Triptych: The Second
II: Poenari Castle, Wallachia, Romania
Were this a work of fiction, you might find fault with my story because I introduce Elena Popa just in time for her to be a victim of the machinations of Vlad III, Drakulya—Dracula. But this “plot point” is not in any way by design; Elena was already headed for a devastating confrontation with the vampiric cryptid before she sat down across from me in a Romanian pub called Hanul Cetății. The tragedy that put her in my path was not of my doing.
The small mountain village where I met her was called Căpățânenii Pământeni, and the road to Poenari Castle passed directly through it, just a few kilometers below the ruins. The inn served travelers, shepherds, and some transient workers, but no one spoke English. I had to point at other people’s plates to get food. I couldn’t risk the same gesture for drink, so I drank the tepid water the waiter brought me.
I had taken three different trains and walked a healthy distance to get to Căpățânenii Pământeni in the Carpathian Mountains. I arrived at night—I was quite tired, somewhat impatient, and decidedly scared, and I’d not yet figured out how I would ask for a room for the night, though the hour was getting late. I had a limited amount of coin—I was a terrible robber but a decent pickpocket, given that I could use my mapped cryptids as distractions. I stole purses; they were easier than wallets by far. But I always made a point of leaving the purse and all of its contents, minus the money, where the owner might find it again. I had also scripted notes in advance that read:
I’m sorry. I’m desperate.
I left a note inside each purse I stole and returned. I wrote it in English, German, Czech, and Hungarian. I couldn’t find anyone to translate into Romanian for me.
A dark-haired girl in a heavy winter coat sat down on the bench across from me at the rickety table where I was trying not to be noticed in the pub. The tips of her exposed ears and her nose were bright red—she had just come in from the cold. She looked very young, though her features hardened appreciably when I met her eyes. It aged her. I stopped eating and looked at her expectantly.
“I see your book,” she said with a heavy accent; it was English just the same, but I resisted smiling happily to finally hear it again as she said, “I have one, too. It was the book of my father. But he is dead.”
I was uncertain how to reply. Her words tinkled as she spoke, but then they fell flat like coins dropped on the table between us. “What does that mean?”
“Ah. You are English,” she said. “But you are trying to hide your accent.”
“I am not English,” I said. “If you weren’t a wee lassie, those would be fighting words.”
She made a dismissive noise between her teeth. “I’m eighteen years old—no younger than you, I am thinking.” She gestured around the inn. “They talk about you. They think you are German or Austrian. They think you come with a purpose, but they do not want to say that they think you come to see Vlad the Impaler.”
I returned to my food—cabbage rolls with pork and evidently cooked in some kind of tomato sauce that I had to tell myself repeatedly was obviously not blood—and I looked away from her. “Is it far?”
She smacked the table with both hands, making me start. She reached across and touched my hand. “So, they guess right. Ai venit să cartografiezi strigoiul?”
When I didn’t immediately answer, she withdrew her hand and lowered her voice, leaning forward to whisper to me. “You come to map the vampire?”
“No.”
“He has summoned you?”
I bristled. “No. I come of my own free will. Someone I value was on her way to see him. I’ve come to stop her or at least find out what has become of her.”
“But you come with a book to map some his—” She fished around for the word—“spirit.”
“Essence.”
“Da. Yes.”
“As I said, no.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Then why do you even have a book? No, forget I asked this. I do not care, truly. I want that you will help me map him just the same. This I hope and I believe.”
I was tired and, regrettably, rude. “What is your name, girl?”
“Elena Popa. Do not call me ‘girl.’”
“Fine. So, does ‘popa’ mean ‘idiot’ in Romanian? You are either telling me a joke or you don’t know that it’s one. Are you even powerful enough to map the likes of Vlad?”
“You are all the same, you casters,” she suddenly shouted in English. Heads turned. She slammed her hands on the table again, this time with rage in her eyes. “You think you are special because you know a hidden world. But you know nimic. Nothing. You think it is a game, finding them, mapping them. You do not even think about how they affect the real world. How they terrify the real world. What they do to the real world. You are an English dog.”
