Free Shot Through The Heart (Supernature Book 1) by Edwin James

Impaler, more famously known as Count Dracula.
    The comic portrayed her early life with sympathy - she suffered from a severe form of epilepsy. The doctor character in the comic suggested it was a result of inbreeding - Mark very much doubted that such a view would have been expressed at the time, even if the scientific basis would have eluded them for a few hundred years. Her affliction was put down to evil humours.
    At the age of eleven, she married a lesser nobleman, at least fifteen years her senior. Her husband had been a soldier and, when he wasn't on the battlefield, Bathory was a devoted wife to him. When he was at the front, though, she hopped into bed with anything and everything, including a particularly graphic scene with her own aunt.
    She eventually gave birth to children - three girls and a boy - in quick succession, though there was a subplot in which the husband doubted how many of them were his own.
    Mark was surprised that she had been a good mother.
    The book darkened after the first twenty pages. Her husband introduced her to the art of physically abusing their servants. In his increasingly long absences, she took the ritual torture of them to new extremes. There was a double-page spread filled with graphic scenes of abuse - whipping servants with a barbed lash before dragging them into the snow to see whether they died of cold or blood loss first.
    She built a coterie of accomplices - a witch who doubled as her children's wet nurse, and a crippled dwarf manservant.
    Mark laughed at the book - it was getting more and more fanciful.
    Her husband died, a seemingly convenient death at the hands of a prostitute infecting war wounds over an unpaid bill. Shortly afterwards, Bathory moved to the royal court in Vienna.
    Mark couldn't quite recall if the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have even existed at that time, but he couldn't afford to get lost in one of his tangents.
    Bathory took up with a female lover, another practicing witch. They set about maiming and killing the lowest of the people they encountered. At this time, Bathory discovered the joys of the blood bath - a bathtub filled with fresh human blood, which she believe reversed the signs of ageing.
    There was another splash page of Bathory in a bath - the only colour in the entire comic, the red of blood, which had been sparing until that spread. She tastefully lay in the bath - a knee and her shoulders emerging - other comics would have shown at least one breast.
    There was a scene with a cousin of Bathory's, who had learnt of her crimes, pleading with her to stop her actions. He tried to confine her to a nunnery, but she refused - the man didn't want the family name to be defiled, so eventually he backed down.
    Bathory's lover died ten pages from the end. She took up with another witch, and her victims switched from common peasant girls to the daughters of nobility, who had the breeding and the blue blood but not the fortune.
    The King of Hungary eventually learnt of the atrocities and ordered her arrest. This spurred the cousin into action - no longer hindered by family loyalties, he led an army to her castle.
    The remaining pages showed the assault, finding bodies strewn around the corridors, the dead and the dying. Bathory was cavorting in a blood bath with her latest lover when she was captured and arrested, showing no remorse for her crimes.
    There were scenes of her accomplices being convicted of the crimes, but not Bathory herself. She was never formally tried. Instead, she was bricked up inside a room, the only holes in the wall being ventilation and slots for food and drink.
    She died three years into her incarceration.
    Mark finished the comic. It was a strange tale, and slightly tall. It seemed to have some elements of truth to it, such as the political climate at the time, but it just felt over-the-top to him.
    He flipped over to a page filled with text.
    This is not fiction, it read.
    This really happened. Elizabeth Bathory - Erzsebet