Until Death

by Kari Anne Kilgore

  "What kind of mess are you dragging me into, Ana?"

  "There's nothing I can do," she said, putting her hand back on the wheel. "I'm sorry."

  "That's all anyone can say to me lately," Leo said, not caring that his anger was deepening into fury. "'I'm sorry.' If you ever cared about me, or about Maria, tell me what the hell is going on!"

  "That's not fair," Ana whispered.

  She didn't stop driving. Leo had never seen this part of the village before. Like so many in Transylvania, the neighborhood was filled with traditional white plastered houses with brown timber supports and reddish tile roofs. None were grand or huge, but all were neat and well-maintained.

  "Tell me how it's fair for you to take me to this guy I've never even spoken to before, and I don't even understand what I've done wrong."

  Ana parked in the freshly paved driveway of the largest two-story house Leo could see. The yard was filled with chickens and a garden, like so many others, and a steep wooded hillside lay behind it. A brand new metal roof made to look like the usual tile stood out as a sign of wealth, status, or both.

  "You're right," she said, taking Leo's hand. Hers was terribly cold. "You haven't done anything wrong. This is what I know. Elena died early this morning, or at least that's when her sister found her. She had no blood on the sheets, no bruises. Nothing wrong they could see. She was holding her rosary, squeezing so tight it cut into her hand. The blood seemed frozen solid around the wound."

  "Okay." Leo was glad he hadn't eaten. "That's awful. But how does that point to Maria?"

  "They said...they said her eyes were wide open, and she looked like she was screaming. All the pictures of Maria, the ones her sister had from when she was a baby, your wedding photos, even a locket around Elena's neck. The glass on every one was broken."

  "And that's why they think it was my wife?" Leo said, ignoring the freezing goose bumps racing over his flesh. "My dead wife? Because some glass was broken?"

  The front door opened, and Igor stood watching them with his arms crossed. He was dressed for a day at the office, with pressed khaki pants and a dark blue polo shirt.

  "I still live here, Leo." Ana kissed his cheek and let go of his hand. "I can't say more. Just know Igor was the head of the Communist Party here, but he was never one of them. He worked very hard to protect us. He still does."

  Leo wanted to shout at her, to demand to know what that could possibly have to do with him, but she was already afraid. And she was making no move to get out of the car. He was on his own. She confirmed his suspicion by backing away and driving off as soon as he closed his door.

  Igor watched Ana's tiny blue sedan. He didn't look back until Leo stepped right in front of him. Leo could absolutely imagine him in the role of Communist Party boss, right out of central casting. His thick black hair was barely longer than a crew cut, the part razor sharp. His moustache stiff and perfectly trimmed. Hair dye or not, he had to be at least sixty, but he showed no signs of age beyond several sharp lines across his forehead and around his mouth and brown eyes.

  No matter who Igor was or who'd he'd been under a dead regime, Leo decided not to be intimidated as the silence stretched on. This man couldn't possibly hold a candle to insecure actors, demanding directors, or jumpy studio execs. Or to burying his wife barely forty-eight hours ago.

  "Want to tell me why I'm here, Igor?" Leo said. "Sorry to be so familiar. Your last name is one of the many things I don't know."

  "Igor will do," he said without moving. "I have the answers no one wants to hear."

  "I'm quite sure I can take it. Start talking."

  "I will remind you of that later," Igor said, pulling the door closed. "Walk with me, Leo."

  He set off down the driveway, one of the few paved ones Leo had seen in the village. For whatever reason, this man had everyone else running scared. With Ana out of sight, Leo couldn't think of anything else to do but follow.

  "Ana tells me Elena died last night," Leo said.

  "She's dead, yes. Did Ana tell you what happened?"

  "Only that Elena didn't seem to be hurt," Leo said. "She just died."

  "Tell me if you still think that's so." Igor held out a large smartphone.

