Now Comes the Mist

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T hat night, in my dreams, I find myself on an empty stretch of beach in front of a stately house, white with blue shutters, standing snug against the rocks and facing the sea. It looks like a fairy tale, all drooping vines and beach roses blooming against the sand. Light winks from one of the windows. Through the fog, I climb onto the veranda, find the door open, and enter an elegant and sumptuously decorated hall. Gold framed art hangs on the walls, curtains spill puddles of dark brocade upon the rich carpet, and fresh flowers burst from marble vases on every surface.

I hear harp music as clear, golden, and sparkling as champagne, the melody rising and falling as naturally as breathing. I follow the sound into a parlor lit by dozens of slim white candles and find Diana Edgerton on a velvet stool beside a great, shining brass harp, her dainty fingers plucking its strings with practiced ease and confidence.

“Mrs. Edgerton?” I ask, surprised.

She neither responds nor looks at me. In fact, she seems to be asleep. Her gleaming light brown hair hangs about her shoulders in waves, her eyes are half-closed, and her lips are parted as though in ecstasy. Her lace nightdress is slipping, revealing a round white shoulder as she plays the harp. A dark ribbon woven into her hair cascades down one side of her neck. I cannot help staring, never having seen the shy and retiring widow so full of life and passion.

“She bloomed like a rose for me,” Vlad says, and I turn to see him on a sofa nearby. “Her soul has been sleeping for years and unfurls only with her music. What depths she conceals, what secret desires no man can satisfy, least of all that doddering old husband of hers. She is not like you, Lucy, with your anger and ferocity and fathomless longing right at the surface.”

“Why are we here?” I ask uneasily.

“I thought I would expand your social circle.”

“Why have you called to me when you already have company?” I ask, affronted. “You said you would tell me everything when we were alone, and we are not.”

Vlad regards me for a moment. “You are quite right. Allow me to rectify that.”

He gets up and moves to Mrs. Edgerton’s side. As gently as a lover, he moves her curtain of hair behind her, exposing her neck. And I realize that what I thought was a ribbon is actually a stream of dark liquid, trailing from a wound and soiling the pristine white lace of her nightgown. It glistens bright red as she continues playing her music in a joyous trance, unbothered.

My hands fly up to my own throat as a terrible shiver takes hold of me. I feel deathly cold as I take in the two gaping holes on Mrs. Edgerton’s slender neck. Blood weeps onto her gown and yet her face registers neither pain nor horror, only a chilling and perfect bliss so at odds with her condition. But there is something else beneath my fear—something I recognize, shocked, as envy. I am jealous of how happy and content she looks, such as I have never been in all my life.

Vlad is watching me with silent intensity.

“What is happening to her?” I croak.

“She is dying,” he says, kneeling behind her. He wraps his arms around her and rests his chin on her shoulder. She leans her head back adoringly on him with no interruption in the music, no pause of her fingers on the strings. “Have you ever seen the life leave a person, Lucy?”

“Yes,” I say, thinking of Papa and of my grandmother, motionless in her bed.

“But have you ever seen it leave like this?” He kisses Mrs. Edgerton’s naked shoulder, and I see that his eyes have changed. Instead of their usual deep blue-green, they have become entirely black with a ring of poisonous red encircling each pupil. He offers me a wide smile, and the candlelight glints on his perfect white teeth, two of which have elongated like daggers of bone. The space between them is exactly the same distance as that which separates the holes on the woman’s neck, and my breath snags in my chest as I realize … I realize …

Vlad lowers his mouth in one smooth, merciless maneuver, puncturing her with his long, sharp teeth. I hear his lips moving like the softest of kisses, and she moans as her body seizes—with pain or pleasure? Her music never ceases as she thrashes in his embrace with unadulterated elation. I tremble at the sight, but this time the envy, the want , is stronger than the horror. I have never seen such unbridled passion outside of my dreams. Vlad’s hand slides to Mrs. Edgerton’s breast as he deepens his kiss, adjusting the angle of his lips, and I let out a ragged breath.

After what seems like an eternity, her hands fall from the harp. The air hangs heavy with her unfinished music as she sinks against Vlad, bone white and drained of life. He detaches his mouth and faces me, teeth gleaming scarlet in the light. Slowly, deliberately, he licks them clean, then wipes his mouth with her nightdress and pushes her away as he stands, his eyes returning to their normal color. Mrs. Edgerton slumps to the floor at the base of her harp, head tilted back, her wounds no longer seeping. And I remember what Harriet had said about the Demeter ’s luckless crew, of which only the captain and a single sailor had remained, dead and empty of blood: “Such a large vessel must have left port with a sizable crew,” she had told us. “What became of all the others, no one can guess.”

