by Ana Calin
I look at Lazarus as I explain further, knowing this is of special interest to him, so he can understand some of his own instincts better. “Since all vampires are basically descended from Dracula, they all can feel what does Dracula good. They can smell it, they can taste it. If any vampire tastes or otherwise picks the trail of Dracula’s Grail, they would feel compelled to find it and bring it to him. Irina is a very good tracker, for example. I was planning to use her in this.”
Juliet cringes as she hears the name. Her pain hurts me.
“But since you haven’t won the auction,” Lazarus says, focused, “you can’t go into that orphanage with an entire squad. So how do you intend to do it now, under the circumstances you have?”
“I intend to go in only with Irina.”
Silence falls over the table. Juliet looks down at her breakfast, clearly uncomfortable at the mentions of Irina, Isolde still wonders at the whole thing, and Lazarus weighs things in his head.
“I think it’s a bad idea,” he finally says. “Using Irina for this.” He speaks her name with hatred, and I know why. Can’t blame him. “We all know she serves Dracula, so as soon as you find something, it will be very difficult to keep it from him until you find a way to use the Grail against him.”
“I know. I was thinking of keeping her—”
“You won’t have to worry about it anymore,” he interrupts, “because we can help you.” He motions around from himself to the girls. “So, instead of using Irina—one of your and Dracula’s people—you can use me—one of Juliet’s people. I’m a vampire, I can track blood as well.”
Okay, how do I put this. “You’re not as good as Irina, simply because you never hunted before. You haven’t developed the minimal amount of skill. I mean, you get your blood, your sustenance, from a lab, don’t you?”
He grits his teeth, looking daggers at me. “Yes, I prefer not to hurt people.”
I measure him up and down, but not in a fiendish way. He would make a good hunter, everything about him tells me that. His looks, very attractive to the ladies, would make his job easy with the women, and his fighting talents, properly trained, would make him one hell of a predator.
“I wasn’t trying to offend you,” I assure him. “I’m just saying this job might be harder for you than for Irina.”
“Well, you’ll have to make do with him,” Juliet intervenes. “Because I don’t want to run the risk of Dracula getting his hands on the Grail.”
“I could be of use as well,” Isolde puts in shyly.
“No, I don’t want you involved,” Juliet protests.
“Please, Juliet, hear me out.” She pauses until we all listen. Shy little thing, but she knows how to make herself heard if she wants to—a pleasant surprise. “I’ve been working with people with disabilities a long time, with the elderly and orphans, all in all, with the cast-outs. I can feel my way into their patterns. Trust me, I’ll be useful to you.”
I have the same feeling. “I agree.”
Juliet’s eyes widen. “You want to take her along?”
“Yes. She understands how cast-outs think. People who need to protect themselves from a very young age, people who need to fight for survival in particularly fine and subversive ways—the elderly often need to outsmart younger caregivers who can physically overpower them, and it’s not different for orphans.”
After a few moments of silence everybody has made their inner decisions. I stand up, holding out my hand for Juliet.
“You ready?”
Radek
WE EMERGE INTO THE orphanage from an old mirror in the restroom. Juliet’s hand squeezes mine as a shudder goes through her. Broken tiles, broken windows, and stained mirrors across from these remind of a time when terrified children brushed their teeth in a disciplined stance, evil-looking educators behind them.
As we head down the deserted hallways with the peeled walls, the energy of the lives orphans used to lead in this place hits Juliet from everywhere. Fuck it. She’s a healer, of course it affects her. She braces herself and bends from her waist as if she just got a terrible stomachache that soon renders her unable to walk. She crouches under the pain.
“The draught brings their whines to me,” she cries. “Jesus Christ! I can feel each and every one of them.”
“But that’s good,” Lazarus says, crouching down beside us and putting a hand on her back. She arches away from it, as if one of those children has taken possession of her, and it’s arching their small body away from the touch of an abusing adult.
