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  “Did you have to waste all that blood?” the Rabbi says. “Never mind. Help me with Jimmy, I think he’s had more than is good for him.”

  They carry the bloated figure of the vampire on their shoulders and wade out of the room.

  “I’m sorry about your golem.”

  “Thank you,” the Rabbi says. “I’ll miss him.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Contact that officious gentleman who is paying our bill, give him the keys to the bank and split with the cash.” The Rabbi glances at the Tzaddik. “What will you do with the money?”

  The Tzaddik smiles, shrugs.

  “Go on holiday,” he says. “A long holiday.”

  They walk down the corridor, two old men and a vampire, and the darkness swallows them whole.

  Transylvanian Mission

  Carpathian Mountains, May 1944

  It was an old man's war, the Rat thought for the hundredth time.

  He surveyed the despondent group of aged troops and sighed. Spread on the damp ground the partisans sat, huddled each into themselves. Stars shone with a pale, sickly light over the thick canopy of trees. The Allies Recon officer was standing to one side, shaving blindly, swearing in a mixture of languages each time he cut himself. The Rat smelled the blood, tasting it on his tongue. The Englishman was an unnecessary complication.

  He shrugged and went back to his book, a small, hard-bound English edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and continued to struggle with the uncomfortable language. Naturally, or rather, unnaturally he thought with a trace of amusement, he had no problem reading the book in what his troops would consider near total darkness. The irony of that, and of reading this book in particular, did not escape him.

  They were waiting, the small group of Jewish refugees, had been waiting for so long that they had lost all thought of victory. The old and the infirm, the invalid and the mad, left behind while their families and friends were carted off by train to far-away Poland and killed, as efficiently and as coldly as a rat-catcher disposed of rats. Now, they took refuge in the mountain terrain of the Carpathians, hiding on the Romanian side of the border, spending what time they had left in puny raids against the Germans that seemed to have no effect...no effect at all. The last Recon officer, another unpleasant Englishman–Malory, his name was–was quite scathing about it. They found him one morning lying naked in a pool of melted snow. The grass around him was yellow where the group of iele had feasted on him during the night. The partisans had put a stake through his heart and left him to rot.

  It didn't take long.

  There was the sound of a bird hooting in the distance. The Rat put the book away and stood up, waiting. A minute later, young Pèter burst into the clearing, his misshapen face excited. Without expression, the Rat gave him a bottle of wine and waited while the boy drank.

  "Report?" he asked at last, seeing that Pèter's breathing had settled.

  The boy was the only one left of his family. He had been saved by an old neighbour who had kept him on his isolated farm, and made to work at the pens and the house and later, at night, in the old man's bed. For all that, he had retained an innocence that owed, the Rat thought, more to his deformed birth than to reality, yet for all that was still touching, still somehow noble. It was best, the Rat sometimes thought, if all the children of the age were born simple, so that they wouldn't know it when the Nazis took them, when the showers opened up and Zyklon-B came pouring out instead of water.

  Pèter's usually cheerful countenance showed excitement. "T-there are p-people coming," he announced. "F-from across the b-border. Here," he thrust a crumpled piece of paper into the Rat's hand, gazing up at him, complete trust in his eyes. "F-from Lalo."

  The Rat opened the paper, motioning for the kid to sit himself down. Someone passed Pèter bread, and he sat munching at it happily.

  The Rat scanned the note, his interest quickening. He motioned for the Englishman. "What do you think?" he asked, passing him the note. The Englishman fumbled for matches, cursed as he lit one and cupped it protectively in his hand.

  He read the note and shrugged. "Worth a look?" he suggested, his put-upon drawl negating the words.

  His reaction was interesting, the Rat thought. Very casual. Very... nonchalant. "Was there anything about this from HQ?"

  The Englishman shrugged again. "Not a word."

  The Rat didn't like it. There were not many people coming across the border from occupied Hungary, even though the Romanian government was allied with the Nazis. For anyone to make the trip to this remote location, the reason had to be important. He didn't like the implications of that.

