Karen Essex

by Dracula in Love (v5)

  He let me writhe under his touch until the final shudder, when my body went limp in his arms. “Ah, Mina, the taste of you,” he said, holding me to his chest and stroking my hair.

  We lay by the blazing hearth for a while, until the cold of the stone beneath us seeped through his cloak and into my bones, and I began to feel the pain from the wound in my neck. It throbbed and burned, competing in intensity with the heat of the flames of the fire. Drops of my blood were on his shirt.

  “I know that it hurts you. Close the wound,” he said.

  I put my hand over it and felt the torn flesh and the lazy ooze of blood.

  You know how to do it. You have done it before.

  Yes, but how? How to unite the magical woman I was in the past with the ordinary Mina in this body—this drained, throbbing, bleeding, and very human body? It seemed impossible.

  He placed a fingertip on my forehead at the temple and made a tiny circle, soothing me. I closed my eyes, until the dark emptiness behind my lids was replaced with a mental image of the wound. Words long forgotten, words stifled for centuries, rose from their grave and sounded in my mind: Divine Lady, I am parched with thirst for your power. Bring me to the Lake of Recollection, where I can drink its cool waters and recall my source. Let me bathe in the Lake of Memory, so that I may remember all that you are, and all that I am.

  My hands began to heat and electrify, and I placed the left one over the wound. Power of the Raven, be mine! Take my pain, close my wound, and let it offend me no more.

  The heat from my hand met the burning sensation in the wound, and it felt as if I were setting myself on fire. My hand seared the lesion, and I did not know if I was further injuring myself or not. But some knowing inside me made me keep my hand over the gash. In my mind’s eye, my flesh bubbled and frothed, like something that rose to the top in a boiling kettle. It was more painful than the original insult to my tissue, and I was tempted to stop before I seared my neck. Maybe my former powers were forever lost to me.

  Do not stop now. Trust.

  In time the pain began to subside, and my hands went from scorching hot to warm. I put my finger where the wound had been, but it was gone and the area was smooth. I searched for evidence of the gash, but the skin on my neck and throat was flawlessly intact.

  I sat up, and he sat with me, arms around me. We said nothing for a long while but simply held each other. I stared into the flames as they resurrected images and memories from my first days with him in this very room so many lifetimes ago. There is no explanation for love; no spoken words compare with its silent exhilaration. If that was true of the ordinary love between two mortals—if love is ever ordinary—then it was truer of a love that has contorted itself into different bodies in different eras over the centuries.

  Finally, I had to ask, “How was it that you, a mortal, lived on eternally, and I, a daughter of the Sidhe, died a mortal death?”

  “It was your choice,” he said, looking away from me. “I could not force you to choose eternal life, though I did try.”

  “What would make me choose a life away from you, my love? I cannot imagine it.”

  “My love,” he said, repeating my words. “I have waited a very long time to hear it roll from your lips again so effortlessly.” Then his expression turned to sadness. “The rest of that story is not a happy one,” he said.

  “Then I do not want to hear it,” I said. “Let us forget the past—all our pasts, whatever they were—and let us bind to each other again in the here and now, and let us make it forever. I never want to be apart from you again.”

  I expected a declaration of love, but he put two fingers on the pulse in my wrist, and then on my neck. “How do you feel? Are you dizzy or nauseous?”

  No, I am not sick, I am exhilarated and on fire with love for you, and I want to drink from you and be with you forever.

  “Yes, I know that,” he said dispassionately. “But I must gauge your physical response to what has happened. It is the rare human who could experience both returning to a past event and losing blood at the same time without severely weakening the body.”

  “Did we actually go back in time?” I had experienced the return to the past with every physical sensation, but that was the way in dreams too.

