Angels of Istanbul, page 1
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.
Angels of Istanbul
Copyright © 2017 by Alex Beecroft
Cover art: Simoné, dreamarian.com
Editor: Carole-ann Galloway
Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm
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ISBN: 978-1-62649-538-8
First edition
March, 2017
Also available in paperback:
ISBN: 978-1-62649-539-5
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Wallachian nobleman Radu is recently arrived in Bucharest with his vampire parents. Welcomed as an eligible bachelor, he’s introduced to the enchantress Ecaterina, whose salon is Bucharest’s centre of magical expertise.
But when Ecaterina’s brother dies of a mysterious new plague, it’s clear to Radu that his parents have not been idle. Soon Bucharest is in the grip of an undead epidemic—a less than ideal time for Ottoman Sultan Mahmud, Wallachia’s overlord, to call Bucharest’s nobility to assemble their armies in Istanbul for a holy war against Britain.
The Wallachians have long resented their Ottoman overlords, so Radu seizes the chance to eliminate them while also ridding Bucharest of the undead: he leads an army of vampires to Istanbul and sets them to feed on the Turks.
As Radu’s demons gut the city of Istanbul, their plans become horribly clear. This is only the start. With the Ottoman armies under their control, the undead are poised to suck the life out of the whole world. Radu, his lover Frank, and Ecaterina are appalled at what they’ve unleashed. But they may be too late to stop it.
Having dedicated Book One to Tolkien, it seems only fair to dedicate Book Two to C.S. Lewis, whose belief that all who were following goodness were following the same God has been formative for me since I read The Last Battle (and was terrified out of my mind) at the age of eight.
C.S. Lewis said: “That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”
Which I take as further excuse to write about things that never happened and make sure they come to a happy ending. I have some issues with C.S. Lewis and his beliefs about women, but dang, when he does get it right, he really gets it right.
About Angels of Istanbul
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Dear Reader
Author's Note
Also by Alex Beecroft
About the Author
More like this
Wallachia - 1742
As Bucharest’s river Dâmbovița was not navigable even by rafts in the summer, they left the boats at Râmnicu Vâlcea and transferred luggage and demonic passengers into a wagon. Frank was impressed to find that the Văcărescus maintained a town house in this large market town, where a carriage only fifty years out of date waited in a stable block, and servants and horses alike couldn’t quite conceal how astonished they were to be called on for service.
On no occasion during the manhandling of the coffins—now nailed together and disguised as a strangely shaped wardrobe—from barge to town house to cart, did Frank think how easily they might be dropped, broken open, have their dirty secret revealed like a more supernatural version of his own disgrace. These thoughts only came to him at night, when Constantin or Alaya or both climbed effortlessly aboard the moving carriage, wiping their mouths. Then he would remember he had meant to find some way of killing them when they were in the soil and defenceless. He suspected they only allowed him to think it then because it amused them to let him know he was their puppet. But he said nothing, and Alaya smiled sweetly at him, while Radu hunched on his seat like a raptor shivering on a snowy branch and looked at no one.
They took the journey easily, stopping at the inns of post that lined the roads at regular distances. These ranged from posthouses London could be proud of—beautiful white plaster buildings with airy courtyards and polished floors—to small houses with a single dormitory and straw pallets on scuffed planks.
They would draw up to one of these just after dark, have the vehicles taken to the stables. The servants—Mirela among them still, at Radu’s command—would disappear to take clothes to rooms, prepare fires, and eat their own dinner in the kitchen. Frank and the family would gather for rough, peasant stew and mămăligă—a savoury yellow maize paste that seemed ubiquitous as bread. Then he and Radu would drink a glass of wine and talk about history and pride, politics, and regrets.
At some point in this ritual they would look up and find that the strigoi were no longer there. Then the conversation would falter a little as they both tried not to think about what that meant, who they might find dead in the morning. It was worse, Frank thought on these nights, surprised, to bring the demons to little townships that had not had three hundred years of experience with them. Here death would come with horror instead of resignation. Radu’s reluctance to take the creatures out of their native setting seemed wiser now, less like a petty child saying no just because he could.
When they could get a private room, they wedged the door shut from the inside and slept together, because Frank was a new man now and had decided that his time of mourning was behind him, and he would take what was on offer and be glad of it.
“What is there to be ashamed of in this, in comparison to the blight we carry with us in the wagon?” Radu had asked, when Frank was skittish and reluctant at first, and that was God’s own truth.
Afterwards he had continued the thought, hands behind his head, staring up at the lace of dusty cobwebs beneath the sloped roof, “Besides, just think how this must choke them.”
Frank had raised himself to his elbow and contemplated the look of suppressed laughter that he had begun to find familiar on Radu’s face. “What must? They’re getting what they want, aren’t they? Because of me.”
“Not entirely.” The smile came out of hiding, white and sharp. “I understand that the laxity of our morals has been known to distress foreigners. So perhaps you’re not aware that in Romania, even for the highest of the nobility, it is perfectly acceptable to have a son out of wedlock. If the family claims that child as its own, no one can consider him a less legitimate heir than one born into a marriage.”
“So . . .?”
“My parents find me difficult. In my true-father’s day they would have simply said, ‘I wish to go to Bucharest,’ and he would have taken them. His mind was in the palm of their hands. But me, well, they have to persuade me. They don’t like that.”
“I’m not seeing what this has to do with me.”
“Oh, Frank!”
At the scoff, Frank grinned and pinched his bedmate in the shoulder, with a pressure that would leave a little purple mark in the morning. Frank had still many layers of fragility, felt like a flaky pastry made up of devastation and guilt, but at least one of those layers had hints of contentment in it, and with the revelation of his innocence and the ending of the threat to his life, he had begun to rediscover his own ability to laugh.
“Let me spell it out, then. Suppose I had a mistress or a concubine, or two—sooner or later I would have a child. That child could be their heir. Their future possession of their estates would be secured, and I could be conveniently disposed of. Instead what happens?” He shoved Frank back. “You arrive, an
What had seemed about to devolve into a mock wrestling match sobered and became distressingly sincere. “Every night I spend with you . . .” He bit his lip and went back to watching the ceiling, silent, with his mouth hard shut on secrets he couldn’t yet share.
Frank thought too, giggled, in the end, remembering Alaya’s patient sweetness. It was good to think he frustrated her merely by existing. “Not quite what they wanted, eh? A son is one thing I certainly can’t give you.”
“I don’t want this to continue. I don’t want to bring another child into this situation, hand the family curse on with the estates. But I don’t want to live my life alone. You have . . . You are very . . . useful to me.”
A cold declaration, perhaps. It took Frank a while to set the words in their right context and see how the meanings changed by it. When he considered that with a mother like Alaya, his lover must associate sweet, fine words with insincerity, he gradually found Radu’s declaration reassuring enough. To be useful was good. To foil the plans of the strigoi and save some future child from slavery, and to save Radu himself from cold inhumanity and isolation at the same time—these were admirable things.
“If I can help,” he said, tucking himself back down beside the other man in unexpected satisfaction, “I am glad to.”
In Bucharest, the Văcărescu family had a holding and a town house on the east side of the Dâmbovița, among the gardens and the casas of the other nobility. The house was old, with squat, heavy walls that would have withstood the cannon fire of less advanced ages. It glowered over parklands of carefully cultivated lawn, which swept down to the wide, shallow marshland about the lazy river. Under the heat of the last week, the river had all but disappeared, only visible as glints among thickets of lush green reeds.
They had sent a messenger ahead of them on a swift horse, so when they arrived the house was clean, the shutters open, the fires lit, and the servants returned to their duties from whatever private lives they had been living with the family away. A footman took Frank’s bag and guided him to one of the fifteen guest rooms. Unpacking for him, he pointedly did not sniff at his lack of belongings. Frank got the message anyway.
“I was robbed on the road,” he explained, “and I am a foreigner here, who does not know how things ought to be done. I shall need new clothes, a new shaving and grooming kit, new writing equipment. Are there shops I should frequent, or do I send for the makers to come to me?”
The footman smiled, reassured, maybe, by Frank’s peremptory tone, as though he had resented having his lovely clean rooms touched by someone who clearly didn’t belong in them. “Either would do, sir. If you wish to walk about Bucharest and make your own purchases, I will give you one of the boys to guide you. But I think, perhaps, we should summon the tailor here first, so that you may appear to your best advantage when you are seen.”
It occurred to Frank, suddenly, that he had no money. The realization had been slow in coming—he was an earl’s son, and no matter how he mentally cut ties with that life, the habits persisted. Credit should always be forthcoming, and debts wiped out by his father in consideration of his family’s honour.
