Page 35 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

35

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

I had made it through most of World War One without so much as a scratch. And there I was, my very first night in Paris, lying in the street with my belly split open.

I wanted to change into moonlight, into mist, into dust. Anything to escape. But when pain is too overwhelming, it’s nearly impossible to shift into another form. Nothing makes us so mortal and flesh-bound as pain.

Well, except pleasure.

But there was no pleasure in trying to hold my abdomen closed as someone dragged me through dirty alleys. Thanks to my time with the Doctor, I knew exactly how many precious things a torso contained. Would I die if I lost them? Or would I merely be in unfathomable pain until I healed? It had itched in the most agonizing way as my nerves and bones put themselves back together after the Queen snapped my neck. How much worse would it feel to regrow internal organs? I put all my focus and strength into holding them in, paying little attention to anything else until I was dumped somewhere. I fell immediately asleep, curled around my wound.

When I awoke, I had more or less healed. I was in a collapsed culvert at the edge of a cemetery, used for centuries to dispose of unwanted or unclaimed bodies. It was perfectly unhallowed, and my rest had been depthless and restorative.

I wasn’t alone there, though. Lying beside me was a vampire. Her skin was white, her eyes were as colorless as the edge of the horizon on a sunny day, and her hair was a tangle of curls so matted with blood and gore that it was impossible to tell what color it actually was.

“You’re awake!” She leaned forward and kissed the tip of my nose. “Ludicrously brave of you, trying to save me! You silly, sweet thing.”

With pain no longer screaming for all my attention, I was able to sort through my memories of what had happened. I’d been wandering, enjoying the vitality and excitement of a city celebrating peace, when I heard a woman’s scream. I ran toward the sound and saw a body crumpled on the pavement. But something was off. Nothing smelled like it should. I had been so puzzled by what was wrong, I didn’t notice the ambush until I was stabbed from behind and then gutted.

“Were you the one who dragged me here?” I asked.

“It seemed only polite.” She stretched and yawned, showing perfect, shiny white teeth and pale gums.

“ You were the body on the ground!” That was what had been wrong. I had expected to smell fresh blood, and I didn’t. She couldn’t bleed properly, even after being split open by a blade.

“Frequently!” She bounced to her feet and shook out her hair, idly pulling the larger clots free. “You must have startled him. What a mess he left! Come on, I’ll bet you’re starving.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me along after her. Though my dress was hopelessly destroyed, hers hung on her frame with jaunty playfulness, as though the blackened blood and smears of grave dirt were whimsical patterns. Strings of pearls around her neck, sticky and stained, clicked together like finger bones as she led me out of the cemetery and into an apartment abutting it. It was abandoned—one corner had fallen in from a bomb strike—but at the top a single apartment remained pristine.

She flung the door open and then flung herself onto a chaise longue, draping over it like the pearls draped over her breast.

“Pick anything you like, darling.” She gestured toward the next room, which was filled to bursting with clothes. Dresses and coats and hats, gloves and stockings and shoes, furs and jewelry and scarves: enough to clothe a whole army of devastatingly stylish French women.

Fashion had shifted so much during my time away! First in captivity and moonlight, and then in the muck and mire of the trenches. I took my time marveling over the textures and cuts of the dresses, wondering how my hair should be done to match; primping gets difficult without mirrors. But when I slipped off my own dress and saw the gaping gash in it, as well as the angry red line on my stomach that hadn’t yet fully healed, I remembered I had come here under rather odd circumstances.

You’d think it impossible to forget waking up in a bone-filled culvert, but it’s not that unusual in my line of existence. And what can I say, I have a short attention span. Or an infinite one, depending. Things feel less urgent when time doesn’t matter.

I was curious, however, as to why we’d been attacked, and who had done the attacking. I went back out to my new friend.

“What’s your name?” I figured that was a polite place to start.

She waved breezily. “I can’t remember, so I change it like I change my hairstyles: often and without reason.”

