Page 1 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

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Salt Lake City, January 10, 2025

Dracula

It starts the moment you look out the window.

You don’t see him through the glare of the night-dark glass. You just look, safe inside but flinging your soul outward.

Your features transform whenever someone speaks to you, but you drop your sweet smile as soon as they turn away—a girl who wears a disguise to survive. It surprises and intrigues him, so he follows when you walk outside.

The night caresses with a grasping cold. Your head is down as you hurry to get home, soft brown curls hiding your face, hands shoved in the pockets of your coat. Rushing for safety and warmth. So dull and predictable, just like everyone else.

Though he has infinite time—a vast and depthless pool of it, holding him in place while the world’s currents drift around him—he no longer has any more time to waste here. He’s ready at last to moveon.

But.

Your steps slow as soon as you leave the pools of manufactured light. Your head drifts up, the curtain of your hair parts, and you gaze heavenward as though seeking the sun for warmth. The stars offer no such comfort. Theirs is a piercing, lifeless grace. You linger in the darkness and devour eternity with your eyes.

His own heart, stilled so long ago, seems to judder to life at the sight of you. You’re special. He aches to make your strange blood his own, to take everything you were or are or could have been.

If others weren’t watching, too, he might not have had the will to hold himself back. He loves the hunt, but you are a prize worth waiting for.

It doesn’t matter how many times he’s started this dance over the centuries, how many yous there have been. Because it feels new to him every time, when it’s right. And every time, for him, there is only you. There has only ever been you.

He is Dracula, and you are young and lovely and vulnerable, and he knows exactly how this dance will end.

You will invite him in.