But he could hardly say as much to Radu’s servant. He nodded and thought viciously that he would have to tap his lover for money like a whore. Not a great start to a new life. “By all means, have the tailor brought here. When can that be done?”
“I should think if I send a boy this morning, he’ll be here this afternoon, sir. Doubtless the lord will wish to see him too. Shall I have a bath brought up for you in the meantime?”
“Please.”
Clean and re-dressed in his castoffs (had the footman noticed the lengthened sleeves, on top of the fact that they were ten years out of fashion?), Frank leaned from his window and watched as the box containing the coffins was wrestled out of the wagon by four stout fellows, and taken to a stone building, chapel or folly, in the grounds, surrounded by marsh on three sides. Swans hissed at the burden as it went in, and from the alder tree behind the building, the doves that had been droning croo, croo, took flight with a sound like applause.
Did the servants know what they were installing? Surely they must guess? Yet the footman had not had the dead-eyed look of the castle’s inhabitants, had seemed on the contrary well pleased with his sinecure of a job. If the family visited their town house once a generation, this was probably the first time he had ever had to work to earn his pay. He would learn soon enough.
The extravagance of the Văcărescu family maintaining all these useless servants, all these empty houses, made him feel better about being one more financial burden. They had money enough to swim in—why shouldn’t Radu spend it on a penniless friend, if he pleased?
With this thought uppermost in his mind, he hunted down his host, found him in the entrance hall scowling between two halberdiers. A man in Turkish dress stood before him, with a white turban, a rose-coloured robe, and a curved sword at his side.
“You will come now,” this gentleman was saying, “as you are.”
“I have only just arrived.” Radu looked shocked, his grey eyes steely with outrage and confusion. “I should be permitted to open my house, to prepare myself in peace. For the voivode’s own honour I should not be dragged before him travel-stained and ragged as a beggar.”
The halberdiers, trying to maintain a dignified air while hiding the fact that they were clearly sympathetic, succeeded only in seeming anxious and apologetic. The official, in his pink coat, was as blank-faced as a statue. He turned a cool examination on Frank. “Who is this?”
“This is Mr. Frank Carew.” Radu paused long enough for Frank to wonder what was coming next. “My secretary.”
Secretary, eh? He could live with that, and request a salary to match. Though he would have to mentally downgrade the requirements of his wardrobe and his toilet. A secretary did not dress like an earl.
“He will come too.”
“He will not!”
The pink-coated official stroked his beard—a fine beard it was, light brown and bushy, substituting width for length. It seemed far too full of vitality for his otherwise pinched and ferret-like face. “My lord, do not trouble yourself with shouting at me. I am but the messenger. I cannot change the order I have been sent to relay. You must take it up with the prince, unless you wish to begin your acquaintance with disobedience?”
“He has begun his acquaintance to me with discourtesy.” Radu’s scowl deepened, but he motioned for a servant to retrieve his outer coat and suffered it to be put on. He beckoned Frank to his side, and together they followed the official, having to walk slowly because of his short strides. Hemmed on each side by the halberdiers, they crossed the Văcărescus’ private bridge—a creaking, slippery thing of old wood—through clouds of droning mosquitos, to the firmer ground where the city rose up on its swell of hill.
By London’s standards it was quaint but beautiful. They meandered on cow paths along the bank of the river, and the noon sun shone on irises and waterfowl and the intricate knotted gardens full of bright flowers of the great houses to their left. After a while the path swung westerly. A larger road crossed the river on a bridge sturdy enough for carriages, and the river had depth enough to slowly turn the wheel of a prosperous watermill.
A little way beyond this, they passed through a gate in the city walls, and the road beneath their feet firmed and gained a welcome bounce. Frank looked down with astonishment, rubbed a circle clear of its thin coating of mud, and saw that the carriageway was made of planks—a road like a ballroom’s sprung floor. “Oh, that’s very fine. Are all the roads like this?”
“Just this one.” Radu unsheathed a smile for him, straightened his shoulders, and began to walk once more as though the tip of his conical hat was all that held the sky up. Frank had long suspected that some of his arrogance was feigned to cover the knowledge of his powerlessness, but he still liked to see it. “This is Mogoșoaia Bridge. The great prince and martyr Brâncoveanu built it to connect the palace of Bucharest with his summer palace at Mogoșoaia, which he also built. His reign was . . .” The smile softened. “A golden age for our country. He was a statesman, a scholar. A great builder. You see that?”
