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"This will work better if you relax."
Dracula couldn't help the suggestive smirk that pulled at his lips, his eyebrows waggling suggestively as Agatha tutted and smacked his arm.
"Vicious Captain Helsing, that's not how you get someone in the mood to relax."
"With you it might work." Agatha retorted, shooting him a shit eating grin of her own.
"Hmmmmmmm you know it just might…"
Pushing off the hands that had found their way onto her backside, Agatha tried to be stern with him, this was meant to be taken seriously. "We are not here to have sex."
"You might not be…"
"Neither of us are here to have sex." Agatha reiterated. "We are here to find out what really happened that night. Now I need you to relax, close your eyes and find a comfortable position."
"Oh, I find most positions comfortable."
"Dracula!"
Head tilting Dracula watched her amused, next to Agatha smiling at him, Agatha frowning at him in frustration was his favourite expression. "Agatha dearest when are you going to call me by my first name?"
That was not a retort that Agatha had been expected and it flustered her somewhat. Obviously, Dracula had a first name, it was just in her head he had always been Dracula or more formally The Count. Calling him by his first name was an intimacy he had never offered before, and if she could still blush, Agatha knew her cheeks would be bright red.
"I…you…Well you never offered." Agatha was on the defensive, smacking away the hand that reached for her chin as she hid her flustered expression from him.
"Well I think perhaps its time. I mean some people might say we are rushing things, we have only had a lot of sex, only declared our love for one another…at least I think we have…"
"Honestly boys."
"Anyway, since you're about to go plundering my brain." Dracula teased, finally catching her chin and lifting her gaze back up to meet his own. "I think it would be ok if you called me Vlad."
"Will it get you to cooperate?"
"It couldn't hurt to try?"
"Fine then, Vlad…" Agatha paused the name sounding weird on her tongue. "Please lay down and close your eyes."
"Yes Ma'am." Dracula lay down on the bed, offering Agatha his hand.
Accepting it Agatha settled down next to him, placing her other hand on his chin and turning his face towards her, pressing their foreheads together, she chose to ignore Dracula's smile or the way his forehead crinkled against hers when he did. When he rubbed his nose against hers and tried to kiss her, Agatha had no choice but to lay her free hand over his mouth.
"Concentrate, take us back to the club first."
Sighing Dracula closed his eyes and reluctantly did as she asked. It was strange at first, he could feel Agatha there, not just her physical presence which was as always hard to ignore, but the sudden extra awareness of her. He tried his best to do as she asked, pictured the club as it was when they arrived.
Crowded, the mortal youngsters drinking and dancing and groping each other in public. Dracula could feel the lingering presence of Gilles de Rais in his peripheral vision, but he chose not to look at him. Instead he took the stairs up to the balcony area, he had been too late to secure a private booth, but the view was best from up here, and this was where they had bumped into Sir Richard.
Sir Richard yes focus on him.
Agatha's instructions were less like he could hear her voice and more like he could feel her intent.
"You know this would be a lot easier if you were just here." Dracula huffed, imaging for himself the last time Agatha and he had been at a club and the dress she had worn for him.
"I did not wear it for you." Now he could hear her, opening his eyes Dracula beamed to find Agatha here with him and wearing his dress.
"Yes, you did, we both know you did." Dracula retorted, his eyes raking up and down her lovely long legs. "We really need to find an occasion to break that old thing out again, or you could just start wearing it around the apartment…"
"Concentrate on Sir Richard." Agatha prompted. Relieved when Dracula stopped flirting for a moment to actually do as she asked.
"Count Dracula, why it has been years." A familiar voice suddenly interrupted them, and Dracula shot Agatha a long-suffering look before turning back to greet Sir Richard as he had that night at the club.
"Excellent…" Agatha muttered mainly to herself, she didn't care to concentrate on the conversation, she was concentrating on Sir Richard.
