Dracula's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Dracula found the medallion at last. His daughter had passed it to his son. His son had spent the final light inside it. The gold dragon still hung on its chain, but it was cold now. Dracula held it to a candle and read for Maria's rite. Nothing surfaced. The moonlight that carried her death-spell was gone. Five hundred years of his hoarding, drained by his own children who never knew what they held. He carried the necklace down to the memorial. Maria's stone likeness stood there, crowned, her marble face calm. Dracula pressed the medallion against the statue's chest, as if the stone could pour the spell back into the gold. It could not. He knelt on the cold floor and did not move for an hour. Sofía came first. She wore her feathered crown and looked at the dead metal in his hand. "You waited too long," she said. "The rite is not faint. It is gone. Miguel burned the last of it. There is no reading what is not there." Hanako entered next, her long veil dragging behind her. She took the medallion and turned it in the candlelight. "A witch stores her spell in what she keeps close," she said. "When the moonlight burns out, the spell burns with it. This gold holds nothing now." She set it back in his palm. "I am sorry, husband." The Mother came last. She had resurrected him. She had summoned Maria's spirit for one sentence. She looked at the medallion and said only the truth. "I cannot refill five centuries. Not even in ten of my lifetimes." She let that sit. "The spirit will not come again either. Something followed her out the first time. I will not open that door twice." Dracula stood. He looked at each of his three wives. The Mother, who had given him this second life. Hanako, who had brought him her clan's blades. Sofía, who hated him and still spoke the plain answer every time he asked. They had done everything he asked. There was nothing left to try. The one road to Maria was ash. "You gave me all you had," he said. "I thank you for it." He closed his hand around the cold dragon and hung it back on his own chest. The rite was lost. To rebuild the moonlight would take centuries. Maria's soul would stay in Hades for a very long time yet. So, for now, Dracula chose the only thing still open to him. He would not spend the coming centuries breaking on a locked door. He set a hand on Sofía's shoulder and one on Hanako's, and looked to the Mother. "Then we live in happiness," he said. "with the eternity we have. The eternity Maria gave to our kind" And for the first night in five hundred, he let himself be glad of the wives before him.