“So Angel stayed in Styria?”
“He wanted to, but had to save his half-human parents, Janette and Amalie, who’d raised him in the human world. He was afraid Night Sorrow would end up hurting them if he didn’t go back,” she explained. “Angel returned to Lohr and managed to help them escape, but Night caught him, aware of his son’s plan to turn against the Sorrows. Night Sorrow imprisoned his own son in a towering castle called the Cachtice, offering him all kinds of human blood to complete his transformation. He’d regretted postponing his son’s transformation since it made him more human than vampire.”
“Just keep going,” Loki said. “Don’t stop.”
“My father fought the temptation and managed to escape the castle. Because he had no allies in Lohr and hadn’t acquired the powers of a vampire yet, he had to escape on foot through the forests, crossing from Transylvania through Hungary, to return to Carmilla in Styria. It was mid-winter, and he risked freezing in the cold. When Night learned his son had escaped, he unleashed vampire bats and black panthers after him. Night, like his name, was fond of everything black. I heard that it was one of his powers, being able to control almost every black animal.”
“What kind of a father does this to his own son?” Loki wondered.
“He’s one of the cruelest vampires known to mankind, but that wasn’t all. There was another reason why he wanted Angel dead, but I will get into that in a while,” she said. “Eventually, my father fed on the black animals Night had sent after him. It’s still a mystery how he killed them, but feeding on the vampire bats and animals increased Angel’s inherited vampire powers dramatically, although it didn’t formally transform him. Night had to send members of his vampire army after him. In their hunt for my father, they were looking for black animals, dead and bitten, in the white snow with red trails of blood,” Snow White turned to face Loki. “This is how the three doomed colors came into my family’s life. Remember the phrase, ‘lips red as blood, skin white as snow, and hair black a…’”
“As night? As ravens? As Night Sorrow?”
“See it the way you like, but remember how the colors came into my family’s life,” Snow White said. “Night Sorrow spread rumors about Angel being the sadist vampire the locals were searching for, that he was the one responsible for spreading the fatal disease everyone feared in Europe. The description of my father spread all over Europe; people imagined that he could be Snow White, Red as Blood, or Black as Night whenever his name came up. Angel was hunted by everyone, even humans. They called him names like: Black Sorrow, Snow Death, and Red Dragon. You know that the origin of the name Dracula was ‘Dracul,’ which means ‘son of dragon’, or is even sometimes interpreted as devil, right? So Red Dragon meant red vampire. My father had become a vicious vampire in the eyes of the world.”
Loki still wondered how everyone else knew more about vampires than he did. Sometimes, he doubted he was the greatest Dreamhunter in the world.
“Angel finally reached Carmilla in Styria. They set a date with her father for a royal wedding, inviting the kingdom’s noblemen to celebrate,” Snow White continued.
“What happened to his vampire-slave parents?”
“Jeanette and Amalie did escape but never made it to Angel’s wedding. They sent him letters from different towns across Europe throughout the years, telling him they were alright, but were struggling with being vampire slaves.”
“Sounds like a happy ending for Angel and Carmilla so far,” Loki said, still wondering what all this had to do with Snow White.
“Not really,” Snow White said as the wind started to redraw their surroundings again.
“Not again,” Loki huffed. “This is like ‘around the world in eighty days’, except it happens in one dream.”
Snow White’s dress fluttered in the wind. “The news of the wedding frustrated the noblemen of Styria,” she raised her voice, using her hands as a feeble shield against the whirling wind. “My mother was young, beautiful, and desired by many of them. They despised her getting married to a stranger from a town plagued by the vampire disease.”
“Where are we going now?” Loki said, unable to hear his own voice. To his surprise the words she spoke to him turned into smoky, readable letters, waving upon the surface of the dancing wind that whirled before his eyes. The words read:
Something unexpected happened the night before the wedding.
“Another dark and stormy night,” Loki mumbled as they were transported to what looked like a cottage in the middle of a forest.