Chapter 17 - Dani and Celeste
"I have to complain about the behaviour of that Rah girl," Grievous said angrily at the next meeting Terror called her "lieutenants" (as Sébastien had started to refer to himself, Ruthven, Carmilla, Orlok, Nightmare and Grievous) to. "She attacked me and gave me these," and he pointed to the three long marks across his face.
"Serves you right," Sébastien said under his breath.
"Did you say something, Nicolae?" Terror asked, looking at him.
"No."
"Hmm." She wasn't convinced, but turned back to her son. "Why? Did you do something to annoy her or was it completely unprovoked?"
"I did nothing to her."
Orlok raised an eyebrow. "Then you did something to someone else, is that it?"
Grievous didn't answer. That was a very good answer.
"I see," Terror said dryly. "I believe I'll ask Miss Rah for her version of events later, and then I'll ask whoever witnessed it. By the way, has there been any sign of the escaped werewolf?"
Moon (how unimaginative) LaMorgan, one of the werewolves they'd captured, had broken her chains somehow and escaped the day before. How was anyone's guess.
"Nothing yet," Orlok said. "She's almost certainly dead."
~~~~
Meanwhile, where was Dani? Running through the corridors as quietly as she could, trying to find a way out and getting well and truly lost. Several times she heard someone coming towards her, and had to find somewhere to hide (which usually involved racing back along the corridor she'd just come down and diving behind a curtain).
Finally, she found herself on the ground floor. There were more people around than before, and she was seen more than once. The first time, she almost had a heart attack. But the person who'd seen her simply walked past her without a second glance.
They must think I'm allowed to wander around, she realised after the third time this happened.
What they actually thought was that she was the child of one of the humans (Terror only let a select few know the details of most of her plans, and humans were rarely included), but she had no way of knowing this.
After forty minutes of wandering around, Dani came to the conclusion that there was no easy way out. This place was a mansion, and it was built in a kind of semi-circle enclosing the courtyard, with just a few gaps for other buildings or gates. Every time she went outside she could be seen from at least a dozen windows, so it would be very difficult to get away unseen.
Nor would it be easy to get out the gates - she had watched people coming and going from a window in a room filled with boxes of something, and saw at once that they had to stop and key something (probably a password) into a keyboard at the side of the gates before they were allowed to leave. There was no way out for her that way.
This place is more like a prison than a mansion, she thought gloomily.
She left the storeroom and wandered aimlessly around the place, taking care to never leave the floor she was on. It was unlikely any way of escape would present itself, but she had to be ready, just in case.
Dani was so absorbed in thinking of how the characters in the books she'd read had escaped from places they were held prisoner that she never noticed the passage she was walking along was heading downward. She didn't even notice that there were no longer any windows, and the light was provided by overhead lamps.
"Owww!"
She hadn't bothered to look in front of her, and had fallen down a flight of stairs. Idiot.
The girl gritted her teeth and got up. Her ankle hurt slightly, but she could still walk. So she got up and continued walking.
I must be heading towards the basement. Maybe there'll be a way out there. She brightened at this thought. And I'll head for the nearest town, and... What if there isn't a town near? She hadn't thought of that. What if she was in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilisation?
I'm being silly, she told herself firmly after thinking this through. There are a lot of people here, aren't there? So obviously, they have to buy food somewhere. So there must be a town - Oh, my god!
The passage, which up till now had been rather narrow, had widened out into a chamber of sorts. And it was filled with the sort of thing you'd see in a museum specialising in the Spanish Inquisition!
She only just suppressed a shriek at this discovery, and spun round, meaning to run back up the passage she'd come down. Unfortunately for her, she had walked quite far into the chamber, and there were two passages, right beside each other, behind her; the one she'd come down, and another one, leading further downwards. In her hurry, she took the one leading down.
Dani soon realised her mistake and stopped, unsure of what to do. There was almost certainly no way out down here. There was certainly no way out the way she'd come. So she might as well keep going.
~~~~
Dani had been away for three hours, and so far the only people to notice her absense were Abihira and Sébastien, who returned to their room (they were now sharing a bed as well as a room, so the girl could have Dracula's bed) to find her gone.
"I told her to stay here!" Abihira said angrily in Vampiruan.
"Maybe Terror sent for her," Sébastien said, as carelessly as he could.
Whether he admitted it or not, he was worried about the girl. Not just because of Grievous, but because... He had first noticed it on the night Orlok had brought her here, and despite his efforts to ignore it, he noticed it to varying degrees every other time he'd seen her, depending on the light.
There was no denying it; Miss Tamari looked like Vlad's old girlfriend. Not exactly like her, of course, but enough for it to be unnerving when Sébastien looked at her. If Vlad ever saw her, he'd probably think he was seeing a ghost.
~~~~
Celeste had been fading in and out of consciousness for what felt like an eternity. When she was conscious, she was in a kind of daze and hardly aware of her surroundings. So perhaps it was no wonder that she thought she was dreaming when she heard someone speaking to her in a very worried voice and had a vague idea of someone kneeling in front of her.
"Celeste!"
Wait... that was... definitely... someone calling my name... But the vampires... never use my name...
She opened her eyes and stared at whoever was in the cell with her. It took her eyes several moments to adjust, and when they did she didn't believe them. She was dreaming. That must be it. She was dreaming.
"Celeste?" the person in front of her asked uneasily. "Is that really you?"
"...Dani?" she said - or tried to; it came out as a kind of gasp. "Are you a dream?"