I was ashamed—not because I’d called her an idiot or because she was right about casters. No, I was ashamed because I laughed out loud. Her fury was so massive, so consuming, that it was utterly incongruous with her small frame. Thankfully, as I laughed, I recognized in her face the signal that if she possessed a weapon of any sort, she was about to use it on me. I reached down and took my fork off my plate, just in case.
“All right, calm down,” I said. “And don’t forget, I’m not English. I’m actually a Scottish dog.”
She found herself again: the fire burned out in her eyes, and the curl that had come to her upper lip loosened. She didn’t speak as she reached down on the bench beside her and brought up an object wrapped in burlap and twine. As she untied it, I spoke into the silence.
“My name is Abraham MacCamaran. And I’m sorry. I’m not normally this obnoxious.”
She didn’t look at me as she pulled her spellbook from the burlap. “You are a caster. You are not sorry for being one.”
The other patrons of Hanul Cetății, seemingly satisfied that there’d be no bloodshed, returned to their meals and their tankards. The barkeeper wandered over to the fireplace and added wood, stoking the flames. Elena put the spellbook down between us as if it were no secret, something far from sacred. She treated it more like a comic book than a source of scripture.
The leather was worn and tired, and the gray-black stone on the front was one I’d never seen before. Elena looked at me looking at it, and she looked annoyed. I started to reach for it, but she pulled it back to her side of the table, undid the clasps, and turned it toward me. When she flipped it open, I knew her late father had been abroad before his end.
“When did your da’ visit America?” I asked. “This is Bigfoot, isn’t it?”
She didn’t offer an answer; instead, she turned the page, where I recognized familiar cryptids—the monster of Loch Ness. A masked man whose mask made him look like an undead bird, whom I knew to be a plague doctor from France. A snipe, duck-faced and googly-eyed. I suppressed the sudden awareness that I missed both Arthur and Whitnail. Instead, I raised an eyebrow as I reached to turn the page, and she nodded permission.
“What’s this one?” I pointed to a card on the next page that vaguely resembled a golden, glowing yak.
“That is called Wi,” she said, her voice becoming excited. “Do you know of the Lakota? They are a tribe in America. Wi was a strong spirit, bringing the light of the—”
“And this one?” Purple ghost-like figure of a woman, her hair wild, her eyes wide, her body invisible from the waist down. A jagged scar ran the length of her face, right down the middle.
“Banshee of the Badlands.” She became dismissive. “She was an extra one my father found. He was actually looking for—”
“Elena,” I said. She stopped and glared at me. “Why are you talking to me? You came over to my table for a reason.”
She took her father’s book back, closing the cover and snapping the clasp back with a gentleness that belied her character. “I saw your book. I know why other casters have come before you. And now that I know you are English, I wonder why you came across a very dangerous enemy warzone to be here. It must be more important than only mapping Vlad the Impaler. More than half who try fail.”
She took a deep breath, steadying herself. Her eyes were so alive that I could not look away when she leaned across the table, narrowing the distance between us to near-intimacy. “Did you come to kill him?”
“No.”
“This is good. Then I can kill him after I map him. But I need help to do this.”
“I’m not here to kill—”
“To map him.”
“I’m not here to map him, either. I don’t know why you want to do this, but I can’t help you.”
She was prepared for this answer. Elena Popa, the first woman I ever loved, would not be dissuaded by something as trivial as the answer no; she knew I was headed for Poenari Castle, where an unholy horror that might have once been human lurked in the ruins, hungering for human prey. And she knew I was alone, far from home, a stranger in a strange land. I would have welcomed the company of wolves so I wouldn’t die alone.
“I will show you how to get there,” she said as if I’d agreed. “I will be your tour guide. And better, I know the director of the Hanul Lupului down the road—I will arrange a room for you tonight. We cannot go to the castle after dark.”
“It’s just up the road. I don’t need a tour guide, and I can go alone,” I said. She began to wrap her spellbook up again. “I’m here to find someone—my sister. She was coming this way.”
