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CAMERE DIN TURN
BRAN CASTLE
5 DECEMBER 1888
Ileana stood on a rickety stool, dusting the crammed bookshelves in my sitting room when I finally made it upstairs shortly before midnight.
A pair of my boots—shining as if they’d been freshly polished—sat on the windowsill, but I didn’t have the energy to ask why. Our grand foray into the master library to see what information we might glean about where the two tunnels possibly led had been fruitless. The only things we’d discovered were that Radu was even more clumsy than originally thought and that he enjoyed reading old German texts.
The Building and Grounds section had obviously not been well maintained—there were books of poetry and journals with silly tales regarding the castle and the surrounding area, but nothing useful. Not that I’d expected us to simply waltz into the library and walk off with a book neither the headmaster nor the royal guard could locate.
I closed the door behind me with a soft click. Without turning, Ileana paused, hand mid-swipe with the dust-coated rag, the wood creaking beneath her feet. The dirt on the bottom of her embroidered apron made it appear as if she’d been trudging through wet earth. I didn’t want to think about what dank part of the castle she’d been forced to clean. If it were anything like the passage we’d been in, it was most decidedly wretched.
“I’m—I’m very sorry for earlier,” Ileana burst out. “Thomas asked for help and I couldn’t—I couldn’t… I didn’t want to say no to Daciana’s brother. I told him it was an awful idea, but he was desperate. Love makes fools of the wisest. I can leave if you don’t wish to speak with me.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself. I’m not upset with you. It’s been a long day, is all.”
Ileana nodded and went back to carefully wiping down the bookshelves. I flopped onto the settee and rubbed my temples, hoping for a bit of serenity to fall from the sky and splatter across my soul like a cleansing rain shower. If only I’d simply been upset by Thomas’s attempt at reclaiming our friendship. His feigning of death felt as if it had occurred millennia ago. We had much bigger problems to contend with.
Though the bats were terrifying, I knew they weren’t responsible for Wilhelm’s blood loss. He certainly would have had discernible scratches on his person if they had been. Which made me all the more confident that his blood had been removed with a mortuary apparatus.
The bite wounds on my hands still burned. I wanted to soak in the tub and cleanse the lingering bat saliva and never think about those grubby little monsters again. Father would start abusing his laudanum once more if he ever found out about my exposure to such potentially disease-spreading creatures.
Of course someone would be breeding vampire bats in a castle whose most infamous occupant was rumored to have become a vampire. My initial impulse was to blame the headmaster, but being rash was the exact opposite of what Uncle would instruct me to do. Coming to a hasty conclusion about the identity of the culprit, and then manufacturing evidence to confirm that conclusion, wouldn’t lead to truth and justice.
“You seem… is everything all right?” asked Ileana.
Even though I’d promised Thomas to remain silent, I decided to share our discovery with her. Perhaps she had heard something about the passages from other servants or occupants.
“We found a rather… mutilated body in the morgue. Well, below the morgue. There was a trapdoor and…” Ileana went rigid. I hurried on, hoping to spare her too much talk of the dead. “Anyway, I wish we’d left well enough alone. It—was difficult to tell if there were similarities to any other case we’ve been involved with. Bats had been… feasting on the blood. I don’t know what to make of it. You mustn’t tell anyone. Not yet, at least.”
“Bats were… drinking from a corpse?” At this Ileana turned, blinking. She appeared shaky enough to fall backwards in a stiff wind. “Was it a student? Did you tell anyone?”
An image of the moon-white body assaulted my mind, viciously taunting me with each vivid detail and the lacerations she must have sustained before taking her last, damned breath. I shook my head.
“It—it was hard to make out anything. I only know her sex by her clothing. We couldn’t inspect the room with all the… bats swarming. We’re going to send the headmaster an anonymous letter if she’s not discovered by tomorrow afternoon. We thought the person responsible for the murder might happen to ‘find’ her body, and thought it best to wait a few hours.”
I closed my eyes, trying to forget the sounds of wings beating against my head, the feel of claws digging into my soft flesh. Her death must have not come fast enough. I hated thinking of how long she’d lingered while they’d drunk deeply. Again and again. Razor-sharp teeth slicing and biting. How powerless she would have felt the more her life force was drained.
I focused on the fireplace, getting lost in the flames. If I allowed my imagination to run so freely, I was sure to be sick.
“Do you think the same person who’s impaled those two others is responsible?” Ileana fiddled with the dust cloth. “Or is there another murderer in Brasov?”
I ticked off the facts I knew. “So far there are two bodies that have been impaled off grounds: one on the train, and the one reported in the newspapers. Then there’s the bloodless body of Wilhelm Aldea. Now this young woman, who likely died from being a living host to the bats. Judging from the lack of rigor mortis, I’d say she… passed away at least seventy-two hours ago. It’s hard to be certain, though.”
I didn’t mention the slight stiffness present in the limbs, or how the warm temperature of the room might have accelerated the process. Uncle had made me memorize different factors that contributed to the speeding up or delaying of the aftereffects of death last summer. Since the temperature had been moderate to warm in the room, and her body was decomposing, that meant a minimum of twenty-four hours had likely passed since she’d taken her last breath. Though I placed her time of death closer to three days earlier, maybe almost four. The stench had been horrid.
“Is it possible she was another victim of the Impaler?”
I peeled off my lace gloves, wincing at the tattered pieces as I unveiled scratches and bite marks. “I wish I knew. One pair of bodies are made to appear as if they are vampires. Another as being feasted on by vampires.”
From outward appearances, these crimes weren’t all committed by the same person. It seemed as if the woman and Wilhelm had been murdered in different ways than the other two, and than from each other.
I wasn’t even sure someone had forced her into that room. Perhaps she’d gone wandering and had the misfortune of getting trapped. It was black as pitch in that chamber—she might have stumbled in, been attacked by starving bats, then fallen, unable to escape from her hell. Until her body could be inspected, there were too many unknown variables.
“Either someone is trying very hard to stage vampiric crimes,” I said, disengaging from thoughts of her battered corpse, “or there are two murderers working—I don’t know, almost working to outdo the other. One who imitates the methods of a vampire hunter, the other those of an actual vampire. I’m not sure what to believe. There are still too many missing pieces. If Wilhelm died because of bats, we would have seen multiple wounds on him. They were quite savage.”
I held my hands up, showing the bites that had dried ruby red.