Just like the Queen and the Doctor and the brides. Most vampires I met had no name. I wonder if that’s part of why we become monstrous. It’s hard to hold on to humanity when you can’t see yourself reflected or even define yourself by something as simple as your own name. I owe my earnest would-be decapitator for that, at least. He gave me Lucy back.

My new friend gestured at her head. “Now, be a dear and describe my injuries to me. In detail, please. We have to be each other’s mirrors, ma petite chou.” It made sense. She wanted to know what had been done, so she could avoid it in the future. The back of her head had gotten the worst of it. I told her about the damage using all the correct anatomical terms, which delighted her to no end and made me miss the Doctor a bit.

The base of her skull had been smashed in—it was still a little concave, but I didn’t want her to worry about it. Eventually it would even out, and in the meantime, I could fix her hair to cover it. She could see for herself the jagged knife mark in her belly, but not the wounds in her back. I traced them, detailing exactly which internal organs each stab would have hit.

“How did he sneak up on you?” I asked, curious. I had been distracted by her. What had she been distracted by?

“That’s in the past, it already happened, why care? We have to move on to the next adventure!” She pulled me to the bathroom.

There are few pleasures that are the same in both mortal and immortal life, but a hot bath after you’ve been through something wretched? That’s one.

It was strange, though. Raven had made everything physical, constantly pushing the limits of pleasure and pain. Sex, but no intimacy. The Queen shared her past with me, but our emotional connection was only on her terms and very one-sided. And the Doctor had neither the time nor the inclination for sex or intimacy. She was as utilitarian with our relationship as she was with life and death itself.

But with the Lover—that’s how I came to think of her—our time together was oddly innocent. She was unconcerned with her own nakedness, oblivious to mine. There was a familiarity with her, a sort of recognition, that I couldn’t explain. Like we had known each other for ages, instead of hours.

I washed her hair and she washed mine, and nothing was fraught or filled with any sort of tension, delicious or otherwise. It was…nice. It had been a long time since I’d had any experiences I would have described as “nice.” Tenderness with nothing else attached.

When we were clean, we tried on dress after dress. We laughed and twirled and modeled for each other. I settled on a rose silk number, sleeveless—such a thrill; I’d never been allowed that before! It fell down my figure like a curtain meant to tease at what was behind it. I covered it with a shawl so sheer it might as well have been a rainbow. Stockings, soft and well-made, felt like heaven. And I wore the prettiest red heels, round-toed, with straps that buttoned across my foot. I loved those shoes. I wonder whatever happened to them.

The Lover wore a similarly cut dress, but in an indefinable color. Gray or blue or silver or white. It shifted with the light, like it was made of clouds, and rendered her nearly colorless. An artist’s canvas, waiting for paint.

She had a collection of postcards and advertisements featuring women’s fashions. Copying what I saw, I worked her hair in waves and pinned it to cover the damage to her skull. She fussed with my golden hair until she was satisfied, then colored my lips red, rubbed rouge onto my cheeks, and dabbed kohl above and beneath my eyes.

Such a small thrill, such a painfully sweet bit of normalcy, to feel pretty again.

The Lover danced and spun around our apartment, and with her, I felt lighter. She had a magnetically innocent charm, an eternal youth instead of just eternal life. After the trenches, after my captivity, after everything that had happened since I died, it turned out I needed to be nineteen again. A freer and happier and wilder nineteen than I could ever have been during my life, but still only nineteen.

We went out, arm in arm, and reveled among the revelers. She taught me to look for men and women drunk on champagne, because it made their blood fizzy and intoxicating.

It’s adorable when you wrinkle your nose like that, Vanessa. It doesn’t really change the blood. It was the Lover who was fizzy and intoxicating. I let myself be swept along with her through the glittering Paris nights. Everyone happy, everyone glutted on freedom, everyone exorcising the demons of the last few years. I was dizzy with the thrill of it all, alcoholic blood or not.

As for the attack, I forgot about it. I had come directly from the trenches; brutality and violence were hardly shocking. And besides, it hadn’t mattered in the long run. In a way, I felt lucky. How would I have found the Lover otherwise?

