Field of Blood by Wilson, Eric (pdf e book reader .TXT) 📕

He’d rebuffed Nickel’s offer that night. It was rubbish.

After fleeing the café, he had tried to repair his relationship with Dalia and Dov—and failed.

Dalia was barely speaking to him now, more condemning than ever of his misdeeds. Dov was almost thirteen, sullen in that teenage manner and wearing his hair over his eyes.

In an attempt to regain some fatherly respect, Benyamin had vowed to take his son camping this weekend in the mountains just north of these castle ruins. This time, Benyamin meant it. He even told himself it was part of his reason for being here now, checking out the terrain for their outing.

That wasn’t his true reason, though.

Bugged by Nickel’s assertions at Café Focsani, Benyamin had decided to investigate the claims on his own time. Using his position at city hall, he checked Helene Totorcea’s records and found that she and her family, including her husband, were Romanian Jews who had returned here after a long hiatus. The only thing odd about their papers was the absence of anything odd. Even the most upstanding families had secrets buried deep in bureaucratic files, but this was a spotless bunch.

Curious, Benyamin had accessed the district property files next.

Which led him here.

This was his fourth random evening observing the comings and goings on the neighboring hillside, at Totorcea Vineyards. He’d even sneaked along the property’s perimeter a few times to count the number of residents.

Eleven. As tallied through his scope.

Was Nickel right? Was this innocuous group responsible for the mur-ders in Israel eight years previous?

But there had been eighteen bite patterns. Nineteen empty boxes.

He recalled Dalia’s words, yesterday in the hallway: Ben, what is it now? Is there another woman? Is that it? No. Please, I’d rather you not tell me. You’ll do what you want, as you’ve made so clear. But your son, he needs his father. His bar mitzvah is close, and you are never around to instruct him. Can’t you see this? One night you’ll stay out late again, only to find Dov grown and gone when you return. Is that how you want it to be, Ben? Is that the Almighty’s wish?

This evening, racing east from city hall after work, Benyamin had watched the setting sun in his rearview mirror and promised himself this would be his last sortie to Soimos. If he found nothing conclusive, he would drop the entire matter. He would set aside the drinking. Apply himself to his marriage. Help his son prepare for the passage into manhood.

His earnest vows had sounded a bit too familiar in his own ears as he climbed the slope to the castle and took up this observation post among the ruins. But he meant them. He did. After tonight’s action fizzled, he would start fresh.

All that changed when the strange—or not so strange—woman arrived.

How did he know her?

Goose bumps now rushed along Benyamin’s arms beneath his jacket, fol-lowed by a buzzing in his head that was a companion to his old itchy-itch.

He double-checked the house through the scope, saw that the door was still shut, the lights glowing inside.

He had a moment.

He set down his scoped rifle—who said he needed Nickel’s weapons or knowledge?—and propped himself against the wall. He rolled up his trouser leg so that he could get a look at his heel in the moonlight.

It was tender. The scar from years ago had become home to raging infection. The once glossy circle of pink was now a mound of crusty brown, and spiderwebs of blue-black ran up along his calf and down over the top of his foot. The entire leg hurt, and some days turned into a conflagration of unbearable pain. Other days, without explanation, he would wake up to find the tempest had died, the natural coloring had returned, and the swelling had subsided.

He tugged off his sock by its toe, airing the wound.

A sharp object moved beneath the skin, a shark’s fin trolling blood-tinged waters. He hated whatever that thing was, despised himself and his sickness, and this world that turned a blind eye to misery.

Where was the God of his fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Who had been there when his grandfather was facing the ovens of Matthausen concentration camp?

Dalia would scold him for such ruminations, as she did for everything else. But what did he care? He felt like barking his frustrations at the moon. This region’s early dwellers had been called Dacians, derived from the word for wolf, and he imagined that werewolves lurked even now in these Carpathian foothills.

In fact, for a moment, he thought he saw glowing green eyes off to his left.

Nonsense, of course. All of it. This was 1997, and he was a man of cerebral means. He had no reason to rant at distant deities or to fear local folklore. He could find his own solutions to life’s challenges, if only he applied himself.

The most immediate solution was in his jacket.

Benyamin was cold, buffeted by the winds that howled through the ruins. Time, he decided, to warm his old bones and prepare for the night watch.

He was tugging the flask from his inner coat pocket when an apparition appeared through the arched medieval entryway. The shape was gargantuan and bearded, its eyes pulsing—there was no way of denying it—with preternatural light.

One of the undead? A man-beast sent from the house to end his snooping?

“Hello.” Benyamin said. “Like a drink?”

He felt calm. Here, at last, he would confront this slippery fear. One way or another, he would know where he stood between the worlds of the seen and unseen.

With the rifle just out of reach beside his bare foot, he switched his hand from his flask to his holster and drew the loaded Makarov into view. He pushed down the safety lever. Aimed the barrel at the apparition’s abdomen.

“Don’t you move,” Benyamin said.

With eyes narrowed and luminescent, the figure advanced. In his wiry beard, flashes of moonlight became trapped like fish in a net, like