Page 45 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

45

Boston, September 26, 2024

Client Transcript

Don’t look proud of me, Vanessa. Yes, I stopped a Parisian serial killer. But do you think I’m better than he was? You’re assigning value and moral weight to different kinds of killing. Different kinds of being a predator. There is no right. There is no wrong. There is only life and death and the things that tip us from one to the other.

Do you remember the train car? The treaty I made everyone sign, congratulating myself on saving so many lives? It was a haphazard treaty, doomed to fail and tip the world directly into a new war. Directly into the same war.

All my false Parisian lightness shed, war once again raging, I felt the weight of hopelessness and failure dragging me closer and closer to the ground. How could I have thought I’d done some good? How could I make up for it?

It was one night, crying next to the dazed and still-bleeding spy I’d made a small meal of, that I understood: Wars were not won on battlefields. They weren’t even won in treaties. Not when that treaty failed to take into account all the information possible. No, wars were won on intelligence. And hadn’t Mina always chided me that I should be a better student?

“Where are all the spies going these days?” I asked the young man. He lay on his back and stared dizzily up at the stars. He was in no pain. My small meals left them wobbly but happy. He would remember this as a surprise tryst with a stunning beauty, and the scars on his neck wouldn’t haunt him for the rest of his afterlife.

“Istanbul,” he said, giggling. It was adorable. He had round black eyes and curly hair and looked so young I wanted to send him home to his mother. “It’s neutral, so it’s the best place to find, buy, trade, or steal information. Everyone wants to push Turkey to one side or the other.”

Istanbul it was. I was tired of France, anyhow. The idea of being on the front lines again, of wading through that much suffering and devastation…Even I have my limits.

Istanbul was a dirt-crusted jewel, a glittering city built on so many layers of history they were indistinguishable. I was starving when I got there, nearly feral with—

No, I didn’t hear anything. Would you like me to go out and look?No?

I was used to my teeth and throat aching, but Istanbul made my soul ache. I wanted to gorge myself on its sense of place and identity. I wanted to be swallowed by the stones, to become a theater or library or mosque, to plant myself there and let history move around me. Such a mixture of old and new, built out of and on top of and over each other. I could have wandered those streets forever.

Except, as I said, I was starving. I’d never minded powerlessness—being my default state, it held no terror for me, and so I didn’t avoid it while traveling. Some might have to be coddled and tucked away into their own grave dirt simply to cross Europe, but I knew how long I could go without sating my thirst or resting my bones.

At a certain point, though, even I began to lose my mind to the drought clawing through me. Fortunately, I had scarcely set foot on the edges of the city when I smelled fresh blood, accompanied by a metal-edged scent I knew well: freezing and sharp, like a scalpel unearthed from snow. The Doctor was in Istanbul.

My nose wrinkled and my jaw ached. The Doctor’s scent threw me back to the trenches. I felt the deaths of a thousand young men in my arms. I wanted to scream and run away. But I also wanted to weep and run toward her. Bad memories or not, the Doctor was my friend. Or at least, she knew I existed, which felt almost the same as friendship.

I needed to be at my best when I saw her, though. She didn’t tolerate foolishness or weakness, and I’ve always been told I have a penchant for both. Also, she’d never forgive me if I showed up looking for a meal.

It was night in a big city, so a meal was easy enough to come by. I stumbled and weaved, projecting vulnerability. Three people tried to help me, which was sweet and reminded me why I wanted to cut this next war short. But the fourth had darker intentions. My would-be attacker followed me so clumsily I almost felt affection for the idiot. He didn’t follow me back out of the alley. I don’t always take small meals.

Happily fed, all I really wanted to do was sleep. But that was far trickier. Istanbul was so old, nearly every inch of it had been bathed in blood, but also consecrated by centuries of faith or love or belief. The ground held so much; even the stones were noisy. It would be a challenge to find anywhere to rest peacefully here.

