Dracula, My Love by Syrie James

Author:Syrie James [James, Syrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-19T22:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

I LEAPT FROM MY BED AND SHRANK BACK AGAINST THE FAR wall in terror and confusion. Was it possible? Could the man I loved be the very monster that I despised…and the same beast that we were all committed to destroy? All that had come before this, everything “Mr. Wagner” and I had shared—was it just part of some devious, incomprehensible plot? Was he here to murder me?

If so, I was entirely at his mercy. I was clad in nothing but a thin white nightdress, and left alone in a house with no one but incarcerated madmen and a few servants and attendants who resided in a separate wing. I was heartbroken, bewildered, terrified, and aghast, all at the same time.

“How?” I whispered. “How can it be? Jonathan said that Count Dracula was an old man, but you are—”

“When I met your Mr. Harker in Transylvania, I took the form that I present to the locals. I had not fed in a long while. The peasants, with their superstitious fears, take care to guard both themselves and their livestock against me.”

“So it is true, then?” I cried in horror. “The reason you have come to England is to gorge yourself on our defenseless citizens—to murder them and create more of your own kind?”

He let out a groan of frustration and disgust, eyeing me with such fury that I feared he might leap across the room and kill me on the spot. “So this is what your precious Professor Van Helsing has told you of me? I guessed as much when I heard your plans earlier this evening. What fallacies mankind creates, in its ignorance! Mina: do you really imagine that I have been murdering the innocent residents of London? Have there been any such reports in the newspapers? With the Ripper killings still so fresh in everyone’s minds, if people were turning up dead in alleys at night with bite marks on their throats, do not you think someone would have noticed?”

Faintly, I managed: “I—suppose so. But—”

“I know of your professor by reputation.” Dracula seemed to be straining every nerve he possessed to hold his anger in check as he paced the room. “He fancies himself something of a vampire expert—although to my knowledge he had never seen one, let alone killed one, until yesterday at Hampstead cemetery. What other lies has this ‘expert’ told you about me? I have little interest in making more of my own kind, Mina. The other vampires I have met or known are mostly foul creatures with whom I have nothing in common besides a thirst for blood. The last thing I would wish is to populate the earth with more of them.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I left Transylvania because after centuries of stagnation in the darkness, surrounded by people who hate and fear me, I wished to live in the light and the world again. I wished to be amongst interesting, energetic, educated people who were doing things: to enjoy and experience the

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