Page 60 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

60

Boston, September 26, 2024

Client Transcript

I raced back to England, taking every form of transportation I could find. Motorcycles and ambulances and tanks and trains and boats and even an airplane. The only thing that mattered was speed. I had to see Mina. Just from a distance. If she was still alive, if she was happy, if she was thriving, then I wasn’t pointless. I was worth something. My love had mattered, even if she never knew.

And if Dracula had gotten to her, well…I wouldn’t be alone anymore, would I?

But when I arrived at last, London was different. My quiet city was an older, grizzled, scarred version of itself. It hummed with low, constant dread. Familiar sights were pocked from bombs and choked with smoke. Cars and ambulances and soldiers were everywhere. And Mina was gone.

I went to her house, but there was another family there and they had no idea who Mina Murray or Mina Harker were. The Harkers no doubt lived somewhere else together, but I’d never been there. Why hadn’t I been there? It was odd that I’d never visited my closest friend after she returned to London a married woman. The end of my life was a pain-soaked haze I deliberately never thought of, but I knew Mina wasn’t in it.

Sitting on a bench in a park—unsure why I was there, but drawn back to some of my old routes as a human—I puzzled through my options. Surely there were records that could tell me what had happened to Mina. But I had no idea where or even what those records were. I was a vampire, not a detective. And in life I had been a wealthy young heiress, so someone else always handled details.

Which left me with one other option. Treading the paths of my life had brought up additional memories. If I couldn’t find Mina, then perhaps I could find some of my other old friends. Surely one of them would know what happened to Mina, since they were the ones who had hunted Dracula. They could help me, as long as they didn’t know who they were helping.

Fortunately, finding directions to the sanitarium was easy. It had been turned into a hospital for wounded soldiers; everyone knew where it was, and it was busy enough that I was able to walk right in without anyone noticing me.

I did shift my appearance ever so slightly, though. I hadn’t forgotten the sound of a saw cutting laboriously through Dove’s spine.

“Excuse me,” I asked one of the nurses. He had a body that spoke of past brawny health withered away. An old scar on his neck drew my eyes and for a moment I wondered if he, too, had been bitten. But instead of two points of pain that would never leave him, it looked like he had been ripped into. “Have you worked here long?”

He nodded, barely glancing at me.

“Do you know Doctor Seward?”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion. He stopped what he was doing and really looked at me. “Yes.”

“Do you know where I could find him?”

He turned and spat on the floor, which hardly seemed sanitary. “He went to America, decades ago. Good riddance.”

I hadn’t been looking forward to a reunion with the man, but it was a blow. It not only took Doctor Seward off my list, it also took off the cowboy. I couldn’t imagine Doctor Seward going to America without his Texan friend.

I wandered outside, walking as I thought. Who else could I look for? The third option was the lecherous old Dutch man, and I hoped he was dead by now, anyway. The idea of him still out there, looming and leering and holding young women’s hands so they couldn’t escape him, was so unfair it made my teeth grate against each other.

That was the worst part of trying to find Mina. It forced me to remember other things. I was digging around in the grave of my past, and I didn’t enjoy what I was unearthing.

Arthur was the only option left to me. But that, too, proved impossible. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember ever once visiting his family’s estate. How had we been engaged and I never saw his home?

An older woman, with hair as white as fresh snow and joyful wrinkles around her eyes, took pity on me as I sat crying on the steps of an old tea shop Mina and I used to frequent.

“Are you lost, dear?” she asked.

“Yes,” I sobbed. “I’ve been away so long, and now I can’t find anyone. I need to see my friend, but no one knows where she is.”

“Have you tried a directory?”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

She tutted and helped me stand, then guided me to a library. Inside, she sat me at a table and then brought over a bound book. It thudded down, heavy with the weight of souls. She tapped the cover. “If they live in London, they’ll be in here. Or maybe someone you used to know will be. Would you like help looking up names?”

I stood and wrapped my arms around her, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “Thank you,” I said. It was exactly what I needed. Both the directory, and the reminder that even in the worst of times, there’s still kindness walking among us. “I can manage from here.”

