Dracul Read Free

This guy looks about my age, even though he’s tall and wearing a puffy black parka, which makes him seem big and imposing.
    He jots a number, followed by the name Constantine .
    “Constantine,” I repeat, blinking at his neat-but-rather-angular handwriting. The number is not the same one I called earlier. A direct line, or Constantine’s own cell number, perhaps?
    Constantine’s looking at my research books, which are piled all over the table with color-coded neon sticky note tabs sticking out everywhere. “You’re studying Dracula? You’re interested in vampires?” He gives me an intense look that’s maybe a little worried.
    “Not so much the vampire part of it. Just the history. I’m a history major. It’s for my senior thesis paper.”
    “It’s only February. You’re off to an early start.” Constantine looks at me with sincere concern in his chocolatey brown eyes.
    “Actually, I’m behind. I’m supposed to have three primary sources, but I only have two. If I’d have known that ahead of time, I would have picked a different topic, but there was a third resource. I just…can’t find it.” I stop babbling. Why am I telling this guy all this? He’s a bat forensics student, or whatever. He probably doesn’t even care about obscure Romanian history.
    “So will you have to select a different topic, then?” For a guy who came here to pick up a bat, he’s surprisingly concerned about my thesis paper.
    “I think it’s too late. We had to declare our preliminary thesis two weeks ago, and I thought then I’d found a copy of the book I needed, so I turned in my initial summary and got it approved. Now I’m locked in. The professor was adamant about making sure we’d done our bibliographical prep work ahead of time—I guess she’s had trouble with students procrastinating until the last minute before—so if I change my topic now, I’ll get a late grade for everything I’ve already submitted, because the new material will all be late. And I’ll also have to basically start over, so, yeah.” I blow a huff of air at a wisp of my long dark hair that’s drifted into my face.
    What I don’t tell Constantine is that the whole reason I picked this topic, is because there’s an abandoned castle in Romania that I love, but when I tried to find out its history and who owned it, I found links to Dracula.
    As in, the real, original guy, not the hyped-up blood-sucking mythical monster.
    The real guy was named after his father, Vlad Dracul, and dracul means dragon . Granted, it’s frequently translated devil these days, which is a derogatory term that chafes me to no end, but that’s beside the point. The point is, historically, dracul , or draco in Latin, meant dragon . Dracula means “son of the dragon”.
    Which makes me wonder if Vlad Dracula really was the son of a dragon.
    But of course, I can’t tell any of that to Constantine, or anybody else.
    I’m just curious, and I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by making the subject of my curiosity the topic of my senior thesis, but we can all see how that’s backfired.
    Even Constantine can see it. He’s standing here in my kitchen looking at me with…I don’t know. Pity? Concern? No, that’s not quite it. He almost looks like he’s weighing whether he should try to help me, but of course, that’s absurd. That can’t be it.
    No matter how much it looks like it.
    I clear my throat. “Sorry, I’ve got to get to class.” I tear the bottom bit of paper off the open notebook page and jot my name and number as well. “Can you call me if that’s rabid?”
    “I will call you,” Constantine vows with a somber smile.
    And behind the smile, he still has that look, like he’s trying to decide…
    But he shakes his head, plucks up the baggie, and heads out the front door.
    I hurry out a few minutes later, in time to make it to class. It’s not until I turn my phone back on after class and listen to the message from the Diagnostic Testing