Chapter 13: An Explanation Owed

'Well, my story's the longest,' Crina said. 'So I'll go last.'

Vasilli nodded. 'I better start. I was the only surviving child of the Count and Countess Karnstein in Styria – which, of course, is now a part of Austria. I was born in 1495. My father died on a battlefield when I was quite young. I immediately inherited his property, his titles, and his fortune. My mother, Mircalla as she was known then, took control of it all, though, until I was old enough to know how to handle it.'

'That wouldn't have made the toff's happy,' Newkirk remarked.

'Actually, most of them were all right with it,' Vasilli said. 'On the grounds that she was only holding the bag until I was old enough not to treat said bag like a toy. There were, however, a number of suitors who wanted to marry my mother for what was my inheritance. Mother knew this, of course, and turned them all away. I remember to one man she said, "I will not allow my son's inheritance to be stolen out from under him". And I remember that because that particular suitor reacted badly.'

'The Forbidden Curse?' Carter asked.

'Oh, yeah,' Vasilli said. 'My mother's closest confidante was her handmaiden. The poor woman was raped and murdered in front of her.' The dhampir then popped open his collar and pulled it down to show a thin white line that travelled right across his throat. 'Then they did this to me to get my blood and forced my mother to drink it before cutting her throat too. She woke up as a Cursed Vampire.'

'All before you were old enough to inherit?' Tiger asked.

'I was 11,' Vasilli said. 'I woke up 90 years later as a dhampir.'

'How?' Hogan asked.

'The Forbidden Curse tends to self-resolve,' Crina said. 'The perpetrators are either forced to repent or they are destroyed, and everything that is taken from the victim is returned. Sometimes those people killed in the process are reborn and sometimes, as with us, the vampiric person's genetic material finds its way into our graves and revives us as half-vampires.'

'How long this takes greatly depends on who and what the perpetrators are,' Varney added.

'In our case,' Vasilli said, 'by which I mean my mother's and mine, it ended when the family line of that jilted suitor went extinct. Of course, there was still a story told of my mother. You probably know her…as Carmilla.'

It amused Hogan to see all of his men jump at the name.

'Carmilla?' Hogan asked as he gently tugged Tiger around to sit next to him. She looked as amused as he felt. 'Wasn't she that one that was meant to…swing the other way?' And she was actually a widow. Interesting.

Vasilli chuckled. 'A misconception on the part of Monsieur Le Fanu. When my mother turned people into vampires, she preferred to turn women because of a variety of reasons – none of which had anything to do with sex. The Victorians were just monumentally repressed.'

Hogan smirked. 'And what happened after your mother's curse was resolved?'

'Oh, my mother turned back into a human and lived out the rest of her natural life in Austria,' Vasilli said. 'And all of her created vampires turned to dust. The same thing happens to every vampire whose Curse is resolved.' He glanced around. 'All right. Who's next?'

Varney pulled out a coin. 'Hey, Walt. Heads or tails?'

'Tails.'

Varney flicked the coin. 'Heads. My turn, I guess.'

'Oh, goody!' Newkirk chuckled. 'The truth behind the old penny dreadful then?'

'If you like,' Varney said. 'But I'm afraid Varney the Vampire wasn't actually active for that long. I was two when the English Civil War broke out. My father was a Cavalier solider – one of the best the Royalists had. He was so good, in fact, that the Roundheads broke into our home, killed all of our household staff, and enacted the Forbidden Curse on him. My mother was the confidante and I was the sacrificial goat, so to speak.' He tapped over his heart. 'Wilson asked me about a scar I have here. I told him it was a childhood injury.'

'Not exactly a lie,' LeBeau pointed out.

'Let me guess.' Hogan frowned. 'That's where they took the blood from you?'

Varney nodded. 'I woke up as a dhampir two years later. My father's curse was resolved when the Commonwealth of England collapsed and Charles II came to the throne. He became human again in 1660…1661. As far as we know, he spent the absolute least amount of time as a vampire, but the stories of him persisted.'

Newkirk nodded. 'And that's how we got the penny dreadfuls.'

'Right.' Varney grinned at the Scotsman. 'Your turn, Walt.'