Lazarus removes his hand and keeps talking softly. “If you can feel each and every one, then you can certainly feel the Grail.”
“I feel the taste of blood in my mouth.” The words hitch in her throat. She wipes the corner of her mouth as if she has blood there. “A slap, that was a slap.”
She keeps crying and whining. Eventually I scoop her up and take her to a side room, but that does her more harm than good. The room is full of bunk beds, rusty springs rising like weed from putrid mattresses, the bed rails chipped, draught wheezing through.
Juliet moans, her face distorted with pain, and soon her body starts to twist. For the first time in six hundred years, I don’t know what to do. I’m helpless in front of my lover’s pain as she writhes in my arms, clawing to my chest.
“Please, take it away!” She looks at me with the eyes of a begging animal.
“That’s it, we’re aborting,” I tell the others, crazed with fear of irreversible loss. “I’m taking you back.”
“No, wait,” Lazarus protests, putting a hand on my shoulder. I jerk away from it, not because I still dislike him, but because of the urgency.
“I didn’t see this coming, Lazarus, but it’s the most natural thing, I should have known. She’s a healer, all the pain that happened here is attacking her now like a thousand knives. The energy has been soaking these walls for decades, waiting to be cleansed through someone like her.”
“But we can help her channel only on the Grail.”
“All this pain might kill her,” I snarl at him while Juliet arches like a possessed creature. Her eyes roll backwards, but just as Lazarus opens his mouth to say something to her, Isolde pushes him aside, drops to her knees, and takes her sister’s face between her hands.
“Listen to me carefully, Juliet,” she says calmly. Her eyes are fixed on her sister, worried, but focused. “Channel your attention to the Grail. It’ll be easy to find The One. You hear me? Easy! The adults in this place knew The One was special, so he or she must be getting some kind of special treatment.”
“Special treatment!” Juliet blurts, white foam appearing at the corners of her mouth. “Special treatment here is torture, Isolde!”
“There has to be something that sets The One apart. Focus on the children being kept separate from the others, or in smaller groups.”
Juliet’s eyes are rolled back, foam at her mouth, and I’m a second away from flashing her out of here. But just as I make the decision, her body relaxes. She breathes out, probably having dropped a whole chunk of pain.
“There are three. Two boys, one girl.”
“Go for the girl. Focus on the girl. Shut all the others out.”
Juliet’s body relaxes even more in my arms. She moans softly, her eyes back to normal but hooded, as if she’s so exhausted she’s about to fall asleep. But after a few moments she talks.
“They keep her in a barred room. She has dark hair over her face in a mirror, I can’t see her features.” A shudder goes through her, and I pull her upright and press her to my body protectively, locking my arms around her.
“Why the girl?” Lazarus whispers in Isolde’s ear. She’s still watching her sister intently. There’s hidden strength to this girl.
“Just a guess. It makes more sense that Dracula’s The One is a girl instead of a boy.”
“What makes you think Dracula is straight?” Lazarus seems genuinely interested. He’s taking all possibilities into account.
“Not
hing,” Isolde answers calmly. “But we have to start from a theory, don’t we?”
“My brother does prefer women,” I volunteer the information, strictly to aid the mission at hand, the only mission on which I don’t feel in control. I was never afraid of dying in battle, or of any other type of violence or conflict-related danger. I welcomed it. The rage I permanently carried in my chest made me swift and often reckless, but this is my frail Juliet at stake now, subjected to pain that she should have never had to experience if it weren’t for me.
She moves a little in my arms, and I know she wants to look away from my chest, ready to inspect the room.
I unlock my arms carefully, ready to wrap them around her again. She turns like a creature guided with a remote control. She’s pale, eyes droopping, mouth sagging—a sight that feels like a spear through my stomach. This is all my fault...
“The room,” she says faintly. “They kept her in a room without sun and silver.”
Lazarus’ eyebrows rise in amazement. “She was a vampire?”
