Until Death

by Kari Anne Kilgore

  "Yeah, this one, what looked like a bunch of her pups, and other dogs from the village. The stray ran off toward the woods and they calmed down. Barked like crazy, though."

  "This was a mistake from the beginning," Igor said, almost to himself. "But we had no choice but to bring her back here. Tell me, have you noticed the photos here, in the graveyard?"

  "Photos?" Igor had to be purposely keeping him off balance, but he had no hope of catching up at this point. Most of the old graves had small black and white photos under glass, beautiful and eerie at the same time. "You mean on the tombstones?"

  "Older cemeteries all over Romania have them now," Igor said. "I understand other places in the world as well. At least in this village, they're not for sentimental value."

  He held out the phone, and Leo considered refusing to look. He even considered taking it, smashing it against the steps, and walking away. But he knew it was too late for that.

  The photos were in pairs, but not by married couples like the tombstone photos so often were. First the glassed-over tombstone image, then a photo of the real person. They didn't quite look the same, even though they were clearly the same person. The second image showed a healthier, maybe younger version. Leo's curiosity struggled through his fear and confusion.

  "When were these second ones taken?"

  "The photos are on the graves so people will remember what the deceased look like," Igor said, waving his hand out at the graveyard. "They must be recognized, no matter how long since they passed away."

  "Must be...recognized?"

  "The second photos are after death, Leo. The second death."

  Leo was again certain Igor was playing some kind of horrible joke, with the worst kind of timing after he'd buried his wife and would have to be there for his mother-in-law. If anyone in the village would let him attend, of course.

  "Listen, you've got my attention," Leo said. "I don't understand why, but you're scaring the hell out of me. They had to embalm Maria for the flight. If you're trying to tell me she's coming back, she won't get far."

  "They do not come back sick or injured," Igor said, shaking his head. "They come back whole, as they were before death. If they were not whole, they could not have children once enough time has passed."

  "Okay, that's enough," Leo said, getting to his feet. His wife's pale, perfectly smooth belly took up his entire mind. The dog shifted, but she didn't move. She just watched him. "I know I'm a foreigner here, but I'm not hanging around to be some kind of joke to you. Your idea of humor escapes me."

  "Nothing is funny about this," Igor said. "We have prevented anyone from returning since the days of Communism, and we've done all we could to make sure Maria's generation would be the end of this curse. I've fought this my entire life, Leo. I'm more exhausted than you can possibly imagine. But I will not allow another line of strigoi to be born."

  Chapter 35

  The phone buzzed in Leo's hand, and he somehow managed not to drop it onto the stones. He gave it to Igor without looking at the number. The other man answered in Romanian, then held up his hand. Leo took one step, meaning to head back to the inn and get ready to leave.

  His feet refused to move further, along with his lungs and his heart.

  Such a harsh, uncomfortable word. Strigoi. The way it grated through his ears and into his mind. But Igor had said he would not allow another line to be born. Right after he said their bodies were perfect, so they could have children.

  No part of him could deny Maria had been obsessed with that very thing.

  What had he made love to that morning? Leo couldn't pretend he'd been dreaming any longer. His groin ached with strong contractions, far more than any dream could bring. Would he or anyone else be able to live with the consequences of whatever he’d done?

  Igor's face paled, and he held his now trembling hand over his eyes. He spoke quietly for a few seconds before ending the call.

  "The woman I wanted you to talk to," Igor said. "One of those who guided us, helped us try to put a stop to all of this. She is dead."

  "If she guided you forty years ago," Leo whispered. "She has to be older than Elena."

  "Certainly, she was," Igor said, his eyes narrow and his voice sharp. "She was in good health. And she was found in exactly the same state as Elena. Age has nothing to do with this."

  "What are you saying it is, then?" Leo said. "Was she related to Maria, too?"

  "No, not related. Was she buried properly, Leo? Whatever is done is done, but I must know what we face."

