Incarnation (4 page)

I stepped again into the street. At once, the trio of hooded creatures moved forward. Almost too late, I realized that they meant not simply to block my passage but to seize hold of me. Anger warred with disbelief. I dropped the valise I carried, hoisted up my skirt, and lashed out with a booted foot, catching one of the assailants in the chest. Such was the force of my kick that he should have collapsed. But after staggering for a moment, the creature righted himself and came at me again.

My recent transformation had endowed me with vastly greater strength and speed than normal, the extent of which I was still discovering. I flung one of the creatures against a
nearby wall and another into a lamppost even as the third tried to grab hold of me. He was strong, but I was stronger. Whirling, turning, a blur of motion and fury, I scarcely knew when my feet left the ground and I soared, unfettered by gravity. That had not happened before and for just a moment I was distracted. The assailants seized the opportunity and came at me all together. I heard their hissing breath, saw their gnarled hands reaching out to pull me down, and realized that one was holding a chain finely wrought from silver links. As it brushed against my skin, a burst of pain convulsed me. For an instant, I was helpless. Two of the creatures bore me to the ground. The third, holding the chain, advanced. In a moment, I would be bound, engulfed in agony, and unable to defend myself.

The monster within me lifted its head and howled. I turned and sank my fangs into the nearest creature. The bite should have drawn blood, but mercifully I tasted nothing. I did, however, hear the high-pitched, keening cry that broke from the assailant as he struggled to free himself. Letting him go, I leaped to my feet and turned on the others. The one with the chain started forward again. I extended both my arms, knit my hands together, and struck him so hard a blow that he flew across the street and landed up against the alley archway. Just then, the moon emerged from behind high threads of clouds. Throwing my head back, fangs gleaming in the cold white light, I howled defiance.

The creature I had struck down did not move, but the other two did. They seized his arms and, dragging him, ran with all speed toward the shadows beyond the Strand. In an instant, I was alone. Only the silver chain, lying in the gutter, remained as mute evidence of the attack.

Giving the weapon a wide berth, I willed myself to be calm
and straightened my ensemble. My hair had come down during the struggle. It tumbled in thick auburn waves around my shoulders. I pinned it up again before recovering my valise and crossing the street. Swiftly, I found the door I sought. It was locked, but that was of no consequence. With care—there having been more than enough disorder that night—I lifted it off its hinges and leaned it up against the side of the theatre.

Just beyond lay a dark passage. My eyes, keener than they had ever been during my human existence, made out trunks and baskets, backdrops, and bits of scenery stacked along the walls. At the far end, a sliver of light shone. I moved toward it, alert to the possibility that more of the strange creatures might be lurking, but none were in evidence. When I reached the light, I paused. An inner door stood partially ajar. I could see a cluttered office and a man working at a desk illuminated by a small gas lamp. I recognized Mr. Bram Stoker at once.

Without hesitation, I pushed the door open and entered. Stoker looked up. His broad face with its thick brows and neatly trimmed brown beard appeared surprised but in no way alarmed. To him, I was simply an unknown young woman whose overall appearance suggested good breeding. My sudden presence in his theatre at night was certainly strange, but not an immediate cause for concern.

“Have you lost your way, miss?” he asked courteously, apparently taking me for a patron incapable of finding the exits.

My eye fell on a pile of identical leather-bound books stacked on a corner of his desk. To my horror, I saw that the spine of each was luridly inscribed with the title
Dracula
. I had not considered that he could have contrived to publish his hash of mangled truths and absurd fantasies so speedily, but apparently I had arrived too late to prevent him from doing so.

“To the contrary,” I replied. “It appears that I have come to the right place.” I gestured at the books. “You are the author of this . . . work?”

With misbegotten pride, he said, “Indeed, I am. I take it you are a fan.” He rose from his chair as he gestured me into one facing him. “Do sit down. I will be most happy to sign a copy for you, if that is what you wish.”

I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes at his eagerness to claim such tripe. Still standing, I said, “That isn’t why I have come.” Moving closer to him, I said, “My name is Lucy Weston, not Lucy Westenra, as you so lightly veiled me in your so-called novel.”

Stoker paled and fell back into his chair with the look of a man who has come face-to-face with his own worst nightmare. His eyes wide and dilated, he stared at me in horror.

Holding his gaze, I tapped a finger on the topmost copy of his execrable book. “You will explain how you learned what happened to me and why you twisted the facts as you have done to conceal the truth.”

It is said that in extremis, humans have one of two possible reactions—flight or fight. Apparently, Stoker knew better than to try to oppose me physically. Therefore, he took the only other option available to him. Barely had I finished speaking than he leaped to his feet and attempted to dash around me in the direction of the door.

Hoisting him in one hand, I returned him to his chair.

“This will go much better for you if you simply tell me what I want to know,” I said.

Stoker was a big, burly man. The experience of being lifted off the floor by what appeared to be a slender young woman undid him. I could quite literally smell his fear.

Staring at me in frozen horror, he said, “You can’t be her. She is dead. They told me so.”

I thought of the dank earth, the coffin, the grave, the stake. My pounding against the wood until it shattered. My clawing my way out, gasping and straining, rising beyond death’s clutches to be born again into the world as the new, strange creature that I was. My hand lashed out to close around his throat.

“Who are ‘they’? Who did this to me? Tell me everything from the beginning.”

Against the constriction of my grip, he gasped, “I can’t! I don’t know!”

Fury rose in me. “You are lying. The story you wrote is a distortion of the truth, but it is still far too close to be coincidence. You must know what really happened to me.”

He did not attempt to deny it, but said instead, “I only learned about it afterward.”

“Who told you of it?”

When he refused to respond, I squeezed a little harder and insisted, “Tell me!”

