**Scene 1: The Road to Rome**
The journey south from Paris took eleven days.
Frederick rode alone. He changed horses three times—once in Lyon, once in Turin, once again at the edge of the Papal States—always paying in silver that bore no mint mark anyone could trace. The wounds on his chest had closed enough to stop bleeding freely, but every jolt of the saddle pulled the half-healed claw marks open again. He bound them each morning with strips of linen soaked in brandy and ignored the way the fabric stuck to the raw edges by nightfall.
The ring on his right hand never left his finger. He caught himself turning it in the dark more than once, feeling the raised dragon crest press into his palm like a brand that refused to cool.
By the time the domes of Rome rose out of the haze, the air had turned heavy with summer heat and the smell of the Tiber. Frederick entered the city through the Porta del Popolo just after dusk, coat buttoned high to hide the stained bandages, hat pulled low. No one stopped him. No one ever did when he walked like a man who already belonged to the grave.
He did not go to an inn. He went straight to the small, unmarked door set into the eastern wall of the Vatican gardens—the door that opened only for those who carried the right blood, the right scars, or the right kind of emptiness.
A novice in a plain black cassock was waiting. The boy's eyes flicked once over Frederick's blood-stiff coat and then away, as if the sight itself might stain his soul.
"His Eminence is expecting you," the novice whispered. "This way."
**Scene 2: The Candlelit Chamber**
The chamber was deep beneath the Apostolic Palace, reachable only by a sequence of descending corridors that smelled of old incense, damp stone, and the faint metallic tang of holy water left too long in silver bowls.
Cardinal Jinette sat behind a long table of black oak. A single iron candelabra burned at his left elbow, throwing restless gold light across maps, sealed letters, and a shallow wooden box lined with dark velvet. The cardinal was older than the last time Frederick had seen him—thinner, the skin of his face drawn tight over sharp bones, eyes the colour of wet slate. The scarlet of his robes looked almost black in the low light.
He did not rise when Frederick entered.
"Close the door," Jinette said.
Frederick obeyed. The heavy oak settled into its frame with a sound like a tomb sealing.
For a long moment the only noise was the soft spit of candle wax and the distant drip of water somewhere in the walls. Frederick remained standing, coat still on, hat in one hand. Blood had seeped through the bandages again during the final hours of travel; a dark, irregular stain marked the left side of his shirt where the deepest claw mark still wept.
Jinette's gaze moved over that stain with deliberate slowness.
"You look worse than usual," the cardinal said at last. His voice was quiet, precise, the voice of a man who had spent decades deciding which lives were worth the cost of saving. "Hyde?"
"Dead."
"How?"
"From the roof of Notre-Dame. The fall finished what the silver started."
Jinette inclined his head a fraction. "Efficient. Messy. Typical of you." He gestured to the chair opposite the table. "Sit before you bleed on the floor. The servants already dislike cleaning up after your visits."
Frederick sat. The movement pulled at the wounds; he kept his face still. Jinette watched the small tightening around his mouth with something that was not quite concern and not quite hunger.
"Show me," the cardinal said.
Frederick did not pretend to misunderstand. He unbuttoned the coat, then the waistcoat, then the ruined shirt. The linen bandages were stiff with dried blood and brandy. He unwound them slowly. The four parallel furrows across his chest were still raw, the edges puffy and dark. One had begun to knit; the other three remained open enough to show the pale gleam of rib beneath.
Jinette rose and came around the table. He did not ask permission. He simply leaned in, close enough that Frederick could smell the faint scent of myrrh and old parchment that clung to the cardinal's robes. A cool, dry finger traced the air just above the deepest cut—never quite touching, yet close enough that Frederick felt the ghost of pressure.
"He marked you thoroughly," Jinette murmured. "Did the violence… affect you?"
Frederick's jaw flexed once. "It always does."
"Yes." The cardinal's eyes flicked lower for a fraction of a second, then returned to the wounds. "I am aware."
He stepped back, returned to his chair, and opened the wooden box. Inside, nestled on the velvet, lay a fragment of canvas no larger than a man's open hand. The edges were ragged, as though the painting had been torn rather than cut. What remained showed part of a dark landscape, a broken tower, and—most clearly—a coiled dragon worked in gold leaf and deep crimson. The dragon's eye was a single chip of black enamel.
Jinette turned the fragment so the candlelight caught the gold.
"Do you recognise it?"
Frederick's right hand closed around the ring without conscious thought. The crest on the band was identical—same coil, same angle of the head, same single black eye.
"Yes," he said.
"Good. Then we may begin."
**Scene 3: The Mission**
Jinette poured two measures of dark wine from a crystal decanter. He slid one glass across the table. Frederick did not touch it.
"Edward Nicolas," the cardinal said. "You have heard the name."
"Vampire. Old. Transylvania. The Church has failed to kill him for three centuries."
