#blood of my blood

[ibrithir-was-here]

Blood of My Blood: “What Dreams May Come” Part 3

Ok! There’s gonna be one more part. It’s all inked just need to color it, so watch for part 4!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 4

#my art #blood of my blood #quincey harker #mina harker #jonathan harker #Lu holmwood #count dracula #Dracula #dracula fanart #dracula fanfiction

[see-arcane]

Blood of My Blood: Never Loved

One more Blood of My Blood cinderblock for you @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush. Put on your most dramatic breakup song playlist.

Summary: Castle Dracula is abandoned. By son, by subjects, by its Master. The latter finds himself dwelling in the dirt and dark as he waits to strike the English shore once again. Thinking on traitors and thieves. And on his dear friend, who makes him bleed still into the grave earth.

Warnings for: Violence, coercion with and without hypnotism, and domestic abuse.

He woke with a draining ache behind his eyes. A worse one in his chest.

The surprise had gone out of this nights ago. Anger rushed over the sensation like a balm. More, he rushed toward anger. Spurred it, stretched it, wrapped it around himself like a gossamer membrane. It would thicken as the night wore on and his mind roamed its new gamut of bile and rage, snapping at itself until the sky overhead should have roiled in time with his internal tempest. But no. Only favorable winds here. Not that such winds were wholly necessary now. He and his grave earth rode a ship without sails. How fast the mortal mites and their innovations worked in this age.

Jonathan had spoken of traveling by one. An idle comment in their talks of England. One of many. The travel, the choice of estate, the precautions needed to counter the possibility of a second attempt to thwart the setting down of roots. Always in that measured way. Always with the mien of one laying out itinerary rather than laying the foundations of an invasion. Always looking his Master in the eye. Always with that sad grey shade in his pallor, the face of a man who hates his work and knows the alternative is worse.

Poor villain against his will. Poor martyr. Poor Jonathan.

Thunder grumbled high overhead. He heard voices through his box, warm bodies exclaiming and jumping. One of them was close. There was a spiced whiff of cigar smoke. A cheap odor.

Not like the ones you gave him. He dropped so many vices after the boy was born. Smoke and drink vanished from his lips overnight. Just in case they might have tainted him somehow. Spoiled the blood. You told him it was nonsense. Even she did. But he would not have it. Not until this year. He used his allowance for one single box of cigars; cheap, like the ones he’d had back in his shriveled nothing-life in Exeter. You caught him at it in January. Within the month he found the little box gone, replaced by a pack of Romeo y Julietas. One, maybe two a month since then. And what did he say when you asked him why? Why return to the habit now?

“Almost time,” he’d said. That’s all. “Almost time.”

He had pressed Jonathan on it. Oh, gently, gently. Barely a nudge of the mesmer; because he’d thought he already knew.

Jonathan had looked at him through the coiling smoke with those dead starlit eyes. The same glowing shade of the ghost-light on St. George’s Eve. And he had simply raised his hand to his chest, rubbing the place over his heart as if there were still a crucifix to wear there. Worry and sorrow had rolled off him like cologne.

“I may as well, Sir. I think I am saying good-bye to it this year. In whatever way.”

And oh! Oh, what an idiot child he had been in that instant! Later that night he had laughed aloud at himself. He had actually felt a pang of fear. Had even strained his ears to be sure of his friend’s heartbeat. It had drummed steadily enough, he thought. Mostly. Steady, but thin. Always thin, for the tide of his blood was necessarily fickle by his exsanguinations, but…

But you did not know for certain if there was some threshold near to being crossed. You’d never had a case like Jonathan Harker before you. Not even to experiment with. Why bother? You never thought in terms of keeping a single body as your reservoir when you were content to either starve or glut yourself at random. No one like Jonathan existed to you until he offered himself up as the living meal to you and two other hungry mouths for twenty years. And, childish thought, you’d wondered if he could do thirty. Longer. However long the charade could last before the inevitable came and you bled yourself back into him, feeding him from your heart’s blood to end the game of humanity and lock him in your thrall. And then, finally, you would get to see him drink. Master’s orders, my friend. Gorge yourself.

But that presupposed there would be no issue come the time of turning.

That this state, the ghoulish and gauntly haunting form that existed on the line between life and death, was not itself a spoiling factor in the process. Would the rules change if he died as this creature? Would he rise at all? If he did, would he be a Vampire or something else? Something still beholden to his Master only because he was chained by love and not the unshakable tether of being sired into undeath?

He did not know.

Having acknowledged that he did not know, he had almost ripped the cigar from his friend’s mouth so that he might force the man to drink from his veins that second.

Jonathan had seemed to read this in him. He tapped his ash into the tray with something very nearly like a smile.

“No, Sir. Not now. There is every chance I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s age alone whispering to me. Many men start to dwell on these things once they reach the 40-year mark. So I was always led to assume. For myself, I remain shocked that I have lived this long in the first place. I only feel as if there is now a clock ticking somewhere in all this. That it will end before the year is out because…”

He had paused to puff and shrug.

“…because it must end. Either because this state is finally preparing to collapse or because, with three adults to feed, I have begun to deplete too much to sustain the meals and myself.”

It was true. The boy was now a boy only in feeling. Somehow the calendars had piled up and the child was now a young man. Careful with his Papa—and no, even now he did not envy the boy learning his Lesson from his mother the night his adolescent hunger had slipped too far and left the man as pallid as his hair—but still taking more than he ever had in his boyhood. He and his mother had agreed in silence to feed a little less, alternating on their meals each feeding. Even he had stopped short of a full draught more than once. And it was not enough.

Still, Jonathan had been unperturbed. His Master had thought little of that calm. Time had not broken so much as smoothed him. An unfinished stone sanded and shined by a waterfall’s endless pressure until what had been his nightmare was reduced to mundanity. Ah, he woke to the New Year feeling that death was imminent? Hmm. A shame. May as well enjoy a smoke first.

Months passed since that scene. Though his blood did not change, his mien did. Each turn of the calendar’s pages brought some unknown weight down heavier and heavier on him. Distraction drew his attention away, his ghost-light eyes blazed like warning flares in the dark sockets, he lost himself for minutes or hours at a time at the desk, and once, in the far end of March, his Master had caught him weeping silently while eating. A tear would roll every few bites. Savoring and saying farewell at once.

Whether this unknown mortal clock really was ticking or not, his friend believed in it. Felt it was real enough to say his good-byes to human sensation. Such a fuss, his Master had thought. Tried to think.

You did try. Truly, painfully, you tried to make yourself laugh. Jeer. Hold to certainty and joy at the approaching finality. Humanity shed to give your friend his stalled eternity. Still, you caught yourself worrying. Wondering. What if something went wrong? What if something was wrong already? What if, ha, he was making plans to short you at the last? What if he had made plans with some conspirator in the towns to pierce his heart and take his head? What if the turning somehow did not take at all? What if, what if, what if?

What if indeed. You fretted so much over those months, old devil. You worried about every little thing that might go wrong before you made your move. Before you ended the game and took your prize and burned the nuisance of mortality on the pyre it deserved two decades ago. 

The prize you never thought was waiting at the end of someone else’s long game.

He made a noise into the soil. A coughing bark of a laugh. Out in the cargo hold, the smoker stirred.

“Hello? You down here, Mikhail?” He leaked himself out of the box. Fog to flesh. The smoker squinted in the half-gloom, coming closer. “Hello?”

“Hello,” he echoed. The smoker swung around to face him. There was not much to face, as he stood still in shadow. He watched the man’s brow furrow. Trying to squint his way toward recognition.

“Who are you? One of Arnold’s new boys?”

“No,” he answered, stepping into the glow of the man’s lighter. The squint turned to a gawking mask of horror bordering on disgust.

“Jesus,” came out in a gasp that reeked of cheap smoke. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Trouble at home,” he admitted with a flash of teeth. Within a blink, he was tearing into the man’s throat. He inhaled blood and cigar fumes until he was iron-grey, until he was at his prime, until he was a youth. Hating the taste with every gulp. Unable to glut himself further, he sighed and twisted the man’s head off. The heart he tore out with more relish than he preferred to admit. He crushed all three pieces of the body as if crumpling paper and did not rise to the deck until he sensed it was unoccupied. Up he went, tossing the balled up remains into the waves. “My thanks,” he whispered after it.

The corpse had provided him with something like a lackluster disguise. A jacket to match the rest of the seafarers.’ He hoped the sight of it might let him go unbothered on deck. Though it was an easier thing to simply slip back down to the cargo’s shade, he wanted the openness of the night and the sympathetic frown of the moon peeking through the clearing clouds. He looked up to it now the way a drunken man sulked up to his barman. A barman who had waned a few phases since he was last seen.

The moon had been so full the last time he saw Jonathan. Rather, times.

Once while alive. The other…

“Which one are you, then?” Swallowing a curse, he slid his gaze to his right. A man with a flask stood there, pausing mid-sip to scrutinize him. His lip curled as he gestured with the liquor. “Who said you could have hair like that and work a vessel, eh?” He did not pause for an answer before shaking his head and taking a full drink. “Arnold’s getting sloppy if he’s hiring from…from…” A cloud of hazy concentration came and went on the ruddy face. “What? The Nordics? The Slavs? One of those lots with hair to their knees.”

He did not answer. Only looked again to the moon. He imagined the wedge of it gazed back at him with apology. The man blundered forward a step, reaching to take him by the shoulder.

“I’m talking to you, boy—,” A callused hand passed through his shoulder like mist. For it was. The flask made a tinny sloshing sound as it struck the deck. “Oh.” It was a small sound. The frightened moan of a child in a rancid dream. Feeling the moment warranted it, he turned his young man’s head to fully face the man. Letting him see the maimed display of the left eye. The dried maroon crust that streaked his cheeks. The man made another noise, even reedier. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Arnold never said anyone died on this one. It’s too new, he said.” His throat worked like a thin tangle of pulleys. Bloodshot eyes bulged. “The Persephone’s only been on the water three years and no one’s ever…”

“Newness is no guarantee against death any more than age is a guarantee against foolishness,” he grated out.

“Right. Right, of course, apologies. I’ll just—I’ll just—,” the man didn’t seem to know what he’d ‘just’ for several tediously agonized seconds. But, between the drink and the rarity of the moment—How often did one cross paths with a spirit, after all?—his feet remained anchored. Then, “…How did you die?”

Of idiocy. Here and now. Requiescat in pace.

“I was betrayed. Over a woman.” Sour needles pricked along his throat. “Over a child. The years made me blind. Soft. Comfortable. So certain that all was in order, that I held everything in my hands. But I lived among thieves without knowing it. I woke one night to find all that was mine was gone, stolen, and the one I had handed my heart threw it away as though it were the sole piece of filth that could not be bothered with. And then…” He gestured to the mark upon his face. His eye now a ball of blazing arterial red set in a spray of wild scarring from the lightning bolt. Even after a deep meal, he felt that the damage had scarcely receded. Had he not twisted in time, the blast would have struck him square through his skull.

The wretched woman had fine aim.

And that’s not all she has, is it?

“Sorry to hear it, son,” came from his right. The man had retrieved his flask again. It winked like tarnished silver in the moonlight. Though his face showed a bleary bafflement as to what exactly the manner of death could have been, he went on, “And here I figured the worst that could happen to a man at sea was drowning.”

“Terrible ends can happen anywhere. But if it saves you worry, I will not remain on this ship forever. I will disappear once it docks in England.”

“Reckon you’re off to haunt the bastard who did this to you?”

“Not yet. First I must go to my son, who they sent away all oblivious to their work. Then,” his hand drifted of its own accord to his chest, dipping under the hanging coat to feel at the lump in a high pocket. It sat cold and out of place there, like an elaborate little tumor. Touching it brought back the pain to his chest and eyes. “Then I shall see to the traitors.”

“Cannot say I envy them.” Another sip, nearing the bottom.

“Few would. They thought me a monster to slay together. But they have yet to meet the worst of me. For they grew comfortable too, seeing me docile, hospitable, giving them my home and my love and a thousand allowances that no other in my life has ever wrung from me. Yes, I will haunt them. I will hunt them. And I will deliver to them a recompense so much worse than death.” The man was trying again to drink from his flask and finding himself thwarted. “Empty?”

“Afraid so. Do you ever miss that, being dead? Getting to drink?”

“No. I still drink. But I am full for the evening.” He bared his teeth in a gleaming crescent. Some of the man’s crewmate still stained his fangs. He watched the man’s face abruptly lose all its tint. “I am glad you got to enjoy your own. It is a rarity not to face this part sober.”

So saying, he plunged his hand into the man’s chest. He twisted out the heart with the ease of one plucking a ripe apple from its bough. The man croaked out only a small noise at this. Nothing more than a damp little bleat, smothered by the steady roll of the waves. He was still gawking at his heart in one clawed hand while the other snared him and hurled him overboard. The sound of the splash was nothing. Sighing, he shrugged off the apparently useless jacket and cradled the heart in it to prevent a drip. Back to the cargo hold it was. Down to the dark and the dirt and—

He left it waiting for you. Even in the midst of all the confusion, the haste needed to get out, to be gone, he made sure to leave it right there in the sow’s coffin.

The cold lump shifted in its pocket.

He bit down a curse as his eyes stung, burned, boiled.

A roost was made in the furthest corner of the hold. The heart sat in his hands. Huge and dense with old smoke and liquor and fatty seaside meals. He’d lied to Jonathan before, about how certain consumed vices changed the blood’s quality. There was no alteration in what it fed, but the taste shifted. Between the crewmate he’d siphoned and the swollen muscle in his fingers, he realized he was indulging in the nearest thing he had to slovenly eating after a hard day. He took an experimental taste of a ventricle.

Immediately acrid. A rich and awful tang that ran to the back of his throat.

Nothing like the spigot that had flowed for him like careful clockwork for two decades. So meticulously tended by diet, by caution, by the vessel it sprang from. Twenty years of ambrosia meted out in scheduled mouthfuls and the occasional drop snuck between meals, as was his right.

“No, my friend, not the wrist. The boy would know someone was taking extra. And from his own plate! So to speak. Undo your collar, you know she will not complain…”

And Jonathan had. The brilliant eyes sliding away from his Master as he stole one, two, three, four or more little tastes from neck and shoulder, collarbone and breast. A single sip from each bite. He had not even winced. Not until Jonathan’s Master brought his mouth up to his face. Printing the blood there like a girl with her kiss’ lacquer. It had taken his Master’s hand around his jaw to make Jonathan turn and face the second one, pressed into his own lips. Eyes shut against the threat of a trance, mind fluttering frantically out and away.

He had let him then, back in those early nights. Always so shy, his Jonathan. Even after the whirlwind of that long-ago summer, the thresholds crossed and barriers erased for the sake of playing his Scheherazade, still he quailed from the gentler edges of his better. Hiding up in his head or in his Master’s teeth or under the flimsy shelter of his duties whether they were self-assigned or not. Anything to not accept what lurked and grew under the veneer of mere surrender to an enemy.

Had that too been a trick? Laying bait the way his Master had once drawn the hunting dogs back to his genius loci with the woman already tainted?

A Wolf did not chase if the prey did not run. And he did love to chase. To play. Up to a point. He had tried more than once to smother the overgrowing feeling in him as the years marched and his friend continued to drop his eyes and tense away from tenderness. When that failed, he told himself it did not matter. He owned his friend through the woman and their son, and whatever performance he sought—the rent owed to many a charitable landlord, really—could be ordered from him.

And he had ordered it.

In specific, he had, on a particularly maudlin night, ordered his friend to kiss him as he would her. He would know the difference. He’d leeched through her senses on occasion when they were, quote, ‘alone’ together. Sometimes he thought Jonathan even saw him staring out of her eyes. Or else the woman simply gave him away by some private sign or other. Whatever the case, Jonathan had never once withheld his love with her.

So, the order. Out of curiosity. Out of boredom. An order given without even a trance to smooth the act, just to see how he would muscle past the walls of indignity and a lover’s loyalty as he had back when he thought he had been charming for his life in their supple sabbatical once upon a time.

Instead, a magic trick.

Between one blink and the next, Jonathan had been the self he reserved for the woman. Even the smile kept for her had been there. A necessary prelude to the hands that bookended his Master’s face and pulled him level. Just like that, there were their mouths together. Not the press of a patient doll’s lips as its owner mashed themselves there in pantomime of intimacy. If he had not known better—

But Jonathan made sure he did. As soon as the kiss elapsed, he’d receded into himself. Less a tortoise into his shell than a closing fist praying not to be pried open lest the treasure in it be snatched away again.

“Was there anything else, Sir?” asked in the rug’s direction. Shame and a miserable whiff of apology yet-to-be had stamped him. He would throw himself into making amends to the woman, of course. Whether or not he wounded her with tattling on this little service, he would meet her with whatever kindnesses he could muster that were not already given. It was one of many moments in which he was convinced that his friend would give of himself until he was down to bones and then try with his last breath to gift someone his ribs. “Sir? Am I dismissed?”

He was not. All at once, his Master had a list of tasks for him to perform over the course of days. Weeks. Months. A year and more. And was that not where the mistake of it all had begun? The willing leap at addiction? Commanding his friend, his immaculate actor, his Scheherazade, into a hundred little indulgences. And not just in matters of sampling each other. Sometimes he would wring whole nights out of the man, without even the boy to perform for, trapping him by the fire or in a moonlit room or down in that half-secret glade by the stream where they played hunter and hunted and hid together from the walls of domesticity, spurring his friend into the easy and smiling talk of companions, of intimates, of…

Go on, old devil. You can admit it. Why not? What point is there in pretending he did not perform so well as to leave you reduced to this?

Fine.

Talk of those in love.

Yes, he had used the exact word. More than once.

Do this, do that, do any and all these things as if you loved me. Just as you do her.

And Jonathan had. Always with the bracing misery before and the shuddering withdrawal after. But he served his Master’s wants. He did so with such an ease that his Master had invented half the trap himself; he had convinced himself somewhere that he was giving his friend permission to do what he truly wished to do, freed from the yoke of duty and fealty to the woman, to his morals, to his sanity. Yes, that was it. He was giving his friend release. Lifting away the leaden weight of his beloved martyrdom and letting him know, yes, it was alright, he could want something other than what was ‘right’ or ‘good.’ What had such scruples brought him besides pain? God and humanity no longer had a place for him or his family or his love; that bottomless fount that had more to give than his veins ever would.

Here, my friend, I will take it. I will catch it all as it spills. Love me. Love and be happy. It’s alright.

The cold lump in his pocket felt heavy and frigid as a glacier on his chest. Scrubbing his hand clean on the jacket, he fished the hateful treasure out of its home and glared at it in his fingers.

