Castle Heights: Crown of Thorns

by Sasha McDaniels

“If it isn’t with me or Ben then who is it with?” I asked.

  “Our father,” Alexi said.

  “Are you even sure he’ll come? We’ll have the whole Grimm bunch here before the night’s over,” Dimitri murmured.

  “Grimm?” I asked.

  “Yeah. That so-called aunt of yours and that so-called mother of yours are the Sisters Grimm.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’ve gathered that much already,” Dimitri said.

  “Screw you,” I spat.

  “Feisty,” Alexi said. “That’s right. Don’t take anything from these jerks.”

  “Hey, whose side are you on?” Nikolai asked.

  “My own,” Alexi said. “As soon as we take care of this, it’s back to Harvard for me.”

  “You go to Harvard?”

  Alexi shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’re jonesing for the Ivy League. Broke into your school file. Impressive test scores. You make it out of here alive, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

  “Why can’t you just let me go,” I pleaded.

  “You can throw us around a bit. I for one could use the exercise,” Nikolai said. Nikolai was the most muscular of the three. He had a thick neck. He looked like he played football. He also smiled the most out of the three of them.

  Alexi came in at a close second, while all Dimitri did was frown.

  “You’ll get tired eventually,” Dimitri said from the corner of the room.

  “Maybe you can sing to all the animals and get them to come rescue you,” Nikolai quipped.

  “Hey, how do you three know so much about me?”

  The Dracul boys huddled together suddenly.

  I was going to get answers before I used my telekinetic powers again. I just hoped my power didn’t run out. I moved to the side edge of the bed. My aunt’s boots touched the floor.

  “So, we were thinking,” Alexi said. “We’re being terrible hosts here. How about we get you something to eat and drink? If you have to stay here, you might as well be comfortable.”

  “I don’t plan on staying here,” I declared. “And you didn’t answer my question. How do you know so much about me?”

  Alexi moved closer to the bed and knelt down in front of me. He was at the perfect vantage point for me to lunge at him. “You really don’t know?” he asked.

  “I don’t. Please, enlighten me,” I said.

  “The prophecy of course.”

  “What prophecy?”

  “The prophecy of Nostradamus.”

  “The prophecy of Nostradamus? What does that have to do with me?”

  “A whole hell of a lot,” Alexi said.

  “She doesn’t know about the book,” Nikolai added.

  “What book?” I asked.

  “The book Nostradamus didn’t publish. The book that he didn’t want the Vatican to see. The book that foretold special events which will remain nameless. We can’t have the details of said book getting out. Ben and the Grimm sisters would love to get their grubby little paws on the book.”

  “What does this book have to do with me and Dracula?” I asked.

  “Can’t really tell you that either,” Alexi said. “Because if we tell you that, then we’ll have to tell you other things—things which you cannot know.”

  “Damnit!” I shouted. “Can’t any of you freaking people tell me anything?”

  “I think you’re cute. Does that count?” Nikolai asked.

  “No,” I said. I stood up. “Either you three start talking or it’s going to be three on one.”

  Alexi scratched his head and stepped backward. “I don’t know. I’d say I’d be willing to help you fight my brothers.”

  “I’m starved,” Nikolai said. “That’s enough chit-chat for me.”

  “Come on,” Alexi said to me. “I’ll show you downstairs to the kitchen.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Then you can watch us eat,” Alexi replied.

  “You’re vampires.”

  Alexi grinned. “So you noticed.”

  “You don’t eat food.”

  “True,” Alexi said.

  “So then what will you eat?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” Dimitri said before he strolled out of the bedroom before the rest of us.

  I didn’t want to see what the three of them were going to eat for dinner. But even more than that, I hoped it wouldn’t be me.

  The halls of Dracula’s manor were stone, like that of an old castle—his castle, like the one in the movies. The cold slithered into my bones. I shivered.

  “We can light a fire when we get downstairs. I’ll light one in your room too when we come back up later,” Alexi said as he walked alongside me.

  “What if your father doesn’t show up? Are you just going to hold me hostage here forever?” I asked.

  “For as long as we can.”

  “But you can’t do that.”

  “Look, it’s nothing personal, okay, but we have to take care of our father.”

  “Patricide sounds like a harsh way to accomplish your goals,” I said.

  “Our father is Dracula. Despite what the movies and books would have you believe, he is a very dangerous guy. Oh, sure, he fools everyone with his charm, but make no mistake, he’s not a nice guy.”

  “Obviously, he wants to kill me.”

  “Who says he wants to kill you?”

  “I assume so. What else could he want with me?”

  Alexi shrugged. “That’s between you and him. All I can say is that he wants you. If you’re here, he’ll come here. Simple as that. We’ve tried to get ahold of our father in other ways, but he’s hard to reach. Plus, I think he knows we want to kill him.”

  “So this prophecy, you don’t want him to fulfill it?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “And you can’t tell me what the prophecy is?”

  “Nope. Definitely not.”

  “And you’re not going to have me for dinner, right.”

  “That, well, I can’t promise.” The way Alexi said those words didn’t sound too menacing, but he was a vampire. What I knew of vampires was that they were cunning, at least in some of the lore.

  “You haven’t tried to glamour me,” I said.

  “Glamour you? Would you like me to?”

  “So you guys can do that?”

  “Absolutely. How do you think we got in the school today?”

  It seemed like we walked down the hall of the second floor forever before we reached a set of stairs. Turned out we were actually on what must have been the third floor of the house to begin with because a second set of stairs appeared after we walked down another long hall.

  Alexi walked slowly for my sake. His brothers were already long gone.

  The first floor of the house, from what I saw that night, was just as dark as the other floors. The walls on the first floor were also made of stone, and the rooms were sparsely decorated with modern furniture. The whole place had a kind of utilitarian vibe.

