Heart of Dracula Read online

  But Maxine’s empathic gifts extended to more than just her ability to read emotions. Flashes of memories came with it. Images of Bella as a young girl, cowering under a bed, weeping. Clutching a ratty stuffed animal to her chest as blood pooled on the ground nearby.

  As for Eddie, there was more grief than there was fear. A loss—something taken from him. A small body in his arms. But both flashes of sensation carried one thing in common. Tears.

  “What is it?” Alfonzo broke her out of her thoughts. “Are you all right, Miss Parker?”

  “Hm? Yes. Sorry.” She shook her head and forced a smile back on her face. “Forgive me. It isn’t often that I am around people with such stories. It is hard not to get lost in the hallways looking at the paintings on the walls.”

  “I…don’t think I understood anything you just said,” Eddie muttered. He glanced at Alfonzo as if to ask if she was crazy. She didn’t take it personally. Most people assumed she was. Or they were too afraid to accept what it might mean if she wasn’t.

  She shut her eyes. Correction—she tried not to take it personally. It still stung. She opened her eyes again after a moment and knew her smile was now marred with the sadness that always seemed to plague her. “What is it that brings you all here?”

  Alfonzo was the one to answer, and she wasn’t surprised. He was clearly their leader. “You were recommended to me by a colleague. He said you are quite talented in your ability to identify artifacts and answer certain…enigmatic questions regarding personal histories and motivations.” He scratched at his stubble with his fingertips. It was obvious he wasn’t a diplomat. He was dancing around the subject with all the grace of a drunken boar.

  Maxine laughed at the piss-poor attempt.

  “What?”

  “I am an empath, Mr. Van Helsing. Is that what you’re implying?”

  “I. Uh. Yes.” He blinked, clearly surprised she had come out and said it. She knew he was shocked. One, because she could see it clearly on his face. Two, she could feel it from where she was sitting a few feet away. Emotions traveled in the air around her like the scent of flowers.

  “And you wish to request my assistance?”

  Alfonzo cleared his throat and nodded. “We can pay you, if that is what you require.”

  “It depends on the nature of the work and how long it will take me to complete.” She paused thoughtfully. “And the risks involved.”

  The three of them traded glances.

  Maxine sighed. “There are risks, then.”

  All three of them nodded.

  “Well, then,” she leaned back in her chair, “allow me to give you a piece of advice when dealing with someone with my talent. Do not lie to me. I can sense it as easily as I can see the sun. Do not hide things from me, as I will find out in due time. Tell me the full of what it is you wish me to do, and I will tell you if I can help you and whether or not there is a price involved.”

  She often took unpaid work to help those who needed someone with her particular gifts. But that was not to say she was a fool, nor was she a pauper. She had learned how to turn her trade into an asset. It had bought her the brownstone she lived in, after all.

  “How do we know you’re for real?” Eddie sniffed. “No offense.”

  “None taken.” She watched him for a moment and let herself examine the “painting on the wall” a little closer. She let her vision go unfocused as she dug deeper into what she could sense from him. “I can prove it to you, Mr. Jenkin, but I fear it might become personal.”

  After a long pause, and likely exchanged looks from the others, the young man reluctantly replied. “That’s…that’s fine.”

  “I see you holding a body in your lap. A young girl. Blood stains her dress, her hands…and her mouth. You killed her. But you loved her. It was an act of kindness that made you do what you did.”

  She heard a chair screech loudly on the floor as he jumped to his feet. That wasn’t an uncommon reaction to her gift the first time it was witnessed. She let herself come back to the moment and pushed away the rest of the memory. She looked up at Eddie and saw him staring at her wide-eyed in shock.

  “You’re—you’re a psychic?”

  “Yes, but I cannot read minds. Not like you may think.”

  “Then how did you—how—”

  “I read souls, Mr. Jenkin. And you carry that moment around with you like it is emblazoned on your sleeve, I’m afraid. It has come to define you.”

