Mina by Elaine Bergstrom Read Free Book Online Page B

crumbling castle erected in the months after she came here
as his child bride.

Yes, she had
loved him, admired him, shared his cause as a true wife must. She even damned
herself for him.
    As their enemies grew, she made a
pact with the Lord of Darkness. I saw her standing alone in one of the castle
rooms, her body bathed by firelight and incense. The room was cold, so cold
that in spite of the blue woolen cloak she had tightly wrapped around her, she
kept close to the fire. I shared her resolve, her incredible courage as she
watched the grotesque form of the master she had chosen lumbering from the
shadows of the room toward the place where she stood so still, as if death had
already claimed her. "I believe," she whispered and knelt to kiss
the ruby ring on his finger, to grasp his dark and taloned hand.
    She had hoped to drink from him-only
to drink--but he wanted more. With growing horror, she watched his yellow
reptilian eyes study her lithe body, watched his hands move toward her cloak
and pull it from her. "My slave," he said, his voice soft and sweet,
so at odds with his ugliness. I thought of Eve in the garden. The snake would
have spoken in a voice such as this.
    Then he
kissed her, sinking his long fangs into his own lips as he did so. She shuddered
as she kissed him, but with the first taste
    of his blood, her loathing
turned swiftly to desire.
    I understood too well the horror she felt, for I had glimpsed some
measure of her passion when I drank from Dracula. But he had once been a man,
still had the semblance of a man. This creature had never been human, had never
known love or tenderness, only the dark beauty of suffering, the fulfillment
of pain.
    As his blood
moved swiftly through her, turning her instantly into the creature she had longed
to become, his savagery increased.
    He could do as he wished to
her for she could no longer die.
    When he was sated, when her body lay
ripped and bleeding on the cold stone floor of the room, when her tortured,
hysterical sobs no longer amused him, he left her to pull the tattered
remnants of her soul back together and live forever in eternal life-in-death.
    He gave her
his dark gift. When the change was complete, she could not die and those who
tasted her blood would share her
    immortality.
    How she begged her husband to accept
her gift! How she swore that nothing within her had changed, that they could
love one another forever. Her lips were warm as they kissed him, her touch
more wanton than ever before. In the end, out of love and need to protect his
people lie weakened and took the blood she offered then left to command what
could well be his legions' final battle.
    The Turks were breaking through
Dracula's last defenses, when Illona threw herself from the castle walls in
full view of them. I sensed her terror as she fell, then nothing until the
night she wandered the carnage of Dracula's final battlefield, searching for
his body among the rotting piles of the dead. There were so many that had
fallen on both sides, yet only one was truly of her blood. As she pulled the
reeking corpses from the mound where Dracula lay dressed in the coat of a
common soldier, she saw that his wounds had already begun to heal. In the
bowels of the castle, she laid him in the tomb she had prepared for him. She
nursed him with her own blood. That and his native soil slowly restored him.
It took months for the wounds to heal completely. When they did, he rose into
her life.
    I saw his
face when he first woke. How radiant it had seemed, how filled with wonder. How
quickly that wonder died.
    The pair had done this for the sake
of their people, but after the change, the needs of mortals meant nothing to
them. They lost all concern about the people inhabiting their lands. Blood,
after all, is the same. They were mad for a while, reveling in the carnage their
powers allowed them.
    The memories
took hours to sort and place in order, the words themselves so many minutes to
write, yet all this was