Page 22 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

22

London, October 4, 2024

Iris

My angel’s blue eyes are wide with shock. “What are you doing here?” she asks, taking a step back from the open front door.

“Oh, wait,” I say, slapping my forehead. For a moment I was paranoid she was one of them. But knocking politely on the door isn’t Goldaming Life’s style, and there’s a far more likely explanation for her appearance. “Do you work for Rahul? Are you my butter chicken?”

She looks even more confused. And, ever observant, I finally clock that she’s only holding a to-go cup of tea. “Butter chicken?” she asks. “Is that…a pet name?”

I laugh, because I don’t know what else to do. This is all too baffling and wonderful and strange. “You did call me a little cabbage, if I recall.” I do recall. I recall every second she’s been in my life. “But no. I’m expecting food delivery, among other things. That’s not you?”

“Not me. I’m here for Hillingham.”

Then it actually clicks. I made two phone calls. “The museum! To help me look at things in the house! Wow, you got here fast.”

Her rosebud lips—I’ve never wanted to garden so badly in my life—purse in a smile. “Sorry. I should have called first. I know it’s unprofessional to be overeager, but I didn’t want to waste any time getting into Hillingham. I had no idea you’d be here, though. I see you managed to make it safely even without my help.” She’s teasing me. It’s agony. We already have inside jokes, why can’t we already be girlfriends?

“Thanks to your advice, I looked right so hard my neck will never recover.” I twitch and earn a small laugh. But I was cagey in my phone message to the museum. I’d better be up front. I don’t want to hurt her. “I can’t pay you for appraisal services. At least not right now.”

Her eyes go past me, searching the interior like she’s about to pounce. She really wants to get inside. I know that fevered look. It’s how I felt visiting Amherst and touring Emily Dickinson’s home. Or how I felt listening to the newest boygenius album the second it was available. This house is one hundred percent my angel’s shit.

“No charge,” she says. “I’m just eager to see it. My specialty is the late nineteenth century. It was a time of so much transformation. And I believe it was the last time this house was inhabited.”

“You know about Hillingham?”

“Yeah. I know a lot about this whole neighborhood.” She gives me a sheepish smile and shrugs, her hair shifting with the movement. The way it catches the late afternoon sun behind her, I notice it’s red, not gold. The shade’s a vibrant, rich color, so many tones blending and shimmering around one another.

I resist the urge to put a self-conscious hand to my own soaking wet hair. It’s dyed a shade of bottle black I’ve used since I was fifteen. I call it Piss Off Your Mother Charcoal.

“I’m Elle, by the way,” my angel says.

“Iris. But you already knew that.”

She nods, waiting for an invitation inside. After a few awkward seconds, her smile drops a bit. “Am I—should I…I’ll just come in then, yeah?” She steps past me into the entry.

I let out a relieved breath and nod. “Yeah.”

Elle’s smile twists, puzzled. “Do Americans not invite people inside?”

“Family custom. We never invite someone in unless they’ve already been inside.” I learned that the hard way as a six-year-old, when I invited a man in because he scared me so badly I was afraid not to. I have only a few memories from that night. His red eyes. The sound as my father hit the wall. The way my mother stood calmly, just out of reach in the darkness.

I have lots of memories of what happened after, though. My new bedroom was so big it echoed, with soaring ceilings that slanted down to an alcove, always sliding my eyes toward two closet doors set up off the floor, too high for me to reach the knobs. Not that I ever wanted to. The doors moved every night as I tried to stay awake, the wood breathing in and out, waiting for me to fall asleep so the darkness held inside could devour me.

Anyway, learned that lesson. No invitations.

Elle’s delicate eyebrows draw close, creating two perfectly symmetrical lines between them. “That’s a really odd custom.”

“You have no idea how odd my family is. So, the house.” I gesture. From the entry, we can see the stairs with hand-carved wood railings I wish I could sell, the hallway leading to the den, locked bedroom, and kitchen, and finally the opening to the sitting room or whatever it’s called. The house I grew up in was palatial, but designed like a modern art gallery, sleek and white and forbidding. There weren’t rooms so much as spaces, almost all of which were off-limits. Any useful or necessary thing like a kitchen or bathrooms or bedrooms were hidden in the back, as though human needs were something shameful.

“It really was frozen in time, wasn’t it?” Elle’s voice is low, like she doesn’t want to disturb the house. I understand the impulse. There’s a sense of something sleeping here. I had the opposite reaction, demanding it wake up and acknowledge me. I’m not good at respecting monsters.

I’d love to impress Elle and pretend I’m here for the history, too. But I can’t abandon my plan, no matter how prismatic her hair or dark blue her eyes or kissable her smile. “Listen. Not to be crass, but I need money. If there’s anything in the house that seems especially museum-worthy, you’re welcome to take it for display. But I’m looking for valuable items I can sell quickly.”

Her nod in response is thoughtful as opposed to judgmental, which is a relief. “Are you clearing out the property to sell? It’s a great location.”

“My focus is smaller items I can liquidate immediately.”

Elle smiles wryly, but she takes a step toward the still-open door. “You’re sure you own this house? I’m not helping you commit a crime?”

I let out a shocked burst of a laugh. Mom called it my donkey bray. I cover my mouth self-consciously. “No. God, no, sorry. If I were asking you to commit a crime with me, I’d come up with something much more exciting. And that involved considerably less dust.”

“Such as?”

