Lamentations

Oh, blood! My beloved dark liqueur of the senses. I thirst for your red gifts, your velvet touch of tongue.

These were his first thoughts upon resurrection, always the first craving—a drained and undernourished Lazarus in need of a white peasant throat to pierce, to gorge and savor the delicate taste of Europe—his homeland forever.

The cold shudders soon raked through him. Then came the feel of cramped wings, the dry mouth of unyielding centuries, the stiffness of his skeleton as he bent his knees and whispered to the inner blackness of his coffin.

“Daciana?”

“Marguerite?”

“Ilona?”

The names of the women he loved graced his lips. The last time he awoke, in the year of their Lord 1767, they had howled from the rotting castle rafters. They flew to him and gave him succor. Their beautiful hands cupped fresh blood, and he drank.

But nothing greeted him now except indiscriminate silence.

Dracula pushed open the heavy lid of his coffin, hoping for a familiar face. The darkness of his secret lair lay thick around him. His eyes roved over every nook and corner of the crypt. Everything was as he had left it since the last vampiric sleep. The white bones of his enemies were racked in bookshelves like old scrolls. Egyptian treasures blinked golden in their millennial solitude, and Georgian wigs lay draped over coats of arms and sooty bottles of fermented blood.

Footsteps led up to his coffin, but a thick layer of dust coated them. It had been some time since Daciana had been here. She would sing to him sometimes while he slumbered, her voice melting into the fabric of his dreams, staining them at the edges with mortal beauty. He remembered rescuing her mortality. She was a thin-limbed peasant girl from the tiny village only a day’s flight from his castle.

He had seen her at the banks of the Argeș, her knees in the sodden earth, coughing into her smock while chores went neglected, clothes still dirty, clots of blood in the cream. She would’ve died from consumption if he hadn’t stolen into her homestead in the dead of night and made her drink.

Drink. The tainted sacrament.

He gave her another life, away from death and disease and despair. Now she was free to wander the dark. Under eye-of-owl and breeze-of-bat, her undead feet walked amidst the ferns. She soon made friends with the wolves.

Marguerite, the golden-haired, was the scholar, the beauty. She studied the ancient texts in his library and watched the sunset’s last rays atop the castle tower, singing funeral dirges to the wind. She was deep and feisty and bottomless like the sea. Not the bluedark Mediterranean, but something pulled from Babylonian myth, like a woman of water that covers all lands, from forest to desert to Tartar steppe.

She loved hearing about the old times, when vampires walked with men in gardens and palaces, and the vampiresses were goddesses to them. Goddesses of childbirth, fertility, and vengeance. Marguerite longed for those tales.

Ilona, on the other hand, was secretive and unyielding. She was most like him, preferring plots and smoky backroom schemes to creative lusts. She shared his desire to consolidate power in Europe under one nightborne aegis. She had young noble men turned and married to powerful families across the continent. Dracula smiled in the dungeon-black—the 18th century had been such good fun. Ilona herself was a noble from lower Bavaria, a Teutonic princess of the basalt hills and crumbling castles. Her hair was as dark as a bat’s wing, and her eyes gleamed crimson when he had turned her. She held onto her religion; Devil knows her stubbornness. Even though her soul resembled a shadow, she clung to her rosary crucifix till her hands were snow-white with pressure. She prayed every sundown.

He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Let him sit alone in the silence when it is laid on him; let him put his mouth in the dust.

A throaty growl from outside the castle tore him away from his past. Dracula pushed the cobwebbed dungeon door open, his muscles weak. How long had it been this time? Fifty years? A hundred? Two?

The sound carried on until it resembled a long, low rumble before it disappeared. He reached a shaky hand to his shoulders as his coffin-wings melted back into the shadow of his being. They disintegrated or formed based on his thoughts. When he felt the liminal shudders of wind from the other side, he knew he was a dance away from Death and all her secrets. Vampires could command the veil between worlds in part and use it for flight.

The castle gloom met his eyes, but the familiarity of his home comforted him: the broken stained-glass windows, the vines that twisted like they had twisted around Wallachia. All he had loved, all he had fought for—they gathered dust now. Beautiful dust.

The fading light of a European sun slanted through the nearest arrow slit. He skirted around the hateful gold and felt a summer breeze as sweet as Christian lands.

Loneliness.

No one had prepared him for this loneliness. Enough. Walk.

The sun had gone down by the time he finally reached the top of the spiral stair. His hands grazed the castle wall and they trembled in their weakness. But something more than thirst and hunger stirred his ache. It was the desire to see the world again and hear its clamor, feast on its joy and beauty, seduce the people in their quiet towns. A great and uncontrollable urge to escape filled him, yet the sound above threatened once more, louder than a dragon and coming from the west.

He pushed open the last barrier to the darkness, and in the muted, purple sky, he saw a great legion of beasts flying toward him, their silver glinting in the arc of ascending moonlight. What animals or machines were they to slice the wind like ancient gods? What mortal contraptions? Dracula stood to his full height as his black tattered cloak fluttered around him.

He bared his fangs as a squadron of German Luftwaffe roared overhead.