Renfield had talked.
And Mihaly had been exposed as a partisan. Who else? Lucy? I started the motorcycle with an urgency that made my heart pound, my hands fumbling, and in my haste I almost tipped the bike over. As the rear wheel caught, the front wheel leapt into the air. I finally managed to get the bike under control and sped toward the Van Helsing home.
EXCERPTED FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOVEL THE DRAGON PRINCE AND I
by Lenore Van Muller
Once, while accompanying her father to a medical conference in Venice, Lucille succumbed to a bout of influenza. She lay in that strange bed with a fever that none of the consulting doctors her father brought in could abate.
When they left her alone she found her own palliative. Stripping herself of her nightdress and underwear, she would lie prostrate upon the marble floor, letting the cool stone soak the heat out of her fevered, naked body.
This was how she felt lying in the vampire’s arms, allowing his chill temperature to absorb the fire that raged through her body after they had coupled.
She gently tugged at his stitches, slowly drawing them out like pulling threads from a sweater.
“Does that hurt?” she asked.
“Not enough for me to leave your side.”
“How long has it been?” She looked into his amber eyes. “Since you succumbed to . . . this other form of lust?”
“What century is this?”
“That is so sad. Truly sad.” She gave him a teasing look and received one in return. Good, he was feeling better.
During their lovemaking Lucille could feel him holding back; his power, the astounding strength that could crush her, break her so easily. What did it say about her that she found the incipient violence as a mighty aphrodisiac? She had been infused with a matching feral ferocity, energised as never before, and she was suddenly overcome with visions: of old worlds, people in costumes she had seen only in ancient paintings. She saw lives taken, absorbed, subsumed. She felt herself die—and then reborn, again and again.
He reached out a cool hand, ran it lightly down her ribs, along the dip of her waist, along the gentle ridge of her hip.
“I would say it was worth the wait, but you might take the compliment as mere flattery,” he said.
She rolled atop his body, feeling the length of him. It was like embracing a marble statue, the flesh so cool, so smooth to the touch, hard on the surface, but pliable, so pliable.
“Tell me, do you receive a thrill when you bite and feed?”
She bit his neck, taking the white flesh between her teeth with just enough tension to pull at his skin. He was not immune to her attentions; she could feel his interest rise betwixt their bodies.
“When you bite,” she persisted. “Is it as good as sex?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Then we must jog your memory.”
And she kissed him. Deeply, pressing her lips fiercely against his. He took her face in his hands, pulled her to him. They rolled over, he atop her, both of them striving to meld their flesh into one body, one being, consuming each other.
He ran a palm across her breasts, and her nipples responded instantly. The hand slid lower and she shivered, but not from the cold.
She gasped for air as they merged. They moved, against and with each other, passion ruling.
Dracula caressed her with his eyes, her face encouraging him, urging him on, her lips, swollen, bruised from desire, her neck, a graceful curve of pale flesh. Where the major artery, a blue line under the fair skin, pulsed with the rhythm of her heart, the rhythm of their congress.
He became fixated on that vein, riveted on its promise, the promise of blood, the throb of life . . .
Lucille noticed the focus of his thrall.
“Do it!” she cried in the throes of her carnal erotomania. “Bite me! Take my blood!”
He succumbed to her entreaties, lowered his head as his fangs extended. His mouth hovered over her throat, feeling the heat of her flesh on his lips.
“Do it,” she whispered, her voice husky with desire.
Lucille tilted her head, readied herself, eyes closing in pleasured anticipation.
“Bite me, dammit!”
Abruptly, she felt him pull away from her, peel his body off hers. She opened her eyes to see him sitting at the edge of the bed, his back to her. Abruptly he strode all the way across the room, as far from her as he could manage.
“I cannot,” she heard him say. “I will not.”
Lucille gasped for air, so suddenly was she pulled back from the precipice of desire.
Dracula walked back to the bed, under control now, the fangs retreated. He began to dress, aware that Lucille was hurt, angry. This only made his anger rise.
