For what seemed the millionth time, Sergeant Okopnik watched the quick decay of a dead mythical creature. As different as they were, they all died the same.
First, the flesh collapsed, like a balloon losing air. The first time he saw this, he vomited. Now it was nothing. Next, the bones, still covered in skin, lost their rigid edges. Not until the skin peeled back, though, did the bones crumble completely, leaving only dust. Finally, the diamonds dropped to the floor, uncomfortably untouched by the wreckage.
This was the first complete decomposition the Allies managed to photograph from beginning to end. Finally, concrete proof that war hadn’t driven the soldiers mad.
The sergeant motioned for his men to stand down as the cameras clicked around them. “Myths are true. Dogs with men’s eyes, men with the eyes of bears, women with snakes for bodies. Such beasts are everywhere. But you knew that, didn’t you? You worked here.”
“Yes. I was his secretary.” She tipped her chin at the remains. “I was a fool,” she whispered.
“But you fought bravely at the end,” the private chimed in. Admiration shone from his face. “How did you kill him?”
Her jaws worked for a moment. A blush ran under her pale skin. “He didn’t expect me to fight back. He laughed when I picked up the poker. That made me angry.” She stumbled over her words. “It’s all such a terrible blur.” Her lips trembled.
The sergeant nodded. “It’s often like that. But you did what you had to do.” He gestured to two men. “Escort the vampire killer to the holding area.”
She flinched at the title.
One of her escorts patted her arm. “Don’t worry. We will treat you well, little warrior.”
The admiring private sifted amongst the ashes. “Here.” He held the earrings out to her. “To the victor belong the spoils.”
She took the emperor’s ransom in jewels in her stained hands and held them to her bosom. “Thank you.”
“You must go,” Sergeant Okopnik said. “It isn’t safe here.”
Halfway out the door, she turned around and looked at her liberators. “Don’t let them cover this up. Show everyone!” She yelled to the flashing camera. “Dracula is dead. And now the world knows it!”
The devastated homes and forests of Germany ran wild with Allied forces and escaping Germans. Shadow Creatures ruled the ruins of Europe after sunset. Vlad Dracula himself, rather herself, emerged from the coffin-sized depression she had dug out from under an old farmhouse.
Pressing her lips together, Vlad forced herself into brassiere and skirt and blouse and waited until the resentment at the discomfort passed. Instead of binding her small breasts, she had to accentuate them.
I am a woman now, she thought as she struggled with the straps of the bra. My name is Valerie. All those years of wanting to experience female life and this was what she got? Three days of being a woman in wartime taught her more than a mortal lifetime of being married. If she hadn’t been a vampire, she would have been raped five times already. Valerie habitually smoothed her now-gone moustache. The prickly stubble under her fingers reminded her of yet another loss from this war. Damn. She needed a shave already.
She searched her clothing and the ground around her bed. No razor. Annoyed, she sat back on her knees. Lucifer’s bloody knuckles, how many more things could happen?
Something pinched underneath her breasts. Valerie tugged at the unfamiliar band that dug into her back. How could women stand this hideous bondage? But she bowed to her choice. Her own survival beat any other concern.
Blood blisters had formed and scabbed over Dracula’s feet in the first days after her escape from the advancing Russians. The unfamiliar high-heeled shoes rubbed and twisted her feet and ankles in torturous ways. By day, she hid from the sun in rubble. After three days of wandering more or less southwest, she still had no plan other than basic survival.
Vlad hated not having a plan.
Bullets whizzed over her head. She hit the ground, cursing under her breath. The whole point of dressing like a civilian was to live, not to get killed by trigger-happy humans.
A few German soldiers dressed in their tattered Wehrmacht Heer uniforms, passed through the wreckage. They weren’t even soldiers. They were children, barely past eight winters, carrying rifles bigger than they were. Unseen in the unstable ruins, Valerie cocked her ears at their whispered conversation.