With high hopes that the Doctor would have somewhere for me to sleep, I followed my nose and found her right away. I didn’t need an invitation, since a laboratory is not a home. Much like a therapist’s office isn’t.

Home is a funny concept, isn’t it? One that we hold sacred, whether we realize it or not. If a home was safe, we carry that feeling with us. And if a home wasn’t safe, we can’t shake the scars of that violation. We never forget the violence of losing a home, or the pain of never having been given one, or the comfort of having lived in one filled with love and community. The longing for home is a universal human experience; there are few of those.

I think that’s why vampires carry both fear and awe of homes with us beyond the space between life and death. Entering one without an invitation is a line we cannot cross; home is sacred and traumatic on both sides of mortality.

I can see you puzzling it out. Is this restriction magic, or merely psychological? Who’s to say what’s magic and what’s not? Stop trying to figure it out. You won’t, and it’ll drive you mad. And then who will you turn to? My therapist is quite busy.

You have such a nice smile, Vanessa. Warm and compassionate and knowing. If it were a home, I would love to live in it. Anyhow, I walked right into the Doctor’s lab. Though “walked” isn’t the right word. It was hidden beneath an old library, accessible only via a locked iron door set into the ground. But there were cracks, so I was moonlight, and then I was inside.

When I shifted back into myself, she didn’t even glance up. Her hands spidered over a prone body, ruthlessly dexterous and relentlessly curious. I felt a flush of affection, seeing her again. Her frown made it clear it was not mutual.

“No,” she said.

“But I haven’t asked anything yet.” I skipped toward her, delicately twirling past various body parts and a few bodies that were not yet parts but would be soon. I didn’t want to get blood on my dress or shoes, not after working so hard in the alley to avoid it. I hate having to steal clothes. It feels cruel, especially back then when clothing was meant to last years. I only ever took from wealthy people, though, which soothed my conscience and suited my vanity at the same time.

Besides, I adored that dress. Blue silk draping down with a coy swish around my calves. It was from the Lover’s collection in Paris, and it made me think of the smells of bread and blood and sex and her. I still think of it sometimes. The dress, not the smells of Paris or the Lover. Though I haven’t forgotten those, either.

“You have that look,” the Doctor told me. “You’re going to make my life more difficult.”

“How can you know what look I have when you haven’t even greeted me properly?” I leaned on the table with my chin on my fist and batted my eyes at her. Flirting never worked on the Doctor, but it always entertained me. Maybe even more because it didn’t work on her.

She didn’t humor me. Her voice was like a door slamming in my face. “Because you always have that look. You’re sad, and lost, and you think I can fix it. We both know I cannot. And even if I could, I wouldn’t care. You’re the one who left me. You criticized me and told me for all my claims of studying, I was never helping. As if you’ve done anything except flit about the world, inflicting yourself on others. Well, here I am. Understanding. And helping. I have a whole system in this city, and I share all my findings with doctors at the university, and I’m quite busy doing it.”

I linked fingers with the body on the table. He was still warm, though he wouldn’t be for long. The Doctor was doing something that couldn’t be undone, rummaging around in the twists and loops and tubes of his abdomen. When insides become outsides, it never ends well.

“I’m busy, too,” I told her.

“Really.” It wasn’t a question, because she wasn’t curious.

I leaned closer, forcing her to meet my gaze at last. I loved looking at her. The Doctor was beautiful —rich black skin, obsidian eyes, cheeks as full as the moon, body all curves and soft folds. So many vampires become thin and rigid and sharp, outer reflections of insatiable, constant hunger. But not her.

I think it makes it a little easier, that she’s the last thing so many dying people have seen. I wouldn’t mind if she were the last thing I ever looked on. Though I would be dying in an unfathomably painful way if that were true.

Anyhow, she didn’t believe me that I was in Istanbul to do something interesting. I pouted, a little. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wanted her good opinion. “I really am here for an important reason,” I insisted.

She let out a small scoffing noise. “You left me to carouse in Paris.”

I lifted an eyebrow, surprised. “How do you know what I did?”