A brooch the size of a dove’s egg. Antique gold ringing a garnet of such brilliance it might have been frozen claret. Splitting it was an ornate dragon, rampant, seeming to cling to the stone like the mythic hoards of legend. One of few mementos kept in his bedchamber from mortal days and nascent immortal nights that had gone sour in recalling their joy. He had taken it from its hiding place of velvet, shined it until it glowed, and, at the end of another race through their wilds, another capture, another victory drunk from the won throat…

“You have been here five years. Yet still I get word that you are not always recognized as being in my service.” This was fractionally true. At least in the sense that he knew there was a certain level of laxness that existed between Jonathan and a handful of those he did business with in the towns. Little mistakes or a dragging of feet on assorted exchanges and services that his friend would try to paper over with excuses on their behalf.

Once, only once, he had even tried to get away with hiding a newcomer’s attempt to swindle him outright. He had only seen a tourist of means with an Englishman’s lilt and tried to rob him over a new toy for the child and a novel for the woman. Jonathan had not pushed back, only gutted his allowance while the seller’s neighbors threw their shocked and silent looks. Perhaps that would have been the end of it but for Jonathan idly mentioning the encounter to the woman as they shared his bed post-feeding, thinking little of it. His Master, listening through her, had thought otherwise. Enough to find and inform the seller of his misstep personally. The next time Jonathan went to town he came back somewhat shamefaced with a burden of extra wares given ‘as a courtesy.’ The peasants were careful to point him out to new citizens ever-after.

All this in mind, Jonathan had looked at him oddly over the excuse.

“If that is the case, it has not hindered me in any way. The people have been nothing but gracious when I come through.” Gracious and afraid, he knew not to say. His Master had shooed the words away like flies.

“You remain ever lenient, my friend. You would apologize to the wheels of a carriage as they ran you over. It is for your own good that you must wear this, lest you and your goodwill are trampled by the opportunists among the chattel.” Out had come the brooch. “You will have this visible at all times. Be it to clasp on your coat or wear at your throat. Do you understand?”

“Yes, S—,” A look was caught. No, no. He knew the rule out here. Away from mother and child. “Yes, balaurul meu, I understand.”

Not well enough, of course. Not even when he was made to sit still, his chin up so that his Master could pin the thing in place. No, he had not understood then. Not until the next night when he took his place in bed for the family meal. There he had sat, undoing his shirt collar—with the brooch nowhere in sight. Not before the feeding. Not after he buttoned himself up with strengthless fingers. Not even on his nightstand.

The boy and the woman had looked up with curiosity and ire respectively when Father hadn’t taken his usual leave for the saccharine post-bleeding period with Papa. Papa himself had looked concerned and lost. No one had made a mistake, had they?

“Father? Did you want to stay too?” from the boy. A thread of worry in his voice, as was natural whenever Father deviated from his routine, but far more of eagerness. Father so rarely lingered overlong with the entire family in the room. And, he would admit it, it stung to deflate the child’s hope.

“I am staying,” he’d said, “But you and your mother must go for a time. There is something important I must speak with Papa about.” There had been some bristling at that. But he had yanked the woman’s leash and the woman had taken the boy away by the hand, thinking soft assurances and lies at him until they were out of the tower. Jonathan, dear oblivious Jonathan, had peered at him with genuine confusion.

“What is it? Has something happen—,”

His Master had flung the full weight of the trance into him like a boulder. A boulder that became a crushing fist around the flailing mote that was Jonathan’s ostensibly free will. Having hold of it, he wrenched his friend up to his feet and prodded sharply at his mind until he turned to where he’d stored the brooch. There, the wardrobe. Go. Fetch.

Jonathan had managed two steps before the weakness of his emptied veins dropped him to hands and knees. He crawled the rest of the way. Staggered back upright. Worked the doors open and shuffled with trembling hands through the hanging clothes. Here was the coat. There, fastened at the chest, was the brooch. He fumbled at it with twice the difficulty of fastening his shirt. So much so that it pricked his thumb bloody and slipped through his fingers. He made a small despairing sound before falling back down on his knees, searching in the shadows and shoes for it. When his hand finally closed on it, his Master tugged again at his mind, ordering him back the way he’d come. Across the floor, up into the bed. Holding the brooch.

His Master tugged again. Jonathan held the brooch out on his palm. The one now striped and smeared from the bleeding thumb.

“What did I tell you to do with that, Jonathan Harker?”

“To—to wear it in town—,”

“No.” He’d paused to watch Jonathan’s face. The shift of expression that sketched such a perfect epitome of dread, especially in a bloodless face. “I said, You will have this visible at all times. And where was it instead? Thrown away, out of sight, out of mind. Is it not so?”

“N-No. No, I did not mean to—,”

“Must I make it simpler for you? The boy still has the collar he never bequeathed to the trapped wolf. I am certain it would fit you. The emblem would never be misplaced again.”

“Sir—,”

“Do you think I gave it to you as a whim? Another token to cast aside, to ignore like all the rest you are showered with all unconscious to, stewing in your precious stringency, self-deprived as a monk?”

“Please, I swear, I only thought—,”

“What? What did you think? Do tell.”

“I thought,” his voice caught and rasped, trying not to be a cough. “I thought it was meant for strangers. As something official, part of a uniform. I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was…” But here the words dried and his face showed again that crumpled confusion. The pain of a kicked dog unsure of what mistake he’d made, only knowing he had erred. Jonathan’s eyes had found his Master’s, as much plea as fear.

What? the look begged. What is this? What did I do wrong? I cannot act without my lines.

There was no questioning of his Master’s anger. Such storms were known to pass and one could only brace and weather them. This was all he knew.

But you knew better, didn’t you, old devil? It took you a moment to catch up to yourself. To truly admit it to your own mind, even knowing from what happy old era’s dust you fetched the thing from. You made no ceremony of it. You buried the giving of it in a disguise. But the meaning was there even as you fastened it to him without fanfare, without warning. All you did was stitch an importance to the ornament that was invisible to him. And look where it led.

Jonathan hadn’t blood enough in him to hold rigid as he usually did before his Master’s moods. He shuddered even as he fought to be still. Afraid. Cold. Eyes of pale blue glass pinned to his Master, searching desperately for a reason to it all, for the thing he must make amends for.

Still with his hand outstretched. The brooch in a bloodied palm.

Just as it is now. Here in the brine-scented shadows. It looked more precious in his.

It had.

Jonathan had kept the hand out even as his Master joined him on the bed. As his Master plucked the brooch up, tasting it clean of the red stain, then kissing away the same from the bleeding thumb. As his Master gently tilted the quivering chin up and fastened the emblem in its proper place. As his Master did not move except to close the last of the gap between them, stroking the white curtain of hair from his brow.

“I am sorry, draga mea. You did not know because I did not explain. It is too easy to forget you are the only one here who does not go walking into others’ minds. So often you fool us all into believing otherwise.” The stroking hand traveled down to trace Jonathan’s jaw. No longer shaking. Not as badly, anyway. “You did not recognize that it had a mate, did you?” Jonathan turned his head an inch, frowning. His Master tilted up his own chin. For a moment, more confusion. Then realization.

The stone worn at his Master’s throat had no beast stretched across the stone. His was a coil that encircled it entirely, an ouroboros of a dragon.

“I know that rings are the tradition. But you are a creature of loyalty and I did not wish to test my Harkers’ ire in demanding you remove the gold band for something of mine, be it a signet or a stone. This is as close as we can come the way we are. At least until the night of consummation. Baptism. Whatever you prefer.” He trapped Jonathan’s eyes with his. “When that time comes, we can talk of more classic rites, insofar as our arrangement allows for such things.”

Jonathan had nodded at this. Perhaps tried to speak. A ‘yes, Sir’ seemed to snag on his tongue. The shock was too much to work around on his own, so his Master hoisted him over it with a final hook of the mesmer and gave him words to say:

“Of course, balaurul meu. I look forward to it.” His mouth had snapped shut around the last word, pallid eyes huge and almost teetering in their sockets. He was shaking again. Ah, it was too much as he was, poor thing. His Master had left him swaddled in another blanket, asking if he was prepared to see mother and child now. Jonathan could only nod, his hand rising and falling away from the space before the brooch. As though he feared the thing would bite him.

Good.

Good enough, you reasoned. He would grow into it. He would accept it. He had accepted it already. Enough that you had to deal with a particularly entertaining round of aftermath from the woman’s mind. For all her collaring of herself when she had to grovel for something—and was her own peasant’s past not fine training there?—the Vampire of her could not be smothered when it came to theft. Not even sharing! This, when you could have ordered the ring off him. Could have had him write up divorce papers for the dead, if only as a prop to hang in the office. But then the boy would have questions. Perhaps even tears. Was Papa not allowed to love more than one parent? It would not do. To think you offered to let her be Maid of Honor.

Amusing fireworks had ensued.

They had cooled, he thought, as the years continued to stack. On and on until the end of their second decade made its way to them. Jonathan never misplaced the brooch again. The woman appeared resigned to joint custody of both her Loves in her sullen way. And the boy, his little diavol, barred from full knowledge and unhappiness, had grown to manhood under their care.

A fine excuse the latter had made.

He thought back to it now. That last scene with the grey and ghastly shape of his friend in his surreal mortality. Another cigar lit, the smoke curling out the library’s window. What a strange image he’d made. He had looked like…

A month or so ago he had found his friend thumbing through an American magazine of all things. Some publication or other that had made its way across the Atlantic and the Channel to join its English siblings. It had been one of his few vices over those latter years, catching up on the newsworthy pulses that beat outside their mountains. The American one had shown an advertisement at the back. A rather charming illustration of a man in what had to be a modern eveningwear suit. Arrow Collar and Shirts for Every Occasion the image declared.

Jonathan had seemed to be a macabre translation of the man posed in the picture.

Seeing this, an abrupt needle of mourning had pierced his heart. Twenty years of feeding had made his friend into this wasting enigma. Twenty years of allowing the arrangement to unspool on and on without end, simply for the fact of Jonathan continuing to breathe and bleed unimpeded, as if his will alone were enough to hold his half-life existence together. Twenty years of letting his friend’s incessant need to give of himself down to the marrow get in the way of sense. Of what was right. Of what was long past due.

How did you allow this? How did you agree to let this carry on so long? Look at him, look at the calendar. So many years lost in which he could have already been what he was meant to be. Why? For your agreement? For the charade of the bitter conqueror taking his consolation trophy? It made sense at the start, perhaps. Those early years of gloating. It was your due. But once the sting was gone, once it became clear what he was to you under the vitriol of old, what excuse was there to drag this on, to make a living ghost of him? What excuse is there now? Look at him, old devil. Look at him and think of what he could have been, should have been, for the last quarter of a century.

And he had. He’d stood in the doorway, staring, overlaying the haggard reality with what should have been. Here was Jonathan Harker, forever young, the flesh back on his bones, his eyes free of shadows and crimson as an opened throat. Jonathan Harker, still and strong, a beautiful killing thing like a spider waiting in its silk.

Instead, he was this. A ghoul waiting to find out the when and how of his death before the year concluded, seeming far deader than the thirsty revenants he called his family. The unfairness of it wrenched in his Master’s chest. Worse still was the hindsight of its pointlessness. As if this arrangement of the household had done anything but ruin his friend and cripple their son against the reality of the wider world waiting for them. He had even felt a twitch of pity for the woman, if briefly. She had lost her Love to the needs of their hunger and their Master’s whim, watching every year as that Love was shriveled and shifted into a wretched grotesquerie of what he ought to be. Her prized possession spoiled by mishandling and a refusal to simply tear their Jonathan free of his scruples and do what needed doing.

“Was there something you needed, Sir?” Jonathan had asked without turning. His eyes were on the moon. Full as a pearl.

“There was. Is.” His friend did not jump upon seeing him abruptly at his side. Nor did he turn his head. “You are almost replenished.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am.” A tap of ash. Still not taking his attention from the sky. “Did you wish to steal a drink ahead?”

“It is not stealing. Only taking what’s owed.” There was a soft sound of fabric pulling away. Jonathan had turned and froze. His Master had removed his own clasp and the cravat under it. Vest and shirt hung open. The skin above his heart was already cut open. “And giving what is long overdue.”

“Sir, that’s not necessary. Not already.”

“When, then? How much longer will you reduce yourself like this? They are beginning to go hungry even with your sacrifice, my friend. Mother and child both. But he is not a child anymore, is he? He is grown. He must feed as such. Yet he tries to feed only as a boy, just as his mother feeds in her little halved tastings. Even I have taken less than my share. All to bow to your craving for self-destruction. No more of it.”

“This seems somewhat—,” Jonathan first tried to sidle away from the sill, only to have himself caged back against the stonework by his Master’s arms, “—abrupt.”

“You have until you finish the cigar.”

“Case in point.” Another drag was taken, neither rushed nor prolonged. Jonathan blew his stream of smoke out into the breeze. Then, “Was that why you had so many of these on hand before? The food and drink and assorted sensory comforts?”

“Before?” Jonathan looked at him. Waiting for him to—, “Ah. Then. No, not precisely. There was an act to perform. Had it been Peter Hawkins there in your place, he would have had the same to consume before his…dismissal.”

“That’s what I mean. You were always planning to either ‘dismiss’ or ‘retain’ your solicitor of choice. You went out of your way to provide the equivalent cuisine and indulgences of a noble’s home, even when the reality of things had set in. I might have had, say, a week’s worth of fine dining and then bread and water from then on. But you kept at the kitchen regardless. Why was that?”

“To drop the quality would be to ruin the masquerade,” his Master said, wondering at the turned subject. Knowing not to be swayed. “Had you proven to be a lowly churl not worth my time beyond the completing of paperwork, you would not have eaten at all. The wolves would have had your bones for toys in the same week.”

“Mm,” another puff. Jonathan was halfway through. “My mistake, then. I had assumed you were interested in giving your pawn a long last meal before his life ended, permanently or otherwise. That or fattening the metaphorical calf. It was hard to imagine you enjoyed playing the role of host and staff without it being part of some standard habit.”

“So it might have been when you returned home.” Oh, only twenty short and endless years ago. Still with their enemies’ blood under his nails. Begging sanctuary for his Loves, bartering his own throat. Memories, memories. “For some reason, you seemed hesitant to trust my culinary skill a second time.”

“Yes, well. Blame that on a joke too many made about the wine and red meat on the menu. I’d not expected you to throw aside pretense to the point of…” Jonathan nodded at his Master’s bleeding chest. “…this.” More ash tapped over the stone sill. A third of the cigar was left. Jonathan’s eyes floated from the oozing cut to the moon. The effect erased all but the furthest edges of blue from his irises and made them into coins of silver. His brooch glowed like fire. “Do you know what I ate on my wedding night?”

Stop. Plug your ears. A trick. A trap. Laying bait again, old devil, do not listen, do not let him talk, do not hesitate, this is how he works, how he has always worked, how he has been the only one in all the infinite hell of your unlife able to steer the storm of you. In pain, in suffering, in servility or supplication, the silver of his tongue did more to tame you than any holy relic, and you knew it and you did not care, did not think to care, because he made himself satisfied with crumbs, with vapor, even when you tried to force bounty into his hands and down his throat, do not listen, do not wait, take him, own him, seize his mind and soul and senses now now now before it is too late—

But this was the bellowing of the present into the past.

All he could do in the ship’s dark was muffle his curses by biting into the bloated heart as the memory unfolded in all its hopeless reality.

“No,” he’d half-whispered to his friend. “You never said.”

“I had what I’d been having since I was taken in by the nuns. Broth and bread. Small simple soft things. I was half-dead then too, albeit in a different direction. Mina and I married and made love on my sickbed, in a rush of joy and tears and illness. I left our wedding venue with one hand in hers and another on a cane. Now I am here, twenty years on, with another marriage to begin in haste. The marriage that will also be my death knell. Lenore again, but without any hope of resting in peace.”

Jonathan watched his Master through his lashes.

“When I am drunk from a last time and I drink in turn, it will be the moment I say farewell to what is left of the good man who existed before I turned the kukri on those I trusted with my life and who I would have died to shield, had it not been for God putting my Loves on the same altar He set before Abraham. The last of that good man will die to the blood baptism, to an unbreakable chain of connection with what is reviled by the divine. Fickle thing that it is. But before I was a Christian, before I was taught the lie that God is absolute love, I already held Love as holy. I held kindness unto others as a mission. It hurt me then as it hurts me now to envision pain wrought on another without cause but profit or cruelty.

“But that feeling will be sunk into a spiritual chasm once I turn. Already I dropped a piece of it into the dark when I bloodied my hands. The rest will follow and I shall become a Judas not only to a select few, but to the whole of humanity. While I can see the logic in throwing myself into consummation for fear of turning back at the last second, I do not think I can stomach yet another threshold where I do not get to walk, but must hurl my way across. Another sprint, another crash into one world out of the last. I would ask—,” his throat had caught, eyes gleaming, “—I would like to have the day.” He cracked a sad smile. “St. George’s Day. A fitting hour to say good-bye to the good of me. And for our son’s birthnight, we shall have our last family meal. No meager shares. No restraint. I shall be too weak by then to hold off. And it will not be done behind closed doors. Behind my Loves’ backs, like another secret. Please.”

The eyes, the eyes, no power in them but what his Master put there, but they held and they drowned and pleaded for this, this last meal, this final allowance, and—

And you swallowed it. Inhaled it. Drank it from him like he’d slit himself open over your mouth. You did, old devil.

He had.

He’d looked his friend in the eye—eyes still vulnerable, still susceptible, still able to be hooked and pinned like the rest of him, ready to be stolen away into his thrall without another puff of the cigar left between them—and said, “Very well. But know that I will accept no hesitation tomorrow. No rescinding, no stalling, no last-minute dawdling. You make your good-byes to yourself tomorrow. Make your peace and apologies to the world if you must. But then I will eat the martyr out of your blood and fill the space with something better. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.” This he said before taking his handkerchief from its pocket and wiping the dark smear from his Master’s heart. For almost a minute said Master held still enough to pass for a waxwork as Jonathan righted the shirt, the vest, the cravat. He took his Master’s brooch from a clawed hand that had turned suddenly feeble before pinning it to the silk. It wasn’t until Jonathan tried to pull his hands away that they were caught.  “Was there something else?”

“Yes. You finished,” he’d nodded to the smoldering nub of the Romeo y Julieta, “and I will not go without something for my patience.”

“I need my hands if I’m to open my collar.”

“Everything I want is above the neck.”

“As myself? Or is this a commission, balaurul meu?”

“Surprise me.”

“Only if you do not bite your tongue.”

He’d not understood. Not until his face was brought down and he had seen the flash of parting lips and teeth and then—

You should have bitten your tongue. Should have trapped his head in your hands as he played at catching yours, should have bitten and fed yourself into him while he was snared. If he would dare lie to your face your deserved to bleed yours into his. Bastard. Delilah.

He thought these and a thousand curses even as he warred with the recollection of that taste, that consumption in two directions. What he had thought was a mere prelude to all the ages yet to come for them. Never thinking for an instant that it was only the last helping of honeyed poison. Even the sheepish fraction of a laugh that had left his friend was another dose of venom to numb him with.

