Page 56 of Now Comes the Mist

My body feels as limp as a rag wrung out too forcefully. The mist surrounds us, blocking the house from view, and I shiver in the unrelenting cold. I feel as though I may never get warm again. “Am I dying?” I whisper. “Was all of this for nothing?”

“You are not dying.”

A weak sob escapes me. “It hurt so much. I thought … I thought I would enjoy it as Mrs. Edgerton did. She looked happy. But I—” I break off as a wave of dizziness overtakes me. I feel as though I might float away with the mist if Vlad lets go of my hand. But he does not.

“I was rougher with you,” Vlad says, smoothing hair off my clammy forehead. “Much rougher. I had to teach you a lesson. I didn’t want to, but you forced my hand. You made me be the monster everyone expects me to be.” He presses his freezing fingers against my wounds, which feels so soothing that I lean against his hand, crying weakly. Gently, he pulls me into his arms and lifts me like a child, and as he stands up, the mist rises with him.

My head droops over his chest where his dead heart lies still. I am so cold and tired that I only vaguely register us moving through the thick fog. We are floating away from the bright windows of the Wilcox home, which slowly fades into the distance.

“I took more blood than I planned,” Vlad says ruefully. I feel no heartbeat in his chest, but I do hear the vibration of his voice. Alive, yet not alive. A man, yet not a man. “I’m afraid you will be very ill for some time. I wish you had listened to me and not forced me to bite you.”

I close my eyes against another wave of dizziness, and when I open them again, I see my family’s lodgings at the Crescent. Vlad carries me to the door and stops on the steps. “You brought me home?” I ask. “But Mamma and Mina and Arthur … the people at the ball—”

“I will take care of it.” He lowers me to the ground. My knees quiver as though I am walking on mist instead of solid ground. “I must leave you here. I cannot carry you inside.”

I press my hand against my neck, feeling the heat of the protruding wounds, and groan. “I am near death, and all you care about is my reputation and servants gossiping?”

“I cannot enter without invitation,” Vlad reminds me. “I told you, but you wouldn’t listen. What I am is a curse. And I am afraid,” he adds, a trifle smugly, “that now you have been infected with my venom, you will feel something of these limitations yourself.”

I blink at him, lightheaded and unsteady. “What do you mean? I cannot go into the sun?”

“Of course you can. You haven’t transformed. But you may find that it hurts your eyes or stings your skin. That is the price of what you brazenly demanded from me.” He strokes a long, icy finger down my tear-stained cheek, his face full of regret. “I think you will be extremely ill tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. You will need a doctor.”

“Oh, what do you care?” I ask tiredly, pushing his hand away and dropping onto the doorstep. “I am only a woman. A plaything and a diversion, as you said, and even after all I have shared with you, you still prefer someone else. Go and leave me here to die.”

“How dramatic you are,” Vlad says brightly. “Are you jealous?”

I lean my head against the door and close my eyes. “No, I am not jealous,” I say, exhausted. “I am only cold and tired and very, very sad. Please just go.”

But he does not leave. Instead, he sits down beside me, as though we are on the bench on the cliffs again, and he pulls my head to rest against his shoulder.

“Why are you still here?” I ask.

“Because what you said is true. I believe I do care more for you than even I know,” he says. “But what I told you before is also true: I do not love. It is simpler not to, and you must never hope for that from me, Lucy. No woman should … though many of them have.”

There are ghosts in his voice, past lovers who had fallen for him and fallen to their deaths. The perfect women of every age, succumbing before he took everything, emptied them like wine from a glass. I think of his admiration for Mina and go cold with fear at the idea that she could ever suffer what I just have. And then I remember what I should not have forgotten all along, had I been a better friend to her and not so absorbed in my own affairs: that Vlad seemed to have known of Mina before the cliffs, as indeed he had known of me.

I sense that this is my moment to ask him, that I will get more answers in his unusual state of gentleness, the closest I will ever get to an apology for what he has done. Mustering what strength I have left, I say thinly, “You told me you have seen Mina’s picture before. Tell me the truth, Vlad. Have you crossed paths with Jonathan Harker?”

“I have.”

I swallow, my throat dry and painful. “Then you are the client he was working for? The nobleman whose castle sits in the Mountains of Deep Winter?”

“I am.”

I am seized with an even more profound cold than what I already feel. Oh, Mina, my poor Mina. “But he left months ago,” I say, my voice trembling. “And you are here, and he is missing and has not written in a long time. Is he … is he dead?”

“No. Nor is he like me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

With a monumental effort, I lift my head from his shoulder and look into his eyes. My voice is barely above a whisper. “But you did bite him as you bit me?”

His smile is a red slash in his face. Some of his teeth are still stained with my blood. “Several times, in fact, and quite enjoyed him.”

“Where is he?” I ask, my heart clenching for Mina.

“Still there,” Vlad says matter-of-factly. “He was extremely useful from the moment he set foot in my castle. He gave me such insight into his society and helped me with the language, in addition to assisting with the purchase of my home. I told him how his country fascinated me. Such a tiny land with such immense reach. Under the rule of a woman, no less!Power calls to power, and England called to me. I needed an agent who would introduce me to her ways.”

“And Jonathan served you well,” I say bitterly.

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