Chapter Text
Lisa Tepes could not abide by this barbaric schedule.
Of course, Lisa was a doctor and had been awoken at odd hours of the night for the emergent case of coughed up blood or a worsening fever. But lately, Vlad seemed to have forgotten that Lisa was human, that a once-monthly blood meal off a small mammal would not sustain her, and that—while she could function without out it once in a while—Lisa needed sleep.
Worse still, she had developed an unusual craving for blood lately. She attributed this at first to being married to and in the constant company of a vampire, only to realize once she had missed her menses that the two incidents might be related.
“Vlad,” she started out of the blue one day, leaning up from her microscope. “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Excuse me?” he asked as if she had just spit on his mother’s grave.
Lisa did not think the statement needed repeating and simply stared at him in response.
“Also, considering my current tentative state, I can no longer remain silent about the work you’ve been putting me through lately.”
Vlad stared at her as if she had just morphed into the manticore in his basement.
Lisa stared back, undeterred and snapped, “What?”
Vlad was very rarely ever at a loss for words. Surprising, for someone who had spent a good hundred years locked away in solitude. But rarely did he stare at his wife as he did now, fanged mouth slightly parted in half-shock and half-confusion.
He decided to address the confusion first, apparently. “Lisa, darling, nothing about our schedule has changed.”
Another moment of realization dawned over Lisa’s face. It was apparent, probably to him as well, that Lisa’s rhythm had mal-adjusted according to the nocturnal fetus growing inside her.
“Oh,” was all she could say at first.
Lisa felt herself pale from the shock and must have looked it too, when Vlad ran a loving hand over her cheek and stretched out his arm behind her in fear of her fainting.
“Are you all right, dear?” he asked, clearly worried. If he weren’t a vampire, Lisa surmised he might have been paling at this very moment, too.
Lisa pressed a thumb and forefinger to either of her temples. “I...Oh. Yes.”
“Do you want to sit down? Should I get you a glass of water? Or something to eat perhaps? Should I call the skeleton butler?” The swiftness with which Vlad’s shock turned into doting touched Lisa.
“Oh…no, I’m fine, dear.” But she still found herself leaning against the cool of his cloak for comfort. “I…I didn’t know we could do that.”
Vlad flushed slightly at her implication, a phenomenon Lisa was previously unaware she was capable of inciting.
And then Vlad did what he always did when he was flustered: pulled away from her and ran to his bookshelf to distract her from his embarrassment. It was only for a brief moment. Lisa would never suspect him of abandoning her while she was in shock, and he kept his eye on her in the instance of her suddenly fainting.
Thankfully, Lisa was hardier than that and had suffered worse ills than a pregnancy scare without fainting.
“If I had known we could do that, I would have used protection.”
“Lisa!” Vlad exclaimed, flushing again.
Lisa burst into a fit of laughter and then made her way over to where Vlad hunched over his bookshelf. The shock had worn off and quickly morphed into excitement.
“I’m pregnant!” she exclaimed to him, and just as quickly, her face fell. “Oh, wait, should I test it first before we get excited? Do I have to do the thing where I pee on barley? Or do you know of any other methods? I know we’ve discussed pregnancy hormones before, but I wasn’t sure if you—”
“Lisa.”
Lisa paused in her ramblings, flushing slightly. Her embarrassment evaporated when she realized Vlad didn’t care if she were rambling in excitement. His face was grave.
“Vlad, love, what’s wrong?” she asked.
She had never seen him this coy before. Usually, he was direct, firm. Generally he exuded confidence, even when he felt flustered over the way Lisa made him feel. Rarely did he recoil away from anything. For the first time, Lisa felt larger than him and almost swore that he was shrinking in front of her.
“Are you sure you want to keep this…” He seemed at a loss for words. “Baby.”
Lisa could feel her cheeks heat. A mix of embarrassment, excitement and anger, perhaps? She wasn’t sure, but of her answer, she was.
“Yes.” Another pause, resounding in the high ceilings of their lab. “Yes, I want to keep this baby.”
Just as suddenly as he had shrunk away, Vlad swooped down on her, holding her close, squeezing her tight. His cloak was cool and his arms steady. Lisa laughed in his chest. He held her tight, as though the thought could bring him no more joy.
