Ileana Caragea stared into the crimson glow emanating from the black cauldron and listened carefully to the rising madmen whispers from the skull within its depths.   Many spirits talked, each fighting to be one voice that overrode the others and gained her attention.   Ileana imagined that the dead were bored.  At least that is what she could discern from how they tended to act when she dared to call upon them.  The voices of the dead thing took practice to hear and those who were not skilled in such magic would only perceive the faint whisper of the wind, the language lost to their living mind.  That very wind had almost driven her insane when she was a young girl.  Sometimes the castle ghosts of her old home had called to her, and she had been frightened out of her wits time and again before she had painstakingly learned how to listen.  And then not to listen.

Behind Ileana and her dark cauldron the half-man half-beast creature that her brother had become strained on a thick length of iron chain. Alexandru Caragea slavered and tried to reach her.  His newborn monster’s voice made the resonance of the dead in the cauldron a sweet symphony to hear in comparison.  The vile lechery of his words and the sheer, unadulterated evil in them caused the inky black hairs on the nape of her neck to stand up.  Alexandru wanted out.  The demon within him demanded freedom.  It longed to stalk the moonlit night, to hunt the forest deer and stray peasants, to drink a fountain of blood from the spouting throat of whatever crossed its path.  Or so it said, over and over, until her skin crawled with the incestuous touch of its words borne on her brother’s lips.

She kept her back to the thing. For what she could not look at were Alexandru’s eyes, so eerily human in a face that was distinctly not human anymore and would not be human again until the coming of the merciful dawn.  The memory of the monster’s face haunted her—clear as if she was still gazing upon the horror snuffling and cursing behind her.  Silky sable fur had sprouted from Alexandru’s once handsome visage.  His lower jaw had distended into a dangerous and snapping maw.  She could still hear the bones stretching and popping as they sought to become the full-blown chops of the werewolf.  Alexandru was naked; save for the tattered shreds of inky black trousers.  She had watched that happen, rippling muscles growing, thickening, and replacing those of his own well-muscled form.  His bones snapped, as he grew impossibly taller, considerably more massive, before her eyes.  His legs had bent backward at the knee and his scream of agony in the face of it had left a black mark upon her soul.  Ileana listened to the fetters that held him howl in metallic resistance of the preternatural strength of their captive.