“It was you,” I breathe. “You came in on the Demeter , as you said you would. You sailed from Varna, and you drank the crew members. Did you … dispose of all the other men?” In my mind’s eye, I see pale drained bodies slipping into the sea one by one.

“Yes. Unfortunately there was no time to hide the two left on board. The storm pushed us into harbor too quickly and people were running to help, and I had to get myself away as soon as possible.”

For a moment, there is no sound but my labored breathing. “How did you disembark? People only saw a dog—”

“In town this morning,” he says calmly, straightening the collar of his shirt, “did you not notice how interested that tiny creature was in me? What was its name … Crumpet?”

“Biscuit,” I say faintly.

Vlad shrugs his powerful shoulders. “Animals always know. They have stronger senses than humans, and our friend Biscuit recognized me. He can see better, smell better, and move faster than you, and he might even outrun me … or at least try. But you, Lucy, would not be able to. You could not hide from me anywhere in the world if I wished to find you.”

It is clear from the curious and intent way in which he studies me that I am being tested. He is weighing my words and my reaction. He knows I am unlike others of my society; he knows that death attracts and compels me, but how will I respond when it stares me in the face with scarlet-stained teeth? I feel, then, the urge to show him that I am more equal to him than any other woman who blushed for him today.

“You say that Biscuit recognized what you … what you are today.” My eyes flicker to Diana Edgerton’s crumpled body. “And here I thought you were just good with dogs.”

Genuine surprise flickers across Vlad’s face. He laughs, the sound warm and inviting, and the candles seem to burn more brightly around us. He looks at me, his strong and handsome face alight, and I know that I have passed his test. “What a marvel you are, my little Lucy, my kindred soul,” he says affectionately. “Are you not afraid of me in the least?”

“Of course I am. I would be a fool otherwise.”

“Quite.”

I cannot stop looking at the corpse. “But I am as curious as I am afraid. I ought to be more disturbed by the manner in which you took her life. But it makes me want to know ,” I say, and with the admission comes the smallest bit of shame. Any other person would be running and screaming, disturbed by the scene, and here I am wishing to learn. It would be easier to shrug away my morbid desire in a dream … but now I know that this is reality.

Vlad seems to take it as a matter of course, however. He is as focused on me now as he was distant this morning. “Ask your questions, then,” he says indulgently, sitting back down on the sofa and gesturing for me to take Mrs. Edgerton’s abandoned stool. I obey, angling my feet to avoid the woman’s still-warm body. “I will answer whatever you want to know.”

“Who are you?” I ask at once. “What are you? And why do you drink blood?”

He laughs again. “I am who I say I am. The names and titles I gave you and Miss Murray this afternoon do belong to me, but only you know my private, given name. That is how special you are to me.” His eyes are soft on mine, and in that moment—try as I might to fight it—I feel myself forgive him. “I told you that in life, I was a scholar, a statesman, a philosopher, a warrior. Since then, I have inhabited many existences in many ages.”

“You are no longer alive?”

“Not in the way you are.” Vlad places a hand on his broad chest. “You see me before you, yet my heart does not beat. I breathe, yet my lungs do not need air. I am a being of fearsome physical and intellectual faculties … and I ought to be. I gave up my very soul for it long ago.”

I grip the edge of the stool. “Then death cannot touch you?”

“Not in the way that it does humans, but make no mistake, I can die.” His smile is a thing of ferocious beauty. “I was born into a powerful family, but with power comes the fight to keep it. My father’s lands were torn between dueling empires and allegiances. Like you, I saw much loss in my youth. And when I in my turn became the lord of my people and inherited my father’s enemies, I heard the footsteps of death behind me wherever I went.” He pauses. “And that would simply not do.”

I feel as though I have forgotten how to breathe. “And so you cheated death?”

“In a way. But death is forever the last, the greatest, and the ultimate enemy, and it holds sway even over the bargain I made.” Vlad gazes out the window to where the sea roars, invisible in the shadows. “I was accepted into a … what is the English word? An academy, deep in the dark heart of the Carpathians. A school to which all of the sons of my family had been invited for centuries but had always refused out of fear. This place is a secret I must keep even from you, Lucy. Its whereabouts, what I learned … and who taught there. But this I can tell you: I was the first of my family to go, the only one brave enough.” His eyes meet mine once more. “Seven students are accepted every seven years, and the greatest of these, the Master takes for his own.”

“You.”

