Renfield swallowed the rat whole and hated himself for wanting a second. He crouched in the wine cellar, blood on his lips, a broken man in a torn suit. Once he was Tyler Tomar, son of monster hunters, raised to kill things like the ones he now served. Now a curse forced him to feed on vermin. He wanted his human hunger back. He wanted to sit at a table again and eat bread like a man. But he could not fight a curse he did not understand. He did not even know what kind of magic bound him, or who had cast it. Without that, every plan was a blind guess. So he climbed the stairs to serve wine, and he listened. Dracula sat in his great chair, the gold dragon gleaming on his chest. Renfield filled the cup and kept his eyes down. "You feed on rats and spiders," Dracula said. "Yet you still hunger like a man. Curious." He did not smile. "Do you wish to know why, Renfield?" The name stung, as it always did. Dracula used it to remind him of a servant who had betrayed him long ago. Renfield's hands shook. "Yes, master." "Then you must ask the one who bound you." Dracula lifted the cup. "She sits at my council. Speak carefully. Her patience is thinner than yours." He found The Mother in the high hall. Her wedding veil trailed behind her for miles, pooling across the stone floor. She was the witch queen who ruled the Strigoi Vii, and she had made him what he was. She did not look up from her book. "You came to beg," she said. "I came to ask what curse holds me." Renfield knelt. "I cannot seek a cure if I do not know the spell." Her blue eyes rose. She studied him as one studies a stain. "It is not a curse," she said. "It is a binding. Your hunger was tied to a hunger already in this world." "Whose?" "His." She nodded toward the far chair where Dracula sat. "I bound your appetite to Dracula's own thirst. While he hungers for blood he cannot reach, you will hunger for flesh you cannot swallow. The two are one knot." Renfield's stomach turned. "Then how do I break it?" "Only the maker of a binding can undo it. That is the law of it." She closed her book. "But I will not. Your suffering feeds the knot that keeps him strong." She turned back to the pages. "You wanted an answer. You have one." Renfield rose on weak legs. He finally knew the shape of his prison. His curse was no random spell. It was chained to the thirst of the most powerful creature in Walachia, and the only witch who could free him refused. To break his own binding, he would have to break Dracula's thirst first. And that made his master his cure and his enemy at once.