It was a difficult skill to master, and one that Agatha didn't have as much experience with as she would like, but she found if she focused long enough on a memory of recent kill, then it was almost like they could invoke the imprint of that soul to re-join them. Dracula carried strong memories of Sir Richard before the part of the night that was all blurred, and if he had killed or at least drank from him then Agatha should be able to…
"What is happening…where am I?" Sir Richard suddenly exclaimed, deviating from the carefully scripted recreation of the night, as Dracula remembered it.
No one else in the party seemed to notice the deviation, they simply carried on drinking and talking as before.
"You…You!" Sir Richard suddenly seemed terrified as he caught sight of Count Dracula. "You murderer!"
"Well I guess that answers that question." Dracula deadpanned, turning to Agatha who was focused on Sir Richard, perhaps holding him here, perhaps processing what he was saying. "Agatha, I told you this was pointless."
"Nothing is pointless." Agatha insisted, dismissing Dracula and approaching a shaking Sir Richard, who was exploring his neck like he couldn't believe it hadn't been severed. "Sir Richard, I don't know if you remember me but…"
"Of course, I remember you, your one of those monsters too." Sir Richard panicked. "Well I don't know what game you people are playing but it is a sick one."
"My name is Agatha Van Helsing and it is very important you listen to me." Agatha pushed onward. "I am here because I need to find out what happened to you after you left the club and went back to that apartment. I need you to provide me with your account of the evening."
"My account, why would you need my account?"
"Our records are a little vague, I need to understand so that the appropriate guilty parties can be charged." Agatha did her best to be vague herself, forcing herself to ignore Dracula's scoff, and focus solely on Sir Richard. "I am going to take your hand, all you will need to do is think about what happened."
Amazingly Sir Richard accepted the hand she offered. His hand was sweaty and trembling and Agatha held on tight, focusing on that strengthened link, causing the room around them to spin and reform.
"What the hell…"
"Concentrate Sir Richard. Remember how the party started from your perspective."
The group watched as the room around them began to fill with people. There were pretty young waiters and waitresses wearing nothing but black silk masks, carrying trays that contained flutes of champagne or others that had neatly laid out lines of cocaine. The guests were dressed like they had descended from a strange mixture of places, some were dressed like they had came from opening night at the opera, others like they had arrived straight from a club. All looked wealthy, or if not wealthy, beautiful enough to make up for it.
"Well this all looks…" Agatha paused as she tried to find a word that would fit, normal certainly wasn't right, as her definition of normal did not involve a man in black tie with his trousers down around his ankles being spanked by a very tall woman in spandex.
"Not murderous." She settled on, shooting Dracula a disturbed look, amused that even he looked a little bashful at having been caught attending this sort of party.
"Do you remember when things started to get strange?" Agatha asked Sir Richard, who suddenly paled and pointed behind her.
Agatha turned just in time to see Dracula, or Sir Richard's conjuring of Dracula rip the throat out of a young man, who was dressed only in a pair of leather trousers.
At first there was a stunned silence as Dracula began to feed, then the screaming began, and everyone tried to run…only to find the door blocked by a grinning Baron De Rais. He had retrieved one of the blunted weapons used by one of the dominatrix's. Normally not enough to do enough damage, in the hands of a vampire they could cause plenty of damage.
Something Sir Richard found as he took one blunted blade to the stomach. Staggering back as he held in his bowels, he grasped for someone to help, only to encounter the unhinged bloody smile of a vampire, his scream cut off as Dracula sank his teeth into his throat. Drinking only for a few moments before dropping a dying Sir Richard to the floor and moving on to another victim.
Gasping out of his ripped-out throat, bleeding out of his stomach, Sir Richard could only stare up at the ceiling, his vision blocked out by the grinning blooded smile of Baron de Rais who a moment later severed his head.
"Well I think we have seen more than enough."
Dracula had been watching quietly from the back of the room, it was he had always feared, he had started it, and seemed to have taken absolute glee in doing so.
"No..."
"Agatha be reasonable we know enough."
"No, we know how it ended, we still don't know how it started." Agatha insisted, stubbornly clinging on even when Dracula tried to push her out. "Just one more, let me try one more, then we can stop I promise."
"You are not going to make me the good guy, you know that don't you?"