“There must be food somewhere.” The lightest of them scrambled over and under the bombed-out village. Cement dust and wood splinters hung in the air like deadly snowflakes, attacking the little militia’s unprotected eyes and lungs. Their coughing and sneezing accompanied endless watering eyes. The debris groaned and creaked under their stumbling steps. But the determined children did not stop their scrounging. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were caught in a collapse.
“We will not surrender.” The littlest spoke with fragile bravado.
The oldest nodded. “The Führer would want us to defend our homes.”
Vlad ground his—her—teeth as she crouched in the woods. Damn it. She would not fail her new identity. Despite being starved, orphaned, and homeless, they still believed. Why did they not see what she had seen?
Poor fools. Their Führer had betrayed them. The war had been lost when the idiot insisted on invading the Soviet Union.
What was the point of having the most experienced military minds in the world on your side if you didn’t listen to them? She shook her head in remembered disgust. Any of the advisors with the intelligence of Lucifer’s curly eyebrow hairs warned the Führer that campaigning in the wintertime was a suicide mission.
The children tossed wreckage aside, worsening the dust, until they were defeated by the fragility of their small bodies.
They moved on, leaving Valerie alone with her angry thoughts and her search for a razor. Disgust fueled her strength as she tossed rocks and building remains aside.
Vlad had been disgusted with the war even before the disastrous Operation Barbarossa. Dracula’s high profile and carefully trained Shadow Corps had been used for cannon fodder, not for the infiltration and sabotage missions they were best suited for. Hitler’s mythical military genius was all the excuse the High Command needed to override the expertise of the German army.
“War has changed since your day, old man,” so-called advisors retorted when Vlad demanded answers about food supply and fuel allocation.
“The Jewish-led Bolsheviks will fall quickly,” another answered when questioned about the wisdom of invading the Soviet Union in December.
Valerie tossed a solid oak table thirty feet to the side. She had been very happy to drain those two dry before faking her death.
Even the premise behind the invasion was flawed. Eliminate thirty million Russian natives in order to make space for the Germans? That idea never went well.
During the planning stage of the invasion, Vlad began to commit small treasons. He ordered his special forces to cooperate with the Allies. Hundreds defected to the British and Americans in order to help against the idiocy of this poorly run war. The fortunes of the North African and Italian campaigns turned on the strength of Dracula’s forces changing sides. Under new orders, giant sharks and angry kraken destroyed Japanese warships and planes. Dracula’s Shadow Corps quietly and stealthily used their might to change the face of Europe.
What happened to those troops next was anyone’s guess.
Vlad’s stomach growled. Obviously, dinner was next.
A man wearing a poorly fitted shirt and trousers wandered into her line of sight. Through the haze and the moonlight, she recognized him. Yet another of the lickspittles of the High Command.
She sprinted across the moonlit path and snatched him before he saw her.
Tucked in her hiding spot, she jabbed her fangs deep into his grimy neck. A far cry from her preferred luxury, but very satisfying.
Sucking her breakfast completely dry restored her skin to its previously smooth condition. His boots fit her well enough. And even
better, he carried a razor.
Before, Vlad had always been grateful for his hirsute appearance. His Eastern European genes had blended to give him a beautiful black moustache. Nothing hid a woman like facial hair. But now?
Hundreds of posters with Dracula’s face littered the ground and any standing walls. Anyone, even a woman, who resembled this visible symbol of the Reich would be staked before questions. Until the news spread of his death,” her life depended on keeping her moustache under control.
She didn’t dare slip. Too many people knew what Dracula looked like. She’d given press conferences, posed for pictures, recruited openly in the mortal world. She’d been so arrogant in the assumption that the Germans would win and order would prevail over Europe.
Valerie shaved by feel under the dappled leaves. She would not give in to shame. The past was gone. Time for the future.
First order of business: get out of Germany and preferably, completely out of Europe. Perhaps South America. The people were said to be lively and tasty there.
