Page 247 of Dragon Slayer

“Yes?” Vlad said, impatient.

“You should – forgive me, your grace, but you should come see for yourself.”

Eira stayed with the body, and Fen beside her; Vlad didn’t think he could have moved her with any urging. He, Cicero, and Malik went to see these advisors.

Two cloaked and hooded men waited in the courtyard, at the foot of the wide stone stairs that led up to the palace’s entryway. They weaved a little on their feet, shoulders tipping to the side, the front, the back. Subtle movements, that might have just been the wind tugging at their clothes – but was not.

The wind blew their scent into Vlad’s face: vampire. But the faint hint of blood that usually accompanied his own kind was deepened, darkened. A rusty, rancid smell.

Cicero growled immediately, a low, constant rumble.

Three palace guards stood in a loose ring around the strange vamps, swords drawn. They darted worried glances toward Vlad, who waved them back.

He still held his own sword, and brandished it as he approached. “Your master is dead,” he said, bluntly, voice echoing off the stone façade of the palace. “Show your faces. Hand over any weapons you carry.”

They didn’t move.

He growled at them. “Show yourselves, or I’ll cut you down where you stand.”

Slowly, both heads lifted, hoods slipping back a fraction.

Vlad had seen his uncle’s body do something truly astounding only minutes before, but he wasn’t ready for the sight that greeted him. Two different faces, one dark, and one pale, but the same expression. The same gaze.

Eyes bright with fever, glassy, unfocused, sunk deep in shadowed sockets, the whites etched with red veins. Mouths half-open, slack, fangs showing. No awareness; no spark of life or intellect.

Together, they began to growl: a breathy, hissing sound, without the usual depth and threat.

“Whatarethey?” Malik asked, and his voice shook.

They moved together, a sudden lunge.

Vlad cut the first down, and his guards closed in on the other. It batted them away, snatched one’s sword, heedless of the way it cut its hand, its blood running thick and black…like that of something already dead.

Vlad pulled his sword from the open, sucking wound on the first creature’s neck, and spun to stab the other through the heart. The vampire fell with an ugly, gurgling sound, clawing at his face as he chased it to the ground and drew his dagger, scratching his cheeks and throat with long, ragged nails like claws.

Cicero drew his falx and took both its arms.

It screamed, loud, awful, wordless. A sound that held nothing of civilized language.

“Gods,” Cicero murmured, awed, frightened.

Vlad cut it open, and cracked the ribcage with his bare hands; black, clotted blood. It stank of putrefaction. The heart, when he ripped it free, was shriveled, blackened, barely beating.

“It’s dead,” Cicero said. “Isn’t it? It has to be. It…”

Vlad brought his thumb to his mouth, and flicked his tongue against it, tasting. He spat on the ground, afterward. “Not dead. Turned by my uncle. He sired this thing.”

Silence a moment, wind snatching merrily at the flags hung above the door.

And then it hit him.

Romulus had turned these things; men made not into vampires, but into things without minds or souls. Immortality in exchange for…absence.

Would this, then, happen to Mehmet?

And if it did…what of Val?

He hunted for the answer in his own mind all that night, as they burned the two corpses, but he could see no easy solution. Not now. He had to deal with Romulus first. And then, finally, it would be time to rescue his little brother.

~*~

He left the next day, before dawn. He took Cicero, and Malik, and three trusted native Wallachian soldiers, his best mercenaries. He left Eira behind to sit the throne, her wolves at her sides.

“When they ask, tell them I’m going to the Holy Land like all the other Crusaders.”

But he didn’t go there, no. And only his party knew where he eventually lowered his decapitated uncle into a deep hole, and covered him with earth, and stone, and left him to gather moss.

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