Free Drew D'Amato:Bloodlines:02 by Drew D'Amato

vampires sleeping in a hotel room.   A perfect escape, but they underestimated the resourcefulness of Bandini. 
    Bandini waved a fake badge to the consigliere at the desk and gave him some bullshit.  The badge said he was from Interpol, and the bullshit was how they were tracking down the assailants behind the attack at Geneva Airport.  Fear of dangerous men at his hotel allowed the consigliere to be controlled and allowed Bandini to search the hotel.  Bandini promised to be discreet, and asked the consigliere not to mention anything to the guests or even the manager.  Again, out of fear, the consigliere complied.  
    They took the stairs.  They went up each flight and Dean Sterling, an aristocratic looking thirty-seven year old man who held the locator of the transponder—that looked like an iPhone—in his hand and one headphone in his ear, kept telling them the signal was above them.  When they got to the top floor Sterling said the signal was still higher. 
    “What do you mean, like from the roof?” Bandini asked.
    “It appears so sir.”
    “Well let’s check it out.  If that’s the case that means they are outside under the bright sun—powerless.”
    They found the stairs to the roof and ran up it, guns drawn, and busted through the door.
    The roof was deserted.  Nothing, except the Milan sun beating down on them.  The signal was still going off from the little screen on the locator. 
    “What the hell is this, is that machine wrong?” Bandini asked.
    The signal had gotten louder once they were on the roof.
    “No sir, the machine is fine,” Sterling said.  “Follow me.”
    The five of them walked, suspicious of the empty roof, but it was all flat, nowhere for the vampires to hide, just small vents scattered around.  The beeping had gotten really loud in Sterling’s ear.  He was focused on the locator.  He turned left looked down and knew the beeping would not get any louder.
    “Sir, the urn,” he told Bandini.
    Bandini who was looking around, looked down and saw it.  It lay on its side, but he could tell the inside was burnt.  Bandini picked it up and put his hand in it.  He pulled out the little microchip that was giving off its location.  He threw it on the ground and stepped on it.  The beep from the locator stopped.
    “What do we do now sir?” Sterling asked.
    “Well, they didn’t just appear at Geneva.  There was a private Learjet that landed there around six the afternoon the day of the attack.  Let’s find the pilot of that plane.”
    Bandini looked back down and kicked the urn, thinking to himself, Thank God we didn’t use the real stuff.
                 
    3
    T hey traveled Northwest back from Bucharest to Sibiu in a different taxi.  Their last stop on the way back to the hotel was Vlad’s old castle—not Bran Castle, the one that gets all the tourists—but Poenari Castle.  It was in Arges County, which is on the southwest border of Sibiu County, so they were not too far from their hotel.  It was located along the Arges River, in Arges County.  The tributary of the river Raul Doamnei, into which his first wife Elizabetta fell to her death, ran along the castle.  Vlad hadn’t been here in centuries, but as he stood on the first of the 1,500 steps that led to the castle, all the memories of her rushed back to him.
    This castle had started as just a watchtower that Vlad’s grandfather had built perched high on the canyon formed by the Arges River Valley.  Vlad foresaw the potential of a castle perched so high up on a steep precipice.  Vlad used the boyars he decided to spare that betrayed his father as slave labor to build the additions of the castle.  He made those bastards work so hard until their clothes fell off, and even then they couldn’t stop.  The place was two-toned—gray stones on top of red bricks that clashed against the lush green of the trees that surrounded it.  As the vampires got higher up the 1,500 steps they took in the