Page 26 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

26

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

You look surprised that the Queen trapped me instead of helping me, Vanessa. You’re forgetting this is a story about vampires. And while vampires can be many things, they’re never nice. No more than a falcon is nice, or a snake, or a spider.

But it’s okay that you forgot. I forgot, too. She was so beautiful and elegant and commanding. I don’t know if it was a particular vampiric power of hers or if I was just easily dazzled, but I was completely under her sway.

“You can be useful,” she said, “as long as you never defy me or break my rules.” I agreed readily. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to be anything at all. Dracula was dead, Mina was safe, and I had to stay away forever to keep her that way.

I joined the training. Though the Queen’s girls lacked my vampiric strength, they had studied the few ways to kill my kind. I learned about anatomy: the fastest way to a heart, better methods of decapitation than my fiancé or I had used. Mostly I learned this by being their new practice dummy. They could stab me without killing me. It’s quite the sensation, feeling a blade punch between your ribs. I’d always twisted myself into unpleasant shapes in order to be accepted. Pincushion was a new one, though.

I also learned how to recognize the signs of someone being fed on by a vampire. The point at which it was too late to save them. The ways to kill them and make certain they never came back.

The Queen didn’t do any of this teaching herself, of course. I barely saw her. On the rare occasions she walked through the courtyard, everyone went still and silent with reverence. I pretended to do it, too, but I didn’t feel the same way toward her. I wanted to get to know her.

I wanted to get to know everyone there, but they refused to talk to me outside of training. It made sense. They’d spent their whole lives hunting and fighting my kind to keep their land free of us. Why should they trust me, even if their Queen allowed me to stay?

I spent as much time as I could patrolling. The Queen had a pair of leopards—did I mention the leopards? She was so fucking cool back then. They prowled the valley and surrounding hills, and I stalked them. They tolerated me much the same as the rest of the Queen’s subjects did. Barely, and at a distance.

I’d hoped by inviting me to stay, the Queen saw me as a potential companion or friend. But I’d been at the palace for over a month, and she still hadn’t said a word to me, and made it clear I was not invited to speak to her, either. I could feel her, though. Watching. Whether in approval or to make sure I didn’t step out of line I couldn’t say.

She needn’t have bothered monitoring me. I would have sooner clawed out my own throat than bite any of those girls. There was something sad and…not old, but weary, about even the youngest of them. They were tidy and quiet and devoted to their tasks, but so many of them had visible scars, and I suspected all of them had scars I could not see.

One afternoon, however, they seemed a bit rowdier. The sound of laughter rang through the usually silent courtyard. It woke me from my partial sleep. I still don’t know how the Queen managed to fully rest there. She kept everything so meticulously clean, there wasn’t even blood-soaked dirt from the leopards’ hunting.

I crept close to the sound of happiness, drawn like a moth to a flame. I had learned a lot in my month at the Queen’s palace, but I hadn’t had much fun. I desperately missed fun.

“Come out, little vampire,” called one of them, as lean as a whip and deadly with blades. I hadn’t been able to sneak up on them, tired as I was and bound by daylight. “It’s okay. She’s gone for a while.”

I emerged from behind a pillar. The girls were lounging around the garden, sharing a bottle of wine. I hadn’t smelled alcohol once while I’d been here. The one who called out to me patted a stone next to herself.

I sat, delighted. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know any of your names.” We never used them during training.

She laughed. “Neither does our Queen. She calls me Knife, for obvious reasons. Most of us you train with are named Knife, actually. The girls who are no good for sending out she calls Pearl. Unless she really likes you, and then your name is Jade.”

A small woman who was missing her right arm nodded, taking a deep drink. “Pearl,” she repeated. Several others raised their hands.

That didn’t seem right. The Queen loved her girls. Why wouldn’t she know their names? “Where is she?” I hadn’t seen her leave since I arrived.

“Out getting supplies,” Pearl answered.

“Food?” I asked.

Pearl laughed. “We can get food on our own. She’s bringing in a new load of us.” She gestured around the courtyard.

Knife nodded. “She goes out once or twice a year to rescue new girls. Whenever she hears of any who need saving, or whenever she needs to replace the ones she loses.”

“You mean if any of you decide to leave?”

Pearl gave me a look as cutting as Knife’s name. “Leaving is not an option.”

“Just ask Jade,” a young woman whose hair flowed down her back like a jet waterfall muttered.

Knife hissed.

“Who’s Jade?” I looked around.

Knife stood, authority and warning in her voice. “Jade’s dead, along with the lover she was stupid enough to take. Everything we have we owe to our Queen, and Jade forgot that. The new girls our Queen brings will love her as we do. And we’ll teach them the rules of that love.”

“But—” Pearl started. Knife cut her off.

