The Enchantress of Bucharest Read online

  Atlantean Devices

  The Enchantress of Bucharest

  ∞∞∞

  Alex Oliver

  Part Two of a Three Part Series

  Copyright Alex Oliver 2019

  ∞∞∞

  In the first part of this series, Carpathian Devils, British scholar Frank Carew was attacked by bandits while traveling with friends to see the Vril Accumulator on Radu Vacarescu’s land in Wallachia.

  His friends were killed, but he escaped, fleeing from a devilish creature that wanted to drink his blood.

  Rescued by Radu, he was taken to stay in Radu’s castle, where he attracted the attention of Radu’s vampire parents, Constantin and Alaya.

  With the aid of the shape-shifting Romani girl, Mirela, Frank intended to find a way to kill the vampires and free Radu and his peasants from their predation. But Constantin and Alaya made their move first.

  Now Alaya has Frank bound and helpless. The vampires have given Radu an ultimatium—will he let Frank die, or will he take them to their family’s summer residence in Bucharest?

  Chapter One

  In which Frank suffers a change of life.

  ∞∞∞

  Wallachia 1742

  As Alaya raised Frank to her needle-toothed mouth, Radu covered his eyes with his free hand and laughed again, the kind of laugh that was indistinguishable from pain. He slumped slowly until his father's hand was all that was holding him up. "We will go to Bucharest."

  Frank was set down gently on his feet, Alaya beaming at him and patting him in mock reassurance on the chest. Her long nails snagged like cats' claws on the fabric above his heart. "Oh, Frank I'm so glad you came to us. You should be too. The capital will be such fun."

  "We should get packed, my dear," Constantin tucked her hand into the crook of his arm as they walked away, leaving Frank bleeding and alive, but racked with a familiar, terrible guilt. His father might well have had the right idea in thinking the world would be better off without Frank in it.

  He looked over at Radu, who took his hand away from his face swiftly as if to deny he'd been trying to hide his new bruise. "Just moving house can't be so very bad, can it?"

  "Wait and see," said Radu coldly. "I hope you're worth it, but we shall have to see."

  That night Frank was left alone, his room no longer a battleground. He took what little comfort he could from that. It meant that, at least until they had arrived at the capital, he was safe to sleep unmolested. Or to try, at least. Sleep was hard to come by, though he undressed and put on the nightgown he had begun to think of as his, lay down in 'his' bed and was physically as comfortable as a man could be, with stinging cuts between his eyebrows and a puncture wound through the palm of his hand.

  The holes were small and had closed up already, looking more like insect bites than tooth-marks, the skin around them inflamed with healing. He pulled the hand into his chest and curled around it, as though he could comfort it with a hug. It felt dirty, and he felt... he scarcely knew what he felt, with his past so newly, rawly restored to him. All to be worked through so that he could try, again, to learn to live with it.

  But the present had ceased to be any better. Pulling the furs tight around his ears – there was ice on the outside of the small window, patterning it with white ferns - he tried not to feel wretched at the look of defeat on Radu's face. This argument about Bucharest had clearly been going on a very long time, meant something far more important than it appeared to Frank. And he had been the one to hand victory to Radu's parents. Not what he had wanted at all.

  "I'm not going to feel guilty for not wanting to die," he muttered to himself, turning over, restless with anger and shame. But it felt like he should. The thought of taking down one of the pistols from the wall, loading it and blowing his own brains out kept recurring like the call to a moral duty. Everything he knew came down on the side of death. Nothing at all argued that he was worthy to survive.

  He should get up and do it now in the quiet hush, while the strigoi were out hunting and could not stop him. But the night dragged on, endless, and he couldn't quite bring himself to it.

  Eventually the dark warmth of his bed, the feeling of safety, unclenched something in his aching head. It grew heavier, as though pulled forward by a great weight. Then in a burst that seemed to shatter his skull he relived the one last missing piece from his memories. The one he had tried hardest to keep from himself. The true face of his sin.

