“Very good. Manannan?” I ask.
“Aye,” he says. “I too agree to this.”
“Coriander, do ye witness this?”
“I do.”
“Well, then. If ye will excuse me, I have some more talking to do. I hope to have an answer for ye soon.”
I have plenty of hopes, in fact, as I leave that fen. So many that I think maybe this qualifies as an example of the Second Law of Owen: Sometimes, ye can clean up the shite.
i am so pumped full of adrenaline by the time we make it back to Kacper Glowa’s house that my hands are shaking as we enter. I had shifted to Flagstaff briefly to pick up the special stakes that Creidhne had given us to use in Rome, where merely breaking the skin anywhere would unbind the vampire in question. We had given them all to Owen for safekeeping and to help the werewolves defend against any vampires that might show up at the site of the grove. Owen and his grove weren’t there, so it was simple enough to sneak in, take a pair of stakes, and sneak out again. Now I have one in my left hand as I descend into the vampire bunker, and Flidais has another; I carry my staff, Scáthmhaide, in my right hand, and Flidais carries her bow. We each turn invisible by prior arrangement as we enter the bunker proper and pause to listen. Nothing.
We creep down to the library in silence and find it just as we left it. I’m tasked with finding the Scooby-Doo lever on the bookcase, and it takes me only moments because it’s painfully obvious: Pull on the Polish translation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and a click and scrape moves the bookcase aside. We’re confronted with a hallway paneled in hardwoods and a floor covered in a plush burgundy carpet. Neither of us moves; we wait.
“Hello?” A voice calls after a few moments, and then repeats it with a note of impatience. “Hello!”
We remain in place. Opening the door was our move; the next one was theirs.
A clear sigh of frustration meets our ears and then some mumbled curses as the unseen guard or receptionist comes to investigate. It’s a mustached man who carries himself like a fighter, but he’s not prepared for an invisible ambush. Flidais plunges a stake into his throat and he gurgles once before falling to his knees, clutching at the stake as blood wells around its circumference. He remains solid as he dies; a human thrall, then, and not a vampire. I figured there would be one or more guarding the place, and it’s difficult for me to summon any sympathy for them since they would not be thralls if they did not wish to prey on other humans.
We wait a few moments more and then Flidais hisses quietly at me to follow. I can’t see her, but once I’m in the hallway I see a desk with monitors behind it to the left. It’s the thrall’s security station. I go that way and run into Flidais by accident.
“I’m rubbish at this,” she murmurs to me in Old Irish. “How do we proceed?”
I duck around the desk and look at the banks of monitors and keyboards and so on. Everything’s labeled in Polish.
“A moment,” I say, trying to decipher what I’m looking at. There are views of multiple rooms, each filled with many men and women lounging in chairs and talking over tables, but there is no way to tell which are vampires, which are thralls, and which are intended to be food.
One room is stacked floor to ceiling with coffins on shelves—strange vampire bunk beds, I suppose, but obviously in a more secure location than the few coffins we found in the rest of the facility. There are two buttons with biometric pads underneath them: one marked LIBRARY, and one marked SANCTUM.
“We’re going to need the body over here,” I tell Flidais, and soon I can see the guard being hauled by an unseen force back to the station.
There are several buttons and switches under the general heading of ALARM, but I don’t know what they do. I’m afraid if I push any of them I’ll sound the alarm rather than disable it.
There’s nothing else around the station—no exits of any kind—so the door to the sanctum must lie at the opposite end of the hall.
“What do you want with him?” Flidais whispers.
“Lug him around here,” I say. She does so and I grab his right hand, extending the thumb toward the data pad marked SANCTUM.
I point down the hall with my free hand. “There should be a door down there somewhere. I’m going to open it from here and follow you in.”
“Understood,” Flidais says. “Wait for my signal.”
After a few moments I hear a hiss from down the hall. I punch the SANCTUM button then press the guard’s finger onto the data pad and am rewarded with a soft chime of mechanical satisfaction. There’s significant movement on one of the monitors, and I look up to see a black-and-white movie of vampires exploding as Flidais moves among them, alternately using her stake and her own unbindings to take them apart. I let the guard’s body go, collect my weapons, and vault over the station, heading for the SANCTUM door. It’s just sliding closed as I arrive and I squeak through, hoping there’s a way to open it from the inside.
The room is painted in violent splashes of red and littered with viscera. Much of it begins to bubble and smoke, decomposing rapidly in the absence of the magic that kept the vampire functioning as a biological entity. Flidais has already moved on to the next room, pressing her advantage of surprise, so I hurry to catch up.
There’s no scream quite like a vampire scream, unhinged from human restraints and allowed to be the thing it is—a sound of distilled rage, poured into the air and swirled in the ears like a fine vintage of malevolence. Of distinct benefit to me, however, is an overwhelming urge to kill the source upon hearing it.
So many screams. The vampires could hear us and smell us as we came into the room, but they couldn’t see us, and by the time they’d gotten some idea of our whereabouts we had already staked them or unbound them with our words.
I do keep count and try to stake them in nonfatal places in case they’re humans. That happens twice, where I sink my stake into the joint of their shoulder and chest and watch them cry out but remain whole. I kick them aside and tell them to stay out of the way.
Flidais has no such scruples. She kills indiscriminately, and we tear through the rooms together, leaving a red wake until we get to the last door, and it’s a locked, armored one. It must be the true sanctum, the room with all the coffins, protected like no other. There’s a bio-data pad on the side. I doubt the thrall’s thumbprint would open it. I dimly hear the metal ratchet of guns loading rounds into the chamber. There’s a different kind of fight on the other side of that door.
It’s just as well that we’re forced to slow down. We have them trapped anyway, so we can take time to ponder and take stock of what’s been done.
I count forty-five dead vampires, about seven human thralls or meals that Flidais killed, and the two other humans I wounded. I wish I’d been able to save more of them or ask Flidais to have a care; I didn’t think there would be so many. I see to the living, letting go of my invisibility and binding their pant legs together so they can’t move, before healing them as best I can, stopping the bleeding at least and binding the flesh back together.
One of them, a blond pale woman with ice in her eyes, is unsociable and taciturn and says nothing. The other, an athletic man with dark hair and cool brown skin, breathes heavily and looks at me with undisguised fear.
“You just…just destroyed them!” he says in Polish. “What are you?”
“I’m a Druid. Sorry about stabbing you. I was only here for the vampires. Hold still, I’m trying to help. I’m going to close that up.”
“But, like, I didn’t see you until now.”
“Nope, you sure didn’t. So are you a thrall or what?” He has bite marks on his neck, but that doesn’t signify his status.
“No, I’m just a bloodbag to them. They’ve been snacking on me for weeks, keeping me here with that hypnosis thing they do, whatever it is—”
“They call it charming.”
“Yeah, that. Thought I’d never get out of here. Did you say you were a Druid?”
“Yep.”
“I thought they just had sex rituals and burned people up in wicker men.”
I blink a couple of times. “I guess we’ve diversified a bit,” I say, after a pause.