Muffled voices reach Mari's ears, sounding so far away and yet so close to her. She wanted to groan, to give some sign that she's still alive, but her body feels as though it's made of stone. The voices swirl around her, reminding her of dancers and balls, of vampires ready to pounce. Am I still trapped there? No, she could hear her brother's voice louder than the others. Where am I then? Was it all just a bad dream? She hoped that she would wake to find her brother holding a plate of food under her nose, that he would laugh when she took it from him.

A sudden pain starts in her cheek, knocking the fuzzy thoughts from her head and making everything clearer to her. Mari's eyes snap open and she lets out a whimper as her chest begins to ache. "I told you it would work," a woman shouts. Mari groans as she recognizes the voice, realizing everything that had happened wasn't a nightmare after all. She opens her eyes, focusing her gaze on the princess that had slapped her. "Are you alright, Mari?" Mari gives the princess a nod, closing her eyes again as she tried to understand everything.

The last thing she remembered was going underwater, yet now she was snug and warm in a bed. Going off the dark stone walls she'd glimpsed when she had her eyes open, she'd say it was a safe bet that she was back in the Valerious Manor. Petre sits beside her on the bed, gently rubbing his thumb across her cheek. She opens her eyes a little to look up at him, smiling up at him and grateful for the extra warmth. She was freezing still and her wet hair stuck to her face and neck.

Just then, Carl rushes into the room with an armful of blankets, breathing hard as he runs over to Van Helsing. Gabriel takes the blankets from him with a quiet thank you and covers me up with them. "I'm sorry, Mari," he apologizes," I never meant to hurt you."

"I know," she assures him," I'm fine now." In one smooth move, he pushes Petre off the bed, takes his place, and places a kiss on his sister's forehead. Carl seemed pleased by the disgruntled sound Petre made, crossing his arms over his chest as he stared at Petre, who was picking himself up off the ground. "Did anyone find out a way to kill Dracula while I was unconscious?" They all give Mari matching looks of are you insane and she could feel the blood rush to her cheeks. "I'll take the silence as a no, then."

"Of course we didn't," Carl says incredulously," we were too busy trying to get you to wake up." He pauses, shooting me a smug grin. "But I did find a way to make Van Helsing and Anna stop fighting for a bit." Gabriel raises an eyebrow at him, but it doesn't make Carl look any less happy.

"What'd you do?"

"Asked them when the wedding was. After all, they fight like a married couple, so it only makes sense that they make it official." That makes Mari laugh even if it caused her pain, her head resting against her brother's arm as she tries to compose herself. No matter how much the comment annoyed her brother, she knew he was happy that she wasn't angry with him.

"We'll have to be sure that's in their vows when they marry." Gabriel and Anna her identical looks of disbelief, Mari returning the looks with one of her own. "What? In my books, the hero always married the beautiful princess he's sent to protect." She pats her brother's arm in sympathy. "You really should read sometimes, brother."

"It may happen in your books," her brother starts.

"But it will never happen in real life," Anna finishes, sending a stern look in her direction. Mari opened her mouth to comment on how they finished each other's sentences, but Carl quickly covered her mouth with his hand, shaking his head.

"Don't dig yourself any deeper," he warns. "Let's go to the library." Mari kicks the blankets off of her and finds herself only in a chemise, letting out a squeak of embarrassment and pulling the blankets back up to her chin. While everyone else had looked away to be polite, Mari noticed the way Petre's eyes had lingered on her a second too long.

"Might I get changed first, Carl?"

"Of course." He nodded hurriedly, Gabriel placing his sister's rucksack on the bed next to her before ushering everyone else out of the room. Once she was alone and the door to the room was closed, Mari quickly changes into a simple pair of black breeches, a white top that had short sleeves and was off the shoulder, a sturdy pair of boots that hugged her calves, a black coat that had a longer back with red satin inside of it, and a simple women's top hat with black feathers stuck in the black ribbon that wrapped around it.

She made sure her hair was dry and tied off her face before placing the hat on her head, and then she checked that her crescent moon necklace was still around her throat before crossing the room and opening the door. Carl was waiting for her in the hallway, smiling when he noticed she was ready. He'd seen her in men's clothing before, she'd wear them whenever she assisted him with his experiments, but this was the first time she'd worn them around other people as well.

"Are you ready," he asks, holding out hand for her to take so he could lead her through the halls without worry of losing her along the way.

"As ready as I could ever be, I suppose," she returns, taking his hand and following after him. The room he takes her to is in a tower and it was quite possibly one of the biggest rooms she's ever seen, filled to bursting with books and weapons and paintings. Her brown eyes had gone wide as she took it all in, running one of her pale hands down the side of an oak bookcase.

"I knew you'd like this room very much." Excited, she kisses his cheek in thanks and begins to explore, not noticing the way Carl blushed or gave a satisfied smile afterwards. She'd never kissed someone that wasn't her brother before and she had a hard time hiding her own blush from Carl's view. Holding his hand had felt nice and the kiss—she couldn't help but think—would have been even better had it been on his lips. But she wasn't brave enough for that yet, and she kept her thoughts occupied as she took a thick book off a shelf and settled in a chair to read.

She woke half an hour later with a start, Carl's excited voice breaking her out of the realm of dreams and back to the real world. "…. he left clues, so that future generations might do it for him!"

"That must be what my father was looking for," Anna says," clues to the door's location." Mari stands and sets her book aside, joining the group across the room near a painting that had been hidden inside the wall until Carl struck one of the sconces.

"The door," Gabriel whispers, looking around for something," of course!" He shoves the heavy books he held into Carl's arms before rushing out of the library and down the hall with the rest of the group following after him. "You said your father spent hours staring at this painting trying to find Dracula's lair. I think you were right—" he stops in front of a large painting at the end of the hall, nothing more than a map of Transylvania. "—quite literally, I think this is the door. He just didn't know how to open it." The map was detailed down to the last town, and it felt smooth under Mar's fingers as she reaches out to run a hand over it. She didn't remember this from her years spent here as a human, but she was still missing some pieces.

"Of course, what better place to hide something than the place no one thinks to look at and even if they did look, how would you open a painting," Mari smiles, catching on to her brother's idea even if her phrasing was a bit odd.

"Look," Carl points," it's a Latin inscription, maybe it works like that painting in the tower." It took Mari a moment to figure out which painting he meant before putting it down to that one he'd shown Van Helsing and Anna that had a vampire and werewolf in it.

"If this were a door my father would have opened it long ago," Anna says impatiently, wanting to get moving again.

"I can't finish the inscription, there's a piece missing." Gabriel smiles in relief, pulling out something silver from the inside of his coat, the silver thing holding a long bit of brittle parchment, ragged at the edges and the same color as the painting.

"You father didn't have this," he says with a look over his shoulder at the princess. He hands the parchment down to Carl, who presses it into the missing corner, reading the Latin quickly.

"Deum lacessat ac ianum imbeat aperiri."

"In the name of God, open this door." Slowly, with the sound of crackling ice, the painting begins to melt away until it's been entirely replaced by a mirror.

Wait, what?