Previous Installments-
Part One
Prologue and Chapters I-X
Part Two
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
PartThree
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXX
Radu-Chapter XXXI (A Novel by Patrick Kelley)
8 pages approximate
Grace was horrified the next time she saw Marlowe. At no time had she ever seen so wretched excuse of a human being, and though she was not quite sure human was an appropriate term for him, she still felt waves of pity coursing through her for the first time in years. He was obviously in as bad a state as any person could possibly be. She knew what was wrong with him. She had seen it often enough. She had gone through it often enough herself.
“Marlowe, you need to get something quick,” she said. “These withdrawals are going to kill you.”
He laughed a bitter, sarcastic laugh.
“Do you know-how hard-it is to-find a- pure-or a Christian-heroin addict?” He laughed for a brief moment, and then he stopped and slammed his fist on the concrete floor.
“Then let me shoot up and take it from me like you have been doing.” she suggested, by now extremely worried as to how these withdrawals would ultimately affect him.
“You are too far along in your pregnancy,” he said with his teeth gritted. “The damage-could be-irreparable.”
He huddled up almost in a perfectly round ball on the floor, as though trying to hide. She went to the front of him and bent down, taking his matted hair gently in her hands, and then moving down to his chin. She held it firmly, and then lifted. He did not resist. He looked up straight at her, and she backed away in horror.
“Marlowe, these withdrawals are killing you,” she insisted. “I am serious. You are dying.”
“No,” he replied. “I am already dead. I know that is hard for you to comprehend. It was hard for me to comprehend what Marty Evans was going through as well, as I never allowed myself to get that far along. Now I know. Still I have no recourse. I have to do this.”
Sweat covered him like a deluge. He was burning and feverish, yet simultaneously seemed cold, shivering from the chills. The pain in his body was obvious from his expression, from the look in his eyes, which begged outwardly for comfort and pity.
“I’m sorry-you had to-see this,” he said, and suddenly he let out a roar much like a wounded animal. Grace started to fear he would be overheard. For three days now, he had not slept, though during the daytime he entered the crypt once reserved for him. She looked over toward the body, still covered with a sheet.
“Why did you bring her here?” she asked. “What do you intend to do with her?”
“Revive her,” he said simply.
Grace looked away from him. She began to fear she was initially correct all along. He was insane. At the same time, perhaps the nature of his delusion was the opposite of what it seemed.
“You have to stop this, Radu,” she insisted. “You are not Marlowe Krovell.”
“I know that now,” he assured her. “Why do you think I am so willingly going through this heroin withdrawal? How can I rid myself of Marlowe Krovell and yet allow myself to be enslaved by his addictions?”
She had no answer for that. She said nothing.
“Did you bring the CD player, and the recordings? I would like to hear them now. I want to prove something to you. In fact, put on Antichrist Superstar. I want to hear it.”
Warily, she did as he requested, and soon the strains of Marilyn Manson’s vocals and music reverberated through the now nearly completely restored basement of the old Krovell Funeral Home.
“If I had heard something like this in my old life, I would have thought the gates of hell had opened on the earth,” he said. “Now, I see it in an entirely different perspective. This was Marlowe Krovell’s favorite-artist, as unbelievable as it is to honor this creature with such a title.
“Did you know that Marlowe came in time to hate this music? Do you know why?”
“I have no idea,” Grace responded.
“He came to hate it for the same reason he initially loved it,” he explained. “It was her favorite.”
He now rose, made his way stiffly over to the body, and removed the sheet, to reveal the collapsing and now rapidly decomposing form of Raven Randall. She was still recognizable, despite the fact that exposure to the relative warmth of the open air, following its exhumation and brief period of freezing, hastened its further decomposition.
“She was the most vicious of all Joseph’s group,” Marlowe said. “Joseph himself feared her, though he was the only one who could really control her. Did you know she had three illegitimate children?”
He looked over at Grace, whose initial response was to ask him what was so particularly horrible about that, but she never got the words out of her mouth.
“She ate them alive,” he told her. She winced when he said this. “When she ate the last one, she convinced the others in the group to join in with her. It was George Dodd’s son, the one called Rhino. She did not tell him that until he had the child’s penis in his mouth. Then, she laughed at him. When he complained about her deception, do you know what she told him?
“Her exact words were ‘you should have known he was your son, Rhino. After all, your dicks are the same exact size.’”
