Page 32 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

32

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

It turns out I’m quite good at sniffing out blood type. For example, you’re AB+, which makes you a universal recipient. I wasn’t, and I speak from experience when I say you’re fortunate, Vanessa.

The first time I brought back the blood the Doctor needed, still conveniently packaged within its original owner, who had, unfortunately, lost a good portion of the top of his head and wouldn’t be needing his blood for much longer—

Sorry, are you all right? You look pale, Vanessa.

Anyhow, I was horrified, too. I dropped the body in outrage when I realized what the Doctor was doing.

“You can’t put someone’s blood into someone else!” I shouted, quivering with rage. There was a whisper of a memory, the details lost but the pain and fear remaining. I raked my fingernails down my arms, trying to claw out the sensation of my veins being on fire, but I couldn’t, because it wasn’t in my veins. The pain was somewhere deeper that I couldn’t reach.

The Doctor inserted a needle without pause. “I use the same type of blood, so the body doesn’t reject it. You did well. This is exactly what the patient needs. Now please go stand in the corner and calm down while I work, or I’ll have to kill you.”

I didn’t think she could kill me, but I did as I was told. My shudders and shivers and flares of pain quieted. The man receiving an infusion of blood wasn’t in any discomfort. A flush of life returned to his sallow skin, and he looked like he was sleeping, not dying.

“Good,” the Doctor said, pleased. “Now he’ll live long enough for me to trace the course of the infection through his body so I can determine the precise point at which it can no longer be treated. I was wasting so much time retrieving supplies. You can do that for me now. You’re much more useful than I thought you would be.”

With that dubious praise warming my own skin much like an infusion of blood, I agreed. What else did I have to do?

Besides, it was marvelous watching her work. She let me study what she was doing as she traced and tracked and cataloged every part of a human body. Those she could easily save were dropped off far away from the front—that was my job, since the Doctor didn’t care about them once they were healed.

The Doctor preferred those she couldn’t easily save, though, both for the challenge and for the opportunity to study life on its way into death.

You might think it would be difficult to move so many soldiers under the noses of all that military might, but it was bleakly easy. That’s why the Doctor was there in the first place. An endless supply of broken bodies, and no one keeping track of where they went.

One night, months into my role as her courier, I was pulling a cart with two young men inside it. They were likely to make a full recovery, one without his right arm and one without his spleen. I didn’t know exactly what a spleen did, but the Doctor assured me that the human body could compensate for the loss.

I myself felt as though I was missing something vital, something irreplaceable, something precious and lost forever. What had been cut out of me while I crossed from life to death? Was it my soul? My future? My humanity? All I knew was that there existed a pit inside me, a hole that no amount of blood could fill.

Lights ahead made me see I’d become dangerously distracted. I had nothing to fear from an active battlefield—you can’t put a bullet in moonlight. The Doctor had to be much more careful. She couldn’t change form at all except to shift her fingernails into precise scalpels.

Vampires are not all the same. Raven could shift into darkness and ride it like a current. The Queen was strong and a ruthlessly efficient fighter after permanently modifying her body. And the Doctor’s senses were impossibly fine-tuned to be able to see, smell, and even hear the slightest changes in a human body. But none of them could change form as swiftly or easily as me—if they changed at all.

So it wasn’t myself I was afraid for as I neared the front. It was these two boys in the cart. I already knew English, French, and Mandarin. I had been adding to them, though learning languages from soldiers left me with rather more profanity than anything else. I can say the most beautifully horrendous things in Italian, German, and Hungarian. But I was hearing German and English. Not close, but too close for comfort. I had no idea which side these boys had been fighting on. Their uniforms were bloody rags at this point, and sides mean less when they’re represented by unconscious, bleeding teenagers dying for powerful men’s stubborn avarice and pride.

One of the boys stirred. The morphine was nearly out of his system. I didn’t have the heart to mesmerize him, not after what he’d been through. I pushed the cart closer to the English speakers.

But something gave me pause before I slipped back into the night. There was a train car surrounded by people in crisp, clean uniforms. Uniforms that hadn’t seen so much as a day of combat, blood that was healthy, bodies that were well-fed.

My teeth were already sharper as I watched these old men who fought a war with young men’s bodies, who counted them as supplies and weapons rather than people. They were German and English alike, and they entered the train car together.

