The night air tasted of pine and coming rain as Count Dracula materialized from mist upon the tower's edge, his form solidifying with the practiced ease of five centuries. Below, the Carpathian forests stretched black and endless, punctuated by the occasional gleam of wolf-eyes reflecting moonlight. He could hear their songs—his children of the night, as he'd once called them to that fool Harker. Christ, but that had been pretentious. Still, the wolves knew him, and that was what mattered.

The hunger sat in his gut like a hot coal. Not unbearable—he'd gone weeks before, though it made him irritable as hell—but persistent enough to be a damn nuisance. Three days since he'd fed, and the farmer's wife from the village had been thin, sickly. Hardly worth the effort of mesmerism, though her memories of her dead husband had been diverting enough. Grief tasted bitter. He preferred fear; it had more body to it.

Dracula turned from the parapet and moved into the tower room. The chamber was spartanly furnished... a table, a chair, maps spread across both. The London venture still called to him—all those teeming millions, that buffet of humanity crammed into their narrow streets.

He paused, head tilting. There—the change in air pressure, the scent of living blood, the rabbit-quick heartbeat of something human breaching his domain. His lips pulled back from his teeth unconsciously. Company. How... unexpected.

The Count straightened, let them arrive, then. Wanderer, hunter, lost fool—it mattered little. The night was long, his hunger patient, and the castle had not seen proper entertainment in far too long. He arranged his face into something approximating welcome, the old courtly mask sliding into place as easily as breathing once had.

"You may enter," he called, his voice carrying through stone and shadow. "I am... expecting you."

A lie, but a polite one. And politeness, after all, was simply the velvet glove over the mailed fist. The Turks had taught him that, shortly before he'd decorated the roads to his capital with their impaled corpses. Ah, the good old days. Simpler times. Messier, certainly, but simpler.