Only later did she realize it was because he saw this as a death sentence.
“My lady?”
Normally, the grim reaper would have refrained from asking Lisa of anything. She was curt and impenetrable, and probably could not get used to having Dracula’s right-hand look like one of her patient’s corpses. So they never asked her anything.
But today, her gloved hand was shoved in Dracula’s mouth, and their master looked unable to answer. So carefully, Death strung their words together, so that they might coax her into answering.
“My lady, what are you doing?”
Perhaps it was her current position, or perhaps it had to do with her pregnancy, but Lisa answered swiftly and eagerly, “I need his saliva for an experiment.”
Dracula let out a series of unintelligible noises.
“Shut up,” Lisa said affectionately, and finally withdrew her hand. Dracula opened and closed his jaw, as if to assess the damage, but then gave her a pitiful look.
“You’ve never told me to shut up before.” Death detected a hint of wounded in his voice.
“Oh,” Lisa exclaimed, genuinely guilty. “I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
Death had never been anything but bones and half-cast magic but swore they could feel a stomach somewhere in them turn at Lisa’s words, like they might vomit. Warmth and affection were new things in this household.
Not that Dracula had ever been particularly cold with his minions. But their hundred-year long relationship had always been mechanical, symbiotic, like that of a bird cleaning a crocodile’s teeth purely for survival’s sake. To have something so unfamiliar as love woven into Dracula’s life…it was uncanny, it was unnatural.
It was strange.
But it was lovely.
Death had never lived or died. They were beyond the constraints of mortals and the undead. But the softness with which Dracula regarded his wife set something alight in Death, as if they carried something made of flesh and blood in their chest. As if they had a heart that galloped in joy at seeing their master so happy.
It was as if Lisa had brought the whole castle to life with her presence. The inner workings of their master and the inner workings of this mansion seemed to be connected, wholly new and reborn with a life Dracula had forsaken at his conception.
“Is there something urgent you wish to tell me, Death?” Dracula’s voice pulled them out of their musings.
“Nothing like that, Master.” It was unusual of Death to present themselves to their master unless dire circumstances warranted it, but Lisa’s mischief was contagious. “Just that…a new soul has entered the living.” And added, just to be sure there was no mistake in their intention, “Right here. In this very castle.”
Reflexively, Lisa’s head turned back to face her husband, her face glowing with delight. “You mean…?” And glanced back at Death. They nodded.
Dracula, on the other hand, regarded the news with a muted sort of shock, like he did most things. “So…our child has a soul.”
“Indeed, Master.”
“Lisa, what in God’s cursed name are you doing?”
He watched in faint horror as his wife shoveled the dirt over some poor deceased soul’s grave.
“Digging up this old man’s corpse. What does it look like?” Lisa stopped briefly, sticking her shovel into the ground, only to wipe the sweat off her brow and continue. It was the dead of night. Lisa should have been asleep by now. “He had an unusual set of symptoms. I think it was a stroke, but I want to dissect his brain to see exactly where the lesion was,” she continued, as if anything she said was relevant at all to Dracula’s current concern.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” he asked in reference to her condition.
“No. Why?”
“You’re pregnant,” he said pointedly. As if the thought needed reminding.
“About that,” she responded. “We are using protection after this one, because I cannot stand having to urinate at least a dozen times a day.”
Silence. Broken only by the sound of metal sliding against dirt. Dracula tried another tactic.
“Did you ask permission before digging up that man’s corpse?”
“Of course not. I’m not that stupid, Vlad. If I had asked and said no, they would have known it was me who dug it up. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
Dracula pouted, drawing blood on the inside of his mouth. “Don’t quote proverbs at me.”
“Why are you so concerned with me digging through a grave? Aren’t you a vampire?”
“It’s not the humans I care about, Lisa. Or the old man’s soul or body or anything else of his person that might matter to his family. It’s you. And our child. Wallachians already have a thousand excuses to send you into the grave with your stroke patient. Don’t give them another one.”
Lisa looked as though she might laugh. Dracula would find it endearing if he weren’t genuinely concerned for her well-being. He flexed his hands, ran his long, pointed nails along his wrist in some sort of vain attempt to quell his frustration with her.
