Dracul (18 page)

“Is that why we’re playing blackjack?” Felix asks.

“Yes.”

But I’m still stuck on the Romanian castle. I mean, I love that place. It’s pretty much my favorite place on earth, and I used to explore every wing I could reach when I was a kid. “The tower that was always locked—”

“Those are my private quarters,” Constantine confirms.

“So you were there, hiding out in the tower whenever we came to visit?”

“Not always. I travel extensively. I was there when you were a child, then I missed you for many years—there when you weren’t, gone when you were—I never knew quite when to expect you. And then one day, four or five years ago, I was there when you visited with your mother and sisters.” Something passes over his face, a kind of pained affection that reminds me of how I felt after I kissed him.

“What?”

“Nothing. It is no matter, only that I followed you at a distance to Montana, saw that you were going to school, and then I left you alone. I traveled down the Rocky Mountains and came to Vegas. We vampires have a history with gambling—it is one of our most notorious vices, though the mythology does not often reflect it—and I soon realized the potential to raise the money to buy back my castle by playing blackjack.” He shakes his head. “But you have helped me against your better judgment. I will not hold you to our agreement. You are free to go.”

“What?”

“If you wish to leave, you are free to go. You need not feel bound any longer by our agreement.”

“But I need you to translate the rest of the book for me.” Am I the only one who remembers I have a paper due—a paper that, up until a couple of weeks ago, was the most important project in my life?

Apparently.

“You have the most important information already. Combined with your other sources, you have more than enough material to write your paper,” Constantine predicts.

“But what about the vampires? What if they come after me again?”

“I think I know who this Gane fellow may be working for. It is safer for you that I go to them than that we wait for them to come to us.”

“What about Operation Bankroll?”

“It was a success.”

“You have enough money—”

“To buy my castle? Yes. I had hoped to earn enough to restore it, but it has waited many long years. It can wait a bit longer.”

“When would I see you again?”

“Rilla?” Constantine steps closer to me, close enough I can see his face clearly in spite of the night, so close Felix cannot see his face from where he’s standing, or read the message Constantine is silently communicating. “I realized…earlier…when I was unable to resist my attraction to you…it is best for both of us if we end our agreement and not see one another again.”

So that’s what it feels like to have a stake driven through your heart.

Not literally, of course, but
ouch
. Everything on Constantine’s face is apology and regret, tinged with a yearning he’s trying not to show.

Behind him, Felix clears his throat. “So, are we going home? What are we doing? The hours posted at the monorail station said they stop running at three a.m. on Sunday mornings, which isn’t too long from now. Even if we try to fly home starting now, we’re not going to get to Bozeman much earlier than tomorrow’s flight. I’m tired and cold and the hotel room is paid for. Can we go back and sleep and take the plane home tomorrow?”

Constantine asks me without words if I agree to the plan Felix proposed.

Since I don’t trust my voice, I answer with a tiny nod.

We climb back over the wall with Constantine’s help, and walk back to the monorail station without him. He teleported away to somewhere—either to the hotel or to find who Gane is working for, or somewhere else, he didn’t say. I’m feeling tired and stunned as we ride the monorail back to the hotel.

“What did Gane say to you about why they think I have the book?” I lean on Felix’s arm and whisper, since there are other people in the car.

“He said somebody gave it to you. Some name that starts with an
m
. Mircea?”

“That’s what I thought he said.” My heart is chugging inside me like the first grinding pumps of a train’s pistons as it gathers momentum to pull away from the station. “Didn’t Constantine say he was born in 1428?”

“That sounds right. Why?”

“That’s the year Vlad Dracul’s oldest son was born. Mircea.” I shake my head, but my heart doesn’t stop its crazy ramming.

“Which one was he?”

“War hero. At the age of sixteen, he ruled his father’s kingdom while his dad went to pay tribute to the Ottomans. But it was a time of war and unrest and his kingdom was attacked. Mircea fought valiantly in spite of being overwhelmingly outnumbered. He saved a major outpost from Ottoman control, only to have his father sign it over to the sultan. His own people rebelled against him and buried him alive at the age of nineteen.”

