The castle is too quiet now that the Pet is gone. It made no difference when Dracula left for London, even when he was at home it was like he was not really there. But the Pet was marvelous. My sisters did not make as much of him as I did, but to me he was something precious. Even better than a child.

While my sisters roll their eyes and snap their fingers and play impatient games of cards when they would rather be hunting, I wander the castle looking in all of his favourite hiding places. I find cupboards where he managed to scavenge some shrivelled vegetable to gnaw on. We kept forgetting to feed him. We only ever think of play. I find the boltholes where he would try to cram himself in to sleep, thick with the animal scent of his fear and loathing. Some of them are still bear tantalising traces of blood.

Finally, when the sisters can bear my sulking no longer, they put down the cards. They bar my usual path through the castle.

“Tonight we go out,” they say. “And everybody dies.”

“Everybody?” I say, with the merest pout. Sometimes they say everybody, but they only mean one house, and they tease me for being greedy.

“Everybody.” They make a fuss of me, petting me and pulling my hair.  I cannot resist for long. We go out.

Far below us, the town of Bukovina should be asleep, but they are all in their pretty stone church. It has stained glass windows and alcoves for statues of saints. Some of these we defaced or pulled down to smash on the cobbles long ago, but one or two remain.

The people are preparing for the midnight Mass. They think there is safety in numbers and that their beautiful building will protect them. But we sisters do not need to go in. We can smell the people inside, and the collective overwhelming odour of them is a sensory assault. I forget my hunger, as I wonder how they can withstand the heat and roar and stench of each other as they press into that building that seems too small to contain them all.

Was I ever like that?

My sisters are busy and when they come around the sides of the church and see that I have been daydreaming they screech and pinch my arms and cheeks until I cry. “You’re wasting time!”

“Do you remember what I was like when I was a little girl?”

This question throws them. They know what I’m going to ask, and they don’t want to give me the chance to get the words out. “Go on, light the byres, this is for you after all. Stop wool-gathering.”

“Why did he choose me?” I ask, holding the torch as if I’d never seen one before.

The sisters give me such a look, and I laugh. “He has his appetites.”

“I was just like that?”

“The same.”

“And you were too?”

“They’re all the same.”

I nod and touch the torch to the kindling my sisters have tucked around the church. We stand together in the courtyard in front of the beautiful hand carved doors and wait for them to realise they are burning so they can run out to us.

They are scared to come out. The people know we are out here, and they are torn between burning to death in innocence or fleeing the flames to face the uncertainty of the night, the possibilities of our embrace. We are but three women, we duck and weave through the shadows. We leave plenty of room between us to give the illusion of hope. Of escape.

We watch their terrified faces inside the church from the broken stained-glass windows, from the open door. We pace back and forth as if we are fish swimming in a garden pond, there is no rush, we have all night. We wait to see who will break first. It is a game.

The flames burn hotter and brighter, and the screams begin to change from fear to pain. The smells change from the nasty animal smell of working bodies and unwashed clothing to fear sweat and cooking meat.

The first one to run is a man who pushes an old woman down onto the searing flagstones so that she burns her hands as she tries to save herself in the fall. He runs into the inky night, and I catch him before he gets even halfway across the courtyard. It makes no difference. The dam is broken, he has broken the confidence of the herd. They pour out of the broiling church and we fall upon them.

They are tired, and hurt, and scared. They scatter and get turned around in the dark. We tear from them throats, and ears, and noses. Break ankles. Let them limp away while we drink from one and then drag them back to break the other leg. I hold the hair of a woman for my sister to drink. We put them in their own stocks and gibbets and swing them around and around.

We play all night.

A few scant hours before the dawn, as we are rounding up the last of them, I find the woman in a dead-end alleyway. She is trying to hide herself in a stack of old abandoned furniture behind the tavern. She can’t make herself fit and there is something wonderful and debased about watching her on all fours, marvelously round and soft, trying to cram herself in here and there, while trying to stifle her own cries like a baby.

