Black Scorpion (33 page)

Vlad had no conception of who had infected him, or when exactly he realized he was sick. Feeling that way had been the norm for him for as long as he could remember. Trembling in the hall in the cold of winter and barely ever feeling warm, racked by chills even in the height of summer.

He was fifteen when he decided to mount an escape. If the attempt failed, he'd likely face death, but Vlad had come to prefer that over what barely passed as life. He hated waking up in the morning, because it meant the whole day was in front of him. Another day of pain and heartache with nothing to look forward to or look back upon. For years, the only thoughts that took his mind off that pain and heartache were of escape; first fantasizing about it, then planning. To make escape a reality, he needed to be strong. And to be strong he used the hate that had festered inside him for so long.

Hate for his keepers, hate for his abusers, hate for the world that allowed them all to be, but especially hate for the father who'd abandoned him and his mother and left them to this wretched life. And that hate made him more than strong; it spurred a vision of having enough power so no one would ever be able to hurt him again.

So he resolved to eat whatever was shoved in front of him and clean the plates left behind by others, too. His closet-size, windowless room was just long enough to allow him to do push-ups, so many he'd lose count both in the morning upon waking and then again at night before surrendering to blissful sleep in which there were dreams toward which to look forward.

At thirteen, he was still fantasizing. At fourteen, he began to plan. And at fifteen, Vlad celebrated his birthday in the surety that the time had come.

He was cursed by his dark, brooding looks. Vlad had inherited his mother's beauty except for the warm smile he so remembered when she'd assure him things were going to get better. Holding him in her lap while telling him tales of the way their life would be when his father finally came for them. Dracu believed her because that's what children do. Now as a young adult he resolved to make the life his mother envisioned for both of them a reality for at least himself. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror he expected a six-year-old's face to peer back, instead of the shaggy hair and big black eyes that made him the
groapă
's most treasured commodity.

Groapă
was Romanian for “pit.”

Men Dracu came to call “Watchers” oversaw life in the
groapă
and transported him to the men all around Ankara who paid for their time with him. Often the men lived in the kind of beautiful homes Dracu dreamed of having someday, the kind of palatial residences his mother had described for him while he snuggled against her in the cold. These Watchers could be alternately kind and cruel on a whim, as prone to offering a comforting touch as unleashing a small whip-like weapon at the slightest provocation.

One of them was coming at him with whip in hand the night Vlad had the chain binding his legs to a heavy wooden post already lashed around his wrist. So when the man drew close enough, Vlad looped it around his throat and pulled tight, strangling the life out of him. He kept pulling even as the man gurgled and thrashed and writhed.

Vlad could never remember a time where he felt more alive, letting the hatred spill out of him at long last. He wasn't powerless; he would never be a victim again. The feeling was almost euphoric, so much so that he longed to kill again almost immediately because nothing had made him feel more vital; he could feel the power it imbued and wanted more. Even as he realized what he'd been thinking of, picturing, as he nearly severed the Watcher's head from his body: His father, the man he'd never met, the man who was no more than a blurry shape in a newspaper photo tacked to a wall that was lost the night they came for him.

After his escape, Vlad walked for what felt like days straight, afraid at every turn others would find and punish him for what he'd done. He found himself in the center of Ankara, begging for food and drinking water out of a hose used to clean the sidewalks.

One night he tucked himself into an alley to sleep only to be awoken with a start by a hand jostling his shoulder.

“Hey, you lost or something?”

Vlad's eyes sharpened to the sight of a ravishingly beautiful Slavic girl, sixteen or maybe seventeen, standing over him wearing ill-fitting clothes that looked like a boy's.

“Something,” Vlad told her.

“You a gypsy?”

“No.”

“I am a gypsy. You have a place to go?”

She spoke a different dialect of Romanian, but Vlad understood it well enough. Hearing it made him think of home, before he and his mother had embarked on their ill-fated journey through Albania to reach Sicily and somehow find his father.

“No,” he told her.

“Then why you come here?”

“Because this is where I ended up.”

“Me, too.”

Their eyes met and Vlad saw a warmth lurking in hers he hadn't recognized in a very long time. He watched her reaching down to take his hand, almost jerking it away at the last from being detached for so long from anything resembling genuine emotion.

“Come,” the girl said, “I show you something.”

Her name was Dorina but she asked Vlad to call her Dori. For the next few hours, he watched her flash her smile, looking beautiful and innocent, as she asked a series of men for directions while picking their pockets. Her smile, friendliness, and looks kept the men's eyes upon her, distracting them from the fact that their wallets were now missing. Strength in subtlety, something Vlad had never considered before. It made him smile until he remembered the way other men's eyes had looked upon him.

“How old are you?” he asked her. “I'm fifteen.”

“That's what I am.”

“And if I'd said sixteen?”

“Then I would've been that instead.”

Dori introduced him to a band of lost children like them who'd banded together as a gang that lived out of the shell of an apartment building in a run-down neighborhood. When he looked back on those times, Vlad remembered Dori above all else, including how she had helped him when she caught him trembling with chills one steamy night.

“You are very sick,” she said, touching his forehead.

“How did you … know?” he asked, not bothering to deny it.

“I have a gift,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes anymore. “Or maybe a curse. I can see things,
feel
things. In my village they thought I was a witch and made me leave—that's how I came to be here. But someday I will return and make them pay.”

“I'll help you.”

Dori met his eyes again. “You have your own problems to deal with. Give me your hand.”

But he pulled it away when she tried to reach for it. “Why?”

“So I can read your palm and tell your future.”

“I don't believe in such things,” Vlad said, giving his hand to her anyway.

“Fortune telling?”