"Four," Jinette corrected. "And we have not merely failed. We have been… prevented. Every hunter we sent either died or turned. One returned to Rome with his own heart in his hands as a gift. Another wrote a letter in the blood of his entire team before hanging himself from the rafters of St. Peter's." He steepled his fingers. "Nicolas is not merely old. He is protected by something older still."
Frederick waited.
Jinette continued, voice low and even. "In the year of Our Lord 1462, a Wallachian noble named Valerious the Elder made a vow before the altar of this very Church. His bloodline would not enter the Kingdom of Heaven until the monster known as Edward Nicolas was destroyed. The vow was accepted. It has never been broken. And it has never been fulfilled."
He tapped the painting fragment.
"This is all that remains of the original portrait commissioned to mark the vow. The rest was burned when Valerious's own son—Nicolas—sold his soul for immortality and turned on his father. The dragon crest was the family seal. Your ring carries the same seal. We do not know why. We only know that every time we have tried to learn the truth of your past, the records vanish or the men who read them die."
Frederick's voice was flat. "What do you want from me?"
"The last two living descendants of Valerious the Elder are in Transylvania. A sister and a brother—Elizabeth and William Richard. Their castle is the final stronghold of the bloodline. Nicolas has begun moving against them in earnest. If they die before he does, the vow remains unfulfilled and their souls are lost. If Nicolas dies, the vow is completed and the bloodline is freed."
Jinette leaned forward. The candlelight carved deep shadows under his eyes.
"You will go to Transylvania. You will protect the last of the Valerious line. And you will kill Edward Nicolas by any means necessary. The Holy See will supply what it can—weapons, silver, the services of one Brother Matthias, an inventive and moderately blasphemous friar who has proven useful with experimental ordnance. The rest is yours to determine."
Frederick looked at the painting fragment, then at the ring on his own hand. The dragon stared back at him with its single black eye.
"And if I refuse?"
Jinette's mouth curved in something too thin to be called a smile. "You will not refuse. You never have. The emptiness inside you requires feeding, Frederick. Monsters are the only meat that satisfies it. We both know this."
Silence stretched between them. Somewhere in the walls a rat scratched. The candles hissed.
Frederick reached for the wine at last and drank. It tasted of dust and old grapes and the faint metallic edge of the silver cup it had been stored in.
"When do I leave?"
"At dawn. A carriage will be waiting at the Porta Angelica. Brother Matthias will meet you there with the necessary supplies. You will travel under the identity of a papal courier. No one will question you until you reach the Carpathians. After that…" Jinette spread his hands. "After that you will be in Nicolas's country. Questions become secondary to survival."
**Scene 4: The Weight of the Ring**
Jinette rose again and walked to a side cabinet. He returned with a small leather portfolio and a folded map of the Transylvanian territories, the borders inked in fading red. He spread the map across the table, weighting the corners with the wine glasses and the wooden box.
"Castle Valerious stands here." He touched a point high in the mountains. "Castle Nicolas is three leagues east, built into the cliff face above the river. Between them lies a village that has already begun to empty. The brides are hunting. Three of them, according to the last report that reached us. Seraphina, Lilith, and Morgana. They are… enthusiastic in their methods."
Frederick studied the map. His fingertip traced the thin line of the road that wound up into the high passes. The claw marks on his chest throbbed in time with his pulse.
Jinette's voice softened, almost intimate. "You are still bleeding."
"It will close."
"Allow me."
Before Frederick could answer, the cardinal had taken a clean length of linen from a drawer and a small stoppered bottle of clear liquid that smelled sharply of alcohol and something herbal. He came around the table once more. This time he did not ask. He simply began to clean the wounds with careful, precise movements.
The alcohol burned like fresh fire. Frederick's breath left him in a controlled hiss. Jinette's fingers were steady, almost gentle, pressing the cloth into the deepest cut until the bleeding slowed. The cardinal's face was close enough that Frederick could see the fine network of broken capillaries in the whites of his eyes, the thin scar that ran through one eyebrow, the way the man's gaze kept drifting from the wounds to the hard line of Frederick's abdomen and lower.
"You should not travel with these open," Jinette said quietly. "Infection in the mountains is a death sentence."
"I have survived worse."
"I am aware." The cardinal finished binding the wounds with practised efficiency, knotting the linen firmly. His knuckles brushed the bare skin just above Frederick's waistband once—deliberately or by accident, it was impossible to tell. "There. That will hold until you reach the first safe house."
Frederick began to rebutton his shirt. Jinette did not step back immediately. He remained close, one hand still resting on the edge of the table, the other curled loosely at his side.
"The ring," the cardinal said. "Does it ever speak to you?"
"No."
"Dreams?"
Frederick's fingers stilled on a button. "Sometimes."
"What do you see?"
"Blood. A woman with dark hair. A man whose face I cannot remember. Fire. And a voice that calls me by a name that is not mine."
Jinette's eyes gleamed in the candlelight. "What name?"
Frederick met his gaze. "I forget it the moment I wake."
The cardinal nodded slowly, as if the answer confirmed something he had long suspected. He finally stepped away and returned to his chair.
