“Why not kill her?” the housemaid asked, curious instead of confrontational. “She’s a complication.”
Maxwell shook his head. “No. Under no circumstances is she to be harmed. All I can tell you is that she is essential to part two.
He held up his hand, halting any questions. “First things first. We need the Guide.”
Maxwell picked up another set of pictures in his hand and then fanned them out.
“Here.” He pointed to a narrow alleyway next to the apartment. “We grab here. He comes home this way every evening. He picks bread up at this patisserie. Drug him, grab him, get out. I’m in no mood to deal with someone so blatantly heroic. And whatever you do, don’t let him slug you in the nose.”
CHAPTER 12
Blood and Coke in hand, Valerie swallowed her prenatal vitamins. She hurriedly drank to chase away the bizarre sensation of the tablets in her throat. She had already made the mistake of grinding the vitamins up and stirring the powder into her drinks. She’d never tasted anything more repulsive.
Clad only in a faded black tank top and panties, she pushed aside the curtains to watch the street. The train would have just arrived at the station. Soon John would be home, carrying more delicious food than could be imagined.
Valerie grinned into her drink. Franco-Swiss cooking might get short shrift in the food snobs’ world, but she’d never experienced such animal sensuality as she had since she’d moved in with John. Hot melted cheese served to her off his fingertips, segments of sausage on dark bread, and liquors that seemed distilled from mountain flowers shook her and the child with bliss. When John offered his neck, reassuring her that, no, really, he did heal fast, she washed his gifts down with his apple-laden blood.
The memory of what they had done once she had drunk her fill made her rub her thighs together. To keep from losing her balance, Valerie supported her even bigger belly with one hand. The child had grown beyond all expectations under the spoiling.
Catalogs for baby supplies and toys for infants littered the countertops. Almost like normal people would have.
Normal? Valerie pursed her lips. How heinous.
“No way, Mom.” The baby agreed.
Mom.
Valerie tried the word on for size. Yes, she could live with Mom. So far the unborn had rejected Dread Lady, Death Bringer, and Omnipotent Potentate. Valerie had rejected the baby’s suggestions of Silly Goose, My Mindless Minion, and Strawberry as names for the maternal unit.
She leaned one elbow against the window’s vertical support and smiled into the coming dusk. This parenting thing was going to have its good moments.
John turned the corner and waved at her. Valerie allowed her smile to spread. She pushed up her T-shirt to let the baby greet him, too. His beautiful black-and-white aura lit up the fronts of the buildings that lined the narrow street.
She had believed the love she bore for Lance could never allow for any other affection. Her love for Ilona had kept her isolated. But this time, the more love and desire John showed for her, the more Valerie had to share with everyone around her. For example, her viola had become popular at the café next door.
A whiff of sulfurous car exhaust interrupted her lovefest. Irritated, she searched for the offender.
A dark blue sedan idled in front of their building. The streetlights reflected on four shaved heads.
The hair stood up on Valerie’s neck. She set down her blood and stepped onto the windowsill.
“John!” she called.
Moving faster than sound, Fallen Angels piled out of the car, surrounding John. Within nanoseconds, they stuffed him into the trunk of the car and screeched off.
“What the fuck?” the baby shouted.
“On it, kid,” she replied.
She wasn’t faster than sound, but she was fast enough to stop a car. Valerie threw herself from the third-story window. The passengers in the car watched her, their mouths open, as she landed on the street behind them. Barefoot, she pushed her supernatural muscles to the limit. One more leap and she landed on the trunk of the car.
She balanced with one foot on the bumper and one on the edge of the car. Her toes dug into the metal, giving her secure footing.
The driver slapped one hand over the other on the steering wheel, whipping the car back and forth. She laughed at him, even when he tried accelerating and slamming on the brakes in a useless attempt to dislodge her. The quaint brick street gave way to the smooth modern highway. The unforgiving pavement stretched like a gray ribbon underneath the smoking tires.