Suddenly, Marlowe doubled over in agony, the pain of his withdrawals suddenly becoming unbearable. He wretched, and then vomited up a hideous bloody mass that wriggled on the floor. She looked at the glob of blood and mucous, enthralled yet sickened. She looked closely at it, and saw maggots squirming throughout.
“You see now what I have to put up with?” he said. “Sometimes I wish I’d stayed at Johns Hopkins.”
“Marlowe, you can’t bring her back,” she told him. “She is too far gone. Her brain will be too decayed. What would be the point of bringing her back anyway?”
“I have to know what was so special about Marlowe Krovell that she fell in love with him,” he explained. “I have to know what it was about him that she thought was worth saving from Joseph. Nothing that I know makes any sense whatsoever. Once I know everything else and can put it all in perspective, then maybe I will know what it is about him that makes him so persistent, so tenaciously determined to exercise control.”
“Yet, you say Marlowe murdered her because he thought she betrayed him in some way,” Grace recalled. “This might not be a good idea, even assuming it’s possible.”
“It’s the only way,” he answered firmly. “It’s the only way I’ll ever free myself from him and rid myself of this addiction.”
Suddenly, he jerked, as though he heard something from a distance.
“Did you hear that?” he demanded. “Turn that damn thing off.”
He indicated the CD player, whereupon she hurriedly turned it off.
“That laughter,” he said. “It was her. I know it. The same laughter when she told Marlowe she was breaking up with him, that he was a fool to think she could ever love him or anybody. The same laughter Marlowe heard after he killed her with an overdose some two weeks later, when-
“I remember now. Marlowe convinced Marshall Crenshaw not to sell to her, or to any of them. She came to him in desperation, and then-he killed her. She laughed that night, the same laugh. It was like she knew all the time.”
Grace watched, as he suddenly seemed calmer than he had since she first returned.
“Marlowe, I don’t hear a damn thing,” she said.
He did not answer her. He just looked at the dead form on the table, the body he had stolen from the city morgue.
“Out of all the dead bodies Brad Marlowe engaged in sex with, Raven Randall was the only one who would have appreciated the sentiment. She was also willfully arrogant in that way. She probably considered Marlowe Krovell’s murder of her out of jealousy the ultimate compliment.
“You are wrong, Grace. I will revive her, in every way. Once I have restored her, she will be a big help to me-a very big help indeed. She will be able to do things that, due to the peculiarities of the curse my brother Vlad put on me, I can never accomplish, at least as it stands now. That will change as well. In the meantime, I will need her help.
“Unfortunately, it might not be safe here for you. I am not quite sure as to the extent of the control I can initially exercise over her. You must leave as soon as you can. Go to your friends’ home and wait for my arrival. By that time, all will be well, I promise you.”
He looked over toward her, and it soon became obvious to him what she felt. She did not want to leave him alone in his current condition, and in his present state of mind.
“I will be fine, I swear,” he insisted. “Remember, I have Cynthia to look out for me. As soon as I have gotten over these withdrawals, she will feed me. She will sustain me. As for Raven-well, the world is going to change in a good many ways by the time you and I next see each other.”
“I have to go through it as well, don’t I?” she asked. “I mean, the same thing you are going through-the withdrawals.”
He looked at her, as though amazed at her seeming prescience.
“You are coming to full term soon,” he said. “The withdrawals will coincide with the birthing. All will be well. You will see. You are not afraid, are you?”
She tried to restrain her dread, but knew she could not hide it. The withdrawals were the only thing in life she truly did fear. It was not the pain she dreaded but the realization this was the one thing in her life she could not control.
“I would be a liar if I said I was not afraid,” she said. “I guess it’s just one of those things that have to be done.”
“You should leave now,” he said. “I really should get started to work as quickly as possible. I want her to be revived sooner rather than later. It is going to take a very painstaking and determined effort on my part. Nevertheless, Marlowe Krovell’s skills as an undertaker will serve me well. So will his addiction. The energy that I feel coursing through me, ripping me apart-how could he have lived with that for so long? How could he possibly have functioned? It was so much a part of him, that as it leaves, it hopefully will take all of him with it.”
“Very well, I’ll go,” Grace said. “You are sure you will be all right? I promised your grandparents I would look out for you. If something happens to you”-
He looked at her sadly at first, and then he smiled.
“They are not my grandparents, Grace,” he said. “They were Marlowe’s grandparents.”
“Of course,” she said. “I will go then. Take care of yourself. I will see you soon. Remember, we have much to do yet together.”
She turned to leave, but slowly.
