by Drew D'Amato
The fire stopped and no blood was left. Vlad inspected it, and then kicked the urn on its side. The silver urn was burnt on the inside with no more liquid inside it. It was done.
“Let’s go men. We must get to Transylvania by sunrise.”
Vlad leaped off, next was Deacon, Stephen and Malachi, then Jericho. The five of them turned into bats to avoid suspicion in the night sky.
Before he could jump Michael got a text from Gabriel: What did Vlad really do with the coffer?
Michael responded before he took off from the rooftop. No one noticed his delay. He texted back: He destroyed it. Radu has nothing to worry about. We will be at your house the day after tomorrow. Be awake for us.
SIX
1
They made it to Romania a half-hour before sunrise. They went to the Hilton Sibiu. Sibiu was a city in the county of Transylvania. The hotel was luxurious and it had a balcony—which might come in handy for the vampires—but check-in was not until two in the afternoon. They decided to take care of their other errands before then.
They had to finish their preparations. Their first stop was to buy some luggage, something to not look too suspicious when then checked in at the hotel. They also needed to fill that luggage. That was their second errand.
They needed more guns and more ammo. They spent most of their ammo at Geneva. And if they had to use their guns against Radu, they would need more than just the smaller guns they snuck in past the airport.
The air smelled familiar, like an old friend. The people looked the same when he lived there six hundred years ago—hard, tough, and weathered. They were not like happy-go-lucky Americans who believed God loves them, and that they are special. They had seen the evils of the world firsthand, they knew how low mankind can sink. They had a darker perception of the world. Vlad loved them for that.
They needed to take a taxi van for all six of them to get into the same car. The taxi driver drove them to a department store where they bought a bunch of suitcases. Then Vlad put $5,000 American dollars in his hand, and asked if he knew anywhere to buy some guns.
“You want guns, I’ll take you to get guns, but I won’t wait for you,” he told them in Romanian.
Vlad respected that logic. Six men in his taxi with a lot of cash, looking to buy some guns, and he didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Radu was right at home here.
They driver took them to the Militari neighborhood of Bucharest—one of the worst neighborhoods in the country. Militari was like a New York City transplanted to the Eastern Soviet Bloc. Not the glamorous Manhattan, New York, but the hard knocks Bronx—apartment complexes, liquor stores, and shady places where a man can find what he needs. The ride took them about five hours from Sibiu to Bucharest. Vlad didn’t mind seeing his home country during the long ride. It brought back a bit of nostaligia.
They pulled up to a suspicious building on Bloc 205. It looked like an old factory.
“Go around the back, knock on the door three times, and ask for Boris,” the taxi driver said. They carried a suitcase each as they got out of the cab.
The air was cold. Some of the windows on the higher floors of the building were broken. The vampires could tell no one actually lived inside, but a lot of lucrative, shady business deals were done here. They got to the grey, cold, metal door. Vlad knocked three times and asked to speak to Boris.
A scraggly, man with big eyes and a receeding hairline opened the door. They spoke in Romanian. The other vampires did not understand what was said, but they understood when Vlad handed him a big stack of cash. It was the universal language.
They were allowed to come in. The inside was an armory. Guns were out on folding tables. Ammo and grenades were on metal shelves. Two burly men stood in the corner, their arms crossed, guns at their hips, and their eyes on the six of them.
“Men pick out what you want,” Vlad told them as he talked business with Boris, who seemed to be getting more nervous the longer they were in there.
The men were all set on handguns. They came here for some bigger equipment. They were going to need more powerful weapons than necessary. They were going to fight this time as humans. Malachi went with a Milkor MGL-140 grenade launcher. The gun had a revolver to it—like a quickshooter from the old west—that held six 40-millimeter grenades. Michael and Deacon both chose the AIMS-74, which was the Romanian version of the Russian AK-74. The ’74 was similar to an AK-47 but with better accuracy. Deacon was starting to idealize Michael a little bit.
