TWENTY-SEVEN

FLYING STRAPPED TO the belly of a vampire, it turns out, is even worse than flying jammed into economy class on a budget airline with a sweaty fat man next to you, a seat-kicking toddler behind you, a screaming baby across the aisle, and a I’ll-recline-my-seat-whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it jerk in front. No in-flight services were provided, not even a handful of tasteless peanuts, and restroom facilities were completely lacking.

Also, the environmental controls were sadly inadequate. The air was already chill. Whipping past my ears at however-many-miles-an-hour a vampire could fly (“An African or European vampire?” asked an English-accented voice in my head) made it considerably chillier. I was numb with cold and my teeth were chattering when we swooped down outside the gates of Zarozje, and it took considerable effort (and help from Vasili) to unhook myself.

Then, rubbing my arms vigorously, I walked up to where Father Thomas stood, staring at the village, frozen in a way I didn’t think had anything to do with the cold. “What’s wrong?” I said—and then I looked up the road.

Zarozje was dark. No torches flickered on the walls; no lamps burned. The ever-present moonlight provided more than enough illumination to reveal that the gate stood wide open. No sentinels guarded it. Nothing moved.

Father Thomas broke out of his momentary catatonia and ran toward the gate. I ran after him—I needed the warming-up, anyway—and was passed a moment later by the wolves of the pack. I glanced back. The vampires were following more sedately, clearly not understanding the priest’s urgency. Several of them carried dark bundles—it took me a moment to realize they were the robes of the werewolves.

At first, I didn’t understand Father Thomas’ urgency, either, but as we neared the open gates, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The village was utterly silent—and, so far as we could tell, utterly deserted. Piotr and Eric raced into it. Father Thomas slowed enough so that Karl and I caught up with him.

“Where have they gone?” he said, staring around in the moonlight. “What has happened to the people?”

“You said other villages have been mysteriously emptied of people,” I said.

“Yes, but I never thought . . . our walls were strong, our people prepared. How is this possible?” He broke into a run again, and I hurried after him, Karl a few steps behind.

We burst out of the narrow street into the courtyard in front of the church. Its doors, too, stood open, but the interior was utterly dark, not even the ever-burning lamp meant to indicate the presence of Christ still alight. Christ, it seemed, had left the building.

Father Thomas hurried up the steps, then turned right in the darkness. I heard him fumbling in the dark, then the sound of flint on steel. A lantern on a pedestal just inside the door glowed to life. He lifted it up and hurried down the aisle into the church’s cavernous interior.

I followed. He stopped at the transept and raised the lantern high to illuminate the apse. “The altar vessels are gone,” he said. “All of them.” He turned this way and that. “Just as in the other villages that have been emptied!”

I looked at Karl. “The third Shaper?”

“It seems likely,” he agreed.

“But how is such a thing possible?” Father Thomas cried. He came back to us. “Where are my people?”

“That,” Karl said, “is what we must discover.”

I heard claws on stone, and I quickly turned to see Piotr and Eric skidding to a halt. They shifted into boy-shape. Behind them, I saw the outlines of the vampires at the entrance to the church . . . but they did not enter. Oh, right, I thought, glancing up at the giant crucifix above the altar. Some parts of traditional lore remained intact.

“We have been over the entire village,” Eric said. “There is no one here. No people. No animals. Nothing but empty houses.”

“Stripped of anything portable,” Piotr added.

“Any signs of a struggle?” Father Thomas said.

Both boys shook their heads.

“The vampires have your cloaks,” I said. “Get dressed.”

They nodded, turned as one, and headed toward the door.

I looked at Father Thomas. “What do you suppose happened?”

“I do not know,” he said in an anguished voice. “As your companion said, that is what we must discover.” He looked up at the crucified Christ. “The people of this village are my flock,” he whispered. “It is my responsibility to protect them. But in their moment of need . . . I was absent.”

“You sought knowledge of events that might impact them,” Karl said. “You were absent because you wanted to protect them.”

“That was only an excuse,” Father Thomas said bitterly. “I accompanied you primarily because of selfish curiosity. I should have been here when . . .”

“If you had been here when whatever happened happened,” I said, “you might be as mysteriously missing as they are, and we wouldn’t even know—we’d have flown straight to Mother Church. Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Your words are kind, but they do nothing to assuage my guilt.”

“In my experience,” Karl said, “guilt can be a useful emotion.”

I shot him a startled glance.

He ignored it. “There is no reason for us to linger here,” he continued. “There is still time to fly to Mother Church before dawn, if the distances on the map were accurate, and if I have judged the flying speed of the vampires correctly. Shall we go?”

Now he did look at me, and I realized, with a slight start, that the question was addressed to me. This being-in-charge thing was going to take some getting used to.

“We should,” I said; and we did, leaving the cold, empty church as we had found it, except that Father Thomas relit the sanctuary lamp, so that, at least for a time, the metaphorical light of Christ’s presence once more glowed within his church.

The vampires waiting outside, all in winged form except Dracula, watched us emerge, their glowing red eyes even more demonical than usual, given the lack of light in the village other than the moon. “And were any insights to be found within this place?” Dracula said. Clearly, Pact or no Pact, backstory including a revelation from God to the vampires and werewolves or not, he still didn’t like churches or crosses or holy water. Probably not big on garlic toast, either, I thought.

If you ate enough garlic before you were attacked by a vampire, would it keep them from drinking your blood? I wondered then. Or would your garlicky sweat keep them from even coming close? I thought about asking Dracula but decided maybe this wasn’t the time.

“The altar vessels are missing,” Father Thomas said shortly. He had warmed to werewolves but still seemed to have as little use for Dracula as Dracula had for his church. I suppose Dracula being the one who had terrorized and captured him had something to do with that. “Whether that is the work of robbers—or whoever drove the people from the village—or whether the people took them, or hid them somewhere, we cannot tell.”

