The Progeny (31 page)

Where are you?

Audra, don’t do this.

Please. I can’t lose you again.

Audra?

I love you.

His voice mails are the same.

Don’t do this. I love you. I can’t lose you.

But I am the one who cannot lose him.

And I have no intention of dying.

“Excuse me,” I say to the driver. “I need to make a stop.”

The next call I make is to Claudia.

38

T
he numbered gate on Csónak Street is painted like that of any residence below Castle Hill on the hilly Buda side of the Danube. It is by now nearly 11:00
P.M
. The street is quiet, only the occasional car or biker passing by.

I step into the light of the lone bulb positioned at the top of the old stone arch and glance straight up at the camera. Ignoring the intercom, I pull off my wig and shades.

A moment later, the gate audibly unlocks. I push it open, step into the tiny overgrown courtyard, and reach the front stoop just as the door opens.

A diminutive man in a sharp tuxedo opens the door and gestures me in. A mask with a curved, beaklike nose obscures the upper half of his face.

Of course.

He doesn’t speak as he escorts me through the foyer to the back of the house and down two flights of stairs to a small chamber that widens into a broad tunnel. Nor do I ask where he is taking me as I follow him through a series of corridors lit by a string of electric lights, past grottoes with multiple exits in the ancient subterranean maze.

By the time we arrive in a cavern shored up with ancient brick, I can hear the drum of that industrial drone. Can sense the Utod gathered in this underground hive.

Trilling laughter echoes from a neighboring tunnel that glows like a great yellow eye. A second later a woman trips into the cavern as a man catches up to her, gold rings gleaming on his fingers. She’s short-skirted Baroque, down to her creamy stockings and bow-tied boots. A second woman in a powdered wig stumbles out of the passage after them, skeletal teeth glowing faintly on red-rouged lips. There’s an air of richness about all three of them, as though
this
were the truest noble court, the one in Zagreb a thrift-store imitation. But they fall silent the moment they see me: unmasked in the cargo pants and shirt I’ve worn since yesterday. I feel the heat of their eyes on my back as the butler leads me away.

By the time we reach a corridor lined on either side by stone pillars topped with rough-hewn heads, I am certain I am in chambers as old as the earth itself.

The sentinels are replaced farther down with human versions robed in black. Their white masks hover in the shadows between electric torches, seem to float without bodies at all. At the end of the corridor: a carved double door attended by two robed figures, white faces turned toward me in frightening uniformity. It is the same featureless mask and robe Nikola wore to court in Zagreb, a thing of nightmares, multiplied as though by mirrors. They are so still I wonder if they even breathe . . . until I see the eyes of one follow me.

My skin crawls as I move past them.

Not all of them are Utod.

The white-faced forms swivel inward as I pass. The last two open the doors. I walk directly into the chamber—and the presence of Nikola.

He stops me, five steps in, with a lifted palm. And I see the round voice box set in the mouth of his vacant mask. But he is not alone.

A robed figure lights a candelabra on a narrow altar behind him along the wall. The massive top half of a face protrudes from the stone above it, the forehead obscured by a primitive crown. The carved lids of the eyes suggest a squint, but their stone sockets are empty.

If there are cameras in this court, they are not kept here; there is no hint of modernity in the room and, other than the altar, no furniture.

“Did you know . . .” the figure at the altar begins, startling me.

It is a woman.

She’s also common. She moves elegantly from one taper to the next, fingers encased in black gloves.

“That long before these caverns became shelters and prisons . . . they were a hunting ground? In a time when that was all there was. Hunters. Hunted.” She sets the last taper in its cradle and turns toward me as Nikola moves aside. “And now here we stand, millennia later, you and I.”

She’s not just common.

She’s a hunter.

Don’t trust Nikola. He’s in league with them.

Do the revelers in the tunnels outside have even the slightest idea? How much arrogance does it take for a
prince
to host hunters within his own court?

And how much deceit?

“I have what you want,” I say.

