Shadows of Falling Night (28 page)

Mitteleuropa

Eric didn’t feel as bad as he had, but even bundled up leaving the
Gasthaus
and going outside again into cold and falling snow was the last thing he wanted to do. Fortunately, doing things he deeply did not want to do was one of his oldest habits. He’d only been awake for a couple of hours, but the craving for more sleep was already unendurable. Doggedly, he made himself walk to the car—some German 4 × 4—and let someone push him in, then fumbled at the seatbelt. The blast of hot air from the heater was almost as unpleasant as the cold had been, but then when you were in the state he was, everything made you feel bad. All you wanted to do was get into the least uncomfortable position in bed and sleep as long as possible.

The old lady’s son drove the car southward; at first for an hour or so over a pretty good two-lane road, with glimpses of snow on fields to either side, and then down a bit of a slope, then turning off through a gate on to what was probably a dirt track, a foot or two down under the layers of snow and ice. He was conscious enough to note that the burly white-haired German handled the deep fresh snow skillfully, not creeping, not going too fast and accelerating gradually when he had to. After a while he started to talk, probably as much to avoid thinking about what was going on and how horribly he was violating the sacred rules as anything else.

“This is the family’s old cottage, you understand,” he said. “My mother’s grandmother—”

Which meant it had happened a
long
time ago, possibly a very long time.

“—lived there, her husband was a woodsman for the Frieherr back before the Kaiser’s war and was called up in 1914. He never came back,
but somehow she got a little gold together during the war—English sovereigns if you believe my mother’s tale of what her mother told her! Given to her by a secret agent she sheltered while he was ill! Well, after the war when the paper money became worthless and a little gold went a very long way she bought the
Gasthaus
…”

Eric tuned out the rest; probably it was picturesque as hell in terms of small-town family sagas, but he didn’t have the free RAM to deal with it right now. He got a vague impression of a small wooden building, black in a clearing with smoke trickling up from a chimney to merge into the falling flakes. Fortunately it didn’t appear to be made of gingerbread.

“
Grüss Gott,
” the German called after them as Peter and Cheba helped him in. “
Und Behüte dich Gott.”

Peter shut the door with his heel after he’d helped Eric in and eased him into a chair; fortunately someone had come out and got everything going before they arrived, and it wasn’t too uncomfortable.

“That means
greet God
and then
may you have the help of God
,” he said. “Personally, I’d like to put off meeting God just as long as I can.”

“It’s Eric who needs God’s help right now,” Cheba said. “And ours, first of all.”

They got him into bed. When Eric woke again he was wet with sweat but clearheaded, feeling weak and washed out but hungry. He wasn’t good to be winning any Ironman triathlons any time soon, but from the way he felt, things would get better from here on. They’d made his bed up in a single main room that evidently occupied most of the cottage, and there was a fire of pine logs burning in a fieldstone fireplace, drawing well but giving a spicy tang to the air that was like and unlike the piñon wood he’d grown up with. Under that was the slightly musty smell of a very old wooden house that was kept up but not lived in much recently, seeping out of the ancient timbers as they warmed.

The interior had much the same feeling, a few modern touches around the windows, but the rest mostly crude carving like being inside a cuckoo clock of the type he’d seen taking his nieces and nephews to the International Museum of Folk Art back in Santa Fe. Someone had done this with the simplest of tools, on long winter nights when he couldn’t work at his usual job.

Leon and Leila were playing in front of the fire, with some wooden toys that looked just as old but were carved in an entirely different style from the rest of the house, a monkey and some type of antelope and a rhinoceros. For a moment his mind wandered off wondering how they’d ended up here, but the cooking smells distracted him.

The door opened for a second and Cheba kicked it closed behind her; she had an armful of split pinewood that she emptied into the bin beside the fireplace, still favoring the left arm and shoulder where they’d been claw-raked.

“So, you are here again,” she said. “It is the afternoon of the day after the day we got here—it gets dark so quickly! Come, I will help you.”

