Page 29 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

29

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

The Queen put me in a lightless cell, cut off from the sun and moon, even the passage of time denied me.

I don’t know how long I lay motionless beneath the ground, as my body painstakingly healed itself aided only by the trickles of blood the Queen fed me. A second burial, one with a far more determined captor than my casket had been. Even after I could move again, I was trapped. I think I spent a few years in that cell, but who can say?

I wondered why she didn’t simply destroy me, but I found the answer in the eagerness with which she studied my face during her visits. Perhaps it was my despair that felt like a mirror to the Queen. Or our shared connection to Dracula, the ways in which our lives and deaths still haunted us. Whatever it was, the Queen wouldn’t keep me like one of her girls, but she couldn’t get rid of me, either. And she didn’t want to. She came to see me regularly.

I stayed sane waiting for her visits. Well, sane-ish. I think sanity is a strange concept, don’t you? Maybe you don’t, given your profession. But the idea that brains and thoughts should work a certain way, and if they don’t, they’re wrong? I have seen and lived too many lives to believe that.

Anyhow. She brought me enough blood to keep me conscious, but not enough to make me strong. She never left immediately, though. Because I already knew her secret, she felt safe enough to share more with me in the darkness. With an impenetrable wall of iron between us, she could be vulnerable. I got to see the bone beneath the gold.

Mortal experiences get hazy when you’re on the other side of them, and she only had a few memories. She’d polished them like pieces of jade until they were smooth and easy to hold. Easy to give to someone else in the dark. A few were happy. Most were horrific. She gave me those memories like she gave me blood, and I fed on both of them.

She told me about her childhood, about her brief life before her endless one. As a young girl, she’d visited this palace with her mother. I liked to imagine her, wide-eyed and awed. And then coming back, red-eyed and awesome, claiming the palace for her own.

I’m not going to tell you about the other memories she shared. They were sacred. A shrine to the girl she had been, the one who had suffered so much. Whatever else has transpired between us—the captivity, the betrayal—I will always respect the secrets she told me in the dark.

At the end of every visit, when I could tell she was getting ready to become more statue than person again, I repeated the same thing:

“You deserved better. I love you.”

I meant it, every time. I really did love her. My heart broke for what she had gone through. And at least her obsession took the form of stealing abused girls and giving them a new life rather than, say, eating children. She was downright noble for a vampire.

And every time after I said it, she growled at me and then left for another day or month or year.

Her visits stirred a painful hope in me: that she would let me go, or that she would decide to keep me. That she’d open the door and embrace me, and we’d be sisters or lovers or friends. We’d hold each other’s pasts and be each other’s futures.

I knew the truth, though. Neither of us was what the other wanted. She could never view me as an equal because I didn’t see myself as one, either. And she could never love me as deeply as I needed.

And so I hatched my plan to get away.

She gave me enough blood to keep me functional and lucid, but I was still very weak. So I chewed up insects and sucked on their juices. I drained every rat I could get my hands on, every burrowing creature that dug too deep and fell into my cell.

You were probably hoping for something more dramatic. A vampire prison break! A golden-clawed battle! The violence comes later. This escape just involved swallowing my pride and picking bug legs out of my teeth.

Whenever I built up enough strength for it, I climbed the walls and clawed at the ceiling. I clawed and clawed and clawed, for months. Probably years. Eventually, I broke through to the tiniest sliver of moonlight. That was all I needed.

I had to escape. But I was leaving someone precious behind in that prison. Not just the girls trapped in the palace, but the Queen herself. She was never going to be free. I left her one last message, carved into the wall. They deserve better. So do you.

Then I became moonlight, and I left. But I hadn’t factored in how weak I still was. Things were about to get much, much weirder, and much, much worse.

In my giddiness at freedom, I forgot to change back before dawn. Have you ever been moonlight in a sun-drenched world? Scattered and blown apart by light so much greater than your own? It took me ages to gather the particles of myself. I’d be so close, nearly there, and then the sun would be back in its merciless honesty. I nearly stopped existing then, I think. At least in any form recognizable as myself.