“Remember where you came from. Remember what she’s given us.”

Pearl closed her eyes and nodded with a sigh. “I remember.”

“Good. Now pass the wine. We need to drink as much as we can right now so it’s out of our systems before she gets back.” Knife lifted the bottle with a laugh, trying to tease the tone back to rebelliously playful, but the atmosphere had shifted. No one seemed light or playful anymore. They drank as though it were a chore.

Once most of them had fallen asleep in the heavy late afternoon heat, I cornered Knife.

“You’re prisoners here,” I said. I should have seen it from the start. They were safe, yes, but it was the safety of a cage, not a refuge. Trickles of memory from my life were pooling in my mind. I knew what it was to have comfort and protection but no say in your future.

“It’s better than where I came from,” Knife said. She was lying on her stomach, trailing her fingers through a pond, letting them linger where curious fish came to nibble. “But you should leave now, while you still can.”

Her words stuck between my ribs, much like her blade often did, and they found just as quick a path to my heart.

I went to the gate without thinking. Would I have left then? I’m still not sure. It wasn’t an option. The Queen had gone, but her loyal servants were lounging on either side of the pathway out, watching me with their enormous golden eyes. Without the cover of night, I couldn’t change form, and I knew enough from trailing them during their hunts that I couldn’t beat two leopards in my exhausted state.

Besides which, I love cats. Of all sizes. I didn’t have it in me to hurt them.

I turned around. But instead of creeping back to the dim closet I’d been given, I ventured somewhere forbidden: the Queen’s own bedroom. Maybe that’s where my affinity with cats comes from—my curiosity, which has nearly gotten me killed on many occasions.

I’d expected opulence. Instead, behind her throne chamber, I found a room not much larger than my own. There was a simple mat on the floor, a few rolls of tattered gray silk that looked more like strips for binding wounds than finery, and a chest.

I opened the chest. It held oddly shaped shoes that couldn’t possibly fit anyone’s feet, a simple jade hairpin, and a few brittle sheets of paper.

I pulled them out. Painted in grossly exaggerated simplicity, the Queen stared back at me. It was a flyer, advertising a show in which the Queen herself was the attraction. The words blurred in front of my eyes, violence and cruelty evident in the spectacle they presented her as. More than a hundred years earlier, she’d been toured around Europe as an oddity—as a display.

A bell rang. Clutching one of the papers in my hand, I walked numbly back to the courtyard. The girls had done their best to recover, standing in neat lines as the Queen entered, pulling a cart behind herself. Only she could have looked regal and aloof doing that. The cart was filled with half a dozen girls, as young as toddlers and as old as teens. They were in rough shape. Not from anything the Queen had done—this was clearly the result of lifetimes of abuse.

The Queen’s knives and pearls hurried forward and took the girls into the room they all shared. I knew they’d get the care they deserved. They’d be healed, as much as possible. And they’d accept this life and stay, indebted to the only being who ever tried to help them.

I finally understood the Queen.

She found and saved those girls because they were representations of who she had been. The girl no one protected. The girl who was merely an object for others. That was the core of the Queen, the thing inside her that became a bottomless pit of need. We’re all driven by our needs, different ones for each of us, something older, deeper, stranger than blood.

Her desire was to protect the memory of a girl who had been stolen and abused. She dressed her collection in silk and jewels, trained them, and made certain that they never wanted for anything. She saved them from their pasts, but she alone decided their future.

She glanced at me and saw immediately what I held. Then she gestured with one clawed finger. I followed her into her sitting room, and then past it. She led me down stairs carved into the earth. And as she walked, her steps ginger with remembered pain, she talked.

“That was who I was when he found me. I do not remember what city I was in. They never told me. After the audience—those who paid extra to touch my bound, mutilated feet, those who paid extra to touch everything else—had gone, the man who owned me was locking me up for the night. But he failed to notice I’d stolen a blade. I plunged it into his eye, and then into his stomach, over and over. When I turned around, covered in blood, at last free, Dracula was waiting.” She paused, looking over her shoulder at me. It was as dark as a moonless night on the stairs, but we could both see just fine. Her smile glowed like the memory of joy. “I leapt and bit him before he bit me. I went right for his throat. I think he never meant for me to be a vampire, but I woke up in a shallow grave thanks to my ferocity. And I have made him pay for it ever since.”

I wished I could be like her. I wished I had a story like hers, where she died fighting, where she never gave in. But I also needed her to see what she was really doing here. “You have to give them their freedom, too,” I said.

As though she hadn’t heard me, she continued down the stairs. “You are the only living creature besides Dracula who knows any of my story now.”

My heart swelled. We were finally connecting. She trusted me. We could work together to make a better life for her girls, and then—

She whipped around and snapped my neck.