Innocent Blood(89)

“In her time, Elisabeta was a devoted mother and a healer.” Rhun spoke so softly that she barely made out his words.

“In our time, she’s a killer,” Jordan added.

Rhun stiffened.

Erin turned to the next page. It contained a skillful drawing of a yarrow plant. The countess had reproduced its composite blooms, its feathery leaves, its taproot rendered with tiny tendrils curling from the sides.

“It looks like she was also a gifted artist,” Erin said.

“She was,” Rhun agreed, looking more aggrieved, likely reminded of the goodness he had destroyed by turning her.

Erin scanned the text, reading the common medicinal uses for yarrow: as an aid in healing of wounds and to halt bleeding. A notation at the end caught her eye. It is also known as the Devil’s Nettle, due to its help in divination and to ward off evil.

The last served as a reminder that Bathory had lived in superstitious times. Still, the countess had sought to understand plants, to bring them order, mixing science with the beliefs of her day. A grudging respect for the woman formed in her. The countess had defied superstitions of her time in order to search for ways to heal.

Erin contrasted that with her father’s strict admonitions against modern medicine. He had adhered instead to superstition, grasping his beliefs with his hard-calloused hands and inflexible attitude, allowing no compromise.

Such willing blindness had killed her baby sister.

Erin settled into her seat and read, no longer noticing the turbulence as she learned about the ancient uses of plants. But halfway through, the illustrations suddenly changed.

Instead of flower petals and roots, she found herself staring at a detailed rendition of a human heart. It was anatomically perfect, like one of da Vinci’s medieval sketches. She drew the book closer. Neat letters underneath the heart listed a woman’s name and her age.

Seventeen.

A chill spread through her as she continued to read. The countess had turned this seventeen-year-old girl into a strigoi—then killed her and dissected her corpse, trying to uncover why her own heart no longer beat. The countess noted that the strigoi heart looked anatomically identical to a human one, but that it no longer needed to contract. Bathory noted her speculations from her experiments in the same sweet script. She hypothesized that the strigoi had another method of circulation.

She called it the will of the blood itself.

Aghast, Erin read the page again. Bathory’s brilliance was undeniable. These pages predated European theories of circulation by at least twenty years. In her isolated castle, far from universities and courts, she had used macabre experiments to understand her new body in ways that few in Europe could have fathomed.

Erin searched the next pages, as Bathory’s methods grew more horrific.

The countess had tortured and murdered innocents to satisfy her insatiable curiosity, turning her talents as a healer and scientist to grisly ends. It reminded Erin of what the Nazi medical researchers had done to prisoners in their camps, acts just as callous and dismissive of the suffering.

Erin touched the aged page. As an archaeologist, she was not supposed to judge. She often had to stare evil full in the face and record its deeds. Her job was to pull facts from history, to place them in a larger context, and to bring truths to light, no matter how horrible.

So despite her queasiness, she read on.

Slowly the countess’s quest turned from the physical to the spiritual. Erin came upon a passage dated November 7, 1605. It concerned a conversation Elizabeth had had with Rhun, about how the strigoi did not have souls.

Bathory wanted to know if it was true. Erin read what she wrote.

I trust him to tell me the truth that he believes, but I do not think that he has ever turned beyond faith to seek to understand the simple mechanics of this state that has been forced upon us.

Seeking evidence of this claim, Bathory experimented and observed. First, she weighed girls before and after their deaths, to see if the soul had weight. It had cost four girls their lives to determine it did not.

On another page was an architecturally precise depiction of a sealed glass casket. Bathory had it crafted to be waterproof. She even filled it with smoke to make sure no gases could escape. Once satisfied, Bathory locked a young girl inside and let her suffocate, trying to capture the dead girl’s soul inside her box.

Erin pictured the girl pounding on the glass sides, begging for her life, but the countess had no mercy. She let her die and took her notes.

Afterward, the countess kept the box sealed for twenty-four hours, examining it by candlelight, by sunlight. She found no shred of a soul in the glass box.

The countess did the same with a strigoi girl, mortally wounding her before sealing her to her death. Erin wanted to skip past these gruesome experiments, but her eye caught upon a passage at the bottom of the next page. Despite the horror, it intrigued her.