Horrified and chilled to the bone, they stood at the entrance of the cemetery Mary herself had been kidnapped from forty years ago in New Orleans. Simon held a jacket around her shoulders, and they made their way within, slowly and carefully.

When they were completely immersed in crypts and stone coffins, they heard a swishing of fabric and mist drifted around their feet. They realized they were completely lost, and he was nearby.

"Oh, Mary. My rebellious Mary," his voice spoke, half laughing. "Be happy. She isn't dead."

The woman set her jaw, determined not to show weakness. "Then where is she?"

He appeared crouching on a crypt not twenty feet in front of them, smirking. "Tell you what; you find her, you can have her back, completely unharmed."

Simon began looking down the aisles of sarcophagi, but Mary gave Dracula a strange eye. Finally, she spoke. "We're not going to find her, are we? You're playing a game with us."

He threw back his head and laughed. "Ah, so you aren't as foolish as once I thought. Yes, you'll never find her on your own. Just as you'll never live to see another sunrise. This is where it ends."

Suddenly he was on the ground and clutching Simon by his elderly throat. Weak with age and frailty, Simon quickly suffocated and fell to earth, asphyxiated. Mary cried out in rage, mourning him.

But she wasn't given much time, because in an instant, the demon was in front of her, tearing open the old chest wound through her brown dress. Blood flowed and she collapsed of pain and exhaustion. Unable to move, she looked up at his towering figure, whimpering a bit in misery.

"I told you you'd live to see this. Enjoy it; every moment your eyes are open means another moment alive."

She watched as he strode over to a large above-ground crypt and slammed his hand into the stone wall. Pulling off some decrepit bricks, he grasped something within and suddenly yanked out the body of Mercy. The girl lay on the ground, crying out of fear and pain.

He forcibly held her down and in front of the girl's mother and the sight of God, he raped her. Right there, on the filthy ground, in the middle of a cemetery and in the presence of Simon's dead body and wounded Mary, he took full advantage of Mercy and when he was done, stood and stared down at the pitiful thing that once was a respectable nun. She was sobbing and trying to claw her way away, her hair wild and tousled and her eyes full and overflowing with tears, but he put a foot on the hem of her mud-stained dress and held her there. She slipped in the mud and her face fell into the dirt and grass, where she wept quietly mixing her tears with the old rain.

"What do you think, Mary mine?" he demanded. "Is this what you wanted? You could have killed her, you know. You could have spared yourself the pain of having your heart torn out and watching your daughter be torn apart, spiritually and physically. But you wanted to keep her. Didn't give a damn about what could have happened to her.

"This must have been what you wanted."

Mary cried, looking to the ground and clenching her eyes to banish the sight. "No, no! Never…"

"Oh, Mary," he soothed, suddenly in front of her and wiping away her tears. "Don't cry. Know that I won't ever kill her. She needs to carry on the blood. She's going to give me something I've wanted since I first saw you. She's going to bear me a child."

Mary's heart froze. No!

"The first of a race in my image. She's going to be the mother of the second Adam or Eve. Can't you see? A world without death or age or pain. So don't cry for her. Weep because you could have been her, and she could have been Eve."

Mary clutched her stomach in the blazing agony and clenched her teeth. All of it was her fault; all of it. She was weak; she had damned her daughter to this sordid disgrace. And there lay the product of her pride; a whimpering, violated nineteen-year-old nun who never knew her own parents and was now probably pregnant with the offspring of a monster.

All of it was her fault.

Of course it is, Mary. He even told you what he'd do, and you'd never imagined this, and you did nothing to stop it save trust in a church.

Nothing would stop him.

You can't do anything.

Mary's eyes failed her and she felt an increasing sense of peace, of all things. Her heart was heavy, but somehow she knew it was almost over, even if it was just beginning. Soon she wouldn't have to feel the guilt, or the pain, or the disgrace.

Soon, she'd be dead.

She heard him only inches away, watching silently as she died slow. His breath was warm on her face, and she took slight comfort in it. At least she didn't have to go freezing.

She was too old for this.

Mercy lay moaning on the dirty ground. Her face was covered in streaks of mud and grass, and her dress was torn around the chest area and she was bleeding from several different spots.

Half an hour ago, she'd been a different person. Now, she felt less than human. She felt like a thing, like a worm that was lower than the ground she lay on.

Her father lay dead only twenty feet away, is throat collapsed. Her mother might be dead or dying from a huge gaping hole in her chest. And she felt like she was suffocating in her own tears.

"Mercy, princess. Stop your weeping," the man placated. "They were extra baggage and useless to you. You lived for almost twenty years without them; you can get along now."

She dug her fingernails into the grass and tried to pull herself up; her defiled self moving only a fraction of an inch on her own strength. Gritting her teeth, she summoned all the power she had in her and sat up, gripping her freezing upper arms and feeling warm, salty tears wash her face.

"Oh, this is perfect," he ridiculed, grinning. "This is as I saw it. Although I never knew what kind of face to give you, be it your mother's or a completely new one."

He strode over and picked her up. She stood unsteadily on her own two feet, unable to break away from his iron grip. And as she tried to keep her own balance, he leaned over and actually licked the tears off her face.

"Cry some more, Mercy. The tears of the righteous are like wine to me."

Instead, getting up her gall, she reared back and spit in his face. "Hell-spawn!"

He scowled and wiped his face. "You'll come to see me in a new light in time. That's all you've got now, anyway."

"I'll kill myself before I let you have whatever antichrist is growing in my stomach."

"I'll never let you."

"Stop me."

In an instant, she kicked up hard and took him in the gut. As he stepped back from the momentum, she spun on her heels and dipped down, picking up a sliver of broken brick. She'd just touched the point to her throat, bringing a drop of blood to the surface, when he yanked the weapon out of her hands, shoving her hard against a tombstone.

"Trust me, Mercy. You won't be able to. For the next nine months, you are guaranteed to live," he snarled.

But a weird glint was in her eye. He peered deep within them, trying to decipher what it meant, when suddenly he felt something warm blossoming on his chest. He looked down and saw that a huge spot of blood was staining his shirt, coming from a gaping hole in her chest.

In his blind fury, he'd slammed her up against the broken wall of the crypt, and one of the steel braces that reinforced the side had been bent sideways when he'd torn it apart. This steel brace was now impaling her through her chest.

"And guess what?" she whispered calmly and cruelly at him as he stared at the wound in shock.

"You played with us too much, too long."

He spun around to see the first light of dawn sparkling over the endless tombstones. As it sizzled his skin, he realized his dust would mingle with that of the cemetery's dirt. No one would bleed here, he knew. He would never be reanimated.

"Good morning, Dracula."