Abraham ran his hands over his face, expression haggard and drawn. His vampire was in the house, and not yet deceased. He'd forbidden the vampire to leave the house, but had at first thought that someone might have removed the creature. Dracula couldn't leave of his own free will, but that didn't mean that he couldn't have been taken out in a trunk or a dustbin. Once the fools who'd lost his vampire had been permanently ejected from his home, he'd gone immediately to his work chamber and began to trace the vampire. The diagram on the floor, formed of his blood and Dracula's, would provide information.
He'd learned two very important facts. The salt he'd strewn on the bloody diagram on had lit up; the vampire was still under his control, and the spell was still active. Abraham's immediate thought was that the vampire was no longer on his property, and the spell he'd bound the creature with was trying to force it to return. His brow furrowed; if that was the case, the beast had to be in utter agony. The spell didn't differentiate between "would not" and "could not".
The second fact was that the vampire was close. The spell was non-directional, only indicating proximity, but the brightness showed the vampire nearby. Either in the house or on the grounds immediately outside it. He scowled at the glowing crystals, their steady bright blue glow reassuring and frustrating in equal measure. Where could the beast have hidden? He debated releasing the vampire from some of the bindings, knowing Dracula had to be suffering immensely, but decided against it. He'd already been subjected to this for more than a fortnight. A few more hours wouldn't make any difference.
Gathering all the staff of his house and stable, they started their search in the basement. He was wise enough to lock off his work chamber, the lab, and the vampire's cell, but all the musty storerooms and coal bins had to be checked, each half-rotten crate and old tarp inspected.
He'd thought they'd find the vampire huddled behind some discarded bit of furniture...and the very thorough search of the basement yielded nothing.
Frustrated, he moved the search outside. It was a proper British home for a wealthy doctor, with properly-shaped shrubs and proper gardens and a few proper topiaries and even a small proper rose arbor. No vampire. He'd wondered if the vampire had somehow ended up in the pond. Water would disable the creature and prevent it from responding. It couldn't have changed into a wolf, bat, or mist; he'd disabled those powers immediately. If he couldn't find the beast, they'd drain the pond and cut down an old, dead, hollow tree as well. It had to be somewhere, and there was an entire house sans basement to check first.
Every room was inspected. Shelves were emptied, cubbyholes and nooks and cabinets peered into. Accesses to plumbing were opened, lights shone into every possible hiding place. Room by room, floor by floor...and nothing. Nothing at all. The dumbwaiters were pulled up, and Abraham realized the vampire might be hiding in the shafts. A quick check up and down showed the passages clear from pulley to pulley, nothing but dust and cobwebs. Two full days of over a dozen people inspecting every possible hiding place, and no vampire. Each cobwebbed crate and trunk in the attic had been opened, each corner checked, and nothing.
With a grudging respect, he admitted the vampire had hidden itself quite exceptionally well. Not that he could blame it.
Day three had a small army of chimneysweeps inspecting the chimneys. With the installation of the furnace by the previous owner, many of them had been blocked off. He was sending them up chimney as often as down them, and it was a full day before he realized that there was no chance the vampire had found any places there. He also realized he had far more chimneys, blocked off into dead ends, than he'd realized. The fireplaces were long gone, but the chimneys remained. Some had been used to route the furnace ducts, but many were just sealed off. Every accessible chimney had been checked, each rooftop opening inspected, and nothing.
But that did make him realize that the furnace itself was a possibility. He could have kicked himself. It was not in use, would not be in use for months more. Trotting to the basement, he pulled open the great metal door to the burning chamber...and found dust. Undisturbed dust. He'd truly expected to see an ash-coated vampire curled into the corner, but...nothing.
However, the large pipes which extended throughout the house, the ducts, were a possibility. The chimney to the furnace itself had been shown to be empty, but there were ducts. Pleased with his realization, he strode to the basement corridor containing the main furnace duct, planning to remove a vent cover...to find that it had none. It was a solid, featureless metal duct without a single opening from where it joined the furnace to where it ended at the back wall. The ducts that branched off into the individual rooms had vents, much too small for a vampire to squeeze through, especially an injured vampire.