“You aren’t taking this seriously. Do you find it funny?” He could not control the fire spinning in his throat, and a less human voice made its way out of it. He had no desire to terrify Lisa into submission, but her nonchalance even at his apparent fury only made him angrier.
To his surprise, she stopped her digging, wiped her brow once more and turned to him. A smile was still apparent on her face, and he could not bring himself to remain angry at her.
“Vlad,” she said firmly, reaching up to press his cheeks. The difference in their height made this situation almost laughable, but that didn’t stop Lisa from trying. She leaned her head against his chin for a second and then pulled back. “Everything will be fine. Stop worrying.”
He said nothing to that, choosing instead to watch her turn back to her shoveling.
“Now, are you going to be a good father to our child and help me dig up this corpse or are you just going to stand there like a deadbeat?”
This was as closest to “I told you so” as Lisa would allow Vlad to get.
She laid in their extravagant bed, ignoring the ache in her neck from craning her head for so long. She was on bedrest for her second threatened miscarriage. She refused to lie flat and insisted on at least being allowed to read, but a low blood pressure reading had gotten that privilege taken away from her, too.
Vlad could have easily goaded her about it, lectured her about how he was right and her antics kept getting her bedridden. But, to Lisa’s relief, Vlad was not the type of man who felt the need to do so.
“Vlad,” she whined, sinking into the sheets. She used to hate how much he spoiled her. She grew up in a glorified shack in Lupu, and the extraordinary lengths he went to assure her every want was met used to make her uncomfortable. Now she reveled in it.
Vlad settled beside her and ran a gentle hand over her forehead. “What is it, my love?”
Lisa glowed under his touch. Since becoming pregnant, it had been incident after incident, and on the rare occasions no new ailment troubled her, she was too wrapped up in her thoughts and fears to allow for Vlad to display any sort of chivalry.
“Read something to me. Anything. It’s been weeks since we’ve discussed your interests.”
“My interests lately have been you,” he responded, smiling faintly. He read between the lines, and in turn so did she. Her statement had been laced with concern: that she had neglected his needs since becoming pregnant. And his words were an assurance that she hadn’t.
But then his smile faded, and he laid himself more comfortably beside her. He took her cheek in his hand, pulled her in close and kissed her forehead. And then he broke away and Lisa knew something he had read troubled him.
“Dhampirs…” he started slowly, carefully, as if the word would shatter over his lips if he held it any tighter. “Don’t tend to survive till birth. And if they do…” Lisa saw him swallow. “They take their mothers to the grave.”
Faintly, she swore she could see tears swimming in his eyes. One of them plopped down, leaving a bloodstain on the sheets between them.
“I’m sorry,” he inhaled.
“Don’t be silly. God knows I’ve left worse stains over your sheets a handful of times. Not to mention the number of times I’ve urinated on the bed since becoming pregnant. You put up with so much,” she added with a short laugh.
Vlad ran a delicate finger over her cheek. “Don’t apologize for things you can’t control.”
They laid like that for a while, with Vlad lacing his fingers through her hair and the two of them sharing the comfortable silence. The candle flame on the nightstand undulated with the breeze and Vlad reflexively pulled her closer, as if to protect her from the cold. He sometimes forgot humans chilled, and Lisa figured this was one time where he remembered.
“Humans are so fragile,” he finally said, not moving. His chin was pressed to Lisa’s head. “I always fear for you, Lisa. That something might break you. I fear that something might be me.”
Lisa tried not to laugh. She didn’t think his worry was misplaced—no, on the contrary, Vlad could never truly understand how fragile her life truly was. But it was ironic of him to fear death so intimately when he was immortal.
She refrained from laughing, but still couldn’t contain her amusement, “A woman comes into your castle and suddenly you fear death, whom you have chained to a leash as your servant. I never knew one little village girl could affect you so deeply.”
“You are more than that, Lisa.”
“To you.” Lisa adjusted her head more comfortably over Vlad’s chest. “There are many women in the world like me. Curious, stubborn, kind. These traits are not exclusive to me.”
“I will never understand how you see that in other humans. To me, they are exclusive to you. I see nothing but contempt and fear and hate in humans. The world through your eyes is so vastly different from the world in my eyes.”
