vampire could launch at Lucy, Adam stepped between them.
‘Your worship,’ he said, keeping his head bowed.
The Countess stopped, looking at Adam as though a bug had stepped in front of her.
‘Ki vagy te?’ the countess replied.
‘English, Countess,’ Adam replied. ‘Remember?’
The puzzled look on her face intensified. She looked almost human, the witch’s blood restoring her to something she’d not been for hundreds of years. The tattered funeral clothes they had buried her in barely concealed the curves of her body as it grew back to normality.
‘English?’ she said, her voice heavily accented.
‘Yes, Countess,’ Adam replied. ‘Do you remember? You learned while your husband Ferenc was in Vienna.’
‘Ferenc?’ she replied, as though the word filled her mouth for the first time. She looked around her. ‘How long has been?’ she asked, the words coming in halting, broken sounds.
‘Four hundred years,’ Adam said. ‘Since your final capture and imprisonment.’
She stared at her hands, and at Adam. ‘You have saved me?’
‘You have saved yourself, Countess.’
‘Hungry.’
‘I know.’
Bathory looked up at Lucy. ‘Eat.’
‘No, Countess,’ Adam said. ‘She is mine. Remember the countenance. These are the rules you set for us, or so legend has it.’
Bathory hissed, but made no further move, looking again at her hands in wonder.
‘I searched for you,’ Adam said, moving closer to the Countess. ‘For half a century I looked. Your legend amongst our kind is unparalleled. Your writings, your deeds — infamous. Since you have gone, we have lurked in the shadows, without leadership, without your wisdom.’
‘The council?’ she asked.
‘It did not survive you. All that did was fairy tale and myth. Folklore. Ghosts in the shadows the humans used to entertain themselves.’
‘Who is this… vitch?’ she said, gesturing to the ground.
‘She tried to bring you back. You must forgive us. The legends of your passing were quite clear — you were killed, and the body burned. They thought resurrection the only way. We looked for remains, anything we might use to bring you back. Witchcraft. Elle had an idea to bring back your essence, join it with that of a witch, and place it in the body of a newly born vampire.’
The Countess spat on the body by her feet, turned and spat at the other dead witch.
‘It matters not,’ she said dismissively. ‘I am finally free.’ She looked Adam up and down like a slab of meat. ‘It has been five hundred years, and people still know of me?’
If Lucy weren’t so utterly terrified she might have had to stifle a laugh. Fame was the universal desire, then? Go back five hundred years to Hungarian nobility and deep down, everyone wanted to be famous.
‘Mostly people know you because of a film that tied you to a fictional character,’ Lucy said, forgetting for a second the danger she was in. The look that Bathory flashed her reminded her soon enough.
‘What is she talking about?’
‘A writer, English,’ Adam replied, almost apologetically. ‘A few hundred years ago, he wrote a novel about our kind, Dracula. It outed us to the world. There was talk you were the inspiration, and you were sometimes called Countess Dracula.’
‘It’s not even a brilliant film,’ Lucy couldn’t help but add.
‘It’s a brilliant film,’ Adam replied.
‘This one is yours?’ she said, voice dripping with disdain.
‘She is.’
Before Lucy could react, Bathory crossed the gap between them, her thin bony hand around Lucy’s throat, pushing her against the wall.
‘Let me have her,’ Bathory said.
‘She is mine,’ Adam said.
‘But I wish to drink of her,’ she pouted.
‘She is mine,’ Adam replied, a little more steel in her voice.
Bathory shrugged and put her down. Lucy dropped to the floor.
‘Come,’ Bathory said, and walked to the far wall, where the door should have been, but wasn’t. She cast her eye over it, reached out, and pulled on the handle of the door that actually was there. Lucy’s brain skipped over it for a second — there was no reveal, no smoke clearing. There wasn’t a door there, but there was, at the same time. Bathory opened Schrödinger's door and stepped through.
Adam followed. Lucy thought for a second she might stay there, wait for this insanity to die down and go home. She’d had enough. She was done.
