Kate gripped the short rope in one hand, wound some mane around her other hand, bent low over the horse’s neck, dug her heels in the animal’s side, and whispered, “Go…please go.”
The huge beast continued lumbering up a trail that Kate could not even see.
It was one minute before midnight when they came out of the forest along the high ridge and Kate could look down and across at Castle Dracula on its crag.
It was more impressive and fantastic than she could have imagined: two of the five tall towers had been completely rebuilt, the fortified crag was connected to the rest of the mountain only by a long bridge—possibly a drawbridge—over a deep fissure, the center hall and the battlement terraces were ablaze with torchlight, people in black and red robes milled along the hundred yards of rocky crag, along the battlements, and filled the terrace at the farthest end of the citadel. Torches wound down along the steep stairway which zigzagged through the bare trees, south into the forest, then down to the meadows more than a thousand feet below. Kate could see a veritable parking lot of dark limousines down there, as well as strigoi guards pacing in the torchlight. A grassy area on a lower crag a couple of hundred yards along the stairway below the citadel obviously had been cleared of trees and Kate could see Radu Fortuna’s helicopter at rest there, a single pilot or guard lounging by its skids. “Slick, slick,” Kate whispered to herself. All along the upper path, into the citadel, and along the north edge of the rebuilt structure, sharpened stakes six feet high gleamed in the torchlight.
She slid off the horse, tied it to a branch behind a boulder, and crawled forward to peer at the castle through her binoculars.
One of the lens tubes had cracked and filled with water, but the other amplified the scene. From her vantage point on the hill above and a little northwest of the citadel, Kate could see the guards on the drawbridge, the guards near the busy entrance to the citadel, the guards around the north edge of the battlements, and the scene on the terrace farthest from the entrance.
Torchlights flickered there on hundreds of faces and silk robes. A space had been cleared on the highest area of the terrace, right where the battlements and south walls dropped a sheer thousand feet to the river and boulders below. In that lighted space, Kate could see Vernor Deacon Trent on a small throne near the battlement edge. The old man was dressed in an elaborate red and black robe and looked like a wizened mummy propped up for display. There were two tall metal stakes set into the stone in that cleared area: one was empty, Mike O’Rourke was tied to the other.
Kate’s heart froze when she saw him. They had dressed Mike in a parody of his priest outfit—black clothes, tall white collar, a crucifix made of thorns hung upside down from a vine necklace—and he had a black blindfold on. His hands were tied behind the stake.
Radu Fortuna stood in front of the crowd, resplendent in a pure red silk robe that outshone the old man’s. Kate had eyes only for the silk-wrapped bundle in Fortuna’s arms.
The binoculars were shaking and she had to steady them on a branch. Joshua’s face was quite dear, pale and feverish looking in the torchlight. On the table between Fortuna and O’Rourke, four golden chalices sat on white linen. The group was chanting softly. Fortuna was saying something.
Kate lowered the binoculars and looked at her watch. 12:05. Lucian said the timers were set to go off at 12:25. She was less than a hundred yards from her child and lover, but she might as well have been a light-year away. Strigoi guards in black watched the approach, lounged on the bridge, stood at the citadel entrance, and were lined around the rear of the crowd on the broad terrace. The crowd itself would keep her away from the ceremony. Her watch shifted to 12:06.
Kate flung the binoculars from her, clambered over the boulder, and began lowering herself into the fissure that separated her ridge from the citadel crag. The rocks were slippery. Slick, she thought. Fifty feet down and the fissure narrowed to a rocky crevasse that dropped another eighty or a hundred feet like the inside of a ragged chimney. It was only five feet across here and from the reflected lights from the torches above, Kate could see a fairly flat rock.
She did not think. She jumped.
Her cheap Romanian shoes scrabbled on stone and she realized that she was missing part of a heel. Shot off when we ran the roadblock. She was sliding back toward the narrow abyss.