“Forgive me. I just now imagined how we must look. An old man preying on the youth.”

“Indeed. You are still all but a gamin, draga mea. In any case, this is hardly novel for us, is it? Merely a change of position. A slow dance.”

“We must all be cautious about said dancing in England, you know. The laws are still—,”

“I am aware. Just as I know what lawmaking parties are at the top of my list to be invited to dinner once we secure the new estates…”

And they had talked. And talked. On and on toward the sunrise. Jonathan had insisted on taking himself to sleep lest he spend his grand farewell to humanity passed out the whole day. Away, Master, away. Shoo.

Off he had gone. Dense and careless.

Did you smell coffee on the way down? Did you? If so, did you think it only imagination or just shrug it away? Your friend, ever disdainful of wasting an hour. Fine, fine, let him wring St. George’s out in his way. What did you care? Fool.

The boy had still been up with his books and, he saw, some his Papa’s magazines. Odd. No less odd than seeing him return to the coffin rather than exercise his ability to doze where he liked; his miracle of a child, born alive and undead at once, able to sleep without a grave earth as bedding. Odd, odd. But he had not cared, had he? What reason was there to care when he had tomorrow night already dangling before his eyes?

The woman was already in her coffin, either sleeping or feigning sleep. He had not bothered to check. Had not cared whether she knew of her husband activity or not. If she now mulled the vision of her Master tasting what was hers, his, theirs, making plans for the future while she gathered dust in the chapel. How pleased he’d been. How sure.

“Father? Are you alright?”

The boy, the child, the son. His son. A young man who’d looked now so agonizingly like his fathers it sent a shamefully fond dart through his chest. Bless the fluke of the woman’s own features, kin of his kin, blood of his blood, by design or accident. He had smiled. Not grinned, not leered, but smiled with an ease he had forgotten he was capable of for so long. The look had made the boy’s face go even slacker with wonder.

“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

“You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. You look…I don’t know. Not younger, but,” the boy had fumbled for a word, “lighter, I guess. Did something happen?”

“No. But something will. Ah-ah, no prying,” when the boy perked up in his coffin, “Go back to your books. You will know more tomorrow.”

“Alright,” came the half-false sulk. “Good-day, Father.”

“Good-day, diavol.”

And he had gone to bed in his tomb fattened on bliss and craving more.

And then.

And then.

Bastard. Delilah. Thieving scheming viper of a traitor.

So much accomplished and destroyed within a day and night. Oh, his treacherous Harkers. Had they only been loyal, been wholly his in mind as much as will, he would have drowned them in praise and prizes for such work against a foe. The patience of it all. The skill. The performance. It surpassed the immaculate and made him ponder for one dumbstruck instant in the midst of his rage whether they had ever been human and not some stealthy pair of incubi come to prey on him.

Such a theory was only an excuse, he knew. It would not do to whittle down their ability to that of mere imps. No, they were but a man and a woman, however altered now, and they had proved themselves to be of such sterling cores of concentrated resolve that their Master had laid barely a scuff mark upon their joint machinations all these years. Their labors had born an unthinkable fruit; one it would have doubly shamed him to behold had he been victim to anyone less canny. But no, no. He had harbored his Harkers for a reason. They were uncommon creatures. Singular. Rare pets he’d thought he could tame. And given another century, perhaps he’d have managed it.

But like the fool who mistakes a tiger for a housecat, he had let his guard down too soon. Too quick. A mere two decades. And now his beasts had bitten and torn and robbed him.

His boy, his son, gone inside a day. Shipped away and on toward the teeming masses of England. This alone had been enough to spur him on. Or would have been.

If not for the impetus that the clever sow and her stolen Lessons from the Mountain had brought down on his head. He had fled before the next bolt could strike. Running, running. Just as he had been running since missing the boy’s departure, since realizing he was the only one left in the castle.

What had actually come first? His mind still spun when he tried to concentrate things into a clear order. The entirety of that period was still a swimming blur in the way the events of a nightmare will reach the waking mind as disjointed pieces.

He had awoken to the nettling pressure of the wild rose upon his coffin lid. The annoyance, the struggle, the hard toss and soul-deep agony that had come with booting the thing off. The blossom crushed. A resignation letter crumpled under the cracked ebony of the lid.

He had known his son was missing.

He had thrust his mind throughout the castle and known he was abandoned in full even before he tore away the lid of the woman’s box.

He had seen the glint of Jonathan’s brooch left on her pillow.

He remembered a vision. Sent from her. Brief. Teasing. Baiting.

Jonathan looking upon her with exhaustion and exultation, with relief, with want, with Love. Drinking from her like a man in the desert finding his oasis. Just the two of them in that boxed dark of her coffin. Mere hours before he found them gone. Eloped. So to speak.

She had left a message for him too, though it had come later. The one that came firing out of the roiling sky he’d thought was solely his. Once again the bait had been too much to ignore, even in his hunt.

It had been him.

How long had it been since he’d first tried to claw his way back into the woman’s mind, into her senses? He could not say. Only that he had been shocked to find himself barred except when the moon was high. She had been hardening herself up from within. There was more of a fortress around her will within two decades than his first trio of Loves had built up in centuries. She had been playing lame all this time. Preparing. Working in the shadows cast by her the distraction of her husband. Sharpening herself all along.

What irony, that they had left Jonathan’s old toy behind. The forgotten memento left in its hiding place in favor of being out and away before their Master fell upon them. Before he thought to whip them into the chase after their child. He’d had the kukri on his hip when he came upon the mist. A tell-tale wisp made visible only by the flash of lightning.

You recognized the essence in it. You knew it and you knew what it would lead to. And still, old devil. Still you threw yourself after him, maddened as a Wolf outran too long by his prey.

Only now it was not a Wolf and a hare, a Wolf and a hart. This was the bitch’s dog, her hunting hound, made to race and tear and follow commands—but not his. Not directly. No lashing of his will into Jonathan Harker’s mind would slow him. No order, no threat, no curse found traction upon the spectral rush of him. Cloud and man and spirit and beast flitting away, away, away, a parody of the hunts of old down their hill. It seemed his friend had been playing lame too.

He knew the speed of the Vampire, as was natural. Man or woman, fit or ill before their change, would have roughly the same gait.

But where he and the woman held that equal speed, Jonathan Harker was lightning on the ground. What had he truly been before he was turned? What blight or miracle had he kept hidden under a guise of constant frailness? He had not cared enough to mull it then. It was simply another frustration for the pile. Another nettle, another spur. The whole of it grated to the point of torture as, idle as a child at play, Jonathan had slowed long enough to throw a look back over his shoulder.

Grinning. Mocking. And there, at last, his own internal voice flying back into his ex-Master’s face:

Have you truly grown so slow, Count?

Through trees, over hills, onward, away, steering him off course, away from where the coast waited. The ships. The boy on the other side of the Channel.

Again, you did not care. Once in bliss, now in wrath. You went blindly after. Never learning your Lesson, old devil.

I see you wear my knife. Is it for my head? Or is it just to let you pretend something of me will still hold you against my will?

His own mind had leapt out after the fleeting shape, all champing teeth and thunder. Not in words. There was too much anger to fashion into coherence. Only the intent made its way out. Hate-fury-hate-fury-hunt-catch-punish—

Mine!

It had slipped from him. Flown. Bright and cutting and horribly naked in what was both a craving and a declaration. Had his eyes stung? It did not matter. The thought-snarl came again.

Mine mine mine mine mine mine you are Mine as the boy is Mine as the woman is Mine and you You YOU were Mine first by right by claim MINE and I will not be robbed by her by you thief traitor bastard Delilah—

Here came an echo from the deepness of the past, that cruel Lesson that Jonathan had once taught them all as his preying family warred over the greater claim to him, tugging at his mind like spoiled children over the same plaything, and Jonathan had thought those horrid sharp thoughts, the woman think-scream-ordering…

You can't, Darling, no, no, no, never. Don't you take yourself away, no one can steal my Jonathan, not even you.

But now here he was. Jonathan stealing himself out of reach. Just out of reach. His claws had scraped the back of his shirt, a lock of his hair. Close. So close.

Never yours, Jonathan had thought back. Never. You knew it then, you know it now. If you were ever so oblivious as to think otherwise, my Darling would have been slain the moment the Conqueror became the Coveter. When it stopped amusing you to see us huddled together and instead began to fester. Red eyes turning green. Because you knew. For all you made us do, all you ordered from me, it was only possible because I belonged to my Love. First, foremost, always. While you were only ever the thief stealing from her bed.

A thunderclap above. A pounce upon the quarry below. Just slow enough. Just as they made it to the clearing.

They had tumbled and Jonathan had thrashed until he was pinned in the grass. His grin had curdled then, deforming into an expression barely an inch removed from that of a bat’s grimace. He did not look at his captor, but bared his teeth in feral loathing at the hands locked around his wrists. There was a hiss as the grips tightened; enough to have broken bones had he been human. Jonathan’s face contorted into a horror of twitching muscle, his fangs crowding with the spires of sharp neighbors that jutted out and snapped so close they might have torn a swatch of flesh from his ex-Master’s face.

“Off me,” came a glottal excuse for a voice. The quintessence of revulsion.“Off me get off me off OFF—,”

“No,” he’d grated back, daring the nearness of the rabid jaws simply to press himself nearer. The closeness itself seemed to repel another bite as Jonathan twisted under him. “I am Master of your Mistress, thief. I am lord of your lady. If she is above the Son, I am above All, and the moment I loop my thrall through her blighted skull, I shall make a noose of the collar your soul donned for her and drag you screaming by it.”

Thunder had rolled again. Louder, louder, until it had irritated. He could not hear himself aloud and was barely better in his mind.

Why so coy now, draga mea? You have missed the wedding night and your funeral! Not to worry. I have what you left for me. It will stick so prettily in your throat.

The sky roared. And its Master, its Weathermaker for over four-hundred years, puzzled at that. He was not ordering the tempest to make such a din. Under him, another change. Jonathan was still. The monstrous face smoothed. Still unhappy, but abruptly devoid of any emotion greater than disdain. Perhaps with a hint of disbelief.

“Even now you insist upon the act. I had thought you would finally drop your mask entirely for the sake of rage, but no. Still you insist on pretense as though sincerity were as great an anathema to you as Him.” The grimace shifted briefly to an upturned rictus. In a lilting voice, brittle and musical as tinkling glass, “You yourself never loved. You never love! Ha. Twenty years of playacting fooled me no more than it did them after half a millennium.” Jonathan’s face hardened again, the grin turned to a razor. “I will never return to your stage again, Dracula. No more acts. No more charades. No more using me and the imitation of affection as another thing to steal from her. We are all but finished with you.” His fangs bared to the gums with a smile. “Now comes the denouement, balaurul meu.”

Then, fired into his head:

This is the last time you will touch me.

And like that, Jonathan Harker was gone. Dissolved and slithered away with such speed he might have been a puff of smoke blown away by the storm. The thunder boomed again. Not by his will.

There was a sound almost lost under the noise. An animal’s cry. A bird?

He looked up, feeling the skim of something familiar—

Her, her, the woman, thief, wretched bi—

—and had only a heartbeat in which to notice first the silhouette of a great owl outlined against the clouds, then the bolt of lightning racing down to find him.

He had dodged. Not quite fast enough.

Not before the pain landed and made its home from face to neck to arm to everywhere, everything, every possible niche of being that could feel agony. A blast that would have killed a mortal man. Had it taken both eyes, the second bolt may have landed too. But he was not blind and so outpaced that one. And the next. The woman was trying to track his motion once again, the old reverse turned on her Master, but he threw up the wall of fire between them and shot away toward the waiting coast. Running from his own sky. His own creatures.

Now here he sat in the present. In the gloom and the sea-salt air, crammed hastily away with a bed of thin earth in a stolen crate, hunting after his own son while his subjects herded and hounded him, dancing through the gaps they had found in his grip upon them. The old tricks of his perished Loves who had known that his hold was not as complete upon a mass as he would have wished. Animal minds were simple to coerce. The Vampire was its wants before all else and that very nature could war with a Master or Mistress if the focus was split enough.

And his focus was in splinters now. 

You would have laughed to see another suffer it, wouldn’t you, old devil? You took all that was hers once upon a time. Now she takes away all that is yours. Even your storm. Even the shapes of the animals. And him, of course. But then, he gave himself away. Is it not so?

“Silence,” he hissed to the cold mound of the heart. The blood was already starting to congeal within it. “Silence, damn you.”

If you have resorted to talking to yourself, you may do well to keep a diary of your own. Record your last nights for posterity.

He sat up quick enough to crack his neck.

I do apologize for the interruption, Jonathan hummed on. I can only assume you are terribly preoccupied. Either trying to pry into her head or trying to keep her out of yours. Even now, I remain banished to the outskirts of the conversation.

He felt himself smile for the first time in too many nights.

Oh, dear. His poor unschooled friend, who had not had needs or means to build up the walls as his wife had. Well. Let this be a Lesson for him then.

His own mind sprang upon Jonathan’s like jaws snapping shut. He felt the younger psyche spasm and raise phantom hackles at the intrusion. Scrabbling with an unpracticed grip at the Presence that bulled its way in, clawing, breaking, crushing his way across the waters that he could not pass in flesh, and then they were—

How do you like flying now, my friend? Everything you hoped it would be?

In the theatre of the mindscape he was launching himself and his catch back across water and shore and hill and mountaintop, wind whistling around false bodies. He was the Bat, Jonathan pierced a dozen times in his teeth. They were—

This is enough for me.

In the snow, the sun frozen an inch from setting, dead men watching as Jonathan brought down the kukri. Head, heart, limbs, over and over, carving and splitting. There was no collapse into elemental dust here. Only the mincing of a carcass. Even here, even wearing the skin of the living man he’d been, his eyes ran red. They were—

Ah, for a thief, still you go after too little. Let us at least be comfortable.

In Jonathan’s bed, each bite into his throat another night, and all those nights were his ex-Master’s. Kissing, mauling, drinking, sinking teeth to the gums. Only now his friend fought in his jaws. Jonathan’s teeth and claws tore at him as if he meant to shred him out of existence. To no avail. He was the practiced mind, the greater mind, greater will, and in mind and flesh his will was Law. But now he heard the whistle of air overhead, metal and timber swinging down. They were—

You still feel this one, don’t you? Mina feels the one in her throat on the same day it cut her. Does yours come like a blow at the end of each June? Again, Count, my apologies. You’ll not suffer the headache of me once your head is gone.

In the morning of departure. The shovel was in Jonathan’s hands, the edge bloody. No basilisk gaze pinned him now and his ex-Master’s brow was not merely scratched, but cracked like a grisly egg. The spade came down again. His ex-Master’s hand came up. They were—

But my friend, you know from experience how much I love to suffer you. To suffer for you. Saving—

In the ladies’ chamber, Jonathan torn out of three different suckling jaws as the dead Loves of old shrilled and grasped at him—

and sheltering—

In the grim first night, the woman in a deathly Limbo in Jonathan’s arms, the boy barely more than a twitching thought in her belly, on his knees, knife cast aside, bartering and pleading for the safety of his Loves, thankless and ungrateful already in his traitor heart—

 and supporting you all this time. Even now! Do you think me angry for your little trick? Your theft? Your lies? Why, it is nothing but heartening! To think I ever worried you were too soft for the eternity ahead of you! You, so cunning and patient, laying your tripwire over twenty years’ worth of convincing me—me!—that you were a thing worth trusting. Once we clear up this mess with the boy and your pending penance, I could see you eating holes through whole countries with your sweet venom.

Jonathan was in his hand now. A cursing, struggling mote trapped in a fist the size of a small house. The hand tightened. Jonathan howled. Not with pain, for there was no real sensation here. But the revulsion was true enough. He fought and pried at the knuckles of his ex-Master’s grip as if trying to break free of a cesspit.

The fist broke into other hands. A hundred thousand flashes of as many memories, cold clawed touches finding him wherever they felt like landing. Not injuring, of course. Would he hurt his dear friend? No! Only come closer, draga mea, the better to see you, feel you, count your pulses, that is all.

Jonathan bayed and swung and shuddered in the flurry. Every forced turn of the head with a hand on his jaw. Every talon of a nail tickling along chin and throat. Every idle raking of hair or stroke of his shoulder. Every seized arm, caught hand, grabbed hip, rubbed back. All of these blasted Jonathan’s unvarnished hate and disgust through the shared plane of their mind. And the worst of them all had been—

There.

The window in the library.

Their last night as man and monster. When he had spoken his last lying promise and slipped it into his ex-Master’s mouth like candy. Only hate had been there. Hate, disgust, shame. The weight of it staggered.

He staggered.

Jonathan broke free, but did not run, pausing to bare psychic teeth.

I can feel your scandal from here, Count. Even had you been short all the hundred other evils I had to ignore, I think your hypocrisy alone would have nauseated me. How do you sit there stunned at the obvious? Did you seriously believe my mind so pliant a thing that it would ignore the cruelty you held over our heads at every hour and fool myself into think you capable of love? This, when we both know you only consented to the terms for the sake of my payment in pain. Another performance, meant to last all of eternity, as you reveled over how I sunk to nightly agony behind every measured word, every smile, every taste of me ‘freely given.’ Our precious little summer together made infinite.

Here was the crackling fireside, a client and his solicitor beside it, white hair and dark switched around again. One of the early nights to judge by the healing cut on Jonathan’s cheek, the newness of the shadows under his eyes. Eyes whose fear had been so carefully reined in as he’d goaded his host into talk of the land, of its history, of himself in the guise of ancestors. Rapt young thing. After, he had sat then as he sat now, trapped against the arm of the couch, his host almost crushing him into the tufting as the old devil purred incessant questions about what there was waiting for him in England. Were there others like Jonathan there? Ah, he should not build up his hopes too much, souls such as his young friend were a rarity in any place…

Now the pleasant-pleading eyes flamed. Running red again.

This here. Even before the Weird Sisters laughed the truth in your face and you insisted on a lie of a rebuttal. This game was the core of all the years to follow. And now you complain because I played it too well and ran away while you were having fun? Over four-hundred years old and still a petulant child throwing tantrums over a lost toy.

The castle fell away into the heart of a storm. Veins of lightning wound through the black of it as the ex-Master loomed over his subject, his vassal, his traitor, his—

A toy? This alone?

Jonathan was seized in thunderbolts. Marionette strings that burned scarlet.

This is what you think would earn my interest? My protection?

Jonathan bowed and danced and split his face with grinning as the strings pulled.

I could have that from anyone, Jonathan Harker. I could have had that from you for twenty years, no longer leaving the sword hanging above your head, but walking and talking you through every night while your mind sat bound and mute behind your eyes. I could have laughed in your face that November night after I had twisted your head off your shoulders and burned what was left of your wife on my fire. I would have too. If you were anyone other than yourself.

