Page 87 of Now Comes the Mist

“To teach you about your new existence, of course. You thought I would be cruel enough to forsake you? How hurtful.” He tilts his head. “Though itwouldhave been fun to watch you struggle, crying into your food and trying to wander about in the sun. That would have exposed me to discovery, however, and I have not yet sampled all that England has to offer. I ought to teach you how to better dispose of your meals. If you keep leaving drained bodies under trees, you might just set that little Chinese doctor on my trail.”

“I thought you weren’t afraid of him,” I snap.

“I am not afraid of him, my dear, but of the inconvenience of being on the run. You will know it well. It is something you never anticipated, did you? In your stupidity and arrogance.” He flicks my nose with a fingertip, and I jerk away from his touch. “Most humans do not like vampires. I’m sure you can imagine why. Too often have I had to flee mobs waving torches and howling for my death. Once one of them gets wind of what I am, the fear will spread quickly to more of them. It happens in every place, in every age, sooner or later.”

“You have been a vampire for hundreds of years and still have not learned to hide yourself?” I ask contemptuously. “You have spent immortality well, I see.”

His eyes blaze with cold blue fire, but his voice remains calm. “Watch how you speak to your master. You will soon learn how difficult it is to move invisibly among the prey you hunt. You think you can hide what you are and stay with your precious Arthur and Mina all their lives without attracting fear and curiosity?” His gaze bores into mine, and pinpricks of pain pierce my scalp. “Vampires cannot stay with anyone. They cannot get close to anyone. They cannotlove.”

I wince. “Stop it.”

“You think you are better than I am. I can hear you.”

“Getoutof my mind,” I snarl, and miraculously, the pain disappears at once. I feel his invasion of my thoughts fading, though I have not even tried to envision my silver shield.

Vlad growls. “You are my property, and so is your mind.”

Once more, I feel the sharp pain of his invasion. And once more, I push it out of my head as easily as breathing. Clearly, my new strength is not just limited to my physical body.

But my pleasure and surprise are short-lived as he pinches my chin between his fingers, hard. “You belong to me. You are an extension of me, however much you want to judge me for enjoying my victims. Can you not see what fun they are having?” Roughly, he turns my head.

The olive-skinned girl is on a bed in her corset and nothing else, lying with the men who had been tugging her about. Behind a billowing curtain, the fat pale man wrestles with the three dark-skinned women he had been chasing. Meanwhile, at the piano, a blond woman is playing with her head thrown back in pleasure. Another woman, naked and copper-skinned, who had been kneeling between the pianist’s legs, gets up and wipes her mouth before collapsing to the floor again. Her gaze finds me, and in it I see a desperate plea.

“None of them are here by consent,” I say, sick with revulsion. I look around the dining table at everyone fainting and limp in their chairs. “You forced them to attend.”

Vlad chuckles. “How charming that you think consent means anything anymore. I am not onlyyourmaster, but theirs as well. I could make anyone do anything I wish. I could have Arthur here in a minute, kneeling betweenmylegs, or Mina waiting for me on that bed. They are all just animals. Slaves for my food and my pleasure.”

My stomach roils with nausea. “How did you call so many of them to you?” I ask, and then I see what I had not noticed before. Every window of this ballroom is open, and the mist is slipping in like a vine of smoke. “You used the mist. You can make humans sleep—”

“Or put them in a trance, as you did to those poor children.” He smiles at my shock. “You will find, my dear, that we are irresistibly attractive to humans. So much so that we can call to them even without meaning to. They will come running through the mist, those lucky few who are caught between two worlds. The waking and the dreaming …”

“And the living and the dead,” I whisper.

“Those who sleep lightly are drawn to us, as are those who walk in their dreams. But you already knew that.” Vlad’s smile widens. “You judge me prematurely. You do not know how fun it can be to make them lose their inhibitions. Let me show you.” He nods at the copper-skinned woman sprawled on the floor, who gets up immediately and stumbles over to us, trembling.

Her knees are red from having knelt in front of the pianist, and her head lolls to one side as though too heavy to hold upright. My gut clenches at the pain in her eyes, even as my newly awakened hunger roars at the clean apple-blossom scent of her blood.

“Let her go, Vlad,” I say furiously. “Let them all go.”

“And have you skip a meal? Don’t be silly.” Vlad strokes my cheek with a cold finger. “Go on and feed, Lucy. This is my wedding gift to you. Drain her dry.”

Against my will, my body flies toward the woman until we are standing inches apart. She is much taller than me and painfully thin, and the holes on her neck are ragged and careless. Up close, her blood smells even more fragrant, as soft and warm and floral as a spring morning. I feel the pinch of pain in my gums as my fangs snap down involuntarily.

“No,” I say desperately. “No, Vlad, I won’t do this again. I cannot take another life.”

“You can and you will.”

“Perhaps I can take only a little. Just enough to satisfy me …” But even as I say it, I know I will not be able to control my devastating hunger. I seized every drop from that vagrant on the street in the blink of an eye, and the intense emptiness roaring inside of me now would destroy any willpower I had. I turn to Vlad, trembling. “You drink from humans without killing them. You did it to me, and to everyone in this room. Teach me. Show me how. Please.”

“I cannot,” he says calmly. “For I never allow my hunger to grow as uncontrollable as yours. That is something you will learn to do with time. For now, do as I say. Kill her.”

I look up into the woman’s drowsy face. Her features are sharp and clear beneath long waves of dark hair. Her eyes are large, dark, and filled with tears of horror and sorrow and hopelessness. In them, I see my own terrible beauty, showy and obscene as a full-blown rose, a virginal woman with blossoms in her hair. And I wonder if this curse will lead to an addiction to seeing myself in the frightened eyes of humans.

“Lucy?” Vlad prompts me.

“No,” I say again, but then I hear the young woman mumble something.

“Please.”

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