"Brother Matthias has prepared a set of weapons designed specifically for Nicolas's… peculiarities. Silver is useful against the lesser spawn, but Nicolas himself has grown resistant. You will need more creative solutions. The friar will explain."
Frederick finished dressing. The bandages pulled with every breath, a constant reminder of the body he inhabited and the emptiness that lived inside it.
"Is there anything else?" he asked.
Jinette hesitated. For the first time that night the carefully maintained mask of ecclesiastical authority slipped, revealing something older and more personal.
"Yes," he said. "Come back. Whatever happens in those mountains—whether you kill Nicolas or he kills you—leave enough of yourself intact to return to Rome. The Church has few instruments as effective as you. I would prefer not to lose this one."
Frederick stood. He collected his hat and the painting fragment, sliding the canvas carefully into an inner pocket of his coat. The dragon crest on the ring seemed to warm against his finger, as if it recognised its painted twin.
"I make no promises," he said.
Jinette's mouth twitched. "You never do."
**Scene 5: The Long Corridor**
The same novice waited outside the chamber to escort him back through the labyrinth of corridors. Frederick walked in silence. The boy kept glancing at the fresh bandages visible through the half-buttoned shirt and then quickly away, cheeks colouring.
At the unmarked door that led to the gardens, Frederick paused. The night air was cooler here, scented with orange blossom and the distant smoke of the city's evening fires.
"Tell His Eminence the map was accurate," Frederick said. "And that the wine was acceptable."
The novice blinked. "Yes, signore."
Frederick stepped out into the dark. The door closed behind him with the same final sound as before.
He stood alone among the clipped hedges and marble saints for several minutes, letting the night settle around him. The wounds on his chest ached with a deep, steady pulse. The ring felt heavier than it had that morning. Somewhere beyond the walls of the Vatican, the city of Rome continued its ancient, indifferent life—lovers in the alleys, priests at their prayers, monsters of the ordinary human kind going about their business under the same stars that had watched empires rise and fall.
Frederick touched the pocket that held the painting fragment.
Edward Nicolas.
The name sat in his mind like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples outward into places he could not yet see.
He turned up the collar of his coat and began walking toward the Porta Angelica. Dawn was still hours away. The carriage would be waiting. Brother Matthias would be waiting. The road to Transylvania would be waiting.
And beyond that road, in the high dark of the Carpathians, something that had once worn the same dragon crest as the ring on Frederick's hand was waiting as well.
The emptiness inside him stirred, hungry and familiar.
He walked on.
**Scene 6: The Hours Before Dawn**
Frederick did not sleep.
He found a narrow room above a closed bookshop near the river—one of the anonymous places the Church kept for men like him—and spent the remaining hours of the night cleaning his weapons by the light of a single candle. The silver spear-tip of his cane had been damaged in the fight with Hyde; he filed the edge until it was sharp again. The blessed chain he coiled and uncoiled until the links ran through his fingers like cold water.
Every so often he took the painting fragment from his pocket and laid it beside the ring. The two dragons stared at each other across the scarred wooden table. Identical. Impossible.
He thought of Jinette's fingers on his skin, the way the cardinal's eyes had lingered, the careful pressure of the bandage. He thought of Hyde's final laugh as he fell. He thought of the woman with dark hair who sometimes appeared in his dreams, her mouth moving around a name he could never keep.
When the sky beyond the small window began to pale, Frederick rose, rewound the bandages one final time, and dressed in fresh clothes that had been left for him—black trousers, black shirt, a coat of heavier wool suited to mountain weather. He slipped the painting fragment into a waterproof oilskin pouch and secured it inside his coat. The ring he left where it had always been.
At the door he paused and looked back at the narrow room. It already felt like a place he had never been.
He stepped out into the grey light of early morning and walked toward the Porta Angelica, where a plain black carriage waited with its lamps unlit and its driver silent. A second figure stood beside the open door—a man in a friar's habit, stocky, red-bearded, eyes bright with a mixture of curiosity and irreverent humour. A heavy satchel hung from one shoulder, clinking softly with the sound of metal and glass.
Brother Matthias grinned when he saw Frederick approaching.
"You must be the famous monster-hunter," the friar said. "I was told to expect a man who looks like he has already died twice and is considering a third attempt. The description fits."
Frederick stopped in front of him. "You're Matthias."
"Brother Matthias, if we're being formal. Which I prefer not to be after the first five minutes. Climb in. We have a long road and I have several highly experimental devices I would like to explain before one of them accidentally removes your remaining limbs."
Frederick glanced once more toward the walls of the Vatican, then stepped into the carriage.
The door closed. The driver flicked the reins. The wheels began to turn.
Rome fell away behind them in the growing light.
Ahead lay the mountains, the last of the Valerious bloodline, and a vampire lord who had already outlived every hunter the Church had ever sent.
Frederick settled back against the hard seat, felt the pull of the fresh bandages, and closed his eyes.
The emptiness inside him smiled in the dark.
It was almost time to feed.