Page 54 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

54

Boston, September 26, 2024

Client Transcript

My green dress was black with blood.

I sat, soot-stained and reeking of smoke in the charred remains of so many men and one precious woman. I had ruined everything, yet again.

Ingrid had kissed me like she was dying, every time. Desperate and passionate and frantic. And now she was actually dead, because she trusted me. Because I couldn’t tell her who I was. Because I was so distracted by the memory of Mina, driven mad by my questions of who she had become without me, that I’d failed everyone.

The secretary was dead, too, which meant he couldn’t give up the information. But what did it matter? The Nazis and fascists would try again, or they’d try something else. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t. And the monstrous machine of war would plow on, devouring youth.

What we’d done that night didn’t matter. Ingrid was just another body, another woman broken and ended, and for what? The Doctor’s question was eternal, and the only question that mattered: And is the war over?

It wasn’t. It never has been. It never will be. All wars are the same war. Evil is banal, evil is boring, evil is predictable, and evil is everywhere. The heroes of that particular chapter, the liberators of Europe and Africa? Go backward or go forward, you’ll find the same blood on their hands. The same violence and atrocities in their own lands, or in foreign lands under the banner of their flags. The same dark deals, the same sacrifices of young bodies in service of old money.

Though I understood at last in that room that I couldn’t impact things in a way that would matter, I have no regrets about helping the sides I did. The Nazis were exceptionally good at evil. And still are. Different names, same agendas. Sometimes even the same name. Time really is a circle. No one ever learns, nothing changes, nothing matters.

I never did. Learn, or change, or matter.

I went back to the Doctor’s lab that night. I slumped in the corner and wept, thinking of Ingrid, thinking of how poorly I’d done. To my surprise, the Doctor came and sat by me. She didn’t hold me or comfort me, but her willingness to leave a man bleeding unobserved on her operating table for a few precious moments was a huge gesture.

“You were right,” I said, miserable and lost. “I tried to be smart this time, and it still didn’t fix things. I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know where to go or who to be. I don’t know how to exist. How do we keep existing?”

“Stay here with me,” she said. “Help me in my studies. The people I’m working with now are making so much progress. We’ll do astonishing things. We’ll defy mortality at every turn, we’ll fix bodies, we’ll…” She trailed off. “We’ll steal back as many souls from death as we can.”

But I didn’t care about people the same way the Doctor did. She wanted to understand how they worked. To know all the ways they could break, rot from the inside, die. She wanted to save their bodies.

I just wanted to know how to make them love me. How to make myself someone worth loving. How to stop being a monster.

“You should study us, ” I said. “Figure out what’s wrong with us, so you can fix it. So you can fix me.”

She stood, all tenderness gone. “It’s pointless, Lucy. There’s nothing to figure out. We’re abominations. Aberrations. It’s best to focus on—”

“You’re being intellectually uncurious.” It was the meanest thing I could have possibly said to her. I wanted to hurt her. I began smashing bottles, throwing the Doctor’s supplies across the lab. “You’re the smartest woman on earth. Surely you can answer my questions. Someone has to answer my questions! You’re the only one left, because he never came back for me!”

“Dracula never cares, afterward.”

My tantrum immediately stopped. It was the first time she’d ever said his name. The first time she’d admitted our connection through him.

She stared past me. “I had been dying long before he killed me. Here in this very city. Sneaking into libraries and hospitals, researching. I was close to fixing myself. So close. And then Dracula found me. After what he did, I wasn’t dying anymore, but I wasn’t alive. He saved me and broke me at the same time.”

Her eyes cut toward me, pinning me with her gaze. “I waited for him, too. I wanted answers, too. But when it became clear he didn’t care about me anymore, I decided to never care about him, either. I focused on what I could do. What I could study and understand without anyone else. That meant researching bodies that still made sense. Exploring life and death in their proper, permanent order.

“But sometimes,” she said, her voice very soft, “I still think he’ll be there. In a dark corner. At a window. And at last I’ll get to ask him my questions. It’s been so long, though, I’ve forgotten what the questions were.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s dead,” I said bluntly. “Killed by the men who couldn’t save me.”

The Doctor tilted her head, frowning. “Lucy,” she said, about to upend my entire world. “That’s not possible. I know for a fact Dracula is still alive.”