The strings were a net were a web. Jonathan strangled in it, unable to die, to move, to look away as the parade of that prelude to his life in Castle Dracula came and went before him. The deaths and undeaths, the pains and the promises. Mother and child, Master and vassal with the blood never clean from their hands.

 All of this, my friend. All of this is because of you. You, who came to make the sale of Carfax. You, who refused to stay in your proper place among my lost Loves, waiting for my return and all the future I would bring. You, who set the hunting dogs upon me and so forced my hand with the woman. You, who faced the consequences of going among good men, pretending you were a mere hound instead of a jackal, striking them down for a Love you put above their mandates and their cherished divinity. You, who brought that Love to my door, groveling for the sake of your selfish heart.

You, Jonathan Harker. You are my equal in this ‘game’ you say I played. It is one impossible to play alone. If you had not baited me, not teased and strung me along, not made yourself into a vital thing to my heart rather than a mere curiosity, all would have ended swiftly.

 Something shifted. He couldn’t say what. A tipping, a sliding. The fraying of some final tether left straining in his friend’s mind. Jonathan had despised his touch and shown it well enough. Jonathan had raged on behalf of his Loves and the slain and their life that would never be. Jonathan had even managed to offer wrath on his own behalf.

This was not that.

This was an incandescent, a righteous, a Holy conflagration of fury that turned the clinging threads to ash and boiled away the storm into a flaming void. For a moment, Jonathan was not Jonathan at all. He was only a blistering red light. The fire trailing behind him spread like wings, either those of Eros or one of the Fallen. Whichever he was, he seared in his ex-Master’s mind like a torch.

Your heart? YOUR HEART?

A hand of flame pierced him, cooking the centuries-old heart before it was torn out as a cinder.

Even now! Even in your own skull! Even with the stage forsaken and the audience of our son finally free, still you must shroud yourself in this act!? STILL YOU FEIGN KNOWLEDGE OF LOVE BEYOND USING IT AS COLLAR AND CUDGEL!?

Jonathan fractured then, an inferno of indignation and devotion, flaring with the memory of all he had cherished and loathed in his life. Mother and child for the former. His ex-Master for the latter. All smiled for, all made happy as he could endeavor. Yet only mother and child were given all of himself in earnest, their own love reflected back into him, keeping filaments of joy alive even as he brutalized himself with the conviction of his being a worse monster than they could ever be in potentia, deserving of nothing, of worse than nothing, of—

Flashes of his ex-Master, of his voice and embrace and the steady grinding away of his sanity and will and soul under the lord of the castle’s heel, crushed by the weight of self-loathing, dragged up and eaten again and again by the bottomless pit of his ex-Master’s want, of the threat that he must play the game or leave his family to suffer, of a conviction that all of this, every minute of every night, was no more than entertainment, a distraction to grow bored of and smash to pieces should he fail to cozen and serve and be a good Scheherazade ever-after. His penance for the dead men. For his wife. For their son.

That was all it was. All it ever was to Jonathan Harker.

The shock of it came on too quick and too heavy for its owner to catch before it tumbled into the mindscape. It shattered open as it fell and showed all that had been true behind its owner’s eyes. Twenty years’ worth of truth. What he had taken for truth.

The woman, no longer even dreamt of as a companion, but a brittle-bitter comfort. A sibling he had never asked for, but could not deny for her use in keeping his own barbs sharp and for the guarantee of what she anchored to him.

The boy, so suddenly grown, his love uncomplicated and real and awed, an experiment fostered and festering, burrowing into his Father’s heart as blithely as an insect left to gratefully build its nest in the home of a welcoming corpse.

Jonathan Harker.

Jonathan Harker.

Jonathan Harker.

The keystone against which the sheltering of mother and child, the performance played for the boy, the willingness even to entertain the farce in the first place, all leaned. Why? Why, when he would not have suffered any other victim, any other enemy, any other dear friend to wring such a feat from him like blood from a stone? Why, unless..?

He could not hide it. Could not bury it. Could not raze or deny or shred it into dust. It was too loud, too vivid, too strong. Too starved.

It lunged at Jonathan like its own living thing, an excited Wolf gone mad with hunger, seeing the only thing it wished to eat. Raced, leapt, pounced, dissolved into a frantically grasping wraith of red tears and a heart, unburned but hanging open and raw in its cleaved chest, coiling around Jonathan’s mind and forcing the reality of itself down his throat. Choking on it, the fire of Jonathan Harker went out. Only the man—what had been a man—was left. Staring.

Now would come the laughter. The insult. The dismay. The sour-mocking questions. Oh dear, old devil. Had he really tripped and fallen so? Had he really dared to think that the feeling was returned?

Jonathan, no longer flame or fury, only stood in the black of their shared mind. Still staring. Still…

The shock was not just his ex-Master’s.

The void cracked and splintered. Now. Now the laughter would come. Now another act. Now a sardonic bat of lashes, a false swoon, a coo of cloying flattery, or else the woman herself would dare to graze his mind with her own, the better to jeer alongside her Love, yes, yes, any moment now. Now. Now.

Count. I did not know.

The laughter did not come. No act. No sneer. Not even a ripple of disgust. Nothing. Nothing but—

I’m sorry.

The sentiment was attacked with a thousand tearing teeth. Shredded down to psychic atoms in the hunt for the disingenuous core, the hidden chuckle, the lie, the trick. But Jonathan was no less bare than himself in this space. There was no more to find in the sensation than the feeling itself. It repeated:

I’m sorry. And, just as sincere: I never intended to break your heart. Only to impale it.

The whole of it saturated with an honesty and apology that cut deeper than any bludgeoning of hate.

Sorry is not good enough, my friend. There is no taking it back.

Jonathan, a pillar against the abyss, nodded.

I know. Not for either side. I did tell you. This will end before the year is out. We shall kill you or you shall kill us. It is all that’s left.

Now came a laugh; a familiar hideous sound that unfolded into a trail of chuckling. Giddy, almost.

No, Jonathan Harker. You misunderstand once again. Yes, you and the woman mean to slay me at last. But I remain nothing but loving in my design. All that is left is that you kill me, or—

The void was gone.

They stood in the castle’s chapel. With the certainty of a dream, they knew that the boy was returned. Their only witness as he clung and wept over his mother’s coffin. She had been willed into paralysis by her Master, moving only to maim herself in the box or to gorge herself. Her meals’ dried carrion lay piled and broken around the coffin. The infants’ heads lined in rows while the tiny hearts were left to shrivel.

‘Please, Papa, you have to, please…’

And Papa was, of course. The woman’s Master had slipped the noose of himself through her at last, and now her orders were his orders, and the order was being carried smilingly out by their dear Jonathan. Pardon, his dear Jonathan. The picture of bliss despite his running eyes. Under his chin, the brooch shined. On his knuckle, the gold band had been replaced with a matching stone and clutching dragon. His vows, leaked through the permanent stamp of his grin:

‘I will never look at her again. I will never respond to any word from her. I will speak of her only as if she were dead. And I will love you as you are owed. I will be yours alone. Always. This I will do, or she shall never leave the box or know a moment without pain again. Te iubesc, balaurul meu.’

‘Te iubesc, draga mea.’

And then they were together, in the snug gloom of the great coffin that had been built and delivered in secret months before, undetected in the same chamber as the kukri. Two Grooms lay within it, one joyous and one merely smiling as he wept a stain into his Master’s breast and eternity finally began.

This is how our game ends and the next begins, draga mea. There are consequences to becoming what a monster loves, by accident or intention. He crushed Jonathan to him in their box, hissing. You stole our son. You stole my heart. You stole yourself. I will have all back in time. And you will never slip free again.

 For just a moment, he felt it. Fear breaking through Jonathan’s miasma of shocked anger and distaste. But it was not the whole of him. Horribly, cruelly, crawling up and out from the center of his friend, was that unbroken condolence.

Again. I am sorry, Dracula. This will not come to pass. And even in the dreams where you paint this future as reality, you will still have my sympathy in this single thing. Your love is only a chain. Never an embrace. Only a noose, not a held hand. Our son is perhaps the first and only soul to love you without coercion, and he does so only because we spent his life hiding the worst of you from him. You will shatter that illusion if you think to steal him back. And then what will be left? Only this?

Jonathan’s hand was on his cheek, sweeping away something damp.

I had thought your pretenses only another knife to twist in us. But the performance was for you as well, wasn’t it? It was as close as you could get.

Jonathan was crushed again. Tighter, closer. Enough to snap an ordinary man in half. The arms, illusory though they were, trembled.

 Do not dwell like this. You have your conquest to think of, don’t you? Your march on the Living? Return to that, if it helps. You are four centuries deep in this existence. Twenty years should be nothing to scrape aside. We were a distraction, all of us. Let us go. Let us be enemies. It will hurt less.

There was no need for breath here. No more than there had been a need for breath for anything but speech since the day he ceased to live as a man. Despite this, he buried his face in Jonathan’s neck, his mouth opened to bite, but releasing only a choked and shaking sound. It was followed by more. Then:

I will—I will conquer. I will slaughter. I will rule. But I will not be alone. If I must have you all on tethers, so it will have to be. You should not have made me happy, draga mea.

There was no true contact in the mindscape. No touch, no sense. He shivered just the same as Jonathan’s arms slipped around him.

I promise to make you very unhappy once we cross paths in person. My hate is rivaled only by my Love’s and her endings for you are as imaginative or worse than my own. In the interim, I shall do my best to gain your hate, Count. But that shall be another time.

There was a change. A softening in the phantasmagoria of the dark as the characters in it began to lose their edges. He grasped at Jonathan all the tighter.

I have not dismissed you. It is a long way to England yet. I hope the woman is satisfied with riding the rest of the way with you in a coma.

The thoughts leered, but the intent begged. It wound around Jonathan in a serpent’s coils, holding, clutching, trapping—

Let me go, Count.

No.

Tighter and tighter on the disintegrating form, becoming a cage, a coffin, a clutching fist, a dragon winding around and around its treasure, no no no, mine mine mine—

Before it’s too late.

No!

Within the mind and above the Persephone, thunder cracked and lightning struck. A great, blinding, devastating bolt. It had her voice and a single message to share.

MINE.

And with that, he was back in the cargo hold. The sailor’s heart had been crushed to pulp in his hands. His fingers and eyes ran with the same scarlet runnels. Above deck, he felt the riot of a storm that was not his battering the ship. He cursed and threw himself out to it, wrestling until dawn to hammer the weather smooth again.

In another patch of water, under the same voyeur moon, the Aurora cruised on under a starlit sky. A girl and her young man stood on the deck, her hand over his as he gripped the railing so hard it bent to the shape of his fingers. The young man’s eyes snapped open, lungs jerkily refilling with a gasp they’d not yet learned was reflex more than need.

 Jonathan?

“I’m fine. …How long was that?”

Less than two minutes.

“It felt longer.”

It’s like that. Even when conscious, it will try to drag things into dreaming. Ever a showman.

“Did you trace him? Do you know which ship?”

Yes. The Persephone. Our ports won’t be far apart.

Her smile curved, red as rose petals, thorn-sharp.

And I believe their vessel has hit some stormy weather just now. Though it is endeavoring to ease the worst of it.

“Do you need..?”

No, Darling. I only press when I feel it slacking. It will be wrung out by the time it reaches shore. I will merely be peckish. 

Her smile dimmed a shade as she searched her husband’s face.

Are you certain you’re alright?

“I am, Mina. Even if I weren’t, we could not risk it being you. Not while he’s still scrabbling to take your reins again.”

It showed you, didn’t it?

“Showed what?” Mina looked at him. Read him. Turned over the stone that her husband had freshly laid over the revelations bled out into his mind. “Ah. That.”

That. Was this what hurt you in there?

“I am not—,” Her hand went to his cheek. A rust-colored drop was swept away. “Oh. I thought I felt lightheaded.”

Do not distract. Was learning it what hurt you?

“It did not hurt. Only shamed me, somewhat. It casts a different light on his pending demise.”

A slaying made into euthanasia?

“…That is certainly a word for it.”

There are few others to choose from. Extermination. Justice. Recompense. Safety. But, in its thinnest terms, yes, euthanasia. I would not be surprised if he welcomed it in the end. I think I would.

His hand seized around hers.

“Why?”

She smiled back. The ghost of the living girl made its edges soft.

You would not understand. You do not know what it is to love and be loved by you, Jonathan. To imagine the latter was a lie? Worse, a lie you assumed was known by the one who loved you? I do not know if I could suffer it. More, you remain Love himself. Coveted and giving and, even for the Thing we hunt, pitying. For you champion the feeling in its own right, even as you did not guess that you were more to the Thing than a trophy.

They were silent for a time. Feeling the creep of dawn coming for the horizon. Jonathan looked to her again. Searching.

“Mina. Did you know?”

The possibility occurred to me. It did not mourn the Weird Sisters for more than a year, despite their time with it. Lucy it was bitter for losing only because she was the first conquest of a new land, slain before she could be enjoyed. I, the supposed new companion, was relegated within months to an afterthought. No more or less than a necessary evil in its mind—the hostage there to keep you there. With it. And it speaks volumes that it kept even a fraction of its word to you at all.

It could have taken you at any time, Jonathan. Pounced and bit and fed and turned, all with no one to stop it. But it didn’t. Not merely to see you suffer through the performance as you had before, but because it wanted to hide in the fact that you had free will. That you were immune to all but the most superficial pulls of the mesmer rather than the permanent leash upon my mind. It wanted you free and human and in its company, ‘of your own choosing.’ Or near enough. I can think of no reason for it beyond the Thing hoping for the act to become real.

“I cannot tell if that’s a mark of insanity or sadness.”

Perhaps both. And you do not have to cover yourself in barbs here, my Love. There are things we do not wish on enemies, even if they are deserved. That being said—,

“My plans have not changed, Darling.” He leaned his face into her palm, smiling. “We will dance on his ashes for what he’s done. For what he means to do.”

When we finish, we can pour what’s left of him upon a garden of wild roses. Perhaps it will carry some peace after him.

The rest of their conversation was not in words. It carried on even as they pressed their lips into the perfect mold of each other’s, the tableau of them spied only by another couple who thought they must be their elders as they went along to their own room.

“Now when was the last time you kissed me like that?”

“Oh, hush. I’m sure it was only yesterday I did. Sometime after the banquet, wasn’t it?”

“Mm.”

“And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing for our age, dear. These young people are growing ever brasher out in the open.”

“Yes, in public, on a boat. Most brazen. Lord knows there’s scads of witnesses…”

Daybreak came and the storm departed with it. The one in the sky, at least.

Down below, in the dark, in the dirt inside a box, a smaller tempest raged. Tried to rage. Tried to hold to thunder and lightning and hail. But the death-sleep melted it down into its truer shape, freed from the whipping of desperation in the guise of anger. The grave earth became rosy mud as new tears rolled. Between this and the toll of keeping back the storm, even nursing from the crushed heart had barely helped in stalling the change. Black hair had turned to iron, iron to ancient white.

Dreaming dragged him down and away from his own will. Through the foam of futures yet unborn, through the penalties and precautions yet to be inflicted, all the way to a moonlit window in the library. His friend stood before him. Alive and undead. Wasted and hale. Blue-eyed and red. Cold lips smiling and pressing into his. Joy frozen in place.

In the world outside his mind, the cadaver of an old man moved just enough in his bed of soil to hold the brooch tighter. Enough so that the clasp split his skin and poured ichor over the golden dragon and its treasure. He did not feel it.

But wept just the same. 

#this AU has wrung four novellas out of me #I pray this is the last or my hands will be reduced to nubs #anyway #for maximum ambience imagine Dracula rocking back and forth in his dirt box listening to Annie Lennox's “Love Song for a Vampire” #but this time with the (grudgingly) appropriate Harker swapped in #he's about there #blood of my blood #dracula #dracula bad ending au #jonathan harker #mina harker #quincey harker #my writing

[luhafraser]

Outlander: Blood of my Blood

Remember when DG had no interest in Claire's parents...

Everything to keep this fandom here!

😜🤣

#outlander #blood of my blood #outlander fandom

[thegoatsongs]

(Following the bad ending, Mina waking up as a vampire in one of the tombs of Castle Dracula after Jonathan carries her body there)

-

The moment she opened her eyes, her whole being was Hunger.

Once the smell that she knew was blood came from the breathing, black-clad body lying with her in a tomb as cold as she, a wild desire came upon her, and she was now pinning it under relentless arms.

She was instinct, bare fangs itching to tear that bag of flesh and bone underneath her apart.

The scent of anything besides blood was a dark blur, yet she was driven to seek fear too. She grabbed the fabric covering the pumping veins beneath and met the eyes; hollow, gleaming in the moonlight.

Why was this man in mourning garments not trembling underneath her adamantine, heartless cruelty? Why was he smiling so sadly up to her?

Why was this invading familiarity hurting?

"Wilhelmina..."

The word deafened the thumping of the arteries in the hand reaching out to her snarling face.

The hand (no, her Darling's hand) cupping her face was cold and tender on her cheek.

A wetness trailed down her cheeks and she saw red liquid drip on his clothes underneath her, staining them.

His thumb simply wiped one of her tears away, and she was again in that sickbed that became their wedding bed, on top of him, as he was looking up at her with these same adoring eyes.

The remnant of his love was supposed to have passed into hate and loathing. Her killing to be done by his hand, with savage delight.

My husband, she tried to assert, but the pain in her wounded throat cut like a bonesaw, but he must have heard it anyway because my wife was his staunch reply.

Her husband bent his head to the hand gripping his collar and kissed the ring in reverence.

She saw through his eyes how the final act had played out: Alone he returned to his old Hell, carrying his other half in his arms for this final visit, and thus he abandoned his place among the stars of Heaven. She understood then where the smell of blood on him had come from, that the snow outside was as stained as her forehead.

But the past was dead like noble old friends with stakes and saws, and there was only the now. No regrets arising from the grave.

In the haze of her mind, she felt a touch of triumph. Her sire's demand for her to devour her man against his will had been overpowered. Could King Saul force his kin to mangle the Beloved intertwined with his soul? Foolish to even conceive. She knew the Vampire would shroud her mind again, but she would not let It take their renewed union and its sanctity away from them.

She lifted her clasping hand away and waited. Wordlessly, her husband presented his dear throat to her.

His caress was tender in her long hair as she sank her teeth, and his sigh filled their desolate chamber. Love surged through her veins, and she was enveloped in warmth.