Elena Popa met my eye again—she was fearless that way. “If she had passed through Căpățânenii Pământeni, I would know. I have been here waiting, and I would have asked her for help instead of you. This means she went around the village and straight to the castle. Is she a caster?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
She turned, gesturing for the barkeeper, and she dug coins out of a pocket in her coat. I protested, but she waved me off. When my bill was settled, she indicated I should put my own winter garb on and follow her out into the cold night. The wind was low, so the snow stayed underfoot, but a dank smell hung in the air. There was no moon, so I could not even see my breath in front of my face until Elena clicked on a torch—a flashlight—that she used to guide us down the empty road. Up ahead were lights from the Hanul Lupului, a small hotel but one with two stories. The sign outside bore the image of a suspiciously happy cartoon wolf grinning with teeth bared. And with one red eye and one black eye. I was not comforted.
The lobby was warm and modern enough that I stopped feeling as if I were in a black-and-white Hollywood horror movie. Elena spoke with the desk clerk, brought me the key, and indicated a stairwell at the end of a narrow hall.
“Second floor,” she said. “It has a balcony, so you can escape paying your bill when you are ready.”
“I don’t know how you decided these things,” I said, “but casters aren’t like that.”
“Oh, I am not thinking about casters. Just you.”
She smirked, and it was enough to make me smile—and to relent. I accepted the key as she said, “I will come for you in the morning. It will take only an hour to get to the castle, so you won’t have much time on the way to decide what your plan is. Mine is to map him and kill him.”
“That’s not a plan,” I said.
“It is a better plan than just trying to talk to him about your sister. Do you think they are pen pals now?” She walked me to the bottom of the stairs and stopped as I began to climb. I looked back at her. She said, “If she came alone and she is not a caster, she might still be at Poenari Castle—as one of his brides.”
I thought about it for a moment before I said, “Then I’ll provide the annulment.”
“You English,” she said as she turned to go, “you have such a good sense of humor. Much funnier than the Scottish.”
***
Vlad Drăculea—affectionately known as the Impaler due to his penchant for suspending the bodies of his enemies on long poles while they were still alive and leaving them as warnings to others—lived in the fortress called Poenari Castle in the mid-1400s. He wasn’t a vampire, just a truly horrible human being who was ultimately killed by Turkish forces on the battlefield in the mid-1470s. Some historical sources say his corpse was dismembered and dumped in a swamp. Others say his remains are buried in a monastery not far from the battlefield where he died.
They’re not.
Bram Stoker—Abraham was his full name, I just want to note—was Irish and nearly fifty years old when he published Dracula just before the turn of the century in 1897. He’d never been to Eastern Europe. He’d based his version of Castle Dracula on one in Scotland, where he started writing his most famous book, a place called Slains Castle. In truth, he didn’t know much about Vlad Drăculea other than his sinister-sounding name and his nasty reputation.
The fact that Stoker opted to make his fictitious Dracula a vampire, a horror just like the real-life Vlad Drăculea, is one of those extraordinary historical coincidences that I’m sure scholars will one day discover was no coincidence at all.
Elena Popa met me after breakfast, and the first thing she did was walk me to a side road in the little village, a dirt path off of the “main road,” a generous term for the narrow dirt and gravel track that followed the river toward the mountain passes. There was no one around; she told me that the healthy men had gone to fight in the war, leaving behind the women, the children, the elderly, and the infirm.
“And you,” she added, smiling sweetly.
I said, “You’re something. I’m sure your sweetheart in the Romanian army hopes the war never ends.”
As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I grimaced, knowing I was trying to ask a question without asking it and without knowing why I was doing it.
She didn’t offer the information I wanted anyway. I felt miserable when she didn’t.
Where we stopped on the dirt path, she pointed out a sizable gap between the few cottages and nearby hayricks: Above us on the distant mountainside cliff stood a stone fortress overlooking the village. It was in ruins—a partially collapsed turret at one end and a jagged wall at the other served to bookend a lengthy, crumbling edifice that bore little resemblance to the castles depicted in fairy tales. It was little more than an oblong man-made rock.
“He lives in that?” I asked.
Elena shook her head. “Under it. In the crypts and tombs.”
“I thought Dracula—”
“You are expecting a sophisticated man in a suit who just happens to drink human blood,” she said, “and who lives with the wealth of aristocrats. I know your movies. But I would expect a caster to understand that monsters are real. We are going up there to find a fiend who murders. If he did this with a knife instead of fangs, maybe you would be more cautious.”
