SNAP: The World Unfolds

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

My suite was lush.  The rooms were large and the windows overlooked the front terrace and the rolling hills of rural Hungary.  They’d taken my sensibilities into consideration and not given me rooms that looked out to the forest.

After Stefan and Pen formally greeted us, Lisbet and Josef took my bags.  Jean-Louis traveled with a laptop.   He had complete wardrobes and toiletries in all of the SNAP Holdings houses around the world.

He was right, I did like Elise.  Lisbet introduced us and helped Elise unpack my traveling cases.  My other boxes would be brought up while we had drinks. Jean-Louis and I went down to the main salon to talk with Stefan and Pen.  A vampire I’d never met before, Milos, was already there when we came in and Jean-Louis nodded at him  “Are we ready?” he asked and the  three men went into the study, leaving me and Pen to make conversation.

“I understand from Mira and Carola that you had some misgivings about coming here,” she said.  As a conversation starter, it was a bombshell.

How much should I tell her?  She’d already let me know she didn’t approve of Jean-Louis and me together.  She didn’t like that my arrival at SNAP has upset the calm and well-ordered life she’d led.  Maybe she even blamed me in some nebulous way for the Baron’s decision to take her out of the limelight.

Alternatively, I had no one else to talk to.  My family was dead, ending with my mother’s death from cancer five years ago.  My college friends were back in L.A., probably toasting my great fortune at snagging such a cushy job.  Even Jazz, whom I’d come to rely on, was denied me.

“Misgivings is an interesting word,” I started, setting my glass down.  “I’m not sure yet if I should be happy, sad, angry, betrayed.  I’m trusting Jean-Louis more, and I guess by extension, trusting all of you more, but I’ve had to give up my life to do that.  I don’t think you can understand how that feels.”

Wow, I really hit a button!

She stood up and stomped over to the windows, which looked out at the dark, dark Hungarian night.  She was so flustered or angry that she was taking in great gulps of air.  Her nostrils flared, she paled, with two hectic spots of color on her cheeks, and her right foot tapped a furious rhythm.  Suddenly she whirled around to me, now icy calm.

“You are such a child.  And such an ill-tempered one.  What makes you think I don’t know how that feels?  Who do you think I am?  How do you think I got here?”

Very good questions to which I had no answers.

“I wasn’t always a vampire...none of us were...”

And that black, black night I began to learn.

“I was the daughter of a minor baron,” Pen began.  “It was after another episode of the Black Death and my father had taken our family to his country estate, out of Vienna.  It was thought that the slums bred the death.  In the 1500s, no one knew or understood germs or bacteria.  The plague was quieter in the country, but there were rumors of vampires hunting at night. My poor father was beside himself, damned on either hand.

“Stefan was there, one of the village elders.  He and my father did farm business together and I got to know him.   He was a villager, but he had manners and breeding more than most of the minor nobility.  I was entranced.  He was older than I, but when we were together, it didn’t matter.

“Eventually, the plague subsided and we moved back to Vienna.  I missed Stefan dreadfully and pined over him like the silly girl I was.  My father was upset with me.  I was of marriageable age and was turning away all the suitors he thought appropriate.  I acted like a spoiled brat.” she stopped, then went on, “I probably was.

“It got so bad my father shipped me to the country again, little realizing that that was what I wanted.  I was with Stefan.   He was falling in love with me, too, but he held himself back.  I thought it was because of his age.  One night I was walking near the stream and was attacked.  I never saw what attacked me, but Stefan was right there, fighting it off.  That was the night he told me about being a vampire.

“Over the next months, I watched more and more of the vampire world unfold.  I still couldn’t leave my world, my father, my family, but the attraction to Stefan was beyond all reason.  Stefan asked if I would be his acolyte and I was torn.  Then came word that the plague was back and this time it came so fast it killed my family before they could leave the city. I was the only one left.  But I had Stefan and I agreed to become his acolyte.

“I could inherit all my family’s property, but not the title, so we married and Stefan became the Baron.  And now you see us. And now you know why I think of you as an ill-mannered child.  You remind me of what I went through.  But this time, there’s no plague, nothing to pull you away from your world.

“So, maybe you should stay there.”

I was stunned into silence.  “Please forgive me, Pen, I had no idea....”

“That’s just the problem, you have no idea.  You blindly go around knocking things over, bashing into people’s lives, and you have no idea because you don’t think beyond yourself and your petty problems.  You are going to have to grow up if you want to be part of us.”

The door to the study opened and the men came out, Stefan in the lead, Milos and Jean-Louis talking quietly behind him.  “Well, we came up with a plan,” Stefan turned to Pen.  “Come, let’s sit and we’ll share it with you.”

I turned out that Milos was a local who’d stayed here and made it his life’s work to watch and monitor the Huszars.  He’d tracked most of them and discovered there were some younger Huszar members—he wouldn’t give a number—who were angry with Matthais.  Milos had heard them grumbling over beers in a nearby village pub and got acquainted.  Neither Milos nor the Huszars admitted to being vampires, so the conversation was more like teenagers complaining about overly-strict parents, but Milos gleaned enough that he felt the young Huszars trusted him.

He would get two of them to a meeting with Stefan and Jean-Louis where the Kandeskys would reveal themselves then offer to work with the younger Huszars to overthrow Matthais.  The carrot was their own SNAP program.  After the initial meeting, I would be introduced, to work with them on the new program and magazine.  They would get to know me, this time as an ally, not as prey.