The Vampire’s Babysitter

Vlad found me alone that evening.

“You are going to kill me,” he said. “And then I am going to leave.”

“You are going to take Ahmed?”

“Yes.”

“And you want a body for the Ottomans?”

“Mehmed needs to know Vlad is dead. The body must be found on a battlefield consistent with this campaign. A head delivered separately. You will manage this.”

I would manage this. I had been managing things since a customs register in Constantinople. A decapitation, a body placement, a historical record that would hold for centuries. One more operation performed to specification, with the flat competence Vlad had built me for.

“When I am gone from this body the silver restraint releases,” he said. “Elena is free.”

I waited.

“She will see clearly when I am gone. I have been the obstruction. Remove the obstruction and she will love you again.”

“You are asking me to kill you as a favor to myself.”

“I am telling you the transaction. You decide whether it is a favor.”

Then, “There is one requirement. The transfer completes through eye contact at the moment of physical death. Ahmed must not look away.”

“How do you ensure that?”

Vlad said, without inflection, “You will hold his eyes open.”

Ahmed was chained. He was twenty-five years old. He was frightened.

This was one of the very few times in the history of my knowing him that Ahmed had been frightened outright. At two years old investigating my collar at a road junction he had been professionally composed. At eleven walking into a mountain castle on the worst night of Elena’s life he had been self-possessed. At twenty-five, chained to a wall in a room with a single lamp and an axe on the table, he was frightened. The composure that had carried him through every room since infancy had found the room it could not carry him through.

His eyes were dark. His features carried his mother’s lineage from the Edirne harem, the face that Elena had been looking at for twenty-four years. He looked at me when I entered. He looked at the axe.

“Costache,” he said.

“Look at me,” I said.

He looked at me. The fear was in his eyes but underneath the fear was something else, something I had not expected. The quality of a person who has been told what is about to happen and has decided to be present for it rather than absent. Curiosity. Ahmed had always been curious. At two years old the curiosity had been about collars and birds. At twenty-five the curiosity was about what was going to happen to him in the next few minutes, and the curiosity was not courage exactly but was the thing that courage is built on, which is the willingness to look at what is coming rather than close your eyes.

I held his eyes open. With pins. I did this with steady hands because my hands had been steady since November 1450, and the steadiness was the condition’s gift, and the gift had never been given for a purpose I wanted less.

The pins went in. Ahmed did not scream. He breathed in sharply, the sound of a person receiving pain that has been anticipated but that anticipation does not adequately prepare for. His eyes watered. The eyes stayed open because the pins held them open, and the holding was my work, and the work was done.

Vlad entered the room. He sat in the chair across from Ahmed. He locked eyes with the boy.

The room was very still. The lamp’s flame did not move. The air in the room had the quality of air in a room where something is about to change at a level that air does not normally participate in, and the air was participating anyway, holding itself, the way air holds itself before a storm breaks.

I picked up the axe. It was not ceremonial. It was a tool. The kind of axe used for splitting wood in a Carpathian winter, heavy-headed, ash-handled, designed for the delivery of force to a specific point. It had been sharpened recently. The edge caught the lamplight.

I stood behind Vlad. I looked at Ahmed’s face. Twenty-five years old. The dark hair. The pinned eyes, wet, locked on Vlad’s. The fear underneath the curiosity underneath the willingness to be present. The face of the baby I had carried through ice water in February 1451. The face of the two-year-old who had assessed me as cold and less interesting than a bird. The face Elena had been watching grow for twenty-four years.

I said, flat, almost to myself, “I suppose I get to keep that promise to Radu after all.”

I swung.

It was not clean. I had never done this before. The axe was heavy and the angle was imprecise and the first stroke did not complete the work. I completed it through to the end regardless. Two more strokes. The sound was the sound of what it was. I will not describe it further. The description is not necessary. The act was necessary. The description is not.

The body fell from the chair. The head separated. The room was quiet except for my breathing and Ahmed’s breathing and the lamp.

Ahmed slumped in the chains. His eyes closed. The pinned lids closed around the pins, the muscles overriding the metal, the body’s reflexive response to what had just happened to the thing across the room from it.

A moment. The room entirely still. The lamp flame steady. The blood on the floor, darker than human blood, the blood of a thing that had been using this body for fifty years and that had changed the body’s chemistry in ways I could not identify and did not want to.

