“May I ask you something?” I whisper.
“Of course.” He smiles at me, and butterflies flutter in my stomach. I’m afraid that damned love potion is seriously messing with my head.
“Have you ever been in love?”
He sips and then shakes his head, his white blond hair glistening in the starlight.
“No, because the ability to fall in love develops in childhood, and I had to grow up at a very young age. I do know love, though. I had a mother, a father, and a brother once. Until I lost them all, but I do remember family affection.”
“Oh. What happened to them?”
“My father was a member of the assassins’ order, and that came with risks. He started training my brother and me when we were only two years old, so we turned hard and ruthless pretty soon, but when our mother got killed it still hurt like hell. My older brother went in search of revenge. He was only twelve when he died.”
He stops talking, his features turning cold and hard again.
“Does it still hurt?” I dare in a small voice, my hands clenching around the glass of whiskey.
“I’m not sure, I don’t think so. That kind of risk was something I expected. My father taught me to live with that early on. But I did miss the love my mother gave and took. I wasn’t very good at expressing it, mostly I’d just sit there, in the same room with her, and it would be enough. When she died, love died with her.”
“That sounds heartbreaking.”
“Heartbreaking? Isolde, I was trained to control and even kill my emotions early on in my life, especially to avoid heartbreak. As an assassin, I needed to stay focused. I think people with rich emotional lives are far more exposed to heartbreak than me. No offense, but look at you.”
I laugh.
“I guess you’re right. So, you have centuries of experience in controlling and killing your emotions. Which is why the love potion doesn’t have an effect on you.”
He nods as if it’s nothing, and sips from his whiskey.
I stroke my own glass absentmindedly, staring at him. Such a heartbreaking sight indeed—a vampire assassin prince, beautiful as ice, an emotional amputee. Such a waste.
“You’re missing out,” I say. “Emotion may hurt, but it also gives you unparalleled highs. I for one enjoy it, even if it’s painful. I saw a documentary once that said that, for the divine highs emotion gives us, we accept its abysmal lows. That pretty much sums up how I feel.”
“Wait a minute.” He leans in, the whiskey between his hands, his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal white and muscular forearms. “You want to fall in love?”
“Let’s say I wouldn’t mind terribly.”
As I stare at his puzzled face, a pleasant thought comes to me. Sitting at this small table by the terrace overlooking the old forgotten harbor, I’m living a romantic evening for the first time in many years. A romantic evening with a beautiful vampire, his white shirt open, his legs apart as he relaxes in his chair opposite from me, resting his glass loosely on one knee.
“I don’t think I’d like to reciprocate those feelings,” he says.
My cheek twitches, but I manage to repress other signs of disappointment.
“Still, Isolde, I do like you, I even feel for you. I assure you that I’ll do even the impossible to see you free of the serpent, and make sure he doesn’t touch you again until I do. But in order to do that—”
He sips, and I do the same.
“I need to know how it even came to a marriage between the two of you.”
Tristan
THREE YEARS AGO ISOLDE Jochs travelled from Berlin to Romania to attend the wedding of her sister Juliet to Radek, Prince of Midnight. Three days later, she attended Lord Dracula’s wedding to her adoptive niece, Lady Ruxandra.
Radek and Juliet had been together for a long time by then, and had been married in secret, because a big wedding would have exposed their location to Dracula. But, years later, Dracula fell in love with their adoptive daughter, and the two brothers went from enemies to friends for good. And they had a sort of double wedding.
That was also the moment when Isolde’s life turned around. At the time she ran her own nursing home for the elderly in Berlin, which she considered her life’s work. She’d been a nurse for the elderly for over fifteen years, she had the experience, the knowledge and the heart.
But when she came to Dracula’s country, two things happened to her. One, she fell in love with the wild, unspoiled nature. Two, the miserable conditions in which the elderly lived, in decaying houses and ailing, hurting bodies, came as a hard blow to her sensitive nature. It also came as an opportunity to take her work to new levels, and feel like she was making a real contribution to the greater good.
After the weddings, when the happy couples went on their respective honeymoons, Isolde took a tour of the country. For some reason, this dismal coastal town by the Black Sea had a special pull on her. There was something magical about the sea, and the town itself had a vibe of mystery that Isolde just had to explore. She decided to move here for good.
She set up her nursing home here, using grants from the European Union. She gathered people from the streets, and gave them shelter, food and medical assistance.
Her heart warmed up to one of these people in particular—an elderly man by the name of Ruben Parvan. He was a former priest, and still did God’s work among the old people in Isolde’s nursing home. But Father Ruben also had a secret, something he had discovered while serving as a priest in a village, high in the Western Mountains. It had been a time of almost complete isolation for him, because the small village stood atop a mountain, and there were no roads that led there. One had to walk through the woods, up the slope. In winter, the village was completely cut off from the world.
It was Ruben Parvan that Mark Serpaint wanted, and the secret that he’d discovered in the solitude of his church that had been set up in a small cave.
“I learned a lot from Father Ruben in all the time we spent together,” Isolde says, her melancholy eyes on the third glass of whiskey she cradles in her lap. “He introduced me to a life of inner peace. I never loved myself more than I did during the time he was here. Everything I did, I did it from a place of happy feminine energy. Everything was right and well. Soon Father Ruben became a great advisor to me, the angel on my right shoulder, and people were happy in my home, even though it could get overcrowded and less than comfortable.”
She keeps her head down all through the story. I can only see her white forehead that expresses pain despite being so smooth, her hair falling in waves of chocolate to her waist. Watching her sit there, thin and delicate behind her satin bathrobe, it strikes me—this girl is a vision of feminine kindness. I can smell the sweetness of her soul.
It was the expression ‘feminine energy’ that opened a new door for me, making me see her in a new way. The more I look at her and listen to her, the more I like her, I genuinely do. I don’t think I’ve met anyone so inherently good before.
“But soon we were out of money,” she continues, unaware of how I’m studying her. “The European Union gave and gave, but at a certain point we had to develop some kind of profitable system that would help us support ourselves. The system that we’d presented as we got the grant just wasn’t working—don’t ask me the details of that, I’m not the one who worked out that system. Anyway, the whole idea behind the funding programs is that the businesses and institutions become self-reliant eventually. And, of course, they’re perfectly right. I was already grateful that they’d helped so far.