“That is just the strangest thing….” I held the camera to my eye and focused on one section of the cloud. It wasn’t completely opaque, but the way it gently moved around on itself was not quite…well, normal. I reached out to touch it again. It wasn’t hot at all, and studying the ground, I found no signs of disturbance, which let out my spring theory. I waved a hand through the cloud, swishing it around vigorously to see if it would dissipate.
Tendrils of the cloud broke off and evaporated into nothing, but the rest seemed to fill in the part that had been removed.
“National Geographic, here I come,” I said, moving in a complete circle around it, photographing as I did so. “They’re guaranteed to want these pictures, and even if it’s just some sort of swamp gas—on the side of a mountain, which is really weird if you ask me—the results will be completely spectacular.”
A thought struck me then—perhaps this was why the locals considered the area haunted? I lowered my camera and eyed the cloud with speculation.
“It certainly is a strange phenomenon, and I suppose if one was superstitious or the least bit prone to being weirded out by things, it would be possible to imagine that you are a ghost. But you’re not a ghost. You’re nothing but a cloud,” I told the strange anomaly, moving closer to it in order to stick my arm entirely through it. “I wonder if I can get a picture of just my arm coming through the other side?” I adjusted the focus and leaned to the side to do just that, but at that moment, the ground beneath my feet seemed to shift, toppling me forward.
I shrieked and threw out my hands to catch myself before hitting the ground, swearing even as I did so when my camera flew out of my hands, leaving me to be completely swallowed up by an inky abyss.
Nothing surrounded me. At least, that’s what it seemed like when I regained consciousness. I sat up, aware of throbbing in my head and mouth.
“Ow,” I mumbled, sitting on my heels as I felt my mouth, pulling away my fingers to see if it was bleeding.
I couldn’t see them to tell if I had drawn blood. At that moment I realized that the visual fuzziness had nothing to do with me waking up, and everything to do with the fact that night had suddenly fallen. Right smack-dab in the middle of the day. I looked up to where stars glittered overhead with a cold silver blue light. “Holy bizarre-o-rama, Batman,” I said slowly, letting my gaze drop back down to the trees surrounding the little clearing.
The wind rustled through them, raising goose bumps along my bare arms, and sending a shiver skittering down my back. Ebony fingers stretched toward me, seeming to shimmer in the moonlight. I stood up slowly, feeling as if I’d stepped through the looking glass into another world. “Only this isn’t another world,” I said aloud, my voice piercing the velvety quiet of the night. “Everything is the same, except it’s night. I must have hit my head and passed out. Oh, Gretl will be insane with worry….” I spun around to find my camera bag, which held my cell phone and wallet, but the move was a bit too much for my still-dizzy brain. I staggered backward and tripped over a small rock, landing on my behind.
“Whoa. OK. Slowly this time.” I waited until the world stopped spinning and got to my feet again, brushing off my dress before carefully surveying what I could of the immediate area.
There was nothing but grass, dirt, pine needles, and the swirly bit of cloud that was now almost invisible in the darkness. “It has to be here. I set it down right before I started taking pictures.” I tentatively felt around the ground. There was enough light from the moon to make out basic shapes, but nothing in the immediate area even remotely resembled a camera bag, or my camera.
“Of all the…someone must have stolen it while I was passed out!” Indignation filled me at such a thought, and gave me the spurt of adrenaline I needed to get moving. I was through the forest and heading for the road before I had the bulk of rude things I wanted to say worked out of my system. “And so help me, if I ever catch the person who left me unconscious in the middle of the woods, they’ll be one sad little panda. Hey. What happened to the road?”
The pale silvery blue light of the moon made the grass verge appear sooty. I glared at the road. “I don’t remember you being a dirt road. I remember you being a normal paved road. What the hell is going on?”
Gingerly, I felt my head, braced for some sort of wound that would indicate I had hit it when I had fallen, but there was nothing there but normal, undamaged head. I took a deep, deep breath and, with only a few minor muttered imprecations, turned to the left and started walking down the (now dirt) road that wound down the hill and led to the town in the valley below.
I was on a flattish stretch that curved through some forest—not the haunted one—when I heard the dull rumble of thunder. “Oh, great, this is just what I need—rain while I have to walk the three miles into town. Someone really does not like me today.”
