Chapter 7 - Truths
"We must learn from the past," Sorin said, totally ignoring what Reggie was trying to tell them. "Dracula is quite mad. He is creating or conscripting an army. They sleep for now, but, when he is ready, they will wake and swarm across the continent."
"We know," Jon said.
Reggie looked over to where her dad was standing. Always quiet and understated, the only place where he was larger than life was in a fight. Of all of them, Jon was the fastest and the strongest, although he didn't look it.
"Dracula is why we are here," Mina added. "We have seen the reports. Does he really ride in a coach drawn by dead horses?"
Reggie hadn't quite been able to believe that part either. All the accounts were second hand and things like that entered into the mythical mindset more often than not.
"Yes," Sorin said. "Sometimes it looks like a normal coach with normal horses, sometimes a decaying wreck with decaying, demonic beasts pulling it. I have seen it."
"Either his power is fluctuating or he's being theatrical," Mina said.
"It could be either," Sorin agreed, and the pair shared a glance as only two people who had actually met Dracula could do.
Reggie wondered what secrets they knew that they weren't even aware of.
"If the stories are to be believed, you had your chance at Dracula over a century ago, but you failed and we are left to pick up the pieces," Baron said.
"You also failed," Reggie pointed out, "and which bit of 'you can't kill Dracula' did you not understand?"
"There must be a way," Lan said.
"There is," Reggie said, "it's why we have come to Transylvania."
Mina shook her head, just minutely, and Reggie shut up.
"So you can kill Dracula, but we can't?" Baron sneered. "What do you have that we don't? We have our own vampire, as you noticed."
Sorin glared at the man; there was clearly no love lost between them.
"We have decades of research," Mina said, "and we know what he is."
"He's a vampire," Baron retorted. "There were vampires before him, there will be vampires after him, and they all die."
"Do all vampires control wolves, Mr Baron?" Mina asked. "Do they all have the ability to become animals or smoke. Yes there were vampires before Dracula, some share one or two of the abilities he possesses because they were spawned from the same seed, but Dracula was the first of a new breed."
"How so?" Lan asked.
"Our research leads us to believe all vampires are spawned from one demonic entity that first contaminated Homo sapiens as early as thirty five thousand years ago," Abe replied.
"Don't be ridiculous," Baron spluttered.
"The evidence exists," Reggie added her voice. "Luckily for humanity most vampires, like many hybrids, cannot create more of their kind. Very few can pass on the curse, and many of those can only do it once. We would be overrun otherwise."
"Dracula has created many vampires," Sorin pointed out.
"Which is why we hypothesised there was something different about him, even before he was resurrected after our encounter," Mina agreed.
"If he didn't die, how is it you are not his minion?"
Reggie wondered if her great-great-grandmother would just hit Baron and be done with it at some point.
"Killing him, however temporary it may have been," Mina replied, letting her eyes flash just for a second, "broke his connection to me. There was no indication I had retained any of the vampire traits, apart from a dislike for very bright light, until I had my second child, which nearly killed me."
"Unlike in Stoker's book, my mother was already carrying me when Dracula attacked her," Quin added. "As a child I had the same aversion to bright light, which neither my brother nor my sister did. When I was eighteen I fell off a horse and cracked open my skull. It should have killed me, it didn't."
"That's when our family realised what was going on," Abe said. "We've been in the business of vampire hunting ever since."
"But our focus has always been Dracula," Jon added.
"Instead of charging in we researched," Mina took over again. "It was obvious Dracula was no ordinary vampire. He has far greater powers than most, and he does not stay dead."
"Then what is he?"
Baron really was going to lose his head in a minute.
"The first," Reggie decided to save Mina the trouble. "Dracula is the demonic entity that started the whole cycle."
A/N: For those judging, this is technically the 8K mark
"That's not possible, Vlad Tepes was a real person, he's no demon," Sorin said. "My father fought in his army."
"Vlad Tepes was a human being once," Reggie replied, "but eventually he went on campaign and did not come back the same man."
"We cannot say precisely where, but we can say, at some point Vlad Tepes was confronted with this demonic entity, but it did not infect him as it had others, it entered him," Mina explained.
"How do you know this?" Baron demanded.
"A record of a short illness while on campaign, written by the priest attending him," Mina snapped. "The priest was mysteriously killed, but some of his writings survived."
"While Tepes lived, his will mostly overrode that of the entity," Reggie took up the story, "making him more blood thirsty, but left him human. When he died, the demon came to the forefront, and Dracula became what he is now. We believe those with him at the time realised, which is why they dismembered him, but this thing brings him back no matter what happens to his physical shell."
"It must be destroyed before Dracula can die," Mina finished and her glare challenged anyone to disagree with her.
~~Thanks for reading, see you soon for more~~
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