  Leo tried to force air deep into his lungs, hoping that would slow his heart at least a little. He looked into the dog's eyes, dark brown and somehow wiser than most humans. He stared at the perfect, pitch black hole in his wife's grave.

  "I didn't want her to be buried with alcohol," he said. His voice was quiet but surprisingly steady now that he was admitting to what he'd done. "Drinking is what killed her. I switched it out with water."

  Igor was silent for several seconds. He glanced at his phone when it buzzed, then held it out to Leo. A woman who had to be at least ninety, hair thin and white, round face deeply lined, stared out at him. Her features were frozen in exactly the same expression of terror as Elena's and all the others had been.

  "I respect your love for your wife," Igor said. "And your sorrow at losing her. I understand why you would not believe me. These two women did not have to die, not yet, and not in such a horrible way. If we do not stop her, this will happen to many others."

  "Why these two?" Leo said, his mind searching for another explanation that his heart knew he wouldn't find. "I've never seen this woman or heard of her."

  "When they return, they seek out the ones they knew in life," Igor said. "In the beginning, when they need to grow stronger, they often draw upon the human trait that can give us most terrible strength. Elena told me Maria deeply resented what we had to do. Is this true?"

  "Yes. She hadn't spoken to her mother since she found out ten years ago. She spent those years and a small fortune trying to undo it."

  "This dead woman gave us the good we needed to stop the evil," Igor said. "The magic of the old ways. Maria found the ones she hated most. And she will not stop there."

  "What am I supposed to do about this?" Leo said. "Why tell me? You could have taken care of whatever has to be done here and let me go back to the US. Isn’t it bad enough that I'll be going back alone?"

  Igor stopped long enough to push the flowers back across the grave before he walked out of the graveyard and into the quiet street. Leo was again reduced to following with his brain unable to respond any other way. The dog did the same.

  "She knows the ones she hates," the older man said. "Just as she knows the ones she loves. She will eventually find you whether you help us or not, and she will trust you. You can get close enough to her to bring this to an end without anyone else risking their lives."

  Leo knew his face was pale, and Igor watched him too closely to have missed it. He'd already been close to Maria, closer than he ever thought he'd be to her or anyone else.

  "If I refuse?" Leo said. "If I pack up and leave today? Are you saying she'll find me across the Atlantic?"

  Leo glimpsed the Communist party boss as Igor stopped outside the gate. He stood tall, shoulders squared, lip curled upward just enough to show his contempt.

  "Given enough time, I'm certain she'd find you in the end," Igor said. He sounded like he thought that was exactly what should happen. "Responsibility for the first strigoi in decades rests with you. With your stubborn refusal to respect our ways even though we took a great risk in allowing you to bring her here. The risk of leaving the ignorant people in America exposed to her was far worse. I would think you'd want to be husband enough, man enough, to take that responsibility instead of running away."

  "You expect me to lure her somewhere and kill her again?"

  "This is not your wife, Leo. Not the woman you loved. This is not even human, except in that a new line of cursed souls can sp
ring from it. This is a monster that will murder me and everyone else in this village unless it is destroyed."

  "If she's not in her grave, how the hell am I supposed to find her?" Leo said. He wasn't sure if he was about to scream or sob.

  "I told you I wanted you to talk to the second woman who was murdered," Igor said. "You'll talk to her granddaughter now. She will know how to find her and what to do. This dog will guide you both. That is their role, and we're most fortunate she and her offspring remember."

  Chapter 36

  The village high up in the mountains, much higher than Costel's inn and Igor's party boss dominance, had been deserted for more than thirty years. Ana told Maria the truth years ago about people returning to maintain the houses, though. The small yards were still neat and clean with the recent attention, dirt roads patched and cleared of winter debris, rustic timber fences in good repair.

  One house, low to the ground and painted white like all of the others close by, gave no sign of being occupied again. No smoke rose from the gray stone chimney. The doors and windows were closed and covered with white shutters. There was no electricity for lights, inside or out.