Lively and tasty? She paused the razor at a shocking thought.
Her secret had prevented the usual string of lovers that vampires and men could have. She’d always sublimated sex into overwhelming violence.
But perhaps, just perhaps, now she could experience pleasure? She always wondered what it would be like to have a penis in her mouth. Rumors told of it being delightful.
“Shit.” She touched the slice under her nose. The cut healed quickly, but now she understood years of complaints about the complexity of female grooming. How she missed her flamboyant moustache. It required so little care.
Pleasure. Wicked indulgence of her every fantasy. A decadent tingle awoke her nipples.
Vlad tucked the razor in her pocket and left the woods. She sniffed the spring night air. A troop of well-fed American soldiers camped down the road. If she ran at full speed, she could reach them in an hour. That would be a fabulous start of her new, more sexual future.
Americans were not only oversexed, they were ridiculously protective of women, as well. She could travel with them, play with them, and feed herself at the same time.
Vlad the Impaler, Dracula was dead. Valerie, no last name yet, had no idea where she was going or what she would do. Not for the first time, her life ended.
Now was the time to rise again.
As she ran through the night, thinking on orgies of blood and sex, she barely noticed the sign reading NORDHAUSEN.
As she reached the American encampment outside the city, the reek of cold mass murder rose from the very soil. It wasn’t the peppery scent of battle or the urine stench of premeditation. Instead, the rot of corruption, decay, and waste obliterated everything. Bodies on litters left the town in an ant trail of misery.
Curious, she skirted the 104th Timberwolf Infantry camp. When she reached the center of a work camp, she stopped cold in the middle of the scurrying medics and soldiers.
Two seconds ago, Valerie would have said nothing about warfare disgusted her. Had she not killed and killed often? Her native urges toward peace on the edge of pike left nothing untouched.
Until now.
Unnoticed amongst the devastation, she wandered the site. Corpses stacked like firewood filled abandoned machine shops and stairways. The fabulous rockets Hitler bragged about to her had been built here. The Führer hadn’t mentioned the dead and nearly dead spread like fallen leaves.
Feces, intestines, flesh, and bones didn’t merely decorate the concrete. The bombing had literally pounded the waste into the floor. Her boots squished as she walked through row after row of bodies.
Once, she breathed in. The stench of decay made even her battle-hardened nose close in on itself.
Cold fury propelled her to the middle of the death camp.
Her own death count numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The anger that scraped up the back of her shoulders made no sense.
A dim memory from her human days came back to her. When she ruled, her towns were safe for the law-abiding. Vlad Dracula killed thieves, criminals, invaders. Not the people who built her weapons. She turned a slow circle, taking in the pain.
Those who stocked the Dracul family’s armory had been pampered, fed, and encouraged.
What she saw here would never have happened under her rule. Professional soldiers knew the risks. Criminals knew the price of their actions. Even those pressed into war knew that death wasn’t personal. When each met their doom, it was merely the business of warfare. Any who met Vlad the Impaler’s justice knew the rules of the game they played and the roles each took on.
Adolf Hitler had promised Dracula, “Bring your kind to me. When I win, all crime and disease will be gone. Isn’t that what you’ve worked for your whole existence? You already rule the supernaturals, but you could rule even more by my side.”
A half-decayed head rolled by her feet.
Oh, yes. It was what she’d wanted all along.
And Dracula had delivered. Oh, how he’d delivered. And this is what they were doing with the power she gave them?
She knelt in the dirt and shit and bowed her head. Let Dracula and Hitler stay dead.
Vlad’s reputation from his mortal life had been greatly exaggerated. Impale one or two people for a well-deserved punishment, and suddenly Ottomans on pikes lined the roads.
This travesty outstripped even the most outrageous tales about her. And she was partially responsible. Every ounce of honor she’d ever possessed demanded she make reparations for these horrors she’d unknowingly allowed to happen. But what penance would be appropriate for this disgrace?