  He opened his hand, palm up. “The past is right here for those who know how to access it. Yes, we returned to it together. It was not a dream or hallucination, and that is why I could not restrain myself. When you opened yourself to me, the veil dropped, and we were caught between the two worlds. When we returned to the present time, I was still taking your blood, and I could not stop. I did not intend for that to happen, but our desire for each other was too intense. We must be certain that I did no harm.”

  “How could you think that you have done me harm? You have opened up the world to me. You asked me to remember who I am, and who we are together, and now I do remember. Nothing else matters now.”

  “Let us go back to the castle,” he said. “It is crucial that you stay warm and rest.”

  I want to take your blood into my veins. I want to be your blood lover and live with you forever.

  “This moment is seven hundred years in the making, Mina. We must be very careful. You are still quite mortal.”

  Suddenly, an overpowering hunger struck me. I felt restless to the core. My legs and arms began to quiver, and a void opened up inside me that I had to fill or go mad. I did not know what I desired, what nourishment could possibly quell this odd starvation. My body yearned for something, and I could only imagine that it was for him. I am starving for you. Let me feast on you.

  He did not respond but observed me as a doctor would, as John Seward had done. He took my pulse again. “Mrs. O’Dowd will have food prepared when we arrive.”

  In the dining room, jumpy flames from the iron candelabra on the table made flickering shadows on the walls. I sat down to a lavish meal of Irish stew, boiled salad with beets, celery, potatoes doused in cream sauce, haddock and rice, and a long cheeseboard piled with pungent varieties and tasty rolls. I ate with fiendish voraciousness, and slowly, my hunger subsided and my nerves calmed.

  We said little. The Count watched me eat, refilling my wineglass as I emptied it. “Much better,” he said, pronouncing on my condition.

  Why did you stop me?

  “It is not a decision to be made lightly,” he said. “There are consequences along the path to eternal existence.”

  “You said that I have the blood of the immortals, and that you have been trying to convince me for hundreds of years to accept eternal life with you. But when I agreed to begin it—thirsted for it, in fact—you would not allow it.” The food had calmed me, but I was still angry that he was able to control me. He had evoked something wild inside me, some feral part of me that eschewed danger and lived to perform feats of magic, and yet he stifled me.

  “There is more that you need to know.”

  “I know all that I need to know about you, if that is what you mean. And I know all that I need to know about myself. I do not care what happened seven hundred years ago after we sealed our love. I no longer care what happened seven days ago, for that matter. The past is dead, my love. I only care about the present and the future.”

  The Count looked at me as if I wearied him. “Let us see if you still feel the same way tomorrow.”

  “I feel more alive now than I have ever felt in this lifetime,” I said. I pushed away from the table and went to him and sat in his lap. He hugged me to him, letting me rest my head on his shoulder. “If we can visit the past, my love, can we not change it? I want to return to the past and change whatever I did that separated us for all this time.”

  I heard him laugh to himself. How many times have I tried to do just that? “If it were possible, I would have already done it, Mina. I would not have stopped revisiting the day of your decision until I changed your mind. I’m afraid that the gift of visiting the past is all that we have. We can revisit it, but only as it happened.”


  “Like actors on the stage who must obey the lines that are already written,” I said, for that is what it felt like to me. “I inhabited my former body, but I did not control it.”

  “And yet our powers are ever evolving,” he said. “We may discover in the future that we are able to do things that now seem impossible.”

  Why did I decide to live as a mortal?

  “Slowly, my love, slowly. Impatience will not serve you in this process.”

  I woke the next day in the afternoon and tried to get out of bed, but my fatigue was great, and I was unable to combat it. Every time I rose, exhaustion came over me, and I retreated to the bed, where I took a light meal and some tea. The Count watched me with concern. I could tell that he had not expected me to respond this way to the loss of blood and the rekindling of my powers. He had been so sure that I would be able to make the gradual transition out of mortal life, but my overwhelming need for rest troubled him. He had the kitchen prepare strong, meat-and bone-based broths for me, which he watched me drink to the last drops. In the evening, he made me take a mulled wine spiced with something that he said would relax me.

