Chapter 3
They were being held at the airport. It had nothing to do with security really because she was the top security clearance for her flight and she, Nikola and Will had all passed through and made it to the tarmac without any problems. The security chief at the small strip had never given her an issue in the past, primarily because he was a humanoid abnormal who relied on shipments from Magnus to keep his job and his freedom.
Magnus would send him what he needed once or twice a year, sometimes coming with the shipments to check on the handful of abnormals running a small Sanctuary Annex in the French countryside, and he would ensure that she would always have a place to land her private jet without having to deal with customs, security or quarantines.
After all forty days of waiting, while some abnormal rattled around in a cage it didn't want to be in, could mean trouble.
The delay was wide spread, pertaining to all flights leaving Paris. There was a storm overhead, stretching for miles in every direction, including up, that prevented take off for a handful of hours. Helen wasn't happy about it. Will was already bored and complaining about all the paper work that he wouldn't have done if he was at the Sanctuary, but claimed he could be doing if he wasn't stuck in Paris.
Nikola was silent.
He had already taken a pad of paper and pencil from behind the comptroller's desk and was bent over at a counter scribbling madly on page after page. Will had given her one or two questioning glances that she had tried to ignore. When the blonde finally asked her the question out loud, she told him, "I haven't a clue." Then got up to go to the pot sitting behind the ticket counter, pouring hot water over an Earl Gray tea bag.
Her conversation with Nikola concerning what might have been Elise' long lost brother had ended abruptly. He'd turned from her, refused to respond to any other questions and she had been forced to return to their table, chagrinned and angry.
Will had asked, "What happened?" as if he didn't remember bursting into laughter and knocking over the vampire's wine in the middle of relatively painful retelling of his past. Helen had grabbed her purse and stormed off, heading for the hotel they had been staying in. By the time she got there she was calmer and was able to check out Will and herself without tearing the desk clerk's head from his shoulders.
Will returned to the room while she was packing and silently did the same.
"Did Nikola say anything to you?" She asked him.
"He came back to the table, asked if he could see Elise to a cab and told me he would meet us at the airport." Will said, his manner subdued compared to that of earlier.
Helen hadn't meant to create such a mood between them, nor had she meant to further upset Nikola. Never in the past had the subject of the war and their involvement in it held so many connotations for her and she still had the feeling that she didn't know all of it. There was still a gap of several months where Nikola had been unaccounted for before returning to London in late 1943 , a time period she had once happily assumed Nikola spent in his native Serbia.
His letters had stopped arriving about when he had returned to the London Sanctuary and she hadn't put much thought into the delay of mail during war time, or that his letters should have continued to come to her even after he returned.
When she had been laminating and cataloguing them she hadn't even read them.
As she sat in the tiny, near empty airport building Helen wondered; if she had said something then, back in late 1943, would it have made a difference?
Would Nikola have even answered her?
Two Miles West of Templin Air Field, Germany
March 1943
"No! Not a chance!" He shouted in response.
"Scheiße!"
Nikola looked to his driver with an amused expression then turned his attention back to the road behind them. What had started out as a column of soldiers on foot in the dark of pre-dawn had turned into an armored truck full of them. Only it wasn't a truck but some sort of hybrid far more suited to the terrain. Instead of rubber tires, it had metal wheels with spokes that allowed it to grip the snow covered dirt road, and it was gaining on the two-horse open sleigh in a way that the classic Christmas song didn't really allow for.
The only downfall to the design of the Nazi vehicle was that the driver and passenger were perched out in the open. The back of the thing was a giant, armored box that could be used for troop or supply transport but did nothing to shield the man behind the wheel.
Ketzel must have been thinking the same thing because a moment later he had plopped a gun into Nikola's lap. What the man was doing with a 1938 Navy Colt revolver Nikola couldn't fathom. It had to have cost him more than a fortune to import the American gun, let alone get it shipped all the way to landlocked Miltenberg. Nikola only knew so much about guns, having left that little hobby to the others of The Five, but he knew enough to see that the gun was well taken care of. He'd spent enough hours watching Tueur take apart his Luger to know how much effort that involved.
