Dracula
How he became a vampire is unclear, although Van Helsing mentions that in life he was a necromancer, and his family had a long history of dealing with the devil. Van Helsing calls him King-Vampire, although he is probably not the first. His powers include a wide range of abilities, some of which are beyond the powers of the other undead in the novel: he can commands any animal and control the weather; he can become mist or elemental dust; he has superhuman strength and speed; his gaze is hypnotic; he can transform himself into a bat or a wolf. He has serious limitations, as well: he is relatively powerless between sunrise and sunset; he cannot enter a home unless invited (although his power to hypnotize helps him to bypass this limitation); he cannot advance when faced by a cross, garlic, or a piece of communion wafer; he can only cross running water when it is at its lowest; he must sleep in soil made sacred by the burial of dead from his own family. At the start of the novel, he is an old man. As he feeds he grows younger and stronger. A long-dead nobleman of Transylvania, he plans to move to London, where he will have a teeming population of millions for his prey. He obsessively pursues young womenthe three vampire women in his castle are his conquests, and Lucy and Mina become his targets in the course of the novel.