  “I do not need a sedative,” I said. “I can barely keep myself awake.”

  “There is a difference between a fatigued body and a relaxed body,” he said. And so I drank it and slept for fourteen hours.

  With one more lengthy sleep, I was able to rise in the afternoon, though a queasy feeling invaded my stomach and would not go away despite three cups of ginger tea and some toast. But a tepid yellow sun shone through the clouds for the first time since we had arrived, and it inspired me to dress.

  I could not find the Count anywhere. I sought Mrs. O’Dowd, finding her in the kitchen. I asked her if she knew his whereabouts, but she shrugged. “I do not, madam,” she said. I waited for her to speculate as to where he might be, but she was as silent as a stone. I sensed that she knew many things about him, perhaps more than I knew at this point, but I also saw that she was not about to reveal them to me. She was solicitous toward me, but by the way that she curtly answered my questions, she seemed either amused by me or suspicious of me, and I wondered if I was not the first female guest the Count had taken to this castle.

  “Mrs. O’Dowd, I would like to try to find out if I have any living relatives in the county,” I said, trying to establish a connection with her so that she might give me some information about my family. I explained that my mother had been an only child, and I did not know anything about my father’s family. I ran the only family names I remembered past her, but she claimed not to be familiar with any of them. She was very formal with me despite my attempts to approach her in a friendly manner. I asked her to arrange for me to have a carriage and coachman. I wanted to pass by my old home and I also wanted to find my mother’s grave. “You may try the old cemetery at Drumcliffe,” she said. “That is where many are buried.”

  She looked at me coldly, and I stared back into her eyes, when, in my own mind’s eye, I had a vision of her as a much younger woman in this very room bent over the long, pine worktable hatcheted with knife marks, with the Count’s mouth on her lips and neck. He looked exactly as he looked today, whereas she looked perhaps forty years younger. I almost swooned with the sight of it, after which she looked at me with even greater suspicion. “I am fine, Mrs. O’Dowd,” I said quickly, even before she asked me. “I took a sedative that has had a lasting effect on me, that is all.”

  “I understand the effect very well,” she said in a very knowing tone. “You needn’t explain anything to me. Do excuse me while I arrange for your carriage.”

  By the time the coachman brought me to the cemetery and helped me out of the carriage, the sun had dropped and the light had grown dimmer. An ancient stone watchtower flanked the cemetery, casting a long shadow over some of the gravestones, and an Irish High Cross that must have sat there for one thousand years, marked by its great circle at the center and decorated with biblical scenes, lorded over the entrance. A Gothic-style church with an inviting wooden door recessed in a massive arch was attached to the cemetery. I wanted to have a look inside, but knew that I must take advantage of the ever-diminishing daylight.

  I asked the coachman to wait by the carriage and I began to walk the rows between the headstones, searching for familiar names, especially those of my parents, Maeve and James Murray. I had nothing else to go on but that my grandmother’s name was Una. Moss, fungus, and wear from the passage of time obscured many of the stones’ inscriptions. I did not find any tombs bearing the name Murray, though it was common enough in the area. I was about to leave the cemetery when I saw a name and date that seemed strikingly familiar: Winifred Collins, 1818–1847. Where had I seen it before?

  I closed my eyes, resting my hand on the headstone. The wind picked up, sending a languid chill across my face, as if it had intentionally stopped to caress me. I remembered the name written on John Seward’s patient file. Winifred Collins: Born 1818. Vivienne? But she had died in 1890 in London. A sickening feeling swept through my stomach, but I quickly told myself that it could not possibly be the same person.

  What were the chances that two female children with the same name had been born in the same year in Sligo County? On the other hand, Vivienne had not said that she was from Sligo. Perhaps this was just a coincidence after all. Though Winifred was not a common name, Ireland was rife with families named Collins.

