II.

Malcolm had dreamt of Vanessa before she died. Far more often than he would have ever admitted, least of all to her. When exhaustion and every single one of his many years finally allowed him to sleep after he'd buried her, he was not surprised to find himself in the maze that used to be the pride of all the gardeners employed at his country house. He was not surprised to see the dark haired girl leisurely stroll before him, never turning back, no older than twelve, the ribbons in her hair loose, hastily bound. One fell down, and he picked it up, feeling the silk and velvet in his fingers. When he rose, he saw Vanessa standing before him, not the child Vanessa, Mina's playmate, but the adolescent girl eager for womanhood who took an unworthy fool she did not even truly want and broke their lives, hers, most of all.

"Sir Malcolm," she said, and the iron garden door, the door he closed in her face that day, it was between them.

A better man would ask her if she truly was at peace now, at God's side. A better man would tell her he had loved her, more than reason.

"I took you for so many things," Malcolm said, his hands clenched around the iron, knuckles white, "but never a deserter. How dare you!"

Colour rose in her cheeks. She was the woman who'd come into his town house now, years later, fury and strength in her eyes, all dressed in black.

"You vainglorious, selfish man!" she cried, as she had then.

"We swore," Malcolm said. "Not to give up. Never."

"I didn't," Vanessa said, Vanessa in her ball gown, the night at Mr. Grey's when she had felt the witches surrounding her, the last night he had been sated with the opium of Evelyn Poole's presence. "Do you know me so little? How dare you!"

Her eyes were blazing. She touched the iron with her own hands, and it melted. Some of the burning drops fell on his hands. He did not draw them back, though the pain was excruciating.

"You need to go to Egypt," she told him. "Our dear Mr. Lyle is there, and he will help you."

"Help me to do what?"

Vanessa took a step towards him. Now she was dressed in a way he'd never seen her, like a simple country woman of the High Lands. He could smell the rain in her hair.

"There are twelve parts," Vanessa said. "I know that now. Twelve here, in the Duat, that let him live forever, and twelve in Egypt. They anchor him to the physical realm. I will destroy those in the Duat. You need to destroy those in Egypt, all of them, or it will all have been in vain. But if we succeed, he will be gone forever, and no more innocents shall die!"

That was when Malcolm know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was dreaming. The sentimental wish fulfillment of an aged fool, no more.

"You were no innocent, Vanessa," he said, finally giving into temptation and touching her face. She wasn't cold, as Mina had been after he'd shot her. No, she burned, as Peter had done, when his son had still breathed.
"And your death was worse than any other. If I dream you, why can't I dream you never died?"

"I was no innocent," she confirmed. "I made my covenant with death. But I have made one with you as well, Sir Malcolm, and I hold true to my oath. Will you?"

"You are dead," he repeated.

"Speak to Miss Hartdegen and Dr. Seward," she murmured. "Tell them that I succeeded. Tell them about the twelve parts. They will understand."

Suddenly, she caught his hand. "Do not fail me!" she hissed, and now she looked like she had done when their foes had possessed her, had taken her body for weeks, skin parched, hair dirty and wild, wrists showing the marks of binding. "This time, don't fail me!"

"Yes, she came to me," Dr. Seward said. He had found her in her office, listening to a recording of Vanessa's voice. While Malcolm had known such things could be created now, it still was both infuriating and painfully sweet to be confronted with such an example. "Before she went to him. And she did have a plan. She wouldn't tell me what it was. That, in fact, was why she'd come: she didn't want anyone to know, not even herself. I had helped her recover some of her memories before, things she'd kept hidden in her own mind because they were so painful. Now she wanted me to do the reverse. He and his brother could read what was on her mind at times, she said, dressing themselves up in those faces that had the most meaning for her. But what she had forgotten, had hidden so well in her mind that even she did not know there was something to hide, he could not find."

"I thought all doctors swore an oath to do no harm," Malcolm retorted. "If she went to him dazed and weakened from some mesmerism, no wonder she..."

"Sir Malcolm," Dr. Seward said with calm disdain, "I am not here as a convenient vehicle for you to transfer your guilt to. Now if you were my patient, I might sit still for such an attempt, since you'd be paying me. But since you don't, let me point out that I had only just started to believe in the existence of this creature, that Miss Ives knew him better than the rest of us, and that she needed to feel she was supported, not critiqued in how she wanted to defeat him."

There was something in a woman calmly dressing him down that Malcolm, under almost all circumstances, regarded as a challenge to be met not just in words but flirtation. This was not one of these circumstances.

"If you knew she wanted to die, you had no business of letting her go. She could..."

"She did not want to die when she left me," Dr. Seward interrupted him. "If I had thought that, I would never have agreed. But she knew it was a risk. She would not tell me even what her plan was. She simply asked me to take the memory of the last few hours from her. I might add that if the stories she told me are true, you asked her to give her mind to him and creatures like him when trying to find your daughter, and you told her, more than once, that you cared not if she died of it. Between the two of us, who showed more respect for her will and mind?"

There was no reply that he could give her to this. Nor did he wish to. He had fought beside this woman against Dracula, and so he respected her, but there were only a few people whose regard or understanding Malcolm had sought in his life, and near-strangers who practiced Alienism and called it medical were not among them. Yet he had witnessed how she had dealt with the insane Renfield. She was efficient in her field.

"How do you tell," Malcolm asked, slowly, unwillingly, "how do you differ between dreams that are but longings of the heart, and those that carry truth?"

Dr. Seward regarded him thoughtfully. "They all carry truth, Sir Malcolm," she returned. "Or else I would not practice. Yet if you wish to know whether it was truly Miss Ives you saw, I would apply deduction. If she were but a figment expressing your own mind, she could not have told you what you did not know. I certainly never mentioned her last visit to you, or anyone else. What did Miss Hartdegen say?"

That conversation had been brief. "Yes, she said that only in the realm of death would she be able to defeat him for good. I told her that she should leave the immortal part of him to posterity, if there was one, and use the first chance she got to shoot the bastard," the young woman had snapped. "I thought I had persuaded her, and later that she had succumbed to him. Who told you about this?"

He had not spoken to Ethan about his dream, not yet. Maybe he was learning kindness in his old age. To kill the one you love: Malcolm knew only too well what it meant. If there was consolation for Ethan, then it consisted of the fact that Vanessa was at peace now. To take this away, and have the reason turn out only the feverish delusions of a bitter old man, that would be cruel even for Malcolm, who had always found cruelty coming naturally to him.

And yet, and yet. Dr. Seward was right. What Vanessa had told him in the dream had been specific, and just been verified by her, and he could not have known this on his own.

This time, don't fail me.

Going to Egypt because of a dream was a fool's errand. But Malcolm had travelled for worse reasons. If there was even the slightest chance that Vanessa was still battling the foe who had destroyed her life, who had used Mina as one more tool for such destruction, then Malcolm could not, would not desert her in this fight.