Ahmed opened his eyes.

The pins fell. The lids opened naturally, without the metal, and the eyes behind them were the same dark eyes and were not the same dark eyes. The face was the same. The features were the same. The twenty-five years of Ahmed were the same.

The quality of the gaze had changed.

I recognized it immediately because I had been reading this quality of gaze since the Transylvanian castle in 1450. The mild, permanent, ancient patience. The familiarity older than the face wearing it. The look of something that has arrived at a new location and is assessing the premises with the flat complete attention of a creature that has been assessing premises for longer than premises have existed.

Ahmed looked at me. He looked at the axe. He looked at the body on the floor.

“Well done,” he said.

The voice was Ahmed’s. The warmth in it was not. The warmth was Vlad’s warmth, the performed warmth that was the same temperature as the actual warmth, which was the temperature of a cellar that has never seen the sun. Except. Except something in it was genuinely warm, the way something in the farmhouse conversation with Radu had been genuinely warm. The acknowledgment of a thing done well by someone who had been watching the doing for twenty-six years.

I put the axe down. I did not have a response.

He removed the chains. They released at his touch, the silver responding to his authority the way it always had, the restraint recognizing its maker. He stood. He was twenty-five and he moved like something that had been moving for millennia, the transition from seated to standing happening without the intermediate adjustments that human bodies require.

“You will tell Elena that Ahmed has been turned,” he said. “That he has decided to go his own way. This is partially true.” He looked at me. “He was curious about what he was being prepared for. Curiosity is a form of consent.”

He walked down the corridor. Out of the castle. Into the world. In a young body with Ottoman royal blood and centuries available and the patience of something that had been doing this since before the concept of patience had a word.

He did not look back. He never did.

I wrapped the body. Alone, at night, in the room with the lamp and the blood and the axe. I carried it south through the forest to the nearest active Ottoman engagement, a position where the fighting had been ongoing for days and where a body found in the morning would be consistent with a man who died in the fighting rather than a man who died in a room with a lamp and an axe and a promise kept nine years late to a dead man.

I positioned the body before first light. I left the head separately, placed where it would be found and sent east. To Constantinople. The head of Vlad III Dracula, proof of death, delivered to the city whose walls I had helped break twenty-three years ago. The circle was the circle.

I walked back through the dark.

The silver had released when Ahmed walked out of the castle. Elena was free before I returned. She was in the courtyard, standing in the autumn cold, looking at the gate. Ahmed was with her.

She did not know yet. Not fully. What she knew was that Ahmed was different. The quality of his stillness had changed. His eyes tracked the courtyard in a way she had not seen before. She was running the inventory. She was always running the inventory.

Ahmed spoke before she finished.

In the voice of a twenty-five-year-old man speaking to the woman who raised him from an infant, he said, “I am going out. There is a great deal I want to see.”

Elena looked at him. Her hands were at her sides. The cold hands that matched my cold hands that matched his cold hands now, three matching temperatures in a courtyard in the Carpathians.

“You were my protector,” he said. “My mother. My guide. I would not have become anything without you.”

He meant this. In whatever sense the thing wearing Ahmed meant anything, it meant this. Twenty-five years of watching a woman raise a child from an infant accumulates into something real even in the oldest thing in the world, and whatever that something was, it was present in his voice, and the presence was not performed.

“We will see each other,” he said.

Elena touched his face. She held her hand against his jaw the way he had held his hand against my jaw at a road junction under a sycamore twenty-three years ago, when he was two and the assessment was cold and less interesting than a bird. She held his face and looked at him for a long time.

“Don’t disappear,” she said.

“I never do for long.”

He went. Through the gate. Into the dark. Into whatever came next.

She watched him go. She knew. I watched her know. I did not explain it because she did not need explanation.

She said, to the empty gate, “Was he in there at the end? The real Ahmed?”

“I think he was curious,” I said.

“That’s an answer?”

“It’s the one I have.”

She wrapped her arms around herself against the autumn cold. She looked at the gate for a long time. The gate was empty. The road beyond it was dark.

I had kept my promise to Radu. Nine years late. To a man who died without receiving the result. The promise had been kept in a room with pins and an axe and a lamp, and the keeping had produced something that was not justice and was not revenge and was not resolution. It was a transaction. Vlad had called it a transaction. The transaction was complete.