  Leo took it without thinking and flinched when he saw the photo. Elena didn't simply look like she was screaming. Her mouth was drawn back, her face twisted and distorted, frozen in what had to have been a horrible shriek. Her eyes had the odd, flat look of death, reminding him forcefully of seeing the same look in his wife's eyes, but the fear hadn't left them.

  "Not a mark on her, you see," Igor said. "Keep going."

  Leo took a deep breath before he flipped to the next image. His mother-in-law's hand, fingers twisted into a claw, with her ancient wooden rosary gripped within. The long edge of the crucifix was digging into the flesh under her thumb, ripping the skin. The wound was deep and jagged, but none of the pooled blood welled out of the gash. Ana was right.

  "Why are you showing me this?"

  "Because no one has seen something like this in many years," Igor said, taking his phone back. "I'm not the only one who knows it must stop, but I am the one who must make sure it does."

  Chapter 32

  "Fair enough, Igor," Leo said. He matched the older man's fast pace along the deserted street. "I'll play along. I see a woman who wasn't young and who'd had a terrible shock when her only child died. She died herself, maybe a heart attack, maybe after a bad dream or something. That's what I see. What's your version?"

  "When Elena was your age," Igor said, "Maybe a little younger, times were difficult here. All of Romania suffered, as did other Soviet Bloc countries. The trouble was worse in the mountains. Many starved and died, same as everywhere, but we were unable to keep up with the dead. The burials were too fast. A problem we thought dealt with long ago returned to us, and many more died because of that."

  Leo closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to keep his temper in check. He couldn't imagine this was a reasonable time to play a practical joke, try to make the outsider look like an idiot. Everything else he could think of made even less sense.

  "You're not going to tell me Dracula was real after all," Leo said. "Please tell me that's not it."

  "No, nothing so crude and fanciful." Igor smiled, and Leo clenched his fists with the need to let his anger jump in and take over. "And nothing so easily solved. I've grown quite fond of Mr. Stoker's creation over the years. Brings in tourists and their money while deflecting from the truth at the same time."

  "And what truth is that?" Leo said. "Zombies, rising from the grave to roam the countryside and stalk their grieving parents? Not the most original pile of horseshit I've heard, Igor."

  "Another fiction from your American movies, one that would be easier to manage." He handed the phone to Leo again. "More of the grieving."

  This time Leo flipped through several color images, then many more black and white. All showed faces remarkably like Elena's, the same terror resting uneasily alongside dead eyes. The quality deteriorated until he thought he was looking at a scan of an old tintype, but the fear was unmistakable.

  "Just tell me," Leo said, giving the phone back. "I'm not in the mood for guessing games, or whatever kind of game this is."

  They were walking in what seemed like circles, along narrow roads, passing tiny houses one after the other. The few people who were outside crossed themselves and went back in, just like the day before.

  "We had our problem under control when I was very young," Igor said. "We thought it well on the way to elimination when the order came down from Ceaușescu. All families, all women, were to have as many babies as they possibly could. Large families were rewarded at a time when many were starving, and birth control or termination was illegal. This much you know."

  "Yes. Elena suffered because she only had one," Leo said, fresh shock at her death twisting through his gut. "And she made choices she never should have for Maria."

  "Now we come to the part you do not know," Igor
said. "Elena and many others in our village made the only choices we could have. To keep a threat the Communists were never aware of and could not have understood from growing out of control."

  Leo turned his head to hide his scowl and realized where they were. The steeple of the church where Maria now rested showed above a row of shops just to his left. At least he knew how to get back to the inn from here. From there to Bucharest and on to somewhere else, anywhere where the world still made sense.

  Before he could speak, Igor held the phone out again.

  "What is it this time?" Leo said. "Rows of peasants on stakes to intimidate outsiders?"

  "I'm afraid Vlad's methods would not help us," Igor said. "This is what we've watched for for many centuries, and we must again today."

