Anton picked himself up off the ground and began to walk. He was finally willing to give up on waiting and take the sleep that he needed. He walked in the direction of Vallaya, towards Andrei’s, where Vasile was undoubtedly resting. But Anton didn’t stop at Andrei’s. He continued walking in the direction of his home, passing by the church and steadily approaching the home he could see on the horizon in the distance.
As he got closer, he could see his father repairing the window and shutters, pounding away at it with a hammer and swearing to himself. When his father saw his son in the distance, he gave him a cold look and didn’t make a step to approach him.
He shouted in Anton’s direction, “Well, look who’s come back. You ready to finally admit you did wrong?” When Anton didn’t say anything, Josif then grunted and turned back to his work, paying Anton no further attention.
Viorica, his mother, was inside preparing food. When she heard Anton enter and turned around to see him, a smile passed across her face. But immediately afterwards she wrapped Anton in her arms in a stifling embrace while tears rolled down her face, “Oh Anton, it’s so horrible! They took Constanta! They took her right out of our bed while we slept.”
“I know,” Anton told her.
“You know?” she asked, raising her tear-soaked eyes to look up at her son.
“I saw her being taken away, in the forest last night,” Anton admitted, “I saw them carrying her.”
“Well, why didn’t you stop them?” she asked.
“I tried,” he told her quietly, “I tried as best as I could, with all my strength, and more. You almost lost me to them too. They almost killed me. But they failed, and I failed too. I just wasn’t good enough. I should’ve never gone to work for Vasile. I was wrong. If I was here I could’ve protected her.”
“I should thank God that I haven’t lost you too,” she said, crossing herself and lowering her eyes. Then she asked, without much interest in hearing an answer, “What will they do to her? What have they done to her already?”
Anton traversed the room to the bed where he and his sister had slept, to the spot from which she’d been taken the night before, and he sat down on her side of the bed, touching the tussled sheets she’d only just recently used.
“I don’t want to know. All I know is that she’s dead by now,” Anton said, before he sank down into the bed and cried.
In fact, when Constanta was taken down into the vampire’s coven, that previous night, she was, just like those before her, tossed through the door to the pen and toppled to the ground.
Just as with Nicoleta, the first person to introduce himself to Constanta was Dragomir, who asked for her name, told her his name and advised her, “Stay out of the way if you want to last.”
Constanta asked the grizzled, ugly man just as he was walking away, “Where am I?”
“You’re in the pen,” he explained, turning back to her with a wily grin, “Welcome to your new home for the rest of your life. And if you want that life to last, do what you’re told, and keep out of the way.”
Nicoleta and Crina were there beside Constanta right after him. After hearing the commotion of Constanta’s entrance, they rushed to go see the new arrival and bent down to help Constanta up.
“You don’t need to listen to him,” Nicoleta quietly said to Constanta, before she asked her her name. “Don’t dare think you’ll be here for the rest of your life,” Crina added. They took her to the kitchen to sit down. Nicoleta and Crina comforted Constanta while they explained the way things worked in the pen.
An hour or so later, after the two subsequent prisoners were thrown in and things were beginning to quiet down, a small uproar began to emerge over a piece of paper that had been dropped into the cage by a small solitary vampire. Lina had, once again and with considerably more caution and circumspection this time, entered the barred room. But, instead of lingering, she simply dropped a piece of paper inside and left, hoping that it would find its way to its intended recipient.
The first person who picked it up couldn’t read it and handed it off. It finally ended up in the hands of Dragomir, who scrutinized the lines on the page and openly declared that it was a confidential communiqué directly from the vampire leadership to himself, and that he couldn’t divulge its contents.
Oana had to directly confront Dragomir and pry the letter out of his hand with Crina’s help, much to Dragomir’s annoyance and against the resistance of Dragomir’s bodyguards. She examined it and confirmed that it was, in fact, nothing like what Dragomir claimed.
Oana walked into another room where Nicoleta and Crina were seated and dropped the letter into Nicoleta’s lap. Nicoleta looked up at Oana and asked, “What’s this?”
“Madalina left it,” Oana said.
Nicoleta opened the folded up piece of paper, which was a small scrap torn out of a book with letters inscribed on one side using some sort of ad hoc red ink. Nicoleta read the written words out loud to Oana, Crina and Constanta, “Nicoleta. You’ll see the sun again. I promise.”
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