Page 109 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

109

Salt Lake City, January 27, 2025

Lucy

I go away for a while.

There’s a maelstrom inside me. Mina is here, Mina is alive, Mina has always been alive. Which means that Iris was right: Mina never loved me. If she had, she would have looked for me. She would have known I was still out there. She would never have stopped looking, like I never stopped looking. But Iris is right about that, too. Just like Vanessa was. I wasn’t looking for Mina or even for Dracula. I was looking for myself. For a way to feel all that love, burning bright and eternally hopeful inside me.

Mina and Iris are talking. I keep my head up, staring. The chandelier sparkles like starlight. Between those dots of light, I can’t see myself. I can see Iris.

I watch her, alone in that mirrored reflection. Angry and sad and defiant. If hope is the thing with feathers, Iris’s hope is a talon. Her hope is a weapon. But no, that’s not right. Her hope is a fortress, keeping her safe all these years. Her hope is a home. My home.

Iris isn’t the answer, because I know another person never can be. But Iris is the reflection I need. The mirror to show me the answer. That’s how I do it. That’s how I free myself. That’s how I keep moving and living:

Love.

Love for myself, and love for the person who showed me how to love myself through how fiercely she loves me.

I’m caught in a flood of freedom. At last, I’m releasing the dreams that trapped me as a girl. The ones that told me if I waited just a little longer, if I performed just a little better, if I pretended just a little more, I could be loved by the people who never saw me. Who never wantedto.

They don’t matter anymore. They have no power over me. I’m in complete control of myself and my fate and my heart, for the first time in my endless life.

But—

There’s blood. Blood more precious than any other blood in the world. I turn in a daze. What happened while my entire inner landscape shifted so seismically?

Iris is on the floor, laughing. Her face is pale. Too pale, ghastly and ghostly. “No more Goldamings!” she trills in a singsong voice.

A vampire lunges toward her, unable to resist the siren song of that blood. Mina jumps onto his back, grabbing his head and tugging. Her attempt at decapitation leaves something to be desired; I could give her pointers, but Mina never liked it when I corrected her.

“No one touches her!” she screams. “Get out, all of you! Now!”

Her other vampire minions scuttle uncertainly from the room. They leave the door cracked open, waiting and ready to answer Mina’s call.

Iris keeps going in her teasing tone. She’s lying on the floor, knife abandoned beside her, blood spurting out of her arm as though it can’t wait to be free, either. “No more blood to sell! No more brand-new resting places across the country where you can recharge at your leisure! No more lurking in my life or my closet, you goddamn creepy grasping vicious boring coward!”

“Fix her!” Mina screams as she at last finishes tugging off the head of the vampire who couldn’t resist Iris’s blood. Iris’s mother scrambles to her daughter’s side. She tries to pinch the skin closed, as though that will help. I’m frozen. What do I do?

“I’ll fix her!” Iris’s mother says, her tone wheedling. “I’m so sorry! I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it, don’t—”

Iris slaps her mother’s hands away, rolling out of her grasp. “She’s gonna kill you for this,” she taunts. “How does it feel, Mom? How does it feel having a cold, ruthless, utterly uncaring monster in charge of your safety and well-being? I gotta say, I’m having a schadenfreude field day!”

“Get back!” Mina throws Iris’s mother across the room. The vampire stays where she falls, either too broken or too afraid to so much as move.

Mina and Iris, Iris and Mina. My head is swirling, my body numb. Am I here? Have I become moonlight? Did I dream this?

Mina kneels over Iris, pinning her in place. She tears a strip from Iris’s skirt and ties it tightly around Iris’s upper arm. Then she rips off another strip and begins wrapping the wound. Always efficient and practical. As she works at the business of keeping Iris’s blood contained, Mina speaks.

“I’m going to lock you up,” she says. “Keep you drugged enough that you can’t move, but make sure you’re aware of what’s happening to you, every minute of every day. I’ll harvest you for parts—first, I’ll take every last egg to make an army of Goldamings. I’ll drain your blood as fast as you can make it, and when you beg me for death, I’ll smile and tell you the same thing every day.” Mina leans close to Iris’s ear, dropping her voice to a whisper. “ Not yet. I’m not going to let you die, Iris. You don’t get to choose that. I do. I’m life. I’m death. And you’re mine. ”

With Mina’s eyes glowing red, her teeth brushing Iris’s neck, her fingers grasping Iris’s body while clutching at her soul, I realize what Iris already figured out:

Mina is Dracula. She always was. They’re soulmates, a matching pair. I could never see it before, but Iris showed me. I drift across the ballroom floor and kneel beside Mina.