“Me. At his feet, I learned about immortality and traded in my soul to become what I am now: vampyr. A vampire. But in return for my gifts of power, strength, and long life, I must drink the blood of mankind.” He looks down at the corpse with detachment. “That is how I sustain myself and how I repay death for escaping its gaze: by taking other lives in the place of my own. Just as there must be a balance in the natural world, there must be a balance in the unnatural .”

I exhale at last, my body shuddering with relief. “You are the only one of your kind?”

“No,” he says, soft and contemplative. “There are two others like me, created by me, but far inferior. Over the centuries, I have taken a small number of men and women as lovers and confidantes, but I always end them when the time comes, and I am careful when I drink now. I will not be like the Greeks’ Cronus, forever waiting for one of my children to overthrow me.”

“ Created by you? You turn them into vampires by drinking their blood?” I ask, looking down at Mrs. Edgerton’s corpse in mingled anxiety and fascination. “Will she revive?”

“No. Nor will any of the crew of the Demeter , I’m afraid.” Vlad gets up and walks over to the window to gaze up at the moon. “Draining a human of every drop will simply kill them. Creating another of my kind takes a bit more forethought than that.”

I wait eagerly, but he does not explain further, and something about his pensive silence warns me not to press him now. “Why are you telling me all this?” I ask instead. “You were evasive when I asked you about the Demeter earlier.”

“You expected me to speak of this in front of Mina, that fragile flower you love so much? No, I cannot be open with her. Only with you.” He turns and looks at me with wonder and affection. “I never expected the mist to bring you. I never called to you those times before you came to Whitby, you know. And yet some sense or awareness helped you find me somehow.”

“The mist?” In my mind, I see open graves, marble statues, a moonlit ballroom. A path of thorns tipped with red and all around us, the silvery blanket of the mist rising, hiding our kisses and my bare arms around his neck and his head tucked against mine.

He lifts his hand, and outside the window a thread of mist appears. “I use it to call to other dreamers. It is how I came to see the land I would call home whilst still on board a ship. It was a tedious necessity, that long route by sea. It took more than a month, but had I gone over land, there would have been curious eyes, train delays, and prying tax collectors. A ship is a world of its own, one that humans cannot easily leave any time they wish.”

“How frightened the crew must have been of you,” I say softly. I imagine being trapped on a vessel tossing in the turbulent sea, unable to escape as something with red-ringed pupils and teeth like knives stalked me in the shadows. Bodies being drained, one by one, with ruthless efficiency. I resist the urge to shudder, for Vlad is watching me closely. “My maid heard that the Demeter carried a curious cargo: thirty boxes full of earth.”

“It is the soil of my homeland. The earth on which my many castles, my sanctuaries sit. I plan to distribute the boxes throughout England, so that I may have a resting place wherever I go, away from human eyes and from the sun, which I cannot abide, as you saw this afternoon.”

“The sun hurts you? Powerful and immortal as you are?”

He chuckles, pleased, though I had been stating a fact and not attempting flattery. “Yes. I, too, have my limitations, insignificant as they are.” He approaches a mirror on the wall, and I expect to see his reflection looking at me, but the glass only shows the room around us. “Mirrors no longer see me. They are backed by silver, which is said to repel evil. Nor can I be painted, for any attempt to capture my likeness becomes warped. Twisted. But these are mere trifles in exchange for everlasting life, do you not agree?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper, staring at the empty place where his reflection ought to be.

“I cannot enter a home without invitation. But that would be rude, so I am glad for that limitation.” He turns to me with a touch of humor. “The very sight or smell of garlic offends me. Something to do with its ability to cleanse the blood, which is anathema to the venom I carry. But I have never liked pungent flavors and smells anyway, and all human food is repellent to me now.”

For some perverse reason, I am reminded of Mamma and Arthur and their aversion to Papa’s tea and incense, and I marvel at the ridiculousness of having such a thought at such a moment. “But the drinking of blood must be a heavy limitation indeed,” I say, looking down at Mrs. Egerton’s crumpled body, my heart aching at how fragile and pale she looks in death. At how easily her flame was snuffed out. “To take a life as though you are a god.”

Vlad shakes his head dismissively. “That cannot stop me. I can subsist on animals if need be. And as for the sun burning my skin, that matters little when I have always preferred the night. So many more interesting things can happen in the dark, don’t you think?” There is a hunger now in the way he looks at me, not that of a beast for his prey, but an empty, fathomless longing.

And God help me, I feel my heart and soul respond to him, this being of unnatural gifts and untold power who, even in his invincibility, might just understand my loneliness. Perhaps that is why I do not feel as afraid as I should be … because I know that beneath his monstrous nature, he is vulnerable, and he has chosen to show that to me. This man who trusts no one.