Except an incredibly powerful, centuries old psychopathic vampire had returned from the grave. In her city. In a room building full of people. She had to do something. And she wasn’t sure the door wouldn’t disappear the minute it closed and trap her in there forever.
She followed the two vampires back out into the hallway, which had been redecorated with arterial blood splatter. The candles burned down to their wicks and the surrounding corridor was full of bodies.
Lucy’s heart sank. Dozens were dead at the hands of Lidia, Boris, Benjamin, and the others. Once it became clear they weren’t getting out, and they weren’t getting their hands on the witches, they turned to what they knew to do. There was no obvious sign of them still here, but they must be, unless they’d punched a hole through Elle’s magic. Maybe it was the most fitting end to this — for these vampires to be trapped for eternity in a York townhouse by two witches who died before their magic did.
Sure, she’d be the only remaining food source, and would die an insanely unpleasant death, but there’d be some satisfaction in that.
How long would Adam protect her? And how much did she want the protection of a man willing to decant two other women into her body without so much as a please or thank you?
‘There are others here?’ Bathory asked. She felt the air like it had signals. Perhaps she had some of her own magic, or maybe she was batshit crazy. Then again, the floor was full of corpses with torn necks — it wasn’t the hardest intellectual leap to make.
Walking back through to the main atrium, the doors were still barred, although their defenders lay dead next to them. The heavy wood showed signs of damage from where the vampires had attempted escape, but they’d held firm. There were more bodies piled up in a heap. Some charred, some bitten, all dead.
There was nobody in the room left alive or undead, but from around the house they heard shattering sounds, as though the place were being turned over by robbers with little in the way of subtlety.
‘In here!’ someone shouted from upstairs. The Countess and Adam headed up the stairs, while Lucy hung back. If they were smashing vases up there, they might hit upon the right one and free her, and if that happened, a few seconds’ head-start might be enough for her to make it out of this alive.
Halfway up the stairs, the Countess stopped, turning back to Lucy. ‘Come, human.’ She turned away. ‘Never know when might need a good human.’
Adam didn’t protest, so Lucy made her way up slowly, hoping to hang back far enough to be forgotten.
At the top of the stairs, the extent of the destruction became apparent. Broken husks of every form of pottery lay about the place. Some were the tiny magical vials she was familiar with, others huge heavy vases and ceramics destroyed for good measure.
Boris came charging out of a bedroom, two tiny vases in his hands. Throwing them to the ground, he watched them shatter with a look of utter frustration on his face, disgust that a vampire of his standing was reduced to this. He looked up and saw the woman in tattered rags moving toward him.
‘Who the fuck?’ he asked.
Grinning, Countess Bathory ran toward him, sliding a foot out to his chin as she came close, before pivoting and bringing the other leg up to meet Boris’s face. The sudden force of it felled Boris like a dead weight, his head slamming against the bannister, shattering it. The burly vampire came within inches of tumbling through the broken wood to the staircase below, where he would have missed Lucy by inches, but he came to with scarcely a second to spare. Face red with anger, he clambered — with little grace — to his feet, and turned to face the woman, who watched him with an amused glance.
‘I’m going to rip your…’
‘Wait!’ came a voice behind him. Lidia emerged from the shadows of another bedroom, hands held out in front of her. Her eyes were fixed on the Countess, but flicked to Adam, who wore a stupid grin. ‘Is this?’
Adam’s grin matched Lidia’s. ‘No witchcraft required. She was in there the whole time, waiting to be freed.’
Boris’s rage evaporated in a second. ‘Countess?’ he asked.
‘I am your Countess,’ Bathory replied, a rictus grin stretching over that not-yet-quite-human maw. ‘Oh, but you are all children.’
Boris got to one knee, and Lidia did the same. Adam hung back, not getting to his knees but maintaining the correct height at the top of the stairs. Lucy hung back further, not about to get down on one knee.
Vampires wandered out of the other bedrooms, five more, each taking their place kneeling at the Countess’s feet. Bathory drank in the adulation with a wry smile and beckoned them to stand.