  And yet a sort of life had returned to the seventh house on the main street. The life may have been unusual and unexpected, but the woman inside the house wasn't surprised in the least.

  Maria stood naked in the sitting room of her maternal grandparents' house, where she and her mother were born. The ceiling was only a couple of inches above her head, and the entire room was smaller than her walk-in closet back in California.

  The furniture she remembered from visits when she was young was almost all gone, hauled down from here in a horse-drawn wagon to her aunt's house when the village was abandoned eight years ago. A built-in sitting area with no cushions, the built-in shelves in the tiny kitchen, and a broken mirror in front of her were protected from thieves or curious hikers by faded blue curtains covering the tiny, low windows.

  The mottled and crazed reflective surface was hardly ideal, and the light was dim. But Maria could see more than enough. She turned to the left and right, catching the best angle she could. Her body was healthy. Her body was whole.

  For the first time in her memory, she ran her hands over a smooth and unscarred abdomen. Even the deep scar on her forehead, the sobriety reminder that failed her in the end, was smooth and flawless.

  "Better than the best surgeon in Beverly Hills," she said under her breath.

  Maria held no illusions, no confusion about where she was and how she got there. The booze had killed her at last, just like she'd always feared. Just like she'd wanted in the end.

  Neither her dread nor Leo's had been enough to stop her once the disease took hold of her again, and her body had succumbed to the renewed abuse. Her memory of that time was hazy with illness and pain medication, but she knew.

  Worse, she had a strong idea what she'd put Leo through.

  Leo was here, though, and her husband had given her the last push she needed to create this perfect new body. None of her studying or conversations in the retirement village in Austria had quite explained how that worked, and it was one of the few things Maria didn't care to learn more about. It worked. She was living, breathing proof. In those moments of realization, of her new life exceeding her oldest dreams, all Maria cared about was being in a strong body with her stronger mind intact.

  As surely as Maria knew she was breathing the musty air despite drawing her last in that antiseptic hospital room, she knew she couldn't stay here. Frail Magda Schmidt, her mind long since lost to her dementia, had warned Maria without meaning to. Staying in the ground she'd been buried in or the house she'd been born in would send her right back into a permanent death.

  Maria caressed her belly again, her fingers straying lower into the thick, glossy hair and the exquisitely sensitive folds beneath. The nerves were as revitalized as the rest of her, crying out for more attention and release.

  She shifted one foot onto the plaster seat, slipping one, two, three fingers as deeply inside as she could, creating pressure from within and without. Maria's breathing deepened, and her knees nearly buckled with her orgasm, stronger and faster than when she was a teenager.

  Leo. She needed Leo.

  Not only for the pleasure he'd been all too willing to provide that morning, though Maria needed that more than she had for years. And not only for the chance to make a baby with him at long last, to erase the meddling of her mother and that awful old woman.

  She needed Leo's protection if she was to survive long enough to be able to leave this place. Long enough to give him the children he wanted so badly.

  The thought of her mother took some of the pleasure and joy, and Maria got dressed in her stolen peasant clothing. Whatever her reasons or justifications, she was a murderer. She'd not only killed her own mother, but she'd killed a very old woman.

  She left the house of her birth and walked in ever widening circles, taking one route, then another, into and out of the empty village. Anyone, or anything, tracking her, would be confused by the overlapping trails. Magda's praise of the dogs that helped with the strigoi had proven true when she'd followed Leo in the woods the day before. The grey-muzzled dog had known she was there, every single time.

  Maria had no doubt she'd kill Igor and whoever he brought with him just as quickly and easily as she'd taken her vengeance upon the two old women. Once she was safe and away from here with Leo, she'd work out how she felt about all of that.

  Until then, all that mattered was her own survival.