With a single punch, she drove her fist through the lock of the trunk. As she peeled the metal away from an unconscious John, the driver of the car swerved harder than before.
“Die!” she screamed, and shoved the now-useless scrap metal through the rear window.
Her makeshift lance pierced the skull of one of the back passengers. His dust coated the interior of the car.
Cursing, the other passengers pulled out semiautomatic weapons. They aimed for her. Ignoring them, she reached into the trunk to gather a limp, drugged John into her arms.
They shot her in the chest.
The bullet was blessed silver. Trails of fever spiraled out from the tunnel the bullet punched through her.
Valerie fell off the back of the car, clutching her hands to her open wound. She rolled on the pavement, her blood spouting from the hole.
“Get up!” the baby ordered.
“Unnecessary orders are the sign of an insecure leader, kid”, she retorted, stanching the wound with her hand.
Then a miracle occurred. The silver stopped hurting. The gunshot hole closed faster than she’d ever experienced before. She found her lips twisting back in a snarling smile. Carrying the kid completely negated any of the usual vampire-stopping measures.
Valerie staggered to her feet. As the car neared a tunnel, she was able to see John groggily resisting a kidnapper. The Fallen was attempting to pull John into the backseat through a gap in the seat back.
“Find Lance,” John shouted before the Fallen coshed him with the butt of his pistol. Red stained his black hair as the car bounded out of sight.
Valerie placed her scraped hands on her knees. Screw Lance. She’d find John by herself.
CHAPTER 13
John Janté’s life hung by a thread.
Valerie could smell his blood hanging in the air. If those idiot Fallen Angels let him die, she’d empty Hell itself in vengeance.
She gunned her black 1966 Shelby Mustang to the limit, burying the tachometer in the red. The tires howled as the car fishtailed against the gravel-laden highway cutting through the Swiss Alps. Cursing, she spun the steering wheel against the skid and roared between two honking tourist buses.
“Lucifer’s wormy teeth, I spit at thee.” She damned the slow-moving vehicles.
The heavily forested mountains and charming villages blurred until the view out her window seemed an unending wall of green and stone. Lake Geneva was nothing but a long deep blue line below her. The powerful engine propelled her through the hairpin turns faster than a vampire could run. Her smaller weapons duffel sat on the passenger seat, an innocent black bag filled with high-powered destruction.
Valerie opened her window and sniffed the mountain air. The kidnappers had a ten-minute head start, but there was the trail. John’s blood, apples, and more damn sulfur than she’d ever wanted in her life.
If she never smelled sulfur again, she’d be a happy vampire.
Hours passed. Empty bags of blood filled the Shelby’s backseat as Valerie tossed her discards over her shoulder. She brooked no delays and would reveal no weakness.
Switzerland’s high mountains gave way to Germany’s woods. The steady thrum of the engine lulled the baby into quietness. Dark clouds crossed the skies like disease-bearing missiles. Seventy-year-old memories about the German countryside kept her company as she kept the pedal to the floor.
She’d been driving full speed for nearly seven hours when she fina
lly caught the sulfurous bastards outside a small town in central Germany.
They had turned off the main road and were speeding toward what seemed to be a park.
The Mustang nudged the blue sedan’s ruined bumper, forcing it into a three hundred and sixty-degree spin. She steered Ilona after the sedan, her left hand already pointing her handgun out of the window. A light press of her index finger, and her bullets shredded the kidnapper’s tires.
The car spun to a stop outside the park.
In a puff of wood smoke and lavender, the car vanished from sight.
Valerie slammed on her brake pedal, barely avoiding a concrete sign.
A sign that read MITTLEBAU-DORA CAMP.
Fuck. Anyplace but this place. She slammed the palm of her hand against the steering wheel as she was forced to slow.
She would find John and destroy whoever it was that had taken him. Their remains would litter the continent like fallout from a volcano. Everyone she’d desired had come to bad ends. She was not going to lose yet another love.
CHAPTER 14
Castle Dracula
June 1446
In spring, a young man’s fancy turns to love. Vlad Dracul III was no exception.
