Dracula's Secret by Linda Mercury Read Free Book Online

outside the city, the reek of cold mass murder rose from the very soil. It wasn’t the peppery scent of battle or the urine stench of premeditation. Instead, the rot of corruption, decay, and waste obliterated everything. Bodies on litters left the town in an ant trail of misery.
    Curious, she skirted the 104th Timberwolf Infantry camp. When she reached the center of a work camp, she stopped cold in the middle of the scurrying medics and soldiers.
    Two seconds ago, Valerie would have said nothing about warfare disgusted her. Had she not killed and killed often? Her native urges toward peace on the edge of pike left nothing untouched.
    Until now.
    Unnoticed amongst the devastation, she wandered the site. Corpses stacked like firewood filled abandoned machine shops and stairways. The fabulous rockets Hitler bragged about to her had been built here. The Führer hadn’t mentioned the dead and nearly dead spread like fallen leaves.
    Feces, intestines, flesh, and bones didn’t merely decorate the concrete. The bombing had literally pounded the waste into the floor. Her boots squished as she walked through row after row of bodies.
    Once, she breathed in. The stench of decay made even her battle-hardened nose close in on itself.
    Cold fury propelled her to the middle of the death camp.
    Her own death count numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The anger that scraped up the back of her shoulders made no sense.
    A dim memory from her human days came back to her. When she ruled, her towns were safe for the law-abiding. Vlad Dracula killed thieves, criminals, invaders. Not the people who built her weapons. She turned a slow circle, taking in the pain.
    Those who stocked the Dracul family’s armory had been pampered, fed, and encouraged.
    What she saw here would never have happened under her rule. Professional soldiers knew the risks. Criminals knew the price of their actions. Even those pressed into war knew that death wasn’t personal. When each met their doom, it was merely the business of warfare. Any who met Vlad the Impaler’s justice knew the rules of the game they played and the roles each took on.
    Adolf Hitler had promised Dracula, “Bring your kind to me. When I win, all crime and disease will be gone. Isn’t that what you’ve worked for your whole existence? You already rule the supernaturals, but you could rule even more by my side.”
    A half-decayed head rolled by her feet.
    Oh, yes. It was what she’d wanted all along.
    And Dracula had delivered. Oh, how he’d delivered. And this is what they were doing with the power she gave them?
    She knelt in the dirt and shit and bowed her head. Let Dracula and Hitler stay dead.
    Vlad’s reputation from his mortal life had been greatly exaggerated. Impale one or two people for a well-deserved punishment, and suddenly Ottomans on pikes lined the roads.
    This travesty outstripped even the most outrageous tales about her. And she was partially responsible. Every ounce of honor she’d ever possessed demanded she make reparations for these horrors she’d unknowingly allowed to happen. But what penance would be appropriate for this disgrace?
    The only answer was service to the helpless.
    She found a die in the dust—a knucklebone, actually, marked with pips. She knelt amid the bodies and rolled it. Six.
    Sixty years, then. Vlad promised herself sixty years to serve the victims of this horrific crime.
    â€œMiss? Miss? Are you all right?” A young American soldier, his hands and uniform covered with other people’s gangrene, knelt in front of her. “I’m a medic. Do you need help?”
    Valerie met his war-weary brown eyes. “No.” She took an unnecessary breath. She would have to breathe to maintain her façade. “But I can help.”
    â€œCome with me.” The boy was too tired to question how a woman came to wander the camp alone. She was here and she was able-bodied.
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