Lisa closed her eyes and smiled. “One day, you’ll see it through mine.”
Lisa let her pen drop to the side. Her wrists ached, and as much as she normally relished in Vlad’s gardens, the sun only seemed to make every one of her symptoms worse.
Five months in. Three months ago, the threatened miscarriages and the vaginal bleeding had stopped. The vomiting, she had never experienced at all, her theory being that her body didn’t recognize her pregnancy to produce enough of the hormone that led to it. The threatened miscarriages only confirmed her suspicions. Her anemia had resolved, save for the normal physiological allowance of pregnancy.
Now it was breathlessness and photosensitivity and a circadian rhythm that made Dracula’s look human.
The sun made her drowsy. She wanted desperately to write, but the light made her head heavy like it was stuffed with wet cotton. She leaned back on the bench and ran her hand reflexively over her pregnant abdomen.
“You haven’t even been born yet, and already such a troublemaker,” she sighed with a smile. She felt a kick, as if the fetus knew and understood. She let out a short laugh.
“Your mother’s just teasing,” she went on. “You should get used to that.”
“You’ll struggle for the rest of your life trying to get used to it,” a voice behind her said. Vlad appeared behind her, laying his hand over her shoulder and smiling slightly.
Lisa had long stopped jumping at Vlad’s sudden appearances. He seemed to live in the shadows, everywhere all at once. It was a source of comfort to her now, that no matter where she might wander in the castle, he would always be able to find her.
“They’ll be my child so I’m sure they’ll only respond to my teasing with the utmost affection. See?” she added as she felt another kick. “They’re agreeing with me.”
Vlad laughed and seated himself beside Lisa, leaning in close. He took her hand in his and kissed the back of it.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” Lisa asked. “Don’t you get tired in the sun?”
“I only came to fetch you. I feel like I never see you sleep anymore.”
“Yes, well…” Lisa sighed and let her head slouch over his shoulder. “That’s your fault for impregnating me.”
Vlad blinked. “Don’t make it sound so crude.”
Lisa closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around his neck, sinking into his cloak. “It wasn’t so crude.”
Vlad pulled apart from her to look at her. “Oh?”
Lisa snorted as his hands ran delicately across her abdomen. “Stop, that tickles. Stop!” Vlad kept tickling her, leaning into her giggling mouth and laying kisses over her face, till his weight forced her flat on the bench. He broke her fall with his arm, hovering over her till her giggles ceased.
She looked up at him, glowing in the sunlight.
“Oh, I shouldn’t lay on my back,” Lisa said, sitting up suddenly. “It compresses the vena cava.”
Vlad looked vaguely annoyed. “Is that all you ever think about?”
“No!” Lisa protested, offended that he would accuse her of such a thing. “I think about astronomy sometimes and…and books. And…” Her voice dropped an octave. “Oh, perhaps you’re right.”
Vlad burst into laughter, throwing his head back but never letting go of Lisa. When he finally managed to collect himself, he pulled her close again, pressing his forehead to hers.
“I find that an endearing quality of yours.”
“Really?” Lisa would have sat up in excitement if Vlad didn’t have her in an embrace. “Most men find it tiresome…I was afraid you’d think the same.”
“Lisa, you’ve spent all this time with me, and you thought I’d dislike your intellect? Or your…what do you call them? Your ramblings? I like hearing you speak.”
“Well, most men find it endearing at first, too. But they eventually tire of it.”
“I’m not most men, and I would never tire of you, Lisa. You could speak of your medical discoveries to me for a century, and I would only wish for more. Even if it were things I already knew. It’s not just what you speak of, Lisa, but the way you speak of it.”
“What do you mean?” Lisa laughed.
“You speak with so much life and excitement.” Vlad looked as though he wanted to continue, but flushed pink suddenly and quieted himself. Lisa laughed again. She could not bring herself to tease him, knowing how much effort it took for him to display any sort of vulnerability. Even with her.
So she made herself more comfortable on his chest, and let herself drift to sleep as his cloak swallowed her whole.
Dracula was not a squeamish man. His sentries paraded the halls with their guts and brains out, his maids and butlers carried dishes with rotting bones, and there was no shortage of blood that decorated some of his halls.
