CHAPTER 3

It was evening in Paris. On the third floor of the Sevinne townhouse, the present occupant was standing at a bedroom window, a silver goblet in her right hand. In the background, she could hear Wagner`s “Siegfried” playing softly. She had many recordings of the Ring Cycle, but to hear the wonderful Spanish tenor Placido Domingo sing Siegfried was a special pleasure.

Mondrian Bluczek, now known as the Countess Czermintek, sipped her drink as she looked out the window at Place Voltaire. It was so wonderful to be here in Paris; the past year had been the most relaxing of her life. It was now over five years since her narrow escape from certain death at the hands of the vampire Alucard.

She could still remember that fateful final evening in Scotland. She had been sitting in her bedroom in her home on the Isle of Lewis when she felt Alucard`s presence at her window. Mondrian had led him to herself by commenting in his on-line journal, using the thinly disguised pseudonym of Monblu. She knew that he would track her down to kill her but she had grown weary of waiting for this confrontation.

Although vampire, Mondrian realized that without foreknowledge of his approach it would be impossible for her to defeat the one who had transformed her. Mondrian could see the lust in Alucard`s eyes as he sat next to her and when he kissed her she made herself wolf in order to destroy him. As wolf, she attacked, only to feel Alucard`s silver dagger at her throat.

Knowing certain death, with a last act of her will she transformed her essence to mist as Alucard decapitated her wolfen body. She had prepared for the possibility that she could not defeat Alucard and had remembered how he had escaped from death at the hands of the first Dr. Abraham van Helsing. Mondrian had spent countless hours working on the wolf-mist transformation and Alucard`s subsequent actions in leaving her wolfen body on the moor, then tracking her vampire servant to the United States, made her quite confident that he believed that she was destroyed.

Mondrian reflected on the four years it had taken for her to reach Paris. She had never had any doubt of where she wanted to live, but she thought it prudent to take her time in arriving at “The City of Lights”. It had taken her two and a half years to work her way through Scotland and England before she arrived in London. Money was not a question; Mondrian continued to have access to her numbered accounts in Switzerland.

However, she must, at all costs, conceal her living vampireness from Alucard and the present Dr. van Helsing. These two beings would go to any lengths to destroy her if they deduced that the wolfen body found on the Scottish moor was not her essence. Mondrian wisely spent another year in London and six months in Le Havre before settling in Paris.

Throughout these five years, she had lived with one further prohibition; she had not shared her blood with any of her victims and therefore had made no new vampires. The two times she had made vampire in the past showed her the folly of attempting to control the rash, risk-taking behavior of a newly created vampire. Mondrian simply didn`t have the patience or inclination to spend the hundreds of years that Alucard had invested in her unworldly education.

Therefore, in London, Mondrian had interviewed several young men for the position of her private secretary and house manager. She hired Brian Woodson, a young M.B.A. freshly minted from the University of London, after she found him particularly conducive to hypnotic manipulation. She now had a servant under her control who could interact with the world during those daylight hours when she must be undisturbed. Woodson had arranged through a “dummy” company to obtain a continuing supply of fresh blood plasma for her and she would in the future hunt for human prey only when she was overwhemed by the need for the kill.

Mondrian finished her goblet of plasma and sat, attuning herself to Placido Domingo`s singing. Ah, life was good!