She bid me good luck and farewell. Honestly, if I were going to turn anyone besides Mina into a vampire, I think I would have chosen her. All the vampires I knew had been changed when we were young and impulsive and selfish. How much better to change when you’ve already grown fully into yourself, with all your wisdom and compassion and power?

But I let her go. And then I delved into the book. I looked for “Murray.” “Harker.” “Holmwood” and “Goldaming” both, since Arthur surely took his father’s title at some point. I even looked for “Seward,” just in case. I couldn’t think of the cowboy’s name, which was disappointing because he held slightly less dread for me than the others, but he was only “the cowboy” in my head. There was nothing. They had all disappeared. I couldn’t find Mina. Was it because she was dead, or because the book was incomplete thanks to the chaos of war?

I wandered out of the library. The city churned and turned around me, and I stood in the center, unmoving. I didn’t know how to find people, because I wasn’t one. But I knew death, didn’t I? And I had all the time in the world to search death for my beloved.

I went to the cemeteries. I worked methodically and intensively. Night after night, cemetery after cemetery, I read every single stone. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of names. And then one night, I found a name I was looking for. Jonathan Harker. It was no wonder he hadn’t been in any of the directories. He’d died only a couple of years after I did, still a young man.

There was no companion gravestone. No loving wife buried beside him. If Mina had been killed by Dracula, she would have been buried in a regular plot such as this before rising again as a vampire. But her grave wasn’t here. I couldn’t imagine Jonathan being buried anywhere but at her side. Which meant Mina had survived. Dracula hadn’t won in the end.

I sat on Jonathan’s grave and wept. I didn’t know if it was from relief or disappointment.

Mina was still out there, alive. Not an old woman, but not a young one anymore. I was certain I would still know her, though. I would always know her. I’d stay as long as it took for a chance to see her.

I slept in my mausoleum, shoring up strength, drifting out to Jonathan’s grave every night to search for evidence of Mina. No one left flowers, or visited, or so much as brushed the dirt from his name. I would have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been so Jonathan.

It was his fault I’d died. If he hadn’t gone to Transylvania, if he hadn’t been striving to deserve Mina, then my path, and more importantly Mina’s path, never would have crossed with Dracula’s.

I dreamed, lying on the uncut grass on top of his grave, of what that life might have been. A life without Dracula, a life without Jonathan. A life with Mina. But when I closed my eyes and slept, I found only darkness.

The stars wheeled overhead. Airplanes came and went, bombs fell, and then they stopped. A tree looming above me went from bare to tender green to droning with insects to brilliant orange and back to bare.

She wasn’t coming. Mina was alive or she was dead, but she wasn’t a vampire. Either way she was out of my reach. At last, I’d lost her forever.

It felt like a period at the end of a sentence I’d been whispering to myself for decades, a sentence of love and longing and the darkest glimmer of hope. And now I had to end it.

I wished then that Mina was dead. I wished that I’d found her grave. I would have burrowed beneath the ground, let the hallowed earth seep all my strength. Stayed forever in Mina’s arms. But I was denied even that. There was no world in which Mina could be mine. There never had been. I’d always known it.

What point was there to anything after that? I went to my mausoleum, slipped inside, and slept. The earth spun, the years passed, and I sought to disappear from all of it. If I could not die, I could sleep. I could refuse to wake up.

I would have rested there forever, as close to peace as a creature like me can find, if not for the rat. The nearness of blood and heat at last pulled me from my deathly slumber.

As I was picking fur out of my teeth, barely lucid, all I could think of was Dracula and his rats. Disgust made me want to carve out my stomach the way I had carved out the stomach of his familiar in China.

But.

But.

If what we consume becomes part of us forever, then my world wasn’t ended. Not yet. If Dracula was alive, and he had ever taken blood from Mina, then part of Mina was still here, too.

I burst from my mausoleum, barely more than moonlight and rage and desire. I was going to find Dracula. I was going to drain him. And then, with Mina at last part of me forever, I was going to go back to sleep and never wake up.