“I am no trifle for you to salve your curiosity,” he said.
“I was not playing. I was serious.”
“Serious or not, you do not want what you ask for.”
“I do,” she said fiercely.
“No.” He shook his head. “Mine is not an existence to envy or desire.”
“So say you. Maybe it is the way you manage that existence.”
“Possibly.” The admission put a damper on his ire. “But mark my words. You do not want what you ask for.”
“You said that.” She turned to dress herself, lifted the negligee, then bitterly tossed aside the fribble with some vitriol and, instead, wrapped herself in the coverlet. She put herself in front of him, looked him in the eyes.
“You’ve had power, in one form or another, most of your life. You also know what it is like to have no power at all. I refer to your imprisonment under the Turks. In my world an intelligent woman is no better than a horse that can talk or a dog that dances. We are treated as an accessory, a trinket for some man. Even you regard me as a ‘mere’ woman when it comes to ‘manly’ things like combat.”
“I did n— I regret that.”
“But you and every other man believe it. I receive no respect for my mind, my innate talents. That changed with the war. That changed the day that I first held a gun in my hand. The first man who saw me point a weapon at him, I saw the respect in his eyes.”
“Might you have mistaken fear for respect?” Dracula asked.
“Fear suffices. But this regard will end once the war does.”
“There is always another war,” he said
“No doubt. But I have seen how men appraise you. They see your power. You receive respect,” she said.
“Again you err. It is fear! And disgust.”
“As I said, I’ll take the exchange.” She stepped into his chest, bared her neck again. “Bite me.”
She leaned into him, close, her breath a sirocco on his face. He stared at the exposed vein, ran his fingers along the blue tributary, felt the thrumming pulse under his thumb.
Lucille held her breath in suspense as he wrapped one arm about her waist, pulled her tight against him; the other hand cupped her head, and fingers snaked into the tangle of her hair.
The bedroom door flew open. Her father rushed into the room.
“Lucy!” he cried. “Prince!”
“Father, I am of age and—”
Van Helsing saw the embrace, his daughter wearing only a blanket. It gave him pause, then he remembered his mission.
“The Germans!” he spat. “They are at our door! We must flee!”
He dashed back out the door. Dracula and Lucille followed.
She darted into her own room, snatched her dress and shoes, dropped the coverlet, and slipped the garment over her head on the run. The cloth momentarily blinded her, and she almost collided with the banister. She paused on the stairs to slide into her shoes.
Her father and Dracula were at the front window. There was a loud clatter and clank outside, melding with an engine’s roar.
“The SS are here,” her father intoned. “They are—”
He was interrupted as the adjacent wall exploded inward with an eruption of brick, mortar, and lath. The front end and canno
n barrel of a tank protruded through the debris.
Dracula suddenly found himself bathed in the blazing sun. He recoiled, fell to the floor as his skin smouldered, protecting his eyes with his forearm.
Lucille and her father gripped him by the arms and dragged the vampire out of the light. They weaved around the wreckage, broken furniture, and rubble. Plaster dust hung in the air like a fog.
Behind them, soldiers began clambering over the tank and through the breach in the wall. Lieutenant Guth led the charge, pointing at Dracula and shouting, “Get him!” Dracula, revived enough to help the Van Helsings reach the clinic, slammed the door behind them.
Inside, the vampire shoved a heavy cabinet across the entrance with such ease it might have been a shoe box. Lucille and her father pushed the chaise to block the door to the anteroom.
Lucille turned to the Prince, examining his face, its skin burnt and blistering. “Does it hurt?” she asked. He shook his head, but it was a lie.
Her father rushed to his desk, put a shoulder to it, and rolled it to the wall on its casters. A trapdoor was revealed underneath.
“Hurry!” the old man commanded as he tried to lift the hatch. Lucille lent a hand, and the door flopped open.
The clinic door rattled with a pounding from the other side. Dracula helped Lucille to the stairs that gaped under the trapdoor.
