Dracula in Love

right-or lawful, for that matter-to deprive Jonathan of his child? I belonged to my lover, body and soul. Surely it was our destiny to remain together forever. But could I reconcile that destiny with the condition of being pregnant with another man’s baby?

Fear gripped me and sadness weighed on my heart. Some part of me wanted to rejoice at the miraculous gift of being pregnant, yet this miracle was rapidly reshaping my world in ways that I could not control. Questions rose up to confront me, and I could answer none of them. What if I had harmed the child by taking my lover’s blood so early in my pregnancy? The Count had said that the baby was human, but did that mean that the child would be mortal? The fetus had had exposure to the Count; was it the breed of mortal who could survive the intensity?

What if Jonathan found out about the child and tried to take him away from me? With the cooperation of the doctors, he could easily portray me to the authorities as an escapee from an asylum for the insane, unfit for the duties of motherhood. But with the Count’s protection-if I still had that-and my newfound powers-if they were indeed intensifying-was I above all that?

I had no answers. The new life I thought I had forged was shattering into tiny crystal shards and disappearing into the atmosphere. Thoughts of my son’s welfare quickly subsumed yesterday’s fantasies of endless travel and adventure and eternal love. I did not know if the Count would leave me, and I was completely unprepared to be left on my own with a child. What would I do? Kate thought that I had the potential to work as a journalist, but no newspaper-no employer, for that matter-would hire a pregnant woman. Perhaps I could see Headmistress about returning to my teaching position. But how would I explain being an abandoned expectant mother? As much as I had been Headmistress’s pet, realistically, she would not consider a pregnant woman in need of work to be a suitable example to her students, whose parents were paying to train their daughters to attract financially advantageous marriage partners. As far as I could see, I was soon to be alone and penniless. My only source of income was the stipend that I had been receiving since the age of seven. And why would the Count continue that? None of the skills I had so scrupulously absorbed in Miss Hadley’s School for Young Ladies of Accomplishment was going to help me now.

I let the day and evening pass, fitfully ruminating on these irreconcilable thoughts. After a night of little sleep, I decided to try to talk to the Count. He had completely shut me out of his consciousness so that I could not read his thoughts or emotions, or feel him anywhere around me. Though I had no idea what to expect from him, I sent him a note by the steward, explaining that I wanted to seek his advice. I thought this was the best approach. No matter how much wisdom and supernatural ability he had acquired over the centuries, he was still a man and susceptible to a woman’s helplessness.

In the same precise script that I recognized from the note he had written to me in Whitby, he sent a reply for me to meet him in the library. Though I felt dreadful, I dressed with care. My hands shook as I rolled my stockings up my legs. My skin was cold and clammy, yet perspiration covered my armpits and burst out on my temples. I did not want to let him see me feeling or looking so pathetic, even though he had access to my thoughts and undoubtedly knew the state I was in.

I sat in a chair to compose myself and to remind myself that no matter what my circumstances, I was not powerless. Months ago, before he had announced himself to me, the Count had asked me to remember who I was, and he had been successful in helping me to do that. Somewhere in my essential being, I was still the woman who had given him the gift of immortality, the mystical priestess who had enchanted him and for whom he had waited long centuries. I closed my eyes, and in my mind’s eye, I wrapped myself in a celestial cloak of gold, letting it tingle as it caressed the length of my body, calming me and constructing a shield of protection around me and my unborn child. I could not recall where I had first learned to do this, but I knew that I had done it many times in the past to shroud my intentions, to arm myself with additional power, and to guard myself from harmful things. As the shimmering light surrounded me, I remembered a truism that I had always known: no woman need let a man know the contents of her mind. I certainly learned that from Headmistress, but I was positive that I had also known it from somewhere deep in my past. Our mystery was our power. It was an elemental certainty unchanged through the ages. Though my stomach was still slightly unsettled, I felt alive and rejuvenated. I checked my appearance in the mirror, threw a paisley shawl with incarnadine silk lining around my shoulders, and went to face him.

He was in the room, staring at the bookshelves, when I walked in, and I was pleased to see that my shield had worked. I had surprised him.

“You wanted to see me?” he asked as if responding to a request from a stranger.

“I want to know what is going to happen to me, to us.”

“By ‘us’ you mean you and the baby?”

“I also mean you and me,” I said, trying to emulate his impersonal tone.

“Why are you asking me? Are you not aware by now that we create our own destinies? Is this baby not what you want? What you wanted since you met Jonathan Harker?” He said that name with such disdain that it made me cringe. He must have thought that I wanted to go back to Jonathan, when I had barely considered it a possibility.

“How do you know that the child is a boy? And human? How do you know that the fetus is not on the path to immortality like its mother?”

He seemed utterly exasperated with me. “He carries the vibration of Jonathan Harker, which I know very well. The fetus has Harker’s frequency rather than yours, which is sharper and more intense. That is because of your immortal heritage, which you will have no use for now.”

“What do you mean? How do you know that?” I had come to him feeling powerful, but he was quickly deflating me.

“Because I have lived your past so many times that I can predict your future. You are incapable of change, Mina. Do you think this is the first time you have done something like this? No, you have destroyed our love time and again with your foolish choices.”

His voice was low and steady, but the words themselves had some kind of force attached to them that made me quiver.

“I do not know what you mean,” I said, hugging myself. “I did not choose to be pregnant.”

For a moment, his eyes flickered, turning pale and then dark again. “Your human tendencies are tedious, Mina. They have always been so. At your level of evolution, you should be weary of feigning helplessness, when you are a master at creating and attracting the very things you most desire. Every time you come close to reclaiming your power, you do something to sabotage it.”

“You are wrong,” I said. His words confused and offended me. I did not see how I had asked for any of the things that had happened to me, including my reunion with him. “I have barely thought of Jonathan, or anything else but making a life with you, since you took me from the asylum. I have wanted you and nothing but you. I took your blood so that nothing would ever come between us again. I did not ask for this.” I put my hands to my face, not wanting him to see my confusion.

“I am sure that this is what you truly believe, at least at this moment. But it frustrates me that you refuse to look deeper into your memory, where you would see what happened in the first cycle of our lives together.”

A feeling of dread began to creep over me. I knew that I was about to hear something that I would have preferred never to hear again, and I knew that I could not stop him from telling me.

“After we met, you very quickly got with child. Surely you can imagine that having revisited our time together. It was a joyous time, but because I was just beginning my transition, and because your father was a human, the child was mortal.”

I did not know what he would say next, only that I did not want to hear it. I waited for him to speak, but he was silent. He looked at me with the smallest hint of sadness.

“Nous l’avons appele Raymond.”

When I heard the name of the baby in the language that we used in those days, I felt my body go weak.

Ah, tu te souviens.

“I do not remember, and I do not wish to remember,” I said. But I had begun to remember, not facts or faces but the feeling of that lifetime and of this experience that he was going to force me to relive.

“You give me no choice but to remind you. Otherwise, you will not understand my ire at this present situation,” he said. “I am not a cruel man, but I can only endure so much, even at my advanced state of development. I must continue, Mina. Do you understand?”