"Yes, that I know." Agatha conceded, she couldn't pretend that seeing this bloodshed and seeing Dracula unhinged like that hadn't unsettled her. This was not the man she shared her bed with, not the one who liked to read poetry in his native language to her, not the man tickled and teased her and told her he loved her; and yet it was him.
"Agatha please we need to leave."
"Just one more, the first one." Agatha insisted, striding over to the body of the half-naked young man.
Sinking to her knees she pressed her hands to his chest, her fingers dripping in his blood as she concentrated on him. It was harder than with Sir Richard, she had never met him, never seen anything more than a mirror of Sir Richard's memories of him. Yet under his hands he became more solid, his features became more defined, his eyes were noticeably blue, and they were staring up at Agatha, not quite alive but no longer dead.
"Hello I'm Agatha." She tried but the almost comatose young man blinked up at her. "I need you to show me what happened."
Agatha had to help drag him back to his feet. She wasn't sure if it were her skills, or if the memory in Dracula's blood was corrupted in some way, but unlike Sir Richard who was solid and had a recognisable personality, this young man was almost ghostlike. As though Dracula hadn't gained a successful read of him when he absorbed his blood.
Still Agatha persisted, connecting as best she could, directing the young man by will alone, and the around them the scene changed. Now blurry, and oddly coloured, the music seemed strangely louder. It was like stepping through a looking glass.
There was a pretty girl he was having a fumble with, even though it looked like she had a dozen eyes, he was happy and alive and enjoying himself. Then there was a blur of a man…he was holding his shoulder and tugging him away. There was a drink being pressed into his hand, it was red and spiced and slightly warm. He had to drink it, the man was most insistent on him drinking it, so he drank it. A few moments later it was like his blood was on fire, his cock was so hard, and the man had his hand down his trousers fondling him.
He tried to get away…but his body was so sluggish…then a popper was cracked under his nose and everything sped up, the room around them getting blurred, people bouncing and crashing into him, he wanted to scratch his skin off, and he began to claw at it, gouging long lines into his skin, blood gushing up under his fingernails. Until he felt a sudden push in his back, and he was falling…falling…until a tall dark man caught him…and then there was pain and screaming…and peace…finally peace.
"Well fuck me." Dracula had watched in mute astonishment and admiration, unwilling to speak before lest he damage Agatha's concentration.
It had been difficult to follow at times, the drug induced recollections were jarring, and it was no wonder that Dracula's own memory had been affected, by his judgement by the time of his death, this young man had been on at least three different types of drugs.
"Vlad you know what this means." Agatha was still crouched down next to the young victim, yet her gaze wasn't on him, nor even on the dark blur that was the Dracula of his memories.
Her gaze was looking past, at the man who had forced the drink, the popper and the molestation on this poor boy, the same man who had pushed this drugged up, and bleeding victim straight into Dracula's path. Oh, the image was blurred, but for those who knew him, it was obvious who the real mastermind behind this massacre was.
"Gilles de Rais." Dracula finished for her, growling as he severed the connection and forced them back roughly into the real world. Not caring that his own head was banging right now.
"I'm going to kill him. I swear it Agatha."
For a moment Agatha struggled to think over her own headache which was far more acute, she could barely lift her head from the pillow, let alone stop a rampaging Dracula.
"And I am going to help you." She managed weakly, jarring Dracula out of his angry pacing.
"Dearest…"
"No, I am deadly serious. I am helping Vlad, it was not just you he was trying to ruin here, but our entire clan with you. So, you are going to let me help, we are going to plan this carefully."
"But we are going to kill him?" Dracula clarified, still amazed to hear Agatha Van Helsing wanted anyone dead, even Baron de Rais.
"Yes together." Agatha insisted, reaching out for him, relieved when Dracula immediately returned to her side. "We are going to make him pay for hurting our family."
Family…when Agatha said it like that Dracula couldn't help but grin, fangs prominent; with his clan behind him Gilles de Rais had better start praying, because there was nothing in this world that could stop Count Dracula now.
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End of part 2