  ~

  It is evening and he's still in bed, sweat cooling on his limbs and his body limp with one long delicious ache that tastes of molasses and sunlight. Most of the time he can't believe that this is wrong at all. The world should be this shape - a small chamber with walls of a cheery green, two candles on their sticks like marigolds in a cricket field. And Gervaise, looking down on him as though he is something precious.

  Gervaise sees him frown, leans in to kiss the furrow between his brows, too fond a smile on his face for the man of politics, for the member of parliament, he is. Not a particularly handsome man, with his nose too large and his face too bony for fashion. But he has tip-tilted dark blue eyes and all the lines on his face are from laughing. They met when Frank's father introduced Frank to the residents of his own coffee house. A paternal "keep away from that one" had added weight to Frank's curiosity, and when Gervaise came up to Cambridge for the hustings it had been an easy matter to insinuate himself into the older man's flock of sycophants.

  And then this. Love, if you will. Love such as Patroclus felt for Achilles. If the Greeks had not thought it shameful of Hephaistion to love Alexander, why should he think it shameful to love Gervaise?

  "I wish I could keep you with me," says Gervaise now. He moves to find his small clothes, put them on, but - at the look of loss on Frank's face - thinks better of it and lies back down. "You know that, don't you? Perhaps when your studies are over you might be my clerk, my protégé, and then we can walk more openly beside each other, without fearing—"

  Boots. The drumbeat of boots running up wooden stairs, and the locked door shudders. There's a crack as the frame splinters. All Frank's blood turns to ice water. Horror in Gervaise's face as he uses the last few seconds to stuff himself into his breeches, and Frank is too slow, cowardly, stupid to follow suit, just grabs the sheet and crawls backwards along the bed until his shoulders meet the wall. What happened to the molly-house's proprietor? The guards who were supposed to give them notice?

  The door flings itself outward and smashes into the wall. Flakes of plaster explode where it hits. Four men and a magistrate burst through. The men have cudgels of oak and the first strikes Gervaise in the temple, knocks him off his feet, sends him crashing into the iron lamp bracket. He falls and lies very still. There is blood on the wall.

  Then they look at Frank, naked under the sheet, and he's never felt so worthless. A talent he didn't know he had until then comes over him like the need to vomit. Without knowing how, he fills the room with blazing light, and as they curse and fumble he grabs his own breeches and runs.

  Shuddering, Frank crawled out of bed and took the chamber-pot from its cabinet, sat there in the bracing cold hugging it until the pressing need to vomit had passed. Oh God! Grief and anger threatened to break his ribs, yet with it there was a certain amount of relief. His crime had not been murder at all. Inversion, only. Thank God, thank God. Not murder.

  He was not ashamed of having been in love, though according to his country’s law and his father’s morals, he should have been. But that he had lost his love to injustice and then, inconceivably, had forgotten Gervaise ever existed? Miserable inconstancy!

  And perhaps he was indeed an angel of death – perhaps everything he touched, everything he loved
, he inevitably destroyed as a result. How could he bear to live if that was the case? Yet he didn't want to die.

  The memories, having started, were now coming back like a landslide, unstoppable, sleeting behind his eyes even while they were wide open:

  "You killed your mother as soon as you drew your first breath," says his father, frigid with rage. Frank hadn't meant to do that, but it makes no difference to his father if he had or not. It never has. The man lost his beloved, gained only an unwanted responsibility. "And this - if this gets out, if a son of the house of Carew is seen choking to death on the gibbet to the amusement of the vulgar mob - this will kill your sister too. You have brought nothing but death to this house, Frank. Would that you had been four months early and stillborn."

  Arthur Carew is too principled a man to take a cudgel to his own son, but Frank well remembers the stripes from his riding crop laid hot across his shoulders as he is chased down the stairs, into the street, his father disowning him with every blow.

  The walk to Cambridge is over thirty miles, and he fears arrest with every step. By the time he gets to Protheroe's lodgings he can't feel his hands or feet, his face is raw from crying in the dusty wind, and the shuddering makes him jerk like the legs of a galvanized frog, harsh, involuntary, mad.

