Into The Shadows, page 79
No matter how much he wished he could, he could only heal things on the outside, never within.
And although that phrase had two different connotations, the truth still stung bitterly in his eyes as he fell to his knees on the floor beside the hospital bed.
His expression illustrated his despair.
"Hera," he breathed.
Dracula's fingers reached slowly upward, gently taking hold of the woman's cold hand. He brought her knuckles to his lips, kissing them reverently. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he had spent a lifetime in tears.
His veneration was astounding, and his despair heartbreaking. It hung in the room like a black cloud, shattering the heart and swallowing up the soul in a deep, unfathomable depression.
The Count could feel a century's worth of bottled up emotions making their way to the surface and in a futile attempt to keep the floodgates from bursting, he clenched his eyes shut and held her hand in his all the tighter.
Then his voice broke.
He could hold it all in no longer.
"Hera, I'm so sorry," he whispered inaudibly as a single tear trailed down his cheek.
He kissed her hand fervently, his eyes opening once more to look upon her deathly still face. Her chest barely fell and rose with each breath and if it hadn't been for the monitor beside him that informed him her heart was still beating, he would have thought she was dead already.
"Hera?" he called, bringing himself shakily to his feet to stand beside the bed. He tenderly caressed her face with the back of his fingers. "Hera, my love, how I've missed you."
He swallowed hard, trying to hold back the tears as the awful truth continued to beep on the monitor beside him.
"I… I don't know if you can hear me," he began," but I'm going to try. I have to say this, love, and I don't know if I'll get another chance. Hera, what you saw in Jane's memory – that night Aleera came to the palace with every intention of killing you. When she found out about us, about the baby, she was enraged – beyond reasoning. Naturally I didn't care what she thought, but in an effort to save you from her, I had to lie to her. I had no idea Jane was in the room, love, and if I had, I wouldn't have said those things. It was never my intention for you to know of my lies and I'll confess, what I told Aleera and… and what you saw – those were my original intentions when we had first met."
He paused for a moment, not because he was searching for the right words, but because it was the first time he would openly admit this and admitting it aloud was so much harder than doing so internally.
"Hera, from the very beginning, I knew you were different. There was something about you, beyond your faith and gifted genius. It was in the way you looked at me. The way you spoke. I had come across and have since encountered many women who were brave, outspoken and defiant, but none of them were ever like you. You were the only person to ever know me… the real me. The monster, the demon, and the man. And despite all my flaws and all the opportune moments you had to run from me, to rightfully loathe me, you never did. You still trusted me, despite it all… even up to the moment when you…"
He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence.
The tears were running freely and silently down his face now and he was totally unaware of their presence. All he knew was that her heart rate was slowing again and he was running out of time.
The blood of the child she had been carrying inside of her had been poisoning her system from the moment the silver stake impaled its head. It was a poison that no doctor could save her from. Not even he could save her from it. It was slowly killing her… with every heartbeat.
"I don't want to lose you," he cried softly, holding her cold face in his hands. "I want you to live, Hera. Please… don't…don't leave me. Not again. Not again…" and the tears came much easier now.
He looked down at her smooth and recently healed abdomen and noticed black beginning to flow through her veins from beneath the pallor of her skin. It spread like the cracking of glass, fragmented networks of veins and capillaries all overrun in a thick poison. The infant's blood was killing her and she was too weak to fight it off.
She was going to die and there was nothing he could do outside of turning her, and he could not condemn her further, not after everything else he had done.
Panic began to beat to a spastic rhythm within him as he looked back and forth between the heart monitor and Hera's pale face. He whispered her name repeatedly, pleading with her stay with him, but his appeals fell upon deaf ears.
Dracula didn't know what to do.
For the first time in his life, he was out of ideas.
He was helpless and without hope.
If he lost her now, he knew, thanks to his damned soul, that he would never see her again. He loved her too much to doom her in order to save her life, so turning her into what he was, was definitely out of the question.
He couldn't save her.
The devil couldn't help him, he knew from experience.
What hope did he have?
Suddenly, an idea crossed his mind that was so unimaginable, so unthinkable, and yet it was all he had. It had been centuries, hundreds and hundreds of years. He hadn't talked to God since he was in his youth back in the fifteenth century, and here he was, contemplating the idea of prayer.
He was almost disgusted with himself, even considering the idea of talking to God, the all-powerful being who had damned him, who had abandoned him, who had left him as the devil's plaything and experiment.
No.
No, he would not talk to God.
He would not sink any lower than he had…
But Hera… she was dying, and it was all because of him.
All because he had been too proud to tell Aleera the truth that night; too proud to kill his own bride if necessary to keep the one he loved safe; too proud to abandon plans he knew were wrong in his effort to seek revenge on the world that had abandoned him; too proud to take Hera far away from danger instead of leaving her in the middle of it, of treating her like a puppet on his string, manipulating her, using her, however unintentional it was.
