LOVE MY READERS FOR ALL THEIR KIND SUPPORT AND REVIEWS FOR THIS SERIES! MAKES ME INSPIRED TO KEEP GOING. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I APPRECIATE IT!
Go ahead and sell me out and I'll leave your sheet bare
See how I'll leave with every piece of you,
Don't underestimate the things that I will do.
Adele - Rolling in the Deep
It had taken Ileana nearly a week to shake the Count's watchful eye. He was always there. Always watching… Perhaps it was because, after a week had passed, the girl had stopped trying to kill herself. At that point, she realized it would be hopeless; Dracula always stopped her. For some reason, he had little faith that Igor could rebuild the experiment from scratch. Ileana was the only one who had been there from the very beginning, he surmised, and therefore she would be the only one to understand the true nature of her uncle's vision for the Creature. While that was definitely true, Ileana knew, just as Igor did, that the vile hunchbacked man was just as capable as she was to rebuild the monster. Dracula was a liar. She knew, at the very pits of her soul, that she would never trust a single thing he said to her in earnest ever again.
It tore at her, you see. Ileana had wanted to love him so very much before all this, and she wasn't entirely sure if she had, but she was very close to it. And then that dreadful night happened. From that point on, nothing would ever be the same again. All the Count did was take from her. He sapped her emotional energy. He took her uncle. He took her freedom. The man – vampire – seemed to want to give back something. No matter how much she insulted him, shouted at him, or tried to hit him, he never once did more than chide her sarcastically. It was as if he was waiting for her to grow out of some silly phase, and soon she would be better; like he was waiting for her to grow up. How he could even fathom such preposterous things baffled the Englishwoman.
At this point, however, she was numb. Her eyes were dry. Her voice was hoarse. Her face were empty. She couldn't give anything more to him because she had nothing left in her to give. Instead, she moved through the castle listlessly. Ileana stared at the pages of books without really reading anything, and would turn pages arbitrarily. Meals were drab affairs, where she would grab a piece of bread and some form of vegetable or meat, depending on what was in storage, and then eat it without preparing anything to go with it. Igor was left to fend for himself in that respect, but somehow he managed. Not that she cared; the man had been dead to her for a very, very long time.
Dracula wanted her to get better, she knew. Some days he carried on a conversation with himself, as though she replied happily. Other times he brought her gifts, occasionally cooked her a meal… He tried so hard. She was not sure what to call him… Yes, he was supernatural, but what kind of person brutally murdered a man, and then carried on as though nothing had happened? After the Count gave her some peace, and her suicide attempts had stopped (though the ideation remained), Ileana had done some readings on vampires and the folklore from the Count's personal library. He had finally given her permission to enter his chambers. They contained a coffin – for sleeping – and some other amenities, though it was much smaller than she had predicted. Along the southern walls were shelves lined with books, and the only books Ileana actually paid attention to were the ones with information about vampires.
Undead. Demonic. Shape-shifting. Blood-lusting. Immortal. Now that she knew his true self, she was sure she would never see him the same again. Not only was he a killer, he enjoyed it. Vampires enjoyed the hunt. For all she knew, Dracula could have been saving her for his next meal once the Creature was complete. He had reassured her several times that he had no interest in making her his next dinner, but she refused to believe him outright. He was a liar, after all.
A month had passed since the death of her uncle. Three very long weeks of numbness. Would it ever go away? How did people deal with death on a regular basis? Ileana felt lost without him. Some nights she wound up in his study and would sit in his chair until the next morning, not sleeping or thinking, just sitting. It was all terribly unhealthy for her, mentally and physically. Her body, though never too curvy or too slim in the past, was wasting away to nothing. Caloric intake was limited, and she barely slept more than three or four hours at night. Perhaps this might kill her without her trying too hard? Who knew.
"Ileana."
The voice made her skin prickle, but she felt nothing. Her body rejected him, but her mind was oblivious at this point. He found her in her uncle's study, simply sitting at his desk. All the papers had been removed; Dracula had been pouring through them over the past few days, hoping desperately that there had been something left that was usable. So far, the remains yielded nothing of value.
Ileana's eyes raised slowly to him. There were dark purple rings beneath them, she knew. She must have looked awful. However, her appearance was hardly a concern anymore.
"Come," he beckoned her with a wave of his hand, "we start again tonight."
She stared blankly, though knowing full well what he meant. For a moment she just sat there, until he took a step into the office and she was on her feet. He wasn't allowed any further. He wasn't allowed to foul up her one room that was left of her uncle. No. No, he wasn't.
"Have you eaten today?" he inquired. She stepped around him and slipped through the doorway with a nod, trying to keep their bodily proximity as distanced as possible. However, he ruined that and grabbed hold of her arm, and then pushed her against the wall. It was gentle for him, but Ileana winced as her weakened body collided with the solid surface. "What did you have?"
Ileana blinked up at him slowly in response, still silent. He gave her a shake, "Ileana!"
