03 - Evolution (23 page)

“Viktor struck two keys,” he stated. “What do you know
of them?”

Tanis resisted an urge to glance over at his library,
where not long ago he had shown Selene and her cohort the original
diagrams of the lock. He tried to remember if that particular volume was
still lying open on the other table.

“Keys? I don’t know of any keys,” he lied.

Marcus cocked his head. An instant later, his wings
snapped forward like the jaws of a trap. Razor-sharp talons pierced
Tanis’ shoulders, slamming him facedown onto the table. Tanis shrieked
in shock and agony. Kicking and screaming, he tried to tear himself free
from the Elder’s vicious pinions, but the talons were inserted too
deeply into his flesh. Using his wings, Marcus effortlessly dragged
Tanis across the table. Copper plates and cutlery clattered to the
floor.

Tanis felt like a fish twisting upon an angler’s hook.
Lifting his head from the rough wooden tabletop, he came face-to-face
with the Elder’s saturnine visage. He saw neither patience nor mercy in
Marcus’ eyes.

“Oh, yes,
those
keys,” Tanis
stammered. “One was kept in plain sight, draped around his daughter’s
lovely neck… right there for you to see.”

Marcus didn’t like the implication. He lifted his wings,
violently hauling Tanis up closer to his face. “And the other?”

“Kept with Viktor,” Tanis said hastily. “At all times.”

“Where?”

“Within him… beneath the flesh.”

Marcus glowered balefully at Tanis, weighing the
historian’s words. Tanis dared to hope that maybe, just maybe, he might
come through this night with his immortality intact.
If I do,
he vowed,
I’m
going to bury myself so deep that no vampire, lycan, or hybrid will ever
find me again. My books will be my only companions.

Then Marcus smiled, baring his teeth, and Tanis realized
it was already too late. “No, I beg you… no!”

Marcus paid no heed to his frantic cries. Still holding
on to the impaled historian with his wings, the Elder drove his fangs
into Tanis’ throat.

* * *

As the blood poured down his throat, Marcus
sifted expertly through the scribe’s memories. As the sole surviving
Elder, he alone now possessed the knowledge and experience required to
control the flow of the blood memories, so that they presented a
cohesive narrative rather than a flood of incoherent images. As with
Kraven before, Marcus readily found the moments he required:

“But I know who can stop him,”
Tanis informed Selene, in a shameless attempt to curry her favor and
preserve his own miserable existence. “Perhaps I can arrange a
meeting….”

Marcus lifted his mouth from Tanis’ neck and withdrew
his talons from the historian’s shoulders. The vampire’s head slumped
lifelessly onto the table. Andreas Tanis would never again betray the
buried secrets of the past. Now he was nothing more than history
himself.

His wings folded around him, Marcus left the cellar
without a backward glance. He now knew where to find Selene and Michael,
and in whose company they were likely to be.

Of course,
he thought.
I should have anticipated as much.

The
Sancta Helena
was docked on the east side of
the Danube, between the Chain and Elizabeth bridges. Piers and
warehouses dominated the sleeping waterfront. Towering steel cranes,
abandoned for the night, perched over dilapidated wharves. Rusty
freighters, bearing goods from all over Europe and beyond, were anchored
along the shore. The
Sancta Helena,
sleek
and immaculate, looked rather out of place among the weather-beaten
cargo ships berthed nearby. No doubt Lorenz Macaro had his own reasons
for staying away from the more upscale docks.

Selene and Michael were parked in a narrow alley
overlooking the pier. Their view of the stationary vessel offered few
clues regarding what sort of reception they might encounter aboard the
ship. “How do we know Tanis isn’t setting us up?” Michael asked.

“He’s not brave enough to set me up,” she replied.
Seated behind the wheel, she questioned whether this was a good idea.
She had heard of these so-called Cleaners before; the Death Dealers had
been aware for centuries that a secret society of mortals was
determined, for reasons unknown, to conceal the existence of the
immortals from their fellow humans. The origins and motive of the
Cleaners had been the subject of constant rumor and speculation, but the
Elders had always discouraged Selene and the other Death Dealers from
probing too deeply into the matter.
Why was that?
she wondered.
What were Viktor and the others trying to hide?