  His little group of partisans, assembled as much by loss as by any real desire to inflict damage on the Germans, did not make a very strong strike force, he was the first to admit. The aged and the infirm and the sick–it was, he thought yet again, an old man's war they had stumbled into.

  Nevertheless, he motioned for his troops to prepare for movement.

  Nestled between mountain ranges, the city of Brasov lay like a sparkling jewel amidst the darkness of the Carpathians. Pinpricks of light burned like a promise of tranquillity. Here, there were still Jews.

  The partisans were arranged in a crescent moon high above the road leading into the city from Sighisoara and beyond, from Nazi-occupied Hungary. They waited in silence.

  The Rat crouched, his senses alert. There was blood on the wind again, old, sick blood, and something else that was less familiar. A musky scent, animal-like and threatening. Like a strigoi, he thought suddenly, remembering the rare times he had run into one of their kin, roaming the mountains in the guise of a wolf or a dog.

  But there had been none that he knew of for at least a hundred years. Whatever this smell was, it was not local, not part of the unnatural fauna of Transylvania.

  He quieted the sense of unease and settled himself to wait. Lalo's note was ambiguous, uncertain, his handwriting jutting over the page like the handiwork of a crazed spider. People are coming, was all it said. From across the border. Watch for them on the way to Brasov.

  Even committing this much to paper was dangerous. Whoever was coming must have been important, to warrant a note. They all liked Pèter, but sometimes, if you wanted to make sure...

  There were faint sounds on the wind, growing in volume as they came near. Jeeps, he thought. Two, maybe three. Scents of gasoline--gasoline and gunpowder. And the heavy musk of some feral animal, one that fed on rotting meat and corpses.

  The Rat spat quietly and suddenly grinned, his elongated fangs slicing the night air. Nazis. He could smell them, coming nearer.

  The sound of car engines grew louder. Soon, they could see beams of light moving nearer, wavering wildly on the dirt road. The partisans cowered into the ground, feeling a sudden fear like a physical object hurling at them from the moving jeeps. The Rat burrowed deeper into the shadows, his face contorting in sudden rage.

  Like strigoi. He glanced at the Englishman, saw him fingering the small silver cross at his neck. He knew what they were.

  The Rat filed the information away and watched. Two, three, four jeeps.One large truck, ambling like a drunkard below. Machine guns, one for every jeep. They moved in a protective formation, two jeeps in the front, two at the rear, guarding the truck. Someone, or some thing, important in there, he thought. He watched, recording the scene in his mind, noting the number of indistinct shapes in the open jeeps, estimating military capacity, finding potential weak spots. The fact that he couldn't see the figures clearly bothered him. Like strigoi. The thought hammered at him insistently. Like dogs. Like wolves. There were rumours...

  Directly underneath them, the convoy suddenly stopped. The shapes in the jeeps shifted, blurred faces looking up, scanning the horizon.

  The partisans shrunk even deeper into the embrace of the dark.

  The Rat held his breath, but their position was faultless: high, secure, and–as far the convoy below was concerned–ineffective. They were strictly observers–
for now.

  As if satisfied of that, sensing that what had disturbed them was not an immediate threat, the jeep engines started again, and the convoy slowly passed from view, disappearing at last into the gates of Brasov.

  The Rat sidled close to the Englishman, who was crouching low in the surrounding shrubs, a little way away from the partisans, as if their presence made him uncomfortable. "What were those things?" he asked conversationally, his voice low.

  "S.S?"The Englishman spat on the ground, his hand still fingering the cross on his neck. "What do you think?"

  In answer, the Rat moved.

  Elongated fingers, their nails stretched and sharpened like unpolished knives, moved with lightning speed and grabbed the officer by the throat. The Rat lifted the Englishman in the air, slamming him against a nearby tree, and held him there, choking, a foot above the earth. "I don't think," the Rat said.

  Around them, the silence was even more pronounced than before as each partisan studiously avoided taking any notice of the scene taking place.