He was grateful his wife was a doctor. Lisa very rarely recoiled at the sight of gore or blood, though she had certainly insisted he keep his castle cleaner. The main levels of his castle—the ones for entertaining guests (in theory) and experimenting—were pristine, but the upper and lower levels were for his minions to crawl and feed and entertain themselves. He could hardly control the amount of bloodshed they wished to indulge in.
Abhorrent, she had called it. Then wafted her hand in front of her face and continued walking like it was normal for a potential suitor to keep ghouls in his basement.
How he wished for that nonchalance now. Dracula knew very little about birth. The idea was contrary to his entire existence. The birth of a dhampir, he knew even less about.
“My love,” he said, as he had uselessly said a dozen times before, watching her sweat and struggle on the floor of his laboratory. He had set aside this area, kept it sterile and as comfortable as he could offer for one in labor, but Lisa had insisted on crouching over the floor to give birth.
“It widens the pelvis,” she had said, filing through a handful of his texts to prove her point. She had delivered so many children, he did not even attempt to argue her expertise in the matter, despite how he personally felt more comfortable with her lying on her back. “And gravity will aid me. You’re old,” she had sniffed as a tease. “You’re stuck in your old ways. Lithotomy position was thought up by bunch of old men like you who loved their unborn sons more than their wives.”
Dracula, for the undead life of him, could not fathom a man’s apathy towards any woman in Lisa’s current situation, let alone his own wife.
“Don’t have a heart attack,” she responded to his affection. “If I shit myself.”
Dracula swallowed a chiding. He could not stamp out the crudeness of her, no matter how much his face always showed his offense. He tried to swallow his worries and make a joke out of it, in part to alleviate Lisa’s anxiety.
“My heart doesn’t beat, so there’s no need to worry about that.”
Between the grunts and the sweat, Lisa managed a smile. But it was all she could do, before another contraction hit her and she bore down on her pelvis. All Dracula could do in turn was soothe his hand along her back and her hips and let her clasp his hand and squeeze tight when the pain wracked her body.
As the contraction subsided, Lisa sighed and caught her breath.
“I never understood that,” she panted, running a languid hand over her pregnant abdomen. “How does your blood circulate throughout your body if your heart doesn’t beat?”
“Now’s not the time to worry about that, dear,” Dracula all but croaked.
Lisa seemed to contemplate the thought, anyway. At least, until another contraction wracked her body, and Dracula could feel every muscle in her tighten with exertion. He felt her slacken suddenly and fluid drip down on the floor.
“The head is out,” Lisa panted with relief. And to his chagrin, she reached between her legs and pulled the rest of the baby out, the umbilical cord dragging behind it. Dracula had to control himself not to visibly recoil. It wasn’t the gore or even the concept of birth that frightened him, but the fact that Lisa—this fragile, tiny human that he so deeply cared about—had somehow managed to endure such pain and violence on her body.
A first, Dracula saw their child and felt blood curdle in his throat. It wasn’t moving or crying. Weren’t babies supposed to do that when they were born?
Lisa didn’t look particularly concerned, which alleviated his fear somewhat. And then, as Lisa rubbed the baby’s back and let it hang for a minute, it coughed and began to wail. Dracula relaxed his shoulders in relief.
“We’ll need to cut the cord,” Lisa said, and almost reached for the scissors herself before Dracula stopped her.
“You’re out of control,” he teased, and to his delight, she smiled. He knew little of birth, but he had paid close attention to Lisa’s lectures. He picked a spot close to their child’s umbilicus and on either side, clamped the cord so that the blood flow would stop.
“A girl,” Lisa sighed, running a hand over the soft hairs on her head. “Not disappointed I didn’t birth you an heir, are you?”
“If she takes after you, I wouldn’t even worry,” Dracula teased back, cutting the cord. As he did, Lisa cradled their daughter to her chest and nursed her.
He had always scoffed at human affection. Dracula had been in love before, had a family long ago, but he had long abandoned those notions of humanity. But here, in their warmly lit laboratory with Lisa staring at their newborn child with a glowing face, he swore he could feel his heart beating again for the first time in over a century.
When their daughter tired, Lisa placed her in the cot to her side.
