The Mark of Cain (31 page)

“Tell Cornivus that Vlad Draculea is here to see
him,” he announced as he jumped off his steed in the Hungarian regent’s courtyard.

“Yes, sire,” one of the guards replied.

Cain shook out his long dark hair, trying to lose
some of the excess water from his thick waves before entering the throne
room—he didn’t want to be disrespectful when asking for help.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” the regent asked,
looking Cain over as though he was a fly in his soup. Cain had dried himself as
best he could, but days of rain had gone
beyond
soaking him.

“Radu’s army has allied with the Wallachian nobles I
haven’t yet killed. They’re planning to depose me. I need more gold to pay my
men so that I can annihilate them.”

The eighteen-year-old regent leaned forward, his
glassy eyes catching the light. “I’m sorry,” he said, picking at his acne, “but
I don’t have the resources to help you.”

Cain laughed, though it was angry and humorless.
First, to have to ask this kid for money in the first place was embarrassing.
And now he would apparently have to beg…. Maybe he should just announce right
out his true identity so he could watch the kid squirm. Already, the sultan
thought him to be brilliant at war. If they knew who he
really
was,
their continued loyalty would be ensured, for he could say that he was testing
them and that they had failed miserably. He decided against it just now. He
could always do so later if he became truly desperate.

“Don’t lie to me, boy. I know you’re getting funds
from both the pope and the Mokolios. Surely the funds that you’re receiving for
the very purpose of fighting the Turks could go to me to do just that,” he
practically spat.

The boy’s eyes instantly became hostile. His lean
chest rising and falling quicker, he stood, his face now a blotchy
purplish-red.

“Arrest him!” he yelled in his squeaky voice.

Cain tried to fight the horde of professional
soldiers that surrounded him, but the truth was, he was just too tired. It had
been days now since he’d had any real rest. Yes, he may not need as much as
mortal men did, but he still tired. He was immortal, not
invincible
.

Only once he was in a solitary cell did he find out
what was his supposed crime. The regent accused him of siphoning off funds
given to him by the pope, evidenced in a forged letter where Vlad pledged
loyalty to Mehmed II, as well as promising to strike an agreement to give
Wallachia to the sultan. Apparently, as Cain was sure the real story went, the
pope had wanted proof of where his money was going, but the regent couldn’t
provide it because he was using it for his own pleasure.

He tried to escape—he could have easily picked a
lock or pulled away the hinges—but the metal door had only a small flap for
food, and an even tinier window for the guards to peer in, all of which was
made quite solidly. When having given up on the door, he then climbed the stone
walls to the miniscule window high above. But it was really a tiny shaft that
reflected light like the tombs he’d devised in ancient Egypt had. Cain knew the
light wasn’t for his benefit, but so the guards could see him without need of
entering the room. Still, he was pleased he’d have some sort of light source,
no matter how minimal it was—it was only bright enough for him to see just
barely more than the outlines of the stones.

What began as an angry mishap, being jailed, Cain
was surprised to find enjoyable. Where many men would be driven mad from so
much solitary time, he found it blissful, for he was already crazy, and where
else could he go but up?

Each day of quiet brought back a small piece of his
sanity. Each hour that consisted of the peace one had when not manipulating and
ruling the world brought comfort to his restless soul. As it was, a part of him
wanted to remain there forever, in the endless dark, for here he wasn’t Cain
the Cursed, or Vlad the Tyrant, or even the Merciless One. Here he wasn’t any
of the aliases he had gone by over the years. Instead, he was who he thought he
could have been had his parents loved him. A content and calm man who stopped
to appreciate the little things in his life. At least it was that way until
she
came and woke a bit of Aemuth from the recesses he’d been hibernating in.

Cain was standing in a corner, smiling at the ray of
sunshine streaming from the window shaft. As he did daily, he had climbed the
stones of his cell—as worn as they were—and was letting the rays warm his skin
when he heard the peephole slide open, metal grating upon metal. It was loud.
Perhaps because it reverberated off the walls. Or perhaps because he didn’t
hear real sound very often. Whatever the reason, he could feel it in his bones.

He jumped down and turned, crouching, surprised to
see a large pair of feminine eyes staring back at him, lit with the orange
light of a fire.

And, just like that, manipulations took over his
mind, pushing all peace from it.

“Hello,” he said with a smile, tilting his head like
a praying mantis watching its prey. “And what’s your name?”

“Ilona,” a whisper of a voice replied, fear and
interest fighting for dominance in both her eyes and tone.

“I’m C—”

“Vlad,” she interrupted, surprising him because he’d
been about to tell her his
real
name. “I know.”

“You seem to know me, but I don’t know you. Just
what is a delicate flower like yourself doing down here in a filthy dungeon?”

“I hear stories,” she said, looking away from his
steady gaze. “I wanted to see if they were true?”

“And?” he asked.

“And I believe they are.”

With a grin that he hoped would speak of what he
thought the stories said and how her belief in them only pleased him, he asked,
“And just what do they say?”

Shyly, she said, “That you’re not a man, but a rabid
demon.”

He threw his head back and laughed, a guttural sound
he hadn’t made in…years? How long had he been held captive here?

Once finished, he turned his gaze back on her.

“I may look like a demon, love,” he said,
momentarily putting a hand to the disgustingly greasy and filthy hair on both
his head and face. “But I clean up nice. I assure you.”

“We shall see,” she said before closing the peephole
and leaving him alone to his thoughts.

He was surprised when, a few hours later, his cell
door opened to let a maid and barber enter, bringing along with them beautiful
light. After getting a bath and a shave, he was given fresh clothes and taken
to a new, cleaner cell for nobles, instead of the undesirables area he’d been
in before—which was where they put people they wanted to forget about. It
seemed that Ilona had power. Power he could use to get out of there for, now
that he had murdered the gentle man he’d become in prison, he was once again
motivated to finish what he’d started in Wallachia.