  Eddie walked away, rubbing his hand over his face and went to stand by the window and gaze through the glass down at the street below.

  She felt her heart break for him. The memory she had dredged up was the worst day of his life, and he was now reliving it thanks to her words.

  Maxine knew she was an overly sympathetic creature.

  Alfonzo reached into a leather satchel he carried with him and pulled out an object wrapped in red cloth. He laid it down in the center of the table, crimson velvet over white lace. He parted the fabric and revealed a small brooch lying in the center of it. She guessed that it had belonged to a man by its design. In the center was a ruby, thick and dark, the color of blood.

  Instantly, it made her skin crawl. She felt goosebumps spread out over her arms underneath the sleeves of her dress, even in the warm summer air. When Eddie, Bella, and Alfonzo came to her door, she had known they had carried death with them. She had assumed it had been their own doing. It was not.

  It was the doing of whoever had once owned that jewel.

  Cold swept over her, and she felt as though something had breathed icy wind down her spine. She shivered and leaned farther back.

  “You can sense it already,” Bella said, watching her with a bright-eyed look of awe and curiosity. “It’s true what was said about you. You read from more than just people.”

  Maxine greatly disliked that she had a reputation. Reputations meant trouble. But they also meant business. And therefore, they were a necessary evil. “Why have you come to me?”

  Alfonzo spoke up. “We need your help to find the creature who owned this.”

  Creature. Not “man.” Mark those words. She watched them warily. “And tell me…who was it who once owned this?”

  “The one we’ve come here to kill. The one responsible for turning the moon to blood and controlling that which runs the streets.”

  No one commands the moon. “I told you not to lie to me. I told you not to withhold information. Already, you haven’t learned.” She shook her head. “Give me an answer, Alfonzo Van Helsing, or our time is over. To whom did this pin belong? Who have you come to Boston to destroy?”

  Alfonzo paused before he finally said the words she knew he dreaded to utter. “The King of Vampires. Vlad Tepes Dracula.”

  2

  Maxine set the bottle of rum down on the table with a heavy thunk. She uncorked it without any explanation—she assumed none was needed—and poured some into her tea before sliding the open glass bottle across the table to her three visitors.

  Eddie snickered and reached for the bottle. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “I’m not old enough to be a ma’am. Call me Maxine, please.” She sipped the tea, glad for the sting of the alcohol. Something told her she would need it.

  “You’re older than me, and I wasn’t raised wrong.”

  “I’m only twenty-three,” she laughed. “Should you even be drinking? Is it wise at your young age?”

  Eddie shrugged a shoulder. “Twenty. Plenty old. It isn’t my first, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Where’re you from? Somewhere west, I assume.”

  “Yes, ma’am—er, Miss Maxine. Colorado.”

  That would do it. She watched her three guests with curiosity. She felt such an array of emotions from them. Determination, hope, sadness, grief, and an immense resolve. “So. Let us start at the very beginning.” She sipped her tea. “Vampires are real.”

  “Very real, I’m afraid.” Alfonzo was the obvious leader of the pack.

  “An
d they can command the moon itself?”

  “This one can. Vampires have plagued our kind since the beginning of mankind’s history. They are at least as old as civilization. And we are part of a secretive few who strive to keep the beasts at bay. We hunt them. Now we hunt the one who rules them.”

  Beasts. She looked out the window at the gardens below. Her kitchen overlooked a small courtyard that was protected from the street by a high brick wall. She spent much of her spare time caring for the plants she kept both indoors and out. The azaleas and roses were in bloom, and she could see bees drifting from one to the other, eager to gather pollen. They cared nothing for the troubles of humans.

  That was why she enjoyed them so much. Flowers were untouched by grief or sadness. “The murders.” Maxine sighed.

  “Yes.” Alfonzo reached for the bottle of rum and added some to his own tea. “The papers attribute it to wolves. I promise you that what hunts the night is far worse.”