She sighed. “You will see the creature soon enough. The tour leaves in fifteen minutes.”
I said, “You speak very good English,” but she was already turning away.
***
The hike up the mountain trail smelled of pine and damp earth, and for a time I could both see and hear the Argeș River. It was an arduous trek; the path was muddy in places, as if the air never dried it out, and the switchbacks up the hillside were sharp and treacherous. The late morning sun was warm despite the cold air temperature, and I was sweating. In all, it was slow going, which gave me plenty of time to build up my fear instead of my courage.
By the time we reached the ruins, I was nearly ready to change my mind.
The last hundred meters weren’t even a trail anymore. It had devolved to a barely discernible footpath clogged by tree roots and rocks. Elena led; her silence, punctuated only by her heavy breathing, made the stillness of the hillside that much more pronounced. Even the wildlife steered clear of Poenari Castle and its lone resident.
“There was an earthquake last year,” Elena said suddenly, as if we’d been talking all along. “Part of the castle fell all the way down the mountainside into the river. Part of the crypts collapsed. But he dug his way out again. Scouts came up here during the daylight. They could sometimes hear him digging up toward them from under the rubble.”
The castle walls were tall, stones mortared together without visible windows or doors. It was misshapen and haphazard, an unremarkable gathering of rocks that was only vaguely shaped like a conceived structure. Elena watched me take it in, and she grinned at me.
“You are unimpressed.”
“I could make a better castle out of loaves of bread,” I said. “How do you even get in?”
Elena laughed, which pleased me. “On the far side, at the castle base, there is an open passage into the crypts. There are other ways, but they are deeper inside and more dangerous.”
We worked our way on a steep hillside around a shattered wall, the dirt loose beneath our feet, until we stood in the wall’s shadow. When I paused, Elena pulled me toward her, out of the shadow and into the full sunlight. She was stronger than I expected, given her slight frame.
“He could stand in those shadows,” she said. “And if he is so inclined to suffer the sun burning his hand, he could reach out of the shadows and pull you in with him.”
I took another two steps out into the sun, just in case.
She guided me through the weeds and the underbrush, away from the trees, always in the bright sunlight, as we paralleled the backside of the fortress. Periodically, I glanced up at the battlements, half-expecting to see a pale face peering at us from the shadows. Nothing moved; nothing made a sound.
“There.” Elena pointed to a dark, jagged archway at the base of the castle’s remaining tower. Beyond it was impenetrable darkness—it was as if the sun, standing straight above us, chose to spread its warmth over the earth just outside the archway, leaving the interior in the blackness that the evil inside cherished.
Elena said, “He’s in there.”
Something shrieked beyond the dark entrance.
We were frozen, Elena and I, as the thin silence finally returned, and in it I could just hear the sound of her teeth clicking together as she shivered.
“Wait here,” I said.
“No.”
“Please, Elena. Just wait for now. I need to know what he knows about my sister. Then you do what you like.” I indicated the short distance between us and the archway. “You can see everything from here.”
She considered, her teeth quieting, then said, “Stay out of reach. And help me when I need you.”
I had a terrible vision then: Dracula, cinematically black and white but for the blood running down Elena’s throat, watching me from the shadows while he consumed her, daring me to step out of the sunlight to save her, knowing I was incapable. I dismissed this with a harsh blink, pulling my winter coat tighter around my body as I ventured forward.
The sun had advanced across the sky, allowing a few more centimeters of shadow to spill from the entryway out into the tall grass and weeds. I stopped well short of that contrast. I cleared my throat.
“Vlad Țepeș,” I called into the entryway, using his Romanian title and hoping I wasn’t mispronouncing it. “Dracula. Are you there?”
Rocks clattered somewhere far from the entryway. A dark shape, even darker than the surrounding shadows, moved toward me. It came like a spider: a human-like figure walking on the soles of its feet and the palms of its hands, its head back at an unnatural angle to watch me.
As it came closer, it rose to its feet, a tall, thin creature wrapped in a dirty and torn burial shroud that might have once been white. Its hair was matted with filth. It approached soundlessly on the balls of its feet, its arms extended as if for balance—or to take flight.
This was Vlad the Impaler.
This was Dracula, the undead.
