A gunshot rang out.
He felt pain in his shoulder.
She screamed.
Bam.
The sound of a rifle echoed loudly in the courtyard. Vlad twitched backward as if something had punched him in the shoulder. His hand went to it, and it was instantly stained red. He grimaced in rage, not in pain, fangs distended and long.
She screamed.
Vlad hissed and vanished into an explosion of bats.
“Maxine!” Eddie raced up the street toward her, a long rifle in his hands. The barrel was smoking. He slung it onto his back. He reached out and took her forearm and pulled her a few steps down the road. “Maxine, we need to go—”
“Eddie?”
“I can’t take him on alone.” He huffed as he was now running down the street with her, pulling her down the street. “I can’t—”
“No. You very well cannot.”
That was the voice that brought so many people so much fear. It was dark, it was expansive. And it was furious. He stood in the center of the road, blocking their path. All pretense of humanity was gone from him. His face was a mask of anger, and his eyes…were pure red, from lid to lid. The wound on his shoulder was already gone.
Eddie pulled up to a screeching halt and pulled two revolvers from holsters at his hips. He pointed them at the vampire. “Back down, you toothy cunt, or I’ll fire.”
“And you think you can stop me?” Vlad sneered. He wore the expression of something that thought of the boy as nothing more than an ant. And he was likely right. “You? Where all others have failed? Tell me, boy, have you even struck puberty yet?”
“Fuck you, you—”
“Enough!” She stepped around Eddie, stunning him. She took hold of both barrels of his guns and pointed them straight down at the ground. “Eddie. Please. This is how you die, if you do this.”
“Maybe I can stop him,” the boy insisted. “I can.” His words were strong. But what she felt from him was only terror.
“No…you can’t,” she murmured and placed a gloved hand on his cheek. “And you know you can’t. It’s all right.”
“Maxine,” Vlad’s voice echoed easily in the empty street without trying, “come to me.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “I leave with you, and he lives. Neither you nor any of your creatures touches him.”
Vlad bared his teeth once more like a feral animal. “He seeks to kill me, empath. You would have me foster mercy for one who seeks my death.”
“He seeks to stop you from murdering a city! You are not some helpless innocent lamb. Do not pretend you are somehow wronged by him.”
“Mind your words.”
“And you mind yours, vampire.” It was her turn to be angry. “You spare his life until the dawn comes tomorrow, or I take his gun and bury a bullet in my brain. Then where will you be without your new shiny toy? Left to return to your siege of the city, I suppose.”
Vlad flinched. His anger faltered. She wounded him. She could feel his hurt from where she stood some twenty feet away. She regretted it immediately, but it was too late to take it back. “Maxine…” When he blinked, his eyes were no longer pure red from lid to lid. His voice was no longer angry, but…mournful. He held out his hand to her. “Come to me.”
It was no longer a command. It was a plea. Do not harm yourself, it whispered. Let me protect you.
Did he honestly care? Did she honestly matter?
She turned to Eddie, who was watching the whole thing as if someone was putting on some sort of farcical play in the middle of the street. “Ma’am, don’t ask me to do this. I can’t leave you.”
“You can, and you will. Your word, Vlad Tepes Dracula,” she called over her shoulder to the vampire. “I will have your word.”
“He will not be harmed. By neither me, nor any of my creatures. I am not to be blamed if he is struck by a carriage in the street, am I?” And there was the Vampire King she recognized. Cynical. Jaded. His wound in his heart had already healed like the one in his shoulder.
Or it had on the outside, at any rate.
“Go, Eddie. Please.” She put her gloved hand on the boy’s cheek once more and stroked it. He would be a handsome man. If he lived that long. “With me, he is distracted. He will not wage his war until I am dead, or his. I will hold on as long as I can. I will buy you all time. Now please…go. Save yourself a pointless death.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he nodded, clearly sick to his stomach at the thought, but unable to argue. He glared over her shoulder at the vampire. “Fuck you.”
“Children these days.”
Maxine rolled her eyes at Vlad’s snide comment. Eddie backed away several steps, then a few more, then turned and ran. When she was alone and the boy was gone, she turned to face Vlad. He still stood where he had been before.
“I was foolish and lowered my guard.” His expression softened, but barely. “You seem to inspire that in others.” He held out his hand. “Come with me. You will live as a guest in my home. Every need shall be cared for. You shall not be kept in a cage.”
“Do I have a choice, Count?”
He dropped his hand to his side. “No.”
She nodded. She suspected as much. She may not have a choice whether to become the “guest” of the vampire, but she could choose whether she went sobbing and screaming or with her head held high.
She walked up to him and felt his gaze on her every step of her approach. As she drew near, he lifted his hand again. She sighed and slipped hers into his. With a firm pull, he yanked her into his chest and banded an arm around behind her back. His other hand caught her chin and tilted her head back to look up at him. “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness.”
He was furious. She saw it now, seething in his red eyes. The night had not gone the way he had wished it to. He had lost this round of the game and was now trying to make it very clear that the board was still his.
