Читать книгу Bloody Good - Georgia Evans - Страница 9

Adlerroost, Bavaria

Bela Mestan had expected them sooner. It was several hours since the vampires’ departure. This time, they brought a third man with them. He smelled of danger and other people’s pain and her heart caught as she feared he was here to kill her.

They did not introduce him; she expected that. She did not even know their names. She’d been instructed to address them as Zuerst and Zweiten, first and second. Was this one Dritten?

“She will tell us what we want to know,” Zuerst said to the nameless man. “Go ahead,” he told her. “What happened?”

She shuddered and he smiled. They both knew the pain her connection with the vampires caused. It amused them.

“They left the plane,” she replied.

“And?” Zweiten asked. “Where are they now?”

She took a deep breath to win a little time to choose her words. They would not be pleased at what happened. “Eiche, Bloch, and Weiss landed safely and dispersed to their contacts.” The three men stared at her, waiting for the rest. “Schmidt was injured.”

“Badly?” Zweiten asked.

“How is this possible?” Dritten snapped at the other two.

Bela took a brief pleasure in seeing them both quail under Dritten’s fury. “He recovered,” she said, keeping her voice level. “He fell onto a tree and the wood poisoned him. He was rescued and found blood.”

Her own chilled at Zweiten’s laugh. “So some peasant found him and suffered in the cause. Good!”

His amusement froze at a glance from Dritten. This man must be the one who drove the entire mission. “Did he kill?” he asked Bela.

“I felt him absorb the life,” she replied. “He was weakened. Without it, he might have expired.” Would that have mattered? There were three others and vampires were next to indestructible. If they avoided falling on trees.

“He regained his strength?” Dritten asked.

“He was restored and is moving.”

“In what direction?”

Would they ever give her peace? She knew the answer to that. She was their tool. Her compliance the price of her family’s lives. She looked Zuerst in the eye, knowing it unnerved him. “That I cannot tell. He is not with any of the others.”

“Is he approaching them?”

“I will know when he gets near them.”

That satisfied them. Until tomorrow, or maybe later that night, when they might visit her again. She was at their beck and call and they all recognized that.

Alone in her cell, Bela looked out of the window toward the mountains on the horizon. Maybe the vampires would prevail. They could fly, had no need to respect frontiers, and guns or weapons could not harm them permanently. But had the foul Germans taken on monsters who would destroy them in return? And how had mere mortals coerced vampires to their cause? Using the same threats they’d used on her? Except fairies were far more likely to succumb to the rigors of the camps than vampires. Maybe the vampires had joined of their own volition, to thrive on the carnage and the killing.

Bela could only guess. Just as she could only guess at the safety or otherwise of her kindred. Who knew if any survived? None possessed her strength of telepathic powers. Maybe they were all dead, but she dare not risk refusing to collaborate, just in case the Germans kept their word and did spare her family.

But the price came hard. Linking with vampires. The filthy undead. Foul was not the word for the dark creatures who’d ripped her skin with their fangs and sucked her blood as she shuddered and struggled under them.