by Ana Calin
Juliet Jochs, the only woman who ever stirred me on the inside, is a tender, loving soul who can heal even the vilest of existing monsters. But I am too vile for anyone to love. She was literally balm to my wounds, and to my heart she was... Fuck, the more I think about it, the more it hurts.
My pain reaches to the very base of this castle, to the rock’s core. Darkness and shadows must have awakened from its twisted corners, so guards and service people all came to the tower where they heard I was, scared, peering inside.
“You should not be around me now,” I say, hands white-knuckling the windowsill. Avoiding facing them, I reach for the cape hanging on the nearest chair at the table. That’s why I always have the cape at hand—in case the monster boils to life without notice, and I have to cover my face in order to keep everyone alive.
I flap it powerfully and hold it against my face with one arm, stomping away through guards and servants who withdraw from my path. Their whispers tell me they’re terrified. As for Victoria, she hides her fists as she braces herself, but I know they’re clenched in anger and frustration.
I also know she thinks she loves me, but what she feels is far from love. I may have never experienced the feeling myself, but I’ve lived enough to see it in other people. Victoria Dunham is the woman who worshipped me most, drinking in my princely image during the day like no other back when I used to feed from her. She was so taken with my princely self that she gladly put up with the monster at night. She kept trying to convince me to do her during the day, while I was beautiful. That was her obsessive goal, but I consistently refused. That would have meant energy flowing the other way—from me to her—and would have turned me into a monster in broad daylight. And I’m very sensitive to daylight.
Of all the women I ever had, Victoria was the one most in love with my looks. Never has she judged me for killing men or senselessly fucking other women, on the contrary, she enjoyed watching me use them. She forgave me for anything as long as I looked pretty, and that made me despise her like no other. All in all, Victoria Dunham isn’t far from a monster on the inside. Keeping her by my side—upon her request—and never sticking my dick in her again was my way of punishing her for her despicable standards until she’d learn her lesson. Of course, she’s free to leave whenever she chooses to.
Once inside the Hall of Ceremonies deep in the heart of the rock, where my monster father initiated Vlad and me in front of all those masked sickos, I feel familiar to myself again.
I snort, my fingers running over the slab of granite they tied me to centuries ago. I was barely more than a toddler. Vlad screamed while they drained my blood, then he doubled over and puked after they had him drink it from a golden grail. I squeeze my eyes shut, banishing the memory from my head. That was only the beginning, and I’m not keen on recounting the rest.
My fingers keep running down the slab, fingernails elongating and scratching the granite with a brain-wrecking screech. What was I thinking, that Juliet would really want to be with me when sober of my influence on her mind? How could she? Not even an angel would bear to know these monstrous hands with flesh that looks like corals touched her. Of course she ran away with a bohemian looking guy with milky eyes and healthy skin that he can put on hers.
A growl rips from my throat at that last image in my head. My claw shoots under the slab, the muscles in my arm flex, and I haul the granite against the rock wall of the cave. It hits the wall then the ground with two deep thuds. The impact doesn’t even chip it, but the wall does send crumbles to the floor. The next thought that crosses my mind is that I’d prefer to be tied down to that piece of granite again than knowing that another man’s body is grinding onto Juliet’s.
She might be an angel, but I’m a monster, and this is my nature. There’s nothing I can do to change that. I can’t live knowing Juliet is going to be with another man. If I can’t have her, nobody will.
Juliet
LAZARUS’ ROOM IN THE attic of the village bookshop is a cozy place. I used to fantasize about a room like this as a child, while I read with a flashlight under my duvet—slanted window with rain pattering on it, wooden beams smelling of fairy tales, and a warm, comfortable bed.
I’m completely sober of the Prince, screaming at myself, “How could you?” but still. The affection still clings to my heart like some oil that just won’t go away no matter how much you wash at it. I keep waiting to lose this affection like some bad symptom but, while my thoughts do sober up, my feelings remain unchanged. I duck harder under the duvet wrapped around me. I have to recount his evil in order to feel disgust.
The Prince is first of all a killer—he fought many wars, where he used to drive his blade through human bodies the way we drive knives through cheese today. It’s probably one of the drawbacks of immortality—you never lose the standards you grew up with, so, if life was cheap for him back in the day, it surely is today, too. Modern society where the weak are allowed dignity must be a sick joke to him.
Fuck, I don’t need to go through all his evil deeds. The last one I witnessed should be enough, shouldn’t it? He fucking turns women into zombies and keeps them locked in a dungeon beneath the ground. It doesn’t get much sicker and vile than that!
“Hey.” Lazarus opens the door, carefully cradling a mug of steaming tea in his hands. He shifts it from one hand to the other to avoid burning himself, blowing air over his fingers. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” I reply in a cracked voice from the duvet’s cocoon. “But I’m exhausted. Pleasantly exhausted though, like I’ve just come back to a warm bed from a hike in the mountains.”
“Only that you haven’t been in a healthy environment like a hike in the mountains, have you? You’ve been held prisoner by a wicked prince.”
