Mina (26 page)

a warmth through me that
I understood all too well.

But last time I had felt
such passion I had been entranced and the excitement had all the focus of an
unwilling dream.

Now my partner was no
vampire, no threat to my life or, though it sounds strange to say it, my
salvation.

I moaned when he touched me, kissed him eagerly
when he walked around me to slip the lace and linen fabric from my shoulders.
He moved to the skirt, the slips, the corset, the tips of my breasts hardening
when he slipped back the top of my chemise and kissed them.

I now stood in chemise and shoes and .stockings,
and though I had forgotten it, I saw in the mirror beside the bed that my
bonnet was still an my head, my hair still piled beneath it. The incongruity of
the scene was not lost on me. I looked like a trollop purchased for a night of
pleasure. The thought seemed so fitting that I smiled as I raised my hands to
untie my hat.

He caught them, lowered them and undid the
straps and pins himself, working so quickly that I started when my hair fell around
my shoulders. His hands followed it, moving the white cotton straps of the
chemise off my shoulders, in y breasts, my hips. Then he was on his knees in
front of me, ordering me to raise one leg then another.

He ran a finger down the
outside of my calf and pushed me backward so I was sitting on the edge of the
bed. He

unbuttoned my boots and removed them, the silk stockings slowly,
one at a time, his fingers moving down the outside of my legs, then up the
bare center, pushing them apart so his thumbs could press against my sex,
reminding me for a moment of what was to come.

Again I tried to touch
him; again he held my hands back and swung me sideways so I lay along the
length of the bed.

"Am I to be only,
used?" I asked.

"Used?" He did
not smile as he raised my arms above my head and wrapped my fingers around the
carved wood posts

of the headboard.
"Tell me if you are used when I am done."

At
home with Jonathan, I would have considered myself ready for intercourse, but
my pleasure had only begun. I don't remember how many times I let go of the
wooden post, or how many times he returned my hands to that place above me. There
were moments when I wasn't even sure what his hands and lips were doing to me,
only that my response was like nothing I had ever felt before, not even in the
vampire's arms.

And I still had not
touched him. It was as if his satisfaction hinged not on his release but my
response, as if he proved his

worth with my cries of
passion, my begging for him to please, please stop just for a moment so my body
could rest.

He
never did, and when I began arching my back, when my hands no longer obeyed him
and buried themselves in his hair, trying to pull him up on me, he stopped
only for a moment. "Used," he whispered and rolled me onto my
stomach, pulled me up on my knees and entered from behind. One of his hands
remained in the folds of my sex, its skill, and his organ pounding inside me,
keeping my passion at its peak until my body no longer had the strength to respond.

And even then his hands
continued their knowing assault, his lips still sucked the tips of my breasts,
demanding the last

shreds of my passion as
Dracula had my blood.

What did I learn in the hours we spent in that
room? That men purchase women for a reason. That I was not at all the civilized
creature I had thought myself to be. Yet something was missing from that hour
of lust and rutting. Perhaps it was the color of the room, blood red in the
afternoon sun, that made the longing for the taste of blood so strong in me.

We left together, the veil of my hat carefully
in place. We traveled to his office as we had to the house, sitting across from
one another in the carriage, never speaking, strangers once more. I knew then
that, even had I not loved Jonathan with all my heart, I could never come to
love the person who had given me such pleasure. The thought of how he had acquired
his skill would always be a barrier between us. Yet if I believed that I would
never be alone with him in that house again, I would have been saddened by the
loss. I need what he gives me. The creature I have become demands it.

As if guessing my thoughts, he whispered as he
left me, "The same day next week? I will meet you here at eleven.” I nodded
and he motioned the cab on. I had it drop me off at Winnie's so I could leave
her the check I had collected for the hospital.

"Fifteen hundred
pounds!" she exclaimed when she saw it. "We may have to name the new
ward after him."

