2 Blood Trail (8 page)

The German patrol crossed his path about three hours before dawn, not far from the village. As they passed him, standing motionless beside the trail with barely inches to spare, Henry smiled grimly at the skull and crossbones that fronted each cap. Totenkopf. An SS unit used for internal security in occupied territory, especially where the Resistance was active.

The straggler was a barrel-chested young man who somehow managed to strut in spite of the hour and the ground condition, and whose
more-master-race-than-thou
attitude radiated off of him. It seemed safe to assume that his comrades had deliberately let him fall a little behind; there were limits, apparently, even in the SS.

Henry had a certain amount of sympathy for the common soldier in the German army but none whatsoever for the Nazis among them. He took the young man from behind with a savage efficiency that had him off the trail and silenced between one breath and the next. As long as the heart continued to beat, damage to the body was irrelevant. Quickly, for he was vulnerable while he fed, Henry tore open the left wrist and bent his head to drink. When he finished, he reached up, wrapped one long-fingered hand about the soldier’s skull, twisted, and effortlessly broke his neck. Then he froze, suddenly aware of being watched.

The forest froze with him. Even the breeze stilled until the only sound became the soft phut, phut of blood dripping slowly onto leaf mold. Still crouched over the body, muscles tensed and ready, Henry turned to face downwind.

The big dog regarded him steadily for another few seconds, then faded back until not even the vampire’s eyes could separate it from the shifting shadows.

The dog shouldn’t have been able to track him. Foreboding ran cold fingers along Henry’s spine. Swiftly he stood and moved toward the place where the huge animal had disappeared. A heartbeat later he stopped. He could feel the lives of the patrol returning, no doubt searching for the missing soldier.

He would have to deal with the dog another time. Grabbing a handful of tunic and another of trouser, he lifted the corpse up into the crotch of a tree and wedged it there, well above eye level. With one last apprehensive look into the shadows, he continued his journey to the village.

It wasn’t difficult to find.

Harsh white light from a half dozen truck-mounted searchlights illuminated the village square. A small group of villagers stood huddled on one side, guarded by a squad of SS. A man who appeared to be the local commander strode up and down between the two, slapping a swagger stick against his leg in the best Nazi approved manner. Except for the slap of the stick against the leather boot top, the scene was surreally silent.

Henry moved closer. He let the sentry live. Until he knew what was going on, another unexplained death could potentially do more harm than good. At the edge of the square he slid into a recessed doorway, waiting in its cover for what would happen next.

The tiny village held probably no more than two hundred people at the very best of times, which these certainly weren’t. Its position, near both the border and the rail lines the invaders needed to continue their push north, made it a focal point for the Dutch Resistance. The Resistance had brought Henry, but unfortunately it had also brought the SS.

There were seventy-one villagers in the square, mostly the old, the young, and the infirm. Pulled from their beds, they wore a wide variety of nightclothes and almost identical wary expressions. As Henry watched, two heavily armed men brought in five more.

“These are the last?” the officer asked. On receiving an affirmative, he marched forward.

“We know where the missing members of your families are,” he said curtly, his Dutch accented but perfectly understandable. “The train they were to have stopped is not coming. It was a trap to draw them out.” He paused for a reaction but received only the same wary stares. Although those of an age to understand were very afraid, they hid it well; Henry’s sensitive nose picked up the scent, but the commander had no way of knowing his news had had any effect. The apparent lack of response added an edge to his next words.

“By now they are dead. All of them.” A young boy smothered a cry and the commander almost smiled. “But it is not enough,” he continued in softer tones, “to merely wipe out resistance. We must wipe out any further thought of resistance. You will all be executed and every building in this place will be burned to the ground as both an example of what happens to those civilians who dare support the Resistance and to those inferiors who dare oppose the Master Race.”

“Germans,” snorted an old woman, clutching at her faded bathrobe with arthritic fingers. “Talk you to death before they shoot you.”

Henry was inclined to agree—the commander definitely sounded like he’d been watching too many propaganda films. This did not lessen the danger. Regardless of what else Hitler had done in his “economic reforms,” he’d at least managed to find jobs for every sadistic son-of-a-bitch in the country.

“You.” The swagger stick indicated the old woman. “Come here.”

Shaking off the restraining hands of friends and relatives and muttering under her breath, she stomped out of the crowd. The top of her head, with its sparse gray hair twisted tightly into an unforgiving bun, came barely up to the commander’s collarbone.

“You,” he told her, “have volunteered to be first.”

With rheumy eyes squinted almost shut in the glare of the searchlights, she raised her head and said something so rude, not to mention biologically impossible, that it drew a shocked, “Mother!” from an elderly man in the clutter of villagers. Just to be sure the commander got the idea, she repeated herself in German.

The swagger stick rose to strike. Henry moved, recognizing as he did so that it was a stupid, impulsive thing to do but unable to stop himself.

He caught the commander’s wrist at the apex of the swing, continued the movement and, exerting his full strength, ripped the arm from the socket. Dropping the body, he turned to charge the rest of the squad, swinging his grisly, bleeding trophy like a club, lips drawn back from his teeth so that the elongated canines gleamed.

The entire attack had taken just under seven seconds.

The Nazis were not the first to use terror as a weapon; Henry’s kind had learned its value centuries before. It gave him time to reach the first of the guards before any of them remembered they held weapons.

By the time they gathered their wits enough to shoot, he had another body to use as a shield. He heard shouting in Dutch, slippered feet running on packed earth, and then suddenly, thankfully, the searchlights went off.

For the first time since he entered the square, Henry could see perfectly. The Germans could see nothing at all. Completely unnerved, they broke and tried to run, only to find their way blocked by the snarling attack of the largest dog any of them had ever seen.

It was a slaughter after that.