“I never would.” She let her hands curl into the fabric of his coat. “Do not mistake my surrender for submission.”
A dangerous grin flashed across his chiseled features, and she watched in fascinated horror as his eyeteeth grew long, sliding from his jaw like the fangs of a snake. “We shall see about that…”
She did not fight him as he tilted her head away. She did not make a sound as his hand slipped from her chin into her hair, fisting it in his fingers, holding her still. He bent to her neck, and she only gasped as he slid his tongue up along the line of her throat, tender from the previous night.
It was only as his fangs broke into her skin that she made a sound at all. And it was not one of pain that he drew from her. It was a moan of pleasure, and she pressed up against him, searching for more.
She let her eyes drift shut.
18
Another vision. This time, she did not stand in a field of mud and gore. She was standing atop the steeply pitched roof of a tower of a castle. She squeaked in surprise as she saw how very close to the edge she was and flew back from the lip that would send her tumbling down hundreds of feet into the darkness below.
She impacted something firm.
It chuckled.
An arm snaked around her waist, holding her against his chest. She knew who it was without looking. She could feel him there around her. She recognized the evergreen forest before her. She had seen the mountain range before in her mind, images stolen from his memories.
“Vlad?”
“We are sleeping in my home. Your gift is insistent and difficult to avoid.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Hardly.”
He was wearing a long, black, crimson-lined cape. It whipped in the wind around her. It was tattered, ragged, and torn. Holes in the rich fabric revealed the stars and the crimson moon behind it. For all the world it looked like jagged, broken claws tearing angrily at the sky.
He was a monster.
“This is who I am. This is what I am.”
She shivered. He had bitten her again, and e
verything had gone dark. He had put her under. She had no idea where she was, but she knew it was with him. “You can hear my thoughts now as well?”
“Yes. You are part of me now. I held it at bay yesterday as best I could to keep from alarming you. But here, in this place, I fear it’s inescapable. Your blood beats within my heart.”
Her hand went to her throat, but here in the dream, she had no marks to remind her of what he had done. Only the memories of how it had felt. She felt her face explode in heat as she blushed violently at how wantonly she had responded to the pleasure it had brought her. She knew if he had rolled up her skirts, she wouldn’t have stopped him. She would have let him—
He could hear her thoughts. She shoved them back into a dark corner and screamed at them to be silent.
He chuckled again, his arm tightening slightly. “There is no shame in what you felt. Or in what you feel now.”
“As you’ve said. You hope that is true. I do not think it’s proven fact.”
Something white breezed by her face. She turned to find the source, looking up at the man who towered behind her. He was another older self once more, with long white hair. His face was as stern, regal, and aristocratic as she remembered it, but the features were different. His clothing was older, perhaps five hundred years or thereabouts, and the garments of a man who was royalty. He was, after all, wasn’t he?
But she knew those crimson eyes. She knew the feeling of his mind around her. His soul.
“I am very old, Maxine Parker. Never forget that.” His words carried such weight that she could not find the words to reply at first.
She looked back out at the forest stretched out before them. “Where is this place?”
“Somewhere I once called home for a time. Carpathia.”
The simple word—home—was enough to shatter the dream around them. Something wrenched her back out of his memories and into hers.
Home.
A terrible word.
It was something she had never truly had.
No, no! Damn it! No! Not here…not now…not like this!
She knelt on the carpet, her dress around her feet. She was weeping into the blue brocade pattern. Her head was in her hands. Her mother had been shouting at her. She had felt the sting of her mother’s hand against her cheek. That was what put her where she was now, squarely in the center of the floor, sobbing.
There was someone else in the room with her. He had been the cause of her mother’s ire. He had been a soldier. Blood covered his gray uniform, put there by the bullet holes that had punctured his lungs and ended his life.
She could speak to souls. Living or the dead.
And after the great war that divided their country, there were many…many dead to be heard.
He did not speak in words but in grief. In sorrow. He was so very sorry for how he had lived, and now it was too late to change anything. He was just a boy of seventeen. Now he would never see the rest of his life.
She had been talking to him, trying to console him. Her mother had once more found her talking to the empty air. Terrified that she was losing her daughter to insanity—something Maxine herself had pondered—she had flown into a rage.
She knew she would bruise from the slap to her face.
A hand took hers. One that was cold to the touch. He pulled her up from her knees, and as she rose, she was no longer the frightened, heartbroken seven-year-old girl. She was herself once more. She didn’t turn to look at the face of the man who had lifted her up from her memory. She felt his presence all the same.
A dark rumble came from behind her. “You fled this place.”
“She tried to kill me, after my stepfather…after—”
At his stunned silence, she pulled her hand from his. She wanted to weave her fingers between his, to find comfort in his embrace, but she had to remember who—what—he was. And to remember his game. She was his prey.
She felt his curiosity. His burning need to see.
“Please. Don’t make me.” She put her hand over her eyes. “No one has ever…I’ve never told anyone.”
