“Bring both in here as well,” Ellen instructs.
Thornley nods at Vambéry and Vambéry reluctantly follows after him.
Bram turns to his sister. “You need to stay here with Vambéry.”
“I will not.”
Ellen is shaking her head. “I don’t trust that man to be alone with them.”
“I need to go with Ellen, and Thornley will never agree to stay; that leaves the two of you,” Bram tells Matilda. “I need you to stay, to watch over the O’Cuivs. Please.”
“Vambéry will attempt to kill them all the moment they are alone,” Ellen insists.
“I don’t think so—and certainly not with Matilda there.”
Matilda nods tentatively. “Bram’s right, I can keep in his favor, if not with charm then with force of might. He is only a man, after all.”
Bram goes to one of the satchels and fishes out a Webley revolver, checks the chamber to ensure it is loaded, and hands it to Matilda. “At any trouble, fire a shot, and we will come running.”
Vambéry and Thornley return with the first crate, then fetch the second, placing them side by side in the corner of the room. “If Dracul’s men are out there,” Vambéry says, “they are not making their presence known.”
“They’re out there,” Bram says, sensing them as Ellen had, their eyes no doubt locked on the small house.
Bram tells Vambéry he is to stay and Vambéry agrees after some persuasion. Vambéry tries to hand the rifle to him, but Bram tells him to hold on to it. He has his bowie knife and a stake.
Vambéry gives Thornley the curved blade he used on the men outside, along with a small bag of garlic. “Look for a fresh grave; that is where he will be resting. He arrived while the sun was up, which means he could not turn himself into mist to enter the grave, he would have been buried, I am certain of this. If you find him, you must drive a wooden stake through his heart and sever his head from his body and place the garlic in his mouth, like we did the others.”
ONE HOUR AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES UNTIL NIGHTFALL
Bram, Ellen, and Thornley step out of the house and return to the village green. Although the sun is now lost behind thick clouds, Ellen appears weak. Her skin has taken on a grayish cast, and her eyes are hazy, no longer bright red, as when she woke, but a dull, faded blue-gray. She pulls the hood of her cloak out over her head once again and disappears in its shadows.
Bram feels the men around them, human beings, lurking in the trees and behind the ruins, but he cannot see them. These men will not be seen until they want to be, but they are there, everywhere. Bram quickly comes to the realization that they are there only to observe—for now anyway. If they planned to attack, they would have surely done so by now. Whether they are in the evil thrall of Dracul remains to be seen.
Ellen falls still, her eyes fixed on the ground.
When Bram looks down, he understands why. Amongst the weeds, beneath the twisted vines and overgrown foliage, the earth is littered with splintered and broken crucifixes.
“How are you able to stand among them?”
“This place is unholy, the whole lot of it,” she replies. “They were buried, but the graves were never consecrated. These relics are unblessed.”
“These are graves?” Thornley asks.
Ellen nods. “When Dracul hid my beloved’s heart here, he killed everyone, the entire village. He placed a curse upon the land. The few remaining survivors buried their dead and moved on; they left this place to rot away, to be forgotten.”
“Not the plague,” Thornley states softly.
“It was never the plague. People believe only what they can understand.”
Thornley is surveying the village green, as well as the land between the buildings and the land beyond the village. Bram knows what he is thinking for he saw it, too. The crosses are everywhere; the bodies are everywhere. “How will we ever find the right grave?”
Ellen points to her left. “The original cemetery is