Free Dracula's Desires by Linda Mercury Page A

joy of touching Josef, she didn’t hear her father approach.
    Hot fluid sprayed her from her neck to her thighs. Josef’s lips faltered on hers. The stomach-curdling metallic smell of blood slapped her nose.
    Josef hung, already dead, from her father’s grip in his hair. His life’s blood still pumped from the gash in his neck, soaking Vlad even more.
    Even expecting the hard hand to her head didn’t ease the blow that knocked Vlad to the once-fragrant spring grass.
    â€œYou stupid fool! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
    Vlad rolled away from his father’s kick, Josef’s blood still slick against the ground. “He wouldn’t have betrayed me,” she screamed at her father.
    â€œHe most certainly would have!” A heavy slap threw the child against the very tree that had sheltered her. “You do what I tell you. You are too stupid to think on your own.”
    Vlad landed a solid punch on his father’s nose, breaking it.
    The two brawled in the mud and blood.
    Hours later, his father dragged Vlad back to the castle. The boy couldn’t walk from the beating. His clothing was ruined by both Josef’s and his blood. But some of his father’s blood graced the iron-brown mess. Vlad hadn’t gone down easy.
    As his father threw him into the river to get clean, Vlad vowed he would never lose another love. “Never again.” He screamed as his father’s boot pushed him down for the third time. “You’ll never take another from me.” He coughed and spewed, but lowered his tone so his father couldn’t hear his words. “No one will.”
    It was a vow he could never keep.

C HAPTER 15
    V alerie rubbed her temples. How ironic. She’d put the war behind her. Forgiven herself her past, earned redemption. But here she was again, where everything had started, undoing the damage birthed by her own reckless actions. Hadn’t the war proven that one race, one species, was not superior to any other?
    The notorious concentration camp had been turned into a museum and memorial. Despite neat, grassy spaces and the smooth surfaces of the buildings, bile rose at the memories of the piles of starved dead, the smells of putrefaction, and the sounds of hatred and pain. She hunched her shoulders under her black coat with the gold dragon and caressed the butt of her hidden pistol as though it were a rosary.
    The colorful crowds of mortals didn’t even exist to her as she wandered the site. The execution site, over at the far side, had been transformed to a grassy depression with the low remains of stone walls. Before, a gallows had stood here, to execute any who resisted. Valerie walked the full width and breadth of the memorial. The crematorium still stood, but without the ashes of the five thousand who had burned there. It still stunk of murder. One of the tunnels for the V-2 construction had been left with the scrap and rubble on the floor. Finally, she ended her personal tour where the inmates gathered for roll call.
    Dracula bore no responsibility for these atrocities. At the time, she hadn’t known they existed. Valerie tucked her lips in against her aching teeth. But she should have known. There was no excuse for an ignorant commander. No amount of time could scour the horrible stench from her memories. She ran her fingers over her bulging belly. To be here, bearing new life within her, felt the ultimate insult to those who had died.
    â€œYou have seen a Fallen ascend, yet you despair.”
    Valerie didn’t know if the vision came from the child or from her own heart, but it nailed her courage back in place. This place had risen from the remains of those exterminated. She could find her lover.
    The car had completely disappeared. Not even the tire tracks remained. The ground beneath her reeked of mildew, decay, and corruption. No apples, no sulfur. John wasn’t within a thirty-mile radius near here. She crossed her arms