Felix raises a questioning eyebrow. “But as the son of a dragon, he was biologically immortal, right? He could only be killed with a stake through the heart, or by decapitation. If he was buried alive, neither of those would have happened yet, right?”

I don’t answer his question directly. My throat is dry. I speak in a faltering whisper. “Constantine gave me the book. Not to keep, just to have it translated. But he’s the one with the book. That’s who Gane was talking about, right?”

“I guess. When I asked Constantine if he sleeps in a coffin, he said—”

“Not usually.” We recite the answer in unison.

I add, “He didn’t deny it.”

Felix looks at me with wide, almost frightened eyes. “Do you think Constantine is really Vlad Dracula’s older brother?”

Chapter Eighteen

I don’t even know Constantine’s room number, so I call him as we’re walking from the monorail station to the hotel. He answers the phone with hesitation in his voice. “Rilla?”

“Mircea?” I ask. When he doesn’t respond right away, I tell him, “I’d like to talk to you.”

“I can meet you in your room.”

“Thank you. We’ll be there shortly.”

Felix looks at me with a dozen questions on his face as I close the call.

“He didn’t deny it,” I confirm.

“What does it mean if he is?”

I shake my head and shrug, my throat too full of emotion to permit words to escape just yet.

“We already knew he was alive back then, we knew he was a key player. He never really explained what type of vampire he is. He said it’s complicated.” Felix is whispering close to my ear as we enter the hotel lobby and head for the elevators.

“I need to know. I need to know all of that.” I punch the button for an up elevator.

We ride in silence.

Constantine opens the door to our hotel suite the moment my fingers fumble with the lock. He looks wary. Once the door is closed solidly after us, he asks, “How did you figure it out?”

I lower my heavy backpack onto the coffee table and kick off my shoes. “Gane claims I have the book. He said Mircea gave it to me. You were born in 1428.”

Perhaps because he’s tired, Felix falls into his awkward habit of asking juvenile questions. “Were you really buried alive? How long were you down there?”

Rather than give Constantine time to answer Felix’s questions, I ask something important. “Why didn’t you tell us? You told me your original name was Constantine.”

“That was my first alias, and my most common alias since.” He turns to Felix, ignoring my real question. “I was buried alive for eight months until my brother dug me up.”

“How did you survive?”

“I could not die.”

“But I mean—air, food, water. Weren’t you injured?”

“Yes, I was injured—they tried to kill me with pitchforks. I went into a dormant state like hibernation. Those who buried me feared I would arise from my grave, so they rolled heavy boulders atop my coffin. These landed in such a manner that they did not crush me, but allowed spaces for air and even a bit of filtered light to reach me. Rain also trickled down, and I drank what I could.”

I’m listening, cringing to think this actually happened—to anyone, let alone to a man I care about. “Some of the historical sources claim your eyes were put out by a red hot poker.”

“Ah, yes. So many witnesses believed.” As he speaks, Constantine reaches up and pulls darkened contacts from his eyes, revealing their true deep red color. “We had a rudimentary eye lens even then—our naked eyes frightened people. But my lenses were knocked out as I fought to free myself. It is not surprising that those present thought my eyes had been burned from their sockets.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I repeat the question he still hasn’t answered.

Constantine places his hands atop his head, fingers knit together, and paces a path across the room. He’s wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. He’s barefoot and hunky and, with his arms above his head like that, his biceps are displayed impressively.

Not that I should probably be looking.

Still.

He lowers his arms and shakes his head. “It’s complicated.”

Felix bellows with exasperation, “It doesn’t sound that complicated to me.”

But I can tell from Constantine’s face that’s not exactly what he meant.

“There’s more than what you’ve told us?”

