Maggie O’Cuiv. “We’ve got this all wrong.”
“They are undead!” Vambéry growled. “Of course they are the enemy!”
I picked up Vambéry’s sword and inserted the blade back in the cane, holding it out of reach. “Let them in,” I told Patrick O’Cuiv.
He looked to Ellen for approval, then stepped aside.
Matilda ran to where I stood and wrapped her arms around me, her eyes locked on Ellen. Thornley stepped in behind her, lugging what appeared to be a very heavy box. He set it down just inside the door, watching me with a wary eye.
“Please tell them what you showed me,” I instructed Ellen. “Tell them all of it.”
For the next hour, she did just that.
* * *
? ? ?
I LISTENED IN SILENCE as she revealed the entire story, trying to hold back the emotion as she did so, but it was painfully obvious that she loved Deaglan O’Cuiv with all her heart, as she did his relatives, his blood. I watched Maggie and Patrick O’Cuiv as Ellen spoke, I watched the emotions flood their pale faces, I watched Maggie cry tears of red as Ellen explained how the dark man had punished him, punished her. Then Ellen told us how she spent the last seventeen years seeking out each part of Deaglan O’Cuiv’s body—buried in suicide graves around the continent, with the exception of his heart. After recovering them, she had hidden his body in numerous places over the years, from the tower at Artane Castle to the waters of Ireland’s bogs, ultimately bringing them here and locking them behind the door in this very room.
“The hand we found in Artane Castle belonged to Deaglan O’Cuiv,” Matilda said softly to no one in particular.
“It was alive,” I told her. “We both saw it move.”
“I thought we imagined it, all these years . . .”
“He cannot die, nor can his body,” Ellen went on. “Not like this. Perhaps if he were burned or his heart pierced with a wooden stake, but as long as his soul is trapped within that cursed body, he lives. In this weakened state, his mind is not his own; he belongs to Dracul, to the man whose spoiled blood circulates in his forlorn flesh.”
Ellen’s gaze fell to the floor. “I’ve tried to speak to him, but he is in such agony. His every thought is manipulated by Dracul. Anytime I sense my beloved, Dracul snatches him away.”
Vambéry snickered, his eyes longing for his sword. “You’ve been trying to speak to a box of body parts? This is preposterous!”
Ellen turned towards him, the anger and frustration burning in her glare. “It’s Dracul’s blood that makes him so! If his entire body can be brought back together, it will heal, of this I’m certain. Deaglan will come back to me.”
“Where is his heart?” I asked, ignoring Vambéry’s outburst.
Ellen sighed. “I only recently learned its true location. Dracul hid the heart well in a small village outside of Munich. He guarded this position most of all, but he let it slip two nights ago; I found the location in his thoughts.” She paused for a second. “His guard fell when he took Emily, and I plucked it from his mind.”
“What does he mean to do with Emily?” Thornley asked, his voice thin.
“She’s bait,” I replied before Ellen could answer. “He wants to draw us all out. Everyone who knows of him. I don’t believe for a second he let this location near Munich be known by accident. He wants us to go there.”
“How do we know Deaglan’s heart is even there? Maybe this is all a lie,” Matilda said.
“It’s there,” Ellen assured her. “Of that I’m certain.”
“Why are we even discussing this?” Vambéry blurted out. “Whatever is behind this door should be burned to ash. We need to release the souls of these undead; that is God’s way, and it is the only way! Their plight is meaningless!”
Maggie O’Cuiv crossed the room with ungodly speed, her feet almost leaving the floor, seeming to float within inches of Vambéry and looking him square in the eye. “We are