The anteroom door gave way with a crash, fell onto the chaise. Five German soldiers scrambled over the door like it was a bridge.
Dracula charged the invading SS with open arms, driving them back. He glanced back at the Van Helsings.
“Run!” he shouted. “Now! Go!”
Lucille hesitated, but her father dragged her down. She fought her father and started back up the stairs, but Dracula kicked the trapdoor shut on top of them. The falling door struck Lucille in the head and knocked her unconscious.
The soldiers massing against Dracula had swelled in number. A dozen men tried to push their way into the room, packed together like a rugby scrum.
The vampire was being forced back, his feet finding no purchase on the floor, skidding across the hardwood. In an instant, he was overwhelmed. The soldiers piled upon him and he was buried under the dozen bodies.
With a surge of strength, he lifted the entire Nazi mob and scattered them about the room like tenpins.
Dracula rose from the floor, eyes becoming bloodshot, fangs growing. He stood before his enemy in all his fiendish glory, ready for carnage.
As he stepped toward them the clinic wall suddenly caved in. A half-track leapt into the room with another avalanche of brick and plaster.
Sunlight fell upon the vampire once more. He screamed in pain, curled into a protective fetal ball.
A steel net was hauled out of the bed of the half-track and thrown over Dracula’s prostrate body, his skin smoking and burning. They rolled him in the mesh over and over until he was barely visible amid the tangle of steel cable.
Guth climbed onto the vehicle and shouted orders. His men scurried to bind Dracula in the net. It took the twelve and more to hoist the heavy steel cocoon and toss it into the rear of the half-track.
The smell of burning skin permeated the air.
“Cover it with the tarp,” Guth instructed. “Orders are not to kill it.”
This was done. The half-track backed out of the demolished house and drove across the yard to the road. The vampire’s howls of pain and outrage could be heard over the metallic chatter of the vehicle’s treads.
Lucille and her father watched this from a gazebo that fronted the yard across the street and a few houses down from the Van Helsing home. They were crouched under the gazebo floor, peering through the latticed slats. She could only watch helplessly as the damned Germans destroyed her home and captured the Prince. For a moment she even mourned what she had angrily fled so many times. This had been her home.
After Lucille had been rendered unconscious, her father had carried her halfway through the escape tunnel until she awakened enough to walk on her own. She tried to go back to help Dracula, but a breathless and fatigued Van Helsing had already collapsed the tunnel behind them with previously rigged falls.
The pursuing Germans were at this very moment in disarray as they found their passage blocked. They assumed that the tunnel ran true, and once aboveground, they drew a straight line from that assumption and raided the abandoned barn directly across the street from the Van Helsing house. But her wily father had designed the tunnel so that it angled after the collapse and led to a nearby property.
The Germans swarmed over the house, searching and finding weapons but also carrying away the van Helsing possessions like thieves. After a while the soldiers gave up and left two guards behind. Lucille helped her father crawl out from their hiding place. They crept through the neighbour’s yard to the nearby garage where they kept a getaway car.
During their entire escape, Lucille’s thoughts focused on the plight of Dracula, the man she now thought she loved.
FROM THE DESK OF ABRAHAM VAN HELSING
(Translated from the Dutch)
My initial and worst fear was that the Prince might assault my dear daughter as he did poor Lucy Westenra. But as life has taught me repeatedly, your worst fear can metastasize into an even more tortuous nightmare. I think that Lucille has become attached to, no, is infatuated with that devil. Nothing has been said, but I have eyes and a father knows. And it vexes me in the extreme. True, he has proven himself not to be the bloody butcher I encountered before, well, except when unleashed upon the Germans. Around our circle of conspirators he has behaved like . . . well, a human—a rather erudite, engaging gentleman of culture and probity.
Still, a relationship with my daughter, in any form, is an anathema to me. It cannot continue. It must not. But I cannot broach the subject with Lucille. I know my daughter. If I forbid their communion she will defy me just out of spite.
