00.1 - Death's Cold Kiss Read Online Free Page A

them.
    “Who’s the monster here? The old man in the dungeon or the
young one baying for his blood?” Meyrink pushed himself to his feet and leaned
in menacingly. It was rapidly becoming an old argument but that didn’t prevent
it from being a passionate one.
    “Forty-two girls dead, man! Forty-two! What about the
sanctity of life? What is the meaning of life, brother, if you are willing to
throw it away so cheaply?”
    “We don’t know,” Meyrink rasped, his knuckles white on the
tabletop. “We just don’t know that it is him. We have no evidence that he gets
out. He’s chained up in there. There are wards and sigils and glyphs and all
sorts of paraphernalia aimed at keeping him locked up down there, helpless…
harmless.”
    “And yet every morning he feeds you stories of his dreams,
talks of the young ones he has seen suffering at the hands of the monstrous
beasts. He regales you in glorious detail, brother. The creature is taunting you
and you are too stupid to realise it.”
    “No. Not too stupid. It is compassion. The old man raised you
as he would his own son, from when the temple took you in fifteen years ago. He
cared for you. He loved you. He did the same for me in my time. We owe him—”
    “We owe him nothing anymore. He isn’t Victor Guttman! He’s a
daemon. Can’t you get that into your thick skull, man? He barely touches the
food we take down for him for a reason, you know. It doesn’t sustain him. Blood
does. Blood, Brother. Blood.”
    “Would you do it? Would you turn murderer and kill the man
who might as well have been your own father, everything he did for you? Would
you? Take the knife now, go down into the crypt and do it, cut his heart out. Do
it, damn you! If you have so little doubt, do it…”
    “No.”
    “Well I am not about to.”
    “I know men who could,” Messner said softly, wriggling around
the impasse with a suggestion neither man really wished to consider. Bringing in
outsiders. Part of it was fear—what would happen if people realised the
priesthood of Sigmar had been infected with the tainted blood of vampires?
Another part was self-preservation. The streets had been rife with rumours for
days. Two witch hunters were in Drakenhof, though from what little Messner had
managed to learn they were not church sanctioned Sigmarite witch hunters, and
were barely in the employ of the Elector Count of Middenheim. Their charge had
been issued nearly a decade ago, now their hunt was personal. They had come to
town a week ago, looking for a man by the name of Sebastian Aigner, who, if the
gossips were to be believed, they had been hunting for seven years. He was the
last of a bunch of renegade killers who had slaughtered the men’s families,
burning them alive. Metzger and Ziegler, the witch hunters, had found the others
and extracted their blood debt. They had come to Drakenhof looking to lay their
daemons to rest, and perhaps, Messner thought, they could purge the temple of
its daemon in the process. “They could tell us for sure. This is what they do.”
    Meyrink looked sceptical.
    “Forty-two young women, forty-two. Think about it.”
    “That is all I have been doing, for weeks. Do you think I
don’t lie awake at night, imagining him out there, feasting? Do you think I
don’t sneak down into the crypt at all hours, hoping to catch him gone, so that
I know beyond a shadow of doubt that he is the killer my heart tells me he
isn’t? Always I find him there, chained to the walls, barely conscious, looking
like death itself, and it breaks my heart that he is suffering because of me!”
    “Forty-two,” Reinhardt Messner said again, shaking his head
as though the number itself answered every objection Brother Meyrink voiced. And
perhaps it did at that.
    “Talk to them if you must, but I want no part of it,” Meyrink
said, finally, turning and stalking out of the room.
    Alone, Messner righted the spilled goblet and began mopping
up the mess. It was,