I affect a moan, a dragging step, my own tears come so easily. It has always been so easy to summon tears.

“Help me,” I weep, “Isn’t there anyone who can help me?”

I know the woman has heard me. She has stopped her frantic rummaging among the debris of domesticity and is now peering out into the dark alleyway towards me with wide frightened eyes. She has stopped her own crying for a moment while she tries to assess the danger, whether I am really another person in need. I can see her at war with herself. There are two fat little dogs inside her, usually asleep beside the hearth of her heart; one is brave enough to save her, and one is noble enough to save another.

There are two wolves inside of me and they snap and tear at the walls of my chest to be let loose and eat and eat and eat.

“Hello?” She finally calls out in the most beautiful tremulous little voice of a housewife. “Hello, are you alone?”

“I’m all alone, and I’m hurt,” I moan, and stagger closer, “I think those women have killed me.”

I let myself stumble and fall to the floor. It is a new game I am playing. I shiver on the ground, covered in the blood of men and women and children, while the woman comes closer and I feel her arms slide around me and she is so warm. And she smells wonderful. I forget my hunger. I am overcome, for the first time, with love.

“Where are you hurt?” The woman clucks over me, breathless with fear. She half drags me back to her hiding place at the end of the alley. She is dismayed by my bare feet, my thin dress. She rubs my cold hands between her soft warm ones. 

“Who were they? Why is this happening?” I whisper. I want her to talk about how scared she is, I want her to talk about my sisters. About me, though she won’t realise it. About how terrible we are, how loathsome. I want her to describe how it felt in the church when they realised they were going to burn.

“They are just monsters,” the woman shrugs. “Dumb animals get in sometimes.”

It is not the answer I was looking forward to, and I must have failed to disguise my disappointment because the woman continues.

 “I know that at times like these it feels like God has abandoned us, but this is when he is the most important, because it is his love that will see us through.”

Her eye lands on my face and something sharpens, and I flinch. “What is your name? I don’t remember seeing you in the church?”

“Florina.” I murmur, demure, hiding my face behind my bloody hands in shame. “Please don’t judge me too harshly, but I wasn’t in the church. I have had a… fall from grace.”

“My name is Elena,” She said, “I can’t say that I approve but I also can’t say that it’s the first I’ve heard of such a thing.” She gave me a knowing little smile and gave my leg another one of those delicious maternal pats.

“What will we do now?”

“Wait until morning?” Elena sighs, “There isn’t long now, just a few short hours. They cannot abide God’s light. They have harassed us, never like this before, but they always leave well before morning. Perhaps the place they must hide themselves is far away.”

Elena’s guess is not far off. I am already overstaying; dawn is fast approaching, and my sisters will be anxious to leave. But this, this is something I have not felt in so long. I had not felt like this even with the pet Dracula had left us before he went to London.

“You remind me of my daughter.” Elena reaches out a hand to stroke my hair, “She has hair so much like yours. You could have been sisters.”

“Did something happen to her?” I ask, eager to know more, to insinuate myself ever further into the picture I was making of Elena’s life. I imagine her with two silly girls who looked just alike, who were so accomplished at everything they put their hands to. And then one night, while her mother was sleeping, one sister ate the other in a frenzy of hair pulling and nail gouging and then crept out to the waiting carriage to join the man who had been haunting her sticky dreams with writhing, bound, terrified sacrifices.

Elena blinks, and bites her lip, “She is still alive. Ioana is away visiting family. I just mean you’re alike.”

I take her hand in mine and squeeze it tight. “Tell me more about her, it will calm my nerves.”

“I think we should be quiet, at least until dawn.”

“I am in so much pain, Elena, please talk to me. Even if it is just a whisper, you are such a comfort to me.”

Elena clears her throat and looks doubtfully out into the night. In the distance, most of the screaming has died out and now only occasionally a shout rings out.

