The silence was agony, and when she spoke, I wanted to cry with the pain of her answer.
‘Yes,’ her voice was very small, her breath very warm against my cheek. ‘Lil, will you sing for me?’
It was easy as breathing, to share a song with her. I sang it soft, and tender, and sweet as her kisses, and when it was done she rolled over and pressed back against me, her body warm against my length. I looked at her in the mirror, and she looked back with a watchful intensity.
At last, she spoke again. ‘Will you forget me?’
I tilted her chin up, and kissed her soft neck, and she shivered. ‘Your lips. They’re cold.’
We watched each other in the mirror until the fire died. The stars began to burn their places in the sky, and I knew it was done. Some loves are built slowly, brick by brick. But Mira’s and mine was forged as a blade: sharp and burning, violence in its beginning, and in its end. She was a wound I felt I would never heal from, a scar I would carry on my heart alongside MamÄ.
I watched her face in the mirror as the light faded, and at last, as night fell and Kizzy returned to fly my love away, so did I.
I did forget her, of course. I tried to remember, but as the years turned to decades, and the decades turned into centuries, she faded just as I had done in that mirror. I mourned when she died, old by human standards, but without tears grief is not very purging. I decided to let her go.
Dracul kept his word. After I drank Kizzy’s blood, he taught me to fly, and we saw a great many things. After a century, another joined our rank of vampyres: a Countess who Dracul spared after purging her husband. We liked her well enough.
All our other labels faded, Traveller, slave, until only one remained: Vampyre. We were feared, we were powerful. We were allowed to choose our prey, and fed only on those who, by our measure, deserved it. We took Boyar Valcar before his tumour did, his blood sour with sickness, and killed numerous other boyars and slavers. We spared Malovski, Valcar’s puppet, as damaged as the girls she commanded, though I hope our night-time visits gave her nightmares that stalked her to her death.
And she did die, eventually. So did Cook, and Dot, and Szilvie, Albu and Fen and Kem, and my once beloved Mira, though they were free to the end of their days. Soon their deaths were as distant as the horizon.
Men never stopped sinning, and we never stopped feeding. But we kept to the shadows. They didn’t exactly forget about Dracul, but truth became rumour, rumour became fable, and so he passed into legend.
We joined him, eventually. They came to call us the three sisters – two dark, one fair – and worse. The beautiful damned, the brides of Dracul, the deathless girls.
And though my loyalty to Kisaiya was my bond, I never knew again what it was to feel my heart quicken in my chest, my blood flood my body at the touch of another. A vampyre cannot love, only thirst. And that, above all else, is what truly damns us.
The central joy of re-visioning Dracula’s ‘dark sisters’ is that Dracula himself was a reincarnation, a forging of many different myths into a single enduring creation. Alongside Polidori’s The Vampyre and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Dracula became a perfect vehicle for the Victorians to examine their neuroses around sex, gender, and sexuality, at a safe, cloaked distance. Women, of course, bore the brunt of this, and so it was women I looked for when approached to pick a classic to respond to for Bellatrix.
I came late to Stoker’s story, but still it has permeated my consciousness for years. In films, TV shows, costumes for Halloween parties, and music; the influence of the ultimate vampire has spread far and wide. This ubiquity means the story is porous and ripe for reimagining, especially in the characters of the so-called ‘brides’ of Dracula.
Stoker himself doesn’t refer to them thus, but of course three sexual, powerful women would not be allowed to exist unattached in the public consciousness. Stoker describes them briefly, as ‘two dark, one fair’, the ‘two dark’ having ‘high, aquiline noses’. As soon as I read this description, I imagined them as sisters, and knew I’d found the story I wanted to sink my teeth into for the Bellatrix project.
My sisters are Kizzy and Lil, twins and Travellers. This is a much persecuted culture throughout history, and has its origins in Northern India, where my own family are from. Due to their lifestyle and appearance, Travellers were maligned and enslaved throughout Europe for centuries. One of the most notorious slave owners was a fifteenth-century Romanian prince, Vlad Tepes. He was also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracul.
Stoker borrowed this moniker for his own creation, and this is the link upon which my story hinges: a story of persecution, danger, injustice – but most of all, love. Drawing on the darkness of history, and mixing it with the glitter of fantasy, I have found a place for my beloved characters to wrestle with fate, lust, death, and evil. Most of all, I hope I have fulfilled Bellatrix’s admirable aims, and gifted these women something of a life beyond Dracula’s lines.