This was a mistake.
He stood just inside the shadows of the crypt entryway. His eyes burned with a fury and a hatred that terrified me nearly to fainting. He was a wild animal at the end of a chain, held back at the very edge of where sunlight fell that marked the border between his unlife and my death. A low guttural growl rattled in his throat. Then his tongue, white as paper, emerged from between his lips and began to thrash to the left and right so fast that I began to gasp for air as panic threatened me.
Then he froze like a statue papered with dead human flesh. His tongue vanished between protruding fangs. Only his lips moved.
“What,” he rasped in English, “do you want?”
My own voice seemed small compared to his. “Hello. My sister was coming here. To see you.”
“Her name?”
“Agnes.”
“And what does she want with me?”
I didn’t know, so I asked, “Has she been here?”
He cocked his head like a rooster, his eyes wide, and instantly leaped to the stone wall of the entryway, his fingers and bare feet digging into the rock as he scaled to the top. There he hung upside down, but his head twisted until it was impossibly upright. He stared at me. I didn’t think I was breathing; I stared back, and I realized he never blinked.
“She does a service for me. She has gone after a thief.” Dracula let his arms hang down toward the ground, clasped his hands together above his inverted head, and began to swing to and fro like a pendulum on a clock. He clung to the ceiling by his jagged, clawlike toenails. “You can stay with me until she returns.”
Each time he swung toward me, his face seemed to enlarge. I thought I could see individual hairs on his chin and jawline, though I was certain the undead did not experience hair growth any more than they did aging. I had to look away from his eyes; they seemed dangerously deep and black.
“What is she looking for?”
His voice was the sound of an animal testing human speech. “Part of me. It has happened before. They carved me into pieces when I died fighting the Ottomans. They delivered my head to the sultan as proof of my death.”
He grinned a feral, bloodthirsty grin at me as he rocked. “So, I went and took it back.
“Now the righteous live again. But when she brings me my spellbook, I will show them how the righteous die.”
To say I was stunned doesn’t do justice to my inability to grasp what he was saying. “You’re a caster? I thought you were a cryptid.”
Dracula just hissed, his rancid breath nearly gagging me whenever he swung forward. I had a score of questions about how an immortal, undead killer in the night could be a caster, but one question above all others demanded an answer. “Where have they gone?”
He spat the name. “Kantipur. They think they can hide above the City of Light, but she will find them. And then I will give her what she asks for.”
I felt dizzy, nauseated. I knew the ancient name Kantipur, and I knew it would take weeks to get there, assuming he told the truth and that was truly where Agnes was going, but what I didn’t know was…everything, I realized. I said, “What does she want from you?”
Too late, I understood what he had done. His pendulum-like rocking had brought him to the very edge of the entryway’s shadow, and the sun had moved just enough across the sky over Poenari Castle to extend that shadow. I was easily within reach if he risked direct sunlight for a heartbeat—and he did.
He lunged for me, extending one hand across that border between darkness and light. I could smell his flesh sizzle in the sun. His fingernails stabbed through my winter coat just above my left breast, even as I tried to retreat. He made a horrifying sound—snarling, spitting, a falsetto shriek behind gnashing teeth.
Elena had me by the shoulders, then, pulling me back, out into the sunshine. Dracula’s fingernails scratched four deep, bloody tracks down my chest, but when he closed his fist to grab my coat, Elena had pulled me out of his range. He came away with shredded fabric as the back of his hand began to blacken and char. I kept my feet. Elena stepped around me to face him.
She said, “Give me back my mother.”
The vampire had retreated into the shadows and licked a blood-red stream of saliva over his burnt hand. It crackled. He scowled at us reproachfully. “She cannot be given back. She has taken a vow to be my bride.”
In a practiced move, Elena whirled her burlap bag from her shoulder and rapidly unwrapped her spellbook, but Dracula didn’t wait. He vanished as if he’d never been there, disappearing into the blackness beneath the castle, back into the crypts.
“Tonight, girl.” His voice came to us, a chilling breeze from down there where the dead were waiting to wake up. “I will give you your mother tonight.”