‘My descendants,’ she said, gesturing around at each, looking somewhat less than majestic in her ruined burial rags, but not letting that stop her. ‘Half a century ago, I embraced immortality for the same reason we all do. The desire for eternal life is one mortals cling to, through their religions and their quests for infamy. We are the only ones who get to enjoy the fruits of that desire… even locked inside a coffin.’
This brought about some chuckles from the assembled vampires. Lucy was not moved to join them; they might remember her existence. She’d be dead before she reached the bottom of the stairs. She doubted Adam’s claim over her would wash with Borisand the others.
The Countess continued. ‘I have returned. Not my full strength, but it’s amazing vhat vitch blood will do. I have magic coursing through my veins, and I will bring down the barriers holding us here.’
She soaked in the cheers of approval from her audience, and stepped forward to speak to them in more hushed tones. ‘I slept. Long years broken only by pain, thirst, hunger. Wishing an end to my life. Desperate, pathetic. I heard whispers, thought long about what needed to be done, if I ever knew freedom again. Too long have we lived in the darkness of the mortal world. It is time to take our rightful place at the head of this new world.’ Her voice rose to a crescendo, and the cheers of the vampires she addressed grew louder. All, that was, except Adam.
‘Countess,’ Adam said, behind her. ‘For half a century, I searched for you, believing you to be the source of our power. You, more than most, know the folly of living beyond the power we can cast over the mortal world.’
She scoffed and turned to the others. ‘This one,’ she said, ‘is a hound who thinks himself a bear. I asked him to share his human with his Countess. He refused.’
Boris scoffed. ‘Not for the first time.’
Bathory shook her head, and walked back toward Adam, who bristled but made no move away from her. ‘He is weak. If this is what we have become, no wonder you hide in witch’s houses, pining for the power you’ve always had inside.’
‘You know nothing of this world,’ Adam said. ‘Five hundred years has given them advances and weapons you could not dream of.’
‘It has also made them soft and lazy,’ Lidia chimed in. ‘You know what she says is true, Adam. You used to believe it, too. Join us.’
‘This one is weak, too,’ Boris said, pointing to Lidia. ‘She let a witch burn her partner to ashes in front of her eyes.’
Lidia’s jaw tensed. ‘I did it for her,’ she said. ‘We need her more than we needed him. He sacrificed himself for the cause.’
‘Bull…’
‘Enough,’ Bathory barked. ‘You,’ she said, pointing to one vampire who had yet to speak, or even look up. ‘Go to the vitch’s chamber. Find me clothes.’
He scurried off.
‘You,’ she said to Boris. ‘You are strong. I like you. You will serve me.’
Boris beamed, as the other vampire returned with a pair of jeans and a sweater, both entirely too pedestrian to house an un-living legend. Bathory cast off her rags in a fluid movement, revealing her figure to be stocky but firm. She was around the same height as Elle, but stared at the witch’s jeans as though handed a cup of butter to wear.
‘You…’ Lidia said, miming pulling on jeans. Bathory managed to get them on, but they were too small. Her minion rushed back into the room, and came back with a flowing dress, flowery and utterly at odds with Bathory’s personality. She took it with better grace than the jeans, however, and pulled it over her head, finding it a better fit.
During this whole spectacle, Adam tried to catch Lucy’s eye a few times, but she didn’t much feel like catching his back. She was still too angry with him, the man more than willing to sacrifice her for some ancient psychopath. No, not a man, she remembered. A vampire. One who might not share his kind’s insane blood lust, but a vampire nonetheless. No amount of him being good in bed could make up for that.
‘Better,’ Bathory said, admiring herself in a mirror at the end of the hallway. ‘Adam, you have but one chance to prove yourself to me. Give me your pet, let me drink from her. I want to bathe in her blood.’
‘No,’ Adam growled, and Lucy finally understood the message of his searching eyes. They were telling her to run.
‘Too bad,’ Bathory said. ‘You could have been interesting.’ She turned to Boris. ‘Kill him and bring me the girl.’