  “I know.” She shut her eyes and felt her awareness expand as she did. It took a great deal of focus to keep from prying into the souls of those who sat across from her. She may have been young, but she was practiced. If she had left her gift unchecked, it would have driven her mad long ago. Survival required skill, and so she learned. A bee was not impressive because it gathered pollen. It learned what was required. “I can feel the creatures that hunt when the moon turns red. Hungry and twisted things. But there is a design to them. Something more than ravenous need drives them. Something intelligent commands them.”

  Alfonzo grunted. “Good. We can skip ahead, then.”

  She opened her eyes to look back to the older hunter. “Pardon me?”

  He shrugged. “Usually, the first hour of this kind of conversation is me trying to convince people I’m not a lunatic.”

  “The problem is that you explain it quite poorly,” Bella chimed with a teasing smile at her older companion. “And you are a lunatic, so there’s no helping that.” The young blonde turned to her, a kind and sympathetic look in her blue eyes. “The King of the Vampires commands the creatures you have felt. He has begun a siege on this city. He works to cut the transportation lines in and out. Soon, he’ll do more than curse the moon and take a few lives to feed his hordes every night. He will unleash terror on this city. Thousands will die if we do not stop him from raising a new empire of the dead.”

  “Well, doesn’t he sound charming.” She smirked into her teacup.

  Bella chuckled. “He is. That is another issue. He commands other vampires as well. He is an ancient, powerful thing. We are here to stop him.”

  “If he is ancient, why do you think you can stop him where all others have failed?”

  “What makes you think others have failed?” Alfonzo had an oddly pleased and knowing smile on his face.

  “The way you speak tells me that he has done this before—that he has taken over cities before, or tried to. Since he still walks the Earth, it tells me that no one has been successful.” She paused and scrutinized Alfonzo. He was still looking at her with the expression of a man who knew he had a straight flush and was betting as if he had a pair. “Or is that not true?”

  “He cannot die. He cannot be destroyed, and believe me, hunters have tried. He has been beheaded, burned, hanged, dismembered, and buried in a silver coffin flooded with holy water. Yet he always returns.”

  “You fight the inevitable, then.” She spun the teacup idly between her fingers, watching the little hand-painted flowers on the porcelain as they rotated in and out of her view. “You battle against a creature you cannot truly defeat. You ask for my assistance in a game that cannot be won.”

  “We can’t kill him, but we can stop him. And that is what we seek to do. To spare this city and to spare the lives he would see ended.”

  She squeezed the muscles at the back of her neck, trying to ease the tension that was working to give her a headache. She was prone to them. Maxine joked that if she sneezed too hard, she’d have a migraine for days. She blamed it partially on her gift and partially on bad luck.

  When some of the knot eased, she put her gloved hand back on the table. Her gaze drifted to the ruby brooch that sat in its center. It burned in her perception like the ember of a flame. It reeked of tragedy and destruction. She had no desire to hold the burning coal and learn precisely how it might harm her. But, sadly, she assumed that was what they wished her to do. “And how am I to help you destroy this ‘Dracula’?”

  “He is biding his time, and we need to find a way to draw him to the surface,” Bella interjected. She struck Maxine as an intelligent woman. And perhaps a little dangerous in her own right. Her dress was a pale green, and it offset her blue eyes, although Maxine suspected that was likely by accident. There was little of the woman that belied any sense of “culture” or “fashion.” Maxine could tell by her posture that Bella didn’t wear a corset. She could see pockets and slits hidden in the folds of the skirt, and she wondered what Bella carried that she might need to produce in short enough order that she needed to conceal them in her skirts. She could tell Alfonzo and Eddie were both armed. The former with a knife in his belt, the latter with two guns in leather holsters. It did not trouble her, but it made her wonder what the woman carried that made her similarly formidable.