I steady the sides of the duvet around my shoulders and reach for the tea with both hands, while Lazarus takes a seat in his desk chair under the window. His features, the focused but kind way he looks at me, everything about him urges me to trust him. I want to spill all the beans to him so much that tears pool in my eyes, but I can’t get carried away.
“Lazarus.” I look down at the mug of tea, the hot steam misting my face. I don’t know how to tell him even the tenth part of what happened at the castle, he’ll think I’m mad. Then I remember the contempt with which he looked at Victoria. Yes, here’s where I can start.
“I saw the way you looked at Miss Victoria. There was definitely something there. Something not good.” I look sideward at him from my mug, eager to read his expression.
“Yeah, she’s the Prince’s right hand. Or the left one, better said. She recruits people for him. She’s a nasty one, I tell you.”
I narrow my eyes. “Are you sure that’s the only reason you hate her guts?”
He snorts. “Juliet, she recruits all kinds of services for the prince. Some of the people she recruited were young girls dreaming of modeling careers. She inspected them like you would horses at a fair, like animals. I’m sure you see where I’m going.”
A flash of the woman launching herself at me and spitting black slime in my face cuts through my brain. I know exactly what happened to those girls and where they are, but how do I tell him?
“You seem to know quite a bit about the prince and his people.” I wet my lips before I continue, thinking of ways to put this. “And you sound bitter against them. You sure didn’t seem that way when you picked me up from the airport.”
“Of course I didn’t, he’s my employer, and you were a stranger, a visitor, a lover, as far as I was concerned. But I didn’t rave about him either, did I? I never painted a nice picture of him to you.”
“Lazarus, remember when you sent me down to the tunnel—”
“Of course I remember, how could I forget?” He rolls closer with his chair, his hands cupping mine over the mug. I look up into his milky blue eyes, feeling so much empathy from him that my eyes wet. “And I’ve been sorry about it ever since. Three months passed since that day, and I felt anxiety all this time, n
ot knowing what happened to you.”
“What did you think could have happened to me?”
His eyes slide on me up and down. “Look at you, I don’t have to guess.”
“Please, this is important.” I demand, but softly. “What were the possibilities that ran through your mind?”
His rubs his palms on his knees, his eyes wandering around the room as he thinks. “Well, we talked about the shadier part of history, which I’ve studied for quite a while, and about masks and rituals. I was kind of scared he—” He wets his lips, clearly worried he might look stupid saying the following. “He might have used you in his rituals, and it would have been only my fault.”
Ideas connect in my head, ideas related to all the stuff we talked about just before I went down to that tunnel. I remember he knew a whole lot and now, in the light of everything I’ve experienced at the Prince’s castle, so much of it gains new meaning.
“Listen, Lazarus, I have to ask you directly. How much do you know about the Prince?”
“That’s a very broad question. But since I suspect you want an answer related to the rituals, I know enough to think he might still be conducting the same kind of rituals as his ancestors.”
“And why would a powerful young man hold on to rituals of the past, when he could be running Silicon Valley?”
“Because they were powerful rituals, more powerful than anything science can offer, and he loves power.” He leans forward with elbows on his knees, his fingers stapled together like a scholar’s explaining things of deeper meaning to an apprentice. He’s young and handsome, and yet assuming the attitude of an old wise man, which I’ve often seen in students of Philosophy and, indeed, History.
“There are many, many valuable things that have gone lost in history, Juliet. You know, in the beginning of my study of History at the university, I despised everything that had to do with conspiracy theories. Let me be direct and admit that I didn’t believe in them, and I thought that humans’ tendency of lending them importance was just a trick of the human brain. You know, people tend to put themselves at the center of everything, and everything has to make some sort of sense.
“It was a while before I understood that the brain was wired like this because that is indeed how things work. If you manage to imagine the world without all its systems and rules for a while, you’ll realize that human experience is indeed of central importance to the universe, and everything happens for a reason.
“This may sound slightly esoteric to you, maybe even cliché on some level, but it’s the truth. I’ll refrain from trying to explain the world. I’ll limit myself to the rituals that the Order of the Dragon performed.”
The pace of my heart accelerates as I anticipate this.
“The masks were used not only to conceal the participants’ identities, but also to blend their individual energy together. People, as we all know, have their specific personalities and energy imprint. The masks made this energy uniform. During the rituals, Vlad the Devil—who was actually Dracula’s father, not Dracula himself—gathered powerful people with energy similar to his own. They would all wear masks so that their energy would align to the same frequency and be channeled toward what they were doing.”
“And what were they doing?”
He shakes his head as if he can’t go there just yet. “There are few accounts on how exactly those rituals went down, and most of them are copies of copies. So they cannot actually retain much of the true rituals that took place six hundred years ago. I mean, come on, even when information is passed on from one person to another bits of it is changed, transformed, so actually no accounts of the past are ever truly reliable.”
“So what is this then, a dead end?” I say, a bit annoyed, when nothing more comes from him. “The outcome is that there is no way to know?”
“There is a way to know.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand. You just said that historical accounts can’t be trusted, because most of them are copies of copies. If we can’t trust that, then what can we trust?”
