Page 68 of Lucy Undying (Dracula #1)

68

Boston, September 26, 2024

Client Transcript

I chased rumors, I followed ghosts, I stalked shadows, on the hunt for one thing: vampires.

I found them, too. That acrid metal sting was like a lighthouse in the dark, guiding me to them. Every time I met a new vampire, I asked if they knew where Dracula was. Every time they said no. Their stories were the same as mine. Young women, on the cusp of the rest of their lives, instead abandoned in this nightmare wasteland.

I killed most of them. Not out of any altruistic sense of purpose or a desire to protect humanity. Most didn’t like being found and attacked me first. But also I was angry. The search was taking me years. Every vampire I found got my hopes up, and every vampire I found brought them crashing back down.

But no. It wasn’t just anger. I let myself think that, before tonight. But now that you’ve had me lay my afterlife out in a neat pathway from beginning to end, I can see it was more than that. These vampires were mirrors. Bottomless pits of need, never sated, never happy. Living the same cycles, over and over, without hope of progression or change. I looked at them, and I saw myself, and I hated it. So I smashed a lot of mirrors.

The saner ones who didn’t try to kill me I usually just fucked, though. Even an undead girl has needs.

I never found a vampire that predated Dracula, though. Not a single one that didn’t smell like him. Was he the first? Or were there others out there, older and smarter than him, that I couldn’t sniff out? But the Doctor proved right—none of the vampires I found had been making other vampires. We were monsters, all of us, but not like him. Never like him.

Eventually, I found myself in Lagos, Nigeria. If any city can be said to be living, Lagos is it. Everything is movement and chaos, all these intricate social systems balancing and striving and pushing and pulling. If I hadn’t been so far into my search and so very tired, I think I could have stayed there for a long time, absorbing the sheer life of it all. I even liked the noise. The honking, the shouting, the constant, inescapable humanity. Overwhelming in the best way.

But I had caught my scent. This one was different. I was used to the thrill of the hunt, to the hope that even now stirred in my veins: Maybe this time, maybe this time. But I was possessed by this scent. I blurred through the night streets, dodging motorcycles and vendors, wishing I were electricity that could be carried along the wires strung everywhere like nerves in a body.

I arrived at a house clinging to the edge of the city. At last close enough to fill myself with the scent, I understood what it was that triggered such urgency. It wasn’t just a vampire. It was a vampire I knew.

Two of them, in fact.

I didn’t need to be invited in, but I knocked to be polite. The Lover opened the door, no surprise in her cloudy-day gray eyes. She took my hand the way she used to and led me inside.

Even if I couldn’t smell her companion, I would have known the Lover wasn’t living there by herself. The place was ruthlessly tidy. Floors swept clean, minimal furniture, clothes relegated to an actual closet. Several mugs were drying on the table, recently rinsed clean of blood because their owner still preferred to drink that way. The Queen stood perfectly still in the center of the kitchen, watching me.

“How did you two even meet?” I asked. Though they had been major figures in my history, I never imagined them together. Both geographically and temperamentally, they had been as far apart as possible. I turned to the Queen. “I looked for you in Liaoning, but everything was gone.” I didn’t add that I didn’t look for the Lover. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

The Queen’s face was as unreadable as ever. “I lost a favorite companion. It made me realize all my girls deserved better. I let them go. Eventually the new government remembered the palace existed, and I was forced to wander.”

“Someone ruined Paris for me,” the Lover said, squeezing my hand a little too tight. “After that, I had to go out and find hungry men on my own, over and over. And I had to kill them instead of reusing them, because that same someone told me I was being selfish.”

The Queen held my gaze as steadily and ready as she held herself, like a rabbit waiting to dart away…or a leopard waiting to pounce. “We heard whispers that someone was hunting down all of Dracula’s vampires.”

“Oh.” I laughed. “Yes, that’s me.”

The Queen raised one eyebrow, the perfect smooth plains of her face untouched by the expression. She no longer wore silk robes, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but her clothes were immaculate and regal nonetheless. “Eventually we found each other. Satisfied that neither of us was the hunter, we banded together. The world used to be a vast place, filled with secrets. Now it is too small for us to hide in. Too small to carve out our own domains. Even Lagos will not work for long.” She cut her eyes toward the Lover. “Mostly because she cannot stop attracting and then killing murderers.”

I didn’t mention that the golden knives still fused to each of the Queen’s fingers probably drew attention, too.

The Lover didn’t react to the Queen’s criticism. She watched me, curious. “I think I never understood you,” she said.

“That makes two of us.” I pulled her closer, surprisingly happy to see her. And happy that she seemed nearly sane at the moment. But she didn’t wrap her arms around me, and the Queen seemed even tenser than usual. “I’m not going to kill either of you,” I said, rushing to reassure them. “You’re my friends.”

After all, I’d shared more with them in the last hundred plus years than I had with anyone else. I wished the Doctor was there, too, but she was well and truly lost.

