“‘Mr. Bertram,’ said she. I looked back. ‘Mr. Bertram,’ said she, with a smile; but it was a smile ill-suited to the conversation that had passed, a saucy playful smile, seeming to invite in order to subdue me—at least it appeared so to me. I resisted; it was the impulse of the moment to resist, and still walked on.

“But Miss Crawford called my name again, differently, with a command and an undeniable charge. And at this sound—at her changed voice, I again turned to look, curiously compelled. . . . But oh! what had she become! A hissing fury! With the blank, terrible, empty face of white pallor, and great blood-rimmed eyes that I had once thought so lovely—they were now akin to hot coals, black and red, burning in a fireplace of damnation with an unholy Cursed light! And her mouth—oh! her normally delightful laughing mouth with its cherry-red pouting lower lip that I had so—ahem—a truly glorious mouth, was now utter crimson, deep, deadly, gaping wide open, and in it . . . terrible sharp teeth, inhuman, deadly—

“She flew at me. In seconds, she was down the stairs and at my side, her clawed skeletal fingers reaching for me, to embrace my throat. And had it not been for the Lord’s blessed Cross at my neck, beneath the clergyman’s collar, she may have had me in her evil grasp.

“I struggled, and I reached for the wooden implement that I had long since carried with me, together with other tools of Exorcism. My vial of holy water was out of reach in a pocket that would have taken too long to fumble open. Hence, the wooden stake. One strike of such through the heart is said to destroy a vampire. . . .

“Her power of fury was superhuman. And yet—I had no heart to stake her, Fanny. And to be truthful, in that moment, there was no need. Within my heart she finally must have looked; she saw it, and she knew. And in that moment, she released me, and suddenly drew away . . . backed away into the shadows.

“She had no power over me—not ever again, not with her monstrous claws or teeth, not even with her saucy gaze. For, I was held in safety, in truth, by the memory of a pair of beloved eyes. Will you not ask me, Fanny, whose eyes I speak of? Oh, but you must! They were yours. You had saved me then, yet again, as you save me now.”

Fanny had grown very, very still. And it had nothing to do with Edmund Years or mummification, quantum inertia, or anything but what was rising in her own heart.

Looking directly at Fanny, Edmund continued: