Curse of Dracula
Immortal Soul: Part Two
Kathryn Ann Kingsley
Copyright © 2020 by Kathryn Ann Kingsley
First Print Edition: August 2020
ISBN-13: 979-8-65555-684-3
ASIN: B089S53NSP
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Also by Kathryn Ann Kingsley
About the Author
Acknowledgments
As always, thank you to my editor Lori for keeping me on my toes. It seems with every new book comes some new word ruts.
To Kristin, for studiously reading these things and giving me a smack upside the head when I go in a bad direction.
To my increasingly patient husband for putting up with the hours it takes me to do all that’s required when one publishes a book.
And thank you to you, readers, for keeping me going.
1
Vlad Tepes Dracula stood atop a building in the city of Boston, the barely born and fledgling city of the new nation that had made such a noise upon its arrival. The youth was reflected in the optimistic industry and mindsets of those who lived here.
Humans were meant to build. To aspire. To reach for the sun.
And he had taken it away from them. Snatched it from the sky and pitched the city into the night.
He reached his arms out at his sides and felt his darkness stretch. He would devour the very metropolis like he would take a life. His nightmare, now released, would spread through the Earth and air like a plague.
He had tried to warn Maxine. He had tried to warn the hunters themselves. But no one ever listened. No one could fathom what it was that dwelled inside his soul.
I am not a vampire. I am far more, and far worse, than that. Within me beats the black heart of all that would splinter bone and pick their teeth with the remains.
I am the river spring from which flows all cruelty on this Earth.
And it was cruelty that made me.
He wondered if those who cursed him so long ago could have even fathomed what they had wrought upon the living. Their faces were lost to him, as were the details of the event itself. He understood only in vague terms as to the why, the when, and the how it had all come to pass. It did not matter. It did not change the simple fact that he was death incarnate.
Yet never allowed to die.
He could bestow that gift upon others, and he did it with both joy and disgust. It mattered not—it did not change the hunger that boiled over in him. The hunger that could change the world around him to the whim of his dark dreams.
The crimson moon had usurped the sun, and with it came his creatures. Demons and monsters he had created over the course of his long “life.” Beasts of warped and mutilated forms that put the ghouls to shame for their lack of creativity.
And the city would know such pain because of the actions of hunters who sought to save it. The actions of one hunter in particular.
Alfonzo Van Helsing had come for revenge. It blinded him to the deal that any sane man would have taken. Any man whose mind was not clouded by hatred would have seen it a bargain to spare the life of a city in return for a single mortal woman.
A woman who wanted to be at his side.
That was…until he soaked the ground in blood. Now, all bets were off.
He watched in idle fascination as a few of his creatures tackled a man on his horse on the street below. The monsters took both rider and steed to the ground. They screamed in agony as teeth tore into flesh and began to rend them asunder without any care for their suffering.
He supposed that was not true. His creatures cared very much for the suffering of their victims—they enjoyed it greatly.
As for himself?
Watching the gore play out beneath him?
He felt nothing at all.
Death came to the city of Boston on crimson wings. The sun had been plucked from the sky and replaced by a moon the color of blood, shrouding the city in its unnatural light.
But that was not what horrified her the most. It was that the sounds of birds, once happily chirping in the trees or soaring on summer air…had been replaced by screams. The sounds of mortal souls caught in terror and pain joined with a chorus of inhuman howls that joyfully called out their bloody victories.
Death had come on crimson wings, and it had a name—Vlad Tepes Dracula.
But Maxine suspected she remained largely to blame.
She pressed her back to the wall of her living room, shivering uncontrollably. A bone-deep chill had taken the summer breeze from the air and was already quickly seeping into her home like a poison. She could feel it beneath the surface of the ground and sense it all around her. A curse had been unleashed. A plague she had thought she had understood. But oh, she had been very wrong. The vampire had asked her if she could eat her steak and kill the cow. If she could face down the hypocrisy of her ignorance and still embrace him.
She thought she had known the answer. And now she knew had been mistaken.
Fear was consuming the city. Fear and the lust for blood, and it crawled over her like swarming insects. Her empathic gift was overrun by it.
How often in her life had she been accused of being cold and austere? Too many to count. It was not because she wished to be such—it was simply because there was no other way for her to survive. But tuning out all her own emotions, all that dwelled within her heart, she could ignore that of those around them.
It was the only way to keep from drowning in the tide. Always around her, like the very air itself, thrummed the emotions of humanity. Every ounce of lust, of joy, of love. Every speck of agony, of grief, of hatred and loss. It was always around her.