The castle guards started taking off their shirts for drills. And none were as handsome or well built as Josef, the second in command.
Young Vlad and Josef carried practice swords and armor to a private, sunny corner of tree-lined meadow.
“Today’s lesson is to speed up your sword work. You are average now, but you must be superb in order to defend your land against the Ottomans.” Josef picked up one of the weighted wooden practice swords. “You must twist to compensate for your arm strength. Look.”
Smooth as a snake, Josef demonstrated the stroke. Vlad shook his head. His wrists were not as strong as the other boys’, no matter how hard he trained.
Josef smiled and cuffed the boy’s head, but far more gently than the elder Dracul would. “Don’t shake your head. You must do it.”
The older soldier removed his practice armor and lifted his shirt. “Here. Move these muscles.” He pointed to the side of his abdomen and traced the movement through the skin. “Feel.”
Vlad laid a trembling hand on Josef’s body, tracking the slide of muscle over hot, slick skin. Josef’s hip bones cut against his narrow, muscled waist. Vlad’s heartbeat pulsed so hard, his tender nipples hurt. Vlad had thought it impossible to feel arousal after his captivity, but evidently his passions ran deep.
He licked his lips and looked up at Josef with wide, stunned eyes.
Josef carefully removed Vlad’s hand and pulled his shirt down.
“Young Vlad, I am flattered by your affection. You are a fine, good-looking youth and I wouldn’t be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed your charms. I prefer women, though. Do you understand?” Josef said.
Josef was kind as well as handsome. Vlad fell even further in love. With youth’s wisdom, he knew that desire wouldn’t survive a secret. So he would reveal his deepest truth, one that he and his parents hadn’t shared with either Mircea or Radu.
Vlad had not slept for the past week, wrestling with his fear over this very thing, but Josef’s words capped the younger man’s confidence.
“I have a secret for you, Josef. And you must keep it. Promise me,” Vlad ordered, unconsciously imperious.
Obviously nervous, Josef ran his hand over the back of his sunburned neck. “Of course, Vlad. I am proud to be entrusted by your father to many of his secrets.”
Vlad unlaced his dirty linen shirt, then yanked it out from under his belt. He unwound yards of fabric that wrapped his chest like a swaddled baby.
Tender swollen young breasts with delicate nipples met the sunshine for the first time in Vlad’s nearly fourteen years. “I am not a boy.”
A strange look crossed Josef’s face. Vlad thought he understood Josef’s confusion. Not only was Vlad Dracula III a girl, she was offering her virgin body to him.
Josef dried his palms on the trousers that cupped those new breasts. “Very pretty,” he said, his voice low and throaty.
Vlad shuddered at the sensation of those calloused hands on her sensitive peaches. As her almost lover bent over, she closed her eyes. Finally, to be kissed! Even Radu, the baby, had bragged of kissing the girls.
As Josef’s firm lips touched hers, Vlad’s groan shook her breasts. Was it possible to die from pleasure?
The still-working logical part of her brain tried to catalog all of the different sensations of a kiss.
His breath on her cheek made her shiver. His teeth on her lower lip wrung an unexpected cry from her throat. His hands traced from her breasts to her belly, almost tickling right about her belt. And his mouth! He never stopped puckering, pressing, licking, nibbling. No wonder people were always going on and on about kissing.
Valerie grew bold and nipped at his upper lip. She wrapped her arms around his strong shoulders and held on, even when he squeezed her breasts just a little too hard.
She gasped. As he eased his hold, he slid his tongue into her mouth.
Vlad had always been a fast learner. Within seconds, she was wrestling with his hot, slick mouth for dominance. Unbidden, she sucked his tongue, surprising a hard groan and a thrust of his hips against her stomach. He let go of her breasts and grabbed her ass, lifting her against his rigid penis.
She squirmed against that hard length, victory and arousal making her pussy slick. She had done that to him. She had made him hard and desperate and eager for her, and with her very first kiss, too.