  Really, despite the stark stone walls, the house was actually quite nice, if not a little interesting looking. It was the sort of house I could imagine being in an architecture magazine.

  The kitchen was vast. A large stainless steel refrigerator with double doors served as the centerpiece for the kitchen. Nikolai and Dimitri stood next to the refrigerator, drinking out of stainless steel thermos.

  “One left in there for me?” Alexi asked.

  “Absolutely,” Dimitri said. “But you better get to it before I do. I’m starved. The journey here was long.”

  “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  Dimitri’s eyes flicked on me. “Romania,” he said.

  “You guys came all the way here from Romania?”

  “Yes,” Nikolai responded. “We went there to see if we could find our father, but we’ve been living in Castle Heights since we were babies. Luckily, vampire children grow at an accelerated rate or else we might have died as babies.”

 
“Why?” I asked.

  Nikolai sat his thermos down on the counter. “Well, we were dropped off here, left alone to fend for ourselves.”

  “Where was your father?”

  “Supposedly dead. Again.”

  “Turns out he wasn’t dead dead,” Dimitri said. He moved towards me and put his hand on my neck. “Nikolai didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  I flinched away. I put my hand on my neck. I hadn’t thought about it since I woke up that first time in the dark when I thought the entire incident in the school cafeteria was a dream. “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Good,” Dimitri said. He moved swiftly across the room.

  I sat down at the bar in the kitchen. “I know my mother will come looking for me,” I warned.

  “I’m sure she will. And when she comes we’ll be ready for her,” Nikolai answered.

  I stood up from my chair at the table. “You better not hurt my mother!” I shouted.

  “We don’t want to, but if she tries to take you from us, we’ll have to restrain her,” Alexi said. His eyes were warm but wicked. He rubbed his smooth chiseled jawline.

  “I’d like to go back to my room,” I said. “If you guys aren’t going to tell me anything, I might as well wait it out up there.”

  “Your mother will have a hard time getting in here,” Nikolai said. He stalked across the room. “You’re toast.”

  I searched for Alexi’s acknowledgment of what his brother said. I almost wanted Alexi to be the one to take me back up to that cavernous room. So far Alexi was the one I felt the most comfortable with.

  “You know, the castle is fortified with lycans,” Nikolai told me.

  I had no idea whether my mother could take a lycan on. I had seen her do a few surprising things here and there. She too could use telekinesis. She could also control the elements.

  If she wanted to, she could have some effect on the weather. It dawned on me right then, while I was standing with Nikolai, that my mother hadn’t used her power to help her and my aunt through the snow storm the day before.

  And then I remembered that my mother was trying to keep a low profile. She didn’t use her powers for the same reason that she didn’t allow me to use mine. Well, it no longer mattered.

  “Why don’t you fight us?” Nikolai inquired.

  “Who says I won’t be fighting you?” I asked.

  “Well, you haven’t yet,” Nikolai said.

  “What if I’m working out a strategy first?”

  It was true. I was working out a strategy to get away. I saw no reason to stick around any longer.

  But I had to play my cards right if I was going to be free enough to break out. I figured if I fought them at the wrong time, they might be able to restrain me. If they restrained me, that limited my chances of getting away. Having the freedom to move my body was good enough, at least for the time being.

  Once we were back inside of my prison, I sat down on the bed, ready to think. It seemed that the hours had passed rapidly. It was no longer light outside—that much I could see from the one window in the room.

  “I can stay here and keep you company if you’d like,” Nikolai said.

  “That’s okay. I need to rest for a minute. Today was my first day of school, you know?”

  “Your first day of school ever?”

  “Yep.”

  “So that’s how she kept you hidden so well. She didn’t send you to school.”

  “That’s right. She also forbade me to use my powers.”

  “So did it live up to your expectations.”

  “I’m not sure, yet,” I said. “Actually, it exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect to get kidnapped by Dracula’s sons on my first day.”

  “We aim to impress.”

  “That much is obvious.”

  “One of us will be back in to check on you later.”

  “If I’m here,” I said teasingly. Except that I wasn’t teasing.

  After Nikolai left the room, I paced the floor, trying to figure out the most inconspicuous way to escape Dracula’s manor.

  I wracked my brain for a long time. I didn’t know what the layout of the Manor was. I had to leave the room and make it past Alexi, Dimitri, and Nikolai without being seen in order to find a door whose location I did not know.

  I was deep in thought when I thought I heard something by the window. I rushed to the window and looked out. The window didn’t have any glass in it, which explained the terrible draft which kept me shivering.

  “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” I heard someone whisper. I looked down. There was no way my hair would reach anywhere near the ground. I was too high up.

  “Let down my hair?” I asked. I grabbed a wad of my hair. “Who’s there?”

  “Ben,” Ben whispered.

  I wondered where the Dracul brothers were. I also wondered how Ben got past the lycans.

  Then again he was related to Van Helsing so I figured maybe he knew something that I didn’t know. As a matter of fact, he knew a lot of somethings I didn’t.

  Something small flew into the window. I leaned down to see what it was that laid on the floor. It was a small pouch. My watch tinged. I had forgotten all about the watch on my arm due to all of the hoopla. There was a message on my watch which read: Pour the contents of this pouch onto your scalp. Braid your hair as it grows. When you think it has grown long enough for you to toss it out of the window, stop braiding. Gotta go. The Dracul brothers are after me. I’ll be back.

  I looked out the window, but all I saw was a mist that seemed never-ending.

  I opened the pouch. It was worth a try.

  Thank you so much for reading this book! Sign-up for my newsletter here for updates or visit me at www.sashamcdaniels.wordpress.com

  Also, don’t forget to look for Castle Heights Book 2…coming soon.

  Castle Heights Book 2