City Under the Moon (26 page)

The administration—and the country, he feared—would never be the same, even if the nightmare ended tonight.

And it clearly was not going to end tonight.

Weston hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. His personal physician checked his blood pressure at his desk in the Oval Office while Weston reviewed the CDC’s latest report on the lycanthropy virus. They were still confounded.

His secretary buzzed. “Mr. President, Mr. Harrison is here.”

It was 5:51, five minutes before moonrise over New York.

As planned, Weston used Teddy’s arrival to escape the doctor’s clutches. They walked silently through the West Wing, nodding false reassurance to every scared face along the way.

They were silent in the elevator, and all the way into the Situation Room.

Truesdale and Luft were waiting for them, along with Defense Secretary Ronald Greenberg, Vice President Allison Leslie, and Attorney General Michael Shinick. They all stood as Weston entered.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Weston said, “we need an endgame.”

Five

Valenkov Estate

Transylvania

12:01 a.m. Eastern European Time

They’d found the castle’s royal bedroom.

The bed was on a raised dais about ten feet from the entrance. Sheer layers of fabric hung from the posts, glistening in the column of starlight falling through the open door. The rest of the room was shrouded in darkness, but Tildascow could sense that it was large.

And there was movement inside.

Rustling drapes in a broken window were playing havoc with the room’s ambience. Something shifted on the hardwood floor, but from which direction?

She threw up an arm to stop Ilecko from crossing the double-wide threshold. Crouched beside his waist, she fiddled with her goggles—

Ilecko pushed her aside and entered. She swallowed her instinct to shoulder-throw him back over the balcony.

Beethoven and Jaguar entered behind him, checking the sides first. Her goggles were working, so she followed. Mantle took up cover at the door.

The room was nearly as wide as the loggia, with enough furniture for an entire house. Armoires, chairs, mirrors. And—

Movement behind a wardrobe. Shifting darkness.

“Do not attack,” Ilecko said.

And then they saw it: a werewolf, padding amid the ruined furniture. It purred a warning toward Ilecko.

“Do not attack,” he said again.

Two more werewolves were positioned around the semi-circular bedroom. They triangulated on Ilecko as he continued toward the dais, matching his every cautious step with their own apprehensive pacing.

Mantle and Jaguar moved inside, prompting Ilecko to warn them again. “Do not attack.”

He stepped up onto the dais and Tildascow followed, avoiding the path of dried flower petals. The silk curtain undulated in the wind, just because there weren’t enough distractions in this fucking room.

Someone was lying on the bed.

Ilecko stepped slowly. Clearly dreading what he was about to find, he pulled back the curtain, revealing the decayed corpse of a woman in her wedding gown.

She was surrounded by a thick nest of needles and flakes that had once been long-stemmed roses. Her cream lace gown had been stained putrid green by the liquefaction of her flesh. The half-pound diamond dangling from her skeletal finger blazed in the starlight, and her diamond-and-ruby tiara had slipped and gotten tangled in her rotting curly hair.

—just like mom’s hair, long and curly and matted down, dripping with her own blood—

“His wife?” she asked, jolting herself from the horrors in her mind.

Ilecko silently assessed the body for several long moments. The shadows covering his face were impenetrable, but Tildascow could feel his sorrow.

All the while, the soldiers tracked the wolves’ movement.

Giving Ilecko his time, Tildascow committed the room to memory.

The male dressing area had been arranged along the east wall. A wardrobe, a dresser, and a high-back armchair with wolf heads carved into its handles and claws at its feet. The chair was crooked, and so was the mirror above the table. This room had been ransacked like the others, and set right to create an illusion of peace. It was all part of the shrine.

The west wall held the lady’s things: wardrobes, dressers, make-up tables, a jewelry chest, and a privacy shade. Anachronisms everywhere—an antique hairbrush sitting next to an iPod boom dock; retrofit windows in the ancient, stone walls. These were strong-minded people of their own tastes.

Ilecko threw back the silk curtain, now ready to leave.

“Is that his wife?” Tildascow asked him again.

“Ecaterina,” he croaked. “The Lady Valenkov.”

Ilecko proceeded with a sorrowful gait, ignoring the Shadow Stalkers as they parted to give him a path between their backs.

On her way out, Tildascow noticed a bronze frame peeking out from behind a dresser near the broken window with its angry drapes. As she took a step toward it, the closest werewolf caught her curiosity. She advanced slowly.

“What are you doing?” asked Mantle.

“It’s okay.”

“Do not touch,” said Ilecko from the doorway.

“I got it,” she said, keeping her eyes on the werewolf.

“Jesus Christ, Tildascow,” whispered Mantle.

The werewolf growled, warning but permissive.

She slid the heavy bronze frame from behind the dresser, trying but failing to keep the edge from scraping the floor. The metal’s searing cold cut right through her gloves.

It was a larger-than-life portrait of Demetrius and his wife Ecaterina, a ridiculously beautiful couple. The lady was light-skinned, practically ethereal. She was folded into her husband’s chest, peeking out from behind her dark hair like some kind of skulking rogue. The glow of her green eyes
had
to have been exaggerated by the artist, or else Tildascow wanted her money back from the people at the gene pool.

Tildascow felt a rush of cold as she realized that the crown upon Ecaterina’s head in the painting was the same one now resting on her corpse. The same rings sparkled on her lovely hands, now mere bones.

Demetrius was barely recognizable without his scruffy beard and long hair. He had light skin, honest brown eyes, and a thick Romanian brow, all on the nimble frame of a dancer. His arms were wrapped around his wife’s lower back.

Tildascow lingered on his smile: so calculating, so voracious, and yet spring-loaded with charm.

European elitist fuckwad bastards?

Snide charisma power-brewed from entitlement?

Or… what?

Genuinely happy people?

Fuck happy people.

And the way they were locked together, like their bodies were magnetic but their touch was combustible—Tildascow’s scowl grew a scowl—they made her want to puke. Or something else. Something dirty and sweaty.

She slid the painting back into its hiding spot, hoping the werewolves couldn’t smell cynicism, and she crossed between the Shadow Stalkers. As she exited the bedroom, the cold air on the loggia hit her like an atomic blast.

Ilecko moved her out of the way—she did
not
like this guy’s hands-on shit—and closed the doors on the werewolves’ glimmering eyes.

“Why didn’t they attack?” Lon asked.

Ilecko rested his head against the seal and closed his eyes in silent prayer.

Sympathy for the Devil,
she thought.
Enough already.

“The werewolves,” Lon clarified, “why didn’t they—“

“His chosen must listen,” Ilecko whispered.

Lon gasped. “Valenkov can
control them?
”

Ilecko nodded.

“Really?” Lon looked around for someone to share his excitement. “So what was in there?”

“His wife,” Tildascow said. “Dead.”

“Who did this?” Lon asked Ilecko. “The villagers?”

Ilecko nodded, either at Lon, or one last goodbye to Lady Valenkov. Then headed back the way they came.

“Because she was a werewolf?” Lon asked.

“If they thought she was a wolf, they would have removed her head,” Ilecko said, never turning back.

“So, what—they just murdered her?”

“And then he killed them all.”

Six

Emory Inn

Atlanta

Jessica Tanner was naked and alone.

As faceless workers in yellow hazmat suits soaked the lounge in germicidal decon foam, one man had instructed her to strip. He never looked in her eyes, but he didn’t look at her flaccid breasts either.
Of course not. Who could ever find these things interesting, who beside Richard?
He took the clothes to be burned and left her shivering.

Naked and alone.

Her thoughts were like a ride at Disneyland, full of wild and wonderful things to visit. She actually thought that to herself, that her thoughts were exactly like a ride at Disneyland, and then there was the painful chattering of her teeth, what to do with Richard’s clothes and mail, her frozen tears, how to tell his parents, the plastic body bag they’d laid over his remains, the growing crowd of hazmat workers, and what time was it—the moon had to be rising soon, could Kenzie have left behind any infected survivors, and were they going to leave her here to freeze to death? And wouldn’t that be just fine?

“This way,” another man said, escorting her to an inflatable decontamination chamber they’d erected in the parking lot. She suffered the harsh pressure of the pneumatic shower while watching them watch her.

Now she realized why she didn’t recognize any of them. They weren’t CDC. They were military.

The shower relented, and she was directed through an opaque plastic tunnel, which was sealed to the vacuum-metalized guts of a van. Inside, a flimsy white robe sat on a sterile metal bench.

It was a short ride full of numbing sounds, but at least there was heat. She stared at her hands for the duration, fighting off vertigo.

The van stopped and she listened as they connected the airtight seal to her next destination. When the doors opened, the cloudy plastic tube obscured everything but the night sky. She passed through air transference and yet another shower before taking a long, descending elevator trip to arrive in another airlock and then, finally, a vacuum-sealed metal box with a few breathing holes in the ceiling for air recycling or purging: a cleanroom.

A hard cot covered in plastic was the only furniture. It sat facing the large observation mirror, just like the one Melissa Kenzie looked into as she transformed into a werewolf.

Sitting on that cot, minutes may have been seconds or hours. Several times she felt shocked awake by the sight of Richard’s gutted body.

This is not magic,
he’d insisted.
This is a virus, a biological entity we can quantify, study and attack.
So damn sure of himself. And now she was left to answer for him.

“Doctor Tanner,” a voice blasted through the loudspeakers. She paused, wondering if it’d been in her imagination. “Doctor Tanner, can you hear me?”

“Who are you?”

“It’s Rebekkah Luft. You’re under quarantine with the Department of Homeland Security. The voice you are about to hear is Dr. Jonathan Drexler, from the DHS Science and Technology Directorate Biochem Division.”

The proverbial light bulb popped over her head. “Dr. Jonathan Drexler” was the only name on the leaked SCORN document, the report on the weaponized strain of smallpox. And yet no one among her colleagues had ever met him and he’d never appeared on any of her Google searches or professional inquiries. Richard, of course, had the wittiest turn of phrase, regarding Drexler as “the s
asquatch of the scientific community.”

“Mrs. Tanner, we’re very sorry for your loss,” Drexler began. “I worked with your husband briefly and found him to be brilliant and personable.”

Jessica rolled her eyes.
Of course
Richard had worked with him.

“I wish we could have this conversation at a more appropriate time, but I’m afraid we’re in a dire rush. I’m going to read you the green code as per your security protocol—“

“You want Sorcerer,” she interrupted.

There was a moment of silence. They were probably contemplating their psychological scenarios, reviewing their strategies of interrogation. They hardly needed her; they could always storm the CDC’s computers or enlist her heads of research to piece together the data, but—

“We need to know if you have a solution for keeping the bacteria alive long enough for effective dispersion.”

Jessica was silent for a long moment. “
If
we have it?”

“Yes,” Drexler said.

Someday you’re going to have to believe in me, Jess.

Richard hadn’t given Sorcerer to the military. He hadn’t even told them they had it.

He hadn’t been using her. He must have…

He must have just foolishly loved her. The big arrogant idiot.

“Dr. Tanner, I’m sure you understand our predicament. We won’t be able to find a cure before—“

“You can have it,” she blurted. “It’s yours.”

Seven

Castle Valenkov

Transylvania

1:20 a.m. Eastern European Time

Lon had comprehensively studied Transylvania’s castles for profiles on his website, but none of them were quite like this one. Castle Valenkov had a distinct French Gothic influence, a more modern architecture than Bran or Poenari Castle, with far superior masonry. He couldn’t wait to cross-reference the stonework. And the deeds, the ownership—where could this place have come from? How could he have missed it in his studies? Sure, they were deep in the mountains, but in this day and age, could something this big go unnoticed?

The world only knows what the Internet tells them.
Those words were written by one Magister Lon Toller, and never were they more true. Lon smiled and shook his head.

They retraced their steps by flashlight and crossed through the grand hall, past the main entrance, to enter the eastern tower. The ground floor was dedicated to a hexagonal library lined with giraffe-high satinwood bookcases, each stuffed with rows and rows and rows of books. One fixture had been replaced with a glass case displaying special books and documents. Lon didn’t recognize anything, but he took note of a series of bamboo slats with handwritten Chinese text.