In a technique that Tom had taught her during one of their few joint rock-climbing exercises, she spread-eagled herself on the steep rock face, bringing her entire body to a friction point.
She quit sliding.
A hundred feet to her right, the bridge rose above the fissure, connecting the stairway and path to the citadel. Guards paced back and forth on the echoing timbers.
Kate began edging right, finding handholds and footholds more by faith than by vision or feel. Once a rock came loose and she held her breath while pebbles rattled down into the fissure that was at least thirty feet wide here. The sound of sliding rock seemed terribly loud to her, but none of the shadows on the walkway above stopped or shouted.
Kate moved under the bridge, clambering over lashed timbers the size of trees. She could climb up here, but that would avail her nothing. She could hear the footsteps of the guards twenty feet above her, listen to the chanting of the hundreds of strigoi.
Kate kept clambering right, always keeping three points in contact with the rock the way Tom had taught her, until suddenly the rough rocks ended and she was staring out at the river canyon itself.
Under Kate’s right foot now, the cliff fell away for a thousand feet into darkness. Torchlight illuminated only snatches of the stone wall ahead of her, but she realized that the south wall of the citadel along this face rose directly from the stone of the mountain.
This end of the castle was not broad, a hundred and twenty feet at most, but the wall was sheer, seeming to overhang at places, and torches crackled on the battlements above. The stones here were part of the original structure, chipped and eroded in places, cracked by ice, and overgrown by weeds and even small shrubs in places. Vegetable holds, Tom had called such plant growth on a cliff face. Don’t use them.
Kate saw immediately that if she started sliding at any point along this traverse, she would not stop until she slid off the wall into the void above the canyon. She looked at her watch.
12:14.
Just time enough to get to the terrace in time for the end.
She shook her head. Without looking down, without looking back, Kate edged her way out onto the vertical wall of Castle Dracula and began the traverse in a steady crablike motion.
Chapter Thirty-nine
THE graduation exercise of Kate’s short-lived climbing experience with Tom had been the climb of the Third Flatiron, a giant limestone slab that lifted above Boulder like a piece of broken sidewalk tilted on end. That climb had taken most of a Saturday morning; Kate figured that she had five minutes maximum to make this traverse.
There were more footholds and handholds on the castle wall than there had been on the Flatiron. Kate continued sliding to her right, slowing frequently but never completely stopping. She remembered from climbing with Tom and from watching Tom climb that sometimes speed itself substituted for friction, the very act of moving quickly over rock allowing one to cling like a fly where there was not enough friction to hold one on if the climber stopped.
Kate did not stop.
Fifty feet out and the pitch of the wall increased, becoming true vertical and worse than vertical in places. The torches above shed some light here, but what might look like a promising foothold often turned out to be a millimeter-thin ledge of rotting rock, an apparently sturdy handhold would become a weed with two-inch roots. But Kate kept moving, climbing when she had to get above some obstacle, reluctantly dropping lower when she had to pass under an overhang or avoid a smooth stretch of stone. At one point she felt the hilt of the silly little dagger cutting into her waist, but it was too dangerous to leverage her body in such a way she could get at the knife to throw it away. S
he left it poking her and continued moving.
Her mistake was thinking that it would be faster halfway across to follow a four-inch ledge of soil where ice had fissured the stone. For a moment it was, and then the ledge slid away with the noise of sand collapsing and she was sliding down the wall with no points in full contact, no handholds, and the toes of her cheap shoes rattling uselessly against stone.
Kate closed her eyes and curled her fingers into claws. Her right hand slammed into a narrow ledge where a block of stone had been displaced an inch by some forgotten earthquake, three of her fingernails snapped off, but she kept her fingers curled and hung on, all of her weight supported by three fingers of her numb right hand.
Kate slapped the wall with her left hand, but there were no handholds. Her toes scrabbled without finding a crack or ledge. Finally she remembered Tom’s technique of wedging the toes and palm and just finding a friction point to balance gravity.
