Stiletto (33 page)

“No. In fact, she said all the fighting had proven very inconvenient for her,” said Siegbert. “She complained that she couldn’t transport me back to her place. Apparently she has some sort of juicing press there.” He shuddered.

“Who else has she taken?” asked Marcel.

“I don’t know,” said Siegbert. “She said that there had been several, but she didn’t say how many exactly.” Claudette knew only who the first four victims were. After that, all the Parisian Grafters had tried to barricade themselves in. To Marcel it seemed like the height of foolishness, but his relatives were scholars and scientists, not soldiers. They’d been conditioned by the tales of the Checquy always to retreat and hide from threats.

Unspoken between the brothers was the possibility that their parents had been consumed by the woman.

“We’ll need to ascertain the status of all Broederschap members in Paris,” said Marcel.

“You may need to do that by yourself,” said Claudette from the floor, where she was propped up on cushions and peering carefully into the neck of the woman’s corpse. “Whatever that woman did to us, it’s been very bad for all our implants. I think some of the materials in my joints have actually dissolved, and a lot of my internal connections have been severed.” She held up one of the tendrils that drooped lifelessly from her shoulder blades. “We’re going to have to do some repair work, and it will take several days.” Marcel glanced questioningly toward his brother and then back to her, and she shrugged sadly.

I don’t know if we can save him,
she didn’t say.

And so, as morning dawned, Marcel had to venture out by himself into a strangely subdued Paris. There was a tension in the air, and people did not meet each other’s eyes. It was not the gay metropolis he had grown up in. Hitler’s soldiers moved through the city and did not hesitate to question any man of military bearing. Marcel hurried through the streets and was prompt in providing his (forged) identity card when stopped. Tucked into the small of his back were two pistols, one of them carrying normal ammunition, the other with the modified rounds he’d been given.

Against his first impulse, he hadn’t gone straight to his parents’ house, which was the farthest from Siegbert’s, across the Seine. Instead, he was methodical, plotting out routes that would take him to as many homes as possible each day while still permitting him to return to Siegbert’s house before night fell. In addition, he was responsible for obtaining food and supplies for his crippled companions.

The first few houses yielded heartbreaking results. In three of them, Marcel found the drained corpses of his relations. A fourth was empty, although from the wrecked furniture and punched-in doors, it was apparent that the three Grafter residents had been taken by the screaming woman. The fifth house, however, held Richard van Eijden, a distant cousin who had replied to Marcel’s knocking with some shouted threats and a spray of some pungent spores under the door. It had taken Marcel several minutes to persuade Richard who he was, and all the while his skin had been itching madly from the spores. Eventually, however, he was permitted inside and given the antidote before his skin peeled off.

Richard’s relief at seeing Marcel and hearing about the demise of the screaming woman was palpable. When he learned that they would be evacuating to Belgium, he was ecstatic. Upon arriving at Siegbert’s house, he immediately set to work on the injured.

Marcel continued to visit Grafter houses but found only two more survivors: Alphonse, a master, and his apprentice, Pauline. They were both so caught up in their studies that they had barely realized there was a war on, let alone that some supernatural entity had been stalking them. They acceded, with very poor grace, to Marcel’s command that they accompany him back to Siegbert’s but insisted on bringing several suitcases of documents and samples.

“So, to recap, we have ten members of the Broederschap horribly dead, yes?” said Alphonse. All the Grafters had gathered in the library of Siegbert’s house. Those who had been struck down by the woman’s voice were propped up on couches or lying flat on the floor. Upon hearing no disagreements, Alphonse made a little note in a little notebook. “And we have two whose horrific deaths have yet to be established.” He looked up to see everyone else staring at him. “What?”

“Ahem, those two unestablished deaths —” began Claudette.

“
Horrific
deaths,” interjected Alphonse helpfully.

“Thank you,” said Claudette. “You are talking about the parents of Siegbert and Marcel, and Siegbert and Marcel are sitting right here in the room with you.”

