Mina (40 page)

when I touched it finer
than before. In life, I had been beautiful. Death had made me exquisite.

I pushed away from him
and stood, but there was no reflection in the mirror beside the bed. With a
moan of anguish, I

turned toward him and
saw him looking from the mirror to me and back.

Though the others do not speak of it, I know
there is a moment of choice for our kind, the moment when we decide how terrible
a creature we have become. Do we kill? Do we use? Do we feast on ecstasy? I
know this now, but Illona made certain I would be a killer like her.

If there had been no
mirror, if the boy had not known what I was, if he had not shook with terror as
he backed away

from me, if he had not turned and bolted for the door, pounding
when he discovered it locked, my pity might have conquered my hunger. I might
have even loved him.

Instead, the need for blood hit, a terrible
searing agony in the center of my body, and I moved toward him. Unable to stop
myself, I gripped his hands, pressed his body close to mine, feeling his
pitiful struggles to escape as I drank. And drank. And felt him die.

Ah, the magnificence of
that moment when you realize that you have consumed death! The potency of it!
The fulfillment!

Afterward, mere tastes
of blood are nothing, no more than kisses are after sex, no more than water is
after fine red wine.

Words fail me here.

Days passed. Weeks.
Dracula did not come.

Sustained by the life I
had taken, saddened by my lack of remorse, I fell into a sort of languor in
which time had no

meaning. Often, during
my waking hours, I would think of the life I had left behind. Though I could
not shed tears, I could cry-dry, terrible sobs. Joanna would come and sit by
me, stroking my hair, telling me to hush, that despair was as useless as hope
in this place.

I tried to leave, to go
home and find the comfort of my family. But as each night drew to a close, I
was forced back to

the castle, until I
understood that the legends were wrong.

Your native earth is not
the earth where you were born but the earth in which you died, and your master
is always the

one who killed you.

I have no will to fight
her hold on me, but he does. When he returned, when he finally had the strength
to face me, I

stood separated forever
from him by my death, and listened to his promise.

He will leave this
place, he said. And when he has prepared a way for me, he will send for me and
leave the others to the

ruins and their own
despair.

I trust him. I have no
choice in that, either. And sometimes, the memory of his love returns to me and
gives me comfort.

Perhaps someday Tepes
and I will be free of this place, free to roam the world, to see its wonders,
to live as best we can

in this eternal
life-in-death.

The gypsies come more
often now, they and no one else. Illona dares not touch them. Yet we go on. We
have no choice.

Today Illona returned
from one of her hunts across the countryside. She brought with her another
fair-haired girl like

myself. She promised
this one to me. I will have no choice but to obey and turn her.

What I have become
cannot be altered by age or infirmity. I loathe myself, but I cannot control
what I will do.

But if you live, and come here by day to read
this account, take pity on me. Look below the room where you found it and where
our servants rest in their own earth-lined coffins. Raise the lids of the boxes
holding our mortal remains in their daytime sleep. Drive a wooden stake
through the heart of the dark-haired woman with the ruby ring on her finger.
Then, if you still have the courage, drive a stake through mine and through
Joanna's.

Joanna and I agree on
this. Death is change. We welcome it.

Dear Lord, Winnie thought, then read the translation again. There
were answers in it, terrible answers to all the questions Mina's strange
actions had raised. Winnie sent a note to the Harker house asking Jonathan to
visit her as soon as possible. A day passed and he did not respond.

Had it only
been months since Mina and he had wed? Could this man have actually risked
everything, even his soul, for her? And

now, when there was just as
strong a possibility that she could not help her compulsion, he turned his back
on her!

The betrayal
infuriated Winnie. The next morning she collected every bit of proof she had
concerning Mina's actions and

appeared at Harker's firm.
The clerk told her that Harker had not come in that day. "Then I'm sure he
would want me to leave him

a message," she said and
walked past the astonished young man and into Harker's office.

The desk was
clean. The lights were cool. Jonathan Harker had not been there.

She walked
to the Harker home. At the corner of his street, she flagged down one of the
local bicycle messengers. "I'd like you

to deliver a package to Mr.
Jonathan Harker," she said.

"But
his house is right there, ma'am. You could go yourself," the boy
responded, pointing toward the bend in the street.

"I want you to deliver it directly into the hands of Mr.
Harker. You are to say it is from his firm." "Ma'am?" "I'll
wait outside. If you are able to deliver it, I'll know that he is home."

The boy
opened his mouth, no doubt to protest again. Winnie pulled five pence from her
purse and handed it to him. "Not a bad

amount for five minutes'
work, is it?"

She waited
at the corner of the front yard, hidden by the old lilac bushes that separated
the lot from the neighbor's. The front

door opened, Millicent,
sounding annoyed, asking what the messenger wanted.

"I'll
give it to him," she said.

"I must
deliver it myself, Ma'am. It's necessary."

She heard
nothing else for a while, then the boy came past her on his bicycle. "He
took it as you asked," he said and went on his

way.

Winnie
waited a half hour then went and knocked on the Harkers' door. Millicent
answered. "Oh, it's you," she said.

"I must speak to Mr. Harker." "I heard you'd spoken
enough," Millicent replied coldly and shut the door.