“I’m glad,” she says. “I’m so pleased you’re here, Audra.” Her English is perfect, with only the barest hint of an accent.

“I’m sorry, have we met?”

“Only in the broadest sense.” Her eyes lift. They are pale, nearly amber. “Though I feel I know so much about you. So very much, from so many sources, so few of them firsthand. Ivan, of course, most recently.”

I blink.

And then I realize that this can be only one person.

The Historian . . .

Is a chick.

My mind revolts. The Historian, a woman? What kind of irony—and twisted misogyny—is
that
?

“You’re surprised,” she says mildly.

“I thought you’d be taller.”

My thoughts, meanwhile, have careened from order. Thinking I’d be meeting Nikola, I was prepared to hand over a single item: half of the Scions’ map. The other half is with Piotrek, to be delivered to a location for pickup once Claudia reports I have arrived at a pub on Kazinczy Street alive. Preferably with some kind of guarantee that Luka will be safe wherever in the world we go.

That, at least, was the plan.

Which is all moot now.

Now any one of these robed figures could kill me—shoot, stab, strangle, garrote me on the spot—and retrieve the documents from my fading memory without ever seeing them in person.

I tamp down the rising tide of panic that threatens to take out my knees.

“I have part of what you want. I won’t receive the location of the other half until I arrive across the river, alive,” I say, making this up on the fly. “And just so you know, I haven’t seen the entire document. So I don’t know what’s on the rest.”

She steps closer. She’s a few inches taller than I am and peers down at me. “So audacious,” she inhales, as though with strange wonder. “So fearless. I see her there in your eyes.”

I recall the empty circle in the succession of Historians, drawn with crisp, new ink.

“You wouldn’t know since you came to this job
after
Nikola killed her,” I say, lips curled back from my teeth.

“Clever girl,” she says and holds out her hand.

I pull the folded paper from my pocket. Slap it into her palm.

She doesn’t even bother looking at it but walks directly to the candelabra and holds it over the nearest taper. I gasp and lunge for it, but Nikola is on me in an instant.

“Where’s Ana?” I hiss.

“I’m sure she’ll turn up. Somewhere,” he says, the electronic voice sinister. And even though I squeeze my eyes shut, I can’t block out the vision of her floating, like a pale Ophelia, in an eddy of the Danube.

I lash out with an elbow, crack him hard across the chin. His head snaps back, the mask slips up his face.

I falter at the sight of that nose, the unremarkable mouth. The line of that jaw.

I don’t need to see his eyes to recognize his face.

Goran. The monk from Cres island.

Ivan’s death. The monastery where the monks came from to retrieve whatever items Ivan left beneath the statue of Saint Anthony . . . the key to the box only I could open. Each thought slots into place in quick succession as Nikola pins me to the ground.

Never mind that he’s got sixty pounds on me; the breath got knocked from me before I found myself cheek to cheek with the floor.

“Is anything you said to me the truth?”
The story about my mother? The rain—her regret and her love for me?

But my mind has already raced both back and ahead at once. Is prepared to hate him for stripping the one memory anyone has ever given me of my mother. And to believe it anyway, even if he laughs in my face.

“Did you know,” he says hotly against my ear, “that these caves once served as the prison of Vlad Tepesh—from whom Ferenc, our early father, learned the art of impaling his enemies?”

“History lessons from you? That’s torture.”

He twists my arm so far around I actually wait to hear it snap. “History teaches us who we are.”

“If the past is all you are, you better hope to God you never lose your memory!”

“You may not understand this,” he hisses, “but what I do, I do for the protection of this court. This safe haven for those who come here to remember who they are.”

“They aren’t remembering who they are!” I shout. “They’re forgetting! Or did you not notice that everyone out there is wearing a mask?”

“They are alive!”

“Yes—walled up alive, just as she was!”

He lets go. I shove myself up. And then his fist lashes out so fast it sends me sprawling.

“You’re just like her,” he spits.