With a dismissive sniff, she continued her work. “I thought you might reconsider and join me here, once you knew what I was doing. But I saw that you were otherwise engaged.”

The Doctor was jealous. It was adorable, but I couldn’t press it or she’d shut me out. And I couldn’t afford to lose this unexpected ally in a city I was determined to conquer. There was a war on again. I had to get it right this time. It felt as essential as blood, as imperative as sleep.

Have you ever held a child’s body as they claw at their throat, choking, their own lungs drowning them? It changes even the unchangeable. I made the Doctor hold one of them, near the end of our time together before. I made her hold him and watch. Not study, not dissect, not assess. Just hold. Not so much as a hair on his chin. Soldier’s uniform hanging on him like it was set there to dry. A child. Ended.

I held a lot of them, back then. Far from home and anyone who had ever loved them. It’s a gasping, choking death, being gassed in a trench. Dying alongside so many anonymous brothers, so many other children. I held them, and promised them they would be okay, and then I snapped their necks to give them the gentle kindness of a swift ending.

It’s the physicality of the snap that lingers. I’ve ushered many people across the divide, but that snap. I can still feel each and every one of them in my hands.

Look. Look at them. Look at my hands. People say they know things like the backs of their hands, but do they know their hands at all? Do they know what they’re capable of? Do they take account of all the things those hands have done, all the things they could have done, all the things they didn’t do?

The Doctor accused me of leaving because I wanted to have fun in Paris, but she never understood. I couldn’t stop crying over those boys, and I couldn’t protect them, and I couldn’t save them.

Before I died, my fiancé and the cowboy and the doctor and the old Dutch pervert tried to save me. I know you only heard about their attempt to cut off my head, but they really did try to keep me alive. They failed. And they didn’t give me the grace of a quick death. I lingered and suffered. No snap for poor young Lucy.

At least my sacrifice paved the way for Mina to be saved, though. But after Paris, I knew better than to throw my body in front of death and hope it was enough. This time, I was going to be clever and smart. I was going to keep so many lives from getting to the point where a quick death was the only thing I could give them.

“I’m not here for fun,” I said to the Doctor as the man on the table’s heart stopped. “I’m here because the war is back, and I have men to kill. I’m going to be a spy.”

The Doctor at least had the decency not to laugh at me. She merely sighed. I think she breathed just to have the opportunity to sigh over me whenever possible. “You missed the real Istanbul, anyway. I was here, at the fall of Byzantium. When the city opened and scholars and teachers and students from all over the world were welcomed in. When it was a beacon of learning and progress. Built on a foundation of blood and horror, but all cities and empires are.”

“You were here then? Tell me about it!” I hopped up on a clean table, kicking my legs, but she ignored me. She never did humor me with stories of her life, much as I wanted to know how she had become what she was.

It didn’t matter. I still loved Istanbul. Even then, a city crushed between two wars, pinched and conquered and controlled, trapped in a long slow decline that would drive out so much of what made it vibrant, Istanbul was a wonder. And, like all wonders, it was equal parts incredible and terrible. Awe and horror are the same emotions, they just depend on the outcome.

I wanted to inspire awe and horror, and I knew who I wanted to inspire it in. Soldiers are just unfortunate children, but the machines behind them? The hands trading the information, moving the pieces? That’s who I would take care of this time.

“It’s pointless,” the Doctor said.

“This?” I held up the scalpel I was toying with, which seemed quite pointed.

“Muddling around in the internal affairs of humans.”

I waved at the man on the table. “You’re muddling around in his internal affairs right now.”

“This accomplishes something. He dies, I learn, lives are saved.”

“My goal is saving lives, too! We’re doing the same thing here.”

“We are not.” But she kept glancing over at me, and I could tell I wasn’t being dismissed. “You look exhausted,” she said, at last finishing her work. “I’ll give you a place to sleep, and in return, you bring me any bodies you need to get rid of.”

It was a good deal, and I took it.