Brothers to the Death

“No!” Larten yelped. When Mika looked at him strangely, Larten forced a weak chuckle. “I have faith in Gavner Purl. This will be a good test for him. If I think that he is struggling, I will send him back to Vampire Mountain. But I believe he will prove himself.”

“Very well,” Mika said and covered his face with his right hand, placing the tip of his middle finger to his forehead and spreading the adjoining fingers. “Even in death may you be triumphant.”

Mika departed. Arra followed, but paused at the door and glanced back with a veiled smile. “This isn’t over,” she purred. “We’ll discuss our relationship in more depth later.”

Before Larten could protest, she slipped out, leaving him alone in the large, ornate suite, to marvel at the fact that he was more worried by Arra than he was by the army of Nazis which would soon be hot on his and Gavner’s trail.

Larten was ready to strangle Gavner. He had endured more than three months of his assistant’s snoring and it was driving him mad. He’d tried herbal medicines, pegs on Gavner’s nose, even a gag, but nothing worked. He rarely got more than a couple of hours’ sleep most days. He was tired and irritated, and he blamed it all on Gavner Purl.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gavner yawned, sitting up and stretching. They had spent another day in a coffin in a crypt. Gavner had enjoyed a perfect day’s sleep, but Larten had been up for the past hour and looked as sour as a pinched baby.

“Three guesses,” Larten snapped, shooting Gavner a dark look.

Gavner laughed. “Don’t tell me I was snoring again.”

“I think you do it just to annoy me,” Larten growled.

“You should move to another coffin if it’s that bad.”

Larten’s expression darkened and he muttered foul curses beneath his breath. It had been his idea to share a coffin. They holed up in graveyards most days, although sometimes they slept in barns or old ruins. They could easily have slept apart, but Larten thought it would be safer if they stayed together. He worried that the Nazis might divide and capture one of them otherwise.

The Germans had been pursuing them for the past three months, ever since Franz realised Mika wasn’t returning. Negotiations had broken down and the officer was replaced by one who never smiled and who demanded Larten agree to his terms immediately — or else. Sensing that he had pushed them as far as he could, Larten stole away that night and he and Gavner had been on the run since.

Larten was enjoying the game of cat and mouse. He and Gavner kept one step ahead of the Nazis, moving swiftly every night, but never so fast that they couldn’t be tracked. The Nazis had almost trapped them a few times, surrounded graveyards where they were sleeping and moved in for the kill. If Larten had been human, he and Gavner would have been caught, but his sharp sense of hearing had alerted him to the threat each time and they’d managed to break free.

On one occasion the Nazis outsmarted them and sent their forces ahead of the vampires to stake out a number of graveyards in advance. That had almost been the end — they’d faced a desperate dash at dawn to find somewhere safe to rest, ending up beneath the roots of an ancient tree. Ants and other insects had made it a long, uncomfortable day. Since then Larten had varied their route, following no set pattern, deciding each day at dusk which direction to take.

Larten wasn’t sure how long the Nazis would dog their trail. Mika thought they would hound him for years. Larten doubted they were patient enough to follow him for that long, but so far they’d shown no sign of quitting. They had doubled their numbers, then doubled them again, even following the pair when they crossed the border into lands where Germans were far from welcome. Larten could have revealed the Nazis’ presence to the local authorities, but his task was to lead them on, not have them locked up.

The only real downside was Gavner’s snoring. It truly was as bad as Larten claimed. Some days he made more noise than one of the polar bears which Larten had wrestled with years earlier during their trek across the plains of Greenland.

“Perhaps if I cut off your nose…” Larten muttered, only half-joking.

“You go anywhere near my nose and I’ll slice off your ears,” Gavner retorted.

“You were not this bad when you were a child.”

“How do you know? You never checked on me when I was asleep.”

“Yes I did,” Larten protested.

“Don’t lie,” Gavner tutted. “Alicia always tucked me in and looked after me if I stirred in the night. She told me I was a terrible snorer from the start.”

“Then you admit it!” Larten pounced.

“Maybe I snore a little,” Gavner grinned.

The younger vampire moved to the mouth of the crypt and stared at the rows of headstones and crosses. It was almost dusk, but the light still hurt his eyes and he had to shield them with a hand.

“How come you don’t mind the sun so much?” he asked Larten.

“Your eyes adjust after fifty or sixty years,” Larten told him.

Gavner grimaced. “I hate the way you make the decades sound so casual. Fifty years is a long time.”

“I thought so too once,” Larten said, although honestly he couldn’t remember when fifty years had seemed like an age. Like most vampires who had been around for more than a century, he had the impression that he’d always been off-hand about the passage of time. He had forgotten the impatience of his youth, the way years had dragged. He no longer regarded the future with unease, wondering how he’d fill so many long nights. As a General of good standing, he had more things to worry about than killing time.

“You must get bored,” Gavner said. “There must be nights when you feel like you’ve been alive forever, and the thought of enduring more drives you insane.”

Larten cocked an eyebrow at Gavner. “You sound like a Cub. Perhaps you need to spend some time with vampires your own age.”

“That lot of losers?” Gavner snorted. “No chance!”

They had run into a pack of Cubs several years earlier. There weren’t as many as there had been in Larten’s youth. Vampires only rarely blooded children now, and new recruits were given more time to adjust to the ways of the clan before being asked to commit themselves. As a result, few felt as restless as Larten once had. Most were not inclined to break away from the clan for a decade or two.

But some young vampires still gathered in different parts of the globe every so often, to mix with humans and lead a free and easy life before giving themselves over completely to the vampire cause. When Gavner had been introduced to a pack, he reacted with scorn. The high-living, dandyish members reminded him of Tanish Eul and he felt nothing but contempt for them. His response delighted Larten, although he did feel a pang of shame when he considered how low an opinion Gavner would have had of him if they had met back when he went by the name of Quicksilver.

“Are there any exercises I can do to make my eyes stronger?” Gavner asked.

“Try focusing on far-off objects,” Larten said. “Fix on something in the distance and hold on it with your eyes almost shut. Slowly widen them. When the pain goes away, take a break, then focus on something else and repeat.”

“That will help?” Gavner asked dubiously.

“You will start to notice a difference fairly soon,” Larten said.

“How soon exactly?”

“Ten or fifteen years,” Larten said with a straight face.

Gavner glared, not sure if the older vampire was joking or not. Muttering to himself – much as Larten had moments earlier – he settled against the wall of the crypt near the door and commenced the exercise. Hiding a smile, Larten set about preparing their first meal of the night. He cooked a couple of rabbits which Gavner had caught earlier, using collapsible pans which Evanna had given him.

“Any rumblings from the Nazis during the day?” Gavner asked after a while.

“How could I hear anything over the sound of your snoring?” Larten replied.

“Stuffy old bat,” Gavner grunted. “You should loosen up and pull your head out of your…” He stopped. Larten thought it was because he didn’t want to complete the insult, but seconds later Gavner said, “Someone’s there.”

“Where?” Larten darted to Gavner’s side.

Gavner pointed. “On the outskirts of the graveyard. Under that tree. I can’t see anyone now, but there was a man a moment ago.”

“A Nazi?” Larten asked.

“I don’t think so. He was small, white hair, dressed in yellow.”

“With green boots?” Larten said quickly.

“Yes. You know him?”