I didn’t know yet I would always have found her. And the Doctor. And countless others. But I hadn’t figured it out. My attention was elsewhere. The women on stage— Oh, the women. They were a display case full of the most delectable pastries, confections of every flavor imaginable. They’d always invite us into their dressing rooms after, because everyone wanted to be near the Lover once they saw her. Everyone loves something precious and fragile. They loved me, too, because I was beautiful and happy and fun again.

They had no idea that we were the most dangerous things on the streets of Paris. It made me affectionate and protective. They didn’t trust me because they were safe. They were safe because they trustedme.

I’d nearly always find someone to join me in a dark corner or costume closet. Sex, as frantic and hungry as it had been with Raven, but lacking the blood-soaked haze and confusion. I knew exactly what we were doing now, and how to do it. It was still without love, but at least it was with tenderness, with humor, with delight. Oh, French women.

French women.

Sometimes I think about them, my stages full of soft delights with their cupid lips, assured fingers, warm tongues. I wonder what happened to them. I hope they were happy. I hope life was one long thrilling jaunt from smoky club to brilliant spotlight to laughter-filled dressing room. I hope they aged joyfully, that they only got softer and warmer with time, that the lines of their faces told winking stories of pleasure and happiness, never want or fear or pain.

But this was Paris in the 1920s. None of that was in their futures.

Still, they didn’t know what was coming, and neither did I. The Lover and I owned that brilliant city. We joined the dancers, performed on stages, drank our fill but never killed. The Lover was adamant about that, and I didn’t mind. I only wanted to be full enough to take the edge off the infinite gnawing emptiness always stalking me. Blood did that. So did sex. If I ever got too empty, I remembered Mina. I remembered myself. And I didn’t want to think about either of those things, so I made sure I was never thirsty and I was never alone.

Though I could have been happy at any of the clubs—they were all basically the same—we never danced on the same stage more than seven nights in a row. The Lover was searching for something, and when she didn’t find it, we moved on.

On to the next club, the next dance hall, the next soirée. Every night was a bright burst of pleasure, every daytime rest an eternity, the only true marker of the passage of time the rotation of our dresses. I didn’t pay much attention to the Lover. In all those arms, on all those stages, among all those frantic bursts of blood or pleasure, I wanted to be lost.

But I couldn’t escape my past. Unlike in the trenches, Mina was everywhere. She always said Paris was for fools and dreamers, but I still found her constantly. Not in the mouths I kissed, the pleasure I gave and received, the audiences of adoring men. No, I found her in the narrowed eyes watching us as we laughed too loudly walking arm in arm down the streets. In the scandalized outrage of women tricked into coming to the clubs. In every pursed lip and judgmental gaze.

I knew exactly how Mina would feel about what I was doing, and I wished desperately to discover her watching me, horrified and disappointed. She’d cover my bare shoulders with a sensible coat and march me back home.

Every dance, every stage, every kiss was a dare for Mina to come find me.

I know it’s not rational, but I felt close to Mina when I was in Paris. Like at any moment I would see her, and she would be the same, and then I could be the same, too.

So it wasn’t just the Lover searching for something in every crowd. We understood each other, though neither of us ever said what we were looking for.

Then one night, everything changed. I wore one of my favorite costumes: elastic bands with two strategically placed, enormous white feathers, and nothing else. At the door, the club owner charged for hand fans. Men and women crowded against the edge of the stage, waving their fans, trying to shift the feathers to get a glimpse of perfection. It was salacious and absurd, dirty and somehow innocent, too, because everyone was in on the joke. Everyone was playing. Sometimes Paris seemed like nothing but one big dare: to drink a little more, to kiss a little harder, to dance a little longer, to look into the dazzling lights and ignore the encroaching darkness for a few more hours, a few more days, a few more years.

As we took a bow and dropped our feathers—that always got a roar of playful anger from the crowd, who had paid for their useless fans—the Lover looked up into the audience and froze. A beatific smile crossed her face, so pure, so exultant, that I wondered what she had seen. In that moment, I loved her. In that moment, I would have done anything for her.

But the smile wasn’t for me. The smile was for him, because he had found her again, and her favorite dance was about to start.