to kill his creator, Zdenik, allowing Leif to retake the territory he’d temporarily lost. He’d very nearly gotten Oberon—not to mention me—killed in the process, and we’d carefully stayed out of each other’s way since then. That was because I’d informed Leif through Hal Hauk, my attorney, that I’d unbind him on sight the next time I saw him.
So here he was, in my sight. Twelve years later. Waving a white flag in a sporting goods store in Thessalonika. How the
“Atticus, please. I am not here by my own will.” He stopped twenty feet away, in the middle of an aisle, plainly in sight, both arms raised. His right hand still held the flag. He had a cell phone in his left hand.
A security guard appeared to my left and began shouting at me in Greek to lower my weapon. I didn’t take my eyes off Leif. Leif, however, took his off me and addressed the guard in Greek.
“Sir? Sir. Look at me, sir.” Eventually the guard looked, and, when he did, Leif charmed him. “You will walk to the farthest corner of the store, face the wall, and piss yourself. You will remain there for one hour before moving.”
The guard slunk away. Niko was taking small, panicky breaths behind me, but he’d stopped calling for help. Nearby customers were concluding that this tableau really wasn’t their business and remembering that they had moussaka in the oven at home.
Having secured some time to converse without interruption, Leif said, “I have been forced into the service of the vampire Theophilus.”
“Since when?” I said.
“Since you made your presence known in Greece by unbinding a vampire in Litochoro.” He waggled the cell phone. “This is a single-use phone. He wishes to speak with you.”
He began to squat, slowly, and continued to speak. “Do not believe anything he says about me. I am very unwilling. He will call momentarily. Be on your guard, Atticus. You are marked for assassination, because you are the only thing he fears.”
Leif scooted the phone across the hard linoleum floor to me. It stopped against the toe of my sandals. I didn’t bend down to pick it up.
“I will try to warn you as I can with Shakespeare. Perhaps I can make amends for the past. I must go now, because I’m being watched.”
“Watched? By whom? From where?”
He didn’t answer. He rose and backed away, his hands up. I watched him go. When he was at the door, the phone at my feet began to ring.
“Granuaile, get behind the counter. All the knives are yours, understand?”
Behind me, I heard my apprentice growl, “All your base are belong to us, Niko.” She said this in English, but Niko didn’t have any trouble inferring her general meaning.
“Yes! Yes! They are yours!” he cried, apparently somewhat fluent in English. Poor guy. He sounded terrified of the girl he’d found so cute a few minutes ago.
“You might want to take the rest of the night off,” Granuaile added, back to Greek. “It’s a shit job anyway, right?”
I dropped to pick up the phone and then moved to the right, scanning the area around me. Customers were still leaving. Niko was scrambling after them, trying to beat them out the door. A pudgy managerial type was on the phone near the cash registers, presumably calling police. The clowns had managed to miss all this and were still arguing over rope.
I pressed the TALK button on the phone. A male tenor voice of surpassing arrogance flowed out of it, as if the speaker were auditioning for the part of the Douchefather. He spoke in Latin.
“Thank you for taking my call. Am I speaking to the Druid?”
“What do you want?”
“I want to be courteous. Since you have managed to live so long, I assume you attach some value to your life and would appreciate an offer to extend it indefinitely.”
“Let me hear the offer in a moment. Since you are in the courteous mood, introduce yourself.”
“I am Theophilus. I believe your friend, Mr. Helgarson, spoke of me.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“Ah. Perhaps that is why he was so eager to help me locate you.”
I ignored this; I wasn’t going to play their mind games. They were both my enemies. “Tell me about the Romans,” I said. “The old ones you used to control.”
“Ah! That is ancient history.”
“Untold ancient history. Please tell it now. As a courtesy.”
Theophilus sighed into my ear, and it reminded me of Leif. He used to like to sigh dramatically too. It must be something vampires did to remember what it was like to breathe.
I was going to take this chance to find out what I could about the Roman campaign to destroy the Druids, since it might be the only one I ever got. Before we’d left for Asgard, Leif had confided to me that Theophilus was the oldest vampire that he knew of. Old as Leif was, he hadn’t been born when the Druids were hunted to near extinction, so he couldn’t answer any of my questions about that time. Theophilus, though, would have been around when Rome spread north and brought the vampires with them.
“What is there to tell? We vampires wanted to expand our territory, and we did it on the backs of the Caesars.”
“But why go after the Druids? They weren’t hunting you.”
“Not hunting, no, but you have that annoying talent of unbinding us regardless of our strength. It’s a bit unfair.”
“Unfair is burning all the groves and then stabbing a man with two dozen spears.”
“One dozen probably wouldn’t have done the job. You’re too good at healing.”
“So you were behind it all?”
“I cannot take sole credit.”
“You mean blame?”
“As you wish. There were many involved. But it was my idea, my pet project, yes: a pogrom against the Druids to ensure that vampires could spread freely around the world. And it worked. Not completely, of course— here we are, talking together—but certainly effective. There are many of us now and only one of you.”
“One of you per every hundred thousand humans, is that right?”
A hint of irritation crept into the vampire’s smooth Douchetone. “Did Mr. Helgarson tell you that?”
Leif had mentioned the Accords of Rome twelve years ago, but I didn’t feel that Theophilus needed to know that.
“Tell me about your courteous offer,” I replied.
“The offer is simple: You get to walk out of the store and live. You’ve certainly earned it, and I appreciate reminders that there are limits to my power.”
“No, you don’t. If you appreciated that, you wouldn’t be threatening me with this courteous offer. What do I have to do to earn it?”
“You must agree not to hunt vampires and to refrain from training more Druids.”
“I’ve never hunted vampires.”
“Explain the puddle you left behind in Litochoro, then.”
“He attacked me. I don’t think he knew what I was. That was simply self-defense.”
“Fine. I will accept your word. But you must also stop training Druids.”
“That’s an unreasonable request. I haven’t asked you to stop making new vampires.”
“That is because you are in no position to do so.”
“And if I say no, which you’re assuming I will?”
“Then the old pogrom renews. A very small one, with you and your apprentice the sole targets.”
I didn’t think his offer was genuine, so I called his bluff. “Okay, sure, Theophilus. You’re on.”
“I beg your pardon?”