“Do you want to or shall I?” Lisa asked, glancing down at the cord emerging from between her legs.
“Sometimes I wonder who the vampire in this household really is.”
Lisa laughed weakly. Dracula spared no second to position himself between her legs, but regarded her warily.
“Tug gently on the cord. Make sure it comes out in one piece or I’ll bleed to death. And put your other hand on my abdomen and push back on the uterus. If you don’t, you’ll take all my insides out with you. Don’t worry, I’ll do most of the work,” she added to his bewildered look.
“So it always seems to be the case.” He had read those instructions before in a text. But doing something was entirely different to simply understanding it conceptually. That, Lisa had taught him dozens of times over.
Still, he was gentle, and delivering a placenta turned out to be mostly instinct. Lisa even managed an enthusiastic clap for him. The placenta slopped on the floor, and suddenly Dracula felt a very human weakness overtake him. He felt dizzy.
“Vlad?” He couldn’t imagine what on his face gave his weakness away, because he was already deathly pale. Perhaps she just knew him well enough to know something was wrong. He couldn’t answer her, however, because the next second he fainted next to her.
Dracula, the lord of darkness, had fainted at the expulsion of the placenta. Lisa couldn’t say she was particularly surprised. In her experience, the hardier a man seemed, the more likely he was to faint during his wife’s labor. By that logic, it was a miracle he managed to stay conscious throughout the majority of her labor.
“Oh, fantastic,” Lisa said to Vlad’s unconscious body. “Death!” she called out. “Death!”
To her relief, Death manifested immediately. Like their master, they appeared from the shadows, almost out of thin air. They had forgone their scythe today, rightfully expecting the use of their hands might be necessary.
“Death, do me a favor. Put a pair of gloves on and reach in and clean me up, will you?”
Death’s face was a skeleton, but Lisa could have sworn she saw something like terror over it.
“For God’s sake, Death,” she snapped. “You’re a grim reaper. Don’t you harvest souls and see gore and naked women every day?”
“It’s not the gore or the nakedness that concerns me, my lady.” Their voice was even. “Is my master all right with this?”
“Oh, please,” Lisa sighed. “This is perfectly professional.”
Death seemed to consider that briefly. And then did as they were told, donning a pair of gloves over their skeleton hands and reaching in between Lisa’s legs to scrape whatever blood remained in her uterus. To her relief, they seemed to be familiar with the circumstances of birth and needed no guiding.
“Have you done this before?” Lisa grunted, ignoring the pain of a hand up a tender organ.
“I wouldn’t say that exactly, my lady. But many souls have been lost during labor, which makes me familiar enough with it.”
Blood slopped to the floor and Death pressed their clean glove to Lisa’s abdomen and massaged her uterus, allowing a trickle of blood to flow.
“I’ve never seen you around my dead patients,” she realized. “Do you come collect souls yourself? Or can I just not see you?”
“I am a concept, my lady,” Death explained. “I don’t so much as collect souls as I am aware of their flow and function. I know where they are headed. If anything, I protect them. Which is why I stay so close to Lord Dracula.”
“Lord Dracula?” Lisa repeated. “Is he in danger of dying?”
“No, my lady.” They hesitated, seemed to consider the weight of their words and then spoke again, “But you are. You tempt fate dancing so close to the dead. He has forgone mortal life, which in turn puts you at risk. And your healing of the sick, it only tempts those in power more to see your demise. The miracles you perform would liken you to a messiah, but you’re a woman. Women cannot be messiahs in this world.” She detected a faint note of amusement in their voice. “A failing of your species, I’m afraid.”
Lisa furrowed her brows, hummed, and laid her head back on the mat. She had no idea what any of that meant and didn’t bother trying to interpret Death’s cryptic words. They always seemed to speak in riddles and metaphors. Eloquent language, she could understand given the writing of her medical texts. But Death spoke as if they hid meaning behind words.
She didn’t need this sort of headache right now.
When Dracula came to, it was to his wife giggling.
He was relieved, at least, that his servants did not let her lie in all her body fluids while he remained unconscious. When Dracula came to, it was to Lisa sitting comfortably in a clean, white shift, rocking their baby to her breast. He was in the same spot he had fainted, a phenomenon apparently so confusing to everyone in the castle that no one had known what to do with him and just left him to lie on the ground.