Jericho persuaded Andrew about the advantages the M4 had over the M16. The M4s have almost completely replaced the M16s in the American Military for the wars in the Middle East. Andrew was sold on it and the two each bought an M4A1 with a Special Operations Peculiar Modifiction kit for their guns. Jericho also picked up a third M4 with a SOPMOD pack for Vlad, too.
“Commies,” Jericho said as he walked past Michael and Deacon holding their AIMS-74s.
The men picked up more than enough ammo (being sure they were armor piercing rounds) for their guns of choice as well as ammo and silencers for the guns they had brought with them from LA. Vlad paid for everything. Boris was a little more at ease when he saw how much over their normal price Vlad willingly paid him.
Vlad also picked up a few bottles of ammo lube. They would need it when they painted the bullets later back at the hotel. The vampires and the Crusaders used a rare paint that is actually made out of pure silver—43% pure silver—from a company called SPI. They paint the silver on the bullet, then apply bullet lube, let the bullet dry, and then they are ready.
Vlad brought the paint with him—a few small bottles, the size of nail polish—in his pockets. But before they went to the hotel to paint the bullets, Vlad had to stop at one last place.
2
Bandini waited until daylight to make his next move. The next day after the attack in Geneva, Bandini and a team of four Crusaders tracked down the transponder inside the coffer. They traced it back to the hotel rooftop in Milan. He expected to find the vampires sleeping in a hotel room. A perfect escape, but they underestimated the resourcefulness of Bandini.
Bandini waved a fake badge to the consigliere at the desk and gave him some bullshit. The badge said he was from Interpol, and the bullshit was how they were tracking down the assailants behind the attack at Geneva Airport. Fear of dangerous men at his hotel allowed the consigliere to be controlled and allowed Bandini to search the hotel. Bandini promised to be discreet, and asked the consigliere not to mention anything to the guests or even the manager. Again, out of fear, the consigliere complied.
They took the stairs. They went up each flight and Dean Sterling, an aristocratic looking thirty-seven year old man who held the locator of the transponder—that looked like an iPhone—in his hand and one headphone in his ear, kept telling them the signal was above them. When they got to the top floor Sterling said the signal was still higher.
“What do you mean, like from the roof?” Bandini asked.
“It appears so sir.”
“Well let’s check it out. If that’s the case that means they are outside under the bright sun—powerless.”
They found the stairs to the roof and ran up it, guns drawn, and busted through the door.
The roof was deserted. Nothing, except the Milan sun beating down on them. The signal was still going off from the little screen on the locator.
“What the hell is this, is that machine wrong?” Bandini asked.
The signal had gotten louder once they were on the roof.
“No sir, the machine is fine,” Sterling said. “Follow me.”
The five of them walked, suspicious of the empty roof, but it was all flat, nowhere for the vampires to hide, just small vents scattered around. The beeping had gotten really loud in Sterling’s ear. He was focused on the locator. He turned left looked down and knew the beeping would not get any louder.
“Sir, the urn,” he told Bandini.
Bandini who was looking around, looked down and saw it. It lay on its
side, but he could tell the inside was burnt. Bandini picked it up and put his hand in it. He pulled out the little microchip that was giving off its location. He threw it on the ground and stepped on it. The beep from the locator stopped.
“What do we do now sir?” Sterling asked.
“Well, they didn’t just appear at Geneva. There was a private Learjet that landed there around six the afternoon the day of the attack. Let’s find the pilot of that plane.”
Bandini looked back down and kicked the urn, thinking to himself, Thank God we didn’t use the real stuff.
