Hunting Karoly Read Online Free PDF Page A

muttered.
    “Right. Try not to screw this up completely, Jenny.”
    Though I stuck my tongue out at the phone again, I couldn’t really blame Nigel for his distrust. Sighing, I simply said, “I’ll try…Nigel?” I added hastily as he seemed about to hang up. “Who is this vampire? Where did he come from?”
    “We think…believe it or not…Romania.”
    * * * * *
     
    The notes Nigel sent by email turned out to be bugger-all use. There was nothing there about vampire lairs and I was left in total ignorance as to whether they slept in coffins lined with their native soil like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula , or if they just pulled the blinds and kept out of the sun.
    On the other hand, he did send the report received from his counterparts in Hungary, where the vampire had apparently spent much of his time. Plowing my way through the dizzying translation, I learned that, interestingly enough, they called my vampire Karoly—Hungarian for Charles. It seemed that in my sardonic humor I had actually hit on his real name. He had been around, they thought, since the fifteenth century, originally a minor nobleman of Transylvania, who, once “turned”, had terrorized the surrounding countryside for generations.
    To their knowledge, he had made no new vampires for the first hundred years of his existence, even though he had continued to live in the castle with his wife and servants until they had died out. After that, he had lived a reclusive life for some years. Then had come a spate of travel and subsequent wake of terror and destruction, alternating with periods of quiet at his ruined castle.
    Nowadays, his castle was completely flattened and though there were still occasional reported sightings of him in the area, he appeared in many places, most recently Hungary, usually with the low profile Nigel had mentioned and which he himself had hinted at to me last night. “Why would I leave dead bodies lying about the place?” Then came the indiscriminate carnage as he prepared to move on.
    Over the centuries, he had lived with several companions, mainly female, the most recent of whom had been killed by a “specialist” in Paris last year. To the knowledge of the Hungarians, he had come to Britain alone.
    So, I thought bracingly. This wasn’t too bad. I had just one vampire to track down and he was in low-profile mode, unlikely to kill!
    Apart from the one at Kelvingrove, there were only four attacks that Nigel knew of, scattered across the city of Glasgow. Even these were merely deduced from unexplained puncture wounds in people’s necks. Only one woman—and she was generally considered unstable—appeared actually to remember being attacked.
    Kneeling on the floor with the map of Glasgow spread out before me, I hung on to my mother’s huge dog to stop him sitting on it. Gazing helplessly at the locations of each attack, I knew there was no way I could narrow down the area of the vampire’s lair. Even including the city center hotel where Maggie’s wedding was held and where the vampire had told me he came every night, didn’t help. It was nowhere near any of the other known attacks.
    Worse, I was fairly sure Nigel knew very well that his information would be no use to me, that I would be able to do nothing with it. Hilda and Frank would be able to blame me when they couldn’t find the vampire tomorrow.
    It’s true I’m not much of a psychic, but contrary to popular belief, I’m not stupid either. This vampire had been around long enough to be familiar in several countries, famous enough for it to be known when he had left one and arrived in another. Yet no one had ever caught him. No one had ever stopped him. No one was likely to stop him here either, but Nigel could still keep the reputation of his beloved Centre if he could just blame bumbling probationer Jenny for this fiasco along with all the rest. It was only a matter of time ’til I got fired anyway. What a godsend this wedding had been, I thought