get it done, but I hesitated. I’d never killed a sleeping vampire. Their daytime resting places were too hard to find to make it worth the effort; I caught them animated and bent on mayhem, not lying around wounded and helpless. This was so different from the fight to the death I’d envisioned that I simply sat there a moment, staring at him. He wasn’t at all what I’d expected.
His face had the same expressive eyebrows and long, dark lashes he’d passed on to me, but with strong, masculine features underneath that made them look quite different. He was very good-looking, but except for shadowy depressions in his cheeks, he was as white as bone. He looked ill, which was absurd, since vampires don’t get sick. Of course, the blood might explain it; the coverlet beneath him was virtually soaked with it. I had an awful idea: had someone beaten me to it? Had someone else stolen my revenge, while I struggled not to fall off that damned wall?
My hands started shaking and I couldn’t seem to stop them, and my breathing was shallow and uneven. I sat back down on the bed until the room stopped swimming, then started to pull off the remains of his ruined shirt. The wounds underneath were deep, with a few showing bone, but none looked to be in the right area for a heart blow. So why didn’t he wake up?
I told myself that a dead vampire was a dead vampire, no matter how he got that way. I got a better grip on my stake and decided to stop worrying about who had attacked him in such a half-assed way and just get it done. I positioned my makeshift weapon over the heart, but again I hesitated. I wanted him awake for this, aware enough to know who was about to end his miserable life and why. It shouldn’t happen like this, without him even waking up. Somehow, it seemed almost obscene.
“Are you going to kill me or wait for me to die of old age?” I jumped at the sudden question, and the hand that had been lying so utterly still and limp a second ago caught my wrist. I struggled, but found that I couldn’t move. I stared at my arm as it hung there in the air, the strength that had never before failed me suddenly useless. “It will be a long wait, I assure you.”
Bright amber eyes looked me over as he easily rose to a sitting position, his other arm grabbing me by the neck like an errant puppy. He smiled, showing fully extended fangs. “You had your chance. Now it is my turn.”
I fought and thrashed against the iron hold, but it was no use—I couldn’t move. I screamed, as much in rage as in fear, and the hold tightened, tearing more cries from my throat. A hand clamped over my mouth and I bit it. Someone swore, and it was in French, not a language I’d have expected under the circumstances. It brought me back to myself slightly. I opened my eyes to find Louis-Cesare bending over me, worry clearly visible in his blue eyes. Déjà vu.
“Dorina!” Louis-Cesare’s face blurred in and out. He looked like he was struggling to stay calm. He wasn’t struggling half as much as I was.
I’d met Mircea for the first time in a bar in Italy, around the turn of the seventeenth century, not in a castle in Romania. Especially that one. Cetatea Lui Negru Voda, the Citadel of the Black Ruler, was the real castle Dracula. It had originally been built in the fourteenth century, but Drac rebuilt and expanded it after he returned from his Turkish adventure. The Turks had let him go after learning of his father’s assassination and Mircea’s burial alive at the hands of the nobles of the town of Tirgoviste, who supported a rival family on the throne. They knew he’d stir up trouble as soon as he got home, giving the Wallachians something else to think about besides fighting them. And in that regard, Drac hadn’t disappointed.
He had decided that the only thing that would protect Romania from outside invaders and inner rebels was a show of strength. On Easter Sunday 1459, he started as he meant to go on. Drac invited the nobles of Tirgoviste to a lavish dinner party. Once there, they were arrested and forced to march fifty miles to the town of Poenari, located where the Carpathian foothills