After brief consideration Nikola set the gun back down on the seat of the sleigh. He didn't need guns. Ketzel cast him a surprised glance, perhaps wondering why he hadn't yet opened fire. The horses were pounding at the fresh snow, pulling the sleigh faster and faster up the road but it wouldn't do. The vehicle…whatever it was, was gaining on them and Nikola felt a little like the character Jonah that his father had been entirely too fond of.
Nikola didn't know for sure if Ketzel would be spared once he jumped ship. Knowing Korhber, the German farmer would be dead the second the horses slowed.
No, running wasn't an option, any more than defending against an army of soldiers with a single six shot revolver.
Nikola turned in his seat to look back at the armored transport, and then tapped Ketzel's shoulder.
"Nicht zu stoppen." He said, then brought his feet up onto the seat, crouching while he steadied himself.
Kohrber wasn't riding with the driver. It was another nameless soldier in another identical light gray uniform. They hadn't fired yet but then Nikola had seen the way Kohrber handled things. He was fairly certain the men behind him deserved to die. At the least they deserved to be stopped.
Ketzel would have been responsible for saving his life if Nikola had actually been at risk of losing it. He shouldn't have been out on that road. The farmer should have been safely and warmly wrapped in his bed with his wife.
Mind made up Nikola jumped from the moving sleigh. He landed on the snowy ground, curling into a ball and bouncing a few times before he impacted something hard, loud and metallic. It hurt but he had only seconds to keep from being run over. He managed to find the top of the grill and clung to it even as his lower half fell, dragging underneath the front of the vehicle. Snow was crammed into the tops of his shoes before he was able to lift them off the ground.
His transformation was next. Teeth, eyes, strength, claws cutting their way out of his gloves. Blood had trickled briefly from his nose before the healing began, and he didn't look terribly pretty coming up over the hood ornament, judging by the stunned looks from the soldiers.
He had to pause and breathe for a moment, letting the rib that had been snapped with the first bounce move back into its proper place, while clinging like a fly to the hood of the…he still didn't know what to call it. He'd heard of tanks but these weren't it.
Still the soldiers said nothing, the mega-trank moving forward as they stared dumbly at him.
He finally said, "Hi," thinking that he might as well seem agreeable.
The soldier on the left responded to the sound, lifting a hand as if to salute. The driver smacked him for it, then tugged at the soldier's gun. That seemed to snap the friendly one out of his stupor and he tried to maneuver the large weapon in the little space he had between himself and the dash. The driver slapped him again and Sergeant Friendly glared before going for a gun on his belt.
Once he had it pulled Nikola would have two choices, duck or move. He chose to move and buried his claws into the hood of the trank, hauled himself up with every ounce of strength he had and just got his feet underneath him when the gun came into play.
He heard click click, watched the driver grab the gun in frustration and kicked the man's teeth in. The driver was dazed and bleeding and the gun was still useless in his hand, Sgt. Friendly was scared again, trying once more to bring his machine gun to bear.
The Trank had started to weave, losing its traction on the road. A quick glance ahead told Tesla that Ketzel had either managed to gain a lot of ground and disappear up the road or he had pulled his sleigh out of the way entirely.
Nikola reached down with one hand, the other engaged in the large sheet of metal protecting the back part of the Trank, grabbed Sgt. Friendly's gun and flung it, and the soldier, free of the vehicle. He slipped down into the passenger seat as the Trank headed for a ditch, jerked the wheel so that they were heading back for the middle of the road, and landed another punch on the driver's jaw.
He felt bones give way under his fist, the driver went limp and slumped against the wheel, taking it out of Nikola's hand and turning it so sharply that traction no longer had any say in what the vehicle did on the road.
