Page 20 of The Curse of Eternity (Descendants of Helsing #1)

A Meaningless Identity

Shifting metallic thuds jostled me awake.

At first, I couldn’t place where or even who I was.

Excruciating body aches set in. That’s right, I passed out at some point after my brain was fried with head-splitting agony.

Something smelled awful. When I pried my heavy eyelashes apart, the slick sensation of sweat covering me from head to toe settled over me like a film.

Great, the bad smell was me .

Arms trembling, I flexed my numb fingers, strung up high over my head. I didn’t have to look to know that the pinching clamp around my wrists were shackles. My mouth tasted like sawdust when I tried to swallow, but couldn’t manage it.

In the dim space, road noise pierced through the cold hard walls. Was I inside some kind of a vehicle? My vision slowly adapted to the surrounding darkness, but I startled when Drake spoke before I could even recognize his silhouette across from me.

“I am terribly sorry,” he whispered, and despite the exhaustion vibrating through every word, I’d have recognized his accent anywhere. “Never did I wish for you to become involved. For any harm to come to you.”

Caught way off guard by his quiet sincerity, I blinked several times through the sweat rolling down my brow, and licked my dry lips. It didn’t help that my tongue felt like sandpaper, so I cleared my sore throat instead.

“What’s going on?” I rasped, and then my sweat chilled like droplets of ice. “Those vampires. They took us, right? I—” Panic threatened to drag me under, but I needed to pull it together. This wasn’t the time to break. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“We will be executed,” Drake answered, and my heart dropped while my brain whirred.

Ever since I started hunting, I knew my life could end at a moment’s notice.

A razor’s edge my ancestors had walked along for generations.

Too many had slipped off, and now I would become one of the fallen .

Then Drake’s brief explanation before we were ambushed surged to the forefront of my mind.

Apparently, Van Helsing hadn’t succeeded as much as we’d thought.

“By the Domnitori?” I suppressed a shiver while my freezing bare arms shook against my restraints.

Through the darkness, Drake’s gaze held mine as he shook his head.

Despite not knowing anything about the vampire overlords, that felt like a relief.

A stuttered breath passed my lips, and I closed my eyes. “Then where are we going?”

“To New York,” he answered, and my eyes flew open. “It is where the Cneaz resides year-round. Our journey north will only grow colder. I am sorry.” His attention flickered to the exposed flesh at my throat, and I could have sworn he swallowed as a chill traced my spine.

“So I’m going to die.” I exhaled a rough, hysterical laugh.

“And nobody back home will even know what happened to me.” For all my daring acceptance of the risks, the hunting lifestyle, I had hoped whatever end I met would be quick.

Not dragged out for months in a hospital room like Mom’s fate…

At least she had had the chance to say goodbye.

“Looks like I failed as badly as Helsing did.”

“What do you mean?” Drake asked, curiosity lacing his tone. I started to shrug, but the shackles restricted the gesture.

“He was supposed to end Dracula’s reign of terror, and he didn’t, not really.

Vampires are still out there, they continue to hurt people, and here I am.

” I savored the burn of cold air in my lungs.

It meant I was still breathing. “Being carted off by a bunch of bastard vamps who answer to some high-up aristocratic parasite.” My jaw clenched, and it was an effort to continue.

“Everything my family and I have sacrificed has been for nothing. We didn’t even know this kind of threat still walked the Earth. ”

“If it is any consolation, your ancestor did alter history for the better,” Drake pressed, and despite our reckless kiss in the park, I couldn’t understand why he seemed so intent on reassuring me of anything. “When I was young, I witnessed the acts of Vlad Dracula the Fourth—”

“What?” I squeaked, equally torn between being horrified, and awed. “You… You were alive back then?”

“I was one of the last of his chosen children.”

For a second, everything else left my head. Shock overshadowed the pain and aches, disappearing alongside my deep-seated terror. Sure, Drake was old, but I never expected this .

“That’s—” I cleared my throat. “Impressive.” When Drake briefly laughed, the sardonic sound managed to pull a smirk from my cracked lips.

“Hardly, and that is what I am attempting to explain. Most of us still existing today are from the same era. Very few immortals are created in this age, and your ancestor is to be thanked for that.” His words managed to warm the center of my heart, that there being less vampires was a good thing.