  Images of fresh graves flipped by, starting in color and again shifting to black and white. They weren't sunken as so often happened before grass was replanted. These were rectangular volcanoes, the centers pushed up and driving cracks through the dry earth all around. No hokey claw marks like in the low-budget horror movies Leo and Brian had loved as kids.

  In the middle of about half the graves, a perfectly round hole sat at the highest point. Once he got to the primitive images at the end of the album, Leo handed the phone back.

  "If we see this, Leo, we must be prepared to take terrible action. We will also have no choice. Under Ceaușescu, as the number of births increased, the number of deaths did as well. We were not able to bury the dead properly, as we attempted to with your wife. What Elena did, and what I did with myself and my own children, was the only way we could defy the Communists and bring a terrible curse to an end."

  They turned the corner of a high stone wall and stood at the back of the cemetery. Leo's eyes found Maria's grave despite his mind's orders to look away. The space was covered with piles of flowers that had been inside the church, ropes of garlic around and through all the rest. He breathed out through his chilled lips.

  "I may not have any kind of legal standing here," Leo said. "But I'll do whatever it takes to keep you from digging her up, Igor."

  "Even if she was not properly laid to rest, that will not be necessary," Igor said. He opened a huge black lock and swung the gate outward. "It would be far too late for that."

  Leo followed on numb legs, his mind and his mouth filled with the pălincă he and Brian had finished the night before. Pălincă stolen from Maria's coffin and replaced with water.

  A shadowy, moist corner of his mind, one that never encountered science or logic or even the plain light of day, wailed in terror at what he'd done. At what he was starting to believe he'd done in his waking dream that morning. If that part of him gained even a shred of control, Leo knew he'd either run screaming or curl up whimpering on the ground.

  Igor stopped beside Maria's grave, beside his wife's final resting place, watching Leo walk toward him. When he squatted, Leo tried to join him. He landed hard on his knees instead. He managed to lean forward when the older man did and helped brush the flowers and braids of garlic away.

  Chapter 33

  The men's voices were faint from her hiding place, but Maria's hearing was as sharp and clear as ever. She stood in the smallest room in the back of the ancient building, supposedly the most sacred place in any Orthodox church. In contrast to the bright paintings and icons covering every surface in the nave, this room was plain white and undecorated. And while the nave itself was barely the size of an entryway in a typical American church, this space was hardly large enough to be a broom closet.

  Maria adjusted the black skirt and white shirt yet again, stolen from a nearby clothesline, trying to get the too-large garments to hang comfortably. She glanced at the priest's holy robes and vestments, smiling at the thought of stealing those instead. She could stride through the village in embroidered golden garments taken from a room she was considered too unclean to step into as a living woman. The heavy cloth was cool and sensual under her fingers, increasing her perverse thrill at entering this forbidden space at last. Only the certainty she'd be caught kept her from taking the clothing.

  Her heart, her strangely strong and beating heart, was breaking over the confusion and fear in her husband's voice. Igor kept on, using every prosecuting attorney trick in the book. Pushing Leo right up to the edge of the truth. Pulling back. Forcing Leo to take the next step himself. Showing him what had to be the same photos Paul and then she had dug up of graves and too many dead bodies to count. Building up the dread and suspense until her lover's mind had to be breaking under the strain.

  She'd done every bit of that herself and more countless times in a courtroom, but she'd never considered what she was putting the person on the other side through.

  Much as Maria wanted to dart outside and bring both Igor and the cruel cross-examination to an end, she wasn't strong enough yet. Her body was gaining power here despite Magda's warnings about churches being unsafe. Perhaps that was her atheist nature protecting her, or perhaps the whole sacred ground thing had been wishful thinking from generations afraid of the strigoi.

  Afraid of her.

  The voices moved away from the window, and Maria walked back out into the sanctuary. She found the same clear spot in the paintings on the windows that she and Ana had helped enlarge, a few scratches at a time, decades ago.

