Dracula's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Dracula had ruled the vampires for five centuries, and still he could not free the one woman who made him what he was. Maria, his first lover, died turning him into the first vampire. Her sacrifice broke Hecate's laws. It cursed him with thirst and chained her soul to Hades forever. Now, in his study high in Castle Dracul, he held the only lead he had left. His witch-wife had summoned Maria's spirit from the dead. Maria had spoken one sentence before she faded: the death-rite that could free her was written in her spellbook. Then the wife had told him the worse truth. No one knew where the book was hidden after Maria's death. He called his three wives to him. The Mother came first, her red hair loose, her three-mile veil dragging across the stone. She had resurrected him. She had summoned the spirit. If anyone could find the book, it was her. "You buried her things," Dracula said. "You know where." "I know where I hid her body," the Mother said. "Not her book. She never trusted me with it." She did not soften the words. She never did. Hanako stood near the door, hand resting on nothing, always ready for a blade that was not there. She said the book was warded. "A witch hides her power close. On her skin, or on her blood." Sofía had said nothing until now. She wore her feathered Aztec crown and a look of open contempt for the room. Dracula had married her to bind the Aztec witches to his line. She had hated him every day since. Yet she was the one who spoke the answer. "You gave the book away yourself," Sofía said. "You just forgot." Dracula turned. "Explain." "Maria wore your dragon medallion when she died. The one you charged with moonlight for five hundred years." Sofía did not blink. "A witch stores her strongest spell in the object she keeps closest. Her death-rite is not in a book. It is folded into that gold." The room went still. Dracula understood at once. The medallion was not a keepsake. It was the spellbook. He had held Maria's rite against his own chest for centuries and never known. Then the cold came. He had given that medallion to his daughter, Maria II. She had loaned it to his son. His children had drained it, used it, spent five hundred years of stored power without knowing what it held. "Where is my medallion now?" Dracula asked. Sofía held his stare. "Ask your son. Ask what he did with it." Dracula's hand closed on empty air. The obstacle that had stalled him was gone. The book was found. But the answer was worse than the question. The rite to free Maria's soul sat inside a piece of gold his own children had been quietly destroying.