“As if you could kill us.” The Queen waved dismissively. She did relax a little, though, softening from carved in stone to merely sculpted out of metal. “How did you kill so many?”

That was new. She had never asked me a question before without delivering it as a demand. Had she changed, or had I?

“I was trained by your girls, and they were the best. Besides, it isn’t difficult.” Part of it was the element of surprise. Vampires mostly avoid each other. So, at least at the beginning, no one was expecting an attack. The other part was the fact that I’ve never minded being vulnerable, which makes me better at surviving. Weakness is an old friend who holds no dread for me.

But the final and most obvious answer is that they wanted to die. Each of them was asking a question that would never be answered. I offered them an end, and they took it.

“This is nice.” I sat on their sagging sofa. The material was coarse and cheap, not up to the standards of the Queen or the Lover. But they had covered it in pretty handwoven blankets. Even on the run, they still appreciated beauty. They were the only two vampires I ever met who tried to build homes wherever they were, rather than being satisfied with a patch of unhallowed ground to rest in.

The Lover sat curled against me, staring dreamily into a distance no one else could see. “We’re going to America. I don’t think they’ll mind us there. They deal so much death and violence every day, no one will even notice us. And I’ll find so many new murderous friends to love me before they die.”

The Queen’s posture shifted like a sigh. She sat on a rattan chair across from us. It was a far cry from her throne. “That is not why we’re going.”

“Then why?” I asked. America seemed so far away. Such an immature, new country. I’d held its dying soldiers, and I’d held children dying because of its soldiers. Its wars were the same war there ever was. It wasn’t special or different, it was just too young to accept it yet.

“Because of the rumors,” the Lover said, giggling.

The Queen clarified. “According to the whispers of those fleeing your campaign of terror, he’s there.”

I stood, as charged as if every wire in Lagos connected directly to my dead heart. “ Dracula? Dracula is in America?”

The Queen shrugged irritably. “I still think he’s dead. I had very good information that he was killed by a cowboy.”

“Impossible,” the Lover said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. It was clear they’d had this argument dozens of times. The grooves of it were worn into them. “The cowboy carried a regular knife. A knife made of steel stuck into Dracula’s chest would do nothing more than inconvenience him. Believe me, I know about being stabbed. He faked his death to escape pursuit. It’s hard to survive once you’ve been noticed.”

“Regardless,” the Queen said, “there are rumors that whole vampire groups live together in America. Something strange is happening there. Maybe we can find safety in that strangeness.”

Based on my extensive experience, large groups of vampires never banded together. Then again, here were two vampires, trying to survive through safety in numbers. Maybe my hunting had inspired a whole new form of vampire community living.

“And if Dracula’s there,” the Lover said, “he’s been surviving in secret for more than a century. So we can, too. And I’ve never been shot before! Everyone gets shot in America. It’ll be exciting.”

It was all I could do to hold my form and not burst into moonlight, spreading myself so thin I’d cover the whole earth and find him. I didn’t want to spend any more years looking. I didn’t even want to spend days. Hours felt infinite. “Where is he, exactly? Do you have any idea?”

The Lover stroked my arm. “Do you know about the magic boxes?”

I looked to the Queen for clarification. She closed her eyes wearily. “She figured out how to use phones. It is extremely annoying.”

The Lover beamed. “A birdie in my magic box told me Dracula was in a place called Boston.”

Don’t be frightened, Vanessa. He’s not the one who attacked me tonight. Let me finish. You’ll understand.

The Lover gave me an address from the little birdie inside her phone. I crossed the ocean clinging to the bottom of a plane, coated in ice and daring to hope. I found Boston. I found the address. It was a club, more frantic and violent than the clubs of my time in Paris. The beat pulsed so strongly it felt almost like my heart was working again. I wandered through the darkness and the smoke and the dancing, and then I smelled them. Everywhere. So many vampires.

I pressed close to one, luminous and gleaming in the darkness, and whispered my desperation in his ear. He nodded to the others, then took my hand and led me to a back room. It was quieter in there. Quiet enough to hear, and quiet enough to use my other senses. They smelled like him— almost. There was something different, something off. Maybe because they were young. Fresh. Maybe that’s what I smelled like, so soon after waking. All the vampires I’d met were at least a hundred years old.

“I need to find Dracula,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

“Yes,” said a woman, strung taut and deadly like a bowstring. I wanted to pluck her and listen to the vibration. “We can take you to him.”

I’d done it. I’d found him, at last. I hummed with the knowledge that I was going to look Dracula in the eyes. I was going to make him give me answers. And then I was going to drain him.

“So pretty,” the bowstring woman said, pressing her lips to my neck.

“So old,” the first man said with a hungry laugh, running his hands down my back. The others, five, six, seven of them, pressed close, too, with lust and desire and the promise of borrowed heat.

I nearly wept. Being wanted, being touched? It reminded me I was real. I was real, and I was almost finished.

They