Blood to Blood (2 page)

Jonathan nodded and Perry continued, "Since Lord Gance died without leaving a direct heir, the title and country holdings will descend on a distant cousin. But his private fortune was his to dispose of as he wished. Without being specific, I can tell you that Mrs. Harker is not the only person named in the most recent changes to his will."

And may at least some of the other beneficiaries be male, Jonathan thought as the man passed him a letter. It was written by Robert Quarles himself, alluding to a brief meeting he and Jonathan had the year before. It was enough to convince him that the man in front of him was who he said he was. Jonathan jotted down the address where Mina was staying and slid it across the smooth wood of the desk. The simple act brought back quick flashes of memories… of Mina writing in her journal, of how helpless she had looked when he'd left her at Seward's to go in search of the vampire, of the brush of her palms against his when he'd reach for her during the night. The Gypsies said you could read the future in the palm of a hand. What would they have made of hers? Of his?

"Are you all right, sir?" his visitor asked.

"Just… curious, that's all. Well, I'll learn everything soon enough, I suppose," he replied.

"As Wilhemina Harker's husband, you are invited to hear it directly from Mr. Quarles at that same meeting."

After the man had left, Jonathan put on his coat and followed. He stopped only long enough to retrieve the letter he had written from the mailbox and put it in his pocket.

She'd be home in a few days. He would speak to her then.

The house in Paris where Mina was staying was built in the Spanish style in a box enclosing an elegant courtyard. There among the spring flowers, the cobblestone patio and walks, the fountain with its water lilies and sculpted swans, Mina would sit in a sunny corner and drink her morning coffee, her afternoon glass of wine. It was far removed from the foggy damp of England or Dracula's crumbling castle to the east.

Her traveling clothes had been soiled and torn, and at her host's suggestion she had visited a seamstress who had made her three new outfits, two of them romantic in their lace trim and airy summer-weight piqué, the last a simple blouse and skirt. It took the remainder of her traveling funds, but she was already earning money, organizing her host's library and papers, trying not to consider that she might be putting Claude's affairs in order for his descendants.

Not that Claude seemed so old, but that he was damnably evasive about his age.

In the fortnight since she had arrived here, Claude had finished her portrait. He declared it a masterpiece he would keep for himself and hung it above the stone mantel in his dining room. When they dined together, she would look up at herself, then quickly away. He was far too flattering, she thought, surprised that none of his frequent guests saw fit to agree with her even in private.

The weeks were pleasant enough that they might have passed quickly. But she'd written Jonathan as soon as she arrived and had still gotten no reply, not even refusal. Each day that passed with such uncertainty seemed longer and sadder than the last.

She was sitting in the morning sun in the garden drinking coffee when her host joined her carrying a large envelope. He laid it on the table in front of her and pointed to the stamp. "England," he said, then seeing her expression brighten, kissed her on the forehead and left her.

This wasn't Jonathan's handwriting, she realized, and opened the package more quickly, half convinced that something terrible had happened to him. Inside were two envelopes. One, on watermarked parchment, was in Gance's hand and had a note that said simply.
Open me first
.

The letter inside was short, and in Gance's fashion, to the point.

My dearest Mina. If you read this, I did not survive the journey. A trite opening, far too melodramatic and hardly witty, but apt.

You said that Dracula ordered you to follow your heart. I do the same, but realize how difficult such an order is for a woman without the necessary means to do so.

Independence is my gift to you.

I leave you the house in Exeter where we spent too few precious hours, and the money necessary to maintain it and yourself in comfort. I have taken great pains to assure that this money will be yours alone to keep or give away as you see fit. This may make your future secure or far more complicated than you wish it to be. That may well depend on what sort of Victorian you married. But understand that I do this with as close to purity of intent as I can ever hope to achieve. G.

The second, thicker, packet was addressed to Mrs. Jonathan Harker. Inside was a bank draft for a hundred pounds and a letter requesting her presence in London for a private reading of the will. It concluded with.
Should you wish to stay in London, we will of course be able to make arrangements wherever you wish
.

They must have gotten her address from Jonathan, she thought. They must also have told him something about why they needed it. She realized with dismay how complicated Gance had made her life… and how free.

In the end it was fear that drove Joanna Tepes away from Castle Dracula.

For days after that woman and Van Helsing had gone, carrying the younger man's body wrapped in one of the upper chambers' rotting rugs, Joanna had hidden in the depths of the castle, in one of the maze of rooms where her brother had kept his slaves, his captives, and later his food. She barely slept, and lived as best she could on the rats, sucking their little bodies dry before flinging them away, furious at her own timidity.

Wasn't
she
also a Tepes? Shouldn't
she
be taking whom she wished, striking fear in the hearts of the lesser creatures in the villages nearby? She wanted to—it was her nature to do so, after all—but she had no experience at it. Her brother had hunted for the women, and when he was absent, Illona had done so. She and Karina had been nothing more than pampered pets, kept because they amused the lord and lady of the castle, each in her own way. Karina with her beauty. Herself, because she was so easy to torment.