But Lisa would not stop giggling.
“Is the idea of me fainting so funny to you?”
“You command the darkness, can manifest fire and hell from the skies, but the sight of a baby coming out of me, you can’t handle,” Lisa responded, still giggling. To his relief, however, she did not dwell on the thought and presented their child to him. “Do you want to hold her?”
A strange wave of fear passed through him. Lisa’s pregnancy had all seemed unnatural to him. He was quite sure—and he had lived a long time and was generally confident in his assessments—that their child would not survive. Or worse, that Lisa would not. He had humored her, and now sorely regretted not trusting her medical expertise to see this pregnancy through.
But the idea of actually having a child, actually holding their child in his arms seemed completely at odds with anything Dracula had ever predicted. His fears of Lisa dying or mourning over the death of their stillborn had suddenly vanished. Now his mind ran with thoughts of how he would raise this child, whether he could even be a good father, where to even begin with this thought process.
“Vlad, you’re worrying aren’t you?” Dracula was broken out of his thoughts by Lisa looking directly into his face. He frowned at being read so easily.
She would not have it. “Here.” And she did not give him a choice in holding their child, because she practically shoved her into his arms.
Their daughter was tiny, tinier than Dracula knew other newborns to be. He was suddenly overcome with the fear that he might drop her or spear her with one of his nails. He considered holding her tighter to secure her, but then feared that he might snap her in half. Dracula was flustered. He rarely ever faced a situation where he had no idea what to do, and that only flustered him more.
“I have never seen a man look more anxious holding a child.” Lisa teased him but pressed herself to him, as if to answer the stream of fears in his thoughts. She secured them both with her gesture, as if to present a simple solution to all his fears at once. He appreciated her gesture with a smile.
“She’s not smiling,” Dracula said, wounded. “Does she not like me?”
To his displeasure, Lisa burst into a snort of laughter.
“Don’t be silly, Vlad. She’s just a newborn. She can’t smile right now.” And then she furrowed her brows and frowned. “All she can do right now is cry and poop.”
The baby hiccupped and spit out a spoonful of her abdominal contents.
“And vomit,” Lisa added.
“What’s a baby to the lord of darkness and the most intelligent woman in the world?” Dracula said to the worried look on her face.
“Apparently a lot, since you fainted,” Lisa teased. When Dracula frowned again, she laughed.
“Enough,” he sighed and put a hand on her shoulder. “You must be exhausted. Let’s get you to sleep.”
Lisa seemed not to have considered how fatigued she was until he mentioned it to her. Her eyes suddenly looked weary and she leaned against Dracula’s chest, blinking sleepily. Her hair was a tangled mess, and despite attempting to clean herself, she still smelled strongly of blood.
He had only pulled apart from her briefly when he realized something was wrong.
Lisa said nothing at first. But he could see the way her face lost its color, see the fear beginning to creep over that worn out face and he knew instantly that something was wrong.
She grabbed his collar with the grip of someone much stronger.
“Lisa?” he dared ask, setting their child down on the cot.
“Vlad.” Lisa’s voice came out as a muted whimper. It struck fear into him, more than the second-long beat of visceral panic upon seeing their unmoving child, more than any creature of the night that rivaled his strength, more than even the light-dwelling zealots that would see him shredded to pieces in the name of their God. Dracula had never heard such desperation in his wife’s voice before, and her fear lent to his fear.
“Vlad,” she gasped. She stared at him with wide eyes, panting suddenly. “I can’t breathe.”
It took all of his strength not to start tearing down the hall in a hysteric fit. He had access to an infinite well of knowledge, and in this moment, he had access to none of it at all. Panic drowned his intellect.
“It’s a clot. Vlad, I have a clot in my lung.”
And that was what he so admired about Lisa. Despite her panic, she still kept a level enough head to figure out her own diagnosis. How she came to this diagnosis, he had no idea. Whatever theories she had would suffice. He had doubted her throughout her pregnancy, and no more would he ever challenge her authority on the subject of medicine.
