Dracul

Dracul

Book Five of the

Dragon Eye series

The books in the Dragon Eye Series:

One: Dragon

Two: Hydra

Three: Phoenix

Four: Vixen

Five: Dracul

Six: Basilisk

This is a work of fiction. It is not meant to serve as an argument that dragons either do exist, or have existed. All references to historical events, real people, or actual events are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, events, and locations are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual places, events, dragons or persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2015 by Finley Aaron and Henry Knox Press

Cover Design by www.designbookcover.pt

Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall—all dance together… —Bram Stoker,
Dracula

Prologue

First, I’m going to tell you the first thing that happened, even though I didn’t realize its significance at the time. In fact, when it happened, I wasn’t entirely aware of what was going on. I was mostly asleep.

But later, much later, I realized, and I remembered.

So, I think it should come first, because it
did
come first, and also because I feel you have the right to know.

I would have liked to have known.

It’s too late for that now, of course.

Okay, here goes. Deep breath.

There’s an old castle in the mountains of Romania. We’ve always assumed it was abandoned. It’s in the middle of nowhere with no roads leading up to it. Like a lot of places in Eastern Europe, it was seized by the government decades and decades ago. But unlike many of those places, which were defaced and used for ignoble things like sanitary asylums and hog barns, this castle, due mostly to its remoteness, I suppose, was left alone.

Preserved, you might say.

We only know about it because we’re dragons, and the lack of roads doesn’t stop us. If anything, it makes us feel safer. More at home.

We’ve been going there my whole life. My parents stayed there long before I was born. It’s a convenient stopping place between my home in Azerbaijan, and any travels we’ve ever cared to take in the direction of Western Europe or even the United States.

I’ve slept in the castle more times than I can count, usually surrounded by my family members.

But lately, my family members have been finding mates and starting families of their own. So while I used to travel with my mother and sisters back and forth from Azerbaijan to school in Montana, in the United States, our group of four has been whittled down, as first my sister Wren got married, and then my sister Zilpha got married, and now my mother is more interested in being with her grandbabies than traveling with me, because anyway I’m a grown-up and I’ve made this trip countless times and I can do it on my own.

So now it’s just me.

I don’t mind. Really. I like being alone. I like quiet and not being bothered. Most of the time, being alone is awesome.

It’s just in the dark of night, in a sort of strange place (I love the castle in Romania, don’t get me wrong, but it
is
a strange place—I’ve explored most of it, but I’ve not been in every room. There’s one tower that’s always been locked.) I feel my aloneness more acutely.

I am not lonely.

I am not scared.

I’m just…a little bit…aware of my isolation, and the fact that if anything bad happened to me, my body would never even be found.

Which might seem like a genuine reason to be afraid, except I’m a dragon and therefore mighty and terrible. Hardly the defenseless young woman I appear to be. Besides being able to breathe fire while in human or dragon form, I can also fly, and I know martial arts, plus I’m quite good with swords, daggers, bows and arrows—pretty much everything except guns, because guns are worse than useless against dragons, since bullets can ricochet off dragon scales and hit whoever fired the gun.

And since it’s pretty much impossible to fire a gun while in dragon form, and since my skin, in human form, is not remotely bullet-proof, I tend to just avoid guns.

Fire and swords are so much cooler, anyway.

So I’m not scared. I’m just aware of the little noises, the unclaimed shadows, the oh-my-goodness-did-a-bat-just-swoop-through-here?

That last one happens way too often for my comfort.

So I go to bed on one of the many beds in this place that are perfectly preserved in spite of decades of being abandoned. I’m in my favorite room, which is the one with the jade-and-gold wallpaper and the big cherry wardrobe, and I’m lying flat on my back with the covers pulled up to my chin, and I close my eyes and tell myself to just go to sleep.

Go to sleep.

After all, I’m tired from flying through half a foggy day and part of the night. The sun will be up soon and it feels so good to lie flat after a long flight.

There’s another swooping swoosh like the flutter of wings. I was very nearly asleep, but now I open my eyes almost reluctantly, just to check.