In the end, it all came down to his pride, his greatest vice, and it was this pride that disgusted him more than the idea of praying to God did.
Hera did not deserve to die because of his mistakes, and for that reason alone did he fall on his knees, holding tightly to Hera's hand for support.
Then he closed his eyes, buried his conceit, and for the first time in over five hundred years, Dracula prayed.
His prayer was simple and rather irreverent. But he gathered what was left of his tarnished soul and poured it into every word he uttered, his pride soon ravaged to unsalvageable pieces.
"Dear… God."
He swallowed hard and wiped a bit of the perspiration from his forehead, gripping Hera's hand, squeezing it tight.
"I don't know what to do," he managed, feeling himself humbling with every syllable. It was degrading, revolting, but he continued.
He was doing this for Hera.
"I can't save her, God. Please… don't abandon her like you did me. Save her… I'll do anything. Anything…" and he sobbed the last word.
This was too much.
It hurt.
All over.
His skin was prickling, the hollow chasm in his chest tightened, his heart ached as though it had been stabbed with shards of glass. He couldn't lose her and the idea of doing so forever mortified him. He was trembling as he sank beside the hospital bed, still holding her hand. Tears rained down like they never had before as he cried quietly.
"Please," he whispered, hardly able to breathe.
It was as if all the forces of hell fought to bind his tongue and still he prayed.
"Save her," he pleaded desperately, feeling a crushing weight of darkness envelope him.
He could hear Ilona somewhere in the back of his mind, her mad laughter, accompanied by the roars of Lucifer, the anger, the malice… the betrayal.
The son of the devil was praying to God.
The Count could already feel hell's flames licking his skin, the crack of Satan's whip tearing the flesh of his back, and the screams of a thousand tormented souls ringing in his ears, and still he prayed.
Hardly able to utter another word, he put everything he had, all of this strength, his resolution, and he was able to utter two more words.
"Save. Me."
Then everything went silent.
The pain vanished, the darkness lifted, and when Dracula opened his eyes and raised his head, he discovered he was surrounded by a pillar of light, brighter than the sun, with a person standing above him. The man's eyes were soft, gentle, yet they shown with a power far greater than the vampire Count Vladislaus Drăculea had ever known.
The Count froze in place, his eyes wide in astonishment.
The light burned his eyes, causing fresh tears to stream down his cheeks, but the sensation was hardly unpleasant, which surprised him.
The personage sensed his amazement and merely smiled.
Dracula heard a voice in his head, one he assumed belonged to the being standing before him.
I believe you and I need to have a talk…
LII
Her Broken Heart
First came the blinding light, and then following, a searing pain in her head.
She tried lifting up her arm in an effort to cover her face, but then she felt something tug in her skin.
"Oh… hell," Hera muttered to herself, groaning.
There was something… no… a lot of something's stuck in her arm. Muttering a few choice words after licking her parched lips, she managed to peel back one eyelid, the dim light from the lamp overhead feeling more like the sun. It took a few moments for her to open her other eye, and then for her vision to clear.
And when at last it did, she made a face.
It didn't take long for Hera to notice that something was off. In fact, the whole being in an antiseptic white hospital room, hooked up to three different IV drips and a heart monitor told her that something was very off indeed.
With a look of revulsion, she gingerly pulled the needles from the veins in her arms, placing them aside as she sat up, her whole body aching as if she hadn't moved from this very spot in days. Her pounding headache was slowly easing away as she took in her surroundings, trying to organize her thoughts, memories. Perhaps this was all a dream? Some weird lucid dream that she'd wake up from, finding herself in a lavish bedroom in Transylvania with her vampire lover, the infamous Count Dra-
Hera spotted something out of the corner of her eye and she turned her head slowly to find… her iPod?
But she had left that in…
Her eyes widened as it all suddenly came flooding back.
Budapest, Jane, the truth, the final battle, Van Helsing and Anna… Dracula.
Her eyes prickled with tears as she recalled it all.
Dracula had betrayed her, lied to her and still – after everything – he had insisted on playing dumb. Now she was back in her own time, in a hospital. Even after all the years it would have been for him, he had brought back her iPod. He had kept it and had chosen now to return it just to torment her more, to remind her of how he had played her, manipulated her like some kind of fancy marionette on strings.
Grabbing her iPod in an abrupt and senseless fury, Hera threw it across the room and screamed, too weak to fight the sobs that soon suffocated her. She fell back onto the hospital bed, body trembling with every shuddered breath and heart-crushing weep, completely oblivious to the doctors and nurses that had suddenly rushed into the room to see what had caused her outburst.
She could barely hear her father in the background somewhere, calling her name, and the flashes of light told her that there were cameras – maybe half a dozen of them attached to the eager paparazzi who had miraculously gotten passed the incompetent hospital security. They were all shouting at her as the lone officer attempted to restrain them, frantically calling for backup. Hera was bombarded with questions, these strangers wanting the full story on what had happened to her, who had attacked her, and what that thing was that she had been carrying inside her womb.