“High-profile assassination? Corporate espionage? Some sort of hilarious protest graffiti? I’m not sure. But I am sure I own the house and everything in it. This place has been in my family for generations. I have proof.” I duck into the den and grab the papers I got from my crabby solicitor, then hand them to her. “Here.”

She glances over them, setting her cup of tea on the stairs. “Goldaming?”

Fuck. The weight in her tone makes me certain she knows about Goldaming Life. I can’t answer questions about it. Not now, not with Elle. I want to keep things breezy and fun. Flirty, ideally. “Yup. Iris Goldaming, like I said in the phone message.”

She snaps. “Oh, right! That’s where I know it from. Ha.”

Thank god. I don’t have to explain my mother’s multilevel marketing empire. And if Elle hasn’t heard of it, she’s definitely not a member. If she’d excitedly told me she was walking the Gold Path and asked what gates I’d been through, I’d have thrown up all over her, which is the opposite of flirty.

Elle sets the papers on a side table near the door, then holds out her hand. It’s warm and fits perfectly in mine, just like I remembered. We shake. “We’re in business, then,” she says. “Legal business. Maybe a dash of crime, though, if you come up with a sexy enough one.” Then she’s already moving on into the sitting room. Even the word “sexy” coming out of her lips gives me a rush of that good low warmth.

Calm your tits, calm your tits, I sing in my head. Be cool for once in my life.

I close the front door and lock it. “Does it feel like you’re underwater in here? Like you’re sealed away from the rest of the world? But not in a safe and cozy way? In a way where you’re…”

“Trapped?” Elle’s considering me with her head tilted. “I think houses hold their history, built up over decades. Like dust.” She runs her fingers along the old piano framed in the bay window, then stares at the marks left behind. “All those stories are still here, even if no one knows them anymore. It’s not surprising that Hillingham doesn’t feel friendly to you. It has a strange and sordid past.”

“You know about it?”

“Everyone does. It’s locally notorious.”

I sit on the edge of the stairs. “Do tell!”

Elle leans against the arched entry to the sitting room. “I might have oversold it a bit. It’s mostly just the deaths.”

“Oh, is that all?” I let out a choked laugh. “Please elaborate.”

“The last family to live here—I could be wrong, I’d need to look at local records and I didn’t have time before I came over—all met tragic ends. The father used to sleepwalk. He wandered out one night and never returned.”

“God,” I mutter. “That’s bleak.”

“Then the mother and daughter died on the same night.”

“Wait,” I say, holding up a hand. “How did they die?”

“I’m not entirely sure.” Elle shrugs.

“Elle. Elle . I think I know how they died! Or at least how the mother died. It was the wolf!”

“ What? There are wolves here? I didn’t think there were wolves in England at all anymore, much less in London.”

“Yes, but only because we’re near the zoo.” I wink at her, then make my voice serious and informative, like a docent leading a museum tour. Only instead of actual research, I have what the internet told me in three minutes of searching. “In the 1890s, a wolf escaped its enclosure. A whole day passed before they noticed it was missing. They’d barely begun searching for it when it appeared once more, pacing outside the gate as though impatient to be let back in. No one knew where it had been, how it got out, or why it came back. But the rumor—and this is unsubstantiated, something of an urban legend passed around schoolyards—was that it jumped through a window and frightened a woman to death. A window in this very house .” I pause for dramatic effect, eyes wide, then point down the hallway. “Do you want to see the Wolf Window of Hillingham House?”

“Okay,” she says, her smile dubious as she follows me to the bedroom.

“I relocked the door, in case the room was infested. With rodents, not with wolves. But maybe with wolves.” I open it and gesture toward the boarded-up window. “See? The window’s still broken! They never fixed it!”

Elle stays on the threshold of the room, looking in. “Huh. It’s odd that they wouldn’t repair the window, isn’t it?”

“And this is the only bedroom anyone locked up. It could have been because of the wolf attack, right? They were afraid it would come back. Did we just prove an urban legend?”

She seems unmoved, her eyes lingering on the window. “Maybe. Can’t exactly sell the story for quick cash though, can we?”

My excitement sputters out. “Right. Dammit. I keep getting caught up in the history.”

“It’s hard not to. History is stories, and we all live on stories.”

“Still, it might make a good photo display for the museum. Pair it with the local legends and any historical documents you could find. And I do mean ‘you’ in this case, because historical research is literally your job, not mine. I’m just the girl who unlocks the door.”

That earns me a smile at last. We’re standing so close. I want to touch the creamy sweater hanging off Elle’s shoulder, see if it’s as soft as it looks. I want to lean even closer and breathe in, see if she smells as good as she looks. But more than that, I want to ask Elle what her story is, unearth all the things that make her who she is. I want to know everything about her.

There’s a hurried knock at the front door, a frantic staccato demand. It’s a desperate knock, not a threatening one. I rush down the hall and throw open the door. Rahul is there with a tall, bald man, their arms full of stuff, both looking over their shoulders. They push past me without waiting for an invitation inside.

“Close it, close it!” Rahul says.

A fox runs straight at us in an orange blur. I brace myself, but it stops dead on the steps. Just short of the doorway. It stays there, locked in place, teeth bared and yellow eyes fixed on me. Then it turns and calmly walks into the hedges.

As Rahul and his husband exclaim over what strange fox behavior that was, I close the door and lock it. I press my forehead against the glass, willing my heart to calm down. Willing myself to be able to react normally, to pretend I’m as surprised and confused as they are.

But the fox was another reminder. I’m not safe here. I can’t forgetit.