Chapter 19 #2
“The point is that Renfield is utterly devoted, completely enthralled, and has a very particular relationship with the most powerful and compelling creature in the room.” He was watching her with that look he got sometimes.
The one she refused to examine too closely because looking at it directly was like looking at the sun—not because it was warm, but because it would damage the beholder. “I’m not seeing the problem.”
“The problem is—” She faltered.
And then she made the grave error of imagining it. Just for a second.
The barest, most involuntary flash of it.
Vile, as Dracula.
The period-appropriate dramatics of it.
The clothes. The castle.
The absolute certainty of the way he would inhabit it—not lampooning it, not winking at the camera, just being it, fully and completely and devastatingly, the way he inhabited everything.
Every story, every character, every genre, leaned into and lived with every fiber of whatever it was he was made of.
The fog. The candles. His hands at a window latch.
Let me in, he would say, in that voice, with those eyes—
She shoved the thought down hard.
“The problem,” she said, very firmly, “is that I am not going to be an underling in hypnotic thrall to you. I refuse. On principle.”
He sat up very slowly. Smoothly. The grace of it was immediately unsettling, and it made her shrink back.
“Oh, but Sasha,” he murmured, and his voice had dropped to something that was barely above a whisper and somehow filled the entire room anyway, “I know you can imagine it. You, completely in my power. Unable to resist. Every word I say weaving directly into the fabric of your thoughts.” He reached out and tucked a strand of her hair back behind her ear.
His fingers barely grazed her temple. Her brain sent up a distress flare from that general area. “Think of it…you would call me Master."
Her breath hitched, even as she fought the temptation. “I would not—“
“You would be helpless but to come when I called. Even if you were trying very hard not to.” His thumb brushed her cheekbone.
Just barely. Just enough. “You would stand at the window in the night, Sasha, and you would know what it meant that I was there, and you would open it anyway.” His voice had gone smooth and dark and unhurried, like ink spreading across paper, like something being written that couldn't be unwritten.
“And I would come in through the dark and I would take you to pieces, and you wouldn't be able to help yourself, and you'd hate that you couldn’t—”
“Stop it.” She pushed him back. Both hands, flat against his chest.
He went onto his back on the bed, because he chose to, which was worse.
Her heart was racing. She knew she must be blushing, because her cheeks were burning.
“Stop it. I'm not—no. No Dracula. No hypnosis, no thrall, no Master, no—" She was waving her hands now, which she knew was not a good sign for her composure. “No! The answer is no, it was always no, it is currently no. I’m not going to let you talk me into doing Dracula: The Reductive and Erotic Power Fantasy.”
“You're protesting very specifically,” he observed.
“I’m protesting comprehensively.”
“Those are different things.”
“They're not—”
“A comprehensive protest covers all eventualities.” He tilted his head. “A specific protest suggests you've imagined enough of the eventualities to know which ones to object to.”
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“No,” she said, for what felt like the fourteenth time, and she was starting to lose count.
He was grinning. He was absolutely grinning, and she could see it even though she was pointedly staring at the middle distance to his left.
“Gothic horror, Sasha. Just think about it for a single moment without your reflexive defensiveness getting in the way. Genuine, glorious, atmospheric gothic horror.” He spread his hands like he was describing a landscape.
“Stone towers. Crypts. Candelabras dripping wax onto ancient stone floors. Brooding heroes and drafty Victorian hallways.” He was listing these things with enormous enthusiasm, the way someone might describe a holiday destination they had already booked and were simply now informing you about.
“The fog. The moors. The dramatic outfits—I wear the hell out of a dramatic cape, and you know it.”
She did know it. That was the problem. “I know what gothic horror is, Vile.”
“The music. Minor keys—strings, Sasha, think about the strings—” He knew exactly what he was doing.
He could predict how she felt about a well-deployed string section.
This was targeted. This was a precise strike.
“The whole delicious, operatic tragedy of the form. The grandeur of it. Everything heightened, everything tragic and meaningful, the architecture itself conspiring against the protagonist—you love that. You love when the setting is a character. And no setting is more of a character than a Carpathian castle in the dead of winter or a rotted out old manor house in the countryside.” He paused, satisfied with himself.
“Don't tell me you've never wanted to wander a crumbling estate in the dark with a candle and very questionable judgment.”
She had. She absolutely had, since approximately age eleven and the first time she'd watched Nosferatu at a sleepover when she was supposed to be watching something else entirely. That was categorically not the point.
She said nothing for a moment.
Just sat there in the starlit dark with the silk blanket pooled around her and the memory of strings playing somewhere in the back of her mind that she was nearly certain wasn't actually a memory yet, that might have been a premonition, or a promise, or a trap with very good acoustics.
“Gothic Horror," she said carefully, "is one thing."
“Wonderful! So we’re agreed.”
“No! I didn’t agree—”
* Indeed, I believe the phrase is “shots fired.” -V