“Wh-what problem?”

“Don’t play dumb. I’m sure Mircea mentioned it, maybe in passing? Drac’s loose.” Radu nodded, gulping. He looked vaguely ill, and I took that for an encouraging sign. It showed he had a brain, and that he knew his brother. “What are you planning to do about it?”

“I’ve already done it,” he told me, gesturing around. “Why do you think I’m here? I don’t like this place. Nothing is ever left where I put it, and one Senate member or another is always prowling about, asking for progress reports. I could work much more efficiently at home. But Mircea said Vlad wouldn’t try for me here.”

“No, I suppose not.” Considering that he’d have to wade through the Senate and their retainers, the Silver Circle and its bevy of psychotic war mages and who knew how many weres, Fey and whatever else was hanging around at the moment, it seemed a safe bet. “So the plan is what? To stay trapped here forever? Doesn’t sound like fun, ’Du.”

“You know I hate that absurd diminutive,” he told me irritably. “Why can’t you leave people’s names alone? Does it physically pain you to utter an extra syllable?”

I grinned. “Looks like I struck a nerve.”

“Nonsense!” Radu sat up a little straighter and pushed me a foot or so back. Talk of his predicament seemed to have evaporated my scare potential—there aren’t many things that look frightening next to Drac. “Mircea said you’d take care of him shortly, and then I can go home.” He looked testy. “Why aren’t you on the hunt, instead of snooping about here? I thought you liked killing things.”

“Aha!” I clapped him on the back. “I knew I wasn’t the only smart one in the family. You want him dead, too!” I went to pour the guy a drink. He’d earned it.

“Of course I do!” Radu snapped impatiently. “Do you have any idea what he’d like to do to me? He’s always despised me.”

“So we’re in the same boat.” He took the glass of whiskey I handed him while I settled onto the hassock at his feet—or tried to before finding myself dumped unceremoniously on my butt. I got up and tried again, only to have the same thing happen. This time, I looked closer at the footstool, a fat paisley-covered pouf with thick tassels at each corner, and noticed something fairly weird, even by my definition of the term. It was hovering a few inches off the ground, its little bun feet not quite touching the rug.

“It was upholstered from an old flying carpet,” Radu explained, seeing the direction of my stare, “and tends to be temperamental. I wouldn’t—” I grabbed the thing, only to find it suddenly wriggling like an overly energetic puppy. It spurted out of my hands, but I jumped on top and held on. “It doesn’t like anyone using it but Mircea,” Radu said. “I think there’s another chair in—”

“I like this one,” I told him, as the bucking-bronco ride I was being treated to careened me into the bedpost, smashing my thigh against the hard wood.

“It doesn’t like me, either,” Radu said as I grabbed one of the tiebacks from the bedpost. The plan was to strap it down, but somehow it seemed to know that, and went skittering off in the other direction, jouncing me as savagely as it could manage in the process. “Anyway, I don’t think Vlad hates you, Dory,” Radu sighed. “Or if he does, it’s merely for an accident of birth.”

“And the little thing of helping to trap him for a century or so.”

“Well, yes, there’s that.” Radu drained his glass while I struggled to get the tieback looped around one of the hassock’s squat feet. I finally managed it, but then I had to figure out where to attach the other end that had a chance of holding it. “But he hates me far more. Mircea and I are full brothers, but he and Vlad were always the soul mates. Two warriors and a bookish runt—it was laughable,” he said bitterly. “I tried to keep up with them, at least at first. But I was no good at any of it. Even with the best instruction in the country, my swordsmanship was never better than average and I was hopeless on a horse. Still am, really.”

“Uh-huh. Life’s a bitch,” I commiserated not at all. The hassock rode us by the bookshelf and I got an idea. I snagged several heavy volumes, and sure enough, its antics slowed down perceptibly. I shoved them underneath me and quickly grabbed two more. The hassock slowly started to settle toward the floor and I thought I had it, but then it gave a huge heave and threw both the books and me off. It flounced away, tassels swinging smugly.

“You can have this chair, Dory,” Radu offered, starting to rise, but I waved him off.

“No, really. I’m fine.” I started stalking the hassock, dismemberment in mind. “You were saying?”

“Yes, well, things deteriorated after Father agreed to our being hostages, of course. Indeed, they became immeasurably worse. I got out of much of the torture after Father broke his treaty with the Turks and they threw us in the dungeons. I should have been stronger, should have defied them the way Vlad did, but you don’t know what it was like.” He licked his lips and set the glass aside with a slightly shaking hand. “I saw what some of the older prisoners looked like, those that had been in there for a while. Noses and lips missing, teeth knocked out, limbs torn off, burns everywhere—”

“Yeah, bad stuff.” I’d seen things that made the Turks look like children at play, but then, so had Radu. The difference was that he’d been pretty damn young, barely a teenager if I remembered right, to be dealing with that house of horrors. Since he was handling the Senate’s menagerie now, something that would have given me nightmares, he must be made of sterner stuff than he looked.

The hassock suddenly reversed course and swept through my legs, knocking me to the floor again. I shot it a dirty glance; even the furniture around here hated me. Then I made an abrupt leap and threw myself on top of it. Turning the wicked thing upside down, I lashed it to the bedpost before it had a chance to try any more tricks. By the time I was finished, it was trussed up in all four tiebacks, the sheet and several items from Mircea’s wardrobe.

“There!” I grinned at it triumphantly. “Now try to move, damn you.”

Radu sighed and stood up to get a refill. “That’s all very well, Dory, but how are you going to sit on it now?”

One of the tassels waved about, giving the distinct impression that it was flipping me off. Fine. It could stay like that until it rotted. I dropped into Radu’s abandoned chair and glowered at it. “Were you trying to make a point, Uncle?”

He propped himself against the bar and regarded me somberly. “Only that I was weak. I was offered a way out, and I took it. Vlad never forgave me for that, for sleeping with the enemy, as they say these days. And then, of course, he thinks I betrayed him and stole his throne—”

“You did betray him and steal his throne.”

“Well, yes, but only after he went barking mad,” Radu said impatiently. “I wasn’t stupid, Dory. I knew the Turks were trying to use me, but something had to be done about Vlad. I’ve never forgotten the sight of the corpses, thousands of them, staked alive on the fields around Tirgoviste. In all the years since, I’ve never known anything like it.”

“There were more killed in some battles in the world wars.”

“Yes, but not with the… the precision, the intent. You remember—he had the stakes laid out in geometric patterns, so he could climb that tower of his and gloat over the pictures they made.”

“No, I don’t recall that. I’d been given to a bunch of Gypsies, remember?”

“Oh, yes.” Radu looked at me vaguely. “How did that turn out for you, then?”

I stared at him. Five hundred years later and he finally thinks to ask. “Oh, peachy. They kept cats around to keep mice off the food, and me to kill any vamps that tried to munch on them. Fun times.” Until they all ended up dead, anyway.

“Oh, good.”

I bit back a retort. I was fast recalling why I usually avoided conversations with Radu. “My point, if you’ll let me make it, is that we both have the same enemy. Okay”—I held up a hand to avoid another waltz down memory lane—“Drac may be planning a more elaborate send-off for you, but me being dead still figures in his plans somewhere. It doesn’t in mine.”