#dracula #jonathan harker #mina harker #jonmina #holiest love #blood of my blood #dracula au #dracula daily #dracula fic

[chicalepidoptera]

Day 10 of @vampirefest 's Bloody Valentine: Blood of my blood

#interview with the vampire #bloody valentine #day 10 #blood of my blood #armand #armand marius #marius de romanus #assad zaman #justin kirk #🤷‍♀️🤡🤷‍♀️🤡🤷‍♀️🤡 #🕯🕯🕯

[bluecatwriter]

This idea would not leave my head, so I drew it. Blood-of-My-Blood-AU Dracula seeing what Jonathan and Mina think of his new t-shirt (based on @ibrithir-was-here's character design)

#i promise i will get to the actual requested drawing prompts at some point #but you can see why this would not leave my brain until i drew it #blood of my blood #count dracula #mina harker #jonathan harker #my art #my comics #undescribed

[outlander-online]

#Outlander #Blood of My Blood

[brian-in-finance]

Instagram

Remember… there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing, so get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little. — Billy Connolly

#Tait rhymes with hat #Good times #Outlander #Blood of my Blood #BOMB #BTS #Instagram

[chickenscratchstudios]

I felt compelled to draw the characters from @ibrithir-was-here and Co.'s Blood of my Blood Dracula AU. (Baller AU guys, keep it up)

Tried to stick with Ibrithir's design, but I mayyy have let elements of my own designs slip in there.

(Also, WHY do all of the characters except one have last names starting with 'H' I didn't realize this until I had labeled all them)

#older men are hard to draw #but hey what else is new #i'm oscillating between loving this and hating this #so i'm posting it before i change my mind #dracula #jonathan harker #mina harker #mina murray #quincey harker #arthur holmwood #lu holmwood #jack seward #blood of my blood #dracula bad ending

[thethirdromana]

Can nobility and title be inherited by adoptive heirs who lack the appropriate blood for it? That is, will Arthur's Lordship pass through Lu to whatever male heirs she might produce, despite the fact that she was born a commoner?

Afraid not - she could inherit his money, but she (and any children) would usually need to be blood relatives to get the title.

#blood of my blood

[sassenach77yle]

Repost from @outlander_starz

It's all coming full circle!

Join us in welcoming Rory Alexander, Sam Retford, Séamus McLean Ross and Conor MacNeill, who join Outlander: Blood of My Blood as the younger versions of some of our Outlander fan favorites.

#outlander #blood of my blood

[ibrithir-was-here]

Blood of My Blood: “What Dreams May Come” Part 4

And done! Thanks for your patience!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

#my art #blood of my blood #dracula fanfiction #quincey harker #mina harker #jonathan harker #count dracula #dracula #dracula daily #what the heck lets reach some new people #dracula spoilers #i suppose

[see-arcane]

Blood of My Blood: Something to Cry About

Consider this a spinoff of a spinoff. Based on @ibrithir-was-here's Blood of My Blood and directly jumping off of @bluecatwriter's chapter, Overindulgence.

In which the Master of the castle runs into an unexpected concern regarding his dear vassal and being the monster in the picture is not quite as fun as he recalls.

(Warnings for suicidal ideation and domestic abuse.)

His eyes were shut, but he wasn’t sleeping.

It was not the first time his friend had greeted him so. Back in that first private summer there had been something of a game made from it. Whenever his friend was caught supine in bed or on a couch without the will to drag himself to consciousness and perform for his Master, the latter would sometimes test the limits of the act. A hand on his throat. Another under the shirt and over the drumming heart. That had been back when only one of them carried a chill.

What a distant thing that season was now. The dark-haired youth had only been able to hide his expression because fatigue still left its miserable countenance stamped on him. He had not been able to fully hide his shudders then; not when the hands began to move. Now here was his friend just shy of the full metamorphosis, human by the thinnest wisp of definition, a marble statue in his bed.

Stained marble. He was so drained as to nearly match the silver-white corona of hair on the pillow. There were the usual shadows under the eyes and the mottling spots that showed where his family nursed at throat and wrist. But the palette broke anew along one side. Even if it was to allow space for the bandages.

Bandages that had started white but now flared in spots of scarlet. Rings, rather.

Bites.

Ah, he had indulged deeply. 

Enough to sand the years away to those earliest days when he himself had been a youth peddling soul and sacrifices away beneath the Mountain. Amusing as it was, and infinitely worth the woman’s face upon seeing the full claim of her husband in action, he did catch himself counting the hours until this whipcord stage would fade out of him. It would be a pain in and of itself for bone and beard and build to all even out again into full manhood. Just having his own voice in his ears would be a relief in itself. Unquestioned as his rule was, even he could not play deaf to the absurdity of the lord of the castle sounding a year short of his first shave.

He could almost fool himself into thinking dear Jonathan was playing ignorant because he did not recognize his Master’s voice. Almost.

“She wrapped it poorly,” he hummed. He sat at the faux dreamer’s hip. “The stain should not be visible.”

Jonathan’s eyes stayed shut. His breathing did not change, thin as it was. Perhaps the woman was in his head, whispering behind his back. But a simple check showed otherwise.

Mother and child were both out from underfoot for the moment, amusing themselves with animals. The boy maintained the wolves as his most cherished creatures, as was right, but the other beasts in the dark had hooked his eye as well. Bat and rat, owl and fox. The latter had scared him once, hearing it scream for the first time—a human shriek from an inhuman throat. The woman was out with another of her husband’s doting gifts, a book of fauna with all the airy definitions and dissections that mortal science had seen fit to cage the local range of species in. It was something to keep them busy and another little facet to add to the boy’s knowledge.

The woman felt him prying and a reflexive response tried to leap back at him. He shut her out before she could know where he was. Not that it would matter. He could revoke her meager privilege with his friend as he liked. But this was not for others to intrude on. Supposing Jonathan dropped his act sometime this decade.

“Oh, dear. I had not realized you were so depleted. Perhaps I should fetch some donors from the village and have them pipe their veins into yours. It worked so artfully for other patients. Or,” he made a show of slitting open a wrist to let the dark vein ooze, knowing the gesture was sensed even behind closed eyes, “since you are so set on the repose of death, we could go ahead and rescind all the playacting and reach denouement early. It would surely save much in time and tears and—,”

Jonathan’s eyes were open. Not looking at him. The pale hands remained folded atop the sheets. One was limp. The other was lax only from the effort to avoid becoming a fist.

“There you are. Ah, and there is the opportunity gone.”

His wrist was already healed. Sealed shut almost the instant it was cut. Even two nights on, he was swollen with his friend’s draught. He had to admire the vitality required for such a task. Poor Lucy would have wilted at the first two bites, with or without her impotent ring of suitors dumping their blood into her to drag out the inevitable. In truth, he had half-hoped that the sweet diversion of the Lesson would end with Jonathan’s heart stopping altogether. The feeding of blood was only a requirement if the transformation was intended to be a slower process, as it had been meted out to the woman.

Had Jonathan died, he would be undead within the same night. Perhaps even the same hour. Being siphoned for almost half a decade by three vampires would leave no room for the process to drag its heels. What a treat it might have been to see the woman realize what she’d done. All her beloved’s sacrifice thrown away because she’d grasped beyond what was hers. And better still to have the weight of the farce finally shrugged from his shoulders as it was ripped from Jonathan’s. The boy would have cheered, he knew, to see his Papa finally in their ranks completely.

And then would come their first hunt…

But he was woolgathering. And, in the fashion of a youth, chasing mere impulse when he knew the fruits were not yet ripe. Let the game play out, young man. He would have his way by the end, do not throw the foreplay away now.

Jonathan still did not look at him.

“You seem unable to turn your head, my friend. Did I truly spend so long with your neck? Memory does not lie and I can see myself that the shoulder received far more attention.”

Jonathan did turn his head—to face the wall. The ghost-light eyes hovered on the calendar, brow furrowed in reading the weeks. His lips moved in silent muttering.

A clawed finger reached out, hooking the pallid chin until Jonathan turned to him. There was a genuine wince as he did so. He had bitten deep and not with the usual set of teeth. He’d called upon the Wolf’s rows to be sure of strength and for the demonstration made before his greedy audience. But even with the heady extra helping of blood, even with the Lesson successfully taught, there was no sidestepping the fact of the method’s sloppiness. Intentional in the moment, yes, but…

But what? He will heal. And if he doesn’t, he will die and do better than heal. Call it a Lesson for him too. Such is the lot of one who clings to the role of livestock. Really, it is probably a boon to his penitent soul. A belated lashing for what he still considers his sins. 

“Does it hurt?” he asked aloud.

Jonathan did not answer. Only stared at him. There was no fear there, nor even that constant element of melancholy. There was only a queer flatness. It might nearly be mistaken for the same glaze of placidity the woman tried to hide her rages with. But no, it was not even anger. What, then?

“Have you lost the use of your tongue as well?” The question came with a flicker of mesmer. It hooked the root of Jonathan’s tongue and yanked.

“No,” Jonathan offered blandly. And no more than that. As if there were truly no other words he had to spare for his Master.

“I had not realized you stored your vocabulary in your arteries.”

“Even if it were otherwise, I imagine I’d have little to say worth sharing.”

My friend, is this you sulking? It has been years!

Years since that last pregnant silence as he showed Mr. Harker the wolves at the door. Since he watched the young man sit and stew and struggle against tears before ascending wordlessly to his room. What a raw little thing he’d been then.

But the thing staring back at him was not raw. It was something leaden and tired and…bored? Was that it? Something near to that, perhaps, but sharper.

“Now, there is no need to pout. You know I have never ceased to cherish our little talks. But I do see you are making do with only water and bread. Dear Mina has left you like a lame pet up here.” In reality the water was fresh and the bread, baked the day before, was joined by what non-perishable goods the woman had scrounged by way of a breakfast. Even the boy had left him with what he considered a treasure by way of a bowl brimming with wild berries he’d picked himself around the castle. All this had been sampled, if thinly. “Yours is the only tongue here left to appreciate a vintage in its original state rather than filtered through a vein. Shall you have a claret or something stronger?”

“Neither. Thank you.”

Flat as a skipping stone. He did not even reach for the old half-joking insistence that he did not dare risk an overindulgence of wine or liquor as, quote, ‘If I drank every time I felt I needed it, I would be an alcoholic within a week.’ Instead, the stare. Still ongoing. Seeming to realize this, Jonathan made himself blink before trying to turn his head away. Back to the calendar.

His Master locked a full hand around his jaw and twisted him back. Another wince.

No fear. No sorrow. No anything. Just that blunt void of acknowledgment. That unknown thing hovering between ire and lethargy.

“Might I ask what it is that so fascinates you about the date? It must be some worthy holiday to outweigh your Master’s presence.”

“Not a holiday,” Jonathan allowed. “Though I suppose I should mark down the evening three nights prior as a milestone. Something to keep on record.” Three nights prior. When the Lesson was taught. “Your first bout of physical abuse on me. I had thought you couldn’t hold out beyond two years. Most of you don’t even make it past the first two months. Yet you are patient, so I figured there would be an insulation period.” 

It was his turn to stare back. Jonathan waited as he did, seeming oddly like he was itching for a pocket watch to tally how many minutes he was wasting breath on this exchange. His Master’s hand moved from the pale chin to the bandaged shoulder.

“Most of who?”

The hand squeezed. Jonathan grimaced, but didn’t blink.

“The demographic of men I had hoped you were better than. There was evidence enough to suggest it. At least a ratio of odds that favored something less predictable. Despite what proofs there are to the contrary, you are not a violent man, Sir. Not when you can happily do worse than violence. Certainly not when the prelude to it provides better results and entertainment. Why else would you take such care to drag out a season of captivity or play your games on the Demeter? Why feed on a victim by drops rather than ravage outright but for the joy of watching their comprehension of the inevitable? The only instances in which you resort to straight aggression are when you want something over with.

“A mother eaten by wolves. Sacks of children thrown like scraps. Your own aide waiting ashore, slaughtered and stuffed in a stone wall to muddy your trail. Quick, quick, quick. Violence bores you in the same way doing linens bores a laundress. If it must be done, fine, let it be over with—but it is no more or less than something to scrape from the schedule. At a guess, that night’s violence was for Mina’s sake. I had not changed anything in my routine. Quincey had done no ill. Mina, I suspect…what? Blinked incorrectly? Asked to see me for a heartbeat beyond the scheduled feeding? Dared to request a moment of make-believe where you do not own us all, as if the very act of imagination equated a challenge to you?

“But that is all beside the point. You have stepped fully into the cliché. And I had accounted for that. The first round tallied. Fine. The issue comes with the timing. Your insistence on who else ought to be in the audience.” In his lap, one hand finally lost the fight and hardened into a fist. The other, attached to the bitten arm, only twitched. “Mina was the point of the show. But our son? Was he part of the Lesson too? Did you order him to stay as yet another hoop for her to jump through, to make her act and lie beyond all extremes? No, I should not ask. Of course he was.”

The ghost-light eyes burned.

“This, when he loves you as his Father. When the entire point of all this is giving him a life he can trust in. You saw him smile for you in this room. He held you and beamed and heard your stories. And then what? What did he ask before you left him in his coffin?”

The woman had not been in his mind at the time to overhear. She could not know. She could not have told her husband what the boy asked.

The boy, his smile fading, his eyes sunset-bright and wondering, blankets fidgeting in his hands.

‘Are you sure Papa is alright? He looked really tired…’     

His Father had told him yes, of course, but Papa had been so enchanting that night that Father had not been able to help himself. Not to worry, his Mum would take care of him as she always did. All’s well, diavol. And the boy had tried to smile. Tried to believe him.

And couldn’t.

“He turns five next year. Five. And you are already blasting holes in the foundation of his faith in you. In what we have been building out of debris to produce a happy reality for him, in which his parents are not monsters.” Now a note of true venom slipped through his voice, the hollow-burning eyes narrowed to cold angles, and at last the feeling was recognized for what it was, and it was... “In which he does not have to be yet another actor for your benefit.”

…Disappointment.

Cold and grey and coarse with recognition. With experience.

“All of that being said, Sir, if you feel you must make another show of the obvious,” the fist uncurled to gesture at the mauled shoulder, “I ask that you reserve it strictly for the adults.” Finally the lambent gaze skidded away, looking not at Master or calendar, but at his still-resting hand on the covers. The fingers still hadn’t curled further than halfway to his palm. “Perhaps I’ll blame it on a doorknob next time.” Then, as if the entire topic were dismissed, he reached across to the nightstand. A notebook sat beside the dish of food. Not another diary, but a weighty planner. Jonathan folded it open to the latest page. The fountain pen’s cap was worked off with some difficulty by wedging it between the fingers of the lax hand. “Most of the itinerary was cleared a week ahead. The triplicates will take a little longer than I’d hoped, but they should still be ready within the month.” The nib poised on the page. “Was there anything else that needed attention, Sir?”

Besides you? said the ghost-light eyes.

His Master regarded him for a moment. Another. A third. As he regarded him, a clawed hand floated out and pinched the book out of Jonathan’s hold. The book flew like a discus into the furthest wall. Outside, a summer storm grumbled. He felt a distant twitch of his senses as the woman and the boy both prickled with worry. Storms were never just storms around the castle.

Jonathan capped the pen and waited. Even devoid of a psychic voice, his eyes spoke with an articulation so clear he might have talked aloud:

Go on. The moment fits the criteria. We are our only witnesses. Fetch a switch off a tree or a broken bottle while you’re at it. Really round out the scene.  

“I came here,” his Master grated with rigid courtesy, “to offer some manner of respite. Perhaps even a token of reward for so expertly assisting in a much-needed Lesson. But I see I was mistaken. If I had known you were in such an ungrateful state, I would have waited. As it stands, it appears you need educating of your own. Poor Mina, she will be so disappointed to learn that her dearly-bought visits are now revoked.” He feigned his own interest in the calendar. Then at the vast window that looked out on the plummeting height of the tower and the half-moon squinting through the thunderhead’s cracks. “Our son’s as well, I think. He really is so spoiled in his free time. Bothering his poor beset Papa night and day when he has so much to do…

“Ah, but then, perhaps this is remiss of me too. I am no child despite my current face. I have run the entirety of this castle and its domain singlehandedly for centuries, all without any novice solicitors to flutter around my office. Likewise for the tending of the castle itself. Really, my friend, what reason is there for you to be so abused as to leave this room at all? To be bothered by maintaining the performance for mother and child? Such a labor, such a trial.

“Well, no more of it! You can stay here, they can stay without, and whenever it comes time to feed, you may empty your veins into a cup. Far tidier that way, and so much closer to the human façade besides! You do want the boy to learn how to pantomime humanity in full, yes? Of course you do. So that is how it shall be from here out. You in your tower, they in the crypt, and I shall endeavor to play go-between for all to the best of my ability. How does that suit you?”

He bared his teeth to the gums with his grin. Waiting for the tears. For the shattering of the dull mask. For the bribe, the plea, the grovel. He did all quite beautifully when the occasion called for it over the years. His wife did well enough, especially for one grappling with the impulse-weight of the Vampire, but Jonathan had it down to an artform. Indeed, he saw the first shine of dew come over the brilliant white-blue of the eyes, the quirk and twitch of his face into a grimace—

No. No, not a grimace.

A rictus.

The corners flinched up before Jonathan could hide it behind his hand. By then it was too late. Assuming the man could’ve stopped himself. A noise that tried to be a sob leapt through his teeth. It came out as a laugh. As did all the sounds that followed. A long hideous string of giggles boiling over into a cackle that brought rivers of tears to his shining eyes. It was not a man’s sound, but the mock-laughter of hyenas, the baying racket of jackals.

Unbidden, he leaned an inch away from his friend. Several inches. The movement snapped Jonathan’s eyes back to him, wide and wild and blazing and for one lunatic instant they seemed to brand the afterimage of the house in Piccadilly on the room, that surreal moment in which he first saw the uncanny Thing that wore his dear friend’s skin; a Thing that could and would kill him with his steel or his own hands. Even in a crowded street.

But that moment passed—long, long ago now, back before the insurance of the woman and her collared will were his precious cudgel—and Jonathan himself seemed wholly oblivious to the recollection. In his face there was only a madness of such profound despair and scorn that the effect dizzied.

“You do not understand. You really truly don’t, do you?” The words were cracked and brittle, barely holding an intelligible shape. “You talk of tokens and punishments. As if I have ever dared to hope, to even think of wanting anything for myself, since that night in October. As if I have not already imagined and lived, expected and met every possible nightmare that God could throw in my path and hers. I lived the first twenty years of a pointless joke of a life already under every bootheel the civilized human world had to offer, as did she. We grasped at crumbs of joy, of hope, of respite from the reality of our lots. This we could do because we had each other and our faith. Faith that for all the ills that humanity dealt out with the good, there was at least a chance for us. There was, we prayed, something better waiting on the other end of life. If we were good. If we did good.     

“But then you had to prove it all wrong. To burst the lie. Not that God is not real. He so very clearly is. But you—all that you are, all that you’ve done, all you will continue to do without so much as a slap on the wrist from the divine Powers that Be—proved that He is fickle. That His love and protection is wholly conditional. That someone as good, as pure, as blisteringly virtuous as Mina could be burned by the Son for another’s sin, abandoned and denied like a used rag for the crime of someone else’s violation. All to have the ransom of her humanity dangled over our heads to spur a handful of strangers onto the hunt after…what? Four centuries’ worth of you owning these mountains and its people, all of them dutifully cowering and dying behind their own half-helpful crucifixes?