“Grace-don’t worry,” he said. “Raven is not a threat to you, whether dead or alive. Your place in the world is secure, if not yet manifest. When the time comes, nothing will change that. As for that meddlesome priest-well, that is a different story. He will soon find that Raven will not be so amenable and eager for salvation as was Joseph Karinsky, nor as easily controllable as Sierra Lawson. What he went through with Spiral Lamont, in fact, will seem like, as they say these days, a day at the beach-whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.”
Grace looked at him in almost a sense of wonder. There were few people in the world she truly liked. She could in fact, after twenty-eight years of life, count them all on the fingers of one hand. Marlowe-or Radu-might in fact well make number six. The idea that the two of them might soon be amongst a very small cadre of elites with access to unlimited wealth and relative security, in the face of a world soon to be thrown into destruction and turmoil, made liking him much easier. At the same time, actually liking him made the prospect of the future much less grim.
She counted herself lucky that she fit into the overall scheme of things. There had to be a reason for that. She was privy to the promise, almost like a prophecy, that soon the world’s population would number not in the billions but in the hundreds of millions, at most seven hundred million-a mere tenth of the current world’s population. They explained the rationale behind their reasoning in unemotional, logical terms. There was in every epoch a point in time when the population was cleared-cleansed, in a sense-through some process of natural selection that served in the long run to strengthen mankind’s genetic structure, for the good of the species, and most importantly, for the overall good of the earth.
With each successive cleansing, mankind became more adaptable towards the next period of adjustment. At this particularly important period, due to mankind’s hitherto unknown scientific and technological advances, an elite corps arose, one that could not only guide the process along, and ride the tide of nature’s wrath, but also hasten it, even focus and direct it in a partnership with the forces of nature.
She had known of this for years, yet disregarded it as an insane fantasy. She went on with her life, her struggles with addiction, her life as a prostitute, even as she struggled to mold her life into one with some meaning, as a reporter. Yet, even at best, her life seemed meaningless.
When she learned the truth regarding Aleksandre Khoska, she had not been surprised. Khoska was not one of those people she liked, though he was not one of the masses of multitudes that she disliked or despised. He was one of those few, rare individuals for whom she had mixed feelings. She understood in time that she merely reacted to the man and his own nature. Khoska himself walked in both worlds. He was a mixture of good and bad, of spirituality and opportunism. He was also one of the strongest men she ever knew, and in his own way, admirable.
Yet, what made Khoska strong would also be his undoing. She looked down now upon the agonized body of Marlowe Krovell, inhabited now by the ancient spirit of an ancestor dead now for centuries. What she saw transpiring she realized was much like the molding of tempered steel. She was obliged to follow that path, the same one on which she had up until this point guided him. Though she dreaded it, she oddly looked forward to it, embraced the potential it promised.
Radu was strong, as was she, and she knew now they would both grow only stronger, and together would be an insurmountable force. Most importantly, the child she carried within her womb would combine both their qualities. The child she would soon give birth to would own the world. She would in fact be the mother of a brand new epoch.
As Grace Rodescu considered these things, she slowly came to realize she had nothing to fear by leaving him here on his own. In fact, it was vital that she do so, that she leave him to carry on this important, pivotal struggle. She said goodbye to him one final time, and then ascended the steps to the outside world.
He watched her leave, and he restrained himself from any further spasms, holding back the pain as he shivered. The conflicting heat and cold tore him with much greater ferocity than it would an average person with even the worse of fevers. After so long, he could stand it no longer. He cried, openly and fiercely, until finally, he wailed. Finally, once more time, he roared, the pain now so unbearable he almost wished he could destroy himself and put an end to it.
As he thought these things, however, he saw his brother Mircea, but only for an instant. Mircea he saw replaced by yet another brother, Vlad, imprisoned and vowing revenge on him and his former Turkish allies, as he set about the apparently insane game of impaling captured birds and mice on makeshift stakes. It was far more than a game, however. It was a magical ritual, one in which Vlad Dracula, his accursed foe and brother, surrounded himself with not the accoutrements of some hidden cult of satanic magic, but with sacred objects of the church. He burned the Koran, the same one Radu himself had been presented as a gift by the Turksih sultan, and which Vlad acquired through subterfuge, through one of the many spies he had installed in Radu’s court. He watched as Vlad infused sacred wine with the blood and the rotted entrails of the sacrificed creatures, as he uttered vile curses in the name of the Christian God Radu had tacitly denounced in favor of Allah and His prophet Muhammed, and the sacred Koran, being obliged to do so for political reasons.
