Page 64 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

64

Boston, September 26, 2024

Client Transcript

The world had changed yet again during my time away. Remade not by war, but by new gods of technology. I felt about these things as the Doctor felt about vampirism: unfathomable nonsense not worth studying, best merely ignored.

It was both easier and more difficult to travel now. More options, but everyone wanted documents. Proof of identity and a quantifiable existence. Sometimes it wasn’t enough to dazzle them with a smile and a gentle vampiric nudge. I crept onto ships, slipped onto trains, clung to ceilings and roofs, a tick hitching a ride on the edge of progress.

I didn’t know where Dracula was, but I had a good idea of how to find someone who would.

Romania was beautiful in a way that made me feel less empty. My destination, Transylvania, had looming gray mountains cut by silvery serpentine rivers, dark green forests softened and hazy with clinging clouds. Quaint villages huddled around old fortified churches, nothing around but fields and hills for miles and miles in any direction.

I assumed my destination would be easy to find; it was a castle haunted by vampires, after all. But everywhere I asked—charming Bra?ov tucked into a valley, picturesque Sighi?oara built on a hill, even chaotic and cramped Bucharest at last coming up for air in the aftermath of a dictator—no one knew what I was talking about. I visited Bran, Pele?, Hunedoara, and a dozen crumbling fortress foundations, but none were the right castle. None reeked of Dracula and his history.

How had Jonathan found it? He must have had a guide. But I wasn’t giving up. I ventured to smaller villages, frozen in time. In places where a horse-drawn hay cart was as likely to be taking up the road as a modern car, where nights were still pitch-dark and winters deadly despite all the progress of the world, they remembered. And they refused to talk.

I used their reactions as my map. The more immediate the silence, the sharper the fear, the closer I was.

Eventually I caught that metal clang in my sinuses. The telltale scent of one of Dracula’s vampires. I knew exactly who it was, too. I wandered over hills and through mountain passes, deep into land inhabited only by wild, creeping things, and at last found it.

My heart sank. The castle was in ruins. A repulsive heap of long-ago glory reduced to garbage. Dracula wouldn’t stoop to live there, I was sure of it. But someone else would.

She was waiting for me as I picked my way over the debris. Her hair, once blacker than night, darker than shadow, had a dull quality to it. Her eyes were wide and red. Not the red of blood or frenzy, but the red of rust, of infection, of being slowly eaten away into nothing.

Raven. Ever the bride, loyally awaiting the return of her master.

Her voice was like the fluttering of a dying moth. “Have you seen him? Is he coming?”

All this time, she’d been here for him. And all this time, he’d stayed away. Even if she were to tell me Dracula’s exact whereabouts, I wouldn’t trust her. Not again. But my trip hadn’t been a complete waste. I could still confirm something once and for all.

Slumped in the shadows of the castle was another of Dracula’s vampires. A small, pathetic thing, half starved. Less than a shadow or a memory; a reflection in muddy water.

“You,” I said, pointing to her. “When did you die?” No reaction. I tried again in several different languages. When I asked in Greek, she blinked at me with empty eyes.

“I’m dead?”

Resisting the urge to sigh, I crouched in front of her. “What do you remember, from your life?”

“I’m dead,” she repeated, frowning.

“Don’t bother,” Raven said. “I found her on my journey back here. I thought she could be a bride, but she’s worthless.” She grabbed me, trying to slip her fingers somewhere they were no longer welcome.

I gripped her wrist, stopping her. “ When did you find her? How long after I left you?”

Raven tilted her head in confusion. She’d been there for so long, the passage of time was meaningless. There were only two states of being for her: with Dracula, and waiting for Dracula.

I pushed her away and turned back to the other vampire. “What year is it?” I asked, keeping my voice soft and gentle.

Her eyes brightened a little at a question she could answer. “It’s 1891! We just celebrated the new year.”

She’d been killed after me—and after the Queen received her report of Dracula’s death. I closed my eyes, relieved. He was out there. The four fools hadn’t killed him. Which meant I could still find him and drain him.

I turned to leave, at a loss for where to look next, but at least hopeful that there was a goal at the end of all my journeying.

Raven threw herself at me, clawing, weeping without tears. “Please. Stay with me. If there are three of us, we can lure him back. He’ll want us again, I know he will. I know he will.”

Sickening as it was, I understood her desperation. He was my focus, too. I still wanted answers. I still needed to look him in the eyes and ask why he had turned me into this. What the point of it all had been. The idea that he might have tasted Mina’s blood was just the excuse I needed to get back on this path. It was the same path I’d always been walking. The one that would take me back to him so I could understand myself.

“We need one more,” Raven screeched.

“Two more,” I corrected her. And then I killed the lost little Greek vampire. It was the only kindness I could think to give her.

Raven’s howls of rage and despair echoed behind me as I walked away. She had welcomed me into this life, but she didn’t have any power over me. And I wanted her to suffer.

I had few friends in the world—and “friend” was a stretch for some of them—but I tried them all. Revisiting Istanbul was surreal. The old buildings were still there, but everything was different. The same and yet irrevocably changed. It was beautiful, rich with history and people and tradition, but lessened. There were absences I didn’t know how to explain, whole sections of the city that had been forcibly erased and changed to conform.

I wondered if I had remade myself so many times that I, too, would be recognizable but devastating to behold. No one lived who loved me, though. No one could trace the history of my gradual decline, because no one was left who knew where I started. Except Dracula, of course.

As soon as I arrived, I knew the Doctor was gone. Istanbul held no scent of her scalpel-sharp heart. I kept traveling east. The Queen had her network of spies. They had been wrong before, but perhaps they had unearthed new information.

Liaoning was unrecognizable. The harbor was bustling, the surrounding empty hills now filled with buildings and people. Though I remembered the way well enough, in place of her hidden sanctuary was a regular street lined with homes and businesses. No trace remained of her compound or her scent. All her work to build her gilded cage, to rescue and protect and trap her collection of girls, come to naught.

While I’d slept in my mausoleum, the world had gotten smaller. I hoped the Queen and the Doctor still existed somewhere, but I doubted it. I was beginning to suspect that only the solitary vampires like me, the ones who drifted along impacting no one, changing nothing, were safe. There were so few secret dark spaces anymore.

After that, I didn’t bother with Paris. If the Lover was still there—I couldn’t imagine her anywhere else—she wouldn’t have information, and she certainly wouldn’t be willing to help me. I was well and truly alone.

But thanks to the Lover, I was excellent at changing my face and blending in. Thanks to the Doctor, I knew how to obsessively apply myself to a difficult task. And thanks to the Queen, I knew exactly how to kill vampires.

I started hunting.