“Why me?” he asked his reflection in the rear view mirror. He looked to the coffee stain on the sleeve of his white dress shirt. It had dried, but his suit jacket that now lined his trunk was likely ruined. “Why me?”

The vampire had been dreading this day, from the moment he was asked to take a group of witches through the Carpathian Mountains. These mountains were long known to be a source of power for the mystical realm. Bringing novice witches into this realm seemed like a terrible idea. Even worse when you considered the event that was approaching.

“I know about the treatise,” Helga had dismissed Anatolie’s concerns. “They may be just what you need.” Helga had a bad history of stoking the flames of conflict among supernatural groups. She had changed a great deal over the last few centuries. It really didn’t matter, Anatolie didn’t have the option to refuse this job.

“Are you the one taking us to Sinaia?” He was clearly a vampire, but Anatolie wasn’t aware that there was going to be another vampire on the trip.

“I’m taking a group of witches through the mountains,” Anatolie got out of the car and stepped up on the new vampire. “I don’t know who you are.” Their faces were only inches apart as Anatolie let a low growl escape his throat.

“You will,” Matthias growled in return as he threw his shoulder into Anatolie. The younger vampire could feel the power of the stranger. Anatolie wasn’t about to back away. He knew that the older vampire wouldn’t risk exposing himself.

“Matthias is coming with us,” Carrie, the only witch he had yet to learn the name of said as she walked up and waited for one of the vampires to open the car door. They both took a step back and Matthias opened the door.

Anatolie got into his seat and stared like he was trying to put a hole through the steering wheel. He was too upset for words at the moment. He hadn’t been warned about the vampire, and he had a feeling that his job had just become a thousand times more difficult.

“Are we all ready to go?” Anatolie turned, recognizing the voice, but barely recognizing the woman walking up to his car. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and sandals. She couldn’t have looked more different from the girl in the coffee-stained sweatsuit than if she had come out dressed as Santa Claus.

“We are running late,” Anatolie snapped as the girls stood around admiring the change of wardrobe. He only had the night to get them into the village and settled at their motel.

Matthias loaded the trunk, then opened the front door for Coffee Girl. She sat down in the seat and Anatolie groaned. He knew this was going to be a long ride. This girl already hated him, and now they were going to sit beside each other for the next two hours.

“Do you spend much time in Sinaia?” Carrie asked from the back seat.

“Less and less,” Anatolie admitted, “but I was raised there. My sister is buried there. I guess it still feels like home.”

“The castle looks like something from a little girl’s dream,” Carrie gushed as she went on to describe the turrets and walls of the great stone structure. Anatolie hadn’t thought about the castle in a long time. It had been an amazing sight to him, at first.

“Do you like castles too?” Anatolie asked the girl in the front seat. She had been silent so far on the trip. He was surprised to hear himself ask the question, but he was trying to be a tour guide after all.

“Ali!” Carrie laughed from the back seat. “She’s still upset that we ruined her spring break by coming to Romania. She hates architecture and, well, anything that isn’t drinking.”

“I like to have fun, you don’t,” Ali snapped. “Let’s move on.”

The car fell silent for the next several miles. Anatolie decided to keep his eyes on the road and his mouth shut. He had clearly touched on a sensitive topic and he wasn’t going to get involved in this fight. Anatolie didn’t want to get too close to these girls anyway. There were reasons he was spending less time in Sinaia.

The others started to talk in the back seat, but the front seat stayed silent. Ali looked out the window. She was barely breathing, and she only looked over once. Anatolie turned to her immediately, only to see her turn back to the window.

The moon was high in the sky, and the mountains were rising out of the distance. In daylight they would’ve been visible throughout the trip, but on a dark, partly cloudy night they had taken longer to appear. The image of them had been looming large in Anatolie’s mind. The winding mountain road was a dangerous place for two vampires and three witches.

Anatolie touched the hula girl on his dashboard. She was glued to the dashboard of the car because Anatolie didn’t want to make any trips without her. The way things were going, he couldn’t risk making a trip without any good luck on hand.

“Stop the car!” Matthias yelled.

“We can’t stop here,” Anatolie said as he looked around at the faces in the car. “Fine, but if we all die that is on you.”

Anatolie pulled the car over, the halt in driving allowing him to subsequently smell what Matthias was smelling. “We need to keep moving.”

“This is what we’re here for,” Carrie explained as she got the door open and started getting out of the car before Anatolie could get the car started again. “We know what’s been going on here, and we want to help.”

“We want to” Ali mocked Carrie’s tone. “That is a very loose use of that phrase. That is something you say when all the members of the team have a say in what’s happening.”

“Helga has given us a mission,” Carrie snapped as she stomped her feet in the gravel at the side of the road. Ali got out of the car and headed off into the thicket that lined the road. There was a very narrow path through the bramble. Gnarled branches, sticking out at odd angles, recently broken by some unknown trauma.

Anatolie didn’t want to follow her, but he didn’t want Ali to find the creature who made that path. The vampire covered the space between them in a second. The wind created by his approach pushed Ali forward. The others were starting down the path as well.

Anatolie could tell that the smell was getting stronger. It wasn’t a smell that a vampire wanted to run toward. It was the gases that were released when a vampire was ripped apart. The smell was so strong that it had to be a very bad injury. Anatolie wasn’t sure there was any point to getting out and trying to save the vampire.