He watched as Vlad instructed his minions as to how the wine was to find its way to Radu, where he would eventually drink of it. As a result, Radu became afflicted with numerous diseases. Any one would have killed him and spread throughout the countryside. The worse of all however, was his insane thirst for the blood of the innocents, of those baptized and sanctified, who in those days were the only ones with the power to resist him.
Radu returned the favor to his brother, though this was impossible for him to accomplish to the same degree, not being that well versed in the ways of magic and witchcraft. Now, however, Vlad was gone-Radu was still here, after five centuries of a death that knew no peace. He would be the final victor after all, in this age when the powers of the church instilled not wonder and faith to the extent that it once did, but instead provided Radu with what was more akin to fresh livestock.
Soon, he would live and rage within a world that would turn back to God in desperation, and yet be all the more helpless before him as a result. When he died, finally, as all men must-even one such as he-it would be, finally, in peace. As he thought on these things, he could see in an instant, throughout the following five centuries, how every child in successive generations born to the daughter of Radu Dracula, ritually exposed to the natural bodily gasses that his remains constantly produced, formed a bridge between him and his descendants.
He saw at last the ancestors of the Krovell family, in America, continue the ritual tradition with their own children. Yet, it was different. Perhaps because of the peasant bloodstock Irenea had been compelled to marry into, these immigrant children did not take well to the exposure. The oldest girl suffered from the plaque. The oldest boy became unhinged. The third child seemed not affected at all, but he expressed an insurmountable urge to return to Romania, though he in fact was born in America. This child watched as his older brother became madder by the day, and the two younger children, while both wise beyond their years, became wicked to an extent none would suspect children capable, engaging in sexual perversions with each other they had not the guile to conceal.
He watched helplessly as the older boy tied them to chairs, and set fire to the room in which he bound them, in the attic of the old tenement slum apartment in which the family lived at the time. He watched as the rest of the family took what belongings they could, Magda impressing on Lawrence to rescue the old trunk, risking his life in the process, while the two children waited up in the attic, tied, gagged, and helpless.
When the cleanup crew found them, nothing remained but their skeletons and everyone assumed they ran up to the attic in panic, until further investigation revealed this was in fact the origin of the fire. The assumption from that point was the two children might well have inadvertently started the fire themselves-the same fire that spread from its point of origin and soon engulfed most of Baltimore.
He watched as the same mayor that outwardly refused outside help for the city of Baltimore, ended killing himself in despair, when money, sent in private from charitable organizations, vanished. He watched all this, because he knew to where the money went-into the private coffers of the Krovell family. This was due to the wiles of the gypsy Magda, and her yet young daughter Irenea. They both managed through subterfuge to steal the money. He watched, knowing the truth about the faked suicide, knowing they murdered the mayor of Baltimore. Then Lawrence Krovell, with new wealth at his disposal, purchased a former Romanian mission once used by representatives of the Phenariot regime-the same mission that would soon become the Krovell Funeral Home.
He watched as the crazed older son, consumed with grief and with guilt over his actions, hung himself in the attic of the new home.
He watched as the new son was born, and as the lone surviving of the previous children years later pursued his dream, and returned to Romania. He watched as this descendant of his visited his own official gravesite, occupied in reality by an unknown peasant. He watched as this descendant found the others, the gypsies who were his cousins. He watched as they initiated him into their tribe, and fed him the sacred blood. He watched as he at first reluctantly and then eagerly pursued the rites of his initiation, by abducting a live child, baptized and sanctified. He watched as he fed on the child in the presence of his tribe, and then he knew at last, the true reason why Marlowe Krovell so loved the person whose rotting cadaver now rested on a metal examining table in the restored basement of the Krovell Funeral Home.
It now became clear to him, even as he watched the American soldier later abducted by relatives of the baptized infant, with officials of the church that had proven more dogged in their determination to avenge the child’s murder than he imagined. They found him, took him out to a remote area, and executed him, fearing his standing as an American volunteer during the war in which he was a noted hero would not engender the authorities to try him fairly, even as they also themselves shared the fear that such an event would endanger their chances for American aid.
He watched as the men gathered around him and passed sentence, as he sat there defiantly and looked into the faces of Corneliu Codreanu, then a young man, and his confederates. They included the Khoska family-that same family that would take his young wife into their home, the same family who would see to the upbringing of her and her child, until that child married Ion Ionescu. He saw it all unfold, and realized all this as well was a mere part of the tapestry that was his destiny.