'All right.' Walt ran a hand through his hair. 'Well, I was born in 1709. In 1722, a cousin of mine asked my father for a substantial loan. There are two things about this cousin. He was a favourite in the family – why escapes me – and he was notorious for wasting the money he was loaned and never even making an effort to return it.'

Hogan pulled a face. 'Don't tell me!'

'Yes,' Walt said. 'My father turned him down cold, and our entire family decided to retaliate by placing the Forbidden Curse on him.' He nodded to Varney. 'Another case of the wife being the confidante and the son being the sacrificial lamb.' He pulled a sleeve up. 'They just bled me out.'

'How long did it take you to come back?' Newkirk asked.

'Not until 1745,' Walt said. 'And then my father's curse wasn't resolved until 1838. The story you'd know would be The Vampyre by Polidori. The narrator in that story was based on a member of our own family. In 1838, the family patriarch finally worked out why the family was being haunted by us.'

Crina chuckled. 'It was the only time, that we're aware of, that the perpetrators of the Curse actually lived through the resolution.'

Walt nodded. 'It's called the Pilgrimage of Penance. First the family patriarch had to denounce what was done to us and then the whole family had to go on a long and ritualistic trip to pay penance. It killed 95% of the family, but it lifted the Curse. And the Ruthven family does still exist.'

'So, in other words,' Kinch said, 'if you use the Curse and you want to live, you have to go on a very long and lethal walk.'

'Pretty much,' Crina said.

'So, how did the Nazis get wind of this?' Hogan asked. 'Apart from the Roundheads, the people who've used it before have all been small or localised groups. Singular families. The Roundheads might have made records of it but they were also religious zealots. I'd think someone in there would destroy their records of the Curse.'

'They did,' Varney said. 'It was unholy and vulgar. Of course Cromwell's Puritans could never be seen having engaged in that sort of thing.'

'So the Nazis should have had no way of getting their hands on the notes for this. Were there stray records hanging around some place? Or just surviving records?'

'Well, the Nazis obviously got their records from England,' Varney said. 'I'm 99% sure they had an insider there.'

'And the ones the Nazis were reading were clearly and plainly written in English,' Walt added.

'But they weren't Puritan records,' Vasilli said.

'I should say not,' Walt said. 'The English was far too contemporary. It probably originally belonged to the Ordo Draco.'

'The what?' Carter asked.

'I believe this is your story, Crina.' Vasilli grinned. 'Crina has the longest story because her father was a vampire the longest – 400 years.'

'Ordo Draco,' Crina said, 'translates into Order of the Dragon.'

Newkirk clicked. 'Dracula.'

Crina chuckled. 'Worked that one out, did you? Yes, my father was Dracula. He died about ten years ago.'

'So it was a lie,' Hogan said. 'You weren't actually in France visiting your brother.'

'No,' Crina said. 'I was actually in England visiting my mother.'

'Eh?' Newkirk said.

'Yeah,' Varney said. 'When her mother was reborn, she was reborn in England. She's quite old by now, of course. Crina spent some time masquerading as an Englishwoman while her father's Curse was resolving, so she can do a British accent like nobody's business.'

Crina promptly dropped her natural accent and adopted an upper class British accent – the same kind Varney had. 'But only this one.' She gestured to the man in question. 'Charlie taught me.'

There were chuckles in the room.

'But, seriously,' Crina returned to her natural accent, 'my story starts before I was even born. You see, my parents were betrothed as children. Toward that end, they spent a lot of time together so that, even if they never liked each other, they would learn function around each other. Fortunately, they fell in love. But, if you're familiar with the story of Vlad III, you know that when my father was 13, his father handed him and my Uncle Radu over to the Ottomans to get support from the Turks.'

'Yeah, I've made a small study of this bit as a kid,' Kinch said. 'That's where he learned about all their tactics.'

'Right.' Crina took a deep breath. 'When my grandfather and Uncle Mirnea died, my father was sent back to rule Wallachia but, in an effort to secure his loyalty, the Sultan forced my father to marry a Turkish woman, despite his betrothal to my mother.'

There was a stunned silence in the room.

AN: If you're familiar with NBC's sadly short-lived Dracula...the next chapter is where the characters and story are finally addressed.