She’d known about her ancestor, Elizabeth of Bathory, for as long as she could remember and had been fascinated with the countess, but only recently, when she’d realized that her age was beginning to show, had she assumed Elizabeth’s name and regimen.

The story was, loosely, that Elizabeth, obviously a bit of a nutcase, had worried about losing her legendary beauty. Also, the countess enjoyed torturing and tormenting others, and one day, slapped a servant so hard that the maiden’s blood spilled onto her arm. Elizabeth had been even more outraged and raving until she noticed that the area of her skin the blood had stained appeared more youthful and beautiful than the surrounding flesh. From that day forward, Elizabeth found ways of ever more increasing cruelty to drain the blood of others for her own personal use.

Now, obviously, the woman had been deranged. Mental case with a capital M. Sadist to the nth degree.

All that royal inbreeding.

No wonder.

Of course many of the stories or legends about the “blood countess” hadn’t been proven, including the bathing in blood. That she had committed atrocities on dozens of young girls was not in dispute, however, and she was eventually tried and convicted of murder and sent to live walled into her castle. Those who had assisted her weren’t so lucky.

But it was the legend, the folklore surrounding the baths drawn from the blood of peasant girls and her eventual nobility that intrigued this new Elizabeth.

Even if the legends had been embellished with the passing of decades, and despite the fact that some of the more bizarre cruelties ascribed to Elizabeth had no foundation in historical fact, the theory about the blood of younger women wasn’t just intriguing, it seemed to have merit.

Hadn’t she, herself, proven its validity?

Now, staring into the mirror, Elizabeth arched her neck, surveying every inch of her body as she slowly rotated in the light.

Hadn’t the first traces of cottage-cheese-like bumps beneath the skin of her thighs, the barest breath of cellulite, disappeared with her first blood-infused baths? And that little suggestion of spider web veins, near the back of her right knee? Hadn’t they faded after the first bath?

Of course they had. Now, the back of her knee was silken and smooth, not even the tiniest line of her veins visible.

She was so convinced of the rejuvenation of her skin, the restorative powers of the blood, she’d almost agreed to dip into a pool injected with some of the blood of Vlad’s lessers.

But no!