“...Yes?”

“Never mind,” said Marcel. It was clear that Alphonse, while possessing an unparalleled understanding of biochemical interactions, was useless when it came to the human kind.

“I have examined Claudette, Hans, Henk, and Siegbert,” said Richard to Marcel. “We cannot repair them without access to significant facilities and more expertise. I will need help, from either your parents or our brethren in the north.”

“I’ll go to the house tomorrow morning,” said Marcel. It had been the sensible thing to leave them until last, but in his heart, he was afraid to go, afraid of having his fears confirmed. In the past few days, a dozen different scenarios had floated through his imagination. The memories of the drained bodies that he had found in those other houses were always in his mind. He envisioned his parents sprawled lifeless on the floor of their parlor. At night, he had been tortured by nightmares of the house in flames or demolished. In his sleep, he had walked through the ruins, and in every room, his parents had lain dead.

It was raining on the morning that he went to his parents’ home. He had an umbrella, but his legs were soaked from the knees down by the time he reached the house. Still, he stood across the street for several minutes, staring through the downpour at the place where he’d grown up. No lights were on that he could see, no sign of anyone inside.

I’ve gone into battle,
he told himself.
I’ve watched my friends die around me. I’ve fought and killed a monster. It seems a trifle ridiculous that I should be afraid of knocking on my own front door.

Eventually he mustered up the courage and crossed the road, the wind buffeting his umbrella.

Little seemed to have changed in the years since he’d left. Pots of flowers stood by the door. They were flourishing, but that meant nothing. Thanks to his father’s tinkering, those plants could flourish without human care. They could probably flourish on the surface of the moon. He rang the doorbell several times, but there was no answer.

That doesn’t confirm anything,
he told himself.
They could be in hiding, afraid to answer the door because of that screaming woman.
He moved around to the back of the house and retrieved a hidden door key from within a beehive whose occupants had been engineered by his parents to be deadly poisonous but also to recognize the scent of their family members. But as Marcel climbed the stairs, something caught his eye, and a feeling of doom swept through him. The door was ajar, and, judging by the leaves and dirt that had blown inside, it had been that way for at least several days.

At that moment, Marcel knew in his heart that his parents were dead. Whether they had been killed by the screaming woman or something else, they were gone. Walking into the house would only bring him pain. But he had to do it. The house was not only their home; it contained a myriad of samples and technology. His parents’ work. It couldn’t be left here to be found by anyone, least of all the occupying forces, who had been undertaking some extremely thorough investigations of people’s households.

Holding both guns, Marcel checked each room. Outside, the growing storm battered against the windows. All through the house, there were signs that preparations had been made. The storage bins and cold containers of his parents’ laboratories did not contain samples, constructs, or strange animals. Their tools had been carefully sterilized. Many documents and books were missing, and, given the copious amount of ash and fragments in the fireplaces, they would never be found. Of his parents’ portfolios and journals, there was no trace. The house had been methodically stripped of any Broederschap materials. Oddly, much artwork was missing from the walls, and quite a few pieces of the more valuable furniture had gone. Marcel hoped this did not mean that the authorities had taken his parents and their work.

But surely the Nazis would have emptied the house completely,
he thought.
And there would be soldiers or officials billeted here.
He looked through the bedrooms and saw that all the beds had been stripped. He paused in his old room and retrieved a few mementos of his childhood. There was no sign, however, of his parents.

He finally found them in the rooftop greenhouse, sitting together on a bench, surrounded by flowers that had clustered around them. Except for their white skin, they could have been asleep. Corruption did not touch them. Possibly it was a quirk of their genetics, but he suspected that his mother had arranged it that way. She would never have wanted to rot, and his father would have indulged her fancy. The air was lightly touched with the perfume of dried flowers, and when Marcel trailed his hands along the blossoms, they crumbled away, as if they had been dead and preserved for years.

