Alcina Dimitrescu was born into the noble Dimitrescu family sometime before the Great War, and through this ancestry inherited a hereditary blood disease, possibly porphyria cutanea tarda. Although her family traced their origins to Cesare, one of the four founders of an isolated mountain village in Europe, Alcina herself lived elsewhere, perhaps through a cadet branch.
At some point in her youth, likely the 1930s, she had a brief music career in the emerging Jazz scene, where she went by the name "Miss D" and played with a band called "The Pallboys" (one of their CD songs would later end up in the Winters' home decades later, with Rose Winters taking a liking to it). In the aftermath of the Second World War and the abolition of the nobility, Dimitrescu returned to her family's former lands, which had fallen under the control of a neopagan cult worshipping the Black God.
Prior to 1958, at the age of 44, Dimitrescu was lured by the cult leader, Mother Miranda, to a crypt beneath the village cemetery, where she was surgically implanted with a Cadou parasite. The purpose of this experiment was to determine her viability as a candidate who could become host to a parasitic intelligence at a later date.
This experiment mutated Alcina's body considerably, granting her regenerative capabilities, retractable claw-like nails, and the ability to transform into a dragon-like monster and back again. Moreover, the parasite halted her aging process, maintaining her appearance perpetually. In spite of these impressive biological changes, the resulting mutation did not nullify her blood disease. As a result, Dimitrescu needed a ready supply of fresh human blood to maintain her health, and was therefore judged by Miranda to be a failure.