“To hell with that, you got hurt worse than I did,” he grumbled. Then: “Okay, I won’t yell at you for a helping arm.”

One of the things that had been added to the cottage was a small but modern bathroom, and it was inexpressible relief to get clean and get dressed. That proved well within his capacities, as long as he took it slowly. Peter served dinner, which was thick German bread and butter, and a pot of a sort of casserole-like thing made with ham, potatoes, onions, canned cream of broccoli soup and cheese on top.

“Minnesota cuisine, the classic hotdish,” he said. “Minnesota cuisine minus the lutefisk.”

“What is this
lutefisk
?” Cheba asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Peter said. “Not before you eat. The people
from the
Gasthaus
certainly left us a well-stocked kitchen, but I think they use this as a vacation cottage now; there’s a dozen pairs of cross-country skis up in the attic, and they’ve got a winter icebox. It makes me feel nostalgic. The back is covered with metal gauze but open to the outside to let in the cold, there were a few of those left in my hometown when I was a kid.”

“Don’t get too nostalgic,” Eric said dryly.

“Seriously, this whole area does remind me of home a bit. And there’s some damned odd stuff up in the attic bedrooms; somebody carved
R. Hannay was here 1916
and
who is this mysterious bugger v. Einem?
on the rafters.”

“Why’s that odd?” Cheba said.

“Well, Hannay isn’t a German name; it’s Scottish, I think. And the language is English, in 1916. When England and Germany were at war—and back then virtually no one in a little place like this would have known English.”

He shook his head. “One of life’s mysteries and going to stay that way, I guess. Like some more immediate ones—why they didn’t turn us over to the cops, for starters.”

The twins had mopped their plates with slices of dark pumpernickel and started in on some strudel. Leon looked up:

“Oh, that’s because we told Greta what was gonna happen to you if they didn’t help. Greta is the cool old lady.”

“Not
all
of what was gonna happen,” Leila said, licking her fork. “We could tell she wouldn’t want kids talking about
some
of things they were going to do to you before they killed you.”

“Ah…Thanks,” Eric said; he felt a shivering chill that had nothing to do with any lingering plasmodium in his bloodstream.
Because I don’t want to hear about them either
.

“Sort of like that stuff
Maman
likes to do sometimes,” Leila said. “We could sort of see it ahead if you didn’t leave. That’s been happening lately. Just sometimes, you know? Seeing what’s going to happen.” She shook her head. “No, really what
might
happen, like sometimes in a video game, if you do one thing you get another? It seems like it’s easier right around this place.”

“It would’ve been like
Maman
having fun, but more gross,” Leon amplified. “And of course we didn’t want that to happen to you guys,” he finished with a beaming smile.

Definitely a chill in the air,
Eric thought.

The kids had evidently been running around in the snow most of the day, and didn’t object when they were brought to the sleeping bags upstairs. When the three adults were sitting with coffee, Peter spoke:

“I did some scouting around here,” he said. At Eric’s raised eyebrow he grinned and waggled a reproving finger: “Hey, I may not be a deadly jarhead detective but I have done things that didn’t involve staring at books or computer screens. I run and ski cross-country, and I used to hunt deer with my dad when I was a teenager.”

Eric shrugged. “My turn to say sorry. What did you find?”

“It’s open pine forest mostly, a lot less undergrowth than I’m used to, and with clearings here and there. The thing is that we’re not all that far from the Danube cross-country, and it looks like good country for it.”

“Cross-country…Oh. You mean on skis? I think I could hack that with another night’s sleep, but what about Cheba and the kids?”

“The children have done a little of this thing with skis,” Cheba said. “I tried today with Peter showing me. I can do it if I must, and I must.”

Eric thought.
And God, it’s a relief to be able to do that coherently.

“I wouldn’t go for it if we didn’t have your little gadgets, professor, but we do. They’ll look for us on the roads first and they’ll assume we
could be hundreds of miles away by now. But we’ve stayed here as long as we can.”