"Food," she forced out eventually as she leaned against the wall. "I'm fine."
"Last time we did this, you vomited," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. "I don't want it to happen again."
"Perhaps I should not handling deceased flesh," she mused stoically, "as it seems to be more of your speciality."
He pursed his lips at her, and then began to pull her down the hallway to the lab. She could already hear some rustling about inside. Igor was there with the body parts he had been sent to retrieve from some nearby graves. It would be the same process as before, sorting the useful pieces from the poor selections, but this time there would be no Victor to rub her back when she felt woozy. No, just a demon and a twisted human to keep her company that evening.
"Some of them are fresh," Igor explained as the pair entered the laboratory, "and some are old. We will have to decide if the decay is too much on the old, I think."
Ileana felt the bile rise to her throat as Igor pulled out the mangled pieces of body parts, casually tossing a forearm down on the operating table. She grasped the side of a nearby table and took a few deep breaths, urging her body to be as neutral as her mind was over all this. Dracula, meanwhile, began examining the body parts callously; just as critical now as he had been when the first batch was brought in over a year ago. While he was no doctor by any means, she had to admit that the man had a very strong working knowledge of the human body, diseases that afflict it, and how everything was connected. Now, he was no Victor Frankenstein, but he knew much more than the regular European noble.
The smell was intolerable, and Ileana had to grab a small rag to hold over her nose. Although she had been working with remains for such a long time at that point, the smell of fresh corpses was something that would never grow on her.
"I have a piece of everything," Igor added, "sometimes doubles. We will see what is best."
"Get your sketchpad, Ileana," Dracula ordered briskly as he examined a hand. "We will need to begin designs quickly if we want to start by the end of this week."
"No," she sighed.
Dracula looked over at her quickly, irritated, and then cocked his head to the side, "Ileana, stop being difficult… I'm in no mood tonight."
"I'm not being difficult," she stated, her voice monotone, "just logical. Why start something we cannot finish?"
Igor cleared his throat awkwardly, and then hurried out of the way when Dracula stepped past him. The vampire arched an eyebrow, and then shook his head, "Victor did everything-"
"Because my uncle was a genius," Ileana noted, "but we are not my uncle."
"You don't give yourself enough credit, my dear," he scoffed. "We have everything that Victor had… but this time we will know what works and what does not. The process should go faster."
"We have… nearly everything," Ileana remarked, somewhat condescendingly.
"What are we missing?"
"You would have noticed that my uncle gave the Creature life," Ileana started, clutching the rag to her body as she sauntered around toward the table of body parts. "He made the heart beat, the blood flow, and the muscles tense… He created all of it."
"Your point?"
She looked back at him, and then blinked, as though he was a little boy, "He devised a brain. A non-human brain made of gears and machinery… How on Earth do you expect Igor or I to come up with something so brilliant? He built it while we were away on our fairy-tale vacation… Don't you remember?"
His eye twitched, and she could hear the bones from the hand that he was holding break as he clenched his hand into a fist. Perhaps it was best not to test his fury, but Ileana couldn't help it.
"So you see," she carried on, her voice only a hint more lively now than it had been, "I see no point in putting all of our resources into something that, once we are ready for it, will be a miserable failure."
He hurled the hand at the wall angrily, and suddenly he was on her, shoving her back into the table. Ileana released a genuine shout in surprise, and her back arched as he bore down on her, a fury in his eyes that she had not seen for some time.
"Why didn't you say anything sooner?" he demanded, "Why did you let me carry on this far?"
She said nothing. However, the corners of her lips quirked upward momentarily, a gesture he caught, and he suddenly clued in on how much she enjoyed watching him flounder about at the thought of failure. His nostrils flared furiously and before she had the time to suspect it, the back of his hand collided sharply with her cheek, knocking her back into the table.
"You will both find a way to make it!" he shouted, his attention momentarily on Igor. The hunched man was cowering by the window. Ileana stared at him from her position at the table, bent over it as her head throbbed. She wanted to roll over and let the cool metal soothe her, but any sudden movement at the moment would be enough to make her weep. Instead, she remained where she was, waiting for her body's sensations to settle.
"Of course, Master," Igor managed finally, his voice a little shaky. "If Doctor Frankenstein could do it, we can do it too…"
Groaning softly, Ileana managed to push herself off the table and gain a steady footing. From there, she promptly turned away from the men in the lab and departed.
"Where are you going?" Dracula snarled in her ear the second she stepped out the door. "We aren't finished."
"I'm going to put something cold on my face," she snapped in return, her cool veneer breaking momentarily, "because I'd like to be able to open my eye tomorrow morning!"
He stopped, his expression as complicated as ever, and he then reached out to take her hand, "Ileana…"
"Don't," she hissed, flinching back from him as though he burned her, "touch me… Not now, not ever again."
He hesitated, but soon retracted his extended hand. Her lip quivered as she gazed at him, but before long she had turned away and nearly flew down the hallway. Perhaps something in the cellar could keep the swelling down.