3
They traveled Northwest back from Bucharest to Sibiu in a different taxi. Their last stop on the way back to the hotel was Vlad’s old castle—not Bran Castle, the one that gets all the tourists—but Poenari Castle. It was in Arges County, which is on the southwest border of Sibiu County, so they were not too far from their hotel. It was located along the Arges River, in Arges County. The tributary of the river Raul Doamnei, into which his first wife Elizabetta fell to her death, ran along the castle. Vlad hadn’t been here in centuries, but as he stood on the first of the 1,500 steps that led to the castle, all the memories of her rushed back to him.
This castle had started as just a watchtower that Vlad’s grandfather had built perched high on the canyon formed by the Arges River Valley. Vlad foresaw the potential of a castle perched so high up on a steep precipice. Vlad used the boyars he decided to spare that betrayed his father as slave labor to build the additions of the castle. He made those bastards work so hard until their clothes fell off, and even then they couldn’t stop. The place was two-toned—gray stones on top of red bricks that clashed against the lush green of the trees that surrounded it. As the vampires got higher up the 1,500 steps they took in the mountainous landscape. To the south, Wallachia, to the north, Transylvania. This was Vlad’s homeland.
The air got colder as they got closer to the top. It was reported to be one of the most haunted castles in the world, but Vlad knew that was just people’s nerves getting the best of them. It couldn’t be his ghost. But then again, there were the souls of all the people he put to death. Maybe their spirits were living on? It sent a little chill down his spine but he moved on. Ghosts haunt the living, and he wasn’t either of them—a ghost or the living.
When they got close to the stairs of the castle proper, they noticed three figures at the top. They put down the suitcases loaded with their recently purchased arms and went for the guns in their belts. It couldn’t be Radu, the sun was out, but it might have been a team of Crusaders.
However, as the three passed them down the stairs, they realized it was not a risk. It was three college students—two boys and one girl, probably from America, and possibly stoned—with piercings in their tongues, ears, and noses, their hair all black, and so were their clothes. They were the kind of kids who loved vampires, and wished they could be one. The kind of kids who had no idea what they were wishing for.
“Fucking Dracula lived here, man,” one boy said.
“That place was fucking sick,” said the girl.
They snapped out of their conversation when they realized six men in all black on the stairs below them. They straightened up like they had just run into some type of authority. Vlad saw fear in their eyes. They nodded at the vampires, quickly tip-toed their way past them and then hustled down the rest of the stairs. The vampires continued their way up.
Once inside the castle, the vampires were in awe.
“Men, feel free to explore,” Vlad told them. Vlad told their taxi driver to keep the meter running. He was already paid in full for the ride back to Sibiu, but if he wanted the handsome tip he was promised he would stick around.
The men went about the place. Deacon and Andrew were more curious than the others. They checked out everything, and everything was something worth checking out. They were like kids on a field trip. Malachi and Michael went down to the torture dungeon. The cement stairs jutted out of the walls. They didn’t look sturdy, but they had lasted for centuries. The cold basement was nothing more than stone walls. But as they walked in they could feel the souls of those who Vlad killed taunting them. They saw nothing ghostlike, but they got the feeling of something rolling over their skin. Goosebumps, something neither had felt for years. Malachi actually felt cold, something he had not felt in centuries. There was some presence in here, thousands had died here, but they couldn’t put their fingers on it. Could it be ghosts? Ghosts don’t exist—but neither do vampires and yet here you are. The irony played inside his head.
“A lot of people died here,” Malachi said.
“And master probably ordered most of it.” Mchael concurred. “He was one major son of a bitch.”
“What are you saying, Michael?”
“He acts so noble now, and thinks so less of us for wanting to stay vampires. Yet he was such an evil bastard as a human. A little hypocraitical wouldn’t you say?”
“Maybe he learned in death what he should have known in life. People deserve a second chance.”
“And people also deserve a chance. He assumes if we had this power to ourselves we would turn evil, yet we have been nothing but loyal and good. We deserve this chance.”
“Michael you sound as if someone had let you borrow their Ferrari and now you’re mad they want it back. If he gave this to us, he can take it back. That’s the way I see it.”
“Malachi, I don’t wanna die.”