We waited, but he didn’t return—not then, anyway. After a time, Elena wrapped her spellbook up again and asked if I wanted her to treat my scratches. I said I would take care of myself when we got back to the village. I asked about her mother, but she shook her head—we would discuss it later, she said.
As we circled the ruins again and found the trailhead that would take us back down the cliffside, Elena paused and turned around to face me.
“It is customary to tip your guide at the end of the tour,” she said.
I laughed. “I have little to spare, I’m afraid.”
“Then information will do. Where is this City of Light, Kantipur? Where did the righteous ones taketook Vlad the Impaler’s spellbook?”
“You could hear all that?” I should not have been surprised; Elena Popa was always thinking ahead to the next transition in her life, and I could have guessed she intended to accompany me when I left Romania. Assuming I still planned to find my sister.
“That is its ancient name,” I said as we headed down the trail toward Căpățânenii Pământeni. “And it’s thousands of kilometers from here—it could take weeks to get there, if I can get there at all. Now it’s called Kathmandu. It’s in Nepal.”
She said, “We will certainly need a tour guide for that.”
***
We returned to the hotel, but only long enough to gather my meager belongings. Instead, we went to her family’s home to wait for nightfall.
Elena Popa’s father had been successful at what she called mixed mountain farming—crops, livestock, and orchards. There were barren fields for wheat and corn on two sides. Rows of trees with dark leaves, which she identified as plum trees, filled a sizable acreage (though she used the term jugăre, which we were unable to convert to acres). Onions would be ready to be harvested soon, and the lambing season was apparently underway.
“But I have sold the lambs,” she told me as we reached the farm, “and the pigs. And the chickens. And the cows. There is no one here to do the work anymore.”
Her place consisted of a large but empty barn, a pigsty, three or four sheds, and the main farmhouse. I could hear the river and smell the mixed scents of the farm—I was reminded of home, the oat fields I’d helped my father and brothers harvest. But that was already someone else’s life, something I’d watch a different Abraham, one his mam called Abrams, experience. A brutal tightness in my chest made my eyes water as we climbed the steps to her front porch, which ran the full length of the house.
“What do you call your farm?” I asked as she opened the front door. She smiled and shook her head.
“I call it ‘the farm,’” she said. “We don’t name our houses here.”
I turned and looked up the mountainside. The ruins of the castle were visible from her steps. “Poenari Castle. What does that name mean?”
“It is named for those who settled their farms below it. ‘The people of the meadow.’” She ushered me inside. “But it was a mistake to name it.”
The interior of the house wasn’t terribly modern—rough planks for the floors, clay stoves to heat the six rooms, oil lamps and candles for light, a sizable fireplace lined with bricks—but it was welcoming. Knitted throws and sewn quilts decorated much of the main room.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“You don’t name a cow or a chicken or a pig,” Elena said, “not when you are just going to kill it soon anyway.”
She laughed, and I laughed, and I experienced a thought that had so very little to do with reality that I wasn’t even sure what it meant.
You could save my life, Elena.
I couldn’t explain the thought to myself; it was just there. It wasn’t literal, I know, but it carried the weight of importance that such a statement requires. We laughed together—and it convinced me in an instant that Elena was just the companion I needed, someone who I almost instantly conceived of having not a single flaw, not one shortcoming, the inability to make a mistake. I noticed her hair and how beautifully small her hands were, and how she carried herself with confidence and preparedness.
I found myself unwilling to talk; I wanted to hear her speak, and it turned out, she was quite the blether—a chatterbox. And everything she said was important, at least to me in that moment.
She was an only child and now an orphan, she explained. Her father had been a caster, and before settling in Căpățânenii Pământeni, he had traveled near and far to map cryptids. (“He told me he thought he was the first caster to ever map Bigfoot,” she said with pride. I doubted that, but I still nodded enthusiastically.) But her father had died unexpectedly of typhoid fever the previous year, which she and her mother had managed to avoid. However, his demise had made their farm vulnerable to neighbors who came courting, though she knew they were not truly interested in marrying either woman.
“They wanted to marry the land,” she said.
The Popas were quite wealthy, it turned out, and if not for the war that began to draw those suitors away, she had no doubt that the pressure to wed one of them and hand over the family fortune would have come from all quarters, including the village elders. As it was, she told me with a stare of certainty, she was the one who had the gold, and she could travel anywhere she liked, carefree.