His mind balanced distances and alternatives. Then he nodded: “If we can get to the river, we should be able to pick up some other form of transport, car, whatever. What’s the but, though? I can see there is one.”

Peter looked down at his hands spread on the table. “There are a lot of old bunkers scattered through these woods. I spotted four or five and I’m not an expert on that type of thing.”

Eric rubbed two fingers on his chin; they skritched on coarse black stubble, which made him remind himself to shave tomorrow morning. “This is Germany, home of the bunker.”

Peter’s expression was grim. “They’re old, but they’re not abandoned. Not completely. The doors and firing slits and ventilators have all been welded shut or plugged.”

“
Thou, oh evil manifest and invasive, get thee gone,
” Cheba swore in her Nahuatl-flavored Spanish. “I know why.
She
talked to me sometimes of their habits and customs. That is for the
brujos
to hide from the sun. The ones who live beyond death and have no real bodies often make such hiding places all around the places they haunt. That way they can go far from their home, almost until dawn, and have a hole to jump in at the last minute.”

Eric hissed through his teeth. It made an unpleasant degree of sense; the main weakness of Shadowspawn who’d shed their bodies, the post-corporeals, was that they needed to hide during the daytime. If there was a network of cubbyholes like that spread around the place…then the limit wouldn’t have to include time to get back to home base.

“Can we make it to the Danube, or at least the inhabited area, in one day?” Eric asked. “So we’re not out in the countryside at sundown, when the little doggies come out to play?”

Peter shrugged and raised his hands. “I could, easy; I could do it by…oh, noon. But you’re sick, and you haven’t done much of this lately; Cheba’s hurt and she’s never done it before
at all
; and the kids are, well, kids. It’ll be close. I suppose it all depends on how fast they find our trail.”

“Not long,” Cheba said. “At night, they can run as wolves to catch our scent, fly as owls to see. They know we left the village, and they are hunters. The Power makes the forms they take, but the forms are real enough—real noses, real eyes.”

Real teeth, real claws,
Eric thought, and sighed.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “But I got this nasty feeling it’s our best bet.
Mierda.
”

The sun was just over the horizon, making the clouds go pale in the east, and Eric felt both bloated and very slightly queasy from the enormous breakfast he’d crammed down—ham, scrambled eggs, French toast, pancakes, left-over pastries—and badly in need of another four hours’ sleep. A session of malaria was no joke. Cheba looked logy too, either from the pain keeping her awake or from the painkillers making her drowsy now. The kids were excited and looking forward to the day, but also a little sleepy—that was probably their Shadowspawn genes. Apparently the natural pattern for purebloods was to stay up most of the night, wake up in the middle of the afternoon and come fully active at sunset, whether they were nightwalking or not. The only one who looked fully ready to go was Peter, and Eric could sense tightly controlled anxiety in the other man. He didn’t blame him, either, with this party of infants and cripples at his ass and some pretty literal bogeymen hiding in the woods. It said something for him that he hadn’t found any occasion to suggest
scouting ahead
or something of that nature.

“These boots fit pretty well,” the Minnesotan said. “But they’re not
our
boots, and they’re old, obviously just left here when people moved up to better. I warmed them up and rubbed them with some wax and bent them as much as I could. If anyone’s feet start to hurt tell me right away.”

He’d checked everyone’s socks before they put the boots on too, making sure they were snug and smooth with no wrinkles. Eric appreciated that; if you took care of your gear, your gear took care of you. If you didn’t, it would always fail at the moment you needed it most, and one of the worst point failure sources were your feet. That had been true in both his jobs, and it was just as important here whether he was going to chase or be chased; plus Shadowspawn
luck
always hit your weakest point when it was operating against you. On Peter’s advice they’d eaten everything they could stuff down, and they were all carrying some food as well as the other essentials, and thermoses of hot sweet chocolate with a shot of brandy in each except the one for the kids.