She wouldn't be surprised if it was; she was ill, and even though she was a werewolf and could heal easily from things that would be fatal to a human, she needed proper care (and food), which was rather hard to find here.
"No, I'm not a dream," Dani said. "But what have they done to you?"
Celeste sat up as best she could, still hardly able to believe what was happening.
"Not much. They've put me in chains that'll give me an electric shock if I try to escape, and they've hardly fed me, but otherwise I haven't been harmed. I think I've caught a cold, though. But how the hell are you even here?"
"Someone calling themselves Lady Terror De Mon brought me here," the human girl said as casually as she could. "I wandered down here trying to find a way out."
Celeste looked at her sharply. The sudden appearance of her school friend had startled her out of the daze she'd been in for days. She was still slightly disorientated, but she could tell that there was more to the story than Dani was telling her. Now that her mind was clearer, she could remember that Carmilla had said something about Terror kidnapping her friend, so she had some idea of why.
But now wasn't the time to ask about what had really happened. They had to get out of here, find her mother (if she was still alive) and get back to Northern Ireland somehow.
She was used to changing into a werewolf every full moon, and she knew from experience that it would be a full moon very soon. Probably tomorrow night. The vampires hadn't bothered giving her the strange drink that stopped her turning for quite a while; maybe they thought she was too weak to be much of a threat. But if she turned, it would mean trouble. Serious trouble.
First things first, she decided. We have to get out of here, so I'll have to get these bloody chains off.
"Do you see that rusty knife on the shelf over there?" Celeste asked the younger girl, nodding in the direction of what she meant.
"Yes."
"I think you could undo the lock on this thing with it. By the way, how did you unlock the door?"
"It was open when I came," Dani explained as she went to fetch the knife. "I saw someone in here and came in to see if I could help them. I didn't know it was you until I was next to you."
Of course, how could she have forgotten? The vampires had taken to leaving the door open, tormenting the chained werewolf with how easy it would be to escape... if she could get rid of her chains.
~~~~
Jackson set the phone down with a grim smile and turned to Lacey and Denzel. "I've contacted InGEN 31 in Budaest and InGEN 20 in Bucharest. They've alerted all the InGEN bases across Hungary and Romania. I think it's safe to say that Dani - or at least someone connected with her kidnapping - will soon be found."
"Why are you so sure anything could be found in Romania?" Denzel asked, frowning. "Hungary stands to reason, as that's where Autumn says Jack thinks the location is, but Romania?"
"One word: Transylvania. This may come as a shock to you, but Dracula was based on real events. How much was fact and how much was fiction is more than I can tell, especially over a hundred years after it happened, but there's a good possibility that some relative of the original Dracula - or maybe the original one himself; I don't know - is still alive and living in Transylvania. Terror will almost certainly have at least tried to get him to help her."
Denzel tried to work this out in his mind, but soon gave it up. "All I can say is, I hope you're right, sir." He brightened for a moment. "Maybe they'll find Private LaMorgan and her daughter there, too."
Jackson and Lacey exchanged glances. Neither said anything, but they sincerely doubted Moon or Celeste would be alive after all this time.
~~~~
It took a lot of work, but an hour and twelve minutes, three cut fingers (the knife had slipped several times, and Dani's fingers had an annoying tendency to be in the way when it did), and a great deal of exasperation later, Celeste's idea worked and the lock on the chains opened.
"Finally!" the werewolf said emphatically, trying to stand and almost falling over.
Dani grabbed her arm and helped her up. "Might not be a good idea to walk just yet."
Celeste leaned against the younger girl, trying to decide what to do. "I think we should try to find my mother before anything else. How many cells are there?"
"I passed about ten. I don't think anyone was in them but the doors were shut so I couldn't see."
"Let's check those, then."
They stumbled out of the cell. Celeste was quite determined to go with Dani and check the others, but Dani was equally determined that she should rest. Dani won, mainly because Celeste tried to walk on her own to prove her point, and had a rather humiliating fall.
As she sat on the stone floor, her back against the wall of "her" cell, the werewolf became aware of a current of fresh air in the passage.
Where's it coming from? she wondered.
She was still thinking about it when Dani came back. It was clear from the look on her face that she had found nothing.
"Let's go further down, then," Celeste said.
The further down the passage they went, the stronger the current of fresh air became. There was also a new sound: running water. It was unlikely Dani could hear it, but the werewolf's enhanced hearing told her not only that it was there, but that it was very close.
An underground river! she realised.
That would explain a lot - an underground river would come out into the open somewhere, which would account for the air - but it posed new difficulties. How fast was it? How deep was it? Could they possibly get out through it?
By now, they'd come to another set of cells, and Dani started to check them, leaving Celeste leaning against the wall again.
"No one here," the human girl called back. "Or here... or here..."
Celeste shut her eyes. She had almost given up hope of finding her mother. Those monsters must have killed her...
"No one in any of those cells," Dani reported when she returned. "And there are no more of them; there's a sort of river thing just up ahead..."
~~~~
Terror couldn't believe her eyes. She blinked and looked at the report again. Nothing had changed. "How did they find out?" she said when she had assured herself that no, she was not dreaming.
"I have no idea," Orlok said. "But find out they have. There is no other explanation."
What did the report say that shocked her so much? It was a list of all the InGEN activity, provided by their agent in InGEN 24. InGEN 1 had ordered every base in Hungary and Romania to search the country. And they were sending a group over to supervise the search.
Terror threw the piece of paper down as if it had personally offended her. "Has the girl been found?"
"No, my lady."
"Find her and kill her. It would be useless to ask her to join us; I know that now. Kill her!"