My ears are ringing, two torches blazing on the wall where there had been only one. I lift my hand to my mouth, tasting blood.

“Enough, Nikola. Leave us.”

I sense more than see Nikola hesitate before striding to the door. It falls heavily shut a second later.

I stagger to my feet with a rolling wave of nausea. Try to assess the figure less than eight feet away as she casually withdraws a pistol, clicks off the safety, and sets it on the altar. My eyes drop to the weapon.

“Let’s not be primitive,” she says. “Even if you reached this pistol before me, my successor is already appointed. You would die within seconds, your memory would be harvested, and my guards would no doubt feel compelled to take out half the population here tonight. Nikola, such that he is, would no doubt find a way to survive . . . and where would that leave us?”

“You just let a man hit me and you’re talking about primitive?”

“If you were a man, would it be more acceptable?”

Slowly, she comes into focus. The side of my face is already beginning to swell, and the outside of my eye with it.

“I brought you what you wanted,” I say.

“A chart with a few names? That is what Nikola wanted. I have given him something better in exchange for the honor of meeting you.”

“And what is that?”

“A limited truce.”

“He didn’t bring me here. I did.”

“Yes. You are a woman who brokers her own fate. I’ve heard about such a woman before. You are so like her.”

“Everybody’s heard about my mother.”

“I mean Bathory herself.”

She leans a hip against the altar, gestures in the direction of court. “Every woman out there is her, in some way or another. Some genius. Some beautiful. Some sensual. Some brash. Each of you endowed with one sin for which she was punished, like the shattered shards of a single stone.”

“Her sin was that she wouldn’t be bullied,” I say, working my jaw and thinking I might not vomit after all.

“She was impolitic at the least, a traitor at worst. And she was crushed by the same power with which she abused others. Her sins were plenty. But I haven’t come to debate with you. Several years ago, Nikola recovered some pages of your mother’s.”

“This is news to me.”

“I believe you have several more pages as of today. More accurate ones. Or the real ones. It’s very possible Nikola’s were planted to mislead, as we have not been able to make sense of them. But more likely they only made sense to her because of how her mind worked. Her Progeny mind . . . so like yours. She was rumored to be very close to finding something before she died. I would like you to find it.”

“Yes. The map. I just gave you half of it!”

“I believe there is something more.”

“The diary.”

“Yes. I believe she encoded its whereabouts in her notes and that only you will be able to make sense of them.”

“The diary’s a myth! The so-called diary is the map you just
burned
a part of!”

“Myths have their foundation in truth.”

I give a short, incredulous laugh. “You want me to find King Arthur’s sword while I’m at it? The Holy Grail?”

“I don’t care what you find, as long as you deliver me that.”

“I can’t do it,” I blurt.

“And yet you will,” she says. “Or Luka will die.”

“You don’t understand. Even if it’s real, the notes don’t make any sense!” I say, scrambling for purchase, my mind already rushing ahead—to China, Madagascar, anyplace on this planet we can run, fly, or swim, as we should have done a week ago. All of us.

“Look,” I say. “Nikola is Utod. He actually knew her. He took her life. Let him earn his truce with you. Send him on your quest. I’ll give up the notes . . . in exchange for Luka.”

She lowers her head, and for a moment I think she might actually be considering it. But then I see that she has pulled something from within her robes. A phone. Without a word, she places a call.

“Put him on, please,” she says.

The screen blooms to pixelated life. She turns it toward me as the camera pans to a bloodied Luka bound to a chair.

39

I
t happens in car accidents. Everything slows, seconds like delayed heartbeats. The closest object in hyperfocus . . . everything else fallen away.

Except this is no accident that can be averted with lightning-quick reflexes. My attention snaps to the gun in her other hand, but I have no control over what happens on the other end of the screen.

“Luka, please say hello,” she says.

Luka doesn’t move. For a horrible moment, I actually think he’s dead.

She lifts the gun and points it at me.

My own face stares back from the tiny screen in the corner.