And there’s another unclaimed shadow. You know the kind I mean—a shadow whose source is not immediately obvious. Yes, I’m in a four-poster bed, but this shadow is too wide for a post and besides, it’s standing at the foot of the bed in the middle, not where any of the posts has any right to be.

And it kind of looks like maybe a man.

But—and here’s the reason why I all but completely forgot about this ever happening in the first place—I’m not scared of him. I almost feel peaceful. Watched over. Like when I was little and my mom used to come into our rooms and check on us every night before she went to bed, when we’d been asleep for a while, and sometimes the sound of her approach would wake me up just enough to see her and recognize her, and it flooded me with this warm reassurance that my mom was watching over me and there was nothing to fear.

That I was loved, even.

And then I fell asleep.

As a little girl, and at that moment, lying in that bed in the castle in Romania, I fell asleep. And that’s the last I recalled of what happened until much, much later.

Almost, you might say, until it was nearly too late.

Chapter One

I’ve never minded bats much. Granted, they’re kind of creepy with their little fanged mouths and clawed hands and veiny, almost-transparent wings.

Creepy, yes.

Scary, no.

I mean, please, bat wings? My wings are at least a hundred times more huge and awesome than those wings.

Besides, bats eat bugs. Totally useful. So they’re like my little flying buddies in the sky.

As long as they stay in the sky. Lately, though, they’ve been infesting the house in Montana where I live.

Now, here’s the deal with our place in Montana. When my sisters and I were fourteen, the age when girls in the United States start high school, my mom came here with us from Azerbaijan to Montana. Partly we went because she wanted us to get a solid education and experience another part of the world, and Montana is about as far from Azerbaijan as you can get, yet at the same time, it’s still remote and mountainous and therefore vaguely reminiscent of home.

Also, Mom picked Montana because when she was a girl, her dad sent her off, alone, to a boarding school in northern England, and she’d vowed she’d never send any of her kids there.

And also because, Mom showed us a picture of Montana and my sisters and I pretty much fell in love with the place.

Knowing we were going to be living here through high school and college, my parents decided it would make good financial sense to just outright buy a house, and then sell it when we’re done with it, rather than paying rent all those years.

Their idea sounded brilliant eight years ago.

Now that I’m in my final semester of school, and we have to make the house look its best so we can sell it, the idea seems way less brilliant.

It’s not that we’re slobs or have slacked on maintenance, or any of that.

It’s the bats.

Seriously, I think the place is infested. And here’s the deal: my mom’s freaked out that people will find out about the bats and then no one will want to buy the house, so she doesn’t want me to call an exterminator.

I even offered to tell the exterminator to park maybe half a block away, but Mom’s convinced people will watch to see which house he goes to, and then rumors will start that our infestation must be particularly bad if we made him park half a block away so people wouldn’t know.

Which I guess sort of makes sense, but then, Mom’s not the one living in the house with the bat infestation. Mom’s been splitting her time between Scotland, where my sister Wren recently hatched a red-haired baby girl, and Tanzania, where my brother Ram and his wife have their hands full with a baby boy. When she’s not either of those places, Mom’s in Azerbaijan, where my dad is a dragon king of a remote mountain tribe.

I’m living here, alone.

Alone with the bats.

Generally, my policy toward any wildlife I don’t want to eat is: you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone. At first, this seemed to work with the bats. Sure, they might swoop through the house at odd hours and land on the curtains. I wasn’t even too upset to discover that they’re clearly not housebroken.

But when they started flying at me, diving at my face and shrieking their blood-curdling little bat screams, I had to defend myself.

I know, I know. I’m a dragon. Bats are tiny. There’s that old rule about picking on someone your own size, and bats are clearly not in my weight bracket.

For the record, the bat started it. And my tennis racket was nearby.

And I didn’t mean to kill it. I just meant to stun it, or shoo it away from my face, or whatever. It attacked as I was on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water after waking up in the middle of the night. I was groggy and disoriented. This wasn’t exactly my most well-thought-through moment ever.