Moments later, standing over his final kill, bloodscent singing along every nerve, Henry watched as the dog that had followed him all night approached stifflegged, the damp stain on its muzzle more black than red in the darkness. It looked completely feral, like a wolf from the Brothers Grimm.

They were still some feet apart when the sound of boots on cobbles drew both their heads around. Henry moved, but the dog was faster. It dove forward, rolled, and came up clutching a submachine gun in two very human hands. As the storm troopers came into sight, he opened fire. No one survived.

Slinging the gun over one bare shoulder, he turned back to face Henry, scrubbing at the blood around his mouth with the back of one grimy hand. His hair, the exact russet brown of the wolf’s pelt, fell in a matted tangle over his forehead and the eyes it partially hid were the eyes that had watched Henry emerge from the earth and later feed.

“I am Perkin Heerkens,” he said, his English heavily accented. “If you are Henry Fitzroy, I am your contact.”

After four hundred years, Henry had thought that nothing could ever surprise him again. He found himself having to rethink that conclusion.

“They didn’t tell me you were a werewolf,” he said in Dutch.

Perkin grinned, looking much younger but no less dangerous. “They didn’t tell me you were a vampire,” he pointed out. “I think that makes us even.”

 

“That is
not
a perfectly normal way to meet someone,” Vicki muttered, wishing just for an instant that she was back at home having a nice,
normal,
argument with Mike Celluci. “I mean, you’re talking about a vampire in the Secret Service meeting a werewolf in the Dutch Resistance.”

“What’s so unusual about that?” Henry passed an RV with American license plates and a small orange cat sleeping in the rear window. “Werewolves are very territorial.”

“If they were living as part of normal. . . .” She thought for a second and began again. “If they were living as part of human communities, how did they avoid the draft?”

“Conscription was a British-North American phenomenon,” Henry reminded her. “Europe was scrambling for survival and it happened so quickly that a few men and women in a few isolated areas were easy to miss. If necessary, they abandoned ‘civilization’ for the duration of the war and lived off the land.”

“All right, what about British and North American werewolves then?”

“There are no British werewolves. . . .”

“Why not?” Vicki interrupted.

“It’s an island. Given the human propensity for killing what it doesn’t understand, there’s not enough space for both humans and wer.” He paused for a moment then added, “There may have been wer in Britain once. . . .”

Vicki slumped lower in the seat and fiddled with the vents.
I don’t want to die, Ms. Nelson.
“So the wer aren’t worldwide?”

“No. Europe as far south as northern Italy, most of Russia, and the more northwestern parts of China and Tibet. As far as I know there are no native North American wer, but I could be wrong. There’s been a fair bit of immigration, however.”

“All post World War II?”

“Not all.”

“So my original question stands. How did they avoid the draft?”

Vicki heard him shrug, shoulders whispering against the thick tweed seatback. “I have no idea but, as most of the wer are completely color-blind, I’d guess they flunked the physical. I do know that the allies used color-blind observers in aerial reconnaissance; because they had to perceive everything by shape they were able to see right through most camouflage. Maybe some of that lot were wer.”

“Well, what about you, then? How does a vampire convince the government he should be allowed to do his bit for liberty?” Then she remembered just how convincing Henry could be. “Uh, never mind.”

“Actually, I didn’t even approach the Canadian government. I stowed away on a troop ship and returned to England where an old friend of mine had risen to a very powerful position. He arranged everything.”

“Oh.” She didn’t ask who the old friend was. She didn’t want to know—her imagination was already flashing her scenes of Henry and certain prominent figures in compromising positions. “What happened to the villagers?”

“What?”

“The villagers. Where you met Perkin. Did they all die?”

“No, of course not!”

Vicki couldn’t see any
of course not
about it. After all, they’d wiped out an entire squad of SS and the Nazis had disapproved of things like that.

“Perkin and I set it up so that it looked as though they’d been killed in an allied air strike taking out the railway line.”

“You called in an air strike?”

She could hear the grin in his voice as he answered.

“Didn’t I mention this old friend had risen to a very powerful position?”

“So.” One thing still bothered her. “The villagers knew there was a pack of werewolves living amongst them?”

“Not until the war started, no.”

“And after the war started?”

“During the war, any enemy of the Nazis was a welcome ally. The British and the Americans even managed to get along.”

She supposed that made a certain amount of sense. “And what about after the war?”

“Perkin emigrated. I don’t know.”

They drove in silence for a while, one of only a few vehicles on the highway now that Toronto had been left behind. Vicki closed her eyes and thought of Henry’s story. In some ways the war, for all its complications, had been a simple problem. At least the enemies had been well defined.

“Henry,” she asked suddenly, “do you honestly think that a pack of werewolves can live as a part of human society without their neighbors knowing?”

“You’re thinking city, Vicki; the Heerkens’ nearest neighbors live three miles away. They see people outside the pack when
they
choose to. Besides, if you didn’t know me, and you hadn’t met that demon last spring, would you believe in werewolves? Would anyone in North America in this century?”

“Someone obviously does,” she reminded him dryly. “Although I’d have expected blackmail over murder.”

“It would make more sense,” Henry agreed.

She sighed and opened her eyes. Here she was, trying to solve the case armed only with a magnifying glass and a vampire, cut off from the resources of the Metro Police. Not that those resources had been any help so far. Ballistics had called just before she left to tell her that the slug had most likely been a standard 7.62mm NATO round; which narrowed her possible suspects down to the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as almost everyone who owned a hunting rifle. She wasn’t looking forward to arriving at the Heerkens farm.

This was the first time she’d ever really gone it alone. What if she wasn’t as good as she thought?

“There’s a map in the glove compartment.” Henry maneuvered the BMW off Highway 2. “Could you get it out for me?”

She found both glove compartment and map by touch and shoved the latter toward her companion.