I look at Mina, but I say, “My little cabbage.”

Iris’s skin is pallid, her lips almost white. But she smiles and her fear fades. Because she knows. She knows I’m back.

“I’m not sure if I can do it alone,” I say. I died to protect Mina because I loved her. Even seeing what she truly is, there’s part of me that loves her still. That always will. “I’ll need help.”

“What are you talking about?” Mina snaps.

Iris’s lips split into a bloodless smile. “Ask me to help you,” she whispers.

Mina turns her head toward me with a baffled expression. I devoted so much energy and study to that face—its subtleties, its secrets. But I wasn’t looking for the truth. Only for what I hoped to find there and never did.

“You always were a little fool,” Mina says.

“Let’s kiss like we used to, Mina.” I lean close.

Mina laughs in my face. And because she’s laughing in my face, she doesn’t see Iris’s hand close over the knife.

“Shoulda looked right.” Iris stabs straight into Mina’s chest.

Mina screams. It’s a scream of lifetimes dealing death to others while hiding from it herself. A scream of, at last, being truly seen. She scrabbles back on the floor, staring at the silver knife piercing her long-dead heart.

“I did it,” Iris gasps. “Guess I just needed the right inspiration.”

“Mistress?” a vampire calls at the door.

Iris lifts her voice a few notes higher and flattens the tone to a cold command. A perfect imitation of her unconscious mother, who crafted a perfect imitation of Mina. “Close the door,” Iris says. “Wait outside the building.”

The door closes. Iris lies back, giggling. “What a bunch of chumps.”

I walk to Mina. She’s not my Mina anymore. She never was. I straddle her, pinning her to the floor like she pinned Iris.

“Lucy,” she whines, the red light dying in her eyes. They’re brown again. The eyes I painted over and over, desperate to re-create them. I pull the knife free.

She gasps with relief. “I knew you would never, I knew you could never—”

I slip my hand into the hole made by Iris’s silver blade. My fingers find Mina’s heart. The heart I’d hoped so desperately she would give to me. Instead, I follow Mina’s example and take it for myself.

It’s so small, freed from its cage of bone. I wonder why I let it have power over me for so long. I gently insert the silver knife back into it, just in case, but Mina isn’t here anymore. Her corpse is already drying beneath me.

Iris coughs a laugh. I stand and see the reason. Her mother, slumped against the wall, is actually dead now. Dead for real, dead forever.

“Mina made them,” Iris says. “Mina made all of them. Every Goldaming Life vampire is now a Goldaming Death vampire. Including me, probably. No get-out-of-jail-free card when I die, since it was her blood infection that turned us. Oh well.”

I’m next to Iris in a heartbeat. I know, because I can hear her heartbeats. They’re struggling. Too shallow, too slow. She’s lost so much blood.

Iris puts a hand on my cheek, drawing my attention from her arm to her face. “Hey. It’s okay. I promise. I’m happy. God, I’m so happy, and I’m so fucking proud of you. You freed yourself. You’re free. We both are. We did this, Lucy. For ourselves, and for each other. And don’t you dare say that none of it matters if I die. It matters. I promise. We have right now, and I love you right now. And my now is an eternity.”

I open my mouth to say I can’t lose her, but the truth is, I can. I can lose Iris and still love myself. But that doesn’t mean I have to lose her without a fight.

“I have an idea,” I say, running my thumb along her bottom lip. “I don’t know if it will work. And I won’t do it unless you want me to. But if you want to try to stay, I want that, too.” I pause, knowing the full weight of what I’m offering her. Knowing she understands it, too. At least as well as anyone still human can. “Ask me to change you.”

Her eyelids flutter as she struggles to stay conscious, but her smile is still the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. “Lucy,” she whispers, “ bite me.” Then she giggles, because even while dying she’s a little shit. I love her so much.

I bite my lips and press them to hers, giving her more of my blood just in case. And then I pierce the cool skin of her neck with infinite tenderness. I take what little remains of her blood, every drop holy, every drop perfect, every drop Iris.

She dies.

I wait, content to sit here forever with my love in my arms.