I felt bad. I still feel bad.

The bat, however,
smells
bad.

I didn’t realize they had enough flesh on their little bodies to even stink, but when I woke up this morning, I was greeted by the stench of decomposing bat flesh (generally, we dragons enjoy meaty smells, but decomposing bat flesh is surprisingly unappealing). Since I couldn’t leave it lying all bloated and rotting on the kitchen floor (my thought the night before was that it would eventually revive and fly away), I stuck it in a baggie in the fridge.

Then I got to thinking, you know, bats don’t usually attack. When I say
attack
, that’s just what I mean. It wasn’t that this little flying mammal just happened to cross my path…several times in a row. It was coming straight at my face in a loud and aggressive manner.

So then I thought, maybe there’s a problem with it.

Maybe it has rabies.

Do yourself a favor, okay? Never google rabies. Just don’t. You’ve got to trust me on this. If you google rabies, you will see pictures of people dying from rabies, and you can’t un-see something like that.

It is seriously not cool.

Rabies has got to be one of the single most awful ways to die in the history of death.

So now I have a rabies phobia, in addition to having a dead bat in my fridge.

It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning.

The thing about bats and rabies is, bats can bite you without waking you up (I learned this online—I am now a bat/rabies expert). See, their teeth are tiny and sharp, so if you’re sleeping deeply, you might not even feel it. So, the official recommendation of all the health sites I visited, is that if you wake up to find a bat flying around near you (and for the record, no, my bedroom door was not closed—in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the bat was part of the reason I woke up in the first place), you have to assume you may have been bitten.

Maybe that sounds like a stretch, but here’s why you have to err on the side of caution: if you get bitten by a bat that has rabies, unless you promptly receive a round of vaccinations, you will die.

That sounds dramatic, like maybe I’m exaggerating, but it’s actually flatly true: from the onset of symptoms, rabies is fatal, so you have to start treating it from the moment you’ve been bitten, even if you’re not sure you’ve been bitten, because the alternative is death.

Painful, ugly death.

So now it’s still not even eight in the morning, and I’m sort of freaking out. At this point, the only way I can avoid getting a series of painful shots, is by having the bat tested for rabies, and even then, it has to test negative. If it tests positive, I’m getting shots.

Fortunately, the critter is still in my fridge.

Unfortunately, according to some of the websites I visited, it’s actually illegal to kill bats. They’re a protected species. Who knew?

What you’re supposed to do if you wake up and find one flying around your room, is to capture it and hand it over to the proper government authorities for testing.

Testing which I’m pretty sure requires them to kill it.

They
can kill it.

I
, on the other hand, wasn’t supposed to.

Since the number for the testing place (which is affiliated with the university I attend, yay) is on my computer screen, I decide to hurry up and call and get it over with.

But, as I realize while the call is ringing through, it’s
still
not yet eight in the morning, so there’s nobody in the office to answer the phone, and I leave a message about the bat and needing to get it tested for rabies, and I specifically omit the fact that the bat in question is actually dead.

Maybe they won’t notice?

Then, since I have class at nine, I hurry to shower and eat breakfast, and keep the phone close to me. But the phone doesn’t ring—the doorbell does.

I literally have my toothbrush in my mouth as I hurry to answer the door.

The sun supposedly rose an hour ago, but the sky is dark with snow-bearing clouds. I tug the door open and startle so hard I almost lose my toothbrush.

My stoop is occupied by a looming silhouette of darkness.

No, it’s okay. The shadow steps forward into the light that spills from my living room, and I can see it’s a guy in a parka on my freezing cold stoop.

“You have a bat?” He asks.

“Yeah.” I sort of splutter and try to suck my toothpaste foam back into my mouth at the same time. Did I mention the guy is cute? And I probably look like a foaming-at-the-mouth…rabies victim? Then, since it’s crazy cold out and I’m standing here barefoot (Montana in February, folks), I invite him in. “This way.”

I hurry to the kitchen with the dude at my heels. By racing just ahead of him, I manage to reach the sink, spit, and wipe my face on a towel before he enters the room.

