III.

The light Vanessa saw was no longer that of candles, the warmth she felt no more of Ethan's arms. It was an overwhelming sense of awe and love that shook her, and with her last breath, she told him: "Ethan, I see our Lord."

Then the last sense of Ethan was gone, and where she had seen but through a glass, darkly, she now saw clearly. It was, to her amazement, a girl she saw, surely not older than eighteen or nineteen at most, with dark hair cut shorter than that of Dr. Seward, and clad in armor, as St. Michael was in all the pictures Vanessa had ever seen of him.

"Welcome, child of God," the young woman said. It took Vanessa a moment more to realise the words had not been said in English, and then she knew who this was. Of course. Her favourite of the saints, the one who had been burned as a witch, namesake to her dearest mentor: Joan.

Jeanne d'Arc.

"Where were you?" she found herself asking, which was not how she had thought to greet a saint. "Where was our Lord? Where is he? Am I so worthless that..."

The young woman gravely shook her head, and suddenly Vanessa became aware that they were standing on a shore. There was the sense of warm sand under her bare feet, as there had been when she was a child, running with Mina.

"Child of God," Jeanne said, "I know your fight. I know your suffering. When they lit the fire for me, it was you I felt, you and all the others crying out, as I did, as he did in the Garden of Gethsemane. We all became one then, did you not sense it? I was waiting for you. To arm you for the battle ahead."

It was as if a wall was tumbling down, a wall of carefully crafted stones Vanessa had built with her own hands, and she remembered once again. The knowledge was fire and strength at once.

"Oh, my poor Ethan," she murmured.

She had never planned to put this burden on him. She had thought it would be Sir Malcolm, who had proven he could survive it already.

"The battle..." She began.

"Yes," Jeanne said. "I know it well, I know your foe." Her face darkened, and for a moment, Vanessa could see the flesh turning into ash. Could see the skull underneath. Then Jeanne was the maid in armor once more.

"He was my comrade once," Jeanne said. "My brother-in-arms."

He. Alexander Sweet. Dracula. Half of an angel, and all fallen.

"The name he bore when I still lived was Gilles de Rais. He fought at my side, and then he wished to claim me. Swore that only he understood who I was, sought to take me from our Lord. It was Gilles who betrayed me so that I was captured. He wished me to call out to him for rescue, to hate all that was not him. Even when I went into the fire, he was still waiting. And then he made our world a slaughterhouse, until they burned his human form as well."

Gilles de Rais, Marshall of France, who rode at Jeanne's side and then tortured children to their deaths, hundreds of children, until he finally was discovered: Vanessa had been taught that tale, during a childhood where such stories were but things to frighten children with.

"It has to end," she said. Not just for her own sake, or Mina's. No, killing Alexander Sweet would not have been enough. All the voices through all the centuries crying out: Enough. She could not let it continue.

"Yes," Jeanne said.

"Why didn't you fight him?" Vanessa asked, with true curiosity. "You are God's maid, and angels speak to you, not demons. Why did you not seek to destroy him in this realm? You, who are in a state of grace?"

Jeanne sighed, then gave her a little smile. "If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am, may God so keep me. But I cannot go where he has hidden what makes him immortal, Vanessa. Whatever else I am, I am a Christian, and I cannot go to the realms that were before God's light came to us. But you can."

"I am no pagan," Vanessa protested without thinking about it, then grew quiet. She thought of all the creatures fleeing her, yet seeking her at the same time, the dark glory she'd felt then: the mother of all evil.

"No, but you were Amunet," Jeanne said matter-of-factly. "And so you can enter the Duat."

As if discussing strategy to lift a siege of an medieval town, she then told Vanessa what she knew: that there were twelve parts to make the Dragon whole, in either realm. That Vanessa still needed allies among mortal men, so that Dracula would have no refuge left, no way to resurrect himself again.

"If you succeed in destroying even one part, he will realise, and then he will fight back," Jeanne warned. "It might still mean your destruction, child of God. If you perish in the Duat, you will never leave it."

"I have known hell already," Vanessa said, and felt the padded walls around herself again, the jacket, and the crushing knowledge that those who put her there, her parents, had done it because they loved her and had thought nothing else would help her to get better.

There was no pagan underworld of old which could be worse than this.

"You will not be alone again," Jeanne said, as if reading her mind, and truly, here, where only mind was real, she probably did. "Never that, Vanessa. I cannot come with you, but anyone who loved you and is dead, you may call to your aid, and if they wish it, they will answer."

That was a gift of such enormity Vanessa did not let herself contemplate it just yet.

"What of the living?"

"No one who has not died may enter the Duat," Jeanne said, to the point and brief.

"But if my living friends are to destroy the twelve parts that bind Dracula to the mortal realm, I need to tell them this."

The maid of Orleans inclined her head, conceded the point and promised that before Vanessa entered the Duat, there would be time to speak with one of the living. Then she gave her gift: her sword, gleaming and sharp.

"You go to fight serpents, my sister," she said. "You must be armed."

Vanessa had not used a sword before, safe in play, as a child, made of wood. But she thought of the other Joan, of lessons about spirit and flesh, and how reality was formed in this place. She made the sword fit in her hands.
"Did you..." she hesitated, but then asked. It was the question that had plagued her through the years.

"Did you ever doubt," she continued, "did you ever wonder whether the voices you heard were truly those of saints? How did you know they were not of the devil?"

Again, she saw the skin peel from Jeanne's face, turn into ash. She smelled the ugly stench of burning flesh. She heard a girl cry "Jesu! Jesu!" in pain beyond belief.

"That was what he told me," Jeanne whispered, "the other brother."

"Lucifer?"

"Yes. He, too, came. When they kept me prisoner in Rouen. He told me that my saints had never come to me, nor blessed Michael the Archangel. Why should God be on the side of France, he asked, or England, or any other realm? He said that I had served him, truly, and that was why Gilles had fought at my side."

For a moment, she wore not her armor, but shackles, and her hair was long, grown through months of imprisonment.

"I was afraid then," Jeanne whispered. "Afraid I'd die, and go to hell, and so I signed my confession, admitting heresy and witchcraft. I feared the fire, even. Such pain. But then they told me I would live, yet live shut away from sun and air. What kind of life was that? That was when I knew he had tricked me. That had been my heresy. To believe him, and all for life without any meaning. No. I claimed my saints again, and went through the fire."

She put her hands on Vanessa's shoulders.

"It is not wrong to doubt," she said. "And all of us fall prey to the Devil at times. But coming back, continuing the fight, that is what counts."

There was the sense of warmth again that had enveloped Vanessa when she had died, of love and awe. She closed her eyes. When she allowed herself to see once more, Jeanne had vanished, and so had the beach. Instead, Vanessa found herself in a maze she knew all too well. With joy and pain in her heart, she began to walk.