And Dracula hadn't entered the ductwork from the furnace. However, if the creature had made it out of the basement and up to the living floors of the house...yes. He could easily have removed one of the big grates and gotten into the ducts.
The chimneysweeps were sent out to check the ducts, scrambling into them from various entrances, floor by floor. Abraham was relieved that at least the duct layout was simple, not the labyrinth of the chimneys, and it was less than an hour before the boys reported that they were done, each shaft, each duct, inspected and declared clear, barring the ones in the attic that were simply too small to enter.
On the off chance that some of the attic ductwork might have larger sections, he entered the attics with two of the boys. As each vent cover was removed, with the aid of a mirror and candles, he looked down each duct. The boys had been quite correct, these were too small. The smallest of the sweeps, with a lot of effort and assistance, might have squeezed through one, but not a full-sized vampire.
Still, it was possible that one might be larger than the others, made of leftover duct or to heat a larger room, and so they kept looking. His next step would be to take down the great dead oak and see if the hollow center concealed a vampire, and then to cut open the dam and drain the fishpond. Both were major activities, and he'd rather rule out the last of the ductwork first.
And then he smelled it. With the noise and activity of the attic search, the crates and boxes opened and moved about, he hadn't noticed. But with only two boys in a quiet attic... It smelled somewhat like a dead mouse, but only somewhat. Drier, acrid...it clung to the back of his throat, with the coppery tang of blood mixed through. Vampires had so little scent; what they had was due more to their clothes, their coffins, their surroundings, and not produced by themselves. But vampiric blood had an odor, unpleasant, one that instinct responded to with hairs on the neck prickling.
He was smelling vampiric blood. More, too; the odor of decay was unmistakeable. But Dracula was there.
It wasn't long before they'd found the obstruction in the ducts, the curled fingers and yellowed nails barely visible, the rest of the vampire lost in the darkness. Unwilling to show the vampire to the boys, he'd thanked them, paid them well, and sent them down to the kitchen for a treat. His housekeeper would see that they returned home safely.
In the meantime, he had a vampire to extract. Ordering the beast to come to him had not even resulted in a twitch of the fingers; he wondered briefly it if were a true corpse and not a vampire in the darkness. No, not with those claws. No human child, lost in a game of hide and seek, perhaps, rested under that floor.
Preparation, this would involve preparation. Extracting the beast would involve pulling up the floorboards, cutting into the ductwork. And he'd better feed Dracula, too. This would not be a quick removal, and would take tools capable of sheering through the metal of the duct. Moving back downstairs, he sent servants to the carpentry shops for metal shears, others to bring hammers and prybars and saws from his own sheds. He'd need to feed the beast, too. The cook confirmed she could only get a small bit of blood, nowhere near the quantity he thought Dracula would need.
He hated feeding the beast human blood, but it was a necessity. The vampire had to be badly damaged, starved indeed for it to have entered that duct. He still didn't know how it had managed that feat, but Dracula must have been truly desperate. Which reminded him...
A few careful modifications to the diagram, and power no longer flowed to the portions of the spellwork that caused pain. Dracula still had to obey, but while he was disabled and unable to do so, he would not suffer unduly.
Not long after, he was handing a shilling to each employee that let him draw blood, harvesting the red plasma into a bottle. He'd sworn to keep it on a diet of animal blood, and the vampire had managed on it...but short of killing one of his horses, he simply didn't have animal blood of any quantity available immediately. Dracula had begged and pleaded for human blood, and he suspected it likely would restore the monster more than animal blood. And the vampire needed all the restoration it could get. Almost a month of no food, the damage from the surgeries and dissections... Grumbling quietly to himself as he extracted the needle and pressed cotton against the tiny hole, he accepted the human blood as a temporary and necessary evil.