Yes, I’m that smooth.

“It’s in the fridge,” I explain.

“Is it…alive?”

“Uh, well, it was.” I pluck the baggie tentatively by one corner and extend my hand toward him. “Not sure if it still is, or not.” I give him my best
hey-you’re-the-expert-not-me
look, with an
if-it’s-dead-it’s-totally-not-my-fault
finish.

The guy takes hold of the bag with way less tentativeness than I exhibited. He’s wearing thick leather gloves, so he can do that.

He scowls at the bag, turns it over a couple of times, slowly, scowls some more, and even sort of squeezes its little bat head. “You killed him.”

“What?” I glance at my tennis racket, which is leaning against the kitchen wall. Note to self: next time, at least hide the weapon.

“His skull exhibits all the signs of blunt force trauma.”

“His skull is like an inch wide. How can you even tell that?” I step a little closer to have a look for myself. What is this guy, some kind of bat forensics expert? “You know, he may have crashed into the wall, or something. He was flying erratically—which is part of why I’m concerned he may have rabies.”

“He does not have rabies,” the guy announces, shaking his head and looking almost…sorrowful? Seriously, I think he’s sad about the bat being dead.

Like I didn’t feel bad enough before.

“How do you know he doesn’t have rabies? Don’t you have to test him first?”

The guy sucks in a breath. “I can get back to you about that. Let me leave you my number.” He drops the bat baggie on my kitchen table, tugs off a glove, and picks up my pen, which is still on top of the open notebook I was using to take notes for my senior thesis paper.

I’m thinking, what, this guy doesn’t have a business card? But then again, he’s probably just a student worker, and there are so many of them the University probably doesn’t bother giving them all business cards. This guy looks about my age, even though he’s tall and wearing a puffy black parka, which makes him seem big and imposing.

He jots a number, followed by the name
Constantine
.

“Constantine,” I repeat, blinking at his neat-but-rather-angular handwriting. The number is not the same one I called earlier. A direct line, or Constantine’s own cell number, perhaps?

Constantine’s looking at my research books, which are piled all over the table with color-coded neon sticky note tabs sticking out everywhere. “You’re studying Dracula? You’re interested in vampires?” He gives me an intense look that’s maybe a little worried.

“Not so much the vampire part of it. Just the history. I’m a history major. It’s for my senior thesis paper.”

“It’s only February. You’re off to an early start.” Constantine looks at me with sincere concern in his chocolatey brown eyes.

“Actually, I’m behind. I’m supposed to have three primary sources, but I only have two. If I’d have known that ahead of time, I would have picked a different topic, but there was a third resource. I just…can’t find it.” I stop babbling. Why am I telling this guy all this? He’s a bat forensics student, or whatever. He probably doesn’t even care about obscure Romanian history.

“So will you have to select a different topic, then?” For a guy who came here to pick up a bat, he’s surprisingly concerned about my thesis paper.

“I think it’s too late. We had to declare our preliminary thesis two weeks ago, and I thought then I’d found a copy of the book I needed, so I turned in my initial summary and got it approved. Now I’m locked in. The professor was adamant about making sure we’d done our bibliographical prep work ahead of time—I guess she’s had trouble with students procrastinating until the last minute before—so if I change my topic now, I’ll get a late grade for everything I’ve already submitted, because the new material will all be late. And I’ll also have to basically start over, so, yeah.” I blow a huff of air at a wisp of my long dark hair that’s drifted into my face.

What I don’t tell Constantine is that the whole reason I picked this topic, is because there’s an abandoned castle in Romania that I love, but when I tried to find out its history and who owned it, I found links to Dracula.

As in, the real, original guy, not the hyped-up blood-sucking mythical monster.

The real guy was named after his father, Vlad Dracul, and
dracul
means
dragon
. Granted, it’s frequently translated
devil
these days, which is a derogatory term that chafes me to no end, but that’s beside the point. The point is, historically,
dracul
, or
draco
in Latin, meant
dragon
. Dracula means “son of the dragon”.