Lazarus gets up from the chair, and caresses one side of my face with the smooth fingers of a scholar. “Some things cannot be explained in words. They can only be understood with the heart. Or, in this case, with the eyes.”
I stare at him, my mouth opening with every one of those words.
“I’ve heard those lines before,” I whisper. Lazarus crouches down in front of me, milky blue eyes resting on mine.
“What matters is that you’re safe now, and that we can keep you hidden from the Prince until we sort this out.” He caresses my face again. “Try to get some sleep. You’ll need your strength in the morning. As soon as you wake up, I promise you’ll meet someone special who’ll tell you everything you want to know about the Prince, his rituals, and our purpose here, in this town.”
He gets up and turns to the door, but I grab his hand. “Wait, you can’t just leave me like this, after you spurred on my fire. Why not tell me now? Why be so damn mysterious?”
“Believe me, I want to satisfy your curiosity on the spot, but I can’t.”
I have to be very direct, so here we go. “Lazarus, do you believe that Radek Basarab is the Prince of Midnight? I mean the real one from six hundred years ago?”
His gaze rests on mine, unfazed. After a short pause, he says, “Yes.”
He closes the door and crouches urgently in front of me again, hands on mine. “Juliet, I need you to trust me, okay? I can’t tell you much more than what I already did tonight. But I can tell you this—I’m an investigative journalist. I came to this town undercover as the bookseller’s nephew, to investigate Prince Radek’s shady dealings. The bookseller and I will explain everything to you tomorrow, but I need you to be patient until then. There are things in this world, Juliet, so deep and incredible, that they cannot be blurted out in one hasty conversation in an attic room.”
CHAPTER XI
Juliet
In the morning I can barely contain myself. Well rested or not, it doesn’t matter, I need to get downstairs right away. I jump out of Lazarus’ oversized pajama that kept me really comfortable during the night, and bend to pick up my dirty silk dress from the floor. I just hold it out in front of me, and look at it like it’s cursed. Incredible, how much emotion it stirs inside. I won’t be able to wear it, I’ll have to go downstairs and meet the mysterious bookseller still in the baggy blue shirt and pants, both covered in pictures of happy smiling racecars.
Thuds up the stairs make me stand to attention. There are muffled voices, men’s voices, reminding me of Radek’s guards at the castle. My brain is quick enough to realize it is them.
Fuck. They found me!
I look around desperately for a place to hide. I should have seen this coming! What did I expect, that he’d simply let me go, that he wouldn’t turn the entire town upside down looking for me? He knows I couldn’t have gotten far in only a few hours. And if his men only come in here looking for me now, it’s because Radek has either found out late about my escape, or they’ve been busy looking elsewhere.
My eyes dart around for hiding options, find no viable ones, so I drop and slide under the bed. I cover myself up with a mess of backpacks and a big plush dog that’s half my size, knowing they’ll surely look here. It’s the most obvious hideout, second only to the wardrobe. I try hard to control my breathing.
The door opens, booted feet stomping inside the room. They have made enough noise to announce they’re coming, but even so, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the room, they were too fast.
I keep controlling my breathing, but the beating of my heart is so loud I’m afraid they’ll hear it. It’s three of them, talking to each other in their native language. It sounds aggressive, like bullets flying at my ears. Everything about them sounds dangerous, sure as hell more dangerous than thugs I’ve seen in movies. Everything about their movement and presence around me smells of blood and sounds of gritted teeth ready to tear into man flesh.
&
nbsp; One of the guards drops to one knee right by the bed, and my heart stills inside my chest. I petrify from head to toe, my eyes wide as I watch a hand lift the rim of the duvet, preparing to look under it. I clutch the big dog to my chest as the tip of a reddish, bristly beard appears, lowering itself. Time has slowed down for me to an impossible level, my eardrums pounding to explode as I watch this happen in slow motion. I recognize the man even without seeing his full face. He’s the guard who stopped me from following Radek down to the basement three months ago, the last time I saw the light of day before he took me to his castle, keeping me high on his dark powers.
This is it. The man will discover me, and it will feel like the world came to an end. They will brutally punish Lazarus and the bookseller for hiding a fugitive from the prince’s castle. Shit. Victoria! An image of her in a dungeon, wearing rags and heavy chains hits me. I should just come out and give myself over. I should come out now.
“Gentlemen,” a female voice says. My eyes dart over to where the voice is coming, and I glimpse pink slippers with pointy tips in the doorway. The calves emerging from them are thick, making me think of an older woman. She speaks in Romanian, but her voice is musical and clear enough that I understand something about refreshments.
But it’s the smell of the medieval drink mead that fills the room—I know the scent from the castle, guards used to have it there all the time. One of the men growls something at her, but she giggles and answers something as pleasant as before, which eventually gets the men out of the room. Only the red-bearded guard is still on one knee by the bed. He picks and raises the hanging duvet again, but then one of his peers calls from the hallway, where they followed the woman.
“Gruia!”
Gruia. I don’t know if he’s the leader, but he’s sure tough as a devil. Mead couldn’t bait him out of here, so he’s more than a base beast. But, from the vibe I get from him, he’s crueler than one. I decide I must watch out for him particularly.