At that moment, Lucinda Van Helsing was eating a rabbit. Or, more accurately, she was sucking its blood—later, Persephone and Hades, the Countess Karnstein’s white wolfdogs, would eat the carcass. Magda was standing beside her in the forest glade, looking down at her approvingly.
“Jó, jó,” she said, which Lucinda had come to understand meant “Good, good,” in Hungarian.
“You’re doing very well,” said Laura, who always came along on these hunting expeditions—“To translate,” she said, but Lucinda had quickly realized it was as much to comfort and reassure. The first time she killed a rabbit with her own hands, she had cried so hard that she almost vomited up all the blood she had drunk. Laura had taken Lucinda in her arms and stroked her hair, saying, “Hush, hush, my dear. You’ll get used to it in time.”
“I do not wish to kill,” she had said between sobs, stroking the bloodstained body of the dead rabbit as though it were her childhood doll.
“But you must learn to,” Laura had said. “Here at the schloss, if you wish it, we could have blood brought to you in a glass—you would never have to learn how to hunt for yourself, or confront the death inherent in your mode of obtaining sustenance. But that would be both dishonest and unwise. You don’t want to be dependent on others. And you are a predator—it is important for you to both understand and accept that fact. Carmilla would tell you the same herself, if she were here.”
However, Carmilla was not there, but at Castle Karnstein. She had spent most of that first week at her ancestral estate, dealing with the mess Hyde had left behind. Evidently, he had left without disposing either of his chemicals or the corpse of Adam Frankenstein, which had been left lying under a sheet in the small, dark chamber where he had spent his final days. “At least I can tell Justine that he is well and truly dead,” Carmilla had said to them on one of her brief visits. She had arranged for a proper burial in the graveyard behind the castle. Hyde had also neglected to pay his debts. He still owed money to the Ferenc family, which had served him so loyally while he had rented the castle. “Miklós and Dénes deserve to be horsewhipped for kidnapping Mary, Justine, and Diana on Hyde’s orders,” Carmilla had added angrily. “But I want to make sure Dénes can pay for his university tuition, and Anna Ferenc needs her medicine. The Ferencs have been tenants of the Karnsteins for two hundred years—I cannot let them starve. I’m sorry, Laura, but finances may be tight for a while.”
Laura had just sighed—she was all too used to finances being tight, partly through Carmilla’s extravagance. Now, she sighed again, but it seemed to be in relief that Lucinda had dispatched the rabbit so neatly. Lucinda simply nodded. What could she say? She was trying, as best she could, to live this new life her father had imposed on her through his experiments. She was a vampire—she would always be a vampire. She would always be able to hear the rabbit’s heart beating as she tracked it in the long grass; she would always be able to climb the tallest trees, hand over hand, as though she were a squirrel. She would never grow old or become ill from the diseases to which men are prone. She would not die unless her head was completely severed from her neck or she was burned so that her body could not regenerate itself. She would always have to drink blood.
She had thought of taking her own life—she still thought of it sometimes as she lay awake, late into the night, for she no longer seemed to need as much sleep. She had thought of somehow lighting herself on fire, burning herself down to ash. She had not told Laura about these thoughts, and she could not tell Carmilla. The Countess was too formidable—she seemed old and distant, although she looked no older than Lucinda. But Lucinda could not have told her anything so personal.
Now, she followed Laura back toward the schloss. Magda came behind with the carcass of the rabbit dangling from her hand. It would provide a meal for Persephone and her brother, Hades.
As they approached the back of the schloss, which had a long terrace, Carmilla came out through the French doors. “Telegram!” she called. She was holding a piece of paper in one hand.
“Who from?” asked Laura. “And when did you get back? I didn’t hear the motorcar. But then, we were pretty far into the forest.… Köszönöm, Magda,” she said, nodding to the—what was Magda exactly? A coachman, a gamekeeper, a protector of the household. She seemed to serve multiple functions. And, of course, she was a vampire—the only one created by Count Dracula who had managed to retain her sanity, or most of it. Sometimes she still imagined that she was on the battlefield, and then only Carmilla could subdue and restrain her. At first, Lucinda had been frightened of her, but Magda had been so kind—they had all been so kind to her. She was grateful for that.
Nevertheless, she was so very tired, and she smelled of blood. She would go up to her room, which had been Laura’s father’s room, once. She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if her father had resembled Colonel Jennings—an ordinary man who liked his books and pipe, who wore the hunting jackets that still hung in the wardrobe or the slippers in a row beneath them. But no, her father had been the celebrated Professor Van Helsing, with appointments at several European universities and a desire to breach the boundaries of life itself, to make himself and men like him immortal. With a logic that still made her so furious she clenched her fists thinking about it, he had started by experimenting on his wife. Lucinda tried not to think about her mother too often—the memory was simply too painful. Her mother had died to save her from her father’s henchmen. Someday, the two of them would be reunited in Heaven, if vampires went to Heaven. If not, then in Hell. Until then, Lucinda would have to live somehow. At least, for the first time since her mother had been taken to the mental asylum, she was among friends.
Who seemed, at the moment, to be quarreling.
“But we just got home!” Laura was saying. “And you haven’t even been here most of the week, but at that wretched castle—”
“I can’t let Mina go into such a situation by herself, can I?” said Carmilla. “The Count won’t be able to leave Budapest until after the Emperor’s visit, so she’s going to Vienna alone. Do you want her confronting Van Helsing’s vampires without support?”
“First of all, she’s not going by herself,” said Laura. “She has Irene Norton there, and Irene has—well, a sort of gang, from what Mary told us. And second of all, that’s an excuse, and you know it. You just want to go off on your own, in that damned motorcar of yours, like some lone figure of righteous vengeance, to fight vampires. Must you be so dramatic? Honestly, sometimes I think you’re more like the Count than you realize.”
“Not alone. I want to take Magda with me. She’s so good at smelling out our kind. Kedvesem, I know you’re angry with me, don’t deny it—”
“Who’s denying it? Of course I’m angry with you,” said Laura angrily, as though to emphasize her point. “And you can’t take Magda. Lucinda needs her, particularly if you’re going to go off on a vampire hunt.”
“—but you also know I’m right. Do you really want Mina and Irene, and a group of girls who may be very capable but have no experience hunting such monsters, to go up against a nest of vampires without our help? All right, I’ll leave Magda here, but I at least need to go.”