  He confesses all to Protheroe, too shattered to make up a decent story. At some point in the recitation, the older student puts a glass of brandy into his hand, folds his nerveless fingers around it and holds on until he's sure Frank will not let go. Protheroe is shorter than Frank - most people are - with a poet's wild hair and a tendency to wear a dozen of the gaudy amulets the theurgy students favor, around his neck and pinned on his sleeves. He has a broken front tooth from brawling, and eyes the color of russet apples. For one long moment, once the story is told, Frank is terrified of him. Then he says, "Actually it's a sign of talent, old chap. Magical talent. I should keep an eye on you. Between you and I, half of the theurgy students are the same."

  Protheroe sends across the corridor for Stebbins, spins him a tale of illegitimate pregnancy, a grasping milk maid, and the sort of disgrace that makes a man fonder of his friends. "I always wanted to see the vril accumulator in Romania," he suggests cheerfully. "How about we go on a mini grand tour together? My treat. Let Frank's father cool down enough to welcome him home with forgiveness."

  News reaches them on the coast of Greece. He sits in a white boat by a white shore, on water so vividly blue and under a sky of such vivid azure that they surely belong in heaven, and reads the notice of Gervaise' death. Dead of the head wound. Never came to trial. Frank tries not to weep openly, tries not to resent the fact that he has to try, that he can't mourn as openly as any widow. It's a long time before he no longer hates the world for it.

  And then his friends die protecting him.

  ~

  Frank smacked the chamberpot hard against the floor. It was heavy earthenware and took a satisfying beating before the cracks widened enough to shatter. The gritty grinding and thuds concealed the sounds of his sobbing a little, but when at last the dastardly pot gave up the ghost, smashed into pieces, he wailed aloud. It was too much. It was too much to bear.

  The door creaked quietly open, and a long lance of butter-yellow light fell over the shards, and made the tears glitter in his eyelashes. He thought - hoped - it was Mirela. Her briskness always made him feel that things couldn't be that bad. But it was Radu, in his shirtsleeves, the white material stitched all over with red embroidery a little less livid in color than his bruised face. Still, half dressed and vulnerable, he held himself like a man who was utterly in charge of himself and the world. It wasn't the truth, but it was a magnificent lie.

  Knowing what he knew now, Frank's reactions to him made an awful lot more sense. That anxiously beating heart, that prickle of hot awareness whenever he was near... He didn't know how he could have missed it for so long.

  Radu put the lantern he carried down on top of the writing desk. He stood looking at Frank's red, watery face for a long time, looking stern but uncertain, like he honestly didn't know what to do with fellow humans and their emotions. Why should he, when to his family humans were servants or food?

  "This weeping will not help," he offered at last. It would have seemed cold comfort if it hadn't been so obviously difficult for him to volunteer even that. "You seemed collected enough earlier. What—?"

  "I remembered the last part," Frank found a handkerchief. Oddly enough that chill gaze was refreshing, like packed snow on a heated wound. "I remembered my crime, why I was sent away. I think my father spoke the truth when he told me I bring nothing, but death to those to whom I most owe love. You should stay here and let them have me. I am not worth sacrificing your principles."

  "It is not my principles I sacrifice."

  Frank huffed in exasperation, oddly comforted. Why must the man speak like his thoughts were little mice, threading their way over a floor thick with traps? Declaration and nothing - his mouth snapping shut as if even that might have been enough to betray him.

  "I'm trying to make it clear that my life is not worth saving for any reason. I am an invert, fleeing from just execution. Even if I had not caused my friends' deaths, my life is owed to the noose already. So perhaps you could shoot me, cleanly - I would prefer that to being fed upon - and then, once dead, I cannot be used to coerce you into doing anything against your will."

  Radu's face smoothed into a masculine version of Alaya's patient certainty. The expression that had too often made Frank feel utterly foolish for disagreeing with her. He shuddered and hitched himself back up onto the bed, drawing his knees to his chest, making a little tent of blankets around his huddled form. Radu came to sit next to him and reached out to curl his right hand around the back of Frank's neck.