“The future.”

She traced it with a finger, the way a blind person reads Braille.

“Much
sânge
has brought you here,” Dori told him, still tracing. “Both your blood and the blood you have spilled.” Her finger stopped, began to tremble, her eyes filling with fear. “You have killed, haven't you?”

“Is that why you're scared of me all of a sudden?”

“What frightens me is what you may yet do, not what you've already done.”

“I killed because I had no choice. But only one man.”

“So far,” Dori told him. “There has been much death in your past. There will be far more of it in your future.”

“Then use your gift. Tell me what you see.”

Dori seemed as if she no longer wanted to look, but continued tracing his palm anyway. “They kept you prisoner. They caused you pain—no, they brought you
durere
.” Finally her eyes met his again, his hand still locked in her grasp. “This man you killed deserved to die. You should not feel
vinovat
.”

“I don't feel guilty at all.”

“Yes, Vlad, you do. But not for this—for not being able to save someone close to you. Your mother, wasn't it? You felt she deserved better than the life she had. You hated what she had to become in order to survive.” Dori had looked up at him from his palm here. “Your hate dominates you.”

“It's the only thing that makes me feel alive,” he managed, trying to push back the tears welling in his eyes.

“But it's dangerous to hate so much because you can end up hating yourself.”

“Maybe I already do.”

Dori went back to studying his palm. “I thought it was the man who killed your mother that you're after. But now I'm not so sure.”

“Because it is another man,” Vlad said. “A man I hate even more.”

Dori kept tracing his palm, then stopped suddenly.

“What is it?” he asked her. “Will I find this man? Tell me what you see.”

Dori's eyes had turned suddenly glassy as if seeing nothing at all.

“Your father, Vlad,” she said finally.

“What about him?” he said, something icy grabbing his insides. “What do you see?”

“Only that he will yet be a part of your life.”

“How? Tell me how! Please!”

“I don't know.” Dori's eyes cleared. “The vision is gone. Slipped away because it too is incomplete, unfinished, just like your own life. The path you choose from this point is yours.”

“Is it?”

“Nothing is set. But…”

“But
what
?”

She let go of his hand and hugged him to her. “You are very sick, Vlad, and now I understand.”

He eased her away so he could meet her eyes. “Tell me. Say it.”

She swallowed hard. “I was brought to you to save your life.”

Dracu fought to stifle another of the coughing fits that had plagued him lately, but failed. “Maybe it's too late.”

“It's not.”

“You can't know that.”

“I can,” Dori said, and lifted his palm so it was facing him instead of her. “Your lifeline runs strong, but is broken. The break here,” she continued, touching a thin crevice in his flesh, “represents today. I will see that you survive it. See that you live many more years.”

“Maybe I'm not worth the effort.”

She took him by the shoulders. “You have the potential to be a great man who can do great things … or terrible things.”

“Are you still telling me my future?”

“I told you, the future's not set. And what I just said is what I feel, not what I saw. But I did see something else. No one is going to be able to stop you. You are going to be a very powerful and dangerous man.”

“And that's why you're so scared?”

“I'm scared because of how you are to become that way. There is a … monster in your future. But he takes your innocence even now.”

“Am I to kill him? Is he going to kill me?”

“Neither,” Dori said, looking away as if suddenly frightened by him, “because the monster is in you.”

 

SEVENTY-FIVE

S
ARDINIA

“Vlad?” Aldridge Sterling prodded from his yacht, when Dracu stopped on the other end of the line.

“I was just thinking,” he mused over the phone, jolted from his thoughts back to the present.

“Of what?”

“Dori was the first and only girl I ever cared about. She realized I was sick, so sick that traditional medicine wouldn't be able to save me. So she brought me to a gypsy
drabarni
healer who'd been ostracized because of the communists, too. It was this
drabarni
, an old woman, who introduced me to the scorpions. Years before modern medicine realized their venom had chemotherapeutic capabilities, gypsies had been using scorpions to treat some of the most serious diseases. This
drabarni
, an obese woman who smelled of garlic, warned me the odds were good the first sting would kill me. But if I could survive the pain, then the venom pulsing through my veins would work better than any
drab
or medicine, keeping the
caeninaflipen
, as she called the disease, at bay.”

“Is there a point somewhere in this story?”

“Yes, but if you interrupt me again I'll show you pain worse than any I ever felt.” Dracu waited for a response, continuing when none came. “Dori was the first girl I ever slept with,” Dracu continued. “She's the one I always picture, always remember, when I'm with all the others that have come since. She told my fortune once, told me someday I'd be a very powerful but dangerous man.”

“And so you are.”

“But she said I have a monster within me I might not be able to control. I've managed to prove her wrong.”

“Because you're not a monster?”

“No, because I've managed to control it. That's why I sent you this gift, to remind you how fleeting that control can be should you lose my trust.”

And, true to Dracu's word, Sterling noticed a launch approaching. The launch slowed its speed as it neared the
Big Whale
, Sterling spotting a luscious figure clinging to the railing, her blond hair splayed about by the wind.

“Your gift just arrived,” he said into the phone.

“A token of appreciation for handling the financial end of things so well,” Dracu said, before his tone sharpened again. “Just don't betray me, Aldridge, or the next gift you receive from me won't be nearly as pleasant.”

 

SEVENTY-SIX

C
ALTAGIRONE,
S
ICILY

Michael walked the grounds of the farm where he'd been born in a state that felt like the first moments of consciousness upon being jarred awake. He had to keep reminding himself where he was, even though it was a place deeply imbedded in his memory. But now all of those memories had turned suspect, thrown into question by the shattering truth about his father, Vito Nunziato.