“But oh no! Too late! Complications abound! The mother is with child and it does not matter to the good men who swore to slaughter her! And God must have declared them good men, for they did so good with Lucy. Lucy, who has surely gone to Heaven with her slaying…or not. What proof is there? What guarantee is there that anyone with your poison in them can hope for salvation, alive or dead? They saw her corpse and nothing else. They choked on hope and called it evidence that this was the right thing to do. God’s will be done.

“I have already murdered to go against His will. I slew those good men to keep them from making an Isaac and a slaughtered lamb of my Loves. I damned myself then as I had been preparing to damn myself since the moment I woke to her screams and your work. Do you understand?”

Despite the sultry rainstorm air trying to bleed in through the window, the room was cold. Somehow it had grown outright frigid around the bed and the Thing hunching out of his sheets.

“I have nothing. Nothing at all but purpose. Nothing I would dare to want, knowing it will be lost. Nothing I have left to lose, having ceased to believe the lie that I have any potential for joy beyond a reflection of my Loves’ peace. Nothing resembling anything so laughable as respite on any level. I am reduced to a talking trough for the sake of a family who deserves worlds beyond the stain you and I would leave on them without supreme effort. So, go ahead. Play jailor. Play glutton. Play king of the castle and lord above all and whatever else you stopped being able to play with your last captive audience once they were worn down to cackling husks that only had room in themselves for hunger and jeering, knowing that you had no more to threaten them with after taking all that they had.

“In fact? Here. Since I still have some feeling in my left hand. Wouldn’t want you giving me a holiday from work without due reason, and it shall save you the trouble of inventing an excuse to maim the rest.”

As he spoke, Jonathan tore at the bandages. They fell away in grisly ribbons to reveal a far grimmer map of injury than expected. It was worse still when Jonathan twisted to show his back. Bites and bruises patterned him like gruesome puzzle pieces. There were stitches closing two flaps of skin together. In one portion there were small chunks of flesh entirely gone where the teeth had torn them loose.

“Go on. Get on with it. Or would it be better for you if I threw in a scream and a plea to top things off? Pick a script, Sir, let me know.”

Jonathan kept his back to his Master. His Master only stared. Then, with a hand laid gentle as a feather on the ruined shoulder:

“I believe you were right at the start. You do have little to say worth sharing.”

The hand traced the first of the marks. A broad bite clamped along the carotid; the kind that could have torn the entire throat out, Adam’s apple and all. If its maker were not cautious. It was only the ensuing that had been ragged, tearing at muscle more than vein. To make a necessary a point.

As if his friend cared. As if he should care whether his friend cared.

His thumb brushed over a small crater where a canine had torn away so thickly that the flesh dimpled.

Jonathan waited for it to be joined by others like it.

Waited. Waited.

It was almost a full minute before he realized the light touch on him was no touch at all. He turned to see his Master was gone. If he’d had the energy to leave the bed, he might have gone to the door. His Master was on the other side, turning the key over in his hand. As he lingered, a bat summoned to the window. Beady borrowed eyes peered through the glass, waiting for Jonathan to rise, to go to the door and see if it was open.

Should he lock it as he rose? As he tried to turn the knob? Or did he skip the key entirely and simply hold the door shut to watch him scrabble one-handed at it?

The bat watched Jonathan hobble from the bed and to the chair of the writing desk. He dragged the chair to the window. Sat. Stared out through the glass at the moon.

His Master willed the clouds to cover it.

Jonathan stared still.

Still.

Still.

His good hand was the only part that moved. There was something white being fidgeted with. A stick of chalk.

It was only when he felt the woman and the boy heading for the tower that the key was pocketed unused and its owner drifted as a mist through another window. The bat watched as Jonathan pocketed his chalk and stood from his chair upon hearing the child’s chirruping voice echoing up the stairs. Papa-Papa-Papa-are-you-up? Papa hid the bandages and donned a robe before grabbing a book at random for his lap while his good hand pinched cold food from his plate. The boy bounded in, mother in tow, Papa, Papa, look-look-look. Jonathan looked dutifully at the new drawings he’d made, including one done from life of a red fox that let them get this close before running off. Jonathan was duly impressed. His weak hand was in his woman’s fingers, gently held, more gently curling and testing the limp knuckles.

Their Master did not linger long enough to know whether Jonathan would tell her of their visit now or later. It was moot. The scene cloyed.

The bat flew and the mist sank away.

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been in his women’s chambers. Even the sole woman left in the castle hardly bothered with them. Antique treasures were buried under the modern trappings he’d tossed their way in preparation for England. They would have been with him once he set the groundwork in London. Them and his good friend.

All dust now.

Like the dust now glazing so much of the old rooms. Jonathan had taken a Herculean task upon himself some years prior to try and chip at the disuse and damage of a room at a time between his usual work. The paperwork, the horses, the errands, the cautious playing of mouthpiece and shield between Master and subjects. Between all that, he set himself to the tidying of this hall or that chamber. It was as impressive as it was embarrassing to note whenever his Master passed by one of these rooms in a state of surprise. He’d half-forgotten most of them existed, let alone what they had looked like before the ennui set in. Even the tarnish on the fixtures and doorknobs was cleaned away.

‘Perhaps I’ll blame it on a doorknob next time.’

He curled his lip and shoved the thought away. Then shoved over a bookcase for good measure. Novels in half a dozen languages went tumbling alongside a few expensive baubles. Old gold bookends, glass statues, cut gems so large and hollowed they could hold a wealth of rings and bracelets. All to pair with the tailoring of the wardrobes. These stood at attention beside abandoned easels, instruments, and myriad other distractions. All things given to be taken away. Only as was merited, of course. Such lazy mincing things, his old Loves. Coaxing anything but bile or idleness from them was like convincing a snail to run.

And most of what was goaded had been—

‘You yourself never loved. You never loved!’

—not a fraction of what they had given at the start. Not even their beginnings had amounted to much after the consummation. Stolen or bartered or lured, his Loves had lapsed so quickly into backhanded camaraderie. They had made cats of themselves, knowing they were craved simply for the fact of their presence and it gave them as close to free reign as their Master would ever give. Not enemies, but pets. Pretty faces and musical laughter to populate the nights with more than his own echoes.

For there had been laughter. With him. At him. Sometimes he had even let them claw or snap at him just for the excuse of the punishment he would inflict after. Really, for the sake of something to actually do with them beyond their nightly sniping.

He left the chambers and frowned down the hall. Moonlight fell through the nearest southward chamber, the window clean for the first time in ages, the interior righted and swept. It held books he had read two centuries ago, an old chessboard he had lost a century before that, now with its polished crystal men standing at attention, fallen curtains beaten from their dust and hung anew, paintings and an elderly world map peppered with monsters reframed and set upon the walls. The latter had been drawn to his attention by Jonathan himself, smiling with the boy in his lap, mentioning idly that he had found a map of fascinating creatures he had no name for, might Father know them..?

Father had, of course. The boy had been enraptured for nights with his definitions, with the monsters proven wholly imaginary or simply animals or, he knew from experience, terribly real. Tales he had relayed giddily at the next family meal, his Papa wasted but smiling on between him and his mother who had already heard her dose of legendry down in the crypt. Holding his Loves with two good hands.

He knocked a dresser over as well.

What did he care? What did he possibly care whether his dear friend took some overdue recompense for his betrayal? For upending meticulous plans and striking a scar into his Master’s brow and daring to haggle for the chance to squat here, under his lenient aegis rather than order the woman to tear into him and their brat and bash her own skull to gruel? Really, his friend was lucky to have such a meager toll to pay.

Other than vassalage. Other than slaughtering in Love’s name over God’s and sending the hunting party’s scraps limping away. Other than complaining of his mangling only because it upset the child; because the child had to hide that he was upset, just like Mum and Papa hide from Father. Other than actively laying foundations for a second invasion of England once the boy is grown, selling himself further down the layers of Hell, for Love’s sake. Other than this, yes, most meager. Practically nothing. You are many things, old devil, but the least you can be is honest with yourself. Or are you not still preening to yourself even now at your bargain?

Your losses: A scratch on the head. A two-decade wait. A handful of women.

Your gains: Your mind. Your future no longer being a mere checklist. Your Harkers.

Your friend.

Draga ta.

He first bristled, then sighed. His mind was walled off. There was no spying. He could admit the obvious to himself.

Not now, not tomorrow, but eventually. No need to fret over it. Time is the sea that eats away all stone, however stubborn. He will break given ages enough. It took the weight of the Mountain and its Lessons, but you broke too. And you were better for it. This sour period will pass. They will all break and learn and be pieced into proper shape.

Obvious, obvious. Of course.

His feet took him to the southward room. Map, art, chess, books. One of many rooms with forgotten treasures. Converted and cleaned and left like little oases. For the boy, for the woman, for his Master.

And yet Jonathan’s own room remained bare.

There was a little bookcase, he knew. But was it used? Was there anything else in the man’s room but a bed, clothes, and a desk? Memory ticked back along his mind. All the visits made to drink or talk or, in his friend’s sleep, simply to watch. What was there to that room that was not already waiting for him when his Master first ordered him in?

Sometimes there were drawings or wild bouquets from the boy. Food from the woman whenever he worked into one of those stupors that made him forget his meals. No more than that. Almost five years under the castle’s roof, diving in and out of the place’s uncounted rooms, going to and from the towns or ordering from afar, and there was not a single thing within his personal four walls to suggest it. And was that not strange in itself? True, he might occasionally be locked inside the tower, but not as a constant.

If the point of giving something was to have it taken away, the reverse held true too. He did let his friend roam where he may more often than not. And his friend did make use of it and his limited access to his Master’s coffers.

For anyone other than himself.

Yes, well. He does have his chair and his window. If he has gone so long without need of more, so much the better. Far easier upkeep than some hangers-on you could mention.

The thought failed to raise a smile on him.

He gripped the bookcase before him—jammed end to end with hardcovers of multiple eras, not a volume out of place—and thought for several minutes of tipping it over. Perhaps throwing it into the courtyard. Instead, he walked his fingers along until they landed on a history text. Written in the native tongue, it was one of the less maddeningly misinformed volumes of the late 17th century. Even the illustrations were passable. Jonathan must have overlooked it. He had been as adamant as their son once upon a time when it came to unearthing old histories. More, he was making more than fair leaps with his practice in the different languages of the mountains.

The book left the room with him.

The book stayed with him for the rest of the night and all of the day.

His eyes were sent elsewhere.

The bats slept, but the rats were busy. Or they would be, if he’d had need of more than one left loitering in the shade under Jonathan’s wardrobe. Animal-fear waned to animal-confusion waned to animal-annoyance as hours ticked by and its verminous little belly went empty as it continued to keep watch for its Master. Eventually it was swapped for another, this one peeking through a crack near the roof. Fear-confusion-annoyance under his thrall again. The same went for a third and fourth rat. Their eyes all showed the same tedium.

Jonathan Harker only ever allowed himself leisure when he had no choice. He only had no choice when he was recuperating from exsanguination. It turned out that his idea of this amounted to either laying in bed or shuffling to the chair to look out the window. Sometimes he even stood and gripped the windowsill. And once, just once, he undid the latch and swung the pane open.

Looking out. Looking down.

His good hand moved on the windowsill as he stared. The chalk had returned. Scratch, scratch, scratch it went, all the way along the stone, like a student writing out a long verse. It was the damned shorthand, of course. Yet it couldn’t be a message for the woman. Her mind was sunk deep in the torpor. Deep enough that her Master could filter into her unnoticed. There was hardly anything worth digging for beyond the usual infantile fantasies of his brutal demise and carrying her Loves off into the sunset. All he needed was at the surface.

Just a few notes. Just enough to make sense of the arcane little dashes.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, Jonathan wrote.

His Master angled the latest rat so he could read it all and filter it through the woman’s knowledge. The rat squealed and flinched away into its hole as its Master’s own shock prodded its speck of a mind.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT

FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

He twitched in his coffin, almost rising wholly from the anchor of the death-sleep.

But then Jonathan sighed and closed the pane. The chalk was erased. A return to the chair, a return to the stare. This time with new tears tracking down his cheeks. He didn’t move again until his stomach snarled. The doorknob was checked—unlocked—and he took himself away to eat. His Master’s borrowed eyes followed him all the way down, watching him cook and carve a fish without relish. Watched him try and fail to open the office door—locked—before idling down one of the in-progress halls. He worked in the dust and the decrepit furnishings for a few hours before marching back up to the tower. His hands were empty despite having handled an array of oddments and literature and art.

Up. Chair. Stare. Bed. Wait.

It is nothing but a recent spell. He has been here almost half a decade. He’s not spent his time only in his little labors and bloodletting. Who could? Perhaps he dwells on the pending retribution for his outburst. Waiting for the sword to fall.

And what of the threadbare room? What of the trips that brought home nothing but sustenance to let him feed his family, give or take a new treat for them bartered from what allowance was spared for him?

What of it?

He did not answer himself. Only waited until the woman made her exit to the tower. The boy was called to under the level of her psychic awareness.

Come here, child. I have an important task for you.

The boy was still in his coffin, reading in the heap of blankets and fairy books. He poked his head up over the rim with a look that balanced between worry and curiosity.

A Lesson?

Not at the moment. Unless you wish for a Lesson on why not to keep your Father waiting.

But the boy was already scurrying out of his box and up the steps of the tomb. He paused to look up in wonder at his Father.

“Your face is coming back.”

So it was. Finally. He felt the itch along his cheek and jaw which told him adolescence was waning finally back to his prime, just as the shiver of bone announced the return to full stature. There was a reason he rarely drank this deep.

“It is. The body prefers its natural shape even after an indulgence too far. It may only be another night before I am myself again. But that is too long a wait for this. Here.” He passed the history text down into the boy’s small hands. “Be mindful of not turning to the wrong page. There are sights inside that your poor parents would not approve of.”

An easy bait, that. The boy’s eyes glittered like a little Pandora’s. For an instant. But then a cherubic moue passed over him as he mouthed out the title. What little blood he had in him flamed up to his cheek.

“I don’t think I can read this yet, Father.” The boy admitted as much as though it were a crime.

“I would be stunned if you could, child. No, this is something to bring to your Papa. He is a fiend as much for history as the trudge of modernity and I know he is as eager as you to master all tongues in the mountains. This shall be a fine practice for him as your little tales are for you. Come, I shall walk you up.” He reached to tuck the boy under his arm in the usual way only for the child to shrivel under his hand. His gaze had flicked away from his Father in the same moment as his buzzing little mind tried clumsily to bury something. “Diavol. Is there something you wish to tell me?”

The boy started to shake his head, knew better, and simply shrank deeper into himself. His eyes were nailed firmly to the hardcover. He hugged the volume like a paltry shield.

“Child.”

The lips trembled and cracked at the same time those brilliant ruby eyes rolled up to him. Fear hovered there, but it was not quite of his Father. It was the kind of fear a Father was meant to dispel.

“Are you and Papa fighting?”

“Where would get such an idea?”

His hand reached out again. The boy still cringed, but did not shrink from him. They walked from the tomb and on toward the stairs.

“Since our last meal he hasn’t talked how he used to.”

“Oh, dear. He has gone mute?”

“No. No, he talks. Only he skips over things now. Things he used to bring up all on his own.”

“We are not playing a guessing game, diavol. Speak plainly.”

They had made it to the floors aboveground now. The boy paused mid-step to look up at his Father, his face turned pale as ivory in a window’s moonlight.

“He has not talked about you, Father. Before he brought you up at least once whenever we were together. Asking what you taught me last. Sometimes he’d bring things up like you do. Little hints and edges of things I would have to go to you or Mum to ask about. Papa was the one who brought up journalism—the power that records the world—and told me to ask Mum about it. And he told me that you knew how to find buried treasure on a magic night, that everyone else was too scared to try. And…” His narrow throat worked with a strain. “And he told stories about before me. About how you and Mum and him all came together.”

A crest of the innate fondness rose and fell in the boy’s look at that. He was ever a fiend for the romance of his parents’ history before they came to live in the castle. The romance as their Master had scripted it.

Yet the child’s cheer over it blew out like a candle.

“He won’t talk about you at all now.” The ruby stare flicked up at him. “Not since we ate.”

Not since you tore at Papa like a wolf with a rabbit, Father.

“It has been less than a week, child. For all that I am an occasional favored subject,” he failed to ignore how something twisted in his chest at that, “it is nonsense to expect he keep a checklist of things to speak of. He is recuperating and things will slip a hazy mind. But, to answer your question, no, Papa and I are not fighting.”

The boy did not look away. Even the expected smile could not follow the rules.

And since when does he have rules of acting to follow?

“Was there something else?”

The fear was back. Redoubled. Not the kind dispelled by a Father.

“Father, are you the one who’s been making him sit?”

They had been walking again. Halfway to the tower. Now it was Father’s turn to freeze. Even to gawk.

“What?” The boy shivered at his tone, half-hiding behind the history book. He winced as the white hand at his shoulder grew out its claws. A long breath was forced. The claws retracted an increment. Then, again, “What do you mean ‘making him sit,’ child?”

“Do you remember when I had the Lesson about trancing?”

The one in which mother, child, and Master sank their psychic teeth in dear Jonathan’s mind and almost tore it three ways down the center with their mesmeric quibbling? Yes, vaguely.

“I recall.”

Now the boy looked away entirely. Facing the tower’s direction. Dread came off him like a perfume.

“Do you remember the sharp thoughts in Papa’s head?”

“…I do.”

“Mum said before—,” another lurch of the little throat, almost choking, “before we all jumped in him, when the Lesson started, that she could make him do things. Things people aren’t supposed to do to themselves. Like walk in a fire or make him stay in one place for hours and hours, not doing anything. No sleep or food or anything that keeps Papa alive. She could do that. But she didn’t. She hasn’t been. Papa would know and he’d not be so mad at her that time when she used him in the Lesson.” The child rattled where he stood, intent on the shadows that led up to the tower. “He was sitting at the window before that night. Lots of nights. And days. The first couple times, I thought he was waiting for me. Back when I first learned to do climbing. I snuck up to his door to surprise him. Watching in the keyhole.

“And he sat and sat and sat there, looking out the window. Sometimes he stood up to look closer, sometimes he scratched something out on the stone and wiped it off. Then he’d go back to sitting. It was strange. I didn’t know what it was. But then the Lesson happened and I saw—I saw him—,”

He could not finish and did not need to. His Father remembered.

Vision of a daylit escape. Rising from the chair. No message written on the sill. Just the open pane, his feet on the ledge, and a tipping over into gravity’s arms. Down, down, down. Gone. Among other methods by rope or steel. But the fall came first and crispest to his flailing mind.

