Darcy returned from an outing in the town with an armful of spearguns. They were the Italian 'Champion' models Manolis had recommended, with very powerful single rubber propulsion.
'I once saw a man accidentally shot in the thigh with one of these,' the Greek related. 'They had to open his leg up and cut the harpoon head right out of him! Our harpoons are being silvered right now. We pick them up tonight.'
'And my flight to Athens?' Harry's resolve was as strong as ever.
Manolis sighed. 'Same as last time. Tomorrow at 2:30. If there's no trouble with your connection, you'll be in Budapest by, oh, around 6:45. But we both wish you'd change your mind.'
'That's right,' Darcy agreed. 'Tomorrow night our people from E-Branch will be out here. And they're trying to contact Zek Foener and Jazz Simmons in Zakinthos to see if they'd like to be in on it. We'll have a hell of a good team, Harry. There's absolutely no reason why you should go off to Hungary on your own. Someone could go with you at least part of the way. A good telepath or prognosticator, say.'
'Zek Foener?' Harry had turned to look sharply, frowningly at Darcy on hearing her name spoken. 'And Michael Simmons? Oh, they'll want to be in on it, all right!' So far there'd been no chance to report what Trevor Jordan had told him about the vampire's superior ESP; now he did so, and finished up:
'Don't you realize who and what Zek Foener is? Only one of the most proficient telepaths in the world. Just let her mind so much as scrape up against Janos's and he'd have her! And as for Jazz ... he was a hell of a man to have around on Starside, but this isn't Starside. The fact is I daren't take any of our talented people up against Janos. He'd just take them out one by one and use them for his own. I mean, this is the very essence of why I have to handle my side of it alone. Too many good people have lived through too much already just to go risking their necks again now.'
'You're right, of course,' Darcy nodded. 'But you're our best chance, Harry, our best shot. Which makes it doubly frustrating to simply say nothing and let you go risking your neck! I mean, without you... why, we'd be left stumbling around in the dark!' Which seemed to say a lot for what he thought of Harry's chances. But:
'I won't argue with you,' Harry said, quietly. 'I'm on my own.' And his voice held a note of finality, and of a determination which wouldn't be swayed...
They hadn't eaten; that evening they went out to pick up their silvered harpoons and on the way back stopped off at a taverna for a meal and a drink. They ate in silence for a while, until Darcy said: 'It's all boiling up, I can feel it. My talent wishes to hell tomorrow wasn't coming, but it knows it is.'
Harry looked up from his large, rare steak. 'Let's just get through the night first, right?' There was a growl in his voice that Darcy wasn't used to. It had a hard, unaccustomed edge to it. Tension, he supposed, nerves. But who could blame Harry for that?
Harry couldn't know it but he wasn't going to have a good night. Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once assailed by strange dreams: 'real' dreams in the main, but vague and shadowy things which he probably wouldn't remember in the waking world.
Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had known two sorts of dreams. 'Real' dreams, the subconscious reshuffling of events and memories from the waking world, which anyone might experience, and metaphysical 'messages' in the form of warnings, omens and occasionally visions or glimpses of real events long since over and done with and others yet to come. The latter had presaged his developing dead-speak, enabling the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind. He had learned to separate the two types, to know which ones were important and should be remembered, and which to discard as meaningless. Occasionally they would overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend might drift into a 'real' dream or nightmare - such as when his Ma had become a shrieking vampire! Or it might just as easily work the other way, when a troubled dream would be soothed by