The Sixth Day (A Brit in the FBI #5)
Catherine Coulter & J.T. Ellison
Thank you to everyone in my Home World who protected me from holiday chaos in the final stretch of The Sixth Day—Karen, Yngrid, Lesley, Catherine. You are the stars in my firmament.
—Catherine
For my parents: The ultimate first readers.
—J.T.
De chiens, d’oyseaulx, d’armes, d’amous, Chascun le dit a la vollee, Pour une joye cent doulours.
In riding to the hounds, in falconry, In love or war, as anyone will tell you, For one brief joy a hundred woes.
—FRAN?OIS VILLON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Beautiful brilliant J.T.—may you continue to soar. Our fifth thriller, amazing.
—Catherine
I’m surrounded by incredible friends who are also authors and share in the triumph of every finished manuscript: Laura Benedict, Ariel Lawhon, Paige Crutcher, Jeff Abbott—thank you for the support, always.
Jen Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Lauren McKenna, and the whole Gallery team for the care and love of our words.
Amy Kerr, my right hand, right brain, and sister-in-arms.
Sherrie Saint, who always puts up with weird emails that start with “So if I wanted to kill someone . . .”
Helen Macdonald, whose brilliant H Is for Hawk brought the cabal alive.
Scott Miller, for all the reasons, and then some.
Mom and Daddy, for all the idea-bouncing and griping and celebrating.
Randy Ellison, the rock all my waves crash against, for never-ending support and plot whispering.
And to Catherine, for always allowing my imagination to soar.
—J.T.
PROLOGUE
Castle of Vlad Dracul III
Walachia, Romania
1448
Vlad Dracul III knew the battle was lost. The ramparts were burning, orange flames leaping into the night sky, licking at the windowsills, closer and closer. Choking smoke billowed in like black death. His soldiers’ screams were nearly drowned out by the cries from within the castle, where the walls to the kitchens had been breached.
Behind him, his twin half brothers huddled together on the cold stone floor, Alexandru watching and listening to the growing mayhem, his thin face white with fear, not for himself, Dracul saw, but for his brother, Andrei, a sickly lad, his brain weak as his body; one scratch, and he bled and bled. Dracul watched Alexandru clutch the dirty manuscript to his chest, his other arm around his brother, who was rocking back and forth, keening and wailing.
Dracul saw Alexandru draw Andrei close and speak in words Dracul actually understood, “Shh. All will be well. I will protect you. I will always protect you.”
But Andrei, who didn’t understand what was happening, rocked and cried, the horrific screams and the hellish flames too much for his mind to grasp.
Dracul’s other brothers, his legitimate brothers, were warriors and had proved their worth countless times. But these two, beget of a maid in a darkened corridor by his father’s indifferent seed, had never shown any worth until yesterday, when a sword had sliced a grave cut through Dracul’s hand. The burning pain was nothing, but knowing his hand might be cut from his body to save his life terrified him. Alexandru, the strong twin, the one who communicated for both of them, had smeared on a strange yellowish salve he and his brother had made. Almost immediately, the pain was gone, the deep cut closed, and Dracul could continue fighting. And this morning, the hand was unmarked, as if there’d never been a wound. Whatever they were—the devil’s evil spawn, or spawn from a magic realm he didn’t understand, their alembics and herbals all recorded in that tome that never left their sight—they had saved his hand, possibly his life. They weren’t warriors, but they had value and, he thought again, mayhap magic.
Dracul’s guards nearby heard the brothers mumbling their unholy garbled sounds and prayed to God to protect them from the devils. Like his soldiers, Dracul knew the villagers were afraid of these cursed twins, as they were called, who belonged to the visiting Romanian Orthodox monks. There were dark rumors surrounding the boys. It was whispered they drank blood, spoke in a language none could understand, drew strange pictures, and wrote strange words. Their evil had brought the enemy down on the villagers, which, Dracul knew, was nonsense.
He was the one with the power, he was the one people really feared, not these two scraps of humanity. Dracul reveled in the fact he was known to all as more monster than man. It was whispered he was merciless, without conscience, a creature who wallowed in death, butchering those who displeased him with joyous abandon. Impaling them. Ah, what a sight it was, the screams, the smells, the devastation of a human body, all done according to his whim. Even the twins couldn’t save a man he’d selected for death. He hadn’t killed his worthless half brothers. No, he’d sold them to the monks, but now the monks were back, bringing the boys with their strange book and ill tidings—his cousin Vladislav’s army was on their heels.
When the monks came for a visit a year earlier, they had tried to give the boys back, but Dracul refused, reasoning they would be better off cloistered and protected behind the abbey walls. For he’d known then how everyone despised them as much as feared them, so different, so strange. If he was called a monster, the twins were called ungodly—their garbled talk no one understood proving they were spawns of the devil. Their very existence was blasphemy.
Now six Romanian monks had returned only days before, bringing the boys back yet again. The twins were evil, Father Stephan said, unholy, mad, a portent of death. In his fear, Stephan had screamed at Dracul only an hour earlier, “Look behind us—the hills burn, people are spitted on bloody pikes! Those mad twins, they’ve brought this horror upon you, upon your people. Kill them!”
Of course it wasn’t true. The monks had led Vladislav’s troops to him, not that it mattered now. Perhaps he should have killed the boys and been done with it. But he couldn’t. No matter their blood was tainted with commonness, probably with madness, they were still of his blood. Instead, Dracul had run Stephan through and left his twitching body on the flagstones, the other monks cowering back against the wall.
The flames drew closer, and he turned to his half brothers, wretched, dirty, their clothes rags, rail thin—obviously the monks had starved them. He saw hate in their eyes, for the monks and for him, and fear, gut-wrenching fear. And oddly, he saw a reflection of himself. Not as he was at this moment, his black clothing drenched in soot and gore, the blade of his sword red with blood, but himself in an ancient past. And he knew that the warrior blood coursing through his ancestors down through the years, he shared with them.
Now he knew he couldn’t help them, not anymore. He couldn’t help any of them. The castle was falling, and Vladislav’s army was ready to take the battlements. Everyone left inside his ramparts, choking on the bitter black smoke, would die if he didn’t allow himself to be taken.
Dracul strode to the window and stared down at the chaos, the slaughter of his brave warriors. Only he could stop it. He, Vlad Dracul, the Walachian prince, had to become a hostage again, and these two miserable scraps who were his half brothers would be killed or tortured, or both, by their enemies, by the villagers, by his own soldiers.