We fed on you greedily, lapping up every drop. By the time the deed was done, blood was smeared across our faces and down our fronts. Alexi shook, less from fear than from an abundance of energy, and Magdalena’s eyes shined like black diamonds, full of life and vigor.

“Jesus,” Alexi said, looking down at his stained hands and then over to your body. Blood soaked the sheets and dripped down onto the aged hardwood floor.

It was a massacre.

As the bloodlust abated, I slowly returned to myself and took stock of the situation. There was a body to contend with, and a defiled marital bed that would probably never be clean again. And, more pressingly, there were the shouts of the mobs from outside, growing closer and more agitated with every moment. They were at the gates now, hoisting their torches as they rattled the locks. There would be no appeasing them. Certainly not now, with evidence of our crimes laid out in a gruesome tableau.

“Constanta,” Magdalena breathed, wiping your blood from her mouth with the hem of her dress. “What are we going to do?”

They both looked at me with wide eyes, the same eyes they turned on you whenever they didn’t know how to handle a situation. You had always been the firm gloved hand on the back of their necks, steering them through life. And now, that responsibility fell onto me.

I wiped my brow and took a deep breath. My mind was running quick as a foxhound on the hunt, and a plan was forming.

I sprang up on the bed, bracing my feet on either side of you as I bent down to wrench the stake from your body. It shouldn’t have been easy for me: the wood was melded to the cavity of your chest with drying blood and viscera, and the sharpened tip had gone all the way through the mattress. But to my surprise, the stake came away easily in my hands. All at once, I was stronger than I had been before. We all were, I suspected, but I was still the oldest. As far as I knew, I might have been the oldest vampire in all of Europe, now that you were really and truly dead.

The weight of this knowledge pressed down on me like an iron yoke.

“Magdalena, help me move him,” I breathed. “Alexi, get the key and go guard the door. I want you to open it, but not until I say so.”

Alexi nodded frantically, scrambling off the bed and fumbling the key out of your pocket. I grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back to me for a quick kiss before I shooed him out of the room. Then I pulled Magdalena into a tight embrace, burying my face into her matted hair.

“What are you going to do?” she asked in a whisper.

I took her face in my hands and kissed her too, tasting the ghost of your blood on her lips.

“I’m going to end this,” I said.