"Or the birthing
rooms,” I replied. I smiled while Winnie laughed, delighted at my wit. I felt
a pang of betrayal as well.

Though I knew he would
not mind my jest, he had taken great care to see that a child would not come
from our union.

Why have I written of
this afternoon at all, let alone in such terrible detail, risking the
possibility that someday Jonathan

or someone else might
read this? I suppose I did it so that, in some feature time when our al fair is
over, I can read my little journal as men read their erotic stories and bring
back the passion to share-perhaps with Jonathan, perhaps with another, or
perhaps only for my self-satisfaction.

Yet there is so much I
did not mention because I cannot put such word to paper. Hints of a few

The way his bud y looked
in the glaring sunlight. The pallor of his skin. The silver highlights of his
hair and the softness

as it brushed against my
thighs.

The sound of my voice,
coming it seemed from some other body, one that Mina Harker, wife to Jonathan,
could never

comprehend.

In a manner totally at odds with her
usual behavior, Winnie Beason had not gone to the hospital after receiving the
mail on Tuesday. Though she had opened the envelope from London, the moment
she saw the contents she had slipped the pages back into it and sent a note to
Mina. Then she paced her parlor waiting for Mina to arrive so they could read
the translation together.

Winnie had
scarcely shut the parlor door for privacy when Mina fell into a chair and
pulled the pages out. "So soon!" she

exclaimed. "I thought they'd take weeks to translate."
She glanced at the letter accompanying them. "Mr. Ujvari has sent part of
the work. Shall I read his letter first?"

"The
pages. Read them aloud," Winnie suggested. "We'll share them
together."

Mina nodded
and began to read.

I have
been in this place of horror for nearly a century. I long ago stopped wondering
if I am a captive, as I know I have become a willing accomplice to the deeds
that go on here. Even so, I write this account in the hope that someone may
find it and know my fate, and as a warning to those who may come here. Leave
this place, if you can. Leave before nightfall.

Even I, who do not wish
to kill, have so little control.

The others laugh at me
for wanting to write this. He, in particular, reminds me that no one ever
leaves this place alive.

Yet I have hope. The world around us is more crowded than ever
before. Someday, someone may come by day and leave by day. If they do and they
are from this region, they may leave me with the true death I long for.

"True
death?" Winnie asked.

"It was a term Van Helsing also used. It means that her body
will be destroyed and her soul will pass on." "What a sad thing to
wish for oneself." "Not so sad when you consider how they must
live," Mina reminded her and continued.

My name is Karina
Aliczni. I was born in the year 1753 in Bratislava, though
myfamily
home was in Targoviste.
My title

then was countess. The title seems so unimportant now that I live
with a prince, a princess and a creature who had no title when she was a alive
though, had she ambition equal to her power, she could rule the world.

When I think back through all the years to my
mortal childhood, it seems that I was prepared for only one station in life-to
marry and become a wife and mother. My training then was in how to wear clothes
properly, how to apply rouge and powder, how to curtsy, how to dance, how to
play the spinet and sing.

I was
also well educated. I had read of foreign places. My father visited some of
them, bringing me hack porcelain music boxes from France, gold earrings with
tiny opaque gems in star-shaped mountings from the Pyrenees, a map of the
world from Italy. The last only made my longing worse. I would not marry some
foolish noble tied to his lands and his traditions.

I wanted to travel, to see everything I could of the world. I
vowed to find someone who felt as I did, even if it meant joining the gypsies
to do it.

My father, of course,
had other ideas, and one of them was to expand the family holdings through the
proper alliances.

My brother wed without
any protest a well-dowered girl. Though he swore to me that she was too ugly to
bed and that

there would never be children from the marriage, she gave birth
only ten months later. To my dismay and my father's great satisfaction, they
seemed happy. My sister married a year later in a similar arrangement, and /
knew I would be next.

I begged my mother for
time, pleading that I was too young to be a wife, too frail to be a mother. I
was the youngest.