It took five hundred years for it all to unfold. Now, he went through a new kind of birth, as the ravages of years of heroin abuse by his current host descendant tore at his every limb. He pounded the ground as he cursed, but eventually he became calmer. He became steadier. Though yet sick and feverish, he perceived an end to the struggle. For one thing, his desire for the heroin was no longer a craving, unrelenting in its ferocity. Now he just wanted it to be well. At the same time, he understood this was perhaps the most deceptive, therefore the most dangerous, aspect of the addiction. Yet, a part of him begged for relief.
No, he realized. It was not he who begged for the heroin-it was Marlowe Krovell. He rose, and painfully, sickeningly, walked over to the rotting corpse of Raven Randall. He had work he had to perform.
“Cynthia!” he called out. He then looked over toward his supplies. Yes indeed, he had work to perform. Within under a minute the vulture appeared at the head of the doorway that led upstairs to where the first floor of the old funeral home was just now halfway through the process of renovation.
Radu dropped down to his knees and craned his head upwards. Cynthia let out a squawk, flew down to his open mouth, and disgorged her predigested blood and meat.
“Cynthia, wherever do you find these people-a Girl Scout, eh? I can tell by the taste she was obviously a good Christian girl. So what was her story? Oh, I see now. The others constantly teased her, and so she ran away from her troop. How then did she die, from exposure? Did you kill her directly?”
He looked into the seemingly mirthful eyes of the female vulture that was in effect his surrogate mother, and saw the events unfold. A group of men, all of them sick, all of them hungry, but mostly, all of them insane-violently insane. He recognized these men. He knew them. He remembered them from the hospital. They had survived the blast, and to his amusement, realized that, in what was a wholly unexpected development, the hospital released them as per Tariq’s apparent orders. Then, they were taken somewhere by-Detective Berry, who took an interest, it seemed, in their spiritual well-being. For the first time in days, he laughed out loud, an effort that caused him not a small amount of pain.
Now, left alone in the woods, their only refuge an old abandoned cabin where Berry checked on them sporadically, they stumbled upon the lost girl. They then had their way with her-not all of them, however. One of them strangled the girl in an impotent rage, and killed her before the others could stop him. Then, in a fury, they killed the man who had deprived them of their chance for sexual pleasure. Afterwards, they left to hunt more victims. Cynthia fed off the carcasses of both of them.
“Very good, Cynthia,” he said. “A little girl, a virgin, raped and killed by a madman deprived of that medical formula to which he himself was dependent, just as I am dependent on this accursed heroin. You have restored my faith, old girl. You have served me well. Now, I must work. Go outside then, go and stand watch that you may warn me of the approach of any who might intrude on this most important and sacred work I must perform.”
He watched Cynthia fly out as he walked to the CD player. He turned it on. He walked then, still shaking, feverish, sweating, and racked with pain, back to the corpse of Raven Randall. He craned her head backward with his right hand cupped under the back of her neck, and he opened her mouth. He disgorged the digested matter into her mouth, and then gently set it back.
Gently, almost tenderly, he combed her hair. He then reached for the makeup kit, the one Marlowe Krovell always used. He extracted the different colored tones and shades and lined them up, along with the scissors, the tweezers, and the sutures. He extracted the rubberized putty compound that he hoped he would have to use no more than sparingly.
He allowed the talents of Marlowe Krovell to come to the fore of his consciousness as he began to work, as Marlowe’s love for the dead and vastly evil and vicious woman also came to the fore, having previously been denied the opportunity before to work on the only woman he ever truly loved-the woman he in fact had murdered.
He felt his own energy draining into the cadaver, as the dead, cold flesh took on new warmth, tingled under the application of his own energy flow, and seemed to vibrate with a new kind of vibrancy as he reached for the drill. Gently, carefully, he took a mallet and, at the temple, delivered a firm and steady, yet gentle blow. All around her skull, he went in a circle, until he made small holes at roughly four inches apart, a total of five of them. He then took the small hand held circular saw, and he began cutting. Finally, he removed the skullcap.
Her brains exposed, he cradled them gently into his hands, and closed his eyes, and hummed. It was working. He could feel the vibrations within the mass of decaying brain matter, as it came to life. After twenty minutes of this, he removed his hands and set about the arduous task of replacing the top of her head. He was much calmer now as he inserted the needle and thread, and sewed. Soon, this part was complete. He moved down to her chest cavity, her stomach, and her abdomen. He noted that the further along he got, the more vibrant and filed with life energy the cadaver seemed.