His fingers clawed at mine, yet surprisingly he continued to resist. “I cannot. These are matters that involve the security of the realm.”

Taken aback, I hesitated, but only briefly. Nothing he said, no lie he told, would spare him. “You are Irish, are you not, Mr. Stoker?”

He stiffened and for the first time I saw anger in him. “That does not make me any less loyal, Miss Weston.”

“As you will. I do not believe for a moment that what was done to me could have anything to do with the safety of the British Empire.” Indeed, I took it to be the feeblest of excuses. Truly, patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.

With more courage than I would have expected under the circumstances, he said, “That is because you are not in possession of the facts.”

Slowly, I released my grip. My arms fell to my sides. I took a step back and stared at him. He flinched, but appeared unable to take his eyes from me. Terror held him captive, but so, I perceived, did fascination. He struck me as a man who dips a toe into the water in the half-hope that the current will take hold and carry him to distant, enchanted realms.

Right then, in the cluttered office at the back of an empty theatre made to resemble an ancient temple, I was the most seductive temptation the author of
Dracula
had ever encountered.

“You are the remedy for my ignorance, Mr. Stoker. Tell me what I want to know and I will not harm you.”

I gave him a little time to come to terms with that. The delay allowed me to get myself under better control. Being so close to Stoker, touching him, roused my hunger to a level that frightened even me. For all my threats, I needed him alive. And yet I also desperately needed to feed. The journey from Whitby to London had taken scarcely four hours thanks to the new piston-driven locomotives of the Great Northern Railway that were knitting the country together more tightly than ever. But it had also put me in close proximity to humans while availing me no opportunity to assuage the appetite they provoked.

Stoker may have sensed something of that, for abruptly he said, “What do you think would happen if ordinary people discovered that creatures such as yourself exist and that the authorities have kept the knowledge of them concealed for centuries? Can you imagine the anger and the fear, not to mention
the loss of faith in our ruling class that would result? All that would play into the hands of those who are determined to harm this realm.”

“Why should I care about any of that?” I demanded.

“Because rumors of your fate could have sparked a panic that would have raged out of control,” Stoker replied. “Before that could happen, a decision was made to create the impression that it was all no more than a fanciful tale.”

I had to admit that it was an ingenious ploy. With the publication of his book, any claim that a young woman really had disappeared from Whitby under terrifying circumstances would be dismissed as the foolishness of those so gullible as to believe a work of fiction. As for my family, they were—like Stoker—loyal British subjects. Had my father been persuaded that my fate was somehow entwined with the safety of the realm, I had no doubt that he would keep silent even in the depths of the most terrible grief. Moreover, he would go to any lengths to shield my mother and sister from such a hideous truth.

“These ‘intermediaries’ of whom you speak,” I said. “They asked you to do this extraordinary thing, create a novel to their specifications and bring it to the world, and you simply . . . agreed? With no knowledge of who sent them?”

“They did not say . . . I swear it!”

He was parsing words in the way of lawyers, writers, and others who would hang the world on a turn of phrase. Shakespeare had his Henry VI muse over the benefits of killing all the lawyers. Conscientious parents forbid the reading of fiction. Neither was entirely deluded.

“But you suspected, didn’t you, or you would never have listened to them.”

“I cannot say . . .”

Regret rippled through me. Of the two of us, Amanda had always been graced with the more delicate sensibilities by far. I recalled her kneeling in the garden at Whitby, weeping copiously over a dead bird cradled in her hands while I looked on dry-eyed, an unsentimental child who saw death as merely one more of life’s endless curiosities. Yet surely the Lucy I had been was not incapable of compassion.

“I do not want to hurt you,” I said.

Far from relieving Stoker, my attempt at reassurance seemed to alarm him even further. He turned from gray to a shade of red that could not possibly be healthy. Sweat beaded on his forehead, dripping into his eyes as his breathing became even more agitated. Yet he remained stubbornly insistent.

“I cannot tell you, for your sake as well as mine! You should go far away from here. No one need ever know that I saw you. I won’t tell, I swear! You can find others of your kind—”

“Others?” My surprise was so intense that I could not even attempt to conceal it. Bending down, I seized his shoulders and shook him hard. His head lolled back and forth, and for a moment I feared he might lose consciousness. Even so, I persisted. “There are others? Beyond the being who took my humanity and transformed me into . . . whatever this is that I have become?”

He sputtered and was overcome by a spasm of coughing that wracked his entire body. Abruptly, I realized that my actions were at odds with my objective. Unconscious—or dead—Stoker would be of no use to me whatsoever. I released my grip, leaned him back in the chair, and made haste to fill a glass with water from a carafe on the desk.

“Drink this . . . slowly. There is nothing to be afraid of. I mean you no harm. All I ask is the truth. You can manage that, can’t you?”

A deep sigh escaped him. He swallowed a little of the water and stared at me. In his gaze I saw the struggle of a man of genuine principle confronted with a reality so far outside his experience that he had no context for dealing with it. Yet I left him no choice but to do so.

Taking a breath, he seemed to come to a determination in his own mind. “Perhaps it would be better to tell you. You must make your way in the world, after all, and ignorance is no fit state for anyone.”

With care, so as not to alarm him unduly, I lowered myself into a chair facing him. “Tell me . . . please.”

My stab at courtesy, however belated, seemed to calm him. He nodded once more but seemed not to know how to begin. Finally, he asked, “What is it that you want to know?”

“The truth. Not what you wove from your imagination but what you know to be real. The term you used in your novel, vampires, how did you come by that?”

Presented with a direct question, Stoker seemed better able to manage. With hesitation, he said, “It is what beings of your kind call themselves. They have existed for millennia and are spoken of by various names in legends throughout the world, but that is the name they prefer.”