Chapter One
I smelled our destination before I saw it. The stench was as bad as a battlefield, all raw viscera, blood and excrement, but the sounds were worse. Far worse.
I stopped at the bottom of a hill to pull the end of my headscarf over my nose. I was dressed as a Romanian peasant woman, because noble ladies didn’t go running around the countryside in this era. And because the headscarf helped to hide my blonde curls and shaded my blue eyes, while the shapeless brown dress made me almost invisible in the deep woods. The scarf was also proving useful as a face mask, not that it helped much.
A woman screamed in the distance and I flinched, and grabbed hold of a tree.
There was no way I wasn’t going to be sick.
“Cassie?” The man I was with turned back from a perch near the top of the hill. It backed up to the forest, but on the other side was open country leading to a small city, or so I’d been told. Fortunately, I couldn’t see anything from here.
If my companion was bothered by the carnage on the other side, he gave no sign. Quite the contrary. He looked better than I’d ever seen him: youthful and energized, with the dark brown eyes sparkling, the sun-kissed skin flushed and rosy, and the mahogany colored hair, usually so tightly confined, flowing freely on the breeze.
He almost looked human again.
Of course, Mircea Basarab, one-time prince, and current member of the North American Vampire Senate, was usually as cool as a cucumber. It was one reason he’d been tapped to lead the vampire army in the ongoing war. He was also originally from our present bit of hell: old Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania, but in this era a smaller, wilder, and far more vicious place.
I flinched as another scream shredded the air, punctuating my thoughts.
“Are you all right?” Mircea called back, as if wondering why I was hugging a tree instead of climbing up beside him. I refrained from shooting him the bird—double handed—because that would have necessitated letting go of said tree, which would have resulted in me face planting in the muck. But my expression must have been eloquent, because he started to climb back down.
I watched him come and didn’t bother to wipe off my scowl.
My name is Cassie Palmer, the time traveling, ghost whispering, chief seer of the supernatural world, a job description that sounds way more fun than it actually is. Meaning that, in the five months since I took office, I’d seen some shit. And smelled some, too, I thought, as the wind changed, bringing yet more evidence that, yes, people do soil themselves when they die, especially when they die screaming on the end of a sharpened pike, because a madman related to my current travel partner had decided that he didn’t like their nose or something.
But today was kind of extreme, even for me.
Vlad III of Romania, the man history knows as Dracula, was better known in his own day as Vlad ?epe?, “The Impaler.” And he’d really earned the title. Nobody had any idea how many people he’d killed by his favorite torture method, but it was a lot, possibly as many as eighty thousand over the course of his short reign.
It sounded like half of them were on the other side of the hill. Possibly with their pikes—long, sharpened poles on which they were destined to writhe their last—arranged in pretty geometric shapes so that their nut job of a lord could admire the effect from the tower of his castle. I didn’t know, because I wasn’t going up there.
I wasn’t going anywhere except back home.
Seriously, screw this!
“Cassie.” A strong hand, sun bronzed despite the fact that its owner had been dead for something like six centuries, grasped my arm.
Good, that makes it easier, I thought, and prepared to shift us out.
“You promised me.” The dark brown eyes were calm and steady on mine.
I arrested the spell part way though, long enough to glare at him. “I said we’d see! We’ve seen.”