She pulled her knees up, forced her feet against the near-vertical stone, pressed her left palm tightly against rock, and was able to lift some of the weight from her cramping right hand. She was panting so loudly now that she was afraid they would hear her on the terrace twenty-five feet above, but no sounds came down to her except the crackle of torches and the incessant chanting, rising to some peak now. She did not turn her head to look at her watch.
The friction point would not hold for long. Two feet to the right of her tiny handhold, another stone jutted farther out, offering a hypothetical hold for both hands. Cracks four feet below that should serve for her feet. If she could only shift her left hand across her body…
She could not. Any movement of her palm or arm put all of her weight on the bruised fingers of her right hand. Her toes were slipping and she did not have enough grip anywhere to lift her feet again. The only thing she could do was let go of her one hold and try to scrabble the two feet to her right.
One, she thought, two…her legs were beginning a sewing-machine shake, her fingers were surrendering the grip…fuck it. Kate shifted her hand, slipped, kept all four points in touch as she scrabbled to her right, slipped again…too far!…and then caught one of the “toeholds” as she started to slide past it. It was deep enough for eight fingers to wedge full length between the stone. She set her chin against the tiny fissure and gasped into it. A bat exploded from the hole, its leathery wings brushing her face. Kate did not even consider letting go.
I could stay here a few minutes. Rest.
The hell you can. Move!
She opened her eyes. Another thirty feet should put her where she wanted to be under the edge of the terrace where the ceremony chanted on. She carefully turned her head and looked at her watch.
12:19. She did not have time for the rest of the traverse.
What if my watch is slow? Kate shook with sudden giggles until she used her wrist to wipe her nose and bring her out of the hysterics. Her arms were shaking again.
She looked above her, picked out a route from crack to crack, stone to stone, and began climbing.
Kate came up over the battlements less than twenty feet from where she wanted to be. All eyes were on Radu Fortuna, who was holding Joshua above him like an offering. A strigoi with a black hood stood next to Mike O’Rourke with a curved blade lifted to the ex-priest’s throat. The chanting was very loud.
Grunting despite herself, Kate leveraged her body up and over the last stone block and swung her scraped and bleeding legs off the battlement and onto a low ledge that ran along the inside of the wall. She did not take time to feel relief at being off the cliff face.
Heads turned her way. Some of the chanting halted. But Radu Fortuna and the man who called himself Vernor Deacon Trent were too intent on the ceremony to turn their heads.
Before anyone else could move, Kate sprinted toward Fortuna. Her legs, shaky from the traverse, almost went out from under her once but she gritted her teeth and covered the last ten feet in a flat run. She did not pause to think what she must look like to the hundreds of assembled strigoi—this wild-eyed woman coming over the castle wall, her face still smudged with Lucian’s blood, her hands bleeding, her clothes ripped and in disarray.
Vernor Deacon Trent saw her first, his heavy-lidded eyes widening, one hand rising from the carved arm of the heavy chair, and Radu Fortuna turned and saw her a second later.
Not in time.
Kate hit Fortuna hard with her shoulder, slamming into his rib cage and hearing the air whoosh out of him. He dropped Joshua.
Kate caught the baby and backed away. Joshua was not much heavier than when he had been kidnapped; his skin was pasty, his eyes too wide, too dark, and terrified. He began to wail.
The strigoi were assembled row on row. Now black and red cowls were shoved back, guards shouted and pushed forward from the rear wall fifty feet across the terrace, there were screams and curses from the crowd, and hands reached for Kate and the baby. She glanced at her watch. 12:20.
Kate hurriedly backed to the low ledge, leaped on it seconds before Radu Fortuna reached her, and then jumped to the lower ledge of the crenellated battlement wall.
Radu Fortuna and the others slid to a stop three feet from the wall.
Kate calmly stepped up on the higher stone and held Joshua out over the edge with both arms, her bruised and bleeding fingers tight under his tiny arms. The outer layer of red silk fell away, fluttering on the wind blowing up the castle wall.
