After many months of getting beta reads and advice from my group, I think I have achieved a final version of this book. It starts and ends much differently than the first draft I posted on here. It is the second book in a series so you might want to...
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Vlad Dracule
A passageway wound deep under the castle, leading out to large iron gate. Past the gate was a garden of sepulchers. Houses of white marble decked with angels shone, moonlike, in groves of cypress and yew. Angels shone like phantoms in the darkness under the willows. Dracule crashed the gate open and made his way to the grave he'd built for Ilia.
Free of the castle and its memories, he hurried along. Light was blooming above the forest, tolling a death knell. After the wedding, he would move Ilia out here under the stars, to a place where no one would find her. In an inner courtyard of this graveyard, was a garden maze, and in the center was a tomb that had been there before the walls of Castle Drag grew up around it. It was the resting place of his first ancestors, the Dragon Royalty of Wallachia. No one could find their way through the maze without a map, and he possessed the only one in existence. He'd restored this ancestral tomb for Ilia. She'd been asleep within its walls for two hundred years. He must see her empty grave to be certain that she had, indeed, left it and returned to him.
And Giselle; he must keep Ilia safe from that girl's scheming and conniving ways. Imagine Giselle choosing to sleep on the altar in the lofty chapel where he had made his vow to Satan, then waking in the atmosphere of death and hellfire, of murk and doom that pervaded the place. In that, she was stronger than he was. He glowered to himself. Giselle was far more wicked than he was. The fairer sex was most cruel.
And Ilia ... It was clever of Giselle to put Ilia in the Sanctuary tower, with its walls of icons and Crosses, thinking that would keep him and his true bride apart. But these holy relics also kept his bride a prisoner, giving him plenty of time to figure out how to secure his prize. Christian blood was plentiful in the villages. With enough of that in his veins, he would become immune to their symbols and Crosses and sainted jewels. Soon theses weapons would lose so much power that they would resume their true forms, and be nothing but trinkets and toys.