It was blood that saved me. One night in my infinite struggle to become corporeal, drifting slowly across the world, I smelled death. Not a single body, but countless. Whole fields soaked in blood, an entire land drenched and drowning in it. The smell of so much blood, the burning and chemical scents beneath and around it, was like smelling salts. Just like that, I was real and ravenous.

I was going to say I was whole again, but I don’t know if I ever really was whole to begin with. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still moonlight, glowing everywhere but touching nothing. Perfectly lovely and perfectly useless. Maybe I was always moonlight. If moonlight can dream, maybe I dreamed Lucy. Maybe that’s why she never mattered to anyone, why she never felt real. Maybe I’m dreaming this right now. Maybe I dreamed you. Can I feel your pulse? To make sure we’re not both a dream of pale light washing across an infinite, cold wasteland?

Come closer.

Oh, Vanessa! I am sorry about that. Sometimes I forget how good I am at dazzling people. It rarely works on other vampires, alas. But don’t look so alarmed. I never bite a woman without permission! Sometimes I just need to borrow a pulse, to anchor myself in the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of life. Pull myself back into the regular flow of time.

Should we talk about something soothing? Or should we talk about war? Yes? All right then.

It doesn’t really matter when the war was. They’re all the same war. But I think this was the first World War. I made it back to Europe in time for the worst of it.

I joined the rats in the trenches, following the stench of decay and the sweet, spreading rot. But rats were never my friends, not the way they were his. Dracula could command them and bend them to his will. That’s not a power I have. Nothing obeys me. Even the natural world recoils from my neediness.

Mina told me that once. That I was too needy and it made me look foolish. She suggested I hide it. Be aloof and untouchable, as my station demanded. I tried so hard, for her. I thought of her there, while I was in the trenches. I wondered if she was happy. If she had a child. If her child was down there in the gore with me, dying. I looked everywhere for her, in every face.

The blood was no good—too much infection and horror—but the sleep was divine. I curled up in abandoned trenches and was at last replenished. During the nights when I awoke, I walked among the dead and suffering. One night I was down in the blood-churned mud, cradling a young man. I sang to him as he approached the divide between life and death. He wouldn’t be coming back from it, not the way I did. I wondered what would greet him on the other side. I hoped, for his sake, that it was nothing. No dreams. Only sleep, perfect and dark and eternal.

One should never let existential questions overtake them on a battlefield, though. There was more in the darkness than mustard gas and shells. The other vampire was on me before I realized she was there.

She threw me out of the trench, aimed straight at a rusted tangle of barbed wire. I turned into mist and moonlight on my way down, avoiding it. My vampire assailant hadn’t counted on that. She leapt up after me, anticipating a soft landing on my body instead of the empty wire she’d sought to ensnare me in. She fell directly into her own trap.

I became Lucy once more, teeth bared. I wasn’t going to be trapped again. Not ever.

She grunted in frustration, trying to disentangle herself. She was beautiful, skin a rich, dark brown, hair shorn close to her head, power and grace in her full, fat frame. But power and grace aren’t a match against that much barbed wire. She continued to struggle, which gave me enough time to calm down. It felt impolite to attack her while she was stuck.

“Why don’t you change into moonlight,” I suggested, waiting.

She just kept thrashing. The barbed wire wrapped tighter, cutting her in a thousand places. She didn’t bleed, which was curious. Even with this many bodies around, she hadn’t been feeding much.

I crouched next to her. “Moonlight,” I prodded again. “Or dust. Or mist.”

“ What are you talking about?” she asked, exasperated. She stopped trying to roll free, instead glaring at me.

“Shift your form so the wire isn’t holding you anymore. And then we can have a proper fight, if you want.”

Her tone dripped derision like her body wasn’t dripping blood. “Why would I want that?”

“Well, I don’t know!” I perched on a discarded helmet, watching as she tried to get free with more methodical efforts. “ You attacked me. But I’m not going to let you drain that poor dying boy.”

Disgust rippled through her, making the barbed wire quiver. “I’m not going to drain him! I was stopping you!”