“I don’t wanna live forever, do you?”
Michael grew frustrated. “I just think after everything we gave to him he should leave us the choice to stay vampires or not.”
“How about what he gave to you? You would have been dead in some French fort over three hundred years ago if not for him.”
The two of them stared each other down. Michael blinked first. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
4
Jericho followed his master. He knew he wouldn’t want to be left alone. Vlad walked up to the square tower—the original part of the castle before Vlad decided to build around it. Vlad went to the balcony. When he got there he wasn’t sure if he saw a ghost or a flashback, but he saw something. It was his first wife Elizabetta in an all-white dress looking at him. She looked just like Jasmin. The image was fluid, yet very vivid. He saw in her eyes, her love for him. He saw that in her. He smelled her. His heart stopped. He broke into a sweat. He tried to speak to her but then she turned away from him and moved toward the balcony. She leapt from it. Vlad stood there frozen, timid, cold.
Reality came back into focus. Now he just saw the stone opening of the balcony with a metal rod across it to protect anyone from accidentally falling down to the Arges River.
“This is where she died, Jericho. This is where she fell to her death. This is where Radu killed her.”
“He didn’t actually kill her,” Jericho said, hoping that would some how make him feel better.
“She had no options, she couldn’t surrender, that would mean death and rape. She leaped to avoid her fate at Radu’s hands,” Vlad continued. Malachi had heard this story before, many times, but he never saw before what he saw next.
Vlad started to cry. Vlad turned around and looked down at the Arges River before him. He wiped away his tears. He uttered words he had never said, but words he had thought for centuries.
“I killed her.”
“No you didn’t, Vlad.” Jericho went and put his arm on his master’s shoulder. Vlad was quiet for a moment.
“I left her alone, I wasn’t here to protect her.” He had blamed Radu over the years to rationalize it, but the hardest person to forgive is yourself. “Jasmine,” Vlad said under his breath. He looked up ahead of him. “She has now come back to me in the form of Jasmine.”
“Vlad, you can’t be sure of that.”
“I am sure, it is fate. In all the death I caused, I am not innocent, but I am not evil. I did what I did for the greater good. I’m a moral enigma, like Judas himself. My
young life as a tortured prisoner distorted my view, and made me feel what I did was just. My time as a vampire has been to make up for these sins, my purgatory, and now it will all be over soon. And I will be in Heaven at some point, with my love—Jasmine. This is fate Jericho, and you cannot deter fate.”
“But what if she is not? What if she is not Elizabetta reborn? Will you still love her?”
“Yes.”
“And what if she doesn’t love you? What if it all falls apart in a few weeks? Then would you regret becoming a human again?”
“No, everything I did as a ruler, no matter how macabre it was, I did because I thought it was the right thing to do for the safety of my country. I thought that it was in some way noble. I can valiadate my existence as a vampire and living off the blood of humans, because I have to save the human race from the threat of Radu. Once that threat is eliminated then what? What am I a vampire for? Jericho, you were a soldier. You did not believe in murder, but on the battlefield you killed people. It was war that allowed this action. This is the same with living the life of a vampire. In order to keep Radu in check we kill who we kill for the sake of the war, but once the war is over we are just…”
“Murderers.”
“Refusing temptation is one of the noblest things someone can do. It’s probably one of the secrets to life. We have a chance to become human again, what are we then if we do not take it?”
Jericho was closer now in understanding Vlad’s true motivations. This wasn’t just about being a human so he could be in love. Giving up this power was something more, something deeper, sacrifice—salvation.
Vlad had accepted his life as a vampire as punishment for the brutality he showed as a human. He felt this was his last chance to get right in the eyes of God. Fighting Radu and protecting humans was what made it right. Staying a vampire or letting Michael and others stay vampires after the death of Radu, was not an option. He had to end vampires. That was his penance. He believed he had to save the world from vampires to save his soul.