Chapter Two

Agatha straightened slightly and let her hands fall to her sides as the blonde woman came to a stop a few feet away but continued to stare wordlessly at her through the glass wall. A third pulse rate also made its way through the barrier, as steady and calm as the two men with rifles, reminding Agatha of both her hunger and that sound was somehow able to pass through the thick glass. Never one to back down, not even in the face of the devil, she cautiously broke the silence, "I did not believe my appearance to be quite so frightful."

The shorter woman slowly shook her head, the surprise that had inhabited her features fading though she continued to stare at Agatha with some semblance of fascination. She took another step towards the glass cage and offered an apologetic smile, "Forgive me for staring. It's just not every day you get to meet a vampire. But I'm sure you understand what that's like, Sister Agatha?"

If she wasn't already a member of the undead, Agatha was sure that a cold shiver would have run down her spine at the mention of her name. Not only did they know what she was, they also knew exactly who she was. Or who she had once been, anyway. In life, she had not been a very good nun; in un-death, she no longer felt entitled to claim even that much. A woman who could not enter a church, or read the Bible, or flinched at the sign of the cross was not a nun; Mother Superior would have been very particular about that. "I think a simple 'Agatha' will suffice given the circumstances. Now, who are you? And where am I?"

"You can call me Bloxham. Everyone here does," the other woman replied easily but her eyes were still busily scrutinising her prisoner. "I'm sure you have many questions, Agatha. I will try to answer them if I can. I have some of my own, too but I'll go first: you're in Whitby, England and this is the Jonathan Harker Foundation. You met Jonathan, didn't you? His fiancee established this Foundation in his memory. I understand that you met her as well?"

"Mina Murray," Agatha supplied, her apprehension slowly building. Most of that was due to being held prisoner but the memory of her time with Mina only added to her growing disquiet. So many people had died that night at the convent because of her, because she'd thought that she was smarter than the snarling beast she had lured to their gates, but she'd made sure that Mina, at least, had survived. It had been a small balm to her soul even as Dracula had feasted upon it. But protecting Mina had somehow led to her incarceration here and she couldn't quite fathom how. Her captor seemed to recognise her confusion.

"There's a lot to take in but I'll try to explain," Bloxham soothed. "The morning after the slaughter in your convent, Mina went back there, expecting to find your body amongst your sisters'. You were already gone, along with Count Dracula, but she did manage to rescue your manuscripts and even traced the Count's movements to a ship that had set sail for England. By the time she made it home the Demeter had already sunk off the coast of Whitby but she found the survivors and learnt what she could of the harrowing journey they had taken. When she received her inheritance she established the Foundation with the sole purpose of stopping Count Dracula should he step foot on this island."

Agatha stared wordlessly at her oddly named captor, slowly digesting the information she had just been fed. Thoughts of holding any kind of advantage over her captors were slowly abandoned; if Mina had her manuscripts and the accounts of the two men who'd managed to flee from the Demeter then there was probably very little that Agatha could share with them that they did not already know. And she did believe that there was at least some truth to the story she'd been told.

Mina had stated that she would never love another so what better for the young woman to focus her time, energy and money on than the very monster that had taken Jonathan away from her? But this Foundation, the very place in which Agatha was now trapped, would have taken time to establish; certainly more time than the four weeks she had spent on board the Demeter. "How long?" Her voice came out weaker than she'd intended so she reiterated and elaborated the question with a firmer tone, "How long have I been in the water?"

"You've been down there for a very long time, I'm afraid," the blonde woman smiled. "You were in some kind of coma or perhaps it's a form of stasis; we're really not sure. But it's been one hundred and twenty-three years since the Demeter sank."

The passing of so much time probably should have hit her harder than it did but she'd always taken a more hardheaded approach to life than most people. And all she'd left behind in the nineteenth century were her dead sisters and a few estranged family members. She was more interested in how she could have survived at the bottom of the sea for so long than dwelling in sentimentality over the lost years. Vampires needed a bed of native soil upon which to sleep and rejuvenate; Count Dracula had made arrangements for fifty boxes of such soil to be shipped to England and had even slept on a cabin bed filled with earth. She'd been in the water, hundreds of miles from Holland and for more than a century with no ill-effects.

Like much of the vampire lore she'd researched, it did not make a great deal of sense. It was vexing but she took some small comfort in the fact that the people holding her did not seem to understand the mechanics of her prolonged sleep, either. She wondered if Count Dracula himself even knew how it worked but then quickly tucked that thought away for later consideration because it brought to mind a more pressing question that needed answering. "And what of Count Dracula?"

