From the very beginning, he had made it clear that he didn't care about her. It was Lucy and Jonathan who mattered to him – indeed, the two people that mattered most to Mina in the world – and now that Lucy was dead and Jonathan out of his reach, he had taken Mina, both as revenge for Lucy's death and as a hostage till Jonathan gave in to him. When he told her this her mouth was gagged and her hands were tied behind her back, so she couldn't ask questions or protest or fight. Then he brought her to the dungeon and left her there. She spent a long time then searching for a possible way out, but when she found none she lay down on the bed (with threadbare sheets it was true, but it was a bed nonetheless) there and prayed that either Jonathan would find her or the Count was more inclined towards mercy than she had thought.
He didn't come back until early the next evening. She heard his footsteps outside the door and then a small slot in the door (she had noticed it earlier, but it was far too small to be of use if she attempted to escape) was opened and a tray neatly set with a plate of food, a glass of wine, and a spoon and fork was handed through to her. Despite herself she thanked him, finding it difficult to forget her manners even in this situation. "You're welcome." He said in reply, and he too sounded polite, if rather cold and distant.
She took a bite of the food, which was surprisingly good. Since she had not heard any footsteps walking away she assumed that he was still there, so, after a moment's pause she asked, "Why did you bring me food at all?"
That same polite but distant, slightly accented voice came from the other side of the door. "I could not simply let you starve. And whatever my purpose in bringing you here, you are my guest and it is my obligation to treat you with that attendant respect. You shall not go hungry while you are here." The last statement seemed to be a promise.
She was surprised. From Jonathan's rambling accounts of his trip she had expected that the Count would leave her in this dungeon to rot except perhaps for times when he might feed upon her blood as he came so close to doing with Jonathan and did many times with Lucy. It was true that he had apparently been kind enough to Jonathan at the beginning of his stay, but she had believed that certainly that would not remain while he held her hostage in a dungeon. She knew that it was probably desperation, but his politeness gave her some small amount of hope that maybe she would not end her life there.
It felt somehow impolite to not speak to him (she knew that it was not necessary to be polite to one's captor, but the feeling was hard to shake), and so she said. "Did you make this food yourself? It is very good."
There was a pause before he spoke, as though her attempt at pleasant conversation surprised him too. "Yes, I did. When one lives for an eternity you end up acquiring many skills. Cooking is a relatively useful one."
The reference to his immortality made her uncomfortable and destroyed the illusion of the polite aristocrat that his voice conjured up. "Why Lucy?" she finally blurted out, her voice thick with desperation.
The pause before he spoke was longer this time, and when he did speak, his voice was more distant than before. "Hand the tray back to me when you are done with it. I shall bring you another meal tomorrow."
She handed him her tray and she heard his footsteps growing more distant as she sat down on the bed feeling tears hot and heavy behind her closed eyelids.
True to his word, the Count did return the next night. By that time she was very hungry, for, despite his admittedly impressive skill at cooking, the Count seemed to have very little conception of how often humans needed to eat. This time she was resolved to not mention anything that might cause the Count to distance himself further, as he had the night before. She needed that politeness, even if it was a façade, for she was alone in that dungeon and he was her only hope of ever getting out.
When he handed her the tray of food that night, she watched his hands; pale and long fingered, they reminded her of Jonathan's. Indeed, they looked exactly like Jonathan's, and she did know what those looked like, for she had watched his hands often as he taught her shorthand, forming the small characters as he explained to her what each meant. Jonathan had beautiful hands.
For an instant she could imagine that it was Jonathan giving her the food, Jonathan outside the door, waiting to let her out so that could go home together. But it wasn't, and so she swallowed her pain and closed her eyes so that she didn't have to look at the stone walls around her before thanking the Count and beginning to eat the food. Finally she decided to be calculating.
"Jonathan told me that you have a wonderful library." She said in between bites. It is a lie, somewhat. Jonathan didn't tell her anything about his journey to Romania, except while murmuring in his sleep. But she had read about the Count's library in Jonathan's journal, though it wasn't something that she had paid much attention to while immersed in her dear Jonathan's suffering. After a short pause, she continued. "I wish I could see it."
Anything to get out of that dungeon.
"I regret, then, that you shall not be able to see it for some time." In the pause then, barely long enough to take a breath, disappointment and hope warred in her, and then he continued. "However, it is possible, should your husband agree to my demands, that I will be able to allow you to wander the castle as you please."
She wasn't sure whether this was an appropriate question for her to ask, but she asked it anyway. "What are you demanding of him?"
The Count's voice seemed almost idle, and he suddenly scared her far more than he had when he was tying her up to bring her to his castle in the first place. "He fascinates me, though in a different manner from your murdered friend, Lucy. I have always from his arrival here intended to make him one of my own, and am even more determined in that desire after my other purpose with regards to Lucy has been thwarted. With him at least I would prefer him to come willingly to me – and you are the means to that, and his reward for obedience."
