Afterglow (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #2) (7 page)

“Goodbye, Rand,” she whispered in my ear over the music recording that blasted through the castle’s great room. “I have to go now.”

“
Don’t leave, Gabby!” I whispered back.

“
I have to. You will understand…soon. I promise.” She gave me a firm hug and said, “That’s for Rudolph, too.”

I almost lost it. I stood, my eyes following her as she kissed each and every one of us goodbye on the cheek. Even Corbin. Her words didn’t make sense, at first. Not until I heard Ambra.
 

“
Get
him, Gabby!
Get him back for all of the horrible things he did to you,” Ambra whispered fiercely, tears shimmering in her eyes.

“
I intend to,” Gabrielle replied. “I’m going to get him back for all of the unspeakable things that he did to me and to everyone who was a captive at the Raven Citadel in Romania. We were subject to his maniacal, cruel and perverse acts of rage and torment on innocent humans and also on vampires.
Like me
.” She looked at me. “This last performance of my life is for Megan, too. And for your daughter, Kristen. But especially, this last act of love is for Rudolph.”

I was choked up. “Don’t go down the secret corridor,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Gabrielle put a finger to her lips. “I hacked the network. I know what’s in there, a gift for me, exactly what I need.
An end to this madness.
And a big surprise for Vlad when he comes in the castle through the vampire trap. To seek me.”

I was about to come unglued. “Life is precious, Gabby. Don’t throw it away.”

“Yes, it is,” Gabrielle said. “Did you know that Vlad has personally killed thousands of people?”

My mouth dropped open. “How is that even possible?”

“Shocking, isn’t it? You want to talk about human life? That is why I must do this. To stop him.
Forever.
”

She looked tenderly at all of us and blew a kiss. “I love you all. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my whole life. Even Rudolph.
Toujours.
”

Toujours
.
My high school French came back in dribs and drabs, but my throat was tight against recognition of the word:
Always.

“
We’re touched by your sacrifice and your grace,” Lucas said and handed her a flak jacket that she put over her dress and then put her cloak back on top of it, so it was not visible.

It was then that I resigned myself to the fact that she was going to be my live tester of the artificial sunlight in the vampire trap. With the body armor, Gabby was protecting her heart from the silver projectiles, in order to give me the one piece of data that I did not have, whether the exact nanometer range of UV light would kill a vampire.

I bit my lip; my legs were rooted to the floor. I was not going to stop her. God help me, I was going to let her kill herself.

God forgive me, but I was going to let Gabby die for our cause.

Gabby said softly, “You are all my dearest friends. After I was raped, beaten, shot, stabbed, chained, whipped and emotionally tortured, you were all there for me, to build me back into this stable and normal woman. You never treated me like you were repulsed or were even scared that I was a vampire. You tried to find a treatment or a cure.”

“
It could still happen,” I choked out, my voice shaky.

She shook her head sadly. “It cannot, Rand. I must go now, my loves. Remember me well.
Au revoir
.”

As Gabrielle turned and ran down the corridor into the vampire trap, faster than any human could run and calling for Vlad to be her lover and take her home, the recorded music of
Vampiress of the Opera
streamed through all of the PA systems, inside and outside of Blackstone Castle.

It was terrifying what she had contrived.

It was diabolical.

And, it was sheer genius.

Jade turned on the cameras in the vampire trap. Of course, vampires wouldn’t show up on camera, except clothing, but the video of the thin mirrors breaking would let us know the progress of her journey. And his, toward her, from outside the castle.

Lucas fell to his knees and wept as he watched Gabby get smaller and smaller in the corridor and then break through the first thin mirror. She kept going.

We were all crying.

The staccato sound of Gabby’s footsteps came over the closed circuit camera, as her running steps blended with her opera singing until at the climatic end of the opera—how did she time it so well?—we heard another vampire scream, but it was a man’s cry. Then her death cry came, too, but hers was more of a battle cry than a surrender. I wondered if she had killed Vlad with Ambra’s scythe necklace. That would have been poetic justice.

Regardless, fifteen minutes before the sun rose, it was all over for the vampires.

After dawn, when the vampire trap was flooded with natural sunlight through the system of many passive periscopes, I temporarily disarmed the lethal weapons—the silver projectiles—and Ambra and I walked through the sunlit vampire trap.

Ambra retrieved her scythe necklace that was lying on the stone floor next to the bank of UV lights from the tanning bed parts that I had used to build some of the light bars. The dust on the floor bore their footprints, running toward each other, and told us the story of her last moments on Earth, and Vlad’s, too.

Gabby had officially died from UV light in the 300- to 380-nanometer range.
We had our data
.

I now had the complete scientific evidence that I needed to develop a convenient, reliable hand-held version of artificial daylight that would kill vampires. Someday, I would develop something like a Jedi Knight Lightsaber that shot out concentrated UV in the 300 to 380 nanometer range. And it would kill vampires. Perhaps it was years of development from now, but yes, we vampire hunters would have daylight on a stick, of the exact kind that would slay our immortal enemy at night.

It was a brand-new day and in the vampire trap, we had burned up Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, killer of tens of thousands of people, if not more.

We had also burned up our beloved former vampire hunter, Gabrielle Dubois, one of the most successful singers in world history, and of whom music critics later wrote, upon hearing her
Vampiress of the Opera:

Her newest album is dark, otherworldly and haunting.

Chapter Seven

The Raven Citadel in Romania.

