PROLOGUE
Castle of Vlad Dracul III
Walachia, Romania
1448
Vlad Dracul III knew the battle was lost. The ramparts were burning, orange flames leaping into the night sky, licking at the windowsills, closer and closer. Choking smoke billowed in like black death. His soldiers’ screams were nearly drowned out by the cries from within the castle, where the walls to the kitchens had been breached.
Behind him, his twin half brothers huddled together on the cold stone floor, Alexandru watching and listening to the growing mayhem, his thin face white with fear, not for himself, Dracul saw, but for his brother, Andrei, a sickly lad, his brain weak as his body; one scratch, and he bled and bled. Dracul watched Alexandru clutch the dirty manuscript to his chest, his other arm around his brother, who was rocking back and forth, keening and wailing.
Dracul saw Alexandru draw Andrei close and speak in words Dracul actually understood, “Shh. All will be well. I will protect you. I will always protect you.”
But Andrei, who didn’t understand what was happening, rocked and cried, the horrific screams and the hellish flames too much for his mind to grasp.
Dracul’s other brothers, his legitimate brothers, were warriors and had proved their worth countless times. But these two, beget of a maid in a darkened corridor by his father’s indifferent seed, had never shown any worth until yesterday, when a sword had sliced a grave cut through Dracul’s hand. The burning pain was nothing, but knowing his hand might be cut from his body to save his life terrified him. Alexandru, the strong twin, the one who communicated for both of them, had smeared on a strange yellowish salve he and his brother had made. Almost immediately, the pain was gone, the deep cut closed, and Dracul could continue fighting. And this morning, the hand was unmarked, as if there’d never been a wound. Whatever they were—the devil’s evil spawn, or spawn from a magic realm he didn’t understand, their alembics and herbals all recorded in that tome that never left their sight—they had saved his hand, possibly his life. They weren’t warriors, but they had value and, he thought again, mayhap magic.
Dracul’s guards nearby heard the brothers mumbling their unholy garbled sounds and prayed to God to protect them from the devils. Like his soldiers, Dracul knew the villagers were afraid of these cursed twins, as they were called, who belonged to the visiting Romanian Orthodox monks. There were dark rumors surrounding the boys. It was whispered they drank blood, spoke in a language none could understand, drew strange pictures, and wrote strange words. Their evil had brought the enemy down on the villagers, which, Dracul knew, was nonsense.
He was the one with the power, he was the one people really feared, not these two scraps of humanity. Dracul reveled in the fact he was known to all as more monster than man. It was whispered he was merciless, without conscience, a creature who wallowed in death, butchering those who displeased him with joyous abandon. Impaling them. Ah, what a sight it was, the screams, the smells, the devastation of a human body, all done according to his whim. Even the twins couldn’t save a man he’d selected for death. He hadn’t killed his worthless half brothers. No, he’d sold them to the monks, but now the monks were back, bringing the boys with their strange book and ill tidings—his cousin Vladislav’s army was on their heels.
When the monks came for a visit a year earlier, they had tried to give the boys back, but Dracul refused, reasoning they would be better off cloistered and protected behind the abbey walls. For he’d known then how everyone despised them as much as feared them, so different, so strange. If he was called a monster, the twins were called ungodly—their garbled talk no one understood proving they were spawns of the devil. Their very existence was blasphemy.
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.
No one ever saw them again. They lived on for a while in stories and legends that spoke of the mad twin brothers who drank the blood of innocents. Eventually the brothers disappeared into the fabric of time, but the idea of them lived on. When the precious book was finally shown to the modern world, it was still missing the ripped-out pages. And no one knew the pages, like the book, had fluttered through history.
Their half brother Vlad Dracul, the Impaler, emerged from the shadows of history to be immortalized on the page and the screen. He became Dracula, the archangel of evil. They said he made others like him. That he and his kind walked the earth, draining the lifeblood in their pursuit of immortality.
But as all things are lost, they are also found. And with them come the plagues of hell.