I drifted inside, too, hovering in the moonlight near a window. I could taste the tension, smell all the chemicals and hormones and alcohol in these men. I watched as they sweated and swore and shouted over an armistice. It quickly became clear that whatever was supposed to happen in that train car was not going to.

I thought of those boys outside who had literally left pieces of themselves on the battlefield. I thought of the ones I hadn’t saved. The ones I had held as they slipped past the divide between life and death that I had merely ricocheted off of.

“Absolutely not,” I said, materializing in the middle of the train car. It was the only thing that could have gotten those men to shut up in unison. They stared at me, bewildered.

And then they all began shouting again, accusing the others of smuggling me in, questioning why they had smuggled me in, insinuating foul things about my presence there. So I bit them.

All.

Fortunately, they had been shouting so much already that the slight change in tone and tenor of the noise didn’t alert any of the guards. And once bitten, twice shy. Or at least, twice as malleable.

“Shut up, all of you,” I said, and they listened. I had never been listened to by men in my life, much less by a train car full of men convinced they were the most important people on earth.

“Sign.” I pointed at the documents. “Sign at once, and when you leave here remember that it was like an angel descended from on high and appealed to your better natures, or some other nonsense like that. But forget me. Just remember how badly you wanted to sign this and how readily you agreed. And then get these boys out of the trenches, you fucking monsters.” I said that last part in every language I knew so they’d all understand.

They signed. And, exactly as I had commanded, they were already forgetting me even while I was still there with them.

I was giddy. I’d done something good, something real. The Doctor wouldn’t have to try and save a few souls here and there. I’d saved them all. I flew home, a jubilant moonbeam shimmering among the smoke, dancing along the flares. I burst into being right beside the Doctor, which made her drop the beaker she was holding, which made her swear as fervently as any soldier ever had.

“I did it!” I declared.

“Yes, fine, now go and get me—”

“No, I did it! I ended the war! They’ve just signed an armistice. It’s over.”

The Doctor frowned at me. I had expected to earn a smile, or at least less of a frown, which counted as a smile for the Doctor. Instead, her frown deepened.

“What do you mean?”

I told her the story, my words shooting out faster than a volley of bullets. But they didn’t find the target I thought they would. She sighed and began carefully washing her instruments. “I wish you had consulted me first. It’s very inconvenient.”

“Inconvenient,” I repeated with numb lips.

“Now we’ll have to find another conflict somewhere else. This was such fertile ground for advancement of my work. It’s disappointing, Lucy.”

I wilted. I thought she’d be proud. I thought we wanted the same thing—to help these soldiers, these children. When we met, she’d been protecting them, too. Or so I thought.

I had to admit at last that, unlike me, she wasn’t looking for the faces of those she’d loved. She wasn’t looking at their faces at all. Only what was viscerally inside. What she could take apart and put back together to learn from. If she happened to fix them, fine. But healing had never been her main goal.

“I can’t help you anymore,” I said.

“Don’t be silly.”

My jaw clenched. It was not silly to protect the boys paying the price for this horrendous war. But I’d learn in a few years that she was right. I’d been very silly indeed, foolish and hopeful and shortsighted.

My time there was done in more ways than one. I had looked for Mina in every face of every boy I saw on the battlefields, but I hadn’t found her. It was exhausting. I needed to stop looking for her, to let myself forget. I also needed to get the scent of blood and rot and terror out of my sinuses. That would never happen at the Doctor’s side.

“Stay with me,” the Doctor said. “You’re useful. And we have so much more to do.”

“No,” I snapped. “You don’t care about me. I’ve as much value to you as a scalpel or a needle.”

The Doctor gave me her most withering glare. “Lucy, there is nothing you can do that is more important than helping me.”

I nearly gave in and let her decide for both of us. Let her tell me who and what I should be. But the scent of morphine lingered, an itch in my soul. Once again something inside of me recoiled from a memory I couldn’t find. A phantom scar on my perfect vampire body.

And just like that, I was moonlight. I fled the Doctor and the trenches once and for all. I didn’t stop until I found so much light it shocked me back into my body.

Have you ever been to Paris in the frantic lull between wars? Everything building toward an inevitable, devastating climax, but oh, the pressure in that buildup! The ways people found to release it! I wandered the streets, lost among a populace raucous with joy over news of the armistice, drunk on the relief of it. I myself was dizzy with the heady triumph of knowing I had given this to them.

And then I was promptly murdered.