Ilona came back day after day until he had made her
fall in love with him. She was pretty, a delicate thing resembling spun glass
by the way light emanated off her pearly skin and golden hair, so he didn’t
mind courting her. Plus, the deeper her love grew, the more freedom he was
granted—he was even released as long as he stayed in the home he’d made with
his new bride—until the day he was finally allowed to return to Wallachia,
prince once again.

As he rode toward the castle with his wife and their
two sons ages eleven and ten, the people cheered until a procession followed as
far as he could see.

“They certainly love you,” Ilona said in that meek
voice of hers.

“I saved them. Before me, Wallachia was corrupt and
starving. The princes only cared about being in either the sultan’s or
Hungary’s pocket.”

When they rode into the courtyard of Poenari Castle,
he was pleasantly surprised to find Seneslav, as loyal as ever, his titanic
hand on the shoulder of a boy fourteen or so years of age.

“Mihnea?” Cain asked, a large smile on his face.
When his son gave him a hesitant grin in reply, Cain opened his arms. He
couldn’t believe that the babe he had barely had a chance to hold was now on
his way to becoming a handsome young man, large like his father.

With a nudge from Seneslav, the boy walked into
Cain’s arms, crying what he hoped were tears of joy.

After introducing Ilona and their sons to Mihnea,
they went into the castle to have a feast.

“How is it you still look so good?” Seneslav asked
with a grin even scarcer of teeth than before. His skin was now leather, thick
lines carved into his forehead and around his eyes. “You look as though you
haven’t aged a day, and yet it’s been fourteen years.”

With a chuckle, he clapped the burly man on the
back, announcing, “Perhaps I haven’t!”

Life settled into a routine as he oscillated his time
between tyranny and family, though he was still on the front lines, battling
Radu’s forces, more often he was at home.

It was only a couple of months since he had returned
when he was in the midst of an intense battle that he felt an explosive heat
through his chest. He looked down at it, at the sword being pulled from it. He
had been stabbed in the exact place where he had forced his own sword through
the real Vlad.

“Sire!” he heard Seneslav yell as he began to lose
consciousness. Cain looked up at him, a halo of light around his man’s bald
head as he felt his body’s warm liquid pour over his fingers clutching at his
wound. But, before he could reply, the darkness overtook him.

When he woke up, he found that he had been buried
alive. They had assumed that he was dead. They did not know that, because of
who he really was and the “curse” God had placed upon him, he could not die.

When he escaped his grave, he hid himself under
traveling robes, hearing stories about Vlad Draculea everywhere he went. People
said that his head had been cut off and was in a jar of honey in the sultan’s
palace, or that it had been displayed on a spike in Constantinople to prove
that he was indeed dead. Such nonsense. Nonsense like his life had been. His
years living as only a husband to Ilona, and father to their two sons, had
tamed the lunacy that had driven him to live his blood-laden life as Vlad the
Impaler.

He was ready to start a new life; one far away from
Vlad. And nobody would even recognize him if he went far from anywhere he’d
recently warred with. He had been smart to have portraits painted of the
long-dead prince in his stead, which he’d commissioned so that nobody in the
future would know who he was, as well as, once done with that life, he could
easily move on to a new one. After so much war, he was spent and needed solace.
He coveted a new life. One far from soldierdom. Being Vlad, responsible for
tens of thousands of his own men’s deaths, and even more civilian lives, had
tired him of bloodshed. As much as he had loved it at the time—and with it he
had certainly proven to God how evil he indeed was—he was ready for some peace
and quiet.

But because his plans had backfired when Alberto had
apparently passed on many years before, the Turkish sultan had indeed taken over
Cain’s large Ottoman forces and would no longer answer to him. The sultan’s men
were loyal to the sultan because they didn’t know that they had really always
been under the thumb of a much different man. All of this forced Cain to fight
to recover his lost forces, the peace and quiet he wanted so desperately far
beyond his reach. And then, as the Mokolios worked hard to reacquire the Earth,
a new mission came to him when he heard whisperings about a prophecy….

***

Inac woke up to find everything dark around him. An
odd and unpleasant sensation swirled in his stomach, and an acidic taste was
rising in the back of his throat. Desiring fresh air, he unzipped the sleeping
bag and untangled himself from Hara. He needed it so desperately that he didn’t
even take the time to throw on his shoes as he got up and left the tent.

The moment he was outside, he tore off his tank top
drenched with sweat. He usually slept in the nude, but he knew Hara wouldn’t
have that, so he’d thrown on some cotton pants that tied on at the waist, as
well as a tight wife-beater tank top that showed off his muscular arms and
chest in hopes that it would help woo Hara.

The air felt cool on his wet, overheated skin, but
it didn’t give him relief for long. The visions from his dream were too vivid
in his mind. He felt as if he had just relived all of his years as Vlad. But,
unlike the first time, now it made him nauseous.

His stomach tightened, shooting a pain throughout
his abdomen as he vomited into the bushes over and over again as his body
attempted to rid itself of Vlad’s psychopathic tortures. Once he felt like he
was finished, he swept the back of his hand across his mouth.

“I didn’t know you get sick?” Tracker whispered from
behind him, offering him a tube of toothpaste.

Inac looked up at him, trying to give him a small
smile as he took the paste. “Yeah, well, I am human, you know. I’ve never had a
fever, but I have thrown up from other things.”

Tracker didn’t say anything as Inac walked over to
the camp’s water spout to rinse out his mouth, as well as to wash his chest and
back. The minty toothpaste was the perfect way to get the taste of vomit out of
his mouth.