Before. He was thinking of it even before that night. Since the boy started climbing. At least two years. And that was just when it was noticed.

The boy was making noise at him again. Accusing.

“Are you the one doing it, Father?”

He would have been mad if it was Mum. We all know no one is allowed to be mad at you. Right, Father?

He struggled with a sudden urge to snatch the child up by his scruff and drag him the rest of the way up to the tower. To hurl him squealing into the room where the loving couple roosted, watching their faces drop slack with horror, and then—

And then..?

Then his mind fell into a red haze. A livid shapeless blank where something like release from the growing storm behind his temples would finally come.

“No, child. I am not responsible.” He stole his hand back with a twitch. “Go the rest of the way yourself. There is something I must see to first.” The boy peered up at him. Doubt in miniature. “Do I need to tell you twice?”

The boy fled. Not walked, not ran, not ambled. Fled. From him.

What of it, old devil? Is this not the proper way? Your adversaries and their spawn cringing and scrambling from you at every turn, quailing under your thumb? This is victory at its height. Is it not so?

He thought of three harpies who mocked and robbed and tittered as he piled their centuries up with gifts and weeping sweetmeat.

He thought of the spur of a delightfully infuriating woman and the admiration of an impossible child.

He thought of his friend, red-handed with the enemies slain for his wife and his Master, slipping silently into servitude and his tithes of blood and obedience, the quiet misery free of charge, Sir.

He thought of his friend, sweeping dust from his mind as blithely as he banished it from his forsaken rooms, varnishing and whetting his nights to an edge finer than a surrendered kukri.

He thought of his friend, who had begun as a mere pending addition to his colony and was now evolved into a thing worth bartering for, worth sheltering and hoarding and honing despite a betrayal paid triply in death and deeds on his Master’s behalf.

He thought of his friend, screaming in his jaws. Clawing his way towards a laugh, look, son, see, son, it’s alright. No, Mina, no, let it be, let him do it, please, Mina, don’t, Mina, do not risk yourself, our boy, please, please.

He thought of his friend, mauled for another’s Lesson, half-dead, streaked in gore and sweat and tears, patched together with inexpert hands. 

He thought of his friend in his desolate box of a room, staring out the window with a piece of chalk as the only barrier between life and death.

He thought of all these things and many more. He went on thinking them as he stalked away to his own room and went to work.

An hour had come and gone since he finished what was needed.

An hour and fifteen minutes since he masked himself from their senses and planted himself outside Jonathan’s door. He listened to the cadence of them as one might strain for snatches of birdsong. Only Jonathan and the boy were audible, but even the woman’s mental chatter carried a bristle on the air. His Harkers made such a warm sound all together.

The sound stopped as he turned the knob.

Three heads lifted like a trio of deer hearing a huntsman’s boot disturbing the grass.

They were huddled together on the bed, as always. The woman guarded her husband’s wounded side. The boy sat under his Papa’s good arm with two books open across their laps. Here was the history book and one of the fairy tale collections. They had been taking their turns reading a page apiece, son reading meticulously through a moment of fantasy in Hungarian while his Papa overdid a silly dull drone in the same tongue over the drudgery of an overpacked page for the child to groan at. Mum would cap the whole act by way of glancing at the page and then thinking a flash of knowledge into their heads. There, done. Thank you, Mum. Laughter abounded.

Until now.

“Goodness, such a hush. Do I interrupt?”

Jonathan, the immaculate actor, smiled and shook his head.

“Nothing that did not want interrupting. For some reason I’m failing to win any appreciation for the recital of 200-year-old politics across the Carpathians. Perhaps it’s my delivery.” The latter was directed half to his Master, half to the boy. He even cupped the child’s shoulder. Hinting. The boy offered him a smile in return.

And tried, “They didn’t make it like a story. Just a lot of, ‘This happened and then this and then this and then this.’ You and Mum could write it better.”

The woman offered a sing-song rebuttal of, Or you could, Dearest. It would make for very thorough writing practice.

The boy made a face of dismay and denial, pretending to take cover behind his book of fables. Cute. Precious, even. The whole charade was. Their Master felt his own grin strain to hold in place as he strolled to the bed. Anxiety thick enough to gag floated on the air.

“I leave such judgment to mother and son. For now, Papa and I must speak in private.” He set his gaze level with Jonathan’s. “There is something I require your assistance with, my friend.” His hand uncurled to take. “Come.”

“Of course,” from Jonathan. Not so much as a tremor. He turned to the woman as his good hand gave the boy a parting hug, then raised it to set in his Master’s palm. “I’m afraid you must take up the mantle of inflicting ancient territory disputes on him—,” But then found his good hand was trapped. By the boy. The woman tensed. Jonathan froze. “Sweetheart…”

“Papa, don’t go. Please don’t go.” The boy held fast around his Papa’s hand and half his arm, a feeble anchor whose attention jumped fitfully among his parents; not including his Father. “Mum, tell him not to. Please?” A hesitant thread of mesmer squirmed in his voice. His Father could have rolled his eyes. This tug-of-war again? Was the child dense? “He’s going to do it again.”

The room chilled.

Jonathan flicked a frantic gaze to his wife, blasting silent urgency through his thoughts. The woman fought an enormous urge of her own to spare her Master a glower before addressing her son:

Dearest. You know that night was only an accident. We are a long way from another meal besides.

Then, thrumming with the weight of a lie:

It’s alright.

But the boy would not swallow it this time. He was an amateur at playing pretend in the way of his parents. A child fed on blood and fairy tales full of monsters who lived in the house as much as without. The boy held onto his Papa and shook his head. Fear crashed up against sorrow and sorrow up against anger.

“It isn’t! You all keep saying it is, and it isn’t! Papa, he hurt you and he did it on purpose! He didn’t kiss you at all! It was just tearing and hurting and—,” a word stuck, choked, flew, “—and lying. He says you aren’t fighting, but you are, or he wouldn’t hurt you and make you sit and be sad and sharp all the time and…and…” His eyes were close to running now, the words melting into a hiccough. “…and he never even said sorry…” The boy forewent his Papa’s arm and clamped around his middle instead, hugging tight and hiding his face in the man’s side. “Papa, don’t go with him…”

Him, him, him.

Was he not even Father anymore?

“Quincey, I promise you we aren’t fighting. Even grownups make mistakes. That’s all that night was.” Then, silk-smooth, “Father apologized already.” He turned to the woman, expecting reinforcements, “Mina, you remember—,” But the woman was looking through him and into the boy. The boy, who had peeked up enough from his sniveling to think out at her, showing the little chat shared between Father and son on the way to the tower. Inhaling it, she looked to her husband with renewed alarm, reflecting their child’s tattling into Jonathan’s mind.

Jonathan lost another shade in his pallor. He turned all but snowy as his wife turned her attention to their Master. A blazing thing, all horror and hate and, surprised that she could still feel it, a new level of shocked disgust.

Even this is not beneath you?

‘This’ being the vision scraped from her son’s spying through the keyhole. Hours and nights and days’ worth of the sight of Jonathan Harker mesmerized by his window.

Her hands had drifted by reflex to grasp her husband, her position shifted in paltry protection of her prize. Likewise for the boy who now clung wholly around his Papa’s waist. Jonathan, meanwhile, appeared truly and entirely terrified to a degree his Master hadn’t seen since their last nights together in that long-ago summer. Afraid for them.

He held them each as best he could before lifting his good hand again—

“My Loves, it’s alright, I promise, I—,”

—and having it caught in his Master’s.

His Master, roiling with ire, pulled him forward. His kin, roiling with fear-hate-love, pulled back. Three iron grips all working against each other.

And what was begun in a battleground of the psyche not so long ago was made flesh upon the bed. Briefly. Just before they heard the pop.

A muffled sound, almost comical. Wet and cracking and quick.

Pop went Papa’s shoulder.

Papa made his own noise to go with it.

The iron grips turned to jelly, their owners flinching back as one. Jonathan caught himself on his working elbow and fought down another agonized note as its own pain throbbed up to the mangled shoulder. This he tried to turn into another smile as his breath came in a huffed stutter of a laugh.

“Oops,” he panted, wavering up on his knees. His only hand went to the sagging shoulder, the hold still too weak to hoist it. “See? Accidents happen.” A hoarse noise, fighting not to be a sob. “Darling, could you..?”

But she was already on him, aligning shoulder to socket, bracing, shoving—

Pop!

—the arm back in place. Another noise from Papa, this time through locked teeth.

“Thank you. See?” The fingers of his right hand flexed experimentally. Weak, but functional. “It’s fine, Sweetheart, it’s fine, you didn’t mean it, no one did, it’s alright…”

But the boy was past mere sniffling. Now he bawled. Red rivers of tears emptied from his eyes, turning his little face wax-white as he scrambled to his Papa, blubbering fragments of apology, of denial, of no no no, Papa, it isn’t alright, no no no. The woman’s eyes were running too. Shame and rage and pain streaked her face like a mask of grief as she wrapped herself around her husband, her mind a litany as garbled as her son’s.

Jonathan Jonathan sorry so sorry Darling my Love sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorrysosorry—

“It’s alright,” Jonathan echoed mindlessly back, the most he could do by way of dialogue through pain and panic. “It’s alright,” as his arms, now both water-weak and crippled, folded around wife and child. His back to his Master as if he might shield them.

His Master felt somehow as if he had ceased to be in the room. Now he was watching a lackluster play unfold. See here, the poor little family menaced and ravaged by the monster. The monster looms over them, gloating over the injuries left, waiting to strike again as they weep. The boy cries, the woman cries, Jonathan cries. And why not? The monster gives them something to cry about. As monsters should. As is right. The family belongs to the monster, not the reverse. The monster has no place within the family. Fragile and grating little thing that it is.

See how easily it’s wounded? How quickly it turns on the monster for a mistake? Not even his own! Not entirely his own, at least.

This time.

So. You can admit it.

The boy, the woman, Jonathan, all crying. All huddling against him. Away from him.

As if any of them can spare the loss of blood. As if they expect him to open his veins and refill them to make up for their own idiot blubbering. As if he can waste more of himself on their fumbling and failures. As if he has not hollowed himself of everything, feeding his blood and his time and his toil and his soul until he has only a husk left for himself, picture of the good husband and father, give give give, work work work, feed feed feed, and all they offer him is more need, more pain, more excuses, sorry, sorry, I did not mean it, Papa, I did not mean it, Darling—

He watched Jonathan raise his head enough to look over the heads of his Loves. A single pining glance at the window.

I did not mean it, draga mea.

“Enough.” It was not the bark he wished it to be. He was not even sure if his Harkers heard him. But they didn’t need to. Within a heartbeat he had shot forward snaked his arm around Jonathan’s middle. He hoisted the man like a doll, shock alone making him flinch and scrabble at the hold. The child keened piercingly and the mother’s mind erupted with hate-panic. Her Master flung an order out.

Hold the boy. Do not follow.

The woman spasmed against the order until every cord of muscle stood out from her like wire. Then she was giving a mute howl as she fell upon her son, snatching him up and trapping him in her arms. The boy shrilled deafeningly and fought his mother in a blur of little limbs, tugging, reaching, kicking, begging.

“Let go! Mum, let go! Papa! Papa!”

The boy’s face was a horror of running blood, his eyes turned to marbles of red glass.

Jonathan was little better. His Master had not allowed him to stand. He would waste time if he had; would have tried to dawdle, to scramble back and soothe the tantrum away, to trap himself and his Master another endless minute in this squalling hell of a room. So his Master had hoisted him up first as a farmer might trap an errant lamb under his arm, then threw him over his shoulder.

Then moved to the window.

The boy shrieked.

“Papa! Papa! No, let him go! Papa!”

“Please,” Jonathan’s voice was a hoarse whisper. His hands clung without strength to his Master’s back, trying to drag himself loose, straining towards mother and child like a dying flower bowing toward the sun. “Please, Sir, not like this. I have to go to them, have to explain things, I have to—,”

SLEEP.

Jonathan became a dead weight over his shoulder. The window was opened. Another scream from the boy, this one so great it turned into a nigh rupturing cough.

“Papa,” a reedy sound, “Papa, wake up, Papa..!”

Out the window they went.

Mid-descent, monster turned to mist, carrying his prey like a leaf in a breeze. Down and away and around the castle’s side. Finding the way back in that no eye or mind within the castle could discover.

Jonathan woke half an hour later.

He did so with a surprising lack of pain. As sleep melted off, he became aware of new wrappings layered on both shoulders. The left’s ragged side was plastered with a cooling sleeve of linen strips. His right was bound with something that felt like a fuzzing velvet numbness trapped under its bandages. Each side ate away their respective aches.

“Alchemy as men know it never did manage to turn iron to gold. But it bridged many gaps between simple medicine and magic’s bending of bodily law.”

Jonathan raised his head enough to see his Master sat at the opposite end of the bed. If one considered it a bed. They were in a nest of blankets and cushions that had been layered into a den of alien stonework. While not musty in the way of other ancient bedding strewn around the castle, they carried the spiced stamp of aromas from the work that was done in the adjoining room. Over his Master’s shoulder he could see a heavy oaken door left a crack open. A lamp glowed there, highlighting glass and clay vessels arranged on a far worktable. Some smoked. Some glowed. Some seemed to look back at him.

“Nature would have you heal over the course of weeks. Likely months. Supernature,” his Master gestured at the bandaged shoulders, “will see you healed within the next two nights at the latest. Of course, this will hardly matter if you decide to forsake your little chalk notes and throw yourself from the window.” Jonathan held his tongue as his Master sunk both eyes into him like brands. “The boy did not catch what you wrote on the windowsill, if it’s any consolation. You could let them go on believing I have been so monstrous as to force my poor friend, poor Papa, poor Darling, to sit dull and dead before the window for hours upon hours whenever he does not work or sleep or bleed. I am so suddenly the only monster under this roof as well as Master.”

Jonathan swallowed. Once, twice.

“Apologies. I shall—I shall explain things to them. Please, forgive me, Sir.”

“No.” Jonathan stared at him. Worry and confusion clashed and crumbled into each other behind the ghost-light eyes. “No,” his Master echoed, “this is not something that is forgiven any more than it is forgotten.” His hands clenched to white stones in his lap. “How long have you been like this, Jonathan?”

Do not lie.

Jonathan twitched but failed to catch his tongue in time.

“The first time was in mid-May. Back when I first started to suspect you. The prospect rose and fell in me more than once until the end of June. If it were not for the chance of seeing Mina again, I would have walked into the wolves on that last night together. I was still thinking of cliffs and wolves the day I escaped, prepared to take that route rather than have the Weird Sisters’ teeth pin me here forever. But those thoughts came and went.

“It wasn’t until October 3rd that the urge came back and never left. That was when I stopped being sure whether or not Mina would heed the threat of death potentially leading to undeath. I know she still thought of high buildings. Of train tracks. Fires. So I started thinking of them too. Just in case. After November, after the killing, I just kept thinking it. Whenever I was not busy or seen or sleeping. I have heard that suicides are damned outright. Murderers of good men too. I have thought sometimes that I could take that leap and die, but I would not know the difference once I woke to Hell. Sometimes I think I jumped an eternity ago and just can’t remember.  

“I know I cannot risk it, of course. It would risk them too and leave them hurting besides. All it amounts to now is a sort of meditation. And I do appreciate the view. It is no more than that, I swear.”

“You swear,” his Master nodded. “You swear in this particular moment. Just as, not so long ago, caught in a snare, you thought of taking yourself away in earnest. The leap or the rope or the knife reached for in full daylight. A most effective slap to rouse your greedy little family from their play. But it does not bode well for this, your current oath. Only a thought, only a meditation. Not to worry. This is what you would have me believe?”

“Thought is not action, Sir. I would not still be here if it was.”

“Indeed, you are here. And doing what? Ah, let me specify. Doing what, besides working and bleeding?”

Jonathan frowned at him.

“Raising my family.”

“Which falls under work.”

A deeper frown, almost stormy.   

“It hardly feels so, Sir. My Loves are not the burden you would paint them as.”

“Even if I believed you, you still have not answered my question. What are you doing, Jonathan Harker? What are you doing solely for yourself? You stare out a window that you must convince yourself every day not to leap from. You clear dust away from every room in the castle but your own. You touch a book only when you must be seen reading, you sing only when there is an ear besides yours to hear it, you wear your smiles the same way a maid dons her uniform. You do not answer me because you have no answer to give.” Lantern eyes burned. “In the five years since you have been here, you have done nothing but hollow yourself of everything. Blood and fealty and life and love. Yes, true, you live. Because that too is in your itinerary. Just another chore of maintenance.”  

 Jonathan sat up fully now.

“And?” A whisper. A thing of lead. “What does it matter?”

Why do you care?

“It matters because, even without a stomach, I am not immune to nausea. Call it secondhand indignation if you like. I have made deals with many devils and played pupil to the best of them. You see what bounty such Lessons have afforded me compared to,” he waved a clawed hand in Jonathan’s direction, “the usual lot of misery that comes to the would-be hero and the practicing martyr. If I should ever get around to some dire retribution from kismet, it will only be after nigh half a millennium of unchecked power and slaughter with nary an angel flying by to chide me for my play. Even Faustus got to have his allotment of pleasure before Mephistopheles tore him to shreds and flung his soul to Hell. But you? You spoke the truth before.

“You have nothing. You began with scarcely more than that. A narrow starving life with only the distraction of a woman who hardly merited the pedestal you lifted her on for playing nursemaid and starring, as so many muses do, within a theatre of high romance you painted around her; she, a soul as commonplace as a grain of sand in a desert. For her, you damn yourself. Her and the unholy miracle of the boy. You started with crumbs and gave away all you had and more, gaining nothing but the safeguarding of others’ fortune. Others’ lives. While you whore your life and veins away and tell yourself a chair and a window are sufficient for the last dregs of self you permit to exist.

“Do not mistake me. It is hilarious in the abstract. I would laugh if you were on a stage. But you are here and real and proving insufferable with your insistence on denying yourself any opportunity to do something other than play the role of grist in a mill.” He bared his teeth. It was not a grin. “But I waste my time telling you what you already know, yes? You have clearly made peace with this Spartan half-life. You did not even bat a lash at the prospect of mother and child’s visits being stripped away.” Jonathan’s breath stopped as his Master looked down on him. Lantern eyes now infernos. “Until tonight. There is a crack in the performance now. Father is suddenly a monster and he has stolen poor Papa away.

“And here, in this space, Papa can never be found. Not even by his wife’s prying mind.” White knuckles rapped against the strange black stonework. “It was not easy making this place. A genius loci can only flex so much. But the Scholomance exists in a space that is not possible and it was with brick from that Mountain that I formed these walls. A little sanctum away from Earthly meddling. Back before my condition required the grave soil. How nice to know it will not go to waste.”