She had always sheltered
me. She did so now.

Something in the way she saw through my lies but
responded to my needs made me more comfortable around her than I had been
since I was old enough to realize that parents are not infallible. I spoke to
her from my heart, telling her of the need I had to live somewhere as far from
our little plot of land and our comfortable home as I could. I hastened to
explain that this was not because I disliked our life but because I wanted,
with a passion I could not understand, to experience something different.

I do not know if she
spoke to my father, but in the days that followed he observed me in a way he
had never done before.

He would ask me to read to him, to sing. He would order my daily
wardrobe and would walk with me in the garden behind
^,
our home.

What my mother must have suggested to him seems
so obvious now. I was beautiful, titled. I should not be wasted on a local
marriage to expand our holdings but sent to the capital to attract a better
suitor, and hopefully forge an alliance with a family of great wealth and
greater power.

The dressmakers came with their satins and
velvets and bolts of delicate lace. At night, my father would teach me the newest
dance steps. In the absence of any music, he would count the rhythm as we moved
through the steps. When he could teach me no more, he sent my mother and me to
Bratislava. !n the capital, I was given my final lessons by dance instructors
and tutors and the well-paid lady's maid my father hired to educate me in
deportment.

I was such an eager pupil and such a quick one.
Everyone said so, and yet all his plans, all my work came to nothing. My mother
took me to court. I danced. I charmed those around me. I even fell in love, in
that innocent way of innocent girls, far more than once on the months we spent
there, but no one was serious about a match.

"It's your
beauty,” one of my servants whispered to me on a night when I seemed
particularly despondent. "It puts men

off."

I looked in the mirror. I had never thought of
myself as beautiful. Instead, I had believed that women smiled at me and men
gave me longer, more admiring looks because of the ribbons in my hair, the way
my servants had dressed me or painted my nails. Such innocence, such perfect
innocence.

While I hid my misery as
best I could and hoped for someone to save me, my mother was renewing old
friendships,

among them one with a woman who had an estate in the mountains
near Sibiu. My mother suggested that we visit there. I agreed happily for I
needed relief from the constant disappointment.

The estate was huge,
with a great stone wall running all around it, and outside its fields and
gardens was beautiful

country, wild and empty. The lower hills were colored dark green
by the dense pine forests, with sharp black peaks rising above them. I loved
the land, but the people were a different story. They seemed isolated,
suspicious of strangers, even those coming to the land in the company of its
ruling family. My mother did not seem to notice, but then all her attention was
concentrated on her friend. She had little desire to see the countryside around
the estate.

Meanwhile,
I had little desire to see another set of tapestry-hung walls, particularly
when my entire life would likely be filled with such walls. I cultivated the
friendship of the woman's son, Janos, a stupid and rather ugly boy a year
younger than I. My charm, which had so little effect on the worldly men at
court, was more than enough for this conquest. Within days, he was helping me
slip out of the estate so he could escort me for rides through the wild
countryside or into the town.

I sensed the vampire's presence the afternoon of
our visit to Sibiu. The day had been thick with clouds, so that noon resembled
twilight. I had been fearful of a storm, but my companion assured me that such
clouds meant nothing in these damp mountains.

How could Janos have known the truth? He was
wealthy, as isolated from the superstitions of the peasants as I. With only a
knowledge of German and Hungarian, he did not even speak their language. If he
had, he might have known that dense clouds did mean something in this or any
land. Clouds meant that the dead could walk.

I think it was a little after noon when we
reached Sibiu, though it would have been impossible to know this by looking at
the sky. We had stopped to visit the priest who lived on the edge of town. I
was dismounting when, outside the stone wall surrounding the churchyard, I saw
a man watching me. Though his back was straight, his face was deeply lined, and
what hair I could see under the black hood of his cloak was thin and gray. Yet
his face interested me. His eyes in particular seemed to catch the light of the
sky and glow as they watched me intently.