For Joanna, it was a bitter understanding, made all the worse because for the first time in centuries she was utterly alone.

Weeks passed. One afternoon she heard the distant creak of cart wheels, the muffled sounds of familiar laughter, the tinkling of little bells. The Gypsies had returned.

From the dark chamber in which she slept, she heard the gates of the castle swing open, the click of hooves on the ancient courtyard stones. She waited joyously for night so that she could go to them and speak to them as she had so many times before.

Instead they ventured into her world. They pried open the castle doors and moved through the great chambers, stripping them of every article that held any value. Some of the older men were familiar with the lower chambers and invaded them as well. She could sense them, pulling the remaining tapestries from the walls, taking even the charred scraps of those nearly destroyed by the fire. The leader, the one who knew the labyrinthine corridors beneath the castle the best, actually opened the door where Joanna retired during the day and shone a torch into its blackness.

Her eyes glowed red in the torchlight, her face a pale white blur, thankfully unrecognizable in the glance he had of it. He gave a small cry of surprise and retreated, barring the door from the outside.

She relished his terror for a moment, then rushed forward, barring the way from the inside as well, surprised that she'd never thought of locking it before.

It would keep them out, but at night, when her powers were strongest, no bars could hold her.

When it was as dark outside the castle as within her chamber, she left its sheltering walls. For the first time in nearly a century, she ventured beyond the familiar haunts of the mountain, traveling almost to the crossroads town of Bukovina. Stopping just outside it, she hid in the shadows beyond the fires of the Gypsy encampment.

She could recall the Gypsy bands of centuries ago, how they would come into her village, bringing songs and music. Like her, they seemed frozen in time—their wagons, their language, their music. She could hear it, carried in a faint breeze that brought with it the scent of life, of blood.

She watched. She waited, hoping someone weak enough to give her courage would venture within reach.

The band had not expected to encounter any enemies that night, or they would have circled the wagons. Instead, they had pulled into a narrow field just off the road and laid them out in a half circle. The men were on one end of the caravan, close to where the horses were tethered around a blazing fire, no doubt intended to keep wolves and other predators at bay. They drank heavily, telling tales of old conquests, sexual and otherwise.

The women were on the other end of the crescent, well away from them, speaking softly of more important things at a smaller fire. Even then, they were busy, stirring a stewpot simmering over the coals. Occasionally one of their children would crawl out of a wagon, carrying a bowl and asking for another helping of dinner.

Children! The women fed what would be her food.

Joanna's hunger was not isolated, as it had been when she was alive and so often hungry. Instead she could feel it as weakness, a craving too strong to resist.

Yet, when a little girl ventured so close that all Joanna had to do was reach out and clamp a hand over her tiny red mouth and drag her off into the shadows, she found she could not do so.

Not so small, she thought, rationalizing the reluctance while her body screamed for blood.

Later, when only one man still sat at the dwindling camp-fire, no doubt to keep the horses safe from thieves, she moved closer to him, coming up from behind.

The scent of him—old sweat mingled with the garlic and smoked meat of his evening meal—made her wince with disgust. Had her need not been so great, she would have returned to the shadows. Instead she forced herself to move forward, half woman, half wraith, gliding toward him, silent as the night mists.

When she was almost near enough to touch him, a horse whinneyed, the sound sharp and anxious. The man stood and scanned the darkness. By the time he had turned to look behind him, Joanna had vanished.

He started to call out to the others, then took a deep breath and shook his head. "Too close to their lair," he mumbled to himself, looking up the mountain, then quickly away, as if his interest might attract something unholy. Something dangerous.

He feared her. It gave her some satisfaction.

If he only sensed how terrified she was of him. Joanna, incorporeal, laughed at his fear and her own—a titter soft as the skittering of ground squirrels or field mice, barely noticed by the one who should have been her prey.

Later, while he dozed at his post, she fed on one of the horses. She was too frightened to drink her fill and kill the beast. Instead she let it live, then picked one of the others for her own, leading it away from the herd, daring to mount it only when she was well away from the encampment.

When she reached the castle, she led the shivering beast inside the gates, hung a bag of silver pieces on the outside of the doors, then closed and barred them. If the men returned to the castle, they would know the bloodline of the one who had done this. Perhaps they would respect her name and leave her in peace. Perhaps not.

She'd had no definite reason for stealing the horse. But as she stood at the top of the wall, looking down at the valley, it occurred to her that she had too many enemies in this country and that they knew her weaknesses far too well.

It was time to move on. Tomorrow evening she would force herself to think rationally, to plan.

The heavy pull of dawn was already on her when she willed herself outside the walls again, returning with fresh grass for her mount. The well still held brackish water. She left that for the horse as well. The beast looked at her more calmly now, even standing still, letting her stroke its head.

