A Mad Vampire Fell for Me

"Hey. Are you sure about this? Something feels off. Maybe we should just go back." Leo Ashford kept his voice low. The whole area had a wrong feel to it. Broad daylight overhead, sun blazing, and not a single ray reaching the ground. The trees were too tall and too dense, their canopy swallowing the sky whole. Cold seeped up from the earth. And the silence, there was no silence like this. No birds. No insects. Nothing rustling in the underbrush. Dead quiet. As if nothing alive had ever passed this way. Rowan Nash had steady nerves and a hunger for adrenaline. He'd been to more so-called haunted sites than he could count, and a few days ago a post had crossed his feed about a castle deep in this forest. A castle of horrors. He was sold before he finished the first paragraph. His usual horror-hunting partner was laid up sick. But Rowan was itching to go and couldn't sit still. He argued, begged, and wore down every objection until his childhood friend Leo finally caved and agreed to come along. And now Leo wanted to turn back. Rowan was not having it. "Relax. I've been to a hundred places people swore were terrifying, and I'm still standing, aren't I?" Rowan kept moving. Leo stuck close, dread burrowing deeper into him with every step, a low murmur trailing at Rowan's back. "Can we go back? Rowan. Something's really wrong here. Please. Can we just go?" Rowan knew Leo was timid. He wouldn't have brought him at all if his regular partner hadn't gotten sick. The fact that Leo had agreed spoke to how solid their friendship was. He sighed. "But we haven't even seen the castle yet. Turning back now, it just feels like giving up." He tried a compromise. "We find the castle, take one look from outside, and we go. We don't go in. Deal?" Leo wanted out. Badly. But Rowan had already met him halfway, and pushing harder might backfire. He nodded. "We find it, we see it, we leave. No sticking around." "Deal." Rowan answered way too fast. They pushed deeper into the woods. A dark angle of roofline broke through the canopy in the distance, and Rowan lit up. "Look. Leo. Right there. You see it?" Leo squinted. A black roof barely distinguishable from the dark tangle of the trees. It radiated something deeply unfriendly. But he'd made a promise. "Let's hurry up and look, and then go home. I mean it. I'm scared." "Yeah, yeah. Coward." Rowan's mouth kept up the act while his feet picked up speed. The castle rose before them. Black from its foundations to its spires. Every stone, every tile, every visible surface the same uninterrupted black, so black that the windows set into the walls nearly disappeared if you didn't search for them. The curtains were drawn tight. The interior gave away nothing. But one of them seemed to stir, a fractional movement, as though someone stood behind it watching the trespassers. Stare straight at it, though, and the movement was gone. The curtain hung still. No face looked out. The castle, like the forest that held it, gave off no trace of life. It didn't feel asleep. It felt dead. The black of the structure radiated cold and ill omen. No vines scaled its walls. Through the gaps in the tall iron gate, the courtyard beyond lay bare and empty. The ironwork on the gate was ornate and dense with patterns that read as ancient, aristocratic. The only color across the entire structure was a pair of dark red gems worked into the lock. One on the left, one on the right. From a distance they looked exactly like a pair of eyes, fixed on whoever approached. Stare back too long and your skin began to crawl. Leo was shivering. He had an overactive imagination and a gift for scaring himself half to death. In the time it took Rowan to walk a slow circuit around the castle, Leo had worked himself into a cold sweat. Rowan seemed to have seen enough. Leo seized the opening. "Let's go. Please. I can't do this anymore. This place is terrifying. I keep feeling like someone's inside. Whoever lives here. We shouldn't have come." Rowan was skeptical. "Really? The post said no one lives here. Dead quiet, they said. People who went inside said there wasn't a trace of anyone ever staying there. Not a thing." "AHH—" A sharp cry split the air and Leo nearly jumped out of his skin. He and Rowan spun toward the sound at the same moment. A crow. Nothing but a crow, bursting from somewhere inside the castle and flapping away into the dark weave of the trees. Leo let out a breath. Rowan, seeing how badly shaken Leo was, didn't push for more. He started back the way they'd come. They never saw what happened after they turned. A curtain in one of the upper windows shifted, parting an inch. A single blood-red eye watched through the gap as the two figures retreated. The curtain fell shut. The red vanished. The castle settled back into its dead stillness. Once the only two living humans had cleared the forest, the heavy pall sank back over everything, smoothing away every trace of warmth and motion the trespassers had left behind. … Today was the day Dorian Vane returned to his birth family. He was the child who had been switched at birth in the Vane household, one of Port Haven's oldest and wealthiest families. Four years ago, the Vanes had tracked down the woman responsible for Lady Vane's near-fatal complications in childbirth. Under questioning, she had confessed to more. She had stolen the Vanes' newborn and replaced him with another infant. Her revenge. She had been dismissed by the family years before and had waited all this time to make them suffer. Getting caught, she said, had been part of the design. Let them know. Let them hurt. Dorian had been placed with a family so ordinary it left no mark. Not poor enough to go hungry, but with nothing left over for anything beyond the essentials. No margin for hobbies. No room to want. By coincidence, the family shared the name Vane. That spared him the trouble of a name change, at least. His first sixteen years had been unremarkable, even content. Only child. Good marks. Parents who loved him. Then, four years ago, the Vanes found him, and everyone learned the truth. The Vanes wanted their biological son back. They offered Dorian's adoptive parents a considerable sum. Generous compensation, they called it, for sixteen years of care. It was buyout money. Severance. Payment for the end of a family. As for the other child, Julian, the boy who had passed sixteen years as the pampered young master of the Vane estate, he was now, officially, the wrong child. The switched one. The adopted son. Julian had no intention of going back to an ordinary household. His biological parents wanted a clean exchange. He was their only child. If the Vanes took him, what would they have left? Who would care for them when they grew old? Who would sit at their bedsides when they died? The Vanes couldn't bear to give up Julian, the son they had raised. But neither could they leave Dorian, their actual blood, to grow up in someone else's house. A Vane heir belonged under a Vane roof. Neither side would bend. The dispute stretched four years. It took four years for Dorian Vane to finally walk through the doors of the family that had given him his name. "Sir. We're here." Dorian had been staring out the window, seeing nothing. The driver's voice pulled him back. "Oh. Right. Thank you." "Of course, sir." The driver lifted the luggage from the trunk. A butler stepped forward to take it, his smile warm but measured. "Sir. Please follow me."