“This village’s people have presumably been taken where we intend to go, into the Sacred Vale,” I said.

“So . . .” I sighed. “Let’s get flying.” Could be worse, I reminded myself. Could be horses. Then I thought of something else. “But first . . .” I turned to the priest. “Father Thomas, would the church happen to have a store of warm clothing intended to help the poor this winter?”

He actually smiled a little. “As it happens, it does! This way.”

A few minutes later, the humans in our strange troupe were all more warmly attired. I still wore the knit top, black trousers, and leather vest I’d taken from the rogue’s cottage, but now I had a proper coat to go on top of it, a scarf, a fur hat, and some fur-lined mittens. The wind in my face remained icy cold as Vasili’s wings beat the air, lifting us up above the courtyard and church, but the scarf across my mouth and nose cut the worst of it, and in general, the flight we embarked on now, across the silvered fields and cottages and streams and ponds and woods of the valley floor, was far more comfortable than the one we’d taken to the village . . .

. . . right up until, with no warning at all, just as we reached the mouth of the Sacred Vale, still forty miles from Mother Church, Vasili screamed and, like a buckshot goose, tumbled from the sky into the forest below, taking me, likewise screaming, along with him.

---

Karl was not accustomed to feeling like baggage, or how he imagined baggage might feel, but there was a definite air of “Not Needed on the Voyage” about his journey strapped to the belly of a vampire—whose name he had not been given—first to the abandoned village, and then west across the valley toward Mother Church.

By giving Shawna the tools she needed to continue the quest even if something happened to him, he had abdicated his position as sole arbiter of what their next actions should be. It had been, and continued to be, a conscious decision. It had made no sense to leave the possibility of achieving their goal dependent upon his survival. Of course, he had every intention of surviving—and, if Shawna fell, he would have to find someone else to attempt to do what she had failed to do—but this way, if either of them died or was otherwise prevented from continuing, there was still some hope, however faint, of success.

All of that he knew, rationally. All of that he had accepted, rationally. Rationally, he was at peace with the decision.

Emotionally, however, it galled him to no longer be the one who decided what they should do, and where they should go, and who should or should not accompany them. It galled him to be reduced to nothing more than a clumsy bundle carried by a taciturn flying monster . . .

. . . and it terrified him when that taciturn flying monster suddenly fluttered from the sky like a moth caught in a rainstorm. He could do nothing but hang there, helpless, while his ride fought to gain control, which she did just a little too late, so that, although they did not crash into the trees below them with fatal impact, they still crashed into them with painful impact. Karl threw his hands in front of his face to spare his eyes as branches and twigs lashed against him as they crunched and slithered down to the forest floor. There, he unbuckled and almost leaped away from the vampire, who slumped and shifted into a naked woman trembling on the ground, pale in the moonlight flooding the clearing in which they had finally landed.

Around him, more vampires came crashing down through the trees. Their burdens freed themselves. The vampires all shifted into ordinary human form. Two of them threw up. Seraphina turned human, pulled her knees up to her breasts, and sat there, shivering, head down. Even Dracula looked ill, as he clung to a tree trunk for support; nor was he “clad” in the shifting veil of shadows in which he had appeared the first time Karl saw him, outside the castle.

The werewolves looked every bit as shaken. They huddled like the pack they were, Eric clinging to Jakob and Maigrat as though they were his long-dead parents.

Father Thomas limped over to Karl. “What happened?” he cried.

“I have no idea,” Karl said, staring around the clearing. “Where is Shawna?”

“She’s not . . . ?” Father Thomas peered around, as well.

The combination of moonlight and tree-cast shadows made it hard to be certain for several minutes, but in the end, Karl had to face the truth: Shawna and the vampire carrying her, Vasili, were both missing.

Piotr suddenly appeared from the edge of the clearing, supporting the vampire who had been carrying him, a dark-skinned woman whose name Karl had not learned. She sank down with her back to a tree, and Piotr, who alone among the werewolves seemed unaffected by whatever had just happened, came to join Karl and Thomas.

“We need to find Shawna,” Karl said to him. His thoughts of just a few minutes before, of having to somehow carry on if Shawna fell, came back to haunt him. He had not meant it as a prophecy. If he had been a Shaper, he would have worried he had somehow made happen the very thing he’d been thinking about.

Piotr just nodded once. He slipped off his robe, turned into a wolf, and loped away into the darkness.

Karl, with Father Thomas following, went to Dracula and Seraphina, who were side by side. “Do you know what happened?” he asked them both.

“A barrier,” Dracula snarled. “In the air. As though . . .”

“As though it were a wall of crucifixes, or a cascade of holy water,” Seraphina said, raising her head. “I cannot pass through it. None of us can pass through it.” She hugged her knees, shuddering. “I feel defiled.”

As I felt after you exerted your glamor against me, Karl thought, but did not say. “I would think it some influence of Mother Church, except the werewolves felt it, too,” he glanced in the direction of the huddled pack, “and they—or, at least, Eric, who clearly is as ill as you—had no trouble entering the church in Zarozje.” He frowned. “And Piotr seems entirely unaffected.”

He is half-Shaper, he did not add out loud. Perhaps that is why. But what does that say of this mysterious barrier?

That it is the work of the third Shaper, he answered himself. A protective barrier. The ordinary werewolves and vampires Shaped by the two queens cannot enter this side valley, where he holds sway.

That the rogues could enter it, he had no doubt at all.

Piotr suddenly returned, rising up into boy form. “I found her,” he panted. “She’s hurt.” And then he was a wolf again, and Karl and Father Thomas hurried after him into the darkness of the forest.