At this point, she didn’t trust any of the Elders’ edicts anymore.

She considered how best to approach the ship.
Maybe I should do some reconnaissance first?
Michael wouldn’t like being left behind again, but she was reluctant to
walk into the lions’ den without assessing the ship’s security first.
If nothing else,
she thought,
we should know where the viable escape routes are.

Furious barking, coming from right outside the car,
startled her. A snarling rottweiler threw itself against the
driver’s-side window, planting its front paws up against the glass.
Selene reached for her guns, but held her fire. The slobbering
rottweiler was just a dog, not a werewolf.

With a sharp command, the dog was pulled back away from
the window. A flashlight beam searched the interior of the car.
Squinting into the glare, Selene saw that the light was attached to an
AK-47 assault rifle being held by a looming figure in a black,
paramilitary uniform. A second beam entered the car from the opposite
direction. Glancing over, she saw another guard and watchdog standing
watch outside Michael’s door.

So much for casing the ship in
advance,
she thought.
Looks like we’re
meeting the Cleaners even sooner than I anticipated.

The first guard stepped forward and shouted at her
through the window. “You’re trespassing,” he declared in French. “Get
out of the car slowly so I can see your hands.”

Selene resisted the temptation to draw her own weapons.
They were here for information, not a firefight. “We’re here to see
Lorenz Macaro.”

Ignoring her explanation, both guards raised their
weapons and took aim at the windows. “I told you to exit the vehicle so
I can see your hands.”

“You want to see my hands, do you?” She slowly raised
her arms, then slammed her open palms against the window.

Sonja’s pendant gleamed in the light of the first
guard’s search-beam.

That did the trick. Within minutes, she and Michael
found themselves being escorted through a high-tech operations center
aboard the ship. Selene was impressed at the scale and sophistication of
the setup. The advanced, state-of-the-art equipment rivaled anything
possessed by the coven. She allowed a flicker of hope to enter her
heart. Perhaps this Macaro really did have the resources to deal with
the threat posed by Marcus.

If he doesn’t,
she mused,
we’re out of options.

A short flight of stairs brought them to Macaro’s
private office overlooking the ops center. The elegant furnishings
reminded her of the opulent decor back at Ordoghaz. She felt a minor
pang at the thought that she might never again set foot in the mansion,
her home for so many generations. She was hardly the sentimental sort,
and yet…

Moonlight filtered through the skylight in the ceiling,
adding to the illumination provided by the crystal chandelier and
Tiffany lamps. Selene eyed the skylight with a touch of apprehension;
Marcus’ newfound wings had her on guard against aerial attacks.

Lorenz Macaro greeted them from behind a large mahogany
desk, beneath the watchful gaze of a carved wooden goddess. Selene noted
the man’s dignified bearing and concerned expression. For a human, he
conveyed an aura of quiet authority. If he had any misgivings about
being in the presence of a vampire and a hybrid, no trace of it showed
upon his regal features.

He nodded at the pendant in Selene’s hands. “May I?”

Selene handed it over. Lucian’s precious keepsake had
brought them this far. Maybe the pendant could somehow convince Macaro
to help them stop Marcus.

It was a worth a try.

The elderly human contemplated the infamous pendant,
running his finger over its intricate detail. Selene noticed his signet
ring, although she couldn’t quite make out the design upon it. She
wondered what was going through the old man’s mind. His inscrutable
expression defied her attempts to read his reaction to the pendant.

Four armed bodyguards stood by the stairs, watching
Selene and Michael warily. Lifting his gaze from the pendant, Macaro
motioned for the men to leave. “But, sir,” one of them protested,
looking with alarm at the Death Dealer and her companion. He was
obviously reluctant to leave his employer unguarded.

“You can go,” Macaro insisted brusquely. He waited for
the men to depart before resuming his inspection of the pendant.

“You’re familiar with this then?” Selene asked.

