Chapter 5: Meet the Children

I'm so bad, I'm already breaking my promise to myself about updates (I haven't even gotten a quarter of the way through Ch. 9. Major writer's block. Urgh.). But, people are being really nice with the reviews and this was a fun chapter to write. I love it when my characters fight.

Inside, I went spinning through the air as Dracula flung me across the front hall. A stone pillar halted my flight abruptly with a sickening crack and I spent the next few second looking at the stars that seemed to hover in front of my face. They were really pretty, actually. Lucky for me, I hadn't hit the pillar head-on, more of a bounce off the side that still made me a little dizzy.

"WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!?" Dracula screamed at me. I got quite a good view of all his fangs and couldn't stop from shaking in sight of his full-blown demonic rage. "YOU WOULD HAVE DIED!" I dodged his wings and scrambled clumsily to my feet, still slightly woozy. As I did, I grew my own wings, not so much for using them as for reassurance.

"Yes, and that would have ruined your plans. I know!" I snarled. "But you listen to ME Dracula," and I sent the winged vampire a glare that would turn the dead in their graves, "I don't CARE about any of your plans and I will NOT. BE. USED!" I fanned my wings in anger and we glared at each other in a battle of wills.

Which was probably one of the stupidest things I've ever done. I lowered my eyes first and spun around to leave the hall.

Only I ran smack into something bulbous and slimy. I drew back in disgust. And noticed similar sacks hung all over the walls.

"What are those?" I cried.

"Ah," said the Count, resting a now-human hand on my shoulder. "Let me introduce you to my children. Of course," his voice held a trace of bitterness in it, "they are dead."

"Your children!?" I retracted my wings in surprise, surveying the seemingly endless rows of sacs, wombs, I realized in horror. If these little monstrosities were ever alive… I didn't want to finish that thought.

"At the moment, I do not know how to give them life," he said. I turned. He was staring up at the sacs with a hint of regret in his eyes. I felt sorry for him. Wait, no! I didn't! But then again…

"I'm sorry," I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. This time, it was he who looked at me in surprise.

"Do you really?" he asked softly, his eyes glinting. I looked down at the floor.

"I…I don't really know. But, I can imagine it must be hard, and if not for you then for your brides, to birth only dead children time and again. Painful."

Dracula looked at me intently. "Who did you know who could not have a child?"

That startled me. "How did you…?"

He tapped the side of his head with one finger. "The mind bond, my dear Destiny. I can sense your thoughts, remember."

"Oh. Right. There was a servant in the castle, Katrina, who was rendered barren by a fever she contracted when she was about my age. Since she desperately wanted a child but could not have one of her own, or so goes what I've been told, she found another woman who was expecting. This woman wasn't from the village and could not keep her child, because she was not married. See," I explained, "if she returned to her village with a baby, she would be forever shamed, and shunned. No man would ever marry her." I realized that Dracula was listening to my story with great interest and continued.

"Katrina agreed to take the woman's child when she gave birth, which was not too far off, and after a couple weeks the woman gave birth to a baby girl, whom Katrina adopted. Now mind you, Katrina was very religious. She believed that fate brought the child to her, that it was her destiny. So that's what she named her surrogate daughter. That's what I've been told all my life." I blinked in confusion. "I don't know why I told you that last part."

The Count shrugged. Well, I hadn't felt him tamper with my mind at all. Maybe I was too suspicious of him.

Paranoid, almost.

Well, maybe not paranoid.

Yet.

"I guess I just got carried away." I said. "Excuse me…my Lord." I added, almost sarcastically as I dipped a small curtsy and left the room, still aching from my impact with the pillar and still furious with him, no matter what the state of his kids. Rounding a corner, I found him staring at a painting on the wall. Conveniently, he was standing in the middle of the hallway.

"Urg!" I cried in exasperation. "Would you stop doing that!?" He tucked a piece of black hair behind his ear and raised his eyebrows.

"I have the right to move as I will throughout my own castle," he said mildly. I narrowed my eyes at him.

"That's not what I meant and you know it." I shook a finger at him in annoyance. "Hmph. You are decidedly the most bothersome, annoying, irritating person I have ever had the displeasure of knowing!"

"You really should stop being so complimentary my dear." Dracula grasped the hand I'd been gesticulating with and kissed the back of it lightly. I pulled it out of his grasp with an oath.

"Damn it Dracula, stop doing that as well!" He smiled down at me. I really hated being shorter than him. I hated being shorter that everyone for that matter, but him especially.

"What a nice change it is," he said in his heavily accented voice, "To hear you speak my name so passionately."

I sucked in my breath as my cheeks flamed, my temper rising further. "Don't even go there Vladislaus Dracula!" I hissed. I pushed him hard enough to sent him back a few paces. "You may be a vampire, but that gives you no right to toy with me like this. And don't even think for a second that you can scare me into submission again!"

"Is that a challenge?"

C'mon, review. You know you want to. (because that's the only way I'll post the next chapter anytime soon. And yes, that is blackmail.) Please?