Winnie
pounded on it, refusing to stop even when no one came. "Please," she
shouted. "I must-
^“

The door
swung open. Jonathan turned and walked back to his study. Winnie caught only a
glimpse of his face but saw clearly

that there had been tears in
his eyes.

Millicent
placed herself in front of the study door, her face red with anger. "How
dare you come here," she said. "Can't you leave

him in peace?"

"Aunt
Millicent, please," Jonathan said wearily. "Mrs. Beason won't listen
to reason, so you might as well let her in."

Winnie swept
by the older woman. Millicent began to follow, but Winnie closed the door too
quickly. To lock it would have been

an insult. She decided that
she could rely on the latch to keep the woman out.

She fixed her attention on Jonathan Harker. His prematurely gray
hair had never made him seem old before, but now, with the grief and worry
etched in deep lines across his eyes and forehead, he could have easily passed
for fifty. "Did you read the note I sent with that package?" she
asked.

"I did.
And I also read the beginning of Mina's journal and I stopped reading exactly
as she asked. Should I follow her

instructions or yours?"

"She asked me to implore you to read it. She said there
should be no secrets between you." "Would that there were," he
responded woodenly. "Mrs. Beason, do you believe my wife is sane?"

"I do." Winnie saw the
grief grow in his expression and added, "But her problem is not a matter
of sanity, at least not exactly." She reached across his desk and picked
up the translation. "Read this before any of the other things. Mina read
this part." She handed him the first half of the translation, then the
last pages. "These came after she had gone. When you finish, it will be
time to talk."

Winnie moved
from the desk chair to the little sofa in the opposite corner and occupied
herself with the latest copy of the
Strand

while Jonathan read. She did
not look at him.

To do so
would have been an invasion of his privacy, and a distraction as well.

"Mrs.
Beason," he called when he had finished, in a tone that, for the first
time, expressed real concern. "What do you think this

means?"

"That
she has never been freed of the vampires' control-not just his, but the others'
control as well. You can guess what they

plan."

"I
don't understand. The vampires were destroyed."

Winnie
pointed to the little journal. "Mina told me that she wishes you to read
this. When you're through with it, come and talk

with me."

Winnie retrieved her coat from the chair where she had tossed it.
When she opened the door and saw Millicent sitting on a chair outside the
door, she turned toward Jonathan and added, "Mina is right. There have
been too many secrets in this house, Jonathan Harker."

"I'll
see you out," Millicent said coldly.

Winnie
walked behind her to the door. Just before she left, Winnie turned to the older
woman and squeezed her hand. "Be a

comfort to your nephew,"
she said. "He is so in need of comfort now."

Millicent
closed the door, then turned and leaned against it. She could think of nothing
to say, nothing at all. It occurred to her that

she had raised Jonathan to be
so strong because she had never known how to deal with weakness.

"Aunt
Millicent," Jonathan called. "Come in here please." When she
did, she saw that he had opened his wall safe and was pulling

a stack of pages from it. As
he held it out to her, it seemed that she had never seen her nephew's
expression so determined.

Millicent carried the pages to her
room and read the accounts of Jonathan, Mina, Van Helsing and the others for
the better part of the day. When she had finished, she took the pages to
Jonathan. She found him in his study with Winnie Beason, the both of them
typing furiously. Jonathan paused when she entered the room, taking the pages
from her, then holding both her hands as he told her why Mina had gone to
London and what had happened afterward. "Now you know the story we did not
want to share with you or with anyone."

"But it
came out anyway, didn't it, Jonathan? Secrets always do." So much had been
answered, but one

question
remained. "Why didn't Mina tell you of her doubts earlier?" Millicent
asked.

"She didn't want to burden me with them. You can understand
that, can't you?" Millicent was a strong woman. She understood it all too
well.

TWENTY-FIVE

April 26,
Varna.
Gance
and I are in the same hotel where I and the others waited months ago for the
ship
Czarina

Catherine.
It seems that we must
wait here again, for Gance needs a day more to recover.

I noticed his fever the
night we pulled out of Lille. When I went to bed, his body seemed warmer. I
thought it might be

the closeness of the
room or the champagne we had had at dinner, so I took a blanket and pillow and
slept on the sofa.

In the morning, he lay
uncovered, his nightshirt stuck to his skin. His face, usually so pale, was
ruddy from heat.

Alarmed, I called for the steward, who found a doctor to treat
him. While I sat in the dining car, the doctor examined Gance, then opened the
wound and cleaned it. After changing the dressing, he sent for me and suggested
to both of us that we stop in Munich until Gance is better. "The wound
may be abscessing. If the infection begins to spread into the lung when you
are in some backward country. . . "

"We go on,"
Gance said.

"I'm leaving the
train in Belgrade,” the doctor explained. He looked at Gance, hoping to see
some wavering in his

resolve. There was none.
"I'll look at you again tonight,” he said wearily and left us.

"Gance, there's no
rush,” I said.

"If we stop and I
become really ill, we could be trapped somewhere for weeks. Varna is a city.
They have physicians

there. "

By evening, his fever
was so high that I had to bathe him with cold water to keep it down. "We
have to stop, Gance."