Macaro gave her a cryptic smile, then gently nudged the
hidden switch with his fingertip. The concealed blades emerged from the
pendant like clockwork. “Intimately.”

She and Michael exchanged a startled look. Did everybody
know about the pendant’s secret workings except them? A thought occurred
to her and she took a closer look at Macaro’s signet ring, even as she
recalled that woodcut illustration of the armored soldiers marching
across a plague-ravaged countryside. The stylized
C
upon the ring matched the crest upon the knights’ shields.

By the Elders!
she thought
as the truth struck home. She looked at the aging human with new eyes.
Although she tried to maintain her cool, her hushed tone betrayed the
awe she felt.

“You’re Alexander Corvinus.”

The man who called himself Lorenz Macaro blinked in
surprise at the name. He glanced at his ring with a rueful sigh. “There
was a time that I was known by that name.” He rose from his chair and
circled around his desk to face Michael. He laid his hands upon the
younger man’s shoulders. Parental pride showed upon his face. “But by
any name, I am still your forefather.”

Corvinus, as Selene now thought of him, handed the
pendant back to Michael, who refastened the chain around his neck. He
gaped at the older man, seeming uncertain how to respond. Selene
recalled Michael telling her that his grandparents had immigrated to the
United States after the Second World War. Surely, when he had decided to
move to Hungary after his fiancée’s death, he had never expected to come
face-to-face with an ancestor from the fifth century.

“How have you stayed hidden all these years?” Selene
asked. Truth be told, she was feeling slightly overwhelmed herself. By
her reckoning, the man standing before her was over sixteen hundred
years old, an impressive span even for an immortal. The legendary
Corvinus was indeed what Tanis had called him.

The father of us all…

“For centuries I’ve stood by and watched the havoc my
sons have wrought upon each other… and upon humanity.” He sighed wearily
and turned away from them. “Not the legacy for which I prayed the night
I watched them enter the world.” He sat back down behind his desk. “And
a tiresome duty: keeping the war contained, cleaning up the mess, hiding
my family’s unfortunate history.”

“Couldn’t you have stopped them?” Michael asked.

“Yes,” Selene insisted.

Corvinus looked sadly at his descendant. “Could you kill
your own sons?”

“You know what Marcus will do,” Selene said. She leaned
across the desk to confront him. “If he finds me, he finds William’s
prison. You need to help us stop him.”

He regarded her skeptically, then laughed harshly. “You
are asking me to help you kill my son? You? A Death Dealer?” His face
was stern and unforgiving. His cultured voice dripped with scorn. “How
many innocents did you kill in the six-century quest to avenge your
family? Spare me your self-righteous declarations. You are no different
than Marcus, and even less noble than William. At least he cannot
control his savagery.”

Selene was taken aback by his verbal attack, but only
for a moment or two. She wasn’t about to be treated with contempt, not
even by Alexander Corvinus. “Anything I’ve done can be laid at your
feet. Hundreds of thousands have died because of your inability to
accept that your sons are monsters. That they create… monsters.” She was
honest enough to include herself in that category. “You could have
stopped all of this.”

“Do not come groveling to me,” he said, scowling,
“simply because you are weaker than your adversary.”

Selene refused to be intimidated. She found it ironic
that, essentially, she was taking Viktor’s side in his long dispute with
Marcus. “You know what kind of devastation William caused before he was
captured. He can’t be set free.”

Corvinus had no ready response. He shifted uneasily in
his chair, obviously wrestling with his conscience.
He knows I’m right,
she thought,
no matter
how much he hates to admit it.

“Let me tell you about what your other son has become….”

The sentry paced the deck of the
Sancta Helena,
keeping an eye out for
trouble. Colin Langely had served with the Cleaners for nearly three
years now, after being recruited from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but
tonight he felt unusually on edge. You didn’t need to be a top-grade
intelligence analyst to know that things were up. Elders assassinated,
the vampires’ headquarters burned to the ground, now a Death Dealer and
a suspected lycan visiting the Old Man in person. All of this was
unprecedented in Langely’s experience.