  As someone who also did not conform to the ideas of what a woman was meant to be in the eye of society in 1897, Maxine instantly felt a fondness toward Bella. It was a camaraderie that came with two souls fighting the same battle, if clearly in very different ways. “You wish for me to help you find him. And how can my gifts do such a thing? I am not a true psychic, I warn you. I cannot peer into a bowl of water and see all that is, or any of what may be. I am not certain if our mutual connection explained to you or was aware of the particular limits of my gift.”

  “Father Uncquist was quite forthcoming with details.” Bella chuckled. “We know quite a bit.”

  Maxine laughed and shook her head. “Never trust a monk. Let alone one who drinks as much as he does. Nice man, but a bold-faced liar. And he cheats at cards.” The way the three hunters laughed revealed they did indeed know Father Uncquist and were aware of his predilections.

  “Let me explain to you, then, precisely what I can do. Then you can tell me exactly how someone like me can help you defeat a vampire king.” She couldn’t believe those words had left her mouth. She had no clue vampires had existed until this moment, although she knew the myths and legends as well as anyone. Her world was often bent toward morbid endeavors by nature of her gift, and often she had been told of creatures that stalked the night that were no longer human. Or who had never been. While she had never seen proof of one for herself, she had no issues taking things on a little faith. The hunters were not lying. “I deal in souls, as I said. In the simplest fashion, it can be reduced to that. I hear them, I sense them, and I can touch them.”

  “What do you mean…you can touch souls?” Bella furrowed her brow.

  “I mean precisely that.” She put her hand on the table, palm up. “I wear these gloves to protect us both. I am an empath, yes. But that is the same as claiming a sparrow is a bird only because it has two wings. I experience the emotions of those around me as if they were my own, but it is because I can hear their souls whispering to me. If I were to touch you, skin to skin, I would be reaching far deeper than that. It allows me to see into a person’s very being. It is unsettling at best for both parties, as you can imagine. And dangerous.”

  “I…see. Father Uncquist told us you aided him in finding the other half of a broken artifact.”

  “I did. Humans are not the only things that carry souls, or something akin to it. Objects carry a history to them, as do buildings and locations. People know this instinctually. You can tell if you hold a blade in your hand that has taken lives or one that is used to slice butter. Everyone has the gift that I have. You feel connections to people around you, to the places you visit, and to the things you touch as I do. I simply can hear it much louder.”


  The three of them sat there quietly for a moment, watching her with various degrees of interest and curiosity. Bella seemed to be nearly overflowing with the need to ask her questions but kept glancing at Alfonzo to see if their leader would speak first.

  “If you were to hold that brooch, what would happen?” Alfonzo asked after a long and thoughtful pause.

  “I suspect I would see a memory. Objects carry the past with them. They contain threads of everything that has happened around them, imprinted by the emotions of what they have witnessed. Some memories are far more impactful than others. Think of them like rocks thrown into a river. If I were to hold a steak knife in my hand, for example, I could not see every meal it has shared in. They are small pebbles. Barely enough to disturb the surface. If I were to throw a boulder, I could change the course of the stream. If the steak knife took a life, that is more unique. More notable.” She looked down at the brooch and felt only dread at the idea of holding it. “From that, I think I will find a continent dropped into an ocean.”

  “You are correct in being wary to touch it.” Bella folded her hands in her lap. “That belonged to him.”

  “I guessed.” With a reluctant sigh, Maxine picked up the item in question. She could feel it pulse even through the layer of black silk protecting her. It did not contain just one memory—it contained many. It was a tangled web of all it had witnessed. “I am not sure how it will help you find him. I can only see what this has witnessed, not where he is or where he will be.”

  “Let me ask you this.” Alfonzo leaned his arms on the table as he talked. “Can you identify one soul from another?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then if you were to see the memories of whomever owned that jewel and found yourself in a room with him, could you identify who it was?”

  She blinked. She laughed and leaned back, watching Alfonzo with renewed respect. He was better at cards than she had given him credit for. “Clever. Very clever. Yes, I could.” She turned the brooch over. Nothing was etched on the back. “You want me to play bloodhound and sniff out the King of the Vampires.”