But the suitors weren’t the only ones watching them.
“Vlad was not a ladies’ man in his time,” she said as she prepared a meal for us. “He was married twice. But I have heard many times that he read Stoker’s book and decided the many brides Stoker gave him was a good idea. For decades, he has crept into our village and all the others across the valley so he can find those to take under his spell.”
Her mother was one of them.
“We were not close, not even when I was small, but we were close enough that I am not going to let him keep her.” She served us some kind of bean porridge with cabbage that was as bad as it sounds. “Now that we have picked the fight, he will come. And I will do what I must do.”
For a few minutes, instinct overruled infatuation. “We should leave now, Elena. We still have a few hours before sundown. If nothing else, we could find a safer location.”
She turned her spellbook toward me, flipping open the pages, and pointed. “First, this. Then we will go to Nepal in the morning.”
And she began to lay out her plan to me for mapping Dracula (“When the time comes, you will need to pay attention,” she said, to which I replied in my best deadpan Whitnail, “To what?”), for helping her mother, and ultimately for dealing with the vampire. It was perfect on paper, but if I thought too hard about it, it seemed more like a potential frizzler, and if it failed, it was in the realm of believability that one or both of us could die.
Oddly, though, I didn’t care. I thought of the line, love-devouring death, do what he dare.
I did not think about how stupid Romeo was, of course.
We talked until the sun went down, lighting candles around the room as we shared, and I learned she knew how to do the Quickstep—her father had taught her. I told her about Whitnail, exaggerating his affection for the snipe Arthur to make her laugh. I discovered we shared a love of books and that she was well-read. Her favorite book was one I didn’t know, a self-help book called How to Win Friends and Influence People.
“I would say you seem to have learned something from it,” I said.
“Maybe. Sinclair Lewis says it’s the handbook for learning how to be nice to people long enough to screw them over,” she said, smiling. “But I don’t care. I like it. It can be very useful, especially Part One, Chapter 2: ‘The Big Secret to Dealing with Vampires.’”
I waited. “Well? What is it?”
She shook her head, and her long dark hair swept across her eyes. She brushed it aside, still smiling for me. “Read the book.”
I didn’t get to respond—the two windows of the main room shattered at the same time as pale-skinned figures hurtled into the room with us. On cue, the front door exploded inward, sending shards of wood all the way to the back wall, forcing us to protect our faces.
The figures—four total, all women—were wretched. They came to their feet, revealed in the candlelight. Their skin was so tight against the bones that they were nearly skeletal; their eyes were sunken so far into their skulls that you could have put your finger in their heads up to your first knuckle. But they did not move like the dead—they moved like wolves, their heads lowered until their foreheads were aimed at us, their arms bent back behind them with their palms up and fingers spread. They wore ragged farmer’s attire, covered in dirt and smelling of spoiled meat.
Elena and I were both on our feet, moving to opposite sides of the room. She had her spellbook open already; I put my back to the wall and pulled out my own. Two of the vampiric women tracked me by turning their heads at impossible angles.
“Which one is your mam?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the panting of the women.
Elena said, “The one at the door.”
Of course. I could easily see the resemblance. Her mother stood in the broken doorway, her chin held low, her body rigid, the sky behind her black, leaving her mostly in shadow. But she didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe. Instead, something moved in the darkness outside, and as Dracula slid into the light, I was reminded of his original name, before Bram Stoker fictionalized him as a count.
Vlad the Impaler.
He pushed Elena’s mother forward, and she fell face-first to the floor. What he had done to her was horrifyingly in keeping with his moniker, from her head all the way down to her feet. She didn’t make a sound as she collapsed.
Dracula, naked but for a pair of ratty trousers, howled like a wild animal, and his four brides responded in kind. He shuffled into the room, eyes darting back and forth between us.
I thought Elena would scream at the sight of her mother’s death, that she would lose control and give him the time, even if only a few seconds, to take us. But she didn’t—she was stronger than I ever could have been. Had it been my mother impaled by a vampire, I would have likely curled into a fetal position. As it was, she watched him carefully as he assessed the standoff.
