Chapter 14: Crina's Story

LeBeau was the first speak. 'I bet that made for an awkward reunion.'

'No idea,' Crina said. 'My parents never expounded on that time. All I know is that my father took my mother as his official mistress. My mother gave birth to me, and my father's first wife gave birth to my brother and sister, Mihnea and Zaleska.' She paused. 'My father's first wife had nearly nothing to do with her own children. She preferred to let servants tend to their needs, so my mama ended up filling in the mother role for all three of us.'

Tiger frowned. 'This wouldn't happen to be the wife that threw herself off of the battlements, would it?'

'It would,' Crina said. 'Her death barely registered to us, beyond the fact that it freed our father up to marry my mother. And that's what he did. There was some talk of legitimising me, but if we did it would delegitimize my brother and sister, so we left things as they were. My parents had three more children, and that's where the Ordo Draco comes in. They had served first under my grandfather and then under my father. Despite what they insisted later, they were formed to defend Wallachia against the threat of the Ottoman Turks.'

'And they were as useful as snowshoes in Summer,' Varney remarked.

'Yeah, really.' Crina scoffed. 'My father decided to dismiss them on these grounds. The problem was that the positions in the Order had made them rich, arrogant, and entitled.'

Hogan nodded. 'So they turned him into the Dracula we've all heard of.'

'I'm afraid so. They burned my mother at the stake for heresy.' She then pulled her collar aside, revealing a circular scar just above her collarbone. 'They impaled me. Then they forced my blood down my father's throat.'

'What happened next is not out of the ordinary for a new Cursed Vampire,' Vasilli said. 'It's just that Vlad the Impaler had his episode documented.'

'You mean the impalement of 10,000 people?' Hogan asked.

'Right,' Varney said. 'That was partially a rampage of revenge. He was doing to everyone he could find what the Order did to Crina. The other part ties into why the victims were so indiscriminate. When you become a vampire, a parasite – for lack of a better term – takes up residence in your body. As a new vampire, you have no control over it and you kill every person you see until the thirst is satisfied.'

Hogan shuddered. That had nearly happened to him last night. Judging by the scale, that meant that if these four hadn't stepped in when they did, everyone at Stalag 13 would have been dead by his hand – ally and enemy alike. Tiger slid a hand into his and he looked down at her, letting his fingers interlock with hers.

It could've happened, but it didn't.

She was safe, and his men were safe.

Crina cleared her throat. 'At the time my father died by historical records, he vanished and he didn't resurface until the Victorian Age. I woke up in 1743.'

'Confused the hell out of the rest of us too,' Walt said. 'Usually, the proverbial sacrificial goat is the vampire's heir. On two fronts, there was no way Crina could have been her father's heir.'

Varney nodded. 'Dracula came to London. Once that happened, we were able to piece it together. His wife – and Crina's mother – reincarnated into Mina Murray. Renfield, despite Stoker's depiction, was his perfectly sane attorney and his friend.'

Crina sniffed offensively. 'Thank you very much!'

Newkirk chuckled. 'So I guess everyone in your inner circle was completely offended at Stoker's depiction of the events.'

'And none moreso than Mina herself, but we're getting ahead of ourselves,' Vasilli said. 'Varney waited until both Dracula and Mina had come back together before he approached. At this point, he sent me a telegram because Crina was staying with us. He told me to bring her to London to be reunited with her parents. As for what everyone was doing in London…the Order had taken up vampire hunting, after creating one, and had moved their base of operations to England.'

'This is where it gets funny,' Crina said. 'The Order members maintained their fortunes on the oil trade. So my father presented himself as an American Entrepreneur called Alexander Greyson, bringing electricity to England.'

'You ever needed proof this was the Victorian Age, there it is,' Carter quipped.

Crina snorted and nodded. 'Anyway, it turned out that the Order's arrogance had grown over the past four centuries to the point where it had to be seen to be believed. They'd gotten into the habit of murdering the families of disobedient Order members. That's where Van Helsing comes in. He was one of those Order members whose wife and children were killed as a punishment for him. And he wanted revenge. So he teamed up with my father for a few months to get it.'

'Had he left it at that, he might've lived,' Varney said. 'But…after he got his revenge and killed the man who ordered his family dead, he contacted Jonathan Harker in order to kill Dracula. It turns out the Curse goes after anybody who sets themselves up against the vampire.'

'And Harker was easy to convince, was he?' Newkirk asked.

'On the grounds that it took my mother a while to actually remember being…you know, my mother.' Crina shrugged. 'She had a whole life before. There was an element of truth in the idea that she was engaged to Jonathan Harker. But he felt threatened by my father and, it turns out, so did Lucy Westernra. Turns out, she really did bat for the other team.'

Hogan's eyebrows flew up. He wasn't the only one.

Crina nodded. 'Yeah. Her response to being turned down by my mother was to sleep with Harker.'

Varney nodded. 'And when Mina found out, and went to confront him, he tried to brush it off. So that was over.'

'That's also where the story of my father turning Lucy comes from,' Crina said. 'When he found out he decided that if she was going to act like a monster, he was going to turn her into one.' She shrugged. 'My mother was the one who usually had peeled back his more violent impulses before. At that time, she hadn't regained enough of her memories of her previous life to know that was necessary.'

'I suppose she worked it out later?' Kinch asked.

'Yeah.' Crina nodded. 'My father's Curse was resolved when the Order fell and Van Helsing, Harker, and all of their allies died. Stoker heard the story from one of the dying cohort. He never actually met any of the people involved and he wrote the book as his own attempt to "save" Mina Murray.'

Walt smirked. 'Of course, by the time he published it, she was Mina Greyson, and was very vocal about how offensive she found the book.'

Tiger frowned and rested her head on Hogan's shoulder. 'Didn't you say your father had those dissolving sutures developed?'

'Yes,' Crina said. 'My mother was a doctor. Being the daughter of a doctor was what allowed her to get the training. It turns out that a lot of Victorian women were more comfortable with a female physician than they were with going to a man who had a 99% chance of telling them they had "hysteria".'

'I'm impressed,' Hogan said. 'I was under the impression most men of the bygone eras didn't like their wives working.'

'My father taught me from a young age,' Crina said. 'When you love someone, your first concern should always be what makes them happy. That was the reason, when she was with Harker, my father made no moves for my mother. And she'd wanted to be a doctor since childhood in her second life, so that was what happened.'

'So I presume they remarried?' LeBeau asked.

'Yup, after my father became human again, and under the Greyson name,' Crina said. 'They had another set of children, who are to this day completely oblivious to the fact that their father was ever a vampire. Cripes! They never even knew I was anything but an Eastern European cousin.'

'You lied to them?' Carter asked in disbelief.

'Would you tell your family about vampires?' Crina asked.

'No,' Hogan said. 'And, that reminds me. Kinch?'

'Yes, sir?'

'When you report back to London, tell them it was a rogue batch of Nazis who'd become suspicious of us,' Hogan said. 'And then tell them all of the Krauts from that batch are dead. Let them work out how on their own.'

Kinch grinned. 'Yes, sir.'

Hogan smiled and kissed Tiger.

AN: I was tempted to write a goodbye scene between Hogan and Tiger, but goodbye scenes don't really happen for them in the show.