This is all a moot point, of course, if we do not free him. I am torn about my duty here. Do I rescue the vampire? Where is my responsibility? As of this moment I am only going through the motions, and I think Lucille suspects my lack of dedication to our cause.
Oh, what have I wrought?
FROM THE WAR JOURNAL OF J. HARKER
(transcribed from shorthand)
JUNE 4, 1941
Only resolution and habit can allow me to make an entry in this journal tonight. I am too miserable, too low-spirited, too sick of the world, including life itself; I would not care if I heard this moment the whispering wings of the Angel of Death. Lately she has been flapping those grim wings with success all over Europe, and I can feel her dark shadow pass over my soul.
I watched the half-track rumble away from the ruins of the Van Helsing residence, then the much slower tank followed by a lorry full of SS. I knew Dracula was in the half-track, bundled in some net-like material. I had seen his capture. But of Lucy and her father’s status I was woefully ignorant. I can only assume they were carried away.
I had failed.
Riding the Sokol to within sight of the Van Helsing home, I had seen the arrival of the German Army vehicles and the encirclement by the soldiers. I parked the motorcycle and dismounted to watch from behind a copse of dogwood.
Cursing myself for my tardy arrival, I could do nothing to help the dear Lucy. Or her father. Or anyone else, for that matter. I was a complete failure. If I had not spent so long at the cafe vacillating, been so dilatory in my progress. If I had just ridden faster. If, if, if . . . What was I to do now?
I sit here in a dank grain storage silo, my only companion a pair of bold rats. My misery envelops me just as the fog blankets the farmland outside this pitiful sanctuary.
Too late. Too late to save Renfield. Too late to warn Mihaly. Too late for dear Lucy. Too late, too late, too late. Is this to be my sad epigram?
DATED: 4 JUNE 1941
TO: CSS REINHARD HEYDRICH, RSHA, REICHSFUHRER-SS
FROM: SS MAJOR WALTRAUD REIKEL
CC: HEINRICH HIMMLER,
REICHSFUHRER-SS
(via telegram)
MOST SECRET
WE HAVE IT STOP.
FROM THE WAR JOURNAL OF J. HARKER
(transcribed from shorthand)
JUNE 5, 1941
What follows I either saw for myself or I was able to gather from eyewitnesses:
Pavel was working at his garage. I was not aware of his civilian occupation, but it appeared that he operated an auto repair service with his uncle. He was under an old Citroen, removing the oil pan, talking to the owner of the ancient car, a Frantisek Zeklos, who was recounting the small avalanche that had ruined his undercarriage. He had been coming around a mountain curve and suddenly encountered a suitcase-sized chunk of granite. The choice of a fifty-foot drop on one side of the road or a collision with the mountain wall did not sit well with the driver, so he tried to straddle the rock and, in doing so, cracked his oil pan, leaving a black snail track all the way into town.
“Like Hansel and Gretel laying out bread crumbs,” Pavel commented from under the vehicle. When he received no reply, he glanced to where the shoes of old Frantisek had been. Instead he saw the black boots of an SS soldier. Turning his head, he could see three other pairs of the same boots. They surrounded the car.
In anticipation of this very eventuality, Pavel made a habit of hiding a pistol in the undercarriage of any vehicle he worked on. First thing he did with every job. He reached for the Belgian pistol he had stowed atop a leaf spring. Hands gripped his ankles and yanked him out from under the Citroen. Before he could raise the pistol, one of those boots stomped on his gun hand.
There followed a succession of kicks and blows that left Pavel bloody and unconscious. He then was shackled and taken to Bran Castle.
Pavel’s comrade, Farkas, was working a huge pillow of dough at his brother-in-law’s bakery, cutting and setting yeasty lumps into bread pans. His job also provided useful intelligence for the Resistance, as his in-law was one of the local provisioners to the SS unit at the castle, plus the Rumanian garrison in Brasov.
Dracula vs. Hitler Page 38
