The Sixth Day (A Brit in the FBI #5)(2)

Now six Romanian monks had returned only days before, bringing the boys back yet again. The twins were evil, Father Stephan said, unholy, mad, a portent of death. In his fear, Stephan had screamed at Dracul only an hour earlier, “Look behind us—the hills burn, people are spitted on bloody pikes! Those mad twins, they’ve brought this horror upon you, upon your people. Kill them!”

Of course it wasn’t true. The monks had led Vladislav’s troops to him, not that it mattered now. Perhaps he should have killed the boys and been done with it. But he couldn’t. No matter their blood was tainted with commonness, probably with madness, they were still of his blood. Instead, Dracul had run Stephan through and left his twitching body on the flagstones, the other monks cowering back against the wall.

The flames drew closer, and he turned to his half brothers, wretched, dirty, their clothes rags, rail thin—obviously the monks had starved them. He saw hate in their eyes, for the monks and for him, and fear, gut-wrenching fear. And oddly, he saw a reflection of himself. Not as he was at this moment, his black clothing drenched in soot and gore, the blade of his sword red with blood, but himself in an ancient past. And he knew that the warrior blood coursing through his ancestors down through the years, he shared with them.

Now he knew he couldn’t help them, not anymore. He couldn’t help any of them. The castle was falling, and Vladislav’s army was ready to take the battlements. Everyone left inside his ramparts, choking on the bitter black smoke, would die if he didn’t allow himself to be taken.

Dracul strode to the window and stared down at the chaos, the slaughter of his brave warriors. Only he could stop it. He, Vlad Dracul, the Walachian prince, had to become a hostage again, and these two miserable scraps who were his half brothers would be killed or tortured, or both, by their enemies, by the villagers, by his own soldiers.

Behind him, he could hear the smaller twin still howling like a wolf to the sky, and the other, Alexandru, muttering his nonsense words meant to calm and soothe. Dracul turned away from them, readying himself for what was to come—a hostage, death, who knew?

Taking their master’s turned back as a signal the boys were no longer under his protection, the guards moved on them, a fitting sacrifice to stop the evil at their gates. Alexandru backed away, standing in front of Andrei, holding the book close, but a guard ripped it away. Alexandru sprang at him, fighting tooth and claw to retrieve it. In the fight, the small bindings broke, and pages floated free. Andrei was huddled, crying on the floor, but seeing the pages torn away, he scrambled up to save them. A guard kicked the pages into the air, laughing to see the vile whelp cry out as he tried to catch them.

Dracul whirled about, snapped his fingers at his men, shouted for them to stop. They didn’t want to, but they didn’t want to die with a pike thrust through their bellies, either. Dracul looked at the boys frantically trying to gather the torn-out pages. He held out his hand, and a guard gave him the book. Before, whenever he’d been forced to confront their existence, he’d seen them only as objects of scorn, to be hidden away. But looking at them now, looking at the filthy book that held what surely had to be magic, he simply did not know. He flexed his healed hand, felt fear skitter deep inside, and he hated that, as well.

It was Alexandru who handed him the loose pages. Dracul shoved them back inside the book. He looked beyond to Andrei, pathetic, small, wizened like an old man, who bled at a simple scratch.

He looked down into Alexandru’s eyes as he gave him the book. “Take it and go.” He lightly laid his once-wounded hand on the boy’s thin shoulder. “The book—guard it well. It is beyond what a man can understand.”

Alexandru had expected to die, not this. He drew Andrei up to stand beside him, and he whispered to the brutal man who was his half brother, “But where will we go, my lord?”

Dracul pulled three gold pieces from his tunic. “It does not matter where you go, anywhere but here. Take these and leave now, before you face the flames, or the enemy. Take the back tunnel, go to the village.”

“They will kill us in the village. Fear of you is the only way for us to live. The monks were afraid of you, so they didn’t kill us, though they wanted to. If you aren’t here—”

Dracul saw something in the boy’s dark eyes that gave him a start, like a curtain that covered something not of this world, and the curtain could lift at any moment. What would he see? What would happen? The curtain didn’t hide the sort of violence he knew. It wasn’t anything he understood. Yet again, he felt a stab of fear.

“Why would you not come with us? You can be saved. If we can escape, so can you.”

“I will not abandon my troops.” Dracul heard the shouts, the screams, too close, too close. “Go now, this is your final chance.” He rose to his full height. “I am giving you your lives.” He looked a moment at their book, covered in writing he couldn’t read and strange green drawings, some looking vaguely human, but most strange shapes alien to him. “You have your book. Protect it. I command you to survive.”

Dracul turned and snapped his fingers again at the guards, who followed him from the room, one staring over his shoulder at the two ragged boys now running down the stone stairs, to the tunnel in the dungeons. Did he hear them speaking in the language only they understood? Surely they would be caught, killed.

Alexandru and Andrei snuck away from the castle under cover of darkness and flame, screams fading in the distance.