  "Now, why don't you tell me what the fuck those things were, and why you don't seem very surprised to see them here? And perhaps, if you would be so kind, you could fill me in on what HQ does have to say about this little nightly excursion?"

  He could feel his fangs protruding, hurting his jaw, see the effect of the raw smell of his breath, like dry, old blood, on the suffocating Englishman. He had to feed, soon. He only wished it could be now, this place, this person.

  With regret, he loosened his grip and the Englishman fell to the floor, his hands around his neck. He was breathing heavily, making wheezing, choked sounds.

  "So nu," the Rat said at last. "What do you know?"

  The night was coming slowly to an end. The Rat moved like a shadow through the dark, cobbled streets of Brasov, a deeper darkness that seemed to suck starlight, and the occasional illumination of a lamp carried drunkenly down narrow alleyways.

  He waited.

  Lengthened nails and fangs like needles, and coarse dark hair accumulating like fine dust over his frame.Hunger.

  Hunger and, at the back of the mind, apprehension. He was worried, worried about the thing the Englishman had said.

  "They're fucking werewolves," he had said at last, massaging his bruised neck. "The Gestapo's very own Wolfkommando. HQ said a whole unit of them was ordered to Berlin two weeks ago. At the express orders of the Führer."

  He stopped, drawing air desperately into his lungs. The look he gave the Rat was, incredibly, a look of reproach, as if he were merely disappointed with the un-gentlemanly behaviour of this uncouth field officer.

  Like the last one, the Rat thought grimly. The Allied officers simply refused to acknowledge anything that smacked of the supernatural, and that, quite frankly, made them a liability. It made them careless.

  He remembered the one before Malory. An Armenian man, ex-Air Force. He wasn't so bad, just wanted to get out of the war any way he could.

  The mound of earth where they had buried him, deep in the mountains, testified to the way his final escape had come about.

  The Rat waited. The residents of Brasov were not as sceptical. Crosses hung in windows, on doors. Bunches of garlic dangled from window-frames, unobtrusively.

  He grimaced. The crosses, naturally, didn't bother him, but the garlic was unpleasant. No one, of course, was fool enough to put silver where it could be stolen.

  Finally, noise reached him. The figure of a man lurched on the road, bottle in hand. He was muttering to himself. Large frame, but unsteady. Good. Probably a farmer on a night in the town.

  He waited until the man was passing right by him, almost touching the shadow that was the Rat, and attacked.

  And was pushed against the wall with inhuman strength, the bottle smashing against his face, spraying him with shards of sharp, painful glass.

  A trap. He ducked a second punch and drove his razor-like nails into the man's abdomen, hard, moving up in a bloody arc through his body, opening a large, gaping gash.

  The man screamed, a high, keening howl that turned into a low growl of rage. His body shifted impossibly in the starlight, coarse, hard fur growing over his skin, his frame changing, hands becoming large, threatening forelegs.

  Large, wet teeth bit at the Rat's leg. He kicked, connected, and as the wolf howled again flew at it, sinking fangs into its belly.

  It was not a pretty sight, not the gentle bleeding of a man or woman as they stood unresisting, trapped against him. This time was different: a feeding frenzy against a dying, dangerous animal. He stooped by the side of the wolf, crouching in a growing pool of blood, and fed, like an animal himself. Organs torn out and discarded on the pavement, bones cracked and broken by his probing fingers, and the blood, the blood flowing into him, something between animal and man, blood that came gushing and gushing out.

  When he was finished, it was nearly dawn. The sun sent pale fingers against the horizon like the promise of an iron fist. He had to leave.

  At his feet, the corpse of a young-looking man lay like a deflated doll.

  The Nazis departed the next day. Of the dead soldier there was no mention.

  The Rat guessed they preferred to keep their journey, and the nature of the soldiery itself, quiet. It was not long ago that Germany had officially invaded Hungary, and there was talk now that the days of the Iron Guard were soon to be over, and that Romania should join the Allies. Dangerous talk, for the moment, but the reality was that the Nazis were becoming less than welcome.