He closes his eyes and stands perfectly still, neither nodding nor shaking his head. “It is difficult for me to talk about. I do not wish to tell it. You have kept your secrets from me. Let me keep mine.” By the end of the speech he opens his eyes and looks at me with pleading.

What can I say? I’ve been demanding everything of him while withholding the truth about myself, even when I should have known it was safe to share it.

So for a couple of minutes we’re just staring at each other, communicating wordlessly. I’m mostly saying
I want to know everything about you
, while he’s telling me
that’s not going to make this any easier
.

To which I might have pouted something like
it’s not fair. I care about you and I’m attracted to you and I don’t want to lose you
.

And his unflinching response is
there can never be anything between us. There is nothing more to gain. We both need to walk away now
.

While we’re doing that, Felix digs around in his bag, pulls out contact lens solution, and removes his contacts, revealing his scarlet-red eyes. “Want to take out your contacts?” He hands me my lens case, which had been tossed in his bag with the rest of the bathroom stuff in our haste to leave.

I remove my lenses and catch my reflection in the mirror. My hair is sort of disheveled, but still curled. My makeup is faded but still far more impressive than my usual chapstick-and-spot-concealer combo. And my dress matches my eyes.

Perfectly.

“No more secrets,” I tell Constantine, for the first time looking into his real eyes with my real eyes, unhidden. “Ask me anything about myself.”

He only shakes his head. “I need to go. I’m going to track down Gane and stop the vampires from hurting you. Please don’t call me. The number I gave you doesn’t work in Europe, anyway.”

He’s going to leave. I have hundreds of questions and he’s going to leave. There are so many answers I still don’t have. Before he teleports away, I blurt out the first question that comes to mind. “You said you followed me to Montana years ago, then left. So why were you there two weeks ago when you rang my doorbell and told me I had a bat?”

For a moment, Constantine hesitates. His face says he’s fighting the urge to teleport away. Even his voice holds reluctance as he answers my question. “There are many bats at my castle. The vast majority of them are mere bats. Just regular bats. Because I am a vampire, I understand their language—it is not a language of words like ours, but a communal form of bodily communication and physical signals. Three weeks ago we had an unexpected visitor, and the bats became unusually distressed.”

Three weeks ago, after traveling to the British Museum to check out
The Life of Vlad Dracula, the Impaler
, and being disappointed to find the book inexplicably missing, I’d stopped at the castle in Romania. It’s not exactly convenient to Great Britain, but it’s a lot closer to where I was than Montana, and I wasn’t ready to leave Europe yet, not empty handed. I’d thought about going on home to Azerbaijan, but then realized I should probably get back to school. I wasn’t at the castle long, just long enough to get some sleep before flying on. “The visitor was me?”

“You were there, yes. I had no intention of going near you, but the bats communicated fear to me. Fear, danger, an unwelcome intruder.”

“Unwelcome?”

“You and your family are always welcome,” Constantine clarifies. “The bats know you. They like you. No, there were other bats—vampire bats.”

“Vampires?”

“Yes. I didn’t know what they were doing there, but my bats were concerned for your safety, and I took their concern seriously.”

A memory I’d all but forgotten returns with sudden clarity—of feeling alone and uneasy. And then, though mostly asleep, realizing someone was there, and feeling protected. “You stood watch over me while I slept.”

Constantine looks distinctly sheepish. “I did not know what the vampires were after, or why they were there. The bats feared they might harm you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I didn’t realize you…” Possibilities skitter through my thoughts like fallen leaves driven by the wind. If I’d realized who he was, I’d have trusted Constantine sooner. If I’d known he knew me, I could have spoken with him freely. I wouldn’t have tried to hide who I really am.

I could have been my true dragon self around him.

But now it’s too late.

“The vampires followed you when you left,” Constantine continues. “Out of concern for your safety, I followed them. They kept their distance, I kept mine, but when I saw one enter your house and not come out again, I knew I had to alert you. I rang your doorbell. You know the rest.”