  Igor squatted beside her grave, and Leo fell to his knees on the other side. His lovely long brown hair fell over his face, and she wished he hadn't pushed it back. Maria wiped a tear away at the horrible, lost look in his eyes as they cleared off the flowers and braids of garlic, exposing the hole where she'd escaped. Her grave looked exactly like those photos she'd obsessed over before she quite believed any of this was possible.

  Before she'd died in Leo's arms.

  The escape from her underground prison felt much like buildup and release she'd found in those same arms. Pressure and heat and movement toward life, churning and seething until Maria had no choice, no chance of resistance or control.

  Her husband had given her the gift of a new body. She didn't need the one that would soon be trapped under the ground. Maria had no doubt Igor would know at least as much as poor Magda had, so she had to keep moving.

  As long as she moved faster than Igor, she would keep herself alive and gaining strength. Until she could catch Leo alone and help him understand they could get away from here and be together, strong and healthy again.

  Magda told Maria if the strigoi survived long enough, three short years, they were even able to have children. The children so cruelly denied Maria when she was one herself.

  After the two men walked away, Maria stepped outside the church. The foggy village was unnaturally silent. No doubt she was the cause of that, and she would take full advantage. She'd heard enough to know Igor was taking Leo to the old woman's house, the last place she'd been before returning to her husband's bed.

  She had none of the fantasy changes, no superhuman strength or ability to fly, but Maria was able to move silently. She'd never managed that trick in her first life. As long as she used her mind, the best weapon and defense she'd ever had, she'd stay one step ahead of Igor.

  And she'd make damned sure to end him and whoever was foolish enough to join his little hunting party.

  Chapter 34

  The raised and cracked soil of his wife's grave was as perfect as any special effects prop Leo had ever seen, as if a gifted artist had copied Igor’s photos down to the last detail. And in the center, in the highest point, where Maria's silent heart should be resting six feet under the dirt, was a perfectly round, pitch black hole no bigger than a quarter.

  "What does..." Leo said, stopping to force air into his frozen lungs. "What is this?"

  "Was she buried properly, Leo?" Igor stood, brushed off his pants, and held out his hand.

  Leo let him pull him up and sat heavily on uneven concrete steps a few feet away.

  "You saw the coffin as clearly as I did," Leo said.

  His ears rang in time with his pou
nding heart even as his mind struggled to find some kind of explanation. Any explanation besides the promise he'd broken, the promise made to a dying woman.

  "I saw her," Igor said. "And you insisted on having time alone with her right before we brought her out here."

  A dark shape moved to Leo's right, and he barely managed to bite back his scream. The ancient mama dog walked toward them, her ears and tail low. Leo held a shaking hand out to her, and she let him scratch her head for a few seconds before she lay down at his feet.

  "What do you know of the dogs in our village?" Igor said, sitting down beside Leo.

  The older man let the dog sniff his hand before he rubbed her back. Leo wasn't sure if Igor was trying to distract him or get him ready for some new kind of shock. He still wasn't sure what the first shock was going to mean to him.

  "I don't know much," he said. "They're usually in pretty good shape even if they're strays. This old girl has been hanging around for a few days, especially yesterday. She walked up in the woods with me. When no one else would."

  "You must not blame people for being afraid," Igor said. "Even the ones who aren't old enough to remember know the signs of trouble. We pass the most vital warnings along to our children, much like this dog has."

  Leo forced himself to focus on Igor's words. Something about that felt important to him. And talking about anything besides his wife wandering the forest like some kind of zombie would be an improvement.

  "I saw a bunch of her puppies," he said. "At least I think they were hers. They looked just like her. Yesterday morning. They all ganged up and made a stray run off. She didn't seem as healthy as these do."

  Igor looked sharply at Leo. For the first time, he thought the older man was rattled.

  "They forced a stray to run off?" Igor said. "Several other dogs did?"