  Poor Vivienne. I tried to banish my last image of her from my mind, dead by the hands of the doctors and their unnecessary, fatal experiments. If the doctors had had their way, I would be lying in the cellar next to her on another cot, covered by a sheet and waiting for burial. I did not like to think about her, either dead or alive, with her mad eyes that were the same color as mine. I remembered how her outlandish stories had captivated me. Now I had relived them the other night in my vision, or whatever that was, with myself as the central character. Had I been correct when I told John Seward that when I looked at Vivienne, I saw my future? Was I, in fact, as mad as she? The experience of two nights ago had been as real to me as any waking moment I could remember, but now I had to wonder if Vivienne had planted those ideas in my mind, and they had taken hold, transforming into an experience that I recreated and called my own.

  I sat down on the grave of Winifred Collins, whoever she was, and put my head in my hands. I wished that I could be more rational, more sleuthlike in assembling all the information I had gathered with all that I had experienced to construct some semblance of reality that made sense to me. I needed a firm identity that I could hold on to, but as things were, that identity was in constant flux, and growing ever more sensational.

  Feeling disturbed, and with more questions than answers coursing through my mind, I walked slowly back to the carriage and gave the coachman the location of the cottage where I had lived for the first seven years of my life. Perhaps I would find something there—anything at all—to help me sort out what was happening to me. “Ah, yes, off the old Circuit Road,” he said confidently, and put me inside the coach.

  We drove down a country road lined with barren trees that I remembered from my childhood. I used to think that the jumble of scraggly branches cradled at the tops of their trunks were giant birds’ nests. Crossing a stone bridge that straddled a narrow, rushing river, we turned away from the sun, driving past old cottages hobbled with neglect—fallen chimneys, overgrowths of reedy grass. When we reached our destination, I saw that my parents’ house had fared no better. Weeds filled the garden where I had played, and windows and doors were crudely boarded up so that I could neither enter nor see inside.

  I walked around to the back of the house and sat alone on the steps, feeling discouraged and rootless. I did not know exactly what I was looking for, but I had hoped to discover some connection with my past. I thought I could hear the current of the river charging over the big black stones I had seen in its midst as we had crossed the bridge. Or perhaps it was just the sound of the wind whipping through the valley. I conte
mplated taking a walk to the river while I still had a bit of daylight. I stood up and turned around.

  “Mina, Mina, Wilhelmina, hair as black as night!”

  I heard girls’ voices singing as if they were standing next to me, but no one was there. I knew those voices, had heard them before.

  “Mina, Mina, Wilhelmina, eyes so green and bright!”

  The voices were encircling me now, frightening me. I swirled around to try to see who or what was singing, and I stumbled backward. I tried to break the fall with my hands, but I kept falling and falling until darkness enveloped me, and only then did I hit the ground.

  I laugh and spin, singing with my friends. I am giving a tea party for them, I know, because I see the little cups and saucers on the play table with low benches where I sit every day and play with my toys. My dress is of plain forest green wool, but the other girls are wearing beautiful tunics the colors of gems—ruby dresses with sapphire mantles and dappled with jewels that dance before me like little insects on fire. My hair is dark as a crow, but theirs is red and gold and even longer than mine. A ray of sun slashes through the turbulent Irish sky, and I see that my friends’ perfect skin shimmers in the sun, making them almost translucent. We all hold hands and sing songs, dancing in circles until I am dizzy. “Mina, Mina, Wilhelmina!” They sing my name again and again, making me feel giddy and special. I fall to the ground laughing. My three friends laugh at me, holding out their hands to lift me up, trying to get me to dance, but I am too tired to join them. While I am lying on my back, catching my breath, they drain all the tea from the cups on the little table and then they disappear. Suddenly, my mother’s face is above me, and I ask her where they have gone, and her look turns dark and angry. “You were alone in the garden, Mina. Why must you always cause mischief? You know that your father does not like it when you invent these stories. Why cannot you be a truthful little girl?”