  They did not, however, go far.

  It was late evening the next day. The Rat crouched low behind a boulder, observing the little camp theWolfkommando had established in the common underneath the castle. Two small fires burned between vehicles and tents, arranged in a protective square. Of all the figures moving in the dark, only one man was clear to his vision. The rest, the werewolves, were blurred, as if light bent itself around them in strange, confusing angles. The man was young and fit-looking, dressed in the uniform of a senior officer. In his hand he held a riding crop which he was tapping methodically against his boots.

  They were, the Rat thought, waiting for something.

  He motioned to Lalo, the Hungarian Resistance's contact person with the Jewish partisans. He had shown up shortly after his delivered note but remained stubbornly reticent with further information.

  The Rat suspected that, in honesty, Lalo simply didn't know. He was there representing the concerns of the Hungarians, whose channels of information were limited. The arrival of the Nazi troops left them worried.

  Understandably.

  "What do you think they're up to?" the Rat asked, nevertheless.

  Lalo spat carefully on the ground and made the sign of the cross in the air. The lines of his face were pronounced, etched in deeper grooves than before.

  The man was afraid.

  "Dracul." He said the word like a curse.

  The Rat grimaced as the man once again spat ritually on the ground and made the sign of the cross. Fucking peasants.

  "Don't be an idiot," he said at last, still watching the Nazis. "No devils, at least not apart from the one right in front of us."

  The German officer was preparing something. Curious tools, medical implements of polished metal, gleamed in the firelight. The wolves were also moving now, checking weapons, talking in low voices that did not carry over to where Lalo and the Rat hid. Nevertheless, the feeling of expectation was tangible.

  They were preparing to move.

  The Rat made his decision. "Lalo, go back to camp," he said. "Bring some of the boys over to keep an eye on them during the night."

  "And you, Rat?" Lalo's face betrayed a mixture of his suspicion and relief. He didn't trust him, the Rat knew, just as he, in turn, did not trust Lalo and his masters. Yet the man's relief at leaving this place was tangible.

  "I'll stay here." His eyes had not left the German officer. "I want to see where they're going."

  He waited until the Hungarian left, d
isappearing into the dark forest like a wild cat, leaving barely a footprint in his passage. He was good, the Rat had to give him that.

  He waited.

  After fifteen minutes, the Nazis were apparently ready. At the command of their officer they began to march, assuming the same formation they did with their vehicles. From afar, it looked unnatural, the man surrounded on all sides by blurred figures, as if he walked in a circle of darkness. They began to move up the hill, toward the castle.

  BranCastle stood like a fairy tale mirage, failing completely, in the Rat's opinion, to look the part of a sinister dwelling. It was built by knights of the Teutonic Order over seven centuries before, and its main claim to fame was its temporary occupancy, in the 15th century, by the Impaler. Now, it was supposed to be occupied by members of the royal family. The Queen, it was said, was exiled by her husband King Carol, who had found himself enchanted by a new mistress - a Jewish one, no less. Others said it was Princess Ileana who lived there, fleeing Hungary from the Nazis.

  It didn't, however, appear to be currently occupied.

  The Rat hurried like a shadow along the cliff wall, the light of a near-full moon sending a shiver of apprehension down his spine as he thought of the Wolfkommando ascending to the same place.

  Castle Dracul.Devil's castle.

  The Rat climbed in the shadow of mountBucegi to the castle. There was a gun-hole there, a narrow shaft through which arrows would have once been shot.

  With distaste, he changed.

  A rat climbed through the narrow shaft and entered the castle.

  A vampire stalked BranCastle once more.

  At least, if the old stories were in fact true. The Rat remembered Tepes vaguely, a petty tyrant like so many of the ones before him and after. Impaler, yes, but no kind of strigoi the Rat had ever seen.

  He lived, briefly, and he died. And that was that.

  Until now.

  He changed back, hauling his clothes through the narrow gun shaft, dressing in silence.