She drinks until not a drop remains, she drinks until his sister is nothing more than this dead thing she cradles.
Behind him, Thornley cries out, and Bram is able to twist his head just enough to witness Patrick O’Cuiv snapping Vambéry’s neck and tossing his spent body aside. It strikes the floor with a hideous thud. Patrick is on Thornley then, his terrible teeth tearing through Bram’s brother’s neck, spraying the room with hot blood even as Thornley screams—not the screams of a grown man but the screams of a child. All goes silent then but for the sound of Patrick O’Cuiv quaffing down every remaining drop.
All the while, Ellen stands in the corner of the room, lifeless, watching. A thin smile across her ruby lips.
Bram breaks free from Deaglan’s hold, feeling a great pain as his flesh is torn away, and dives for Vambéry’s sword, glimmering on the ground alongside its owner’s lifeless body. With every ounce of energy in his body fighting the desire to pass out from his loss of blood, he comes up with the blade, the sharp edge finding Ellen’s neck—
“Bram, no!” Ellen shouts. She wraps her arms around him and pulls him to the corner of the room, away from the table, away from her beloved. “It was a vision! Only a vision!”
The silver blade burns against her skin; Bram hears it, smells it, tastes it in the air.
Bram’s eyes dart frantically around the room. He sees Matilda standing opposite him, her eyes locked on him. Maggie beside her. Thornley, Vambéry, and Patrick O’Cuiv standing motionless on the other side of the table, all watching him.
He sucks in a deep breath and releases the sword. It falls to the floor with a clatter and slides under the table. Vambéry snatches it back up.
Alive.
All alive.
It was like back in the room at the abbey, the visions from behind the door. Only now the body is right here, right next to them, in the same room—
“Dracul’s blood flows through him still; he can use that,” Ellen whispers at his ear. “He will use that until Deaglan is free. It is all right now, you are safe. It was not real. You are stronger than he.”
“He is strong, my countess!” Dracul’s voice rings out over the churning storm. “The strongest yet! How kind of you to bring him to me! Him and the others!”
Bram shakes off the remains of Ellen’s loose hold and goes to the window. The undead are all around, their fiery eyes watching the house with unfettered lust. Above them, something runs across the remains of the roof, tiny little footsteps, quick and fast, followed by another pair. Others scratch at the walls. At the foundation, he can hear them digging, slowly digging under. Awful sounds, the undead everywhere.
“They cannot get in, not without being invited,” he hears Ellen say. “Bram was right about that.” The others hear her, too, but that does not put an end to their uneasy stares.
Dracul moves closer, only twenty feet or so from their door now, Emily at his side. “Bram, if you truly believe Ellen will spare your family and friend, you are laboring under a delusion. Why else bring you here? Someone will find your wagon in due time, but nothing else. Most likely, they will blame the wolves. How else for a group of foreigners to disappear in the woods?”
As if in response to this, Bram hears the wolves again, the howls of a dozen or more of them from amongst the trees of the forbidding forest.
Dracul waves a hand. “Some of my children have not eaten for a generation. Tonight they find joy, for a feast is at hand!”
Bram is not certain if he is making reference to the wolves, to the undead, or to both.
Emily advances to the little house, drifting down from her place next to Dracul and leaving no tracks behind in the muddy earth, the undead part for her allowing her access. She raps on the door, three slow knocks.
“A knock, a knock at my husband’s door, will he kiss me evermore?” Emily’s voice chimes out in a singsong. “A