Marcel walked toward his parents, his eyes wet. He pressed his arm to his face, blotting away the tears, and then drank in the portrait of them both. When he reached out to touch his father’s shoulder, both Arjan and Hendrika fell away to powder, as if they were themselves dried flowers.

He sat for a while and remembered his life in that place. Then he got up and opened the doors at either end of the greenhouse. The wind swept through. It picked up the dust and the flakes of all the plants and whipped them away, up into the skies of Paris.

Good-bye.

As he left the house, he noticed a troop of soldiers down the street. They were going from door to door and did not seem overly concerned with courtesy. He sighed and turned his back on them.

*

Getting away from Paris proved even more difficult than getting there. Whereas before they had been three warriors well equipped for combat and stealth, they were now a party consisting of one warrior who had an unorthodox gun, three alchemists whose implants tended toward the scholarly, and four horribly crippled invalids. In addition, they were transporting various documents, equipment, and samples that could not be easily replaced or safely destroyed. Vans, trucks, and automobiles were still in short supply, and they again ended up in a wagon (this one stolen) pulled by a horse (this one legally purchased). Now they were moving against the flow of refugees, which made them stick out even more. As a result, they were obliged to travel on meandering back lanes and often went across the countryside — a strategy that kept them out of sight of soldiers but slowed them considerably.

Partway through the journey, they discovered that the damage that the screaming woman’s voice had done to Henk’s, Hans’s, Siegbert’s, and Claudette’s insides had been far greater than anyone had realized. If Richard and the other two Grafters had not been with them to administer first aid, it was highly doubtful that any of them would have survived the first two days of the journey. The woman’s cry had attacked their Broederschap implants like a virus, shredding the patterns within, leaving them in a state of ongoing liquefaction.

To Marcel’s despair, Siegbert was in especially bad shape. The double exposure to the woman’s scream had increased the effect, and Marcel could actually see his brother wasting away in front of him. Every hour melted flesh off his bones. His breath rasped painfully in his lungs and throat.

“He’s dying,” Marcel said to his wife.

“I’m afraid he’s not the only one,
beertje,
” she said, and she patted him weakly on the cheek. “Unless we do something, the four of us won’t make it to the border. But he won’t survive another twelve hours without help.”

And so that night, in a field near Amiens, the hale Grafters were driven to crack open their comrades’ bodies and set about some frantic jury-rigging. They dealt with the comparatively easy ones first. Henk and Hans submitted to their operations with stoic silence. Claudette provided testy instructions even as they opened up her chest. All three of them seemed a trifle better after their procedures, although none of them could yet sit up.

Then Siegbert was laid down on a bed of dingy straw. Richard confided to Marcel that his twin was too weak to receive any form of painkillers, but it hardly mattered. Siegbert had passed into a delirium and had no idea where he was. His fingers trembled, and his breath was shallow, but other than that, he lay still.

“I don’t know what I can do for him,” Richard confessed.

“Just try,” said Marcel. “Please.”

Several desperate hours ensued. They were hardly the best conditions in which to undertake emergency surgery. The cows whose field the Grafters were occupying had moved off to a distant corner, but a fox watched the operation from the hedge. Marcel held his twin’s hand and prayed that the animal hadn’t been drawn by the smell of carrion. Rain fell, trickling into the incision in the patient’s belly. Pauline, the apprentice, hurried to the containers they had brought with them and fetched new organs that dripped with preservatives and oils. Clipped instructions passed back and forth between the two master Grafters, and their hands and tools moved frantically.

Finally, despite their best efforts, Siegbert’s hand went limp in Marcel’s and a last, labored breath eased from his mouth. They were all silent, and Richard drew his hands out of the abdomen.

“We can’t leave his body here,” said Richard finally.

“I know,” said Marcel softly as he closed his twin’s eyes and then closed his own.

*

“I’m sorry,” said Felicity, and Marcel opened his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said. “It was very difficult at the time.”

“What did you do after that?” she asked.