Sensing he’s finished answering the question, and fearing he’ll leave any second, I try to unscramble my thoughts and ask one of the other many questions that plague me. “Can you please translate the rest of the book for me? There’s still so much I don’t know.”

“The book.” Constantine frowns. “It has
caused
this trouble. I regret ever writing it.”

Felix has been hanging back politely, but now he asks, “What about the gold? Didn’t you say there was information about that in the book—information you wanted to impart to someone you trust? Like us?”

“It matters very little what I tell or don’t tell. They’re only pieces to the puzzle. No one has the whole picture.”

“Yes, but with enough pieces—” Felix begins.

Constantine shakes his head. “I have seen more atrocities committed on the quest for gold than any other pursuit. These vampires have a history of torturing innocents to get what they want. They’re after you because they believe you have information. I must convince them you do not.”

I remind him, “Earlier, you said you wanted to tell me.”

“That was before I realized how high the stakes had become. No. I will not tell you anything more—to do so only increases the danger to you. I must be going.”

Before either Felix or I can say anything more, or even thank him for what he’s done for us, he’s gone.

Felix lets loose a frustrated roar. “Where did he go? We don’t even know his room number, do we?”

“We don’t. Even if he went to his room, it’s only to get his things so he can leave for real.”

“I need to follow him. How can I follow him when I don’t know where he teleported to?”

“He’s going to face the vampires, Felix. It’s not safe for you to follow him.”

“But they want to know how to make gold. They already know some things about how to make gold. They have pieces of the puzzle. He has pieces of the puzzle—maybe, if I can gather enough of their pieces—”

“Didn’t you hear what he said?” I’m emotionally raw right now, so I struggle to keep my voice down. Who knows who might be listening? “Atrocities committed in the quest for gold? Torture? It’s not worth it.”

“He said it’s not worth it
to him
. Who says it’s not worth it to me?”

“It’s too dangerous, Felix. You have too much to live for.”

“Do I? Maybe this is what I’m supposed to live for.”

“No.
No
. We need to repopulate the race of dragons before our kind go extinct. That’s our purpose. Not chasing gold.”

Felix makes a sound that’s half sigh, half sad laugh. “I would love to repopulate the dragon race, but last I checked I don’t have a mate.”

“You’re only nineteen. Give it time.”

“I have searched the world over.”

“For someone who’s biologically immortal, you’re awfully impatient.” I grab my bag and head for bed. “Get some sleep. You’ll think more clearly in the morning.”

*

Come morning, I wake to discover Felix has thought far too clearly.

“He’s going to Europe,” Felix announces as I roll out of bed and stumble toward the bathroom. He’s sitting on the loveseat of the suite sitting room, showered and dressed and way too bright-eyed after the night we had.

“Constantine is?” I’m awake now. News like that is stronger than coffee.

I much,
much
prefer coffee.

“He said you can’t call him because his phone won’t work in Europe anyway. He said he thinks he knows who Gane is working for, and he’s going to track him down. Those vampires started following you in Europe. He’s going to Europe.”

“So you want to go to Europe? You’re not going to be able to find him. It may be one of the smaller continents, but there are still like a billion people there.”

“It’s only like three-quarters of a billion.” He makes one of those
duh
kinds of grunts little brothers are famous for. “Besides, he has a castle there, remember? And he finally has enough money to buy it, so there’s a good chance he’ll go there. I’ll just fly to the castle, find him or wait for him to return or whatever, and then follow him when he leaves again.”

“You’ll follow him when he leaves? You don’t teleport. None of us knows how to teleport,” I remind him. My brother-in-law knows how, and he’s tried teaching my sister (his wife), but it’s one of those skills you really need to start learning when you’re young, apparently, because even after lots of practice my sister Zilpha can only go short distances, and then only when she’s holding on to her husband, who’s skilled at the art.

Teleporting is a super-high-order function, which we’re assuming is a major reason why our line of dragons lost the skill (unless there’s another reason my family can’t do it—which is totally a possibility we haven’t ruled out yet).