It helped, even if it only distracted me from our impending death for a moment.

A memory clicked into place, from before I left my family at the club, and drove to the Rio Bravo park where Drake awaited.

In hindsight, he must have known the other vampires and the sorcerer would come for him.

Except that wasn’t what made me pause. It was another player on the field whose nosy involvement hadn’t made any sense before.

Carefully, I wiggled my hips to figure out if that little orb the faery gave me was still nestled safely in my pocket and—miraculously—it was.

Hope surged, my breathing sped up, but I tamped it down before I could give anything away. My hearing picked up every pot-hole and passing car on the road. I would bet the vampire driving this— van? —had superior hearing even to a descendant of Helsing.

Coming up with a plan would have to wait, so I refocused on the conversation at hand, and asked, “How is that possible? And why aren’t there any new vampires being made?”

When the van jostled, I stifled a shriek as the shackles pulled at the sores forming across my wrist bones. Drake’s brow pinched, concern crossing his features while I breathed through the pain.

“It was made illegal shortly after Dracula suffered his final death, sometime around seventeen-fifty-two.” Drake’s tone was perfunctory, like talking about what happened almost three hundred years ago was inconsequential.

Maybe that’s what it was like to survive for so long.

The impact of events packed less of a punch.

“Why? Their whole plan was for world domination, wasn’t it?” At least, that’s what I’d been raised to believe Dracula had been after.

“Once their voievod, Dracula, was gone, the Domnitori acted as a council to lead the remaining immortals. Many of them ‘saw the writing on the wall,’ so to speak. They feared human invention, the acceleration at which it was progressing, and opted to enact a law of secrecy.”

“The vampire leaders…fear us ?” I balked, but Drake nodded.

“Perhaps they can terrorize and torment the few, charm those who fight against them—but the entirety of the human population?” Drake scoffed, his lip curling.

“Dracula only believed it was possible because he existed during the aftermath of the Black Death. When humans fell left and right like flies, their numbers in Europe decimated with the ease of neglect. Many of his council came long after, nearing the industrial age, and they were right to be afraid.”

Flooded with too many revelations, I blurted, “My… My family always told the story like Dracula was given his immortality by the devil.” Part of me needed to know, if only to ground myself, just how much I’d been misled to believe—or chose to ignore.

“Grandpa explained that there were three brothers, the sons of Vlad the Impaler…”

Being a story I’d been told since childhood, the rehearsed words flowed easily off my tongue.

“The oldest was Mihnea, followed by Alexandru, and then finally Dracula. When the Impaler died, Mihnea was too sickly to take the throne of Wallachia, a failing kingdom already. Except Dracula wanted to rule instead, so badly that he made a deal with the devil for immortality, speed, strength, heightened senses…” Everything that made vampires the monsters who preyed on people.

“He received it, yet it came at a price,” Drake continued on my behalf, and my gaze shot to his.

Dark eyes bore into mine, and my stomach warmed beneath his unwavering attention.

“Consuming the life blood of others was key to maintaining such ‘eternal youth.’ Under the rays of sunlight, our true ages are revealed which cast us as skeletal creatures—held together by magick and wicked deeds.”

A small, sardonic grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.

“With his newfound strength, Dracula bested his elder brother, Alexandru, yet lost interest in Wallachia when he set his sights on more . Whether that was the continent, or the globe in its entirety, I have no clue. The world seemed smaller in those days.”

“Except Alexandru didn’t die,” I argued through a cough, my parched mouth almost at its limit.

The distraction of our conversation was the only thing keeping my thoughts from spiraling, so I clung to my family’s oral history instead of acknowledging whatever future laid ahead.

“During his final breaths, he was visited by the archangel, Michael, and given a similar version of immortality.

But his came with an expiration date. That was the balance, or something.

Over the centuries, he eventually took on a new name—Abraham Van Helsing.

“Once he killed Dracula, he aged like any ordinary man. That’s how I came to be…

” It was how Grandpa always ended the story, impressing onto us, even as kids, that we were part of a great legacy.

One which led to Helsing’s great descendant being chained up in a van, driven across the country by vampires and some asshole sorcerer.