“Why not destroy the body?’ Anatolie asked as he looked at the headless vampire in front of him. Ali was speechless as she stared at the finely dressed corpse. “This had to be wolves. Only they would be this sloppy.”

“It’s hard to say,” Carrie and the others were just getting to the body now. Anatolie stepped back to let them get a closer look. “If we can find the head, we may be able to bury the pieces and restore his life.”

Anatolie started to look around him. He didn’t move too far, but he did check the ferns in his immediate area. He knew that the head could be reattached. It was one of the best parts of being a vampire. Any injury could be fixed by a day in the dirt.

The dirt of the Carpathian Mountains was especially powerful, and it was often said that you could become even more powerful than before if you were to sever your limbs and spend a day in this mystically charged soil. Anatolie had never tried it, but he had heard about it his entire undead life.

“I don’t think the dirt will fix this,” Ali said as she used her phone’s flashlight to illuminate the pile of red and blue goo. “I don’t think any amount of time can fix all of that mess.”

“Yeah, that’ll do it,” Matthias sighed as he pulled a stake out of the rotting pile. “Stake to the brain, the head is dead.”

“Are you saying that the body is alive?” Carrie sounded more fascinated than disgusted. She was staring at the mound like she wanted to put the lumps of dead vampire brains under a microscope. “Do you think the dirt could put it all back together?”

“It would put back together a brain-dead monster, and not a fully functioning vampire.” Matthias bent down over the body. “We have to destroy the body.”

“We can’t even try?”

“Why are we going to try to create a vampire Frankenstein mashup?” Raven seemed upset that Carrie would even try to stop Matthias. Anatolie wasn’t about to get in the older vampire’s way. Not just because he was holding a stake, but the thought of bringing a new type of monster into the world was horrifying.

“I’m just curious,” Carrie moaned as she watched the stake go through the heart of the body on the ground. The splatter went everywhere. “Ewwww!”

“That was so gross!” Raven sounded more excited than grossed out. She was playing and pulling at the long strings of sticky goo on her finger tips. “Why does it do this?”

“This man’s insides have been decomposing for centuries,” Matthias explained.

Anatolie had never seen a vampire explode like that. It was weird to think that he was filled with this same goo. His human organs had all but disappeared. Anatolie had only been to one other staking, and it wasn’t nearly as messy.

“We still have to check into a motel,” Carrie shrieked as she wiped the goo out of her eye. “We can’t walk into the front office looking like this, I think they’ll have a few questions for us.”

“I can do it,” Ali said as she stepped out from behind Carrie. She had a little bit of vampire in her hair, but that was it. Anatolie couldn’t help but be impressed. “Let’s get out of here.”

Anatolie followed Ali, with Carrie trailing behind them. Matthias and Raven stayed to burn the goo. The stake was enough to kill the vampire, but unless you burned the body there was no guarantee that some random sorcerer couldn’t use the flesh to create an army of zombies. Anatolie had only heard stories about this, but it was said to be the reason that all dead vampires were burned.

Back in the car the group was still processing everything that had just happened. “So, we were meant to see that, right?” Carrie asked.

“There was a reason that the body was still alive, that’s all I can say for sure.” Matthias seemed very troubled by the discovery. Anatolie was relieved that he wasn’t the only vampire who was upset by that sight.

Anatolie was still relatively young. He had been alive for the last 120 years. There were humans who lived that long. The young Romanian man had been working as a mercenary in the Ottoman army in 1917 when he was attacked and bitten. His vampiric attacker was older than even Matthias. He had been alive for a millennium at this point.

“What’ve you done to me?!” Anatolie had cried at the monster. His maker only laughed and tossed a young soldier to him. Anatolie couldn’t understand the urge to bite the young man in front of him. The newly turned vampire was tasting the soldier’s blood before he even had time to question his own actions.

Anatolie could still feel the fear coursing through that young man’s body. It made the blood taste sour, but the new vampire didn’t know the difference at the time. He had since learned the tricks of drinking a meal from a calm and relaxed human. The young soldier was the first and last kill for Anatolie. He had decided that he didn’t want to end lives just to live.

He wanted to be different from his maker. The bloodthirsty murderer who turned him was always trying to amass treasure, power, and people. It only took a week in his service to convince Anatolie that he needed to find another way.

“We need to be careful,” Matthias’s voice brought Anatolie back to the present, and the car he was driving through the winding Carpathian roads. “Someone knows we’re coming.”

The words shot through Anatolie. He couldn’t say anything as they drove into the town. He had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He knew that these people were in trouble, but there was no way to tell them. It was likely too late anyway.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ali asked. Anatolie looked up to see that Ali was looking right at him. He could feel the panic on his face. He tried to swallow the fear and smile. “That is terrifying, never smile like that again.”

“How should I smile?” Anatolie growled as he turned back to the road.

“Like someone who isn’t a sociopath,” Ali smirked as she delivered the blow. Anatolie could hear some giggling from the back. He was done talking for the rest of the trip.

He pulled the car into the motel and Ali hopped out. She was headed for the main office, and Anatolie found himself watching her. He wanted to turn away, and continue to pout, but he was transfixed. He let his head drop to the steering wheel. Why did he have to become attached?