  “You stupid clown, are you fucking blind? You could have killed me!” she screamed at him.

  The man didn’t even turn towards her, his eyes were glued on the spot where the two cars had collided, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened.

  “Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you!” the young woman kept on braying, her nerves fraying all the while. “That’s it, I’m calling the cops. Just you wait and see, my fiancé is a close advisor to the king. Yep, yep, that’s right, asshole, you’re in deep shit!” she announced, hoping to see at last some reaction to what she had been saying.

  The truth was that she didn’t want to call the police and have her fiancé know that she was involved in a traffic accident at a place she wasn’t supposed to be. On the other hand, the car had to be repaired and that meant that she had to scare that ape standing before her enough for him to plead not to involve the cops and settle the whole issue amicably, with him of course covering all expenses. She pulled her cell phone from her handbag in an overly theatrical manner and began punching her code to unlock it.

  “You’ll see, you’ll see…” she kept on mumbling, suddenly realizing that the man was now standing right in front of her, unsettlingly close. She felt her skin crawl and, with a quick glance, noticed that they were all alone at the spot.

  She looked at him. The man was staring at her with a devilish, cold look on his face. Marilda swallowed and almost forgot the cell phone she was still holding in her hand. Her rage had been replaced by a sensation she had never felt before: the sheer terror of staring into the eyes of a beast one can neither fight off, nor avoid; that instinctive terror which bursts free and betrays what the mind refuses to admit, namely that death is lurking close by. The man did not disappoint her instinct. With one hand, he grabbed her by the throat while he clamped the other over her eyes. He whispered a word, which the young woman did not understand and immediately she felt as if her eyes and throat were on fire. She would have screamed, the pain was shearing, only she found herself unable to make the slightest sound. Everything around her went dark and the last thing she felt before passing out was her legs being lifted off the ground and the man hefting her on his shoulder.

  Maybe he should have turned the cameras off, was Marcos�
� first thought as he walked into the interrogation room. John had grabbed the detainee by the neck with one hand and was hitting him on the face with the other. Under normal circumstances he would have stepped in, but this time something prevented him from reacting. Perhaps it was the tattoo on the detainee’s arm that stopped him, a pentagram with a demon’s head at its center. Perhaps it was merely the fact that he was tired of treating all these bastards by the book. In any event the man, who was handcuffed and unable to parry the blows, seemed unfazed by the assault. After he had landed several blows, John paused and dragged the man back to the table, getting him to sit on the chair at the center of the room. The man’s face was bloodied, his nose broken. And yet, despite the fierce assault and the fact that he wasn’t particularly muscular, he looked like he hadn’t been affected in the least.

  “You’ll tell me all that I want to know, otherwise you’re not getting alive out of here; you won’t get to talk to a lawyer, appear before a judge, nothing. And don’t you think someone will come to stop me, they were all listening while I was beating the crap out of your sorry ass”, said John, as he was getting around the table.

  The man, completely untouched by the threats he had just heard, turned towards Marcos.

  “You’re bleeding, my friend”, he said with an odd smile.

  Marcos looked towards his wound and saw that a small bloodstain had formed on the clean shirt he had worn. It would seem that the brief stop, over at his place, before coming to the station had been quite pointless. He buttoned his jacket so as to hide the stain and coughed to clear his throat.