Page 20 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

20

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

There was something hollow about the stranger tugging me away from the Liaoning port. His skin, hair, and eyes had the bleached quality of dead coral, and I tried not to shudder as his skeletal fingers tugged my arm.

Dracula almost never fed off men—his type is young and female and full of promise. But he’d still figured out how to use them. Like Raven’s contact in London, this man was one of Dracula’s familiars. Gaunt, gray men, lingering in the space between life and death, neither fully human nor infected enough to become vampires. The blood in his belly wasn’t a matter of survival; the familiar chose to drink blood to feel closer to his master. I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew was I needed help, and he seemed to be offering it.

There was enough variety of sailors at the port that he didn’t stand out, but I definitely did. And starving as I was, I couldn’t change my appearance. I needed to feed so I could be what people expected when they looked at me. As you know, a woman is always in danger if she doesn’t show the world what they expect to see. Even a vampire woman.

“Blood,” I moaned through cracked lips.

“Yes, yes, come on, quickly.”

There was an urgency to his movements that I didn’t like. It wasn’t purposeful and assured. He dragged me, creeping from shadow to shadow, constantly looking over his shoulder.

His manner was possessive. It was the way rats grab bits of food, every sense on alert as they rush to get their prize to safety where they can consume it at their leisure. I was his prize. But I would never be a man’s meal again.

I leapt onto his back. My knee cracked his spine in half as I bit through his throat and tried to drink. His blood was foul. Like spoiled milk. Even thinking of the taste now makes me gag. I couldn’t stop, though; I was too desperate. There was fresher blood inside him, uncorrupted by the poison in his veins. I made a mess of pulling out his stomach, but I managed not to puncture it.

Oh, the look on your face. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. If it makes you feel better, think of it like a juice pouch. At least it was fresher than his own blood. And it was enough to clear some of the fog. I could at last think.

I was crouched in a dark alley between two warehouses that stank of fish and salt. I could hear heartbeats all around me, smell the rich, complex scents of their late suppers. All while that thing’s supper seeped, repulsive but replenishing, through my stomach and into my veins.

Mina would have chided me. Look at that mess! Always acting without thinking! In my defense, I was only a few months undead. But imaginary Mina was right. Aside from the gore, I’d made a mess of the whole situation—I’d ripped out his throat before talking to him. Now he couldn’t answer any of my questions.

He lay there, surrounded by trash and his own pale, flaccid intestines, hands uselessly scrabbling to put them back in. Dracula had granted him some small measure of power and strength, so he wasn’t dead yet. But he wasn’t going to recover anytime soon, if ever.

I searched his pockets. Of all the things he could have been doing with his life, he’d bound himself to a vampire and lurked alone here, wearing the most atrocious, reeking, ill-fitting clothes! The least he could have done was take advantage of the incredible textiles being traded. So many beautiful things in the world, and he cared about none of them.

His hideous jacket held an envelope, several knives, and a tool that looked like a sharp-tipped metal straw. I removed the envelope and set it aside, but my mind was stuck on Mina and how disappointed she’d be in me. She hated when I left things undone. Embroidery unfinished, letters half written, paintings abandoned. For all I knew, the familiar didn’t deserve to suffer. I erred on the side of compassion. I wasn’t certain whether he’d turn into a vampire after death. Given what I’d done to him, I preferred he not be able to come back.

I had learned my lesson from watching Arthur laboriously hack away at Dove. I laid the familiar’s sharpest knife flat against his neck—which was difficult, because I had to keep slapping away his scrabbling hands—and then slammed a brick down into it. My method severed everything at once. Awful, but efficient. He was dead, permanently.

I pushed the remains into a corner of the alley with the rest of the heaped trash. He blended right in. Then I sat and thought of Mina and had a nice, self-indulgent cry. Sometimes a girl finds herself alone at the feet of an unknown land, covered in grime, having just decapitated a stranger, and it’s all too much.

Once I calmed, I remembered the letter. I opened the envelope and scanned the writing. I shot a regretful grimace at the remains of the hollow man. He had been dragging me away, yes. But not to devourme.

I assumed the letter was from Raven. It sounded like her. She opened with a plea for any news of Dracula, and then warned the familiar to be on the lookout for me. “She’s young and stupid,” Raven wrote, “but because she’s Dracula’s, he can safely rest wherever she leaves a victim. If she fills some graves for our master to sleep in, at last he’ll have a foothold in the East. We’ll both be rewarded with his love. Help her. Lie to her. Do whatever you must to encourage her to kill as many as she can before they find and destroy her.”

I threw the letter on top of the man’s bloody remains. I felt as fragile as spiders’ thread, a few strands strung hopefully between branches, never strong enough to catch anything.

I had been sent across the world as a plague rat. My job was to make corpses and plant them in the ground like flags of conquest, each a safe place for Dracula to rest. Because he had infected me, any vampire or grave I created was his by default, too. A pyramid of death, with Dracula always at the top.

A devastating lethargy came over me. All that time, all that travel, pointless. Meaningless. Done in unknowing service of Dracula, who had abandoned me. Tricked by his bride and further than ever from any answers or purpose. Where was he?

I lugged the remains of the familiar to the harbor and unceremoniously dumped his pieces into the water. No grave for him meant no grave for Dracula. No triumph for Raven. They could have my mausoleum; I wouldn’t give them anywhere else safe to rest.

I drifted until I was out of the inhabited spaces, up into the hills. It was beautiful, rolling land curved lovingly around a crystal harbor. All those shacks and buildings looked like barnacles from this far, clinging to the edges of uncaring forces. I admired their tenacity, their industry, their humanity. And I needed to remove myself from it so I wouldn’t unhallow any ground for Dracula.

I sat on a rock. I was too tired to go on, too sad and betrayed. I didn’t stand as I heard footsteps approaching. Not even when those footsteps had no accompanying heartbeat. I had failed yet again, undertaken a task without thought or planning and doomed to failure, just like Mina had always cautioned me against.

I was so very, very far from her, and I realized for the first time that I always would be. So when the other vampire grasped my neck, I did nothing.

I was ready to die, again.