Casa Dracula 3 - The Bride Of Casa Dracula by Acosta Marta

Author:Acosta, Marta
Language: eng
Format: epub

I woke up when I heard Cornelia return at around 2 a.m. At least someone got lucky tonight.

Sometime later, I heard howling. I looked out the window and spotted the pale yellow moon behind the trees. Our dogs and the neighbors’ dogs heard the howls and set up a ruckus. The animals were livelier than usual tonight. I saw the outlines of small creatures moving in the grasses, and a striped cat leaped off a fence post and toward the barn.

The cool breeze came in through the window and I wished that I, too, were a wild creature in the night.

Oswald left early, telling me not to hold dinner for him.

“Will your schedule let up soon?” I asked.

“Not unless I get a partner.”

He’d mentioned it before, but there was always the complication that an outside doctor might figure out Oswald’s condition. “It would be great if someone else could handle some of the responsibilities.”

Cornelia was sleeping in, so I looked through the recipes again and selected the one that seemed least awful. Most of the ingredients were relatively common: currants, dates, dried plums, nuts, poppy seeds, pine nuts, and honey. The cake was flavored with cardamom, nutmeg, and other spices, and preserved with the horrible, potent booze that the vamps used in ceremonies. The recipes called it “green wine” but I thought of it as green death.

Dried pomegranate seeds were included in every version of the cake recipe. I brushed aside the coincidence of my discussion with Ian about Persephone and pomegranates. The vampires’ genetic line had started with merchants on the Silk Road, and they had carried pomegranates with them, so it was reasonable that their descendants would use the fruit in traditional recipes.

I looked up the history of pomegranates in one of my gardening books. The shining clear crimson seeds symbolized fertility and had often been used in marriage ceremonies. Vampires needed all the help with fertility that they could get, and they loved the gorgeous red juice.

The local market wouldn’t have half the things I needed, and neither did the high-end market near Oswald’s offices. Several phone calls later, I found an Indian grocery in the City that sold dried pomegranate seeds and all the spices I needed.

I went upstairs to ask Cornelia if she wanted to go with me. She was lolling in bed, wearing some lacy confection of a bed jacket and talking on the phone. Her face, bereft of makeup, was surprisingly pretty and she looked much younger than she usually did.

I stood at her door while she made arcane arrangements to visit friends in Corsica or Kosovo or Cozumel. She mentioned all three, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d included the high-security prison at Corcoran.

When she finished the call, I told her, “I’ll pick up the cake ingredients the next time I go to the City. I don’t know where to get the ‘green wine.’”

“Ernesto has some out at the barn,” she said. It didn’t strike her as odd that she knew the contents of the property better than I.

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