Prince of Twilight

“My prince,” said the man in brown. “We have done it. Take this.”

He handed Vlad a scroll, rolled tightly and held by a ruby ring—the ring he’d given to Elisabeta. It had been on her finger. Seeing it caused pain to stab deeply, and he sucked in a breath.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You removed her wedding ring. Why?”

“We performed a powerful ritual, commanding a part of her essence to remain earthbound. The ring is the key that holds her and will one day release her. When a future incarnation of Elisabeta returns to you, all you will need to do is put this ring upon her finger and perform the rite contained on this scroll, and she will be restored to the very Elisabeta she was before. She will remember everything. And she will love you again.”

“Are you sure?” Vlad asked, afraid to believe, to hope.

“On my life, my prince, I swear to you it is true. There is only one caveat. And this could not be helped, for we risk our very souls by tampering with matters of life and death and the afterlife. The gods must be allowed their say.”

“The gods. It was they who saw fit to take her from me this way. To hell with the gods.”

“My prince!” The sorcerer looked around as if fearing Vlad’s blasphemy might have been overheard by the deities themselves.

“Tell me of this caveat, then,” Vlad snapped. “But be quick. I must attend to my wife’s burial.”

The man boldly took hold of Vlad’s arm and began walking beside him, catching them up to the procession, while keeping enough distance for privacy. “If the rite has not been performed by the time the Red Star of Destiny eclipses Venus, then the gods have not willed it, and the magick will expire.”

“And what will happen to Elisabeta then?”

“Her soul will be set free. All parts of her soul, the part we’ve held earthbound, and any other parts that may have been reborn into the physical realm. All will be free.”

“And by free, you mean…dead,” Vlad whispered. He gripped the man by the front of his russet robes and lifted him off his feet. “You’ve done nothing!”

“Death is but an illusion, my liege! Life is endless. And you’ll have time—vast amounts of time—in which to find her again, I swear.”

He narrowed his eyes on the sorcerer, tempted to draw his blade and slide it between the man’s ribs. But instead, he lowered him to the ground again. “How much time? When, exactly, does this red star of yours next eclipse Venus?”

“Not for slightly more than five hundred and twenty years, my liege, as nearly as I can calculate.”

Vlad swallowed his pain and his raging grief. Rhiannon had predicted he would find his Elisabeta again in five hundred years. His chief concern at the time had been wondering how the hell he could manage to survive so long without her; how he could bear the pain.

Now he had an added worry. When he did find her, would it be in time to enact the spell, perform the rite, and restore her memory and her soul?

By the gods, it had to be. He was determined. He must not fail.

He would not.

He was no ordinary man, nor even an ordinary vampire, after all.

He was Dracula.

1

Present day

“Melina Roscova,” the slender blond woman said, extending a hand. “You must be Maxine Stuart?”

“It’s Maxine Malone, and no, I’m not her.” Stormy took the woman’s hand. It was cool and her grip very strong. “Stormy Jones,” she said. “Max and Lou are busy with another case, and we didn’t think it would take all three of us to conduct the initial interview.”

“I see.” Melina released her grip and dug in her pocket for a business card. “I guess this must be out of date.”

Stormy took the card, looked it over. The SIS logo superimposed itself over the words Supernatural Investigations Services. In smaller letters were their names, Maxine Stuart, Lou Malone, Tempest Jones and beneath that, in a fancy script, Experienced, professional, discreet and a toll-free number.

She handed the card back. “Yeah, that’s pretty old. Maxie and Lou got hitched sixteen years ago now. Of course, we didn’t get new cards made up until we’d used all the old ones. You have to be practical, you know.”

“Naturally.”

“So why all the mystery?” Stormy asked. “And why did you want to meet here?”

As she spoke, they moved through the entrance and into the vaulted corridors of the Canadian National Museum. Their steps echoed as they walked. Melina paid the entry fee in cash, and led the way deeper into the building.

“No mystery. I want you to handle a sensitive case for me. Discretion—” she tapped the old business card against her knuckle “—is imperative.”

“You can trust us on that,” Stormy said. “We wouldn’t still be in business after all this time if we didn’t know how to keep our mouths shut.” She looked at a threadbare tapestry on display inside a glass case. Its colors had faded to gray, and it looked as if a stiff breeze would reduce it to a pile of lint. “So why this place?”

“This is where it is,” Melina said, eyeing several tarnished silver pieces in another case. Bowls, urns, pendants.

“Where what is?”

“What you need to see. But it won’t be here for long. It’s part of a traveling exhibit. Artifacts uncovered on a recent archaeological dig in the northern part of Turkey.”

Stormy eyed her, waiting for her to say more, but Melina fell silent and moved farther along the hall, among line drawings and diagrams of dig sites, framed like pieces of art. Then she turned to go through two open doors into a large room. There were items lining the walls, all of them safely behind glass barriers. Brass trinkets, steel blades with elaborately carved handles of bone and ivory. Stormy glanced at the items on display, then rubbed her arms, suddenly cold to the bone. “You’d think they’d turn on the heat in here. It’s freezing,” she muttered. Then, to distract herself from the rush of discomfort, she snatched up a flyer from a stack in a nearby rack and read from it. According to it, the items found didn’t match the culture of the area in which they’d been located, and many were thought to be the spoils of war, brought home by soldiers who looted them from faraway lands and conquered enemies. The dig site was believed to have been a monastery of sorts—a place where men went to study magic and the occult.

“Here it is,” Melina said.

Stormy dragged her gaze from the flyer to where the other woman stood a few yards away, in front of a small glass cube that sat atop a pedestal. Inside the cube, resting on a clear acrylic base, was a ring. It was big, its wide band more elaborately engraved than the gaudiest high school class ring she’d ever seen. Its gleaming red stone was as big as one of those, too, only she was pretty sure this stone was real.

“It’s a ruby,” Melina said, confirming Stormy’s unspoken suspicion. “It’s priceless. Isn’t it incredible?”

Stormy didn’t reply. She couldn’t take her eyes off the ring. For a moment it was as if she were seeing it through a long, dark tunnel. Everything around her went black, her vision riveted to the ring, her eyes unable to see anything else. And then she heard a voice.

“Inelul else al meu!”

The voice—it came from her own throat. Her lips were moving, but she wasn’t moving them. The sensation was as if she had become a puppet, or a dummy in some ventriloquist act. Her body was moving all on its own, her hands reaching for the glass case, palms pressing to either side of it, lifting it from its base.

A hand closed hard on her arm and jerked her away. “Ms. Jones, what the hell are you doing?”

Stormy blinked rapidly as her body snapped back on line. She saw Melina holding her upper arm while looking around the room as if waiting for the Canadian version of a SWAT team to swarm in.

Stormy cleared her throat. “Did I set off any alarms?”

“I don’t think so,” Melina said. “There are sensors on the pedestal. They kick in only if the ring is removed.”

Frowning as her head cleared, Stormy stared at her. “Why do you know that?”

“It’s my job to know. Are you all right?”