“I almost died from boredom on that ship,” he says, mouth quirking at his own choice of words, “as we sailed slowly west through Gibraltar and then north through the Celtic Sea. But I had you, Lucy. You who are young and innocent and yet seem to understand that I did not so much as take this woman’s life as I gave her a moment of the perfect happiness that had always eluded her. The grand passion of which she dreamed … and of which you dream, too,” he adds, so knowingly that I blush. “And now that I have told you everything, I would like you to do something for me . I am in need of music. Will you play?”

I glance at the harp in surprise. “I am much better at the piano.”

“Indulge me.”

I tentatively touch the strings, half fearing that they might still be warm from the widow’s touch, but they are not. “You request that I play? You do not compel me as you did her?”

His eyes gleam. “I like you with free will. Now, no more talking. Play something.”

Mamma had always insisted that I learn and excel at music. I had hated the piano as a child, but as I grew older, I saw that it was a useful excuse to be the center of attention at parties and allowed men to watch me openly. I had only ever played the harp with Mina, who had taught me some duets, sitting side by side, our four hands making a beautiful harmony. It is the opening chord of one of those duets that I play now, though I will perform alone … or so I think.

As my fingers play the notes with an ease that does justice to Mina’s teaching, I sense Vlad moving behind me. I hold my breath at the nearness of him, and my heart races as his white hands reach out on either side of me. But instead of touching me, his fingers find the harp and he begins to play, with perfect precision, the other half of the duet. His breath stirs my hair as he moves even closer to me, the buttons of his waistcoat pressing into the back of my nightgown.

In a daze, I shift forward to the very edge of the velvet stool, my knees touching the sides of the harp. There is no break in the music as Vlad sits behind me, his arms and legs framing mine. He buries his face in my hair as he plays, and I shiver uncontrollably, never having felt so close to him before, even after so many embraces in the night. I am helpless, lost in his body like a shell in the arms of the sea. I lean into him and feel his icy lips on my bare shoulder.

The tempo of the music increases with the intensity of his kisses. His mouth explores me with light scrapes of his teeth, and I gasp. This passage of the duet requires him to play the strings at the very center of the harp, and his arms tighten around me as he takes the melody and I the harmony, my fingers somehow steady even though every nerve is blazing with need for him. His lips push my nightdress off my shoulder, exposing the vulnerable, pristine skin of my neck.

Half of me is terribly afraid, remembering the holes in Mrs. Edgerton’s neck and imagining my fragile flesh tearing beneath his teeth. But the other half burns with unquenchable lust and desire, needing him to enter me as badly as I need air. “Please,” I moan, though I am not even certain what I am begging for. “Please, Vlad.”

With one hand still playing, he takes the other and pulls the nightdress farther down to expose my left breast. His cold fingers cup me tenderly as his thumb finds my nipple, sending waves of unbearable excitement through me. Never have I been touched this way, and I wonder how on earth I have lived without it before now. I lean fully against him, not caring if I send us both over the back of the stool, but he is like solid granite resisting me. His thumb strokes, his mouth tastes, and I no longer have any idea what melody I am playing.

I am as wet where I sit as if I had lowered myself into the ocean. As the music escalates into a rising crescendo, I feel as though I am running up, up, up a hill with my arms flung wide open, anticipating the blissful moment when I will plummet down the other side.

Vlad’s hand leaves my breast to find my throat. I feel a sharp, hot sting as his fingernails scratch the skin below my ear, and then his mouth is there, sucking greedily at my blood, though he is careful to keep his teeth away. I close my eyes and let out a long moan as the downhill comes and colors explode behind my lids. It is as exhilarating a freefall as jumping off the cliffs toward certain death. My hands drop away from the harp at last and I shake like a leaf in his arms, gripped by overwhelming sensations, as he finishes drinking me with a soft kiss.

His low laugh tickles my ear. “Sleep now, Lucy. I will see you again soon.”

I blink my eyes, and the candlelit parlor is gone. I am lying in bed next to Mina, who is fast asleep with her cheek pillowed on her hand. Outside the window, the sky is still dark, and my room is wreathed in shadows as though I have been here all night, like I am supposed to be.

Like a good girl should be.

But when I sit up and meet the eyes of my own reflection in the mirror above my dressing table, I see that my disheveled hair is coming out of its plait and my nightdress is pooling around my waist. I am damp between my legs, and when I touch the left side of my neck, I gasp when my fingers come away with the faintest trace of blood.

I cannot help smiling at my reflection because I know that I am not a good girl.

I am not a good girl at all.