"We'll be all right, you and I. The wolves won't trouble us here." She released another peal of nervous laughter into the lightening sky.

Later, lying on the earth floor of her bare chamber, she found sleep elusive. Instead the ancient stones of the walls and vaulted ceiling reminded her too much of the centuries that had passed, often without a single worthwhile memory to them; and of her youth, still so vivid that it would never die.

Joanna was born eight years after her half brother Vlad, a fact that like so many others, she learned much later in life.

Her mother had been a princess in her own land, given as a hostage of Vlad Dracul in Tirgoviste, to assure that Dracu' sons, Vlad and Radu, would come to no harm in Turkish hands.

From everything Joanna could later learn, it took only a few months before the lonely child her mother had been fell deeply in love with her captor.

For years Joanna believed that the feeling had been mutual. Perhaps it had been, but fewer than three years after she was born, mother and child were abruptly sent back to Turkey.

Joanna's earliest memories were of that journey. Throughout her life the smell of lathered horses would bring back the memory of the sudden, swift departure, the hard ride, and her mother holding her so tightly that she could scarcely breathe.

"What do you think her father would have done with her when she returned with the child of his enemy?" Vlad asked her years later.

Joanna couldn't answer because she would never know. The first night of the journey, as they were camped in one of the high mountain passes, her mother picked her up and carried her away from the horses and wagons, stopping at the edge of a high cliff.

In the years that followed, Joanna often wished her mother had given in to her first instinct and killed them both. Perhaps she had feared for her soul if she killed her daughter. Perhaps she thought the Fates should decide if Joanna lived or died, and there was a good chance that wolves would find her long before Dracul's soldiers did.

They almost did. She glimpsed the beasts padding silently through the scrubby mountain trees. One came so close to her that she could have reached out and touched it. She started to, but before she did, its attention was drawn to a snarl farther down the slope. It whirled and left her, bounding off as silently as it came.

"It smelled your mother's blood and that drew it away," Vlad told her so many years later. "When the soldiers found her, there was little left but her clothes and some bones they had not broken for the marrow."

He'd spat out the words, as if by wounding her he wounded her mother. Though he had never known the woman, he'd had reason enough to hate her.

When the soldiers found her and her mother's remains, they followed their orders and delivered Joanna into Turkish lands, leaving her at the first village they passed, along with information on her mother's suicide and a letter from Vlad Dracul to Mezid-Bey, her grandfather.

Whatever Dracul had written had not been enough to soothe Mezid-Bey's rage. And he knew all too well whom to vent it on.

Not a tiny girl, too young to understand and who he often said resembled her mother. Much better to turn his attention to his hostages. The pampered life that Vlad and Radu lived in Mezid-Bey's court came to an abrupt and bloody end.

Vlad was brought to Mezid-Bey's chambers. No words were spoken, no explanations given. The sultan stripped off the silk and fine tooled leather clothes he wore, flung him onto the carpet and fell on him, pleased that the child would not relax, that he fought as hard as an eleven-year-old could fight, that he did not cry when he lost, not that night or for the dozens of nights to come.

And that was how Vlad Tepes, one day known as The Impaler, learned hate.

Joanna never admitted to her brother how much her grandfather had doted on her, how often he said he cherished her as he had her mother. No, he would never have killed her mother, though how was she to know that? It was a piece of her past that she thought best not to share with her half brother, a secret she kept through her life and the centuries of life-in-death that followed.

Though they shared the same house, brothers and sister rarely spoke.

Her happiest memories were of the sultan's garden. She dreamed of it now, of the heady scent of the flowers, the lilting trickle of water in the pools, and the brilliant golden sun beating down.

It darkened her skin until she looked pure Turk. Only the reddish cast of her dark hair gave hint of her heritage, that and the brilliant green eyes with the fire in their center. Sometimes, when she would look directly at her grandfather, he would wince and turn away for a moment, then turn back to her, smiling again.

As she grew older she learned to never look at him directly. He did not seem to notice. After all, it was how any well-bred Ottoman woman would have behaved.

Night came, pulling her from her dreams. She knew she had work to do, but the nature of it eluded her for a moment. She sat in the darkness, listening to the drafts in the ancient hall above her. the scurrying of rats in the crumbling walls, the clop-clop of the horses' hooves on the packed earth and stones of the courtyard.

And remembered.

She rushed to the courtyard, gave the horse water then led it into the high meadow beyond the castle so it could graze.

There were wolves in the area, so she dared not leave the horse alone. Instead, she sat beneath a tree and guarded the beast, her means of escape. Even at a distance, she could feel its heat, its life; smell the blood that moved through its veins.

Something rustled in the leaves close beside her. She reached out, almost absentmindedly, and closed her fingers over the tiny vole. Its tiny heart beat in terror and she ran a finger down the soft fur of its back, calming it slightly before raising it to her lips to drink. It would nourish, as would any warm-blooded creature, but not in the same way as human blood, whose taste reminded her of the life she had lost so long ago.