I looked around the room, my head suddenly spinning with the conversation and bright lights and the whole strain of the evening. If Darcy was spending the night playing guard to Pirin, then there was no point in my staying awake. Suddenly all I wanted was to be quiet and safe and away from danger. I slipped away unnoticed and made my way up to my bedroom. There was no sign of Queenie, which didn’t surprise me. She was probably snoring by now. I checked the window to make sure the shutters were fastened securely from the inside. I even opened the wardrobe and, after several deep breaths, the chest, and, satisfied that I was the only person in the room, I pushed a heavy chair against the door and undressed. But I was loath to turn the light off. Did vampires come through walls, I wondered; or through locked shutters? Anything that could crawl up that castle wall could probably do a lot of improbable things. I climbed into bed and pulled the covers up around me. The fire still glowed in the fireplace but had done little to take the chill off the room. I couldn’t close my eyes. I kept checking first one corner then the next, seeing those faces glaring down from the molding and the corners of the wardrobe, and then my gaze drifting to that chest.

“You are letting your imagination run away with you,” I told myself. “There is a good explanation for all of this, I’m sure. It’s an ordinary room and you are quite safe and—”

I broke off and sat up suddenly. There was now a completely different portrait hanging on the wall.

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Night in the chamber of horrors, Bran Castle
Thursday, November 17

Instead of the attractive and rakish young man there was now a different face staring down at me. This one looked as if it came from an earlier time, with a stylized royal sneer, not unlike Siegfried’s, a high collar and a velvet hat like a powder puff perched on his head. I got out of bed to examine it more closely. The paint was cracked and lined like in so many old paintings. That’s when I realized something about the other picture—the paint had been daubed on, in the manner of more recent art. And there was something about the freedom of the strokes that indicated French impressionists or later. It had been a relatively new painting.