At least he was alive.
Magda waited impatiently while one of the gate sentries went to get Papa. They had already kept her waiting a good hour before they opened the gates. She had rushed over at first light but they had ignored her pounding. A sleepless night had left her irritable and exhausted. But at least he was alive.
Her eyes roamed the courtyard. All quiet. There were piles of rubble strewn about the rear from the dismantling work, but no one was working now. All at breakfast, no doubt. What was taking so long? They should have let her go get him herself.
Against her will, her thoughts drifted. She thought of Glenn. He had saved her life last night. If he hadn't held her back when he had, she would have been shot to death by the German sentries. Luckily, he had been strong enough to hold her until she came to her senses. She kept remembering the feel of him as he had pressed her against him. No man had ever done that—had ever been close enough to do that. The memory of it was good. It had stirred something in her that refused to return to its former quiescent state.
She tried to concentrate on the keep and on Papa, forcing her thoughts away from Glenn...
... yet he had been kind to her, soothing her, convincing her to go back to her room and keep her vigil at the window. There was nothing to be done at the edge of the gorge. She had felt so utterly helpless, and he had understood. And when he had left her at her door, there had been a look in his eyes: sad, and something else. Guilt? But why should he feel guilty?
She noticed a movement within the entrance to the tower and stepped across the threshold. All the light and warmth of the morning drained away from her as she did—like stepping out of a warm house into a blustery winter night. She backed up immediately and felt the chill recede as soon as her feet were back on the causeway. There seemed to be a different set of rules at work within the keep. The soldiers didn't appear to notice; but she was an outsider. She could tell.
Papa and his wheelchair appeared, propelled from behind by a reluctant sentry who seemed embarrassed by the task. As soon as she saw her father's face, Magda knew something was wrong. Something dreadful had happened last night. She wanted to run forward but knew they would not let her. The soldier pushed the wheelchair to the threshold and then let go, allowing it to roll to Magda unattended. Without letting it come to a complete halt, she swung around behind and pushed her father onto the causeway. When they were halfway across and he had yet to speak to her, even to say good morning, she felt she had to break the silence.
"What's wrong, Papa?"
"Nothing and everything."
"Did he come last night?"
"Wait until we're over by the inn and I'll tell you everything. We're too close here. Someone might overhear."
Anxious to learn what had disturbed him so, she hurriedly wheeled him around to the back of the inn where the morning sun shone brightly on the awakening grass and reflected off the white stucco of the building's wall.
Setting the chair facing north so the sun would warm him without shining in his eyes, she knelt and gripped both his gloved hands with her own. He didn't look well at all; worse than usual; and that caused her a deep pang of concern. He should be home in Bucharest. The strain here was too much for him.
"What happened, Papa? Tell me everything. He came again, didn't he?"
His voice was cold when he spoke, his eyes on the keep, not on her: "It's warm here. Not just warm for flesh and bone, but warm for the soul. A soul could wither away over there if it stayed too long."
"Papa—"
"His name is Molasar. He claims he was a boyar loyal to Vlad Tepes."
Magda gasped. "That would make him five hundred years old!"
"He's older, I'm sure, but he would not let me ask all my questions. He has his own interests, and primary among them is ridding the keep of all trespassers."
"That includes you."
"Not necessarily. He seems to think of me as a fellow Romanian—a 'Wallachian,' as he would say—and doesn't appear to be particularly bothered by my presence. It's the Germans—the thought of them in his keep has driven him almost insane with rage. You should have seen his face when he talked about them."
"His keep?"
"Yes. He built it to protect himself after Vlad was killed."
Hesitantly, Magda asked the all-important question: "Is he a vampire?"
"Yes, I believe so," Papa said, looking at her and nodding. "At least he is whatever the word 'vampire' is going to mean from now on. I doubt very much that many of the old traditions will hold true. We are going to have to redefine the word—no longer in terms of folklore, but in terms of Molasar." He closed his eyes. "So many things will have to be redefined."
With an effort, Magda pushed aside the primordial revulsion that welled up in her at the thought of vampires and tried to step back and analyze the situation objectively, allowing the long-trained, long-disciplined scholar within her to take over. "A boyar under Vlad Tepes, was he? We should be able to trace that name."
Papa was staring at the keep again. "We may, and we may not. There were hundreds of boyars associated with Vlad throughout his three reigns, some friendly to him, some hostile ... he impaled most of the hostile ones. You know what a chaotic, fragmented mess the records from that period are: If the Turks weren't invading Wallachia, someone else was. And even if we did find evidence of a Molasar who was a contemporary of Vlad's, what would it prove?"
"Nothing, I guess." She began filtering through her vast learning on the history of this region. A boyar, loyal to Vlad Tepes...
Magda had always thought of Vlad as a blood-red blot on Romanian history. As son of Vlad Dracul, the Dragon, Prince Vlad was known as Vlad Dracula—Son of the Dragon. But he earned the name Vlad Tepes, which meant Vlad the Impaler, after his favorite method of disposing of prisoners of war, disloyal subjects, treacherous boyars, and virtually anyone else who displeased him. She remembered drawings she had seen depicting Vlad's St. Bartholomew's Day massacre at Amlas when 30,000 citizens of that unfortunate city were impaled on long wooden poles which were then thrust into the ground; the sufferers were left pierced through and suspended in the air until they died. There was occasionally a strategic purpose for impaling: In 1460 the sight of 20,000 impaled corpses of Turkish prisoners rotting in the sun outside Targoviste so horrified an invading army of Turks that they turned back and left Vlad's kingdom alone for a while.
"Imagine," she mused, "being loyal to Vlad Tepes."
"Don't forget that the world was very different then," Papa said. "Vlad was a product of his times; Molasar is a product of those same times. Vlad is still considered a national hero in these parts—he was Wallachia's scourge, but he was also its champion against the Turks."
"I'm sure this Molasar found nothing offensive in Vlad's behavior." Her stomach turned at the thought of all those men, women, and children impaled and left to die, slowly. "He probably found it entertaining."
"Who is to say? But you can see why one of the undead would gravitate to someone like Vlad: never a shortage of victims. He could slake his thirst on the dying and no one would ever guess that the victims had died from anything other than impalement. With no unexplained deaths around to raise questions, he could feast with no one suspecting his true nature."
"That does not make him any less a monster," she whispered.
"How can you judge him, Magda? One should be judged by one's peers. Who is Molasar's peer? Don't you realize what his existence means? Don't you see how many things it changes? How many cherished concepts assumed to be facts are going to wind up as so much garbage?"
Magda nodded slowly, the enormity of what they had found pressing on her with new weight. "Yes. A form of immortality."