Jonathan’s face fell as his Master stood. In less than a blink his Master was at the door, then through it, filling up the threshold. Perhaps too late it occurred to him that the nest of a room had no light lit in it. Not so much as a candle. The only illumination left was the faint glow at his Master’s back and the fires that were his Master’s eyes.

“You have a new task before you, my friend. Something to meditate on without distraction. No work. No window. No wife or child. The task is this: Think of something to do, to be, to want, that serves only you. An addition to your life that you can drop into the raw pit you have carved out of yourself to feed the clamoring maws of your dear family.”

His hand curled around the handle.

Jonathan’s eyes were wide and bright as stars.

“Wait—,”

“In the meantime, for as long as you fail in this endeavor, you will be here. To the boy and his mother, you will be a ghost. Undetectable by mind or sound or scent. They will only know you live by the taste of you in the cup. But do not rush yourself. Take however many nights or years you need.”

Jonathan fought his way out of the tangle of covers.

“Please, wait—,”

“I’m certain they will take it well.”      

The door shut and bolted. A moment later there was a hammering in the dark interior, fists drumming against the thick oak. From the exterior it sounded barely louder than the patter of rain. The shouting only the buzz of an insect. Rain and insect grew slightly louder when the laboratory’s light was put out, erasing even the outline of the door. All was dark. Hammer, patter, shout, buzz.

Silently, the Master of the castle sighed.

He just as silently took a seat outside the door. His eyes were their own strange points of light in the pitch and they glanced down into the open face of his pocket watch. It stood out clearly enough to him. One hour. Two. Three. His friend carried on at intervals through them all. Shouts or sobs, pleas or pounding.

Out in the castle, mother and child were hunting. Father and Papa were nowhere to be found. They threw out the feelers of their psyche as far as they could go, scented the air, raced and called to each other on every floor and through every room. Nothing, nothing. The woman even dared to breach her Master’s bedroom.

Ah, close! So close! Did she detect her husband there? An echo of his presence?

Of course she did.

Her husband was the only one other than her Master to be allowed in that room, and then only with their Master’s beckoning. Even if she had no reason to doubt the freshness of the hint, there was still no following. Not into this space that only a student of the Mountain could detect, let alone enter. She came and went within walking distance of her beloved. All as he screamed out for her. For their boy. For their Master.

By the fourth hour the room had quieted.

He held his ear to the crack:

“Please…” came a croak almost too thin to count as a voice. “Please, I don’t understand this. What do you want from me? What am I supposed to say? Just tell me, please…”

I did. I did and you still cannot make sense of it. Draga mea, has this been you your whole life?

He wanted to laugh.

A curse was mouthed instead.

He stood, relit the lamp, unbolted the door, and found his arms suddenly full of his friend. The bandaged arms clung to him while a face streaked in tears and sweat ground into his chest, eyes somehow still running. He made a note to force a carafe down the man’s throat before he passed out. For now, he let his friend hold to him, shaking.

“Sir, Master, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for angering you. I only want to understand what has to be done to mend this. Please.”

He held his friend in turn, stroking through the white cloud of hair.

“That you say this means you have not taken the order to heart. How is it such a trial to want something? Whether you fear it being taken or not, how is it you cannot even name a thing you desire?”

“I don’t know.” The words left his friend like millstones. He seemed almost to deflate in his Master’s arms. “I don’t know.”

“You could not have been so before you were here. Before you were mine. Even the destitute will dream. Did you not want for anything then, however meager?”

Quiet unspooled for almost a minute. There was a small breath. He waited.

“…Wanting gets conditioned out of some lives,” was his friend’s answer. “Need comes first. Need is always there, taking up your mind and your time. Urgency. Efficiency. Every cent and minute hoarded. Books were a luxury. Second and thirdhand purchases, the rest from the library. Theatre was a treat to reserve once a season at most. No concerts, no revelries, no records playing in the apartment on a phonograph never afforded. The first time we did not know need was after the man I considered a father died and left the gift of his will behind. A house and a business and a bank account that finally did not sting to look at, traded into our hands at the loss of another precious life.

“Between Lucy and Hawkins, there was not even a heartbeat in which to be more than performative in appreciating our changed fortune. Not before the trap of you sprang again. Van Helsing’s call to arms. You know the rest. Even Mina, even the blessing of our child, those priceless wants above all others, were made into another thunderbolt from Fate. Another proof that some people are just not meant to want, let alone have. No matter how great or small a treasure. I learned that Lesson well enough even before you. And so I have schooled myself out of it. Wanting.

“The part of a mind that craves for itself has been atrophied and beaten into dust in me. But if you say I must want, I can perform otherwise. Tell me I am sick of the window and I shall board it up. Tell me to read, I will read. Or sing a song. Or dig up old recipes to enjoy even when I am not cooking to flavor myself. Or whatever else. Even while you all sleep. Even with no one looking.” Jonathan pulled his face away from his Master’s heart and turned bleary eyes up to him. Blue ringed in rose. “Whatever fixes this. Please.”

Throw him back in. He will do better in a week. A month at most. Do it.

He sensed mother and child outside the castle now. Running, circling. They had taken clothes from Jonathan’s wardrobe and, against the Lesson so gravely taught, son watched mother order the wolves to her, demanding they take her husband’s scent and search, go! The wolves would lead them to the usual route Jonathan took to the towns, no more. But they were desperate. Still weeping. Bloodless and starving for grief.

Do it.

Jonathan stared at him. Waiting for another blow. For a laugh, a sneer. A cold hand tossing him back into the dark. The dog laying before his Master’s rising boot, knowing the fine quarry brought home was no excuse for not wagging his tail as he did so.

A fine dragon you are, old devil. Are you so soft now? You laid out the terms. He has not satisfied them. Do it. Do it!

“Fifteen years. That is how long the boy has left to nurse from you if you have your way. Fifteen more years until he is a man, innocent of taking a single life. Likewise for his mother. Because you feed us all. Wasting and wasting until that final night. Do you expect to die and remain dead at that hour? Do you think I would lose you, even if Mephistopheles himself came up to collect?”

“No,” barely a breath. Jonathan seemed to wilt another inch as it left him.

“No. The wait ends. Your unlife begins. Which means what?”

Jonathan could not bring himself to speak. Only looked away. His Master thumbed away another tear.

“Eternity in potentia,” he answered himself. “Centuries. Longer. We both know the Vampire is made of its wants before anything else. Such is our nature. I will give credit to dear Mina for her control. She has far more cause for loathing me than her Sisters did and she does admirably against her own desires. Even if she only has as much will as my own allows, it is a thing of iron in itself. But what of you, draga mea?”

Recognition pinched Jonathan upright again. The ghost-light eyes gaped with what was uncertainty or else the wish to be uncertain.

“You will no longer be as you are. No more playing vassal. No more wearing the yoke of mere servility. No more stalling in your martyr’s Pit. You will be Vampire, you will be want. And what will you do if there is nothing of the latter there to catch you? What shall you do with infinity? Will you only be as my missing shadow? Only your woman’s faithful dog? Will you still have the boy, grown and whole, pulling at your apron strings? A servant, forever caught between bowing to others or laying as a corpse in the moonlight for lack of anyone to serve. That you would be for eternity?”

The hand that wiped the tear moved to Jonathan’s jaw. It held like a strut against his attempt to turn away.

“I always kill my pests. I may torture an enemy before his end. But I would ultimately be rid of them, not leave them to such a Hell as the one you seem so dedicated to crafting for yourself.”

The hand was a snare and it kept Jonathan facing forward. Straight into the basilisk gaze and the mesmer at its heart. An order that was a plea.

“Think. Think of one single thing you want for yourself tonight. Just one.”

The trance worked deep. Snapping at the heels of Jonathan’s mind like a hound after a fox. Further, further, down, down, through a pinhole of a tunnel into the abandoned gloom where the carcasses of hope and yearning had been thrown away. The trance dug. The trance prodded. The trance found a coin’s worth of treasure, like dead men’s gold hidden under a blue flame.

Here was another view from another window. After the departure of a captor. Before the arrival of the hypnotic mists and their hungry smiles. Sweetly in-between, here was the sight of the moonlit world back when it had been a beautiful balm. A sole comfort in his terror but a heartbeat from being spoiled by his hostesses’ threat.

Jonathan Harker had seen small shapes moving on the wind. An owl soaring far below. Moths fluttering past like living petals. So high, so close to the peaks and stars, a needle of nostalgia had found him. The boy within the young man who had wished with the hopeless fantasy of all hungry children looking up from their sparse plates and miserable families and through tatty curtains at the open and untouchable sky. Wished with sweet-somber futility for escape. For…for…

Jonathan spoke the wish aloud. A last wet trail fell from his bloodshot stare. His Master wiped this too.

And found Jonathan’s mouth with his before willing him back to sleep.

Mother and child were returning from the road. She had taken the boy up in her arms again, cursing as she half-ran, half-flew. The child had ceased sobbing, at last, but he rattled in her embrace. This had never happened before. They had not thought such a thing could happen. That anyone, let alone Papa and Father, could simply disappear. Especially from her senses. It was impossible to lose track of them. She always knew where they were. Always.

And now…

“Mum?” She had stopped. Her head cocked like a wolf’s, ears pricked high, eyes flaring. “Mum, what is it?”

There. They’re right there. How?

“Where, Mum? Are they close?”

She didn’t answer. Only took off at another rush, firing herself and her son like a spectral bullet through the forest. Perhaps the boy would have been more stunned than afraid that his mother could be such a blur if not for his worry. His senses were smaller than hers, still reaching and searching for whatever it was she’d found. It wasn’t until the outline of the castle came into view that he skimmed the presence of his fathers on the air. They were at the castle, but not within it.

Two frantic sets of eyes hunted around the grounds, trying to make sense of how the mingled presences could be so near and invisible at once. Closer. Closer.

Up.

They craned their heads until the moon met their gaze. That and the two shapes against the sky.

Jonathan was held close in his Master’s arms. The two of them were a speck against the stars. A moment more and they were drifting down to the ground. Jonathan was set lightly on his feet and almost knocked off them as his son clamped around his waist. His wife almost finished the job by locking her arms about his mending shoulders. Their Master watched on at a careful distance; no sudden moves to alert the herd.

The next hour was devoted to running both men’s tongues ragged.

Yes, diavol, he had lied. There had been a fight and he was embarrassed for it. But it was not what caused his Father’s tearing at Papa. That was his Father forgetting himself, forgetting how easy Papa was to break. Father grew angry at himself first for the mistake, then again when Papa was upset for frightening their son, and then most of all when, old man that his Father was, he had forgotten a remedy he had once known to cure away the injury and make Papa well again. It made him stormy, as all saw. He hated having a solution just out of reach.

But he had remembered at last. That was why he had come to take Papa away that evening. To put his mistake right. But then had come all the hurtful words from their harsh-tongued child, the tears, the fretting, and then that nasty surprise of a second mistake. Again, poor Papa was forced to pay the price for an unruly family. And Father had snatched him away before more pains could add up.

He had gone to a place that, he will be honest, did not exist properly inside the castle. Like a ballroom tucked into a woodshed. It was where his older magic was stored, back before Father was all that he was, back when he had need to worry about skin and bone. There he took Papa to heal. And to talk.

About his sitting and staring. About how he did this for lack of joy alone. Papa made himself so busy and tired that there was nothing left in him to play or take pleasure all on his own.

Was it the sharp thoughts again, Papa?

A tremor here from the boy. Begging, but bracing.

No, son, only absurd ones. The kind that grownups do not like to admit out loud because they do not wish to seem foolish or idle. Other things too. Little things that would need asking for. But your Papa hates to ask for anything, and so he hid all that in his head too, so he would not ask at all.

Yet Father had made him talk and ask and it turned out it really wasn’t such an absurd thing at all.    

“I asked to fly.”

“Like us?”

“Like you. Isn’t that silly?”

“It’s silly that you didn’t ask! I always wanted to fly too, seeing Mum and Father do it so easy.” The boy held tight to him again, grinding the coagulation of old tears against his Papa’s neck. In a small voice he shuddered, “I thought you wanted to do something else. I thought…”

“I know, Sweetheart. I’m sorry for scaring you all before. I would never listen to the sharp thoughts like that. It’s just a sour part of imagination. That’s all.” He rested his chin atop the boy’s head. One hand cupped him close. The other looped around the woman’s shoulders, the ease of the gesture proving the strength of the medicine. Her eyes dug in his. Knowing and shelving the truth for later. “I promise,” Jonathan breathed.

…Do you still want to fly?

“Once you have another meal in you, Darling. I think we are all too worn out for now.”

“No,” the Master intoned from the castle’s shadow, “You need not soften it. You are worn out, all of you. I remain the only one overfed and hale. I shall still be so once you are ready to feed again.” He waved his hand. “I shall skip my helping at the next feeding, lest I burst like a tick.” The boy perked up in his Papa’s lap while his mother narrowed her eyes. Father never skipped his taste of Papa. Not ever. Father only grinned. “But before Papa plays family dinner again, it must be agreed that he needs a holiday. I believe he had some ideas he wished to share with you.” His gaze flicked to Jonathan. “Is it not so, draga mea?”

Mother and child each recognized the term as it hit the air.

The woman was considerably less enthused than her son, who knew the words from the fairy tales. The magic words between one true love and another.

Jonathan distracted them both with the first small thing: A phonograph and new music to play on it. Perhaps even sheet music of their own, if any of them would dare to risk each others’ ears with the practice.  

What was a phonograph, Papa? Was that like the music boxes he’d brought home for them?

Something like that…

Chatter carried on under the moon until Jonathan’s stomach growled. The woman stopped just short of carrying him off to the kitchen. Master and child dawdled behind. The latter pretended interest in a moth that had landed first on a flower, then a stone, and then up on his Father’s shoulder like a great grim tree.

But the moth flew off and still he did not look away.

“…Yes, child?”

“I’m sorry, Father.” Thank every god below the Earth, he did not bring himself to tears as he said it. Though he looked close. “I should never have thought you’d hurt Papa.”

“Ah, but I did hurt him. We all did. By accident, with carelessness, without ill intent, still he was hurt. We are fortunate that he is so forgiving a soul and strong enough to weather us. Such men as him are rare. I do not think I have met another like him in four hundred years.” The child’s eyes shined just short of another bloody tide he could not afford to lose. Sensing this, he snuffled and squinted and fought the weeping back. Good boy. “He will be alright. Amends will be made and we shall not repeat our mistakes with him. Papa does so much out of love for us. We will do the same, yes?”

He held out his hand. The boy forsook it to duck wholly under his arm in his accustomed spot, huddled close as a pup to his kin. The open hand drifted down to stroke his hair.

“Yes,” the boy nodded against him, scrubbing the last dry tracks of tears away on his suit. “Promise.”

“Good. No more tears tonight, diavol. There is nothing to cry about.”

#I promise I'm working on the Dracula Daily-inspiration ref post #but my internet has been patchy as hell and I couldn't get some of the ref links and images I needed #it'll be up soon #but in the meantime enjoy this lovely terrible Text Brick #-throws it through Blood of My Blood's window and runs- #jonathan harker #mina harker #quincey harker #dracula #dracula bad ending #blood of my blood #horror #my writing

[kiaora45]

So far we have met the main cast,of Blood of my Blood, Jamie and Claire's parents and the brilliant choice for Lord Lovatt. No mention of who is going to play the Laird Jacob McKenzie. Ellen's father who is described as tall red haired. Hmmm just a thought

#Outlander #sam heughan #blood of my blood

[calico-heart]

WIP excerpt of a post-Main Story Lyrha/Astarion fic.

Lyrha's cryptic pregnancy ends badly when she enters labour prematurely and complications nearly claim her life - as well as out her secret condition to Astarion. Not exactly the best way to learn you're a dad.

Tags: Dangerous Pregnancy, Unwanted Child, PTSD, Angst & Snark

"You could have died. You would have died." He snarled, "It's a miracle we're even having this conversation. Honesty, what were you thinking?"

“I was thinking it’s not your problem to deal with, so there was no reason to tell you.”

“Well I’m afraid you’ve created a fairly big problem for me, Darling.” He scoffed, hands spreading with irate disbelief, “After months of secrecy, you’ve spent days at death’s door and left me this screaming brat to tend to with no preamble." A hand flourished. Red eyes fixed on her accusingly, "Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a wetnurse for such a bedraggled little beast? Especially when you can’t enter a house uninvited, and only under cover of moonlight?” His teeth bared.

“Well I didn’ ask ye to.” Lyrha hissed, voice crackling over the edge of her pain. “When have I ever obliged of you anythin'? Never. I never planned t'involve ye at all.”

“Oh? And how did you imagine that was going to work out?” His lip twisted, “Were you going to hide it under the floorboards?”

“I was goin' to get rid a-" Her throat seized over the words, somehow too horrible to finish out loud, even after weeks of planning. Knowing. She shook her head, "I wasn' keeping it. I knew you wouldn't want it."

"Well you were right about that." He scoffed, nearly sneered. She was used to the bite of his ire, but it hurt this time. Body and mind were weak, and the knife of him slipped into vulnerable places all too easily, twisting. Lyrha flinched.

Astarion's eyes narrowed. Quieter, he asked, "…But what do you want, Lyrha?"

The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Lyrha shut her eyes, jaw clenched so tight she thought it might shatter. “I want you t’know ye don’t owe me… or the - the babe anything. I wouldn’t try t’trap ye like that.”

“I’m grateful, but that isn’t what I meant and you know it.”

She huffed, voice straining higher with each word, “I wanted never t’be in this damn situation, tryin’ t’explain things t’ye and - and…”

“Lyrha…” A heavy sigh. His gaze stayed fixed on her, searching for something. Maybe for a lie. Or a half-truth.

He surprised her again, “I’m angry. But not about the baby. You can do what you want with it.” He dismissed flatly, then leaned forward, “I’m upset because you didn’t tell me about it. We’re supposed to be in this together, in theory. You should have included me before the damn thing nearly killed you.”

She absolutely should not have. She’d seen many times what happened to women who sprang unexpected, unwanted babes on their men. Especially those who'd promised such things were impossible. Women tried to entrap their brigands all the time, and most often, at best, it got them left stranded. She deflected, “It might not even be yours.”

He laughed, harshly, once. “You haven’t seen the teeth on that thing yet. It's absolutely mine.” Something lighter twinged in his tone, though it left her more anxious rather than less. He was capricious, especially when cornered. “I suppose this rather refutes the whole ‘spawn can’t create vampires’ law.”

Teeth already? Lyrha blinked. Grimaced. Then, "… you said you found a wetnurse for it? Even-?"

Another irritable puff, "I found a goat." His voice pitched high again, "It's downstairs. Eating the furniture. But I couldn't very well keep it outside in the sun."

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate iii #tav/astarion #fanfic #wip #my wip #text #pregnancy #ptsd #angst #bg3 spoilers #blood of my blood

[ladywynneoutlander]

All I want out of the prequel series is wee Adso of Milk.

#outlander #blood of my blood #adso