“Maxine.” His voice was soft, gentle, with more compassion than she could have expected from him. She looked up at him, meeting his gaze. She couldn’t hold it. There was too much there. She turned away and walked around the now-frozen memory of the ghostly and bleeding soldier boy. She had finally succeeded in convincing him to let go of his lost future and all his regrets. He had faded from her view as something akin to a current pulled him onward.
Leaning against the window frame, she looked out at the Virginia countryside and the white columns that decorated the front of the manor. “She was a well-to-do woman. Social appearances meant more to her than anything else, especially since father died. More to her than even me, her only child. She was convinced I was going mad. Honestly, at the time, I wasn’t so certain she was wrong. I talked to people who weren’t there. I told people what they were feeling. I always knew when other people were lying. That might have been enough for her to withstand. She would only keep me out of the public eye long enough to marry me to some unsuspecting gentleman and I would no longer be her problem.”
She picked at the paint of the sill with her fingernails. There was a small gap in the paint there that she remembered. It wasn’t the first time she had stood here and done this. Although her company was quite remarkable this time. “But then…she remarried. He was a nice man. He never said anything wrong. Never did anything out of line. He was gentle. Sweet. But there was a darkness in him. A seething, terrible sickness that I could feel whenever he was near me. It crawled over me like insects. I couldn’t stand him.”
A hand settled on her shoulder. Cold, but not unwelcome. She shut her eyes and tried to force herself not to relive the memory of what followed. But it was hopeless.
Her bedroom. The dead of night. The moon was bright outside, casting shadows of the mullions across the floor. The windows were open, the lace curtains blowing in the breeze. They danced like figures at a ball.
A ball she wished to attend someday. She had been a child. She had dreamed of being a proper lady like her mother wanted. She dreamed of being a princess, and having some dashing prince sweep in like a fairy tale. But it was all simply that—a pointless dream.
She stood in the shadows of the room, watching her smaller self as she lay under the covers. A girl of twelve, maybe thirteen. She didn’t really quite remember. It hadn’t mattered at the time.
The door clicked open. A figure slipped into the room. A man. Nothing more than a shadow of a monster. He slipped to her bed and under the covers with her.
Then…she had felt his hands.
Her memory of herself screamed.
Muffled against a hand against her small mouth.
“This was the first time it happened,” she whispered to the vampire standing at her back. “The first time I destroyed a soul. I had always been a sensitive creature. I could always tell others what they were feeling, or I knew when they were lying. But until this point, I wasn’t a danger to others. It wasn’t until he attacked me that I could no longer touch another.”
The man screamed as well. He howled in ear-piercing agony. He fell from the bed, landing with a heavy thump on the ground, limp and lifeless. But neither was he dead.
The little girl screamed. And screamed. And then couldn’t scream anymore. Servants came in carrying lamps. The light washed over the face of the man on the ground. His eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream. His chest was heaving. He was alive.
But empty.
She turned from the dream and forced it away. She was back in her old parlor once more. Tears streamed down her cheeks, unchecked. She had cried over that night many times before, and she would do it many times again in her life.
Arms circled her, pulling her close to a broad chest. She leaned her head against him and let herself take the comfort that was being offered. When he broke the silence, she felt the rumble of his voice against her cheek almost more than she
heard him. “What happened next?”
“He starved to death. My mother blamed me for it. She didn’t know how I had done it, but she knew that somehow, I was at fault. I tried to tell her what he had planned to do to me. I felt his intention the moment he touched me. But she didn’t believe me. She hit me, saying I was lying, disparaging her second dead husband. She told me that if it wasn’t for me, neither he nor my father would be dead.”
A hand stroked over her hair slowly, soothingly. “The cruelty of humanity knows no bounds.”
“I’m sure you’ve seen far worse in your years than a mother ill-fit for the job.”
“I have. But it makes the proof of it sting no less. What happened next?”
“Please, no more of this.” She pushed away from him and walked across the room, returning to the window by which she had spent so many years reading, or dreaming, or doodling. But it seemed she could not escape him, not even here.
A hand on her shoulder turned her to face him. A chill finger curled under her chin and urged her to look up at him. Crimson eyes flicked between hers, searching for something. His scrutiny was hard to withstand. When she tried to pull away from him, he pressed her shoulder against the wall firmly to keep her there.
He would have her whole story from her. She sighed and found herself looking at his cravat and the ruby that sat pinned at the knot to avoid watching his eyes. She could not take the scrutiny she saw there. “One night, a year or so after my stepfather died, she snuck into my room with a blade. She meant to end my life.”
Maxine touched a spot on her ribs, over where she had the smallest scar. “She had the blade a quarter inch into my flesh before I touched her. I was going to tear her soul to pieces like I did his. But I…I couldn’t do it. I came close. She screamed at what she felt, fell into the corner, and would not stop crying. I do not know what she saw when I put my hand on her. Perhaps she saw the piece of my stepfather’s soul that I still carried inside me and the mental poison he suffered. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen. I gathered all I could fit into a bag, and I left.”
Heart of Dracula Page 20