“No. But she could make things levitate, and she could turn silver into blades. They didn’t want her to be able to see things around herself, so they kept her away from light and silver. Still, she eventually killed them one by one. Like Samara from The Ring.”
Lazarus joins me as we follow Juliet down the hallway to the basement. I’m relieved she can walk again, and don’t dare complain about her zombiesque state. Anything is better than the pain.
“Samara from The Ring,” he says. “I’m afraid your brother got himself a badass bride. She might just kick his—”
“That’s something I’d like to see,” I reply, keeping my eyes on Juliet’s back, her curly blond ponytail swinging softly as she walks.
Lazarus can’t hold back a small laugh, but then he clears his throat. “Does he have a preference for tough women?”
“He never liked them weak, but none of his mates was ever—” I motion to Juliet. “What she describes. They were refined ladies.”
Lazarus snorts. “Well, then I’d sure like to be there when he meets this one.”
Down in the basement, Juliet stops short in front of a double door with small oval windows to peer through. Even after all this time, they’re perfectly sealed around the joints.
“This,” Juliet says weakly. “This is where she’d been the last time.” She makes to push the door, but then changes her mind.
“What is it?” Isolde whispers.
“There’s smoldering pain in there, waiting like a dark spirit.” Juliet starts to tremble. She’s terrified at the mere memory of what she experienced upstairs, and I feel guilty as hell about it.
Isolde grips her sister’s hand, giving her strength. Another emotional flash goes through me. When did Vlad and I lose that?
“The girl,” Isolde says. “Focus on the girl.”
Then Isolde pushes one of the doors. It creeps open to reveal a sinister shower room, with shower heads built into the ceiling, pipes looking like rusty snakes a among them, the smell of dead rats creeping out.
“Jesus Christ!” Isolde pinches her nose.
Juliet doubles over as if she wants to throw up, but she just bursts into tears, like she’s exploding with pain.
“This is a fucking gas chamber,” Lazarus whispers. “Jesus, how can humans be so cruel?”
He steps into the room, while I stay out with Juliet. I don’t care about anything right now except getting her out of here.
“This wasn’t a good idea,” I tell her, but she moans and jerks up as if someone put electroshocks on her.
“She killed them all,” she cries out, like an oracle in a trance. She looks up into some void as her mind accesses the pain in the gas room all those decades ago.
“She was here,” she says. “But this isn’t where she died.”
“The orphanage had its very own gas chamber,” Isolde thinks aloud, still at the door with us, but peering inside. “It seems to me this place wasn’t an orphanage at all. It was a concentration camp.” She turns to us. “For children.”
“It means the children were either all Jews, or gypsies,” Lazarus says, returning from having inspected the gas chamber. He shakes his head at me. “There are traces of blood, but not hers.” He looks behind himself. “I can smell, very faintly, old traces of adult blood, so no child died a death by blade or bullet here. I suspect they were all dead when the adults came in, determined to take out The One because the gas hadn’t killed her. She must have been special that way, too. Then she must have killed them.”
He looks up at one of the rusted pipes snaking between the showerheads on the ceiling. “She must have used her remote steering powers to break that. The remains look sharp, like the teeth of a shark.” He turns to us again with his conclusion. “If you ask me, she managed to kill her way out of here but, if the old Nazi who owned this place went out of his way to keep the authorities out for decades, and survived, then he must have—”
“Taken her away. Personally,” Juliet says weakly. She’s so exhausted from the pain that her eyelids are falling tiredly over her eyeballs. “His house,” she manages. “We have to go to his house. If The One systematically killed all the adults, I’m sure the owner of this horrid place would have been top of her target list. But she let him live until he died a natural death this year. She must have skipped him for a reason. Or he managed to somehow bind her powers.”