I increased my pace, hoping against hope that I’d make it at least into town before the rain hit, muttering to myself about my spate of bad luck of late, and why that needed to change immediately. The sound of the thunder increased.
“Screw this,” I snarled, and sprinted down the road, bits of dirt worming their way into my sandals, grinding painfully against my soles. Despite the slight decline of the road, I ran like crazy, my eyes on the lights of the town just visible in the valley below. The road hairpinned back and forth up the side of the mountain, however, and just as I was contemplating taking a straight route across a rocky bit of land that dropped down to the stretch of road below, the devil rose up out of the darkness, and ran me over.
12 July 1703
“You’re sure you do not wish to spend the night, Gnädiger Herr?”
The woman’s voice was as smooth as the pearly white skin that he had moments ago been caressing with his mouth and tongue. Nikola gave the invitation serious consideration for a few seconds, aware that this particular pigeon could be his with just a nod of his head, but despite the rather insistent urges of his body, he declined.
“Another time, my sweet.” He dropped a few coins onto the table next to where the innkeeper’s wife sat in boneless grace, and he worried for a little moment that he had taken too much of her blood. But one look at the sultry eyes with their obvious invitation reassured him that the woman was under the influence of the peculiar form of bloodlust common to his donors, rather than the loss of blood itself.
With a little bow, he strolled out of the inn, giving his waiting coachman orders to return home. His daughter would be home awaiting him, no doubt, and as his journey from Heidelberg had been delayed by bad weather, she would be worrying. Imogen was a worrier, he mused as the carriage lurched forward in the cooling night air. She got that from her mother.
Pain spiked through him at the memory of Margaret, pain and guilt that he hadn’t loved her as she had deserved, and certainly not to the depth with which she had worshipped him. And that irritated him, for Margaret had been a gentle, loving woman who had spent the last twenty-three years of her life attending to his every need.
“Women,” he muttered to himself, staring blindly out into the night as the carriage left the town and began the long, winding climb to Andras Castle. “They insist on being loving and kind and caring, and why do they do that? To make a man feel guilty, that’s why. And then they lure innocent men who are busy with important scientific research into impregnating them, and then said busy men end up caring about said spawn. And these ladies smell good, too. Deliberately. The wenches.”
Nikola nursed his sense of injustice as long as he could—about ten minutes—but even he knew it was a foolish attempt to avoid the truth: He had honored Margaret as best he could, but it wasn’t what she was due. And now she had been dead seven years, and their youngest child, his son, his Benedikt, was off to university in Heidelberg. Margaret would be pleased by that. She had been the daughter of a cobbler, and had never imagined herself catching the local baron’s eye, let alone being his wife and bearing him children.
“And the truth is that I would never have married her except for the curse.” Saying the words aloud seemed to make the guilt ease a little, as if acknowledging it took away some of its power. “I could not love her, but I gave her my name, position, and wealth.”
But not your heart, a tiny little voice pointed out. You gave her everything but your heart.
“I did the best I could,” he argued with the voice, shifting uncomfortably. Why the hell did he always end up having these arguments with himself? Did other people do such? Or was it something particular to his nature? He made a mental note to ask Imogen if she regularly held mental debates with herself, or if it was something that came with the curse. “I gave her all I had.”
That lie stung him even as the words passed his lips, and he slumped back against the cushioned seat, wondering why his conscience had chosen this moment to flagellate him. “It’s not as if I can change anything. It’s not as if I could go back in time and—”
A flash of white caught his peripheral vision just a scant second before the carriage rocked, and the coachman shouted angrily.
“What the devil is going on?” Nikola was out of the carriage when it lurched to a stop, his gaze, always good at night, immediately catching sight of a body lying to the side of the road.
“’Tis a woman, Master Nicky. She was suddenly right out in front of me, and ran right into Heinrich.”
Old Ted, the coachman, slid down out of his seat with an audible grunt of pain, hobbling over to where Nikola crouched over the body of the woman. “Be she dead, do ye think?”
Nikola placed a hand on her neck. Her pulse was a bit fast, but present. “No. Just stunned. Let’s roll her over to see if she’s injured.”
“I’ll get the lantern,” Ted said, limping heavily to the carriage to lift off a hook one of the lamps that illuminated the road before them. The light bobbed and jerked as he returned, but Nikola didn’t need its yellow glow to see that there were no signs of blood or obvious injury on the woman who had run so heedlessly into his horse.