She pushed it all away to keep herself sane. To keep herself whole. To keep from sinking to the bottom of that sea and becoming consumed by it all.
But now a storm had come to her shores. A terrible nor’easter that battered at her windows. She could not fight nature. And nature had come with the singular intent of tearing her shutters free and forcing her into the waves.
Death.
Pain.
Fear.
Suffering.
Agony.
She could feel in her heart what it was like to watch a loved one be torn to pieces. She knew it because someone nearby was experiencing it in that very moment. When she shut her eyes, teeth were sinking into her flesh. Sharp, dagger-like things crunching through bone like she was made of nothing more than twigs.
Max
ine twitched as she felt claws tear out her throat. She put her hands to her own throat to ensure that it had not truly happened. But she could almost—almost—feel the wet blood pour through her fingers as cackling, broken-faced monsters devoured her alive.
Limbs were being torn from bodies with wet-sounding pops. Heads were taken from shoulders. Eyes from their sockets. Again and again, more and more, agony flooded into her. Her city was dying, and she was on a sinking raft in a sea of blood.
She was struggling to keep her breathing even, but it felt too quick and shallow.
She loved the creature who caused this. Or she thought she had.
Now all she knew was a primal panic that triggered something in her deep and intrinsic to her species—run, survive, escape. But there was nowhere she could go. She was trapped. Both by the Vampire King who had unleashed his wrath, and by the chain that bound her wrists and kept her tethered. A prisoner to the three people responsible for dragging her into this mess in the first place.
The vampire hunters.
They were ignoring her, arguing and shouting at each other. Alfonzo was pacing around the room. Bella was sitting with her head in her hands, and Eddie looked as though he was attempting to pull out his own hair. Their anxiety did nothing to ease her own overwhelmed emotions.
She wanted to sink to the ground and weep. She wanted to cower and hide. But she was trembling. Her legs itched with the need to run from the wolf in the shadows. But where could she go? Where could she hide, even if she could free herself from her chains and escape the three hunters?
I am naïve. I am a fool. I thought I could see the whole of him. I thought I understood what he was. Now, how many will come to pay the price for my idiocy? I let him in. I let him get close. Looking down at her bare hands, they were shaking like the rest of her.
“This is your fault!” Eddie was still shouting at Alfonzo. “You should’ve given him Maxine. Even if he was lying, it was worth the chance that he wasn’t. You didn’t tell me he could take out the sun!”
“Because I didn’t know he could. But we’ve prepared for this. This is the war we were expecting to fight. Nothing has changed.”
“No. No, we aren’t prepared to fight a war. I, for one, never got told we were facing down a man who could destroy an entire city with his mind. You never sent me that little note. And besides that, you know what else has changed? We could have stopped it, Al. We had a chance. And you fucked it up!” Eddie was frantic in his anger, his voice higher pitched than usual.
Maxine sank to the ground, sliding her back down the wainscoting. Her dress and the chain pooled around her feet. It was not the only chain she wore. The monster that had unleashed the chaos she felt burning in her mind was the same one who held her far less physical leash. The one that connected to her mind and her soul.
The one she had welcomed in. The one whose hand she had willingly taken. The one who she had allowed to woo her and win her. “This is my fault…” Her murmur, which she thought was too quiet for them to hear, broke through the argument the two men were waging. She shuddered, her body covered in a cold sweat.
“What, Maxine?” Eddie prompted her gently.
“Are you all right?” Bella asked.
No. No, she very much was not. The fear of all those in the city was consuming her, like a deer that had fallen to a wolf’s hungry teeth. It was drowning her, and she did not know if she could survive the tumultuous waves.
So many were dead or dying.
So much pain.
And it was all because of her.
She could have stopped this. She could have stopped him, if only she had been strong enough to try. She had held his soul in her hands. Instead of casting it into the void like she should have, she cradled it to her chest, selfish and self-centered in her need to be embraced for the first time in her life.
Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she did not care enough to wipe them away. All she knew was blood on her hands and beneath her nails. Sticky and hot. She could taste it. But there, mingled with the fear and the agony, was hunger. Joy. Need. Pleasure. “This is my fault,” she repeated numbly.
Lust for blood clashed with the pain of being torn to pieces. Prey and predator, victim and violence, and she felt both at once.
And I could have stopped this.
