This is who we are

“This is who we are!” is Vlad Dracula’s declaration to Glynis Wright after she has fed on the innocent and confronted the reality of what she has become. It names vampirism as a shared identity, but does not settle what that identity means for Glynis. The scene makes the phrase both an act of possession, spoken by the being who has controlled her, and the starting point of her own uneasy decision to live with the hunger while continuing to seek freedom.

The phrase in the blood feast

The words arrive at the climax of a ritualized feeding. Vlad gives Glynis a goblet, and she drinks until she is glutted and falls into his arms. He lowers her into blood while her vampire sisters dance around them. As the blood renews her vampire heritage, her wounds fade, her senses sharpen, and her heart begins to beat. The physical change brings power, but it also restores her conscience: she recognizes that she has feasted on innocents in the arms of her captor and tormentor, betraying her own resolve not to become the monster Vlad predicted.

The scene makes the declaration inseparable from its terrible setting. Glynis sees the dead and dying around her, including a woman with a stake protruding from her chest and a young man close to death. What first seems to be celebratory music is revealed as the fading heartbeats and tortured sounds of the victims, magnified by her new senses. Ariana and Elina dance in the blood, while Cneajna approaches Vlad and licks blood from his hair. The phrase belongs to this spectacle of shared appetite and kinship: Vlad presents the violence not as an isolated transgression but as the nature of the family Glynis has entered.

A collective identity, not an easy absolution

Vlad catches Glynis and turns her toward him before speaking the words. The gesture draws her into the scene at the same moment that his declaration subsumes her within a collective “we.” It can be heard as welcome, but its force is also coercive: Glynis is the newly remade bride of a master who has repeatedly claimed authority over her, and the family identity he offers is bound to the bloodshed surrounding them. The phrase does not erase her horror or make the victims’ deaths harmless.

Glynis’s response distinguishes accepting what she is from accepting every demand made in its name. After the feeding, she takes a dagger, cleans its blade on her tongue, and returns it to Vlad. When he observes that she has killed, she says she acted mercifully; he questions whether mercy has a place in their world. Glynis tells him she will no longer fight the hunger, but reserves the right to be merciful when it suits her. Her words and actions make her acceptance conditional and self-directed rather than a simple conversion to Vlad’s values.

The longer struggle over selfhood

The declaration’s significance is sharpened by Glynis’s earlier resistance to the roles imposed on her. As a young woman, she tells May Wright that she wants to live as a woman with the freedom men enjoy, without social constraints. After becoming a vampire, she encounters another restrictive order: she describes herself as a slave to Vlad Dracula and resents being made to exchange her own clothes for an outfit she finds degrading. Cneajna, meanwhile, insists that going to Vlad when he summons his new bride is Glynis’s duty. In that context, a shared vampire identity might seem to offer belonging, but it is also shaped by hierarchy, obedience, and the control of her body.

Clothing and display continue to mark the difference between self-expression and imposed identity. In the castle, Glynis chooses a blue Italian-silk gown and removes the garment she had been made to wear. Later, when Vlad plans for her to visit Andrew Wright in Buda, he orders a veil to conceal her appearance and tells her not to wear recognizable English clothes or jewelry, since he has told Andrew that everything was lost in the accident. In Buda, the heavy veil frustrates her so much that she tears it from her face. These episodes do not repeat Vlad’s phrase, but they extend its central tension: others keep defining what she must look like and how she must appear, while she keeps asserting a claim to act for herself.

What Glynis carries forward

After the blood feast, Glynis turns away from Vlad and the dancing brides. She leaves the throne room bloodied but resolved, and reflects that she will surrender to the hunger while finding her own way. She also connects that resolve to her promise to her mother to escape. The immediate consequence of the phrase, then, is not reconciliation with her captivity. Glynis accepts the hunger as part of her condition, but keeps her objective of freedom intact.

That distinction continues to matter in her relationships. Glynis and Ignatius share a love that she promises to pursue despite the difficulty of slipping away; later, Vlad insists that she is his wife and that he will share her with no one. Cneajna, who once pulled Glynis toward Vlad in the name of duty, later kisses her tenderly but admits that Glynis has become first in their husband’s affections, then attacks her. Such intimacy, rivalry, marriage, and coercion complicate the idea of a unified vampire family. Against that shifting web of attachment and control, “This is who we are!” offers no uncomplicated answer to who belongs or what belonging costs.

Narrative significance

The phrase compresses the book’s conflict between inherited or imposed nature and chosen conduct. Vlad uses it to make Glynis’s feeding signify membership in his world; Glynis does not deny her hunger, yet she refuses to let that fact determine every choice she makes. Her claim to mercy is neither a return to her former human life nor proof that she has escaped the violence of vampirism. It is a limited moral distinction she asserts from within it.

The scene therefore gives the declaration a double edge. Its “we” binds Glynis to the vampires who have remade and surrounded her, while her subsequent departure from the throne room preserves a difference between them: she will live with the hunger, but intends to find her own way. The words name a collective identity at the very moment Glynis begins to define the limits of what that identity can demand of her.