“Not a step!” she shouted. “Or I drop him.”
Chapter Forty
YOU crazy American cunt,” hissed Radu Fortuna, his face close enough that Kate could see the white spittle at the corners of his mouth, “you can’t believe we are going to let you and the child go.”
“No,” said Kate. She suddenly felt very calm. This is where all of her efforts had brought her. This is where she had to be. Joshua had quit wailing and fidgeted only slightly in her hands. His tiny feet were bare and she remembered all the times they had played this-little-piggy together before bedtime. He was looking at her with wide eyes.
“Give us the child,” ordered Fortuna, taking another step closer.
“If you don’t get back,” said Kate, “I drop him.” She tossed Joshua slightly, catching him firmly under the arms. But not before the crowd of reverent strigoi gasped.
Radu Fortuna took a step back. The crowd was too dense and pressing to allow any more room. He turned and said something in rapid-fire Romanian to Vernor Deacon Trent. The old man had stepped off his throne and was just another face in the crowd.
“Doctor,” Vernor Deacon Trent said to her, “there is no purpose to this.”
“Yes,” said Kate, “there is.” She could not see her watch. Three minutes remaining perhaps. Not enough time for anything. But she would go ahead.
Vernor Deacon Trent shrugged. Two huge bodyguards were plucking at his sleeve in some haste, as if Kate’s very presence were a threat. “If you are going to jump, jump,” said the old man, and turned away.
Kate licked her battered lips. “Release him.” She had to nod in the direction she meant.
Radu Fortuna turned slowly, “The priest?” He laughed out loud. “All this to save your lover?” He spat and looked behind him. A dozen strigoi guards had rifles or automatic weapons aimed at Kate’s face. If they fired, Joshua would drop with her.
Kate’s arms were very tired from holding the baby out above the darkness.
“Release him,” said Kate. “Release him and I will step down and give you the child.”
Radu Fortuna sneered. “No.”
Kate turned and looked down. It would be a long fall. She shifted her wrist so that she could see her watch. 12:22. Too late. She wondered if she and the baby would feel anything.
“Yes,” said Vernor Deacon Trent from deep in the crowd in his shaky, old man’s voice. “Release the priest.”
“Nu!” shouted Radu Fortuna, “I forbid it!”
Vernor Deacon Trent’s face seemed to Kate to shift then, from something merely old a
nd worn-out to something powerful and not quite human. “Release him!” bellowed the old man, and there was no trace of weakness in his voice this time.
Radu Fortuna blinked as if he had been slapped. He gestured weakly to the executioner who stood next to O’Rourke at the stake. The long knife cut the ropes that bound the priest.
O’Rourke took off his blindfold, rubbed his wrists, and looked at her. “Kate, I don’t—”
“Shut up, Mike,” she said, her voice soft. The only other sound was the crackling of torches. “Just go.”
“But I—”
“Just go, my darling.” She nodded toward the bridge and the steps leaving the castle. “Go down the trail…past the slick, all right? Past the slick and down to the bend we can see from here. Take one of the torches out when you get there and wave it back and forth so we can see that you are there. Then I will give the baby back to them.”
“Let it be so,” Radu Fortuna said in English and then in Romanian.
O’Rourke hesitated only a second. Nodding, saying nothing, he stepped down from the sacrificial dais, went around the table laid out with chalices, and made his way through the strigoi. He was limping, but his damaged prosthesis obviously still worked. The dense crowd parted for him; one guard spat as he passed, but no one interfered.
Kate leaned out farther and hugged the baby to her side. Anyone rushing her would send both of them plunging. If she were shot, the impact would knock her off. Joshua began crying softly, his pudgy hands gripping the wool of her sweater. He babbled syllables and Kate was sure that she heard “Mommy.”
“Hand us the child and we will let you go,” Radu Fortuna said smoothly, extending his arms.
Kate hunted for Vernor Deacon Trent but the old face was no longer visible in the crowd. “You won’t let me go,” Kate said tiredly.