Juliet
I WRAP THE FLUFFY NIGHT robe tighter around me. I’m gonna wear it in bed, I don’t seem able to get warm enough lately. It’s been days since the orphanage, and I still haven’t recovered. I’m still weak, permanently tired, and I wake up in the middle of the night to find the robe damp with my sweat.
On the bright side, I discovered a new perk of being rich—you can afford great beds. The spring box bed with the dark-blue canopy has been a real haven these past few nights, the fluffy mattress enwrapping me like a cocoon, the comfortable pillow lulling my heavy eyes shut in no time. A blessing until deeper in the night, when pain would creep in through my sleep like a black mist under my covers. It feels like a stomachache that first takes over your dream, then wakes you up, except that in my case it wasn’t the stomach. It was that pain I felt when dad left.
Tonight, that pain transforms into something romance-related. It begins slowly, seeping through my skin, into my muscles, and then into my bones, localizing in my heart. I’m back at Magda’s door five years ago, doubling up on the mat, feeling betrayed and worthless.
The beautiful man who’d looked with passion into my face every single night as if I was the most valuable person in the world for months had just treated me like junk, asking me for a threesome with another woman. What had I done to lose his love? Had he finally seen how worthless I was, that not even my own dad managed to love me?
Then I remember something that never happened to me. I trail down a tiled wall in a dark bathroom, and ram something sharp into my forearm in a desperate attempt to blot out the pain inside. Sweat breaks out all over me, and I shoot up in a sitting position. It takes a few moments until I realize what happened, and remember the wound on Radek’s forearm a few days ago.
I throw off the duvet, jump from the bed and hurry to the mirror. I stop in front of it, inspecting myself. I push my wild hair behind my ears, arrange the robe, square my shoulders and take a deep breath. One thing will probably never change about me when it comes to Radek—I’ll always be self-conscious.
I focus on him in that natural and easy way that has brought him to me since he returned to Berlin. His presence begins to radiate from the mirror, his energy touching my skin. I wait for the mirror to clear to his image, but no. It keeps up that soft ripple. The movement is regular, making me understand he doesn’t intend to show himself. Slowly, I touch the mirror frame on both sides with my fingers, allowing the robe to open, revealing my white satin nightgown under it. It flows on my body the way he likes it, clinging to my breasts and thighs.
“Why don
’t you show yourself?” I whisper.
The ripple keeps steady. I touch it, my finger sinking slowly into the liquid glass that feels viscous and cold.
“Please,” I breathe. “I need to see you.” I allow the pain in my voice and in my face. I crave him. “I know what you’ve done. I know where the scar on your forearm came from.”
The ripples flow to the sides of the mirror, revealing Radek’s beautiful face. He’s the same young prince with the finely cut bone structure, ivory skin and irresistible red mouth, and yet pain has made his features somewhat haggard. Strands of glossy hair fall over his forehead as a sign that he’s been running his hands through it often, worrying or even suffering.
I take a few steps backwards, holding out my hand, inviting him.
“Please, come in.”
He hesitates.
I lower my voice to a grave tone. “I’m hypersensitive since the orphanage. You and I have a connection, and I sensed your pain. I felt it when you stabbed your arm.”
He keeps looking at me. The mirror begins to ripple at the sides, and seemingly move behind him, like paper unwrapping itself from a present. In a few moments the mirror has moved on the wall, behind Radek, as if he hasn’t stepped into the room at all, but it moved to contain him.
I inspect him up and down, pain radiating in a circle around my heart. He’s wearing a white shirt, this time buttoned up, only with the neckline open, the way I always liked it. Could it be that he’s wearing things to my liking even though he doesn’t expect to meet me, the same as I do? I’ve been wearing silk and satin at night for years because I liked looking just the way I knew I’d appeal to him.
The room is half dark, only the silvery light from the street lamps filtering through the curtains, but I still see the blood snaking down both Radek’s forearms from wounds. I whimper at the pain of seeing his beauty stained by self-inflicted cuts and stabs.