The vampire tried to jump free as they tilted sideways, but the snow that he had gone tumbling through made every surface in the open cab slick. His foot slid on the metal floor, and became entangled with the driver's legs and the gear shift. He got turned around backwards as the engine raced and felt the first explosion of excruciating pain as the trank collapsed onto its side. His head and torso were slammed into the hard ground and he lost what was left of his grip on reality, slipping into the black.
Paris, France
Present Day
Word had come an hour after they were originally meant to depart. The storm had dissipated enough over the city to allow for take-off. One private jet had to make an emergency landing then the strip and the air would be theirs.
Helen had gone out into the wind and rain to be sure of the readiness of their pilot then returned to the quiet building. Will was asleep in the uncomfortable chair he had chosen to sit in, and was likely to fall back asleep once on the plane. Given how whirlwind the last few days had been she couldn't blame him.
In fact things at the Sanctuary changed so quickly from day to day that a good motto was to get sleep when you could, if you could. Helen knew, in Tesla's case that was next to never.
She approached him to give him the update on the status of their flight. He gave the plane a glance, nodded to her, then went back to his scribbling.
She remembered a time long ago when the thought of flying at all petrified him, regardless of his status as immortal. Times had changed. Planes had improved. He had even managed to board a commercial flight on his own in order to get to Paris. She imagined that that would go down in Tesla's personal history as his worst experience with a plane.
Somewhere over Germany
March 1943
He woke cold again. Only this time there was no rocking, or screeching or the sound of metal on metal. Instead there was a hum, steady and throbbing. He couldn't breathe, it was becoming a far too common occurrence, but he knew for a fact he wasn't underwater this time.
His arms were crossed over his chest and when he tried to kick his feet he found that he could only get so far before he hit something solid. He tried to lift his hands and found that they were chained, again, or perhaps still, as the metal cuffs had never been removed in the first place.
He tried again, with no success. The chains were stopping him, hooked and tightened against an anchor point just above his shoulders.
He was in something, chained, being transported, somehow, likely by plane.
Helen wasn't there.
He tried to take a breath and couldn't. Something was stopping him.
He thought about her hair, about the red she had chosen for this decade. Or it could have been the century. He hadn't been around her enough to know how often she…
The chains were tight…
His chest burned…
Why couldn't he breathe!
Then darkness.
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
Present Day
Tesla woke beside her violently, fully vamped out, bursting from his seat and crouching in the aisle, gasping for breath. She had been so close to a nap herself, her eyes burning as she stared at Elise's biography, her second time through it. Nikola's sudden move caused the book to fly, at least one of her hands searching for a gun at the waist band of her pants.
By the time she realized she didn't have a gun to pull he had already begun to calm. She watched him as his muscles slowly relaxed. Crouching lower and lower until he let go of one of the seats that had been accidentally shredded by his claws, sinking down to rest seated in the wide aisle. His claws disappeared as he leaned against the open couch on the opposite side, his eyes fading to blue. He was staring toward the back of the plane but Helen knew he wasn't seeing Will's sleeping form. He was lost, somewhere in the dream world that he had managed to slip into after boarding.
Helen rose from her seat after a moment. When he heard her move Nikola's focus snapped towards her and she froze, judging how much of him was there, and how much was still locked away so that the vampire could defend himself. She slid forward, gracefully finding a way to sit in the aisle with her feet drawn up. She reached a hand out to his knee, watched his face, then moved the same hand to take up one of his.
She was shocked to find him trembling. She hooked her thumb around his and curled her other hand over top. She felt his fingers easily surrounding her palm and when she looked up to his eyes again he was staring at her.
She saw pain, and terror, such as she had never before seen in her friend's eyes. Horrors that she had thought herself immune to given how many years she had been fighting the demons of the world. Her heart broke and she fought tears that she didn't deserve to shed.
"Oh Nikola…"