He continued with renewed vigor, as he made incision after incision with scalpel in hand, quickly yet concisely filling each incision with extractions of his own spittle, which mixed with what remained of the decaying oils that had once been fatty tissue and flesh. He added as well drops of his blood, though this served to weaken him considerably. He went down the length of her torso, her buttocks, her back, her hips, her arms, her legs, her hands and her feet.
He stood back and surveyed his handiwork. As he saw his bodily fluids seeming to react favorably, he sewed up the incisions, one at a time, and then applied the make-up putty, which would in time dissipate as the incisions healed-or so he hoped.
When he moved to her vagina, he felt Marlowe’s passion welling up inside him, searching for a release. The vagina was moist, tingling with sensation. It pulsated-but Radu stepped backward and surveyed one final time the extent of his as of now more than two hours worth of handiwork. He saw everything now. He saw the truth at last. He saw the true intent of Raven Randall in those last weeks of her life. She had intended to kill Marlowe Krovell all along. She intended the entire time to bend him to her will, and lure him out to where he would become what she always determined he would become-just another one of her victims.
Radu saw all this, and finally, at long, long last, Marlowe Krovell, somewhere deep inside his subconscious, saw it as well. Radu cried, allowing the truth to manifest in a deluge of emotions, as he crawled in agony toward the mirror. He looked inside it, and inside the now truly fading and defeated mind of Marlowe Krovell.
“Now you know, Marlowe,” he said. “Now you know.”
He felt a brief flash of pain as he closed his eyes, and fell to the floor on his knees. The sickness of the withdrawals was gone, and with them, the spirit of Marlowe Krovell. He had succeeded. Yet, he was exhausted, so much to the point he wanted not to wait for the sunrise to return to his crypt.
It had been more of a struggle, these last few months of life during which he tried to make his will predominant, than the entirety of the previous five hundred years which he spent locked in the confines of that old iron trunk, fortified with tar and sealing wax. During that long period of confinement, at least his spirit was his alone. These last few months were a constant battle for dominance, and for his very survival. He was now exhausted, more so than he ever was. Never did he need to rest more than now.
It was, however, a rest he would take with the assurance that he and he alone would awake in the morning, in a body that he shared now with no one else. He was exhausted, but at the same time, he felt a sense of exhilaration unknown to him for years, since the time he was a teenager and he played about the palaces of Istanbul and roamed the streets of the bazaars, amazed at the fine goods readily available to even many commoners. How amazed he was at the time, in that though he was a prince from a royal bloodline, he never knew anything but privation in his little backwater principality.
There was constant struggle and strife, famine and disease, death and fear. It was a struggle to acclimate to his new surroundings, when his father handed he and his brother Vlad over to the Turkish sultan as hostages. Vlad never did, but he, Radu, eventually came to love the opportunity to live his life free of despair and destitution, of the fear of the fate which came eventually to his father, and to his brother Mircea-his skin scalped from his face while he lived, red-hot irons driven into his eyes.
When the sultan, his friend, appointed him the Voivode of Wallachia, he wanted to bring true civilization and prosperity to the region. More importantly, however, he wanted to bring hope in place of the despair that had been the lot of the people for centuries. He wanted them to have the same peace and hope for life, for they and their children, as he enjoyed. The boyars, however, had other ideas. They betrayed him, and plotted his downfall and destruction, while Vlad, who foolishly resisted the Ottomans, waited in the wings to return to power. He would do so, eventually, and the end result of his brief return to power was yet more centuries of repression, poverty and despair for the people who betrayed him.
He would never make that mistake again. Now, he wanted to live only for himself. The world of the ignorant and superstitious could never appreciate the opportunity for the gift of true peace and prosperity. Give the masses any opportunity and they in time would squander it, and betray even their greatest benefactors. All it took was the direction of a few high placed, deceitful, and manipulative upper class nobles and priests.
No longer would Radu fall prey to the whims of humanity. He now had a new opportunity, and he would not squander it on the likes of them. They now existed for his benefit, and he would pursue his life to the fullest, and at their expense. He would begin soon. For now, he must rest. He was exhausted, yes. Nevertheless, he was finally at peace, and would sleep well this day, and awake in the morning fully refreshed, and hungry for blood. He would eat well the next day, he decided. He closed his eyes and for once, in his mind's eye, he could see his own true image, the form of Radu Dracula. He smiled in a sense of profound satisfaction and contentment.
Then, he felt a cold hand clamp his right shoulder with a grip of iron. In shock, he looked up into the mirror, into the cold, piercing light blue eyes of Raven Randall.
She looked at him and laughed with obscene hatred, and everything once more went dark.