  Chapter 37

  The old woman's house was not nearly so large or grand as Igor's. The one-story building sat at the end of the paved roads of the village, with only a dirt and gravel path twisting up into the woods beyond. When Leo, Igor, and the dog arrived, a young woman stood outside. Leo remembered her from the funeral, the quiet figure in a modest black dress talking with Elena.

  Today she wore faded blue jeans and a black t-shirt gone nearly gray. She'd caught her long, brown hair in a rough ponytail, and Leo guessed she was in her early thirties. The cigarette in her hand made him wonder how far off he was, especially if she smoked as much as so many people in Romania. He'd learned over the years to simply be grateful the smoke wasn't nearly as foul as American brands.

  "Igor," she said. "Thank you for coming so quickly."

  "I am very sorry about your grandmother," Igor said, kissing both of her cheeks. "Sanda, this is Leo."

  "Her time was short," Sanda said. "And she knew the risks she took. Elena's death pains me more deeply. You understand what's happening here, Leo?"

  "I don't understand anything," Leo said. "I know my wife is gone, and Igor believes she had something to do with all of this. I'm sorry about your grandmother either way."

  "All we can do now is make sure all the souls we've lost are at peace," Sanda said. She knelt, and the dog went right to her, wagging her tail furiously. "You've brought a powerful ally for our journey."

  "Journey?" Leo said. "I don't know where I'd be going. Or why."

  Sanda looked up at him, and the morning light caught her light blue eyes. Those eyes were daring him, sure, but her whole demeanor was shaming him more openly than Igor had. She'd go without him if she had to. And right now she expected to.

  "All I have is a guess," she said. "This old girl will be our best guide. The dogs always have been."

  "I know this makes me sound like the biggest coward in Europe," Leo said, "But assuming I believe any of this, why would you want me to go? I'm not some kind of hunter or tracker. I've never killed a damned thing in my life."

  "I explained what has happened," Igor said, looking at Sanda. "Leo knows he is at least partially responsible, though I wonder if we ever should have let her come back here."

  "We had no choice," Sanda said, standing beside the two men. She barely came up to Leo's shoulder, but he was more than intimidated by her attitude and confidence. "Burying her somewhere else would be a disaster. What part did
you play in this, Leo? In her coming back?"

  "I can't..." Leo stared up the path beyond the house, up into the woods he'd been so at peace in just yesterday, despite the odd silences. That seemed like a thousand years ago. "I know something's going on here. I'm not stupid. But I'm not having an easy time accepting my undead wife has anything to do with it. For the record, I switched the pălincă in her coffin for a bottle filled with water."

  "Why would you do this?" Sanda said, crossing her arms.

  "She drank herself to death. I couldn't stand the thought of her buried with what killed her."

  Sanda shrugged. "And so that's what enabled her to come back instead. It is done now. All we can do is deal with the result. At least we know one of her weaknesses. We'll be ready."

  "Let me know what I can do," Igor said. "When will you set out?"

  "We leave as soon as Leo is ready," she said. "Once word of my grandmother's death gets around, you will not want to be in the village anyway. Terrible dreams for so many and two deaths the next day. This one gains strength far too quickly."

  "This dog and her pups chased a stray away from the inn where Leo was staying yesterday morning," Igor said. "The strigoi was powerful before it even arrived here. I suspect Maria was already drawing strength on the flight from America. And I suspect Leo hasn't told me all he knows."

  Leo closed his eyes, remembering Brian's restless flight, with everyone on board having bad dreams. Had that poor stray dog been the start of all this?

  "Then we have no time to waste," Sanda said. "Igor, if you could bring pălincă, that would save us from having to go buy it. We'll meet you at the cemetery. I have everything else I need ready in the wagon."

  Igor nodded and brought out his phone yet again. Sanda started toward the back of the small house, the dog at her heels.

  "Have you decided I'm going along?" Leo said, hoping he wasn't loud enough to wake the neighbors. "I don't know where you're planning to take me or what you plan for me to do."