Night came quietly. Woermann kept getting up from his bedroll and going to the window overlooking the courtyard, a useless routine but a compulsion, as if he could keep everyone alive by maintaining a personal watch on the keep. On one of his trips to the window, he noticed the courtyard sentry walking his tour alone. Rather than call down and cause a disturbance, he decided to investigate personally.

"Where's your partner?" he asked the lone sentry when he reached the courtyard.

The soldier whirled, then began to stammer. "He was tired, sir. I let him take a rest."

An uneasy feeling clawed at Woermann's belly. "I gave orders for all sentries to travel in pairs! Where is he?"

"In the cab of the first lorry, sir."

Woermann quickly crossed to the parked vehicle and pulled open the door. The soldier within did not move. Woermann poked at his arm.

"Wake up."

The soldier began to lean toward him, slowly at first, then with greater momentum until he was actually falling toward his commanding officer. Woermann caught him and then almost dropped him. For as he fell, his head angled back to reveal an open, mangled throat. Woermann eased the body to the ground, then stepped back, clamping his jaw against a scream of fright and horror.

Saturday, 26 April

Woermann had Alexandru and his sons turned away at the gate in the morning. Not that he suspected them of complicity in the deaths, but Sergeant Oster had warned him that the men were edgy about their inability to maintain security. Woermann thought it best to avoid a potentially ugly incident.

He soon learned that the men were edgy about more than security. Late in the morning a brawl broke out in the courtyard. A corporal tried to pull rank on a private to make him give up a specially blessed crucifix. The private refused and a fight between two men escalated into a brawl involving a dozen. It seemed there had been small talk about vampires after the first death; it had been ridiculed then. But with each new baffling death the idea had gained credence until believers now outnumbered nonbelievers. This was, after all, Romania, the Transylvanian Alps.

Woermann knew he had to nip this in the bud. He gathered the men in the courtyard and spoke to them for half an hour. He told them of their duty as German soldiers to remain brave in the face of danger, to remain true to their cause, and not to let fear turn them against one another, for that would surely lead to defeat.

"And finally," he said, noticing his audience becoming restive, "you must all put aside fear of the supernatural. There is a human agent at work in these deaths and we will find him or them. It is now plain that there must be a number of secret passages within the keep that allows the killer to enter and leave without being seen. We'll spend the rest of the day searching for those passages. And I am assigning half of you to guard duty tonight. We are going to put a stop to this once and for all!"

The men's spirits seemed to be lifted by his words. In fact, he had almost convinced himself.

He moved about the keep constantly during the rest of the day, encouraging the men, watching them measure floors and walls in search of dead spaces, tapping the walls for hollow sounds. But they found nothing. He personally made a quick reconnaissance of the cavern in the subcellar. It appeared to recede into the heart of the mountain; he decided to leave it unexplored for now. There was no time, and no signs of disturbance in the dirt of the cavern floor to indicate that anyone had passed this way in ages. He left orders, however, to place four men on guard at the opening to the subcellar in the unlikely event that someone might try to gain entrance through the cavern below.

Woermann managed to sneak off for an hour during the late afternoon to sketch in the outline of the village. It was his only respite from the growing tension that pressed in on him from all sides. As he worked with the charcoal pencil, he could feel the unease begin to slip away, almost as if the canvas were drawing it out of him. He would have to take some time tomorrow morning to add color, for it was the village as it looked in the early light that he wished to capture.

As the sun sank and the fading light forced him to quit, he felt all the dread and foreboding filter back. With the sun overhead he could easily believe it was a human agent killing his men; he could laugh at talk of vampires. But in the growing darkness, the gnawing fear returned along with the memory of the bloody, sodden weight of that dead soldier in his arms last night.

One safe night. One night without a death, and maybe I can beat this thing. With half of the men guarding the other half tonight, I ought to be able to turn this around and start gaining ground tomorrow.

One night. Just one deathless night.

Sunday, 27 April

The morning came as Sunday mornings should—bright and sunny. Woermann had fallen asleep in his chair; he found himself awake at first light, stiff and sore. It took a moment before he realized that his night's sleep had gone uninterrupted by screams or gunshots. He pulled on his boots and hurried to the courtyard to assure himself that there were as many men alive this morning as there had been last night. A quick check with one of the sentries confirmed it: No deaths had been reported.

Woermann felt ten years younger. He had done it! There was a way to foil this killer after all! But the ten years began to creep back on him as he saw the worried face of a private who was hurrying across the courtyard toward him.

"Sir!" the man said as he approached. "There's something wrong with Franz—I mean Private Ghent. He's not awake."

Woermann's limbs suddenly felt very weak and heavy, as if all their strength had suddenly been siphoned away. "Did you check him?"

"No, sir. I—I'm—"

"Lead the way."

He followed the private to the barracks within the south wall. The soldier in question was in his bedroll in a newly made cot with his back to the door.

"Franz!" called his roommate as they entered. "The captain's here!"

Ghent did not stir.

Please, God, let him be sick or even dead of a heart seizure, Woermann thought as he stepped to the bed. But please don't let his throat be torn. Anything but that.

"Private Ghent!" he said. There was no evidence of movement, not even the easy rise and fall of the covers over a sleeping man. Dreading what he would see, Woermann leaned over the cot.

The bedroll flap was pulled to Ghent's chin. Woermann did not pull it down. He did not have to. The glassy eyes, sallow skin, and drying red stain soaking through the fabric told him what he would find.

"The men are on the verge of panic, sir," Sergeant Oster was saying.

Woermann daubed color onto the canvas in short, quick, furious jabs. The morning light was right where he wanted it on the village and he had to make the most of the moment. He was sure Oster thought he had gone mad, and maybe he had. Despite the carnage around him, the painting had become an obsession.

"I don't blame them. I suppose they want to go into the village and shoot a few of the locals. But that won't—"

"Begging your pardon, sir, but that's not what they're thinking."

Woermann lowered his brush. "Oh? What, then?"

"They think that the men who've been killed didn't bleed as much as they should have. They also think Lutz's death was no accident... that he was killed the same as the others."

"Didn't bleed...? Oh, I see. Vampire talk again."

Oster nodded. "Yessir. And they think Lutz let it out when he opened that shaft into the dead space in the cellar."