She was shivering. The city was dying, the city was feeding, and there were both teeth digging into her and the sensation of sinking fangs she did not own into supple flesh. She wanted to retch.
“No, no, Maxine…” Bella sank down close to her. The young huntress reached for her hands but stopped. She didn’t dare touch Maxine’s bare skin. And for that, Maxine was exceedingly grateful. Instead, Bella chose to place them on her knees over her dress. “You are not to blame.”
“But I am.” She curled her hands into fists and pulled them closer to herself, dragging the chain across the floor.
“No. Dracula has done this, not you. He has killed these people. He has attacked the city. You have done none of this.”
“But I…I could have tried. I could have attempted to stop him.” She looked up at the younger woman. Bella was so pretty—so full of life, so seemingly innocent. And her life was likely to end here in this war. None of them would survive this, she was certain. Alfonzo, Eddie, Bella, they would all die. All because of her selfishness. “I could have tried to destroy his soul.”
“What? How?” Alfonzo walked up to her.
“The same way I could destroy any of you, were you foolish enough to touch me.” She couldn’t meet Alfonzo’s gaze. She looked down for lack of anywhere safer. She needed the pain to stop. She needed the sound of the screams to go away. She ran her hands into her hair and gripped the strands in her fists, pulling them tight, trying to use that to give her something else to focus on.
“You can destroy his soul,” Eddie said through a heavy exhale. “Fuck.” Now he was the one pacing the room. “Oh, Hell, Maxine.”
“You can kill him.” Alfonzo was watching her keenly. Something close to madness glittered in his eyes. Something that scared her a great deal. “You can kill him for good.”
“I…” Maxine didn’t know what to say. She only knew that she wanted to crawl into a dark place and hide. Somewhere far, far away from the hunters, the vampires, and all the death that cried its warpath outside her door.
“Then I’m going to make sure you get that chance.” Alfonzo leaned down and picked up the chain that ran to her wrists. He wrapped it around his palm a few times. “I’m going to make sure you’re going to want to do it when you get there. Bella. Eddie. Get your things. We have a war to fight.”
“No, I—”
It didn’t matter what she said. The crusader had his goal. Alfonzo smiled down at her, and there was no friendship in his expression when he did. “We have a war we can finally end.”
Dracula stood upon the roof of his temporary home, still lost in thought. Now his new fortress, it was the city’s library. By the looks of things, it had recently opened. The paint smelled new, at least to him. But his senses were keener than most. Either way, this building was now his. It was his in the same fashion that all the rest of the city now belonged to him.
The reproduction gothic church that stood across from his home would have an amusing new use. He had plans for it already. What an odd and curious human behavior—to build new places in the fashion of the old. It was an attempt to cling to their past as though it were somehow better and grander than their future.
The past is only ever lesser. What may come is all that will ever give us hope.
He looked down at the corruption spreading through the streets and alleys of the young American city. He had unleashed his curse in full. He had become an unwelcome disease that had taken hold of the center of this little outpost of humanity.
“You are a plague upon your house. You will be a plague upon the world.” He remembered those words spoken to him so long ago, when he could feel the grit of sand in his teeth and taste unwelcom
e and bitter blood in his mouth. “You will be alone forever.”
He drove away the unwelcome memory with a growl. His beloved empath had dredged up several preserved corpses from the bottom of the bog in his mind. It was disconcerting.
A sign proclaimed this place “Copley Square.” He could not care less. The sign that once stood proudly in the center of the plaza beneath him was now twisted and bent by some terrible nightmare. And a nightmare had come, indeed. He watched his power spread, the shadow consuming all that it touched.
The sound of screams hung in the darkness of the never-ending night.
It made him smile.
This city had thought it understood fear when he had turned the moon to blood. Now it would know true pain. It would know true death.
It, like Maxine, would know what kind of demon he truly was.
“Master. Is this…is this truly wise?”
Ah, Walter. The vampire was a rare direct child of his blood, one of the few strong enough to withstand the kind of power his kiss brought. One of the few creatures with the mental capacity to handle immortality for longer than a few hundred years. Or so he hoped. Walter was also forever attempting to play the role of the conscience that Vlad had given up a long, long time ago.
“It is certainly not wise. It is anything but. Yet it will happen regardless. Where is Zadok?”
“Where do you think?”
It was rare that Walter was sarcastic with him. He must truly have annoyed the redhead with his decision to finally wage his war and claim this city. His question had, in truth, been a pointless one. He knew precisely where the illusionist was—off in the mayhem, wallowing in the slaughter.
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