Gleeful, she filled her hands with his muscular, round ass and squeezed.
The sun warmed the meadow’s grass. Butterflies circled them as they writhed against each other.
When she and Josef got married, she would be able to let go of her deception. Fourteen years was a long time to pretend to be someone you weren’t.
She groaned when he traced a finger over her wet slit. Vague visions of being able to wear lace, of being able to stop looking over her shoulder softened a fear that had been part of her for so long; she hadn’t recognized how much it ruled her.
She was so lost in the joy of touching Josef, she didn’t hear her father approach.
Hot fluid sprayed her from her neck to her thighs. Josef’s lips faltered on hers. The stomach-curdling metallic smell of blood slapped her nose.
Josef hung, already dead, from her father’s grip in his hair. His life’s blood still pumped from the gash in his neck, soaking Vlad even more.
Even expecting the hard hand to her head didn’t ease the blow that knocked Vlad to the once-fragrant spring grass.
“You stupid fool! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
Vlad rolled away from his father’s kick, Josef’s blood still slick against the ground. “He wouldn’t have betrayed me,” she screamed at her father.
“He most certainly would have!” A heavy slap threw the child against the very tree that had sheltered her. “You do what I tell you. You are too stupid to think on your own.”
Vlad landed a solid punch on his father’s nose, breaking it.
The two brawled in the mud and blood.
Hours later, his father dragged Vlad back to the castle. The boy couldn’t walk from the beating. His clothing was ruined by both Josef’s and his blood. But some of his father’s blood graced the iron-brown mess. Vlad hadn’t gone down easy.
As his father threw him into the river to get clean, Vlad vowed he would never lose another love. “Never again.” He screamed as his father’s boot pushed him down for the third time. “You’ll never take another from me.” He coughed and spewed, but lowered his tone so his father couldn’t hear his words. “No one will.”
It was a vow he could never keep.
CHAPTER 15
Valerie rubbed her temples. How ironic. She’d put the war behind her. Forgiven herself her past, earned redemption. But here she was again, where everything had started, undoing the damage birthed by her own reckless a
ctions. Hadn’t the war proven that one race, one species, was not superior to any other?
The notorious concentration camp had been turned into a museum and memorial. Despite neat, grassy spaces and the smooth surfaces of the buildings, bile rose at the memories of the piles of starved dead, the smells of putrefaction, and the sounds of hatred and pain. She hunched her shoulders under her black coat with the gold dragon and caressed the butt of her hidden pistol as though it were a rosary.
The colorful crowds of mortals didn’t even exist to her as she wandered the site. The execution site, over at the far side, had been transformed to a grassy depression with the low remains of stone walls. Before, a gallows had stood here, to execute any who resisted. Valerie walked the full width and breadth of the memorial. The crematorium still stood, but without the ashes of the five thousand who had burned there. It still stunk of murder. One of the tunnels for the V-2 construction had been left with the scrap and rubble on the floor. Finally, she ended her personal tour where the inmates gathered for roll call.
Dracula bore no responsibility for these atrocities. At the time, she hadn’t known they existed. Valerie tucked her lips in against her aching teeth. But she should have known. There was no excuse for an ignorant commander. No amount of time could scour the horrible stench from her memories. She ran her fingers over her bulging belly. To be here, bearing new life within her, felt the ultimate insult to those who had died.
“You have seen a Fallen ascend, yet you despair.”
Valerie didn’t know if the vision came from the child or from her own heart, but it nailed her courage back in place. This place had risen from the remains of those exterminated. She could find her lover.
The car had completely disappeared. Not even the tire tracks remained. The ground beneath her reeked of mildew, decay, and corruption. No apples, no sulfur. John wasn’t within a thirty-mile radius near here. She crossed her arms and closed her eyes.
Memory teased her nose. Something had happened, something that smelled almost like love. She opened her mouth, tasting the air. Earlier, her past had opened up and poured out on top of her. What was it?
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