"Oh, we found him a few months ago," Bloxham said, a little too flippantly. "He was much closer to the Demeter than you were. But he's a slippery bastard, isn't he?"

"He escaped," Agatha frowned, her hands curling into fists until her nails pressed into her skin. She had blown up an entire ship to stop Dracula, and herself, from spreading the foul contagion of the vampire and these people had apparently set out with the intention of undoing all of her good work. But her displeasure wasn't limited only to their actions; it included the flutters that had briefly danced inside her upon hearing that Dracula was out there, somewhere, and not at the bottom of the sea. She attributed it to the thrill of the chase even though she was quite clearly trapped here and then felt guilty for doing so; innocent people would be killed, were probably being drained of blood right now, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Bloxham shrugged indifferently but her account of Dracula's escape that followed gave away an underlying frustration, "There was a… legal complication. The Foundation spent decades looking for Count Dracula, and millions of pounds building all of this to contain him, and he just walked out of here in less than a bloody day! So I had to come up with a 'Plan B', which is you, Agatha. But trust me: we are not going to make the same mistakes with you. I even managed to not lose a thumb this time."

Agatha stared in horror at both the hand Bloxham was now holding up, the thumb clearly missing and the wound healed, and the woman's attempt at humour. Unfortunately, her stomach made the connection between the lost appendage and food, contracting in response but she continued to ignore the pangs of hunger. She had spent her adult life successfully denying herself all forms of temptation and she would do so again.

The only indulgence she had ever allowed herself, outside of a dream, had been her fascination with everything dark and evil, and that had ultimately led to her current predicament. She would not do that again. "I am not like him," she growled at Bloxham, who was tucking her mauled hand behind her back once more. "You've wasted your time on me when you should have been looking for Dracula!"

"Don't worry. We know exactly where Count Dracula is," the blonde woman grinned triumphantly. "And now we have a way to get him back to the Foundation."

"Me?"

Bloxham nodded in response. "We know that he travelled hundreds of miles, in the body of a wolf, to find Jonathan Harker. To claim his bride. Dracula will do the same thing for you although, quite frankly, I hope he uses a car this time. When he comes back, we'll have you both. Two vampires for the price of one."

A soft snort escaped at the suggestion she was to be the honey in the trap. Dracula might be arrogant enough to try and claim her as his property, and he'd probably enjoy being able to taunt her once more, but she was certainly not bride material. As an educated and opinionated woman she never really had been. She would never bend to Dracula's will and he would end her existence, probably in a very short amount of time.

That wasn't an entirely unattractive outcome to her but the downside was that there would be no-one left to stop Count Dracula. This Foundation may well endeavour to capture and contain Dracula but they'd already failed in that venture; she did not have much confidence in their ability to restrain him indefinitely - and their belief that her presence would somehow assist them to do this was ridiculous. She had to make them understand that. "Dracula's brides mean very little to him, you must know that? He travelled all that way for Mr Harker and then ended the poor man's existence that very same night. He'll do the same to me."

"Then we'd still have the best of the vampires," Bloxham retorted a little defensively. She edged a little closer to the glass wall and softened her tone, "But I really don't think that will happen. Not to you. My understanding of that night in the convent is that Count Dracula destroyed Jonathan Harker so he could get to you. And then he kept you alive for weeks after that."

"Dracula was always going to kill me," Agatha protested again, unsure how to get through to her captor just how dangerous the Count really was and how unimportant she was to him. Yes, they had talked and played chess within his opiate-induced dream world, and then talked some more on the deck of the Demeter, but she'd been under no illusion that she was anything more than his newest toy, to be broken and thrown away like all the others before her. "He just enjoyed taking his time."

"I don't doubt that there's some truth to that but you weren't there when he woke up, Agatha. The first word he uttered was your name."

It sounded unlikely and yet the other woman seemed so confident in her words that Agatha was inclined to believe it was true. Or had some truth to it. The only explanation she could come up with was that her face was the last thing he'd seen, and her voice the last he'd heard, on board the Demeter. But these people were naive, or just plain stupid, if they thought she would be enough to exert any control over Dracula. "He'll know this is a trap," she warned, trying one last time to prepare these people for the monster that would be coming their way. It went unheeded.

"Probably. But he'll still come and this time he won't get away so easily."