Dracula — Chapter 22 (Bite 2)

The morning after Dracula forced Mina to drink his blood, the group gathers to plan their final assault on the Count's London properties. Van Helsing has placed a communion wafer on Mina's forehead as protection, but when he does so, it burns into her flesh like white-hot metal, leaving a scar. Mina screams, then sinks to her knees wailing, "Unclean, unclean. Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh. I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the judgment day."

The plan of attack

The chapter opens with a long speech from Dracula himself, delivered through a newspaper clipping Jonathan has kept. The Count explains his philosophy of criminality with chilling clarity: "All that is in doubt is the conscience of the employer, and the belief of your placement as to whether or no that employer has a good conscience or a bad one." He tells a story of a burglar who broke into a London house while the owner was in Switzerland, then openly sold the house and its contents through legitimate channels while police helped him, leaving the returning owner to find "only an empty hole where his house had been." The lesson: audacity and legitimacy of appearance matter more than actual right.