“Do you think we’re the only ones left?” I whisper. I watch her chin wobble for a moment but instead of crumble she gathers some fortitude within herself and rallies. Again I do not get the response I want.

“I’m sure there are yet some that survive. They won’t get everyone. We have a spark inside us that they cannot match.”

“God?” I ask, trying to sound pious but I am trying not to sneer, the word emerges from my throat in a peculiar warble.

“We are alive, and we want to protect the life we share.” Elena says with a firm voice, suggesting this was a stance she has had to defend before, “And I don’t believe that’s blasphemy, God gave us the spark. But they don’t have it, they can’t remember what it felt like. We are cups which may fill to overflow and fill other cups. Their cups have holes, and no matter what they pour into themselves they will never be satisfied.”

“Did you send Ioana away because she also had a fall from grace?” I ask. Elena looks at me, two wet eyes sharp and shining in the moonlight.

“My daughter is to be married, but she wanted to see her grandmother again before her vows. The old woman is too ill to travel, but they have always been very close. They share a kinship, a love of the old handmade lacework I have no patience for. I’m glad she will help it endure though.”

“Where does her grandmother live?”

“Why does that matter?” Elena asks. And then, “Is your wound still troubling you?”

“Of course.”

“Where are you hurt?” Elena reaches out again to touch me. My dress is stained red neck to ankle in swathes of blood, but none of it was mine. I let her soft hands press firmly into me here and there, bringing the vulnerable parts of her close to me. “I cannot find any wound on you.”

“No.”

“Aren’t you cold in that thin dress, soaked to the skin like that?”

“No.”

Elena sighs, so tired and afraid and lovely. “Why pretend at all?”

“All we think of is play,” I console her, wrapping my own strong arms around her. “and we’ve had such a wonderful time together.”

I feel Elena shudder in my embrace, “You’re mad, I was a fool to think I could reason with you, appeal to the woman in you.”

I laugh in surprise, “Is that what you were doing? Oh, no. You have wasted your final hours, if that was what you were doing, appealing to some finer feeling in me.”

“I don’t think so.” Elena pushes at me, disgusted by my clinging grasp but unconcerned apparently by my words. “I’m an old woman. A widow. My daughter is grown and engaged; I’ve seen to her. I wonder how many good people, men and women with their little children escaped tonight because you sat here in this alleyway playing your silly little game with me?”

My jaw snaps shut and a glowing coal of fury roars to a fire in my belly. My sisters promised everyone. I was the one who wandered off and became distracted by this creature. This animal.

I spring upon her, and she barely fights me. Another frustration. She will never give me what I want. I want her to scream and thrash, claw at me with her nails. I want her to cry and pray. I want her to pray for her God to save her and realise that he can’t. It is my favourite thing when the light of their faith goes out of them, and they give up, and they think their entire life has been a lie and the animal takes over instead. They become creatures of rage and spite, furious not only of the injustice of their deaths, but of the waste of everything they were forced to go without, the pleasures that were withheld from them. The lies they believed without question. It all comes roaring to the fore in those final moments.

But Elena merely lies there, as immoveable as stone, her eyes locked on the horizon, awaiting the light of God to vindicate her.

When I rejoin my sisters they are furious. They will not even speak to me. We barely make it back to our resting places before the light of the morning becomes intolerable.

It takes all three of us a long time to recover from the return journey, and even then, once they have heard my story, they are enraged with me all over again. To endanger them so, for one old woman. All of that work, all of that death, what should have been a night of glorious excess, and still I was not satisfied?

I cannot stop thinking about Elena. I love her and hate her in equal measure. I wish I had not killed her. I wish that I had brought her back to the castle and kept her like the Pet; except that I would have fed her. I could have talked to her more, made her tell me more about Ioana.

Perhaps I can find her. When news travels of the tragedy that has befallen the Church in Bukovina, Ioana is sure to come home for mourning.

She could be my sister.