  "Has it not become clear to you that being an invert is no bad thing in my eyes? I'd wondered from your skittishness if I was misinterpreting what I saw, but I am glad to hear I was not. How many times do I have to tell you that this is my land? My will is law here, and if I do not object, who will dare to condemn you?"

  "They always do," Frank said, remembering the boys who had become blasé about picking up soldiers in Lincoln's Inn fields, in the Inns of Court. "You let your guard down for a moment and they string you up."

  But the sharp, unbearable pain of the memory was wearing off, letting him feel recovery under it. Over the past few months of journeying he had mourned Gervaise and learned to live again. Now those memories came back too, letting his heart and his grief settle inside of him. The shame of exposure, awful though it had been at the time, had not touched his conviction that there was nothing wrong in the love they'd shared. Now, with a reassuring hand warm on his skin and the coverlets tucked comfortingly around him, with the light that shone from the lantern making a golden globe of the room, he allowed himself to be consoled.

  "Not here. Much though I regret it in other ways, we have at least learned something about human nature from the Turks. Besides, we have other, more important problems."

  The thought of life, the need for life, leapt up like a fire and scorched Frank’s lungs, but he wouldn't be a coward, wouldn't think only of himself. "Your more important problems are using me to get to you. You could solve that with a single bullet. Why won't you?"

  The hand on his nape slipped around to clasp the junction of his neck and shoulder, holding on just a little too tight. He was going to have bruises there come morning. But he liked it, liked the way it distracted from his punctured palm, held him together.

  Radu's expression was nothing like fond - fierce and grim, his mouth sullen and his eyes doubtful. "Just recently a very impertinent young woman told me that I was not the boyar here, I was simply my parents' slave. She was right. Perhaps I wanted to insist on having my own will, for once. To just, for once, have something of my own that they did not force on me. Something I chose for myself."

  "You resent them too," Frank said, surprised. He tucked away 'something of my own' to worry abou
t later, when he could pick apart the separate clusters of feeling that came at the thought. A combination of indignant denial I am no one's possession. Not to be used by anyone to prove a point and a mute, doglike joy at the phrase 'My own.'

  "Of course I do. I despise them."

  The hand seemed to become heavier to accompany these heavy thoughts. Or perhaps it was Frank's weariness that weighed him down. He pushed himself back to lean against the wall. Radu came with him, shifting his arm behind Frank's neck and pulling him down to lean against his shoulder. It was an innocent enough thing, both of them dressed, Frank's cheek touching only embroidered linen, laundered into softness, welcomely warm. But he knew full well what the gesture meant, what he was saying by accepting it.

  He'd gone out looking for a champion, and it seemed he'd found one. It was such a relief not to be facing the future alone he could quite see how Radu could feel the same. That thought sparked an idea on the edge of dreams. "Could you kill them? In the day time when they're not awake, could you do it?" Mirela thinks so.

  A laugh, in keeping with the drowsy quiet of the room. "Could I kill my parents, Frank? I don't know. Could you?"

  He remembered being picked up. Five years old and thrown from his pony, with torn knees and elbows and a bloody nose. Carew had picked him up, carried him home, let him bleed all over a five pound cravat.

  "I don't know. I wouldn't want to try."

  "Well then."

  At length, sitting up gave Frank a crick in the neck. He shuffled round and lay down, stretching out under the covers as the memories settled further, gained more distance. Radu lay down on top of the bed, twitched the edge of the fur comforter over himself, flush to Frank's back but for the many layers of blankets between them.

  All very medieval Frank thought, grief and terror loosening under the animal comfort. Like lying with an unsheathed sword between us. He still felt weak and watery with the shock of Alaya's attack and the final revelation of who he was. He was as thin as the layer of ice on the window, and a falling leaf might have shattered him. At the moment, the undemanding company of a sleeping friend was welcome indeed.