Page 12 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

12

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

There I was, offering myself to four men who had always wanted me. Anger and horror warred on their faces. Anger won. They held up crucifixes in an attempt to banish me, but also as condemnation.

The most humiliating part of their rejection was that I didn’t actually want any of them. Not in that way. I was just cold and confused and always so very, very thirsty. And Arthur had given me back my name. It was more than either of the brides had, and I was grateful. I still am.

I let them drive me away. It was not the crosses, but the looks on their faces. Was I really that horrifying? I retreated into my mausoleum. I tried to remember how they had looked at me before. I said my name out loud, pulled it on like a dress, but it didn’t fit quite the same way it used to. As though I had grown and shrunk at the same time.

Raven appeared next to me, pulling me close. “That is why you can never go home.” She caressed me, giving me the physical intimacy I had been ravenous for long before I woke up in this dark place. “They think you’re a monster now. They’ll kill you.”

Maybe they were right. I hadn’t considered it before then, lost in the hunger and new sensations. The relief of plunging my teeth into a neck, the burst of feelings built by Raven’s fingers or tongue, the way I could smell and see and feel the night around me. I had been ruled entirely by my senses up until then, but now I was forced to think. All the next day as the sun made its relentless trek across the sky, I thought about the things I’d been doing with Raven and Dove.

Not the sex—I didn’t feel guilty for that, and I still don’t—but the killing. Is it murder when a wolf sinks its teeth into a rabbit? When a hawk snatches a mouse? Where is the line between murder and survival?

I didn’t know then. I still don’t. I have lines I won’t cross; many of us do. Not all of us, as you’ll see.

The simple ease of my newborn existence was gone, though. Everything was wrong and right and neither. I didn’t want to be a bride alongside Raven and Dove anymore. Their spell over me was broken. I needed someone else to tell me what to do, and I knew exactly who that was now. With my own name, I’d remembered one other: Mina.

Mina had always been so good at taking charge of me. I knew if I could find her, she would lecture me about how being an undead creature of the night simply wasn’t becoming of a young woman of my station, she would tsk over how silly I was being, and she would set me right. I really believed in that moment that she could fix everything. As soon as the sun set, I was ready to go.

“Stop that,” Raven said. She held me back, her fingers a manacle around my wrist. I had begun drifting away on a shaft of moonlight. She often had to remind me to hold my human form.

Oh. That requires explanation. The sun binds us to what we are when it rises, so we can’t change our shape then. It’s crucial to have a body when dawn arrives. Being able to turn into moonlight or mist is all very well and good until you’re stuck that way under the brutal rays of the sun. I once lost months because I forgot to change back in time and got scattered by daylight.

We can change into animals, too. I’ve been a fox and a bird and a moth, but I don’t enjoy animal form. I was always good at moonlight, though, because moonlight isn’t real, either. It’s just a wan reflection of something else’s light.

Raven didn’t understand why I liked being nothing sometimes. Most vampires I’ve met hate abandoning their human forms, afraid they’ll get stuck or trapped. But this body was always both boon and curse. I like that I have the power to leave it at will. Even with the risks.

There’s a lot you can do as a vampire if you aren’t afraid of consequences. For example, vampires are petrified of running water. We get denser every year, time compressing us tighter and tighter. Like coal into a diamond. All this to say, we sink. Fast. Under water there’s no hallowed ground, no warmth to steal or borrow, so all our strength is sapped. We’re stuck, forever starving without the hope of the release of death. It’s a vampire’s hell.

I cross water all the time. If I sink, I sink. I probably deserve to, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Ah, Vanessa. I can see in your expression that you want some rational explanation for all of this. Why does the sun bind us? How can I change into moonlight? How can I move and think and feel without being alive?

But I’ll ask, why do you dream? Why do you look at the ocean and feel awe? Where does love come from, and why does it feel so much like fear? There might be reasons for all those things, but do you need to know the reasons? Will that help you feel any of those things?

Don’t try to make sense of what I am. You never will. I never have.

Let’s get back to the story. In the cemetery where my first life was buried, Raven was still holding on to me. “I want to play a game,” she said. “You owe me that, don’t you? For welcoming you into the world? For taking such good care of you?”

Though I have confessed to multiple murders already, it’s important to me that two things are perfectly clear:

The first is that I had no idea what Raven’s game would result in. I didn’t understand her yet. I do now, which is why I left her alive the last time we met. She deserves that torment far more than she deserves death.

The second is that I never knew what Dove had been doing as she skipped away from us each night, singing and cheerful. I had no inkling.

Dove hadn’t left us yet, but she had that faraway, vacant look that meant she was about to.

“Isn’t our new sister pretty?” Raven said to Dove, toying with my hair. “Dracula likes Lucy best right now. I think he’d like you best if you looked more like Lucy. I think everyone would like you best if you looked more like Lucy.”

Dove stared blankly at me. Something was missing behind her eyes. If it’s possible to see a soul, Dove didn’t have one. As I watched, her hair changed from a white nimbus to dark, silky gold. Her features shifted subtly, too, until she could have been my sister. Then she skipped away into the darkness, singing a lullaby.

Raven’s laugh was as rough as a cat’s tongue rasping against my skin, and I was easy to lead away into the cemetery. What was one more night of hunting and sex? When it was nearly time to sleep, though, instead of rushing us toward my mausoleum, she held back. “Watch,” she said, tucking us into the shadow of a looming tree. “The game, remember? It’s nearly over.”

I had forgotten about Raven’s game, because it didn’t interest me. But something else caught my attention. The men from the night before—my fiancé, the doctor, the cowboy, and the old Dutch man—came tromping righteously by and stood outside my mausoleum, barring the entrance.

They didn’t notice us watching. A low growl escaped me. Raven petted my hair, soothing me. “Look,” she whispered. “Our sister is back.”

Dove danced and twirled her way toward the mausoleum, clutching something to her chest. It was about half her size, a bundle wrapped in a blanket. Before I could see what it was, Raven turned my head and kissed me. She quivered with excitement, as mirthful as I’d ever seen her. I could feel her smiling against my lips. I wanted to be happy, too, but I didn’t know what we were happy about.

“Wait,” Raven whispered. “It’s going to be divine. The most perfect joke.”

Dove paused in front of the men, confused. She still looked so much like me she could have been my sister. Then she dropped what she was carrying and darted past them, sliding across the darkness through the cracks in the door. She was safe inside. But the door didn’t hold the men back.

Doors never did keep them from me. A memory, fleeting and impossible to hold, of each of those men on my doorstep. Each holding flowers and promises. Each smiling. Each entering regardless of what I wanted.

They did not smile now. They held only weapons and crucifixes as they followed Dove inside.

“We should—” I started, but Raven put her hand over my mouth. She squeezed tightly, fingernails cutting my cheeks.

“We need to get closer,” she whispered. We slipped through the darkness, right past the door they’d left ajar behind themselves, and joined the shadows in the back corner of the mausoleum. The men were so focused on their task, they never even noticed we were there. I would have screamed, or run, or intervened, but Raven held me as tight and silent as the night holds the earth.

And so we watched as it became clear that my fiancé—the man who had promised me he’d take care of me forever, the man who claimed to love me, the man who had tried so hard alongside his friends to save my mortal body— couldn’t tell the difference between Dove and me.

He stabbed her through the heart, kissed her lifeless lips, and then proceeded to cut off her head.