Page 69 of Now Comes the Mist

And then a shrill scream shatters the night.

I blink my eyes, and suddenly Vlad is gone. I am lying flat on my back on the cold bench. I turn my head to see Harriet running down the path, parting the mist over the graves. She sobs as she holds a lantern over me. “Oh, miss, are you all right?” she cries. “There was a wolf, a great ugly beast. It ran and jumped right over me! It was … You were … I saw …”

She trails off, her eyes widening in horror as she takes me in.

When Dr. Van Helsing performed my transfusion, I had felt like I was floating above my own body, watching the scene from somewhere above. That sensation returns to me now, as though the mist has lifted me into the night air, and I can see myself clearly through Harriet’s eyes: my long hair is a dark tangle, my knees are spread wide apart, and my toes are touching the grass on either side of the bench. My nightdress is ripped down to my waist, baring my breasts, and the hem is rucked over my legs, hiding absolutely nothing, including the splatter of blood staining the inside of my thighs.

A hundred emotions flash over my maid’s face in seconds.

I feel as empty as a shell or a husk. My throat throbs with pain and I am sore and bruised between my legs. “Harriet,” I say faintly, “I think you ought to take me home now.”

And then, in the darkness and the mist, I laugh and I laugh and I laugh.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

This time, I feel sure I am dying.

I lie in bed for days on end, struggling to breathe as my heart flutters in my chest instead of beating. I eat nothing, for I can keep no food in my stomach. I am too weak to stay awake for long, and thoughts flit in and out of my mind like bats in the shadows. One reigns above all others: the suspicion that this bargain between Vlad and me—my virtue in return for his dark gift—was only ever a bargain inmymind, and that he has simply taken what I offered him without any intention of granting me immortality. He tricked me.

And I, in my arrogance and stupidity, have allowed him to kill me. No vampire am I, not when I have been reduced to this weak, mewling husk of my former self.

I toss and turn, feverish and raving, and in the haze of my dreams I am dancing with Vlad again. I see his slow, knowing smile and hear his words, low and dark and private. “I bite my victim multiple times,” he whispers. But what had he said afterward? I cry out in frustration as threads of memory slip through my fingers. There had been something about killing before sunrise, and another piece I have lost in the trauma of his first bite and the lust of his second …

Faces drift in and out of my consciousness. I see Mamma, her face white as she clings with trembling hands to my bedpost, and Arthur with shadows under his eyes, running from his ailing father’s side to mine. “I will fight,” I want to reassure them. “I will find Vlad and demand that he fix this. I will be with you forever.” But none of it leaves my lips.

Jack Seward hovers over me, his brow furrowed and gaze shrewd, studying me as a physician now and no longer as a lover. Dr. Van Helsing’scalm voice breaks through the gloom with quiet resolve. “She needs blood, Jack. A great deal of it.”

“But what could have taken so much from her?”

“I am not certain.” Dr. Van Helsing’s solemn face floats into view. “But this is no dog. See how it bit her in exactly the same spot? Fitting its teeth into the old wounds …”

I slip in and out of sleep, only awakening fully when I feel a pinch in the crook of my arm and a rich, silky, metallic fragrance wafts into my nostrils like the finest perfume. Even if I had never seen blood, even if I had no idea what it looked like, I would still be able to smell its color: the deepest, most vivid scarlet red, swirling with vitality.

“Hold her down!” Dr. Van Helsing sounds frantic. “Hold her down, I say!”

Rough hands on my shoulders. A restraining grip on my grasping arms. I scream and cry and hiss to no avail. I could break every one of their fingers for denying me what I crave. Something is wrong with my vision. Everything near me is blurred as though I am looking at it through foggy glass: halos of yellow lamp light; the doctors’ weary faces; and a long, swinging rubber tube stained brilliant crimson.

But when my bleary gaze finds the bedroom window, I can see a droplet of water upon a branch, a withered leaf on the ivy trellis, a beetle crawling along the trunk of a tree. I can smell rain on cobblestone, horse droppings on a passerby’s shoe, a package of rotting food, and the musky scent from between a woman’s legs on a man scurrying down the street after a tryst. It reminds me of my encounter with Vlad, of my arms and legs locked around him and the feeling of him inside me like a stake made of ice, his hands moving me on him with exquisite precision.

“Stop her, Jack,” Dr. Van Helsing says sharply.

A strong hand takes my wrist, pulling my yearning fingers away from the seam of my legs, and I shriek in frustration. This, they dare to deny me also.

The buzzing in my ears is overpowering. I can hear a dozen conversations at once.

The cook, muttering in the kitchen. “I slave over these dishes all day only to have them come back untouched. And for what?”

Mamma, in her room. “What will I do? I cannot die before Lucy wakes. I must hold on for her sake. I must be here to care for her—”

My mother’s maid. “What you must do is stop fretting, madam, for it will do you harm. Now, be a lamb and go to sleep.”

Dr. Van Helsing, down the hall with Jack. “I have read of such things, of night creatures that feed upon the blood of the living.” Jack makes a sound of disbelief, and the doctor adds, “But how? How did it know to follow her here from Whitby?”

Harriet, talking to the other servants downstairs. “The mail is to be kept here, so as not to disturb Miss Lucy. But she will be upset not to hear of Miss Murray’s marriage.”

And then, suddenly and violently, my illness grows even worse. I heave up water, though my mouth is as dry as a desert, and I am so hot that I feel as though I have somehow floated through the mist and up to the sun. I writhe in pain, chafed by every thread in my sheets and blankets. It feels that the very air is killing me and tearing through the tissues of my lungs.

“Her pulse is almost gone. What’s happening to her?” Jack asks, hoarse with fear.

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