Page 258 of Dragon Slayer

“No, not yet. We would know. But his curse is awake. And I think someone’s looking for him. Someone wants him awake.” He felt the stirrings of old rage, still hot under his skin.

For the world, it had been nearly six-hundred years.

For him, it had been less than a month.

“Who would want to wake him up?” Val whispered.

“Someone stupid. Or someone ambitious. Someone who wants him to take over the world…or wants to use him to do it for himself.”

“That’s…terrifying.” Then his eyes sprang wide open and he pushed himself up unsteadily on one arm. Vlad made a reflexive reach to steady him. “Vlad,” he said, voice shaking. “The mage – the Necromancer – is it him? Is he the one starting all this?”

Vlad had wondered as much. “If he is, he’ll regret it.”

~*~

A dinner tray did indeed arrive, and it wasn’t the prepackaged, microwaved fare Val usually enjoyed in his cell. No, this was freshly prepared by hand in the manor’s kitchen, the same food that Vlad, and Talbot, and Treadwell, and all the mortals in the mansion ate. Roasted chicken, and rice, and steamed vegetables, and a cup of pig’s blood alongside a dish of something soft, and chocolate-smelling.

“What is this?” he asked, prodding it with his spoon. It wiggled.

“Pudding,” Vlad said, like the idea of such a thing was beneath him. Sour enough to have Val biting back a laugh. “It’s dessert.”

It was delicious, is what it was. Val ate every bite of it first thing, and then licked the dish before taking a more civilized approach with his chicken.

When his belly wasn’t so empty, he slumped back against the headboard and ate more slowly, sipping blood in between. “Alright, oh patient one, tell me of your elaborate plan.”

Vlad stood at the window, arms folded across his chest, staring out through the parted curtains at the moonlight lying across the lawn. It shouldn’t have, considering all that had happened since their reunion – Val set down his cup and reached to gently touch the wound that lay beneath his shirt, still angry-red in the mirror and healing slowly from the inside out – but the sight of him there, immovable as ever, was a comfort.

As if he sensed these thoughts, Vlad’s gaze slid over to him. “What?”

Val smiled. “You’re a warrior in every century, aren’t you?”

His brows lifted.

Val explained: “Now. In this century: they have no shortage of soldiers. Weapons – weapons we never could have dreamed of. Don’t take this the wrong way, brother, but they don’t need you. They want you, yes. But. But you could…you could be something different. You could” – he thought of Nikita Baskin and Sasha Kashnikov, holed up in a rundown New York apartment, working mundane, mortal jobs – “be whatever you wanted to be. But you are a warrior.”

Vlad stared at him, outwardly unimpressed with his logic. “It’s what I was born for.”

Val sighed. “Of course it is.”

“And I’m the one who buried Romulus. I stand the greatest chance of killing him.”

“You couldn’t kill him then,” Val reasoned, but not unkindly.

“Ididn’tkill him. There’s a distinction.” Vlad’s lip curled. It could have been a snarl, but Val knew it to be a smirk. “And, as you said: they have weapons we never could have dreamed of.”

“Ah. Going to drop a bomb on him, are you?”

“Among other things.”

Val couldn’t help but smile. He was the same as always, and he was glad for it. “Tell me your plan,” he prompted for the second time.

So Vlad did. In usual Vlad Dracula fashion, it wasn’t a bad plan at all.

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