I mirrored her disgust. “I would never. ” I paused, because it was obvious to both of us I was well-fed. A bit sheepish, I leaned forward and began slicing through the barbed wire. When I needed, I could make my fingers into claws to rival the Queen’s. “I did bite a commanding officer. A few of them. All right, every officer I find, whenever I can. But only when they’re comfortably far from the trenches, safe and cozy and well-fed. I would never attack these boys, though. They’re children. I heard him dying and didn’t want him to be alone. Oh, no!” I finished with the barbed wire and climbed back into the trench. He was gone. He’d died alone.

I sat in the muck and wept for him.

“Wasteful,” the other vampire muttered, standing atop the lip of the trench. And then she tromped away.

But I wasn’t finished with her yet. There was something familiar about her. Or maybe it was just that I hadn’t had a conversation since the Queen, and I was desperate for company that wasn’t dead or dying.

“You don’t attack them, either?” I asked, scurrying after her. “How long have you been here? What’s happening, anyway? This is ghastly.” I kicked a femur out of the way, then made myself a little less solid so I could walk without sinking into the mud. My companion was struggling with each step, using her strength to power through. “Why don’t you turn into moonlight and float above everything? Where are you going?”

“Is this not bad enough without the torment of your questions?” she asked, gesturing to the cratered, corpse-littered battlefield around us. A string of barbed wire barred her way and I helpfully darted ahead, cutting a path.

She stepped through without a single thanks. Then, when it was clear I wasn’t going to stop following her, she ticked off answers like she was checking them on a chart. “I don’t attack soldiers. There are far more valuable uses for their suffering than sating my own base needs. I’ve been here since the first trench was dug in this pointless battle, which is a war being waged by most of Europe because someone was assassinated and every country had agreed to fight another country in such a circumstance and no one had the sense to say Perhaps we shouldn’t. I don’t turn into moonlight or dust because that’s nonsense. And I’m returning to my field office so I can continue my studies.”

“What are you studying? I was studying painting. I think. I remember paintbrushes, at least.”

“Who are you?” she asked, looking at me in bewilderment.

“Lucy,” I said brightly, holding out my hand. She ignored it.

“I’m a doctor,” she said, leaving it at that.

I know what you’re thinking. Hadn’t I learned my lesson with Raven and then the Queen? But the answer is no. I hadn’t learned my lesson. I was still desperate for companionship and connection. I didn’t know why, but something about her was familiar, like she was humming a song I knew in my heart. It wasn’t a song I liked, necessarily, but sometimes familiar is better than good.

She kept waving her hand at me like trying to shoo a fly, and I kept dodging it and peppering her with questions she ignored. We arrived, at last, at a factory. It was half caved in from a recent bombing. The side that still stood had been efficiently turned into a field hospital. There was an assembly line of beds. Each was occupied by soldiers in various states of catastrophic injury. There were tools, blades, bandages, bags of liquid suspended above the soldiers, and blood.

So much blood.

I got a little dizzy, my borders fuzzing.

“If you can’t control yourself, I’ll kill you,” the Doctor snapped.

“I can!” I said, ever eager to please. I stood primly in the center of the room, hands clasped, idiotically angelic smile pasted on my face. “What exactly are you doing here?”

The Doctor was already moving from body to body, injecting things, checking pulses, frowning. “Studying all the ways humans can be broken.”

“Oh, that’s nice!” I paused. “Actually, that’s not nice at all. Why are you studying that?”

“If I can examine enough dying and death, if I can map out all the ways in which mortal bodies fail, then I can protect them.”

“Protect who?” I asked.

“Protect mortal bodies,” she said, as though I should have known. “Are you really still here?”

I looked down to make certain I was. I was still a bit moonlight-traumatized. I never got over that, as you’ve seen. “Yes,” I confirmed. “I’m still here.”

“Well then, you may as well be useful. Smell this.” She held up the arm of one of the soldiers. His other limbs were gone, though he’d been sewn up well.

“Laudanum,” I said, wrinkling my nose. It reminded me of something. Some one. Mother. But something stronger, more recent. A trio of women, on the floor, unconscious. Who were they? What had happened? Everything from my life before was held at a remove, as ephemeral as a dream.

“Morphine,” she corrected. “It’s more efficient. But ignore that. Smell his blood, then go out and find someone with this exact type of blood. Exact, ” she insisted. And then she turned her back on me and got to work.

That was how I became a blood and body parts courier, and how I inadvertently ended the war.