Page 324 of Dragon Slayer

61

SIRE

Jake was a practical man. Born of a practical family, a boy who’d played baseball, and gone to the homecoming dance every year with a pretty date on his arm. A stand-up, designated driver, mom friend kind of guy. Decent grades in all subjects, but excellent ones in history and politics. A guy who’d known right away that he wanted to enter the military, spurred by the same swell of indomitable post-9/11 patriotism that had propelled so many young people to their local recruitment offices. West Point to Iraq, to a German hospital bed. He wasn’t one for fanciful thoughts. He’d never enjoyed books about made up shit, noLord of the RingsorWalking DeadorStar Wars.

He hadn’t been prepared for redheaded girls who threw fire out of their hands. Nor for vampires. A nerd could have found the proper mental drawers in which to file these impossibilities, but he’d had no such resources.

To keep from going crazy, he’d decided to think of vampires like this: as dangerous zoo animals. Like the lions and tigers that are never touched with bare hands; instead lured with meat, and clickers, transported in huge metal crates and forklifts, feral golden eyes watching through the round holes cut in the sides.

He suspected that was why Vlad chose not to make Talbot’s study his headquarters. It smelled of another animal, of a male, and Vlad wanted to press his scent into a room as of yet untouched, his own area, and no one else’s, one in in which he graciously allowed others to visit, but never to stay.

Jake felt very much like he was walking into a tiger’s lair as he crossed the threshold of Vlad’s designated study. It was a room at the front of the house, with a wall of mullioned windows. A former sitting room, the kind with dainty furniture and pale blue wallpaper, designed for ladies in frothy dresses with delicate teacups.

Vlad had found a desk somewhere, a heavy, dark, masculine one at war with the rest of the room’s décor. He sat behind it, hair loose down his shoulders, poring over a map that took up nearly all the surface space, anchored at two ends with matching green lamps.

He afforded Jake only the barest of glances when he entered, a flat thing shot from beneath his brows, without lifting his head.

A small orange cat, the one the baroness had given to Prince Val, sat beside one of the lamps. It twitched its tail once, then stood, leapt down soundlessly, and disappeared somewhere near Vlad’s feet.

Jake approached the desk with a kind of hesitance he hadn’t even known in war. Cleared his throat. “You wanted to see me?”

Vlad hummed a sound of agreement and motioned to the chair across from his desk – powder blue with curved white legs. “I’m going over your modern maps.”

Jake sat down slow, like the chair might bite him. It creaked. “I’m guessing they look a lot different from the maps you had in your day,” he said, carefully. Because if Vlad was a tiger, then he was one who’d swatted at his keepers, and broken his latch.

Last night, Jake had dreamed of Vlad’s sword cutting through that guard’s neck. The wetthocksound of it, like a woodsman’s axe notching a tree. The twin thumps of the body and the head hitting the floor separately. Blood everywhere. The awful stink of the dead man’s bowels voiding.

Jake had seen lots of death in war, before the war eventually took his sight. But for reasons he couldn’t understand, that death shook him to the core. The cage had come open; the tiger was loose.

The tiger was staring at him over a map of eastern Europe.

Jake swallowed with difficulty. “Do you need help with any of the new names for things?”

Vlad gave him an unreadable look, then dropped his gaze back to the map. He pressed his index finger to a city. “This is where I was born.” He slid it over. “And this is where the palace was. Where Val and I grew up.” His voice was still commanding and implacable, but softer, gruffer. “Here, Bucharest. I built this city from scratch.”

Jake swallowed again and scooted to the edge of his chair, forearms resting on the desk so he could peer down at the map, some of the buzzing anxiety in his belly calming. “It’s a major metropolis now. Modern. But some of the old buildings are still there.”

Vlad looked up, sharply. “You’ve been there?”

“I looked at pictures when Talbot told me about you. I’ve never seen it in person.”

A nod, and his gaze swept downward again. “There are some immortals who know that I buried my uncle. I had my wolves spread false rumors about the location, however. It is true that I rode to Damascus. I was seen riding east from there…and also west. The deserts of Egypt? The deserts of Arabia?” He tapped his fingertip. “That was a ruse. He’s in Bucharest.”

“He…heis?”

“If he hasn’t been found, then yes, he is.”

“But…” Images from the video Talbot had shown him flashed behind his eyes, shaky, visceral, repulsive. Undeniable. “The footage. The mountain village. Christ, that was in Pakistan! How…?”

“There’s no way to know how many humans Romulus managed to turn before I put him in the ground. It could be dozens, or hundreds. Everyone he turns is eventually corrupted by whatever dark disease lies in his blood – and anyonetheyturn doubly so. They’re little more than raving monsters.”

“Zombies,” Jake said, flatly, overwhelmed. “They’re like – fuck, they’re like zombies.”

“Zombies?”

Jake made a vague gesture. “The undead. They eat people. There are movies about them.”

“Movies.” Vlad tasted the word.

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