Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 112849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112849 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
She frowned. “You are a vampire and you still believe in God?”
I shot her a puzzled look. “Who else is there to believe in?”
She gave her head a weak shake and gently rested her hands on her belly, the motion making my heart wince at all the loss. “Could you turn me into one? Is that not how it works? I read a story in a woman’s digest and they said vampires can turn humans into vampires too.”
She sounded so hopeful it broke my heart to tell her no.
“I can’t do that,” I told her. “But our child would have been a vampire, or at least would have turned into one at the age of thirty-five, if a boy, or twenty-one, if a girl, when they would become immortal, living solely on human blood.”
Her upper lip curled. “So that part is true.”
“Yes. I have to drink blood to survive. But if I were to bite you, drain you of your blood and fill you with my own, you would become a vampire but you wouldn’t be like me. You would be damaged.”
“Would I live forever?”
I mulled that over before I answered. “Yes. But you would live forever as a monster. It takes years, decades, probably even centuries for the monster to be buried, for the madness to stop and for the humanity to take over. It might not even happen at all. You wouldn’t know who you are or who I am. You would be this dangerous beast who would kill for the sake of killing. No one wants to live like that. And as much as I hate this world sometimes, the people of this world don’t deserve to have monsters like that roaming all over it. They are better kept in the other world.”
“Other world?” Her blood-shot eyes widened.
“The Red World,” I told her. “Where vampires originally came from. A place way up north, accessed through a veil, to where the king of vampires resides.”
She sighed heavily—it was obviously a lot to take and all too much for her at that moment—and I immediately put my hand on hers on top of her belly. “Now is not the time for me to be telling you this,” I added. “You need to rest. The doctor says he’s going to induce labor soon.”
“And if that doesn’t work?” she said in a bone-weary voice.
“Then he will perform surgery to take the child out,” I told her.
“Take the corpse out,” she said, giving me a dull look. “That’s what you mean.”
“Oh Lucy,” I cried out suddenly in a rush of emotion. I leaned in and I held her as tight as I could without hurting her, my heart breaking into a million pieces.
She fell asleep shortly after that and the nurse and midwife came back in to take over. I went back downstairs and talked to the doctor for a bit. I told him that she remembered she was Mina and Van Helsing was impressed that I had been right all along. It would have felt good to have that win over him, if the rest of my world wasn’t falling apart.
The next two days were precarious and Van Helsing was growing impatient. All the natural methods to induce labor, such as special herbs, weren’t working. There was a moment when I thought the doctor was going to call over a witch to see her through, but he had the good sense not to. Even witches that were said to be helpful to vampires could never be trusted, which was a shame because their herbs and spells and potions worked.
“We need to get the fetus out,” the doctor said. “Today.”
He brought out a de Ribes bag which he inserted inside of Lucy with a pair of forceps, pumping it full of water to induce labor. I am sure a lot of men wouldn’t have been in the same room with their wife for this, but being a vampire there was a lot I could handle. The ways vampires viewed the human body were a lot different from everyone else, and I wasn’t about to let my wife go through all of this torture alone.
Except when the doctor brought out the formidably pronged cervical dilator, a nightmarish steel tool. When that didn’t do anything except make my poor Lucy scream, I was starting to feel sick to my stomach.
Which then got worse when he brought out something called a decapitating hook, and I don’t have to tell you how that thing worked.
“Stop,” I told him, pushing the serrated hook away from her. “No. You’re not using that.”
The doctor gave me a steady look. “It is dead, Val,” he said in a harsh whisper so that Lucy wouldn’t hear, but she was pretty much passed out from the pain as it was. I had given her some morphine to make the process easier.