The only answer was service to the helpless.
She found a die in the dust—a knucklebone, actually, marked with pips. She knelt amid the bodies and rolled it. Six.
Sixty years, then. Vlad promised herself sixty years to serve the victims of this horrific crime.
“Miss? Miss? Are you all right?” A young American soldier, his hands and uniform covered with other people’s gangrene, knelt in front of her. “I’m a medic. Do you need help?”
Valerie met his war-weary brown eyes. “No.” She took an unnecessary breath. She would have to breathe to maintain her façade. “But I can help.”
“Come with me.” The boy was too tired to question how a woman came to wander the camp alone. She was here and she was able-bodied.
For two years, she helped the Allies clean the camps, moving from Mittlebau-Dora to Dachau to Sobibor. All over Germany and Poland she studied the wreckage of lives.
The waste revolted her.
All the labor and energy the guards and commanders had put into the camps could have been used on the fronts, perhaps preventing the Germans’ defeat. The tortured and the dead Jews could have been productive laborers instead of starved and ruined. Disgust ruled Valerie until a strange new emotion, pity, stirred her dead heart.
In 1947, the UN formed Israel. It was a clear signal of what she had to do.
Valerie lied on her application and joined the newly formed Israeli Army as a trainer. Safely hidden now in her new gender and identity, she hunted the vampires she’d made, destroyed every collaborator she’d used. One by one, they found themselves on the receiving end of her tools of the trade.
The small new country was riddled with holy ground. She endured the endless pain and weakness as part of her penance. Through it all, Valerie vowed she would never allow these horrors to happen again.
Because she planned to execute every murderer herself. Only then would she allow herself to experience life as a real woman.
Chapter 8
Twenty-four whole hours had passed since Lance Soleil’s radical act and Radu Tepes still couldn’t wrest the media attention back to himself. He had a plan, though.
If it hadn’t been for his dignity, he would have sprinted down the Governor Hotel’s luxuriously patterned carpeted hallway toward his private meeting room. Instead, he forced himself to advance like conquering royalty through the throngs of shouti
ng press and onlookers.
“How do you feel about the Tualatin Mountain Homeless Shelter and its new, integrated services?” one asked louder than the others.
“This is wonderful news,” he replied. “I am now meeting with my staff to best decide how to support Father Soleil in his quest for greater social accountability.”
As he reached for the suite’s doorknob, his gaze fell to a flake in his carefully buffed thumbnail. Quickly, he pulled a sleek platinum PDA out of his suit jacket’s inner pocket. A fast SCHEDULE MANICURE note on the screen and he secreted the device back before any mortals could see.
“Would you ask Father Soleil to be your vice president when you throw your hat into the ring?”
Excitement tightened his lungs. For the first time in his long life, he was poised to get exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it.
“You know that I don’t wear hats.” Radu gave the reporter a mysterious smile. “If you would be so kind as to excuse me now.”
Radu threw open the heavy white painted wood door. Lucifer below, he loved the Governor Hotel. Of course he enjoyed the large, old-fashioned windows, perfect furnishings, and the lavish rooms.
Mostly, he loved the quick service. Two minutes ago he’d asked for a private conference space, and now he had it. There was no way he could be seen having these conversations in his fabulously press-friendly terrace suite.
When the news of Lance Soleil’s actions broke, Radu’s advisors, Joe Carter and Ben Trask, had suggested the CCC and the shelter work together to expand their mutual goals.
Radu refused. He was tired of being Number Two, of being someone else’s partner. It was his turn.
No showboating priest was going to steal his limelight. It merely meant he had to scramble to contain the situation. Radu didn’t like scrambling, but it was a necessary evil.
He closed the door behind him and smiled at the solitary person waiting for him. The rest of his staff had orders not to show for another three minutes. He had a situation to exploit. Radu needed perfect deniability.
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