Immortality

***
Sixteen

He woke slowly, swimming in semi-consciousness for quite some time before he was able to drag himself up into the waking world. Slowly his eyes opened and adjusted to the dim light. Slowly, almost absently, he wondered where he was; he was used to the feeling of confusion on waking, so often in a different place from day to day or week to week, had grown accustomed to staring blankly at a dank hotel room until it dawned on him where exactly he was. This time it was wholly different, as unlike all those other mornings, lying in a bed until he remembered how he’d come to be there, he knew that he’d not brought himself to this place. But he knew where he was: Castle Dracula.

He sprang from the bed and ran to the door, over theor tor that was wet from the melting icicles that hung from the ceiling above him. He grasped the handle but ther war was locked as he’d felt almost sure that it would be, and when he tried to force it open, charging with his arm and his shoulder, it wouldn’t give. It was a thick, old oak door, locked and probably also barred from the other side. Charging at it had hurt, sending sharp spikes of pain through his already bruised arm, and he felt so weak, so tired, so drained… he sank to his knees as if in slow motion, his head coming to rest against the heavy, immovable wooden door.

Everything that had happened the previous night he remembered, from waking in the chair by the dying fire to striding out so purposefully into the woods, from the cold inside the inn to the warmth he felt in that clearing, in Dracula’s arms. He remembered how it had felt just like a dream and how he’d been drawn by that feeling out into the woods, unarmed and strangely unafraid. And with a sick lurch he remembered Dracula’s teeth as they grazed against his throat, as they sank down into his yielding flesh.

Quickly, as quickly as his weakened form would allow, he reached up at his neck. Then, with just a little shuddering hesitancy, he touched the tips of his fingers to that spot. He could feel the marks, bloody and raw, left by Dracula’s bite. He gasped in a sharp breath and sank down harder against the door. He’d been bitten. It was all true.

“You’re not going to die, you know,” said a voice from across the room. “And you won’t turn into a vampire, either, so all that you really have to worry about it him killing you. I’d say you have a good week or so before he tires of you.”

Slumped against the door, he turned his head and opened his eyes; he wanted to stand but it seemed all his energy had vanished, evaporated from him in his attempt to escape. “Hello, Dorian,” he said weakly, his voice a low creak barely above a whisper. “I wondered when I’d see you again.”

A small smile spread on Dorian’s lips as he sat there across the room by the window, his grey suit immaculate and his long legs crossed at the knee. “Well, here I am,” he said.

Gabriel closed his eyes, feeling strangely unsurprised though perhaps that was due to his lack of energy rather any any actual lack of surprise; he’d imagined Dorian on his way back to Paris or London, back to a life of decadence, not waiting for him in a locked room in Transylvania, or wherever it was that Castle Dracula stood. But he was there, beautiful as ever, serene and unchanging, the very knowledge of his presence taunting him.

Then Dorian moved, splashing his way over the wet floor. Soon he was by him and though he wanted to struggle against his grasp, he simply couldn’t muster the energy. Instead he muttered meekly as Dorian hauled him to his feet and walked him across the room, laying him down on the wide, canopied bed. Then he retreated to the chair across the room, and returned to silence.

Gabriel didn’t understand his presence there, feeling groggy, his mind clouded and slow as thinking through thick treacle. He sighed and struggled to pull himself up a little on the bed, to rest against the pillows at an angle from which he could see the room, and felt entirely exhausted when his action was complete. His apparently weakness was almost painful.

The room was of a fair size, each stone wall wet with the water of the melting ice; there were torches lit around the walls that kept up the heat in that place which would have otherwise been frozen, and lit the room with eerie dancing shadows. The walls were otherwise blank and empty, except for the wall by which Dorian was sitting, which housed the long, high window through which a very little light was filtered, flat and grey as the sky outside. And aside from the large, canopied, four-poster bed upon which Gabriel was lying, and the chair were Dorian was sitting, there was precious little furniture: a dresser, a small table, another chair by the window. It was a bare, absolutely inhospitable room, not that Gabriel had expected any better.

He lay there, still, fully dressed with the exception of his coat and his pocket watch. It could have been an hour or more that he stared from the bed on the edges of consciousness, staring over at Dorian who remained just as still as he. With the way he was feeling he had apparently been stripped of the concept of time; it could have been hours of blankness, listening to the crackle of the torches and the pumping of blood in his veins, before Dorian finally moved. He rose from the chair and drew the heavy black embroidered drapes across the window, then walked to the door and knocked. Soon, it opened.