Mina began to tremble, and despite herself dropped the fork that she was holding onto the stone floor, where it clattered. Of course, in theory she had known all of this before, but to hear it spelled out so coldly was startling. But his voice was almost kind as he spoke again. "There is no need to trouble yourself with things that are out of your hands. As with last night, return your dishes to me. I shall return on the next night. Your husband did tell me of your love of learning, and I do sincerely regret that you are not able to explore my library at your leisure now."
She nodded, forgetting that he could not see her do so. After a few minutes, during which neither she nor the Count said anything, she handed him back her tray – this time she had left her wine untouched. She did not sleep that night.
The night after that, after handing her the tray of food, the Count said, "I do hope that you are fond of the Classics. They were the first things that I found in English." As he began to read and Mina recognized the opening lines of Iliad, she smiled.
For a while she could pretend that she was somewhere completely different, for the Count's voice was pleasant and clear while reading, and the poetic beauty of the words washed over her like a wave of some healing water of which she had long been deprived. After an hour or more – the Count did not seem to grow at all tired of reading aloud – her exhaustion from having not slept the night before caught up with her and fell into a restful sleep.
After a time, the Count unlocked the door and entered quietly. He stood over where Mina lay sleeping for a long instant before leaning over and touching a finger to her neck for a brief instant. Then he seemed to think better of it and stood again, picking up the tray and leaving the room, shutting the door beside him.
When Mina woke up, it was far more hopeful than she had been before. She could remember the things that the Count had done and said that had made her terrified for both herself and Jonathan and saddened that Lucy had ever been in the hands of such a being, but after he had gone to the trouble to read to her after she had talked about how she wished she could see his library, it was hard to hate him. In many ways he had been, considerate, kind and polite. There were certainly far worse people to be her jailers. In that instant all the terrors that she knew Jonathan had experienced seemed to fade from her mind. Perhaps his imprisonment of her really was valid. She could not truly understand things from his perspective, after all.
And so, that night, she looked forward to the Count's visit.
Once she had thanked him for the food she asked, trying to make pleasant conversation, "Did you family insist that you learn about such literature when you were a child?"
For a moment she wasn't sure that he would answer such a personal question, but he did. "To a certain extent, though much of what I know of literature and other languages was learned later on in life, when I had more leisure to study. Of course, I had very little formal education past the age of perhaps eleven."
It was hard to imagine the Count as ever having been a child. "If this is not prying, may I ask why it was at that age when you stopped receiving formal education?"
The Count's voice was surprisingly flat, as though what he talked about was something that had distanced himself from. "At that age, by necessity, my younger brother and I were sent as hostages to Mehmed II, then ruler of the Turks."
It was even harder to imagine him, a scared and frightened child, sent to an enemy county. "Oh. I'm sorry." She said, feeling inadequate.
This time he sounded quite nonchalant. "There is no need for that. Those years were invaluable for me, as without them I would have not known half so well why it is so important to keep your country free. From them I also learned how to control a country, and how much it mattered to me that I remain free."
She spoke quietly, speaking words she thought she would never say. "You are a good man, at heart. I don't think you chose to live this life. I think that you were never given a chance to live a good and moral life."
She had forgotten who it was she was speaking to, that he was holding her prisoner as he had held Jonathan before her, that he had turned Lucy into a demon, and remembered only that he brought her food and read to her. When her world consisted of her single room and the voice and hands from outside of it, she was desperate for someone to trust.
"You're a naïve fool." The Count's voice was icy, almost as though she had offended him with her assumptions.
"I just –"
But he was firm as he cut her off. "Go to sleep, Mina."
It was the first time he had used her name.
The next night, the door was opened, slowly, creaking slightly on its old hinges as though the very stones of the castle understand how momentous an occasion it was for Mina. She looked at the Count carefully as he stepped inside her cell, and to her his black clothing seemed somber rather than intimidating, his nose aquiline rather than beaky, his eyes wise rather than cruel. She smiled upon seeing him as she would have smiled upon seeing her husband himself, and at even his simple words "Follow me." she grabbed his hand – which was so like Jonathan's own – as she would have grabbed Jonathan's, without thinking of whether or not it was proper or fitting. His fingers were far colder than Jonathan's, but she didn't care, and followed him up the long, winding staircase, through many stone corridors, each just like the last, and into a room lined with books, most of them in Latin or Romanian, but many in English as well. "I decided that I could trust you enough to allow you to come here as you had wished to." He said almost kindly, and she smiled at him and said, "Thank you."
She walked to the nearest shelf and ran her fingers over the spines of the one of the books, relieved to feel the sensation of something other than cloth and metal and stone against her fingers. When the Count put his hands on her shoulder and moved her hair to one side of her neck she leaned into his touch.
She didn't know what was happening until she felt his fangs in her neck, and by then it was only a few seconds before the life left her and she fell to the ground.
The Count didn't spare her a second glance. Jonathan did not seem likely to come for her if he had not done so after so many nights, and he needed blood. And, after all, she wasn't beautiful enough for him to make her one of his brides.