Among Gabby’s last words to us, she had given us key intel for rescuing the captives from Vlad’s secret stronghold, a place that was apparently so secret that Gabrielle had waited until just moments before she died to throw us that bone. Why had she waited to tell us? Unless Gabby had been a double agent who decided to switch to our side in the very last hour of her existence, I couldn’t fathom it, how she could know where this horrible monster Vlad had captives and was torturing them, and yet, had not told us right away. Had Vlad somehow hypnotized her to cloak information from us?

I pushed the double-agent suspicion out of my head. Even if it was true, in the end, Gabby had died for our side. A more courageous, nobler death, I could not have imagined. It also occurred to me that she didn’t tell us where his lair was, until she knew he was not going to be a threat to our safety, for whoever pursued a vampire into his lair certainly knew that the vampire had the home-court advantage.

The dark, compelling music alone—that she had written this grand opera in order to seduce Vlad to our castle to retrieve her—was quite possibly one of the most brilliant vampire traps ever executed. Far beyond my technology, Gabby had turned herself into a singing siren in order to trap and exterminate one of the worst serial killers in the history of vampires.

Now that Vlad was dead, and my comrades in arms were going to bed after dawn broke, I did some internet research on the
Raven Citadel
, which was a “ruins” castle not far from the official tourist destination of Vlad the Impaler’s castle, The Citadel.

A hefty walk in deep snow through a couple of miles of back country, The Raven Citadel was supposedly haunted, and it was private property, no trespassing. That put it in the realm of possibility that it was the hideout and lair of Vlad the Impaler, his blood slaves and lesser vampires, perhaps a clan of them that shared the captive blood resources.

There would be no sleep for me, as it turned out. Unless I did it while I traveled. I logged onto the Eurail site to see how close the train would get me to Raven Citadel. Pretty damn close.

Once I knew where I was going, I packed up my vampire-hunting gear and weapons, a small paper dictionary of various foreign phrases, warm clothes, a bunch of protein bars, and my passport and my American driver’s license.

It would have been easier to move between countries as Rudolph, but I drew the line at using my dead brother Rudolph’s passport. Also, it didn’t appear that any authorities were looking for Rand Sebastian, at least, not internationally. There was just no explaining the facts to any government authorities:

Vampires killed my wife, my brother and my parents and they kidnapped my child.

I might as well throw myself to the wolves as tell anyone that information, outside of my own vampire hunter family.

Even though I’d spent much of my adult life in the pursuit of offing vamps, otherwise I was completely law-abiding. In my book, that was one of the key things that the Brotherhood of the Blade and the Sisterhood of the Scythe had going for them: unlike other vigilante organizations, we did not consider ourselves above human law in matters other than killing vampires. That was one of the reasons that I chose to serve with them. And to stay with them.

After Megan had been killed, it would have been easy to just trust Ambra and Lucas and the others, but I did my own investigation of the organization, over the months that I had been there, and they were clean.
We
were clean.

In some ways, though, I missed the autonomy and spontaneity of my lone vampire hunter existence.

It had been a long time since I’d gone on a lone vampire-hunting expedition. But I was ready for this secret mission.
More than ready.

With Vlad killed in the vampire trap, I knew that there would be other vampires jockeying for the position and power, power that their dark master had once held. But now, Vlad was dead and I had to save the poor captives before they were also enslaved by vampirism or just outright killed by their cruel caretakers.

Like a thief in the night, except it was daytime, I left Blackstone Castle and headed for the Zürich airport in my little red Jeep, which Lucas had given me on my birthday a few months ago. He was generous like that to all of us.

I couldn’t fault the paycheck either. It was about five times what I had been paid in the military and I was socking away money like crazy for the day when I would find Kristen and we would say goodbye to the vampire hunter lifestyle and find some quiet place where I could again be her dad.

I was reluctant to go out on my own again, and yet, I knew it was time to stop depending on my brother and sister vampire hunters for their support of every move I made.

Now that I knew of the vampire stronghold, there was a part of me that swore to tear apart Vlad’s Raven Citadel looking for my daughter, Kristen, or any intel I could gather about her whereabouts. While there, I would free every captive possible, especially the blood slaves. If any vampires tried to get in my way, I would be a one-man, vampire-killing machine.

I thought about discussing a team hunt, but this was too intensely personal.

As I drove across the Blackstone Castle drawbridge and then closed it up behind me with the remote, I reflected on my plan to do a one-man invasion on Vlad’s decrepit torture castle in Romania.

I felt a little guilty about running off for a solo vampire hunt—I’d left a note on the table in the great hall, apologizing for going off on my own, but without telling them where I had gone. I was sure the others had caught Gabby’s phrase:
The Raven Citadel in Romania.
I hoped that none of them would come after me.

I just didn’t want to put anyone else at risk. It was going to be painstaking to fight the usurpers to Vlad’s old empire and then free the captives and talk to them and see if anyone knew where Kristen was.

I wished that I had mastery of many languages, as did Ambra, but I would make it work. Someone had to know something about Kristen’s whereabouts. I was betting that vampires bragged among themselves about their captives. I hoped that my daughter had not been tormented and abused like Gabrielle had been.

I tried to put that sickening fear out of my mind and concentrate on navigating the long, icy road to the Zürich train station.

Chapter Eight

Because of the incident on the cruise ship, months before, I didn’t know if I was on any international no-fly lists. I didn’t know if I was wanted for questioning in either my cruise ship jump into the sea or for my wife’s death and daughter’s disappearance.