“He’ll be with you soon,” he said, without turning to him, and then slipped from the room. And to the sound of the turning of the key, Gabriel slipped from consciousness.

When he woke, he was on fire. It seemed that before as he’d lain there he’d felt so very little, that his every sense had been muted, but now… now his senses were set alight just as the torches that flamed against the walls. His breath came to him so freely now, warm air filled with the smell of fire, and he opened his eyes to look upon his captor.

“You slept so long, Gabriel,” said the count, who was sitting there at the foot of the bed. As if on instinct Gabriel kicked out at him, but as he had known that he would be, Dra waa was just too fast; in a second he appeared right by his side. “That is no way to repay my hospitality.”

“Hospitality?” Gabriel sat up in the bed, fixing his gaze on Dracula’s white face. “You’re holding me captive.”

Dracula smiled with an odd, disarming sincerity. “That perhaps is true,” he said, in that thick Romanian accent, with his crystal clear English and his low voice. “But that does not mean that I cannot be a good host.” He gesture to the table by the window and cautiously Gabriel glanced over at it, finding a large silver tray there covered with meats and ts ats and wine, just the sight of which made his mouth water in spite of his present circumstance. “Go, eat. I expect that you must be hungry.”

When Gabriel didn’t move he gestured again with one pale hand and a look of expectation on his face. Gabriel *was* hungry; eventually he left the bed and walked across the floor – now quite dry – to the table where he seated himself and began to eat quite hungrily, ignoring the count completely as he joined him in the second chair and crossed his legs with their high black boots at the knee. It was his guess that were Dracula intending to kill him immediately he would have found a more entertaining way to do so than by poison, so he could at least dine and then die on a full stomach.

“I am glad that I did not kill you on your last visit,” said Dracula almost thoughtfully, breaking the tenuous silence between them.

“Strange,” Gabriel replied, not looking up as he spoke between bites of a large leg of lamb; the heightening of his senses had dulled somewhat but the food still tasted marvellous. “I wish I *had* killed you.”

“Ah, such humour. I knew that there was a reason I allowed you to live.” Gabriel bit back a sarcastic retort and took a sip of the wine. “You have been away so long. Oh, and I hope you do not mind so much that I took back my ring.”

This time Gabriel did look up at him, as he held up his hand to show off the ring that he wore there, the silver ring with the crest that Gabriel had always assumed was his. It was strange to see it on another hand and especially Dracula’s, especially when it looked like it belonged there. He couldn’t even muster a meek complaint. And then, as if an accident, he glanced up into Dracula’s eyes; for a moment they were black as night, without any trace of white, pupils that filled the whole eye before he blinked and brought back some normalcy to his gaze. Gabriel dropped the lamb back to the plate. Suddenly his appetite was ruined.

“I don’t want for you to fear me,” Dracula said. “That is not why I brought you here.”

“So why *am* I here?”

Dracula rose, slowly, and left his seat, pacing slowly across the room with his hands tucked back at the base of his spine. “I want you to remember,” he said. “While you are here with me. And I will see to it that you cannot forget.”

Strangely, the idea was not as repulsive as Gabriel had expected it would be; in fact, he *wanted* to know, wanted to regain what he’d lost, in spite of what Abraham had told him. He knew, *knew*, that no matter what he’d done he would never have asked to forget. Nothing could be so very terrible, not when he’d done what he’d done since then. Not that he’d comply. Not even a wish as deep as the knowledge of his past could compel him.

Or so he thought.

He was watching Dracula walked back across the room as he felt it, a strange sort of curiosity welling inside him. He watched the count’s movements just a little more intently then, noticing the fluidity with which he moved, how unnatural it seemed. He stood, so that he could watch more closely, almost staring then as the count moved toward the far wall with a strange, unsettling grace that was nowhere in nature. He stepped toward him, watching the heels of the count’s leather boots as they struck the floor. And then he stopped, and Gabriel stopped. He realised then far too late that he was in Dracula’s thrall.

Dracula turned and seized him by the shoulders, the pain of it coupled with his now renewed weakness rendering him unable to move. The last thing he saw as each of the torches blew out was Dracula’s long canines as they swept toward his throat. And then all was black.

Somewhere in the midst of swirling euphoria and stricken disgust, he passed out there in the dark. And Dracula caught him.

***