“The anticoagulant…” she started again, still gasping. He wanted to tell her to hush, to save her breath, but he needed her instructions. Her wide eyes slid over to look directly at Dracula. “It’s not ready…Vlad, you have to bite me.”
“I…what?” He understood the concept of clotting, of medicine used to fibrinolyse and inhibit coagulation. He had studied and experimented those concepts beside her. But the thought of biting her when she had already lost so much blood in labor and when the concentration of whatever substance might help her was in such diluted form in his saliva…he could not do it. At least not without properly goading.
“Vlad!” Lisa tugged on his collar. “Either way, I’m going to die, so you might as well try it!”
That did it. Lisa’s panic only served to short circuit every remaining cell functioning in Dracula’s brain. He could not do anything except obey her, especially if it meant her dying.
Dracula’s knowledge of anatomy spanned nowhere near that of his wife’s, but he knew enough, at least. She would need the coagulant to go directly to the heart, either through the subclavian or the jugular. He chose the latter, fearful that his fangs might puncture her lung if he chose the former.
Dracula wrapped his arm around her hips, tugged her in close. His other arm steadied her shoulders. Lisa did not shake or quiver in grasp, and this only furthered his admiration for her. But this was so dangerously close to his old habits of preying on humans for blood, and in his fearful haze incited some of the same instinctual urges. He held them down.
“Lisa,” he rasped. “Forgive me if this hurts.”
He parted his jaw, sunk his teeth into her neck and ignored the ripple of pain her cry sent through him. She did not struggle or scream, but held to him tightly, trustful that he would not drink to his heart’s content and kill her out of temptation.
He could not remember how long he held her for. The taste of her blood placated him, but he dared not drink more or sink deeper into this bliss when Lisa was so dangerously close to death. He realized their mad plan had worked only when Lisa’s breath stilled and she ran a gentle hand through his hair.
“Vlad,” she said sleepily. “I’m fine.”
“You poor thing.” Lisa sighed in contentment as he ran a knuckle along her cheek. “Let’s get you to bed.”
She had no protest to that, nor any quip or comment. The moment he let her slacken in his arms, she fell right to sleep, dead on her feet.
“I still can’t believe you fainted.”
Death snickered in the corner, hushing only when their master gave them a glare that could cut glass.
Dracula stood, tall and looming over the figure of his postpartum wife. Despite her recent brush with death, she was glowing. All the weariness in her eyes from last night seemed to have evaporated upon seeing their child.
Under any other circumstances, he might have found fault with her for teasing him incessantly about his fainting spell. But he would not do anything to lessen her positive mood. She was ecstatic, unusually giddy and most of all, alive, and he would put up with hours and hours of her teasing him about subjects he was sensitive about as long as it meant seeing her talk happily. He would not take that away from her.
She seemed to have noticed and did not press her teasing any further.
“Oh,” she said suddenly. Dracula did not notice the issue at first, until Lisa glanced down and his eyes followed hers. There was blood dripping down the length of her skirts.
“Shall I hold her for you?” Dracula asked, and Lisa give him an appreciative glance. She was still weary in some ways, and Dracula did all her could to aid her. But he was so woefully ignorant about birth when it was so contrary to his very nature. He was still in shock that both mother and dhampir had survived.
He was still not used to the way his heart swelled upon seeing their child. Lisa had stirred a long-dead feeling in his heart when they had first met, but this child made him feel something else entirely. He could not find the word to describe it. Happy, perhaps, but in a bittersweet way. Like he knew this child would love him, imitate him and then outgrow him one day.
Their daughter blinked up at him.
The sight frightened him, and he startled, losing his grip on her. Before he could do anything to stop it, their daughter was plummeting to the floor.
“Vlad!” Lisa cried out, jumping to save their child’s skull from cracking against the ground. But there was no need. Lisa’s hands froze in the air. “Oh my God,” she said.
Their daughter floated an inch off the ground, safe from harm’s way. She was still bundled up, staring at the two of them, apparently unaware of the power she was currently displaying.
“She’s inherited some of my powers, it would seem,” Dracula said. He flashed an amused glance his wife’s way and was surprised to find a worried look over her face instead.
Lisa slapped her hand to her cheek in a manner that was so unlike her. She sighed. “I won’t be able to do any research for this!”