Yet, she wasn't entirely conscious of any of it.
All she knew was it had felt like someone had taken her soul and torn it in half. It was as though she were simultaneously empty, yet bleeding inwardly and the pain was unlike anything she had felt or would ever feel again. There was only one thing Hera could hear amidst her torment – and it was the echoes of Dracula's screams in her head as she had disappeared in his arms.
But those images of him with Aleera, his conniving grin, his suave, seductive charm made her furious with him and yet still she ached. She could feel the fragments of what was left of her heart shattering when she realized he had been here. He was the only one who could have brought her her iPod. Who else would have brought it?
He had been here… with her.
Her one opportunity to confront him, and he was gone.
"VLAD!" she screamed, sobbing hysterically as she fought her way out of her bed, possessed with a sudden need to get to her iPod.
She had to find him, had to tell him how much he had hurt her, had to make him see what he had done, that she couldn't just forget about him. She had to understand why he had taken things so far.
She dove for her iPod, mere inches from grabbing it when two pairs of strong and unforgiving hands grabbed her by her arms and pulled her back to the bed.
"Somebody get these vultures out of here!"
"Come, Miss Garret. Calm down. You need your rest."
"NO! No! Vlad! VLAD!"
"Place her on the bed. Nurse, the restraints! We need to sedate her."
"No, let her go!"
Hera started to struggle, but soon went dead-weight, falling to her knees on the cold floor when the men who had been pulling her back let go.
Tumbling down to her knees, she buried her face into her arms and wept. The cameras and chaos of the reporters soon ceased as they were escorted off the premises; the doctors and nurses all stepped back in silence; everyone watched as Hera lied on the floor, placing her cheek on the cool tile, pathetic tears of an unsalvageable broken heart pooling on the ground as she curled into a ball, hardly decent in the flimsy hospital gown.
He was gone.
She couldn't feel it inside of her, that connection she had had with him—it was gone.
He was gone.
And she knew deep down that nothing would ever fill that void again and that knowledge made her sick.
"Hera?"
Hera looked up slowly to see her father kneeling in front of her. It had been over year, maybe even two, since she had seen him and yet he hadn't changed at all. His charming, aged face, his concerned, all-knowing eyes. She could feel his gentle hand as it reached out for her and brushed some of her hair from her face, tears of concern tumbling down his wrinkled cheeks.
"Mon enfant, what has happened to you?" he asked, so broken to see his only living daughter so inexplicably distraught.
Throwing her arms around him and burying her face into his chest, Hera's aching heart burst as she wept on the floor, more like a small child in that moment than she ever had been. She breathed in his familiar scent – strong black coffee, peppermint, pipe tobacco, and aftershave.
Oh, how she had missed him, and that realization only seemed to make her cry harder.
With gentle pleading in Mr. Garret's eyes, the doctor and several nurses exited from the room, leaving the two alone on the floor in silence and there they remained for some time until at last, Hera's sobs finally came to an end, though tears continued to tumble down her flushed cheeks.
"Papa, I missed you," she whispered timidly, looking more like a small, lost babe in his arms than the grown woman that she was.
Henry Garret soothed her, stroking her hair and holding her close, offering what comfort he could, making sure she was calm before inquiring upon what everyone else had been burning to ask.
"Hera? What happened?"
Her slightly erratic breathing ceased rather dramatically in response to his question and she stiffened in his hold.
Immediately sensing the change in her, he pulled himself back so he could look into her eyes.
They were bloodshot, naturally from all the crying she had done. But that wasn't what bothered him. Her once vibrantly honey-colored eyes seemed duller. They weren't lifeless, but they were not the same. They looked aged. Something in her had changed and it pained him to see it.
He looked into her eyes for a moment or two in silence, waiting for her answer, watching as she internally fumbled around as if recalling everything that had transpired in her head and filing it away before ever uttering a word.
She was clamming up and he couldn't stop her once she had begun.
"Papa," she breathed, "I want to go home."
Deciding that it would be best not to press the matter, he nodded his head and helped her to her feet. Removing his old, weather-beaten trench coat and helping her into it in an effort to keep her more decent, he then wrapped his arm around her body, holding her close as he called in the doctor.
Although the physician would have preferred to keep the woman overnight to run more tests, she was in perfect health, save her despair, and they had no reason to keep her any longer. Within the hour, Hera had been checked out and her father led his daughter out of the hospital. She had her iPod gripped tightly in her left hand, the device clutched to her chest, her eyes cast down to the floor.
The paparazzi outside in the pouring rain were relentless, screaming their questions and accusations, begging for a comment, but the father and daughter silently pushed through the crowd and outside into the English summer, the torrential downpour soaking the two of them through as they made their way to the car.