“I thought vampires couldn’t come into a house without being invited,” I said, fumbling for the card Elena had handed me earlier when she was telling me her plan.
“I am sorry to say my mother let him in before,” Elena said, raising the card I’d given her. When I saw it in her hand, I stepped to my right and pressed my fingers down on the blank card in my spellbook. A gate opened from my card that Elena held aloft, and it rushed over Dracula just as a second gate—the one Elena opened from the card I held—shot across the room in the opposite direction, passing over him the other way. In a matter of heartbeats, we had both mapped him.
He knew instantly what we had done, and in a fury, he snarled something guttural, something animalistic. All four of his brides charged us.
They didn’t know what was about to hit them; if they had known, they would have fled to save their undead lives. But as it happened, Elena pulled a card from her father’s spellbook, and she brought forth a cryptid she had tried to show me the day before. I had been too distracted, too excited about all the others her father had mapped, so I didn’t get to hear her explanation about Wi, the Lakota tribe’s deity that brings the light of the sun. The shape that appeared was not unlike a yak or a bison, and as it took its form, it exploded with light so bright that I had to look away.
It wasn’t just a mysterious divine light; it was sunlight.
The brides shrieked as one and exploded into dust. One moment, they crept in pairs across the room like insects, fangs bloodlessly stabbing their lower lips, and in the next, they were clouds of ash and dust, obliterated. They were second-generation undead, too weak, too newly converted to survive a direct blast of sunlight, and as Elena had explained to me when she told me her plan, they were nothing more than fodder.
The master vampire, however, was another matter.
He whirled for the door, but the sunlight scorched his back from his neck to his waist, first as a deep, angry red scar and then to a blackened, chipped scab. He screamed, flailing, falling, and the light that seared his bare feet sheared his toes off as they shriveled like burning paper. He caterwauled like a dying animal, but the sound was laced with obscenities in myriad languages. Elena’s head was bowed as she communicated with Wi, and I could only tell the blazing bison was moving toward the door because the heat blasting against me like a high desert wind began to diminish.
I expected him to shriek threats, but by the time Wi had reached Elena’s mother lying on the floor in the entryway, Dracula had simply gone silent. I doubted he was dead, but I did not doubt that he had fled for his ruined castle to try to heal his ruined body.
I stood apart, my eyes averted, as Elena knelt and whispered in her mother’s ear before turning Wi’s power on the body. As the passage says, dust you are, and to dust you shall return.
When her mother was gone, Elena sagged and let Wi disappear again. Though candles were still lit within, the room seemed suddenly as black as the tomb itself.
“He lives,” she said, her voice weary.
“But he hides.” I moved to her, balancing her as she closed up her spellbook. “What do you want to do now?”
She found her own strength again, even while leaning against me, which I welcomed with silent joy. “He’s weakened. We need to go up to the castle and finish him while he sleeps.”
We stepped out into the cold night air, neither of us dressed for the winter, our coats inside on the chairs, and we stared up at the sky where we knew Poenari Castle to be. I squinted, but of course, there were no lights in the ruins, so it wasn’t visible, but we could both sense the vampire’s presence even from here.
“We’ll need torches,” I said, turning to her.
And there he was.
Dracula had his arms and legs wrapped around her body as if she’d consented to give him a piggyback ride. He had one charred hand over her mouth to silence her, and his misshapen, toeless feet crossed ankles around her waist. With his free hand, he had driven his forefinger into her ear, and the sickening absence in her eyes told me he had her. Wherever he had been—in the shadows along the wall, on the roof, under the porch—he had attacked in dead silence. She wasn’t dead—but I was no longer sure she was alive. And my heart began to wail. I opened my mouth to threaten him and instead vomited at her feet.
“Bring back my book,” he whispered. His voice was pained even just to hear. “I want it. It is mine. You bring it, and she lives.”
How could he have known what I felt? I didn’t argue; I didn’t say that my sister Agnes was already pursuing it. I didn’t say that Elena Popa was a useless hostage, that he would have to do better if he wanted to force my hand. I didn’t say any of these things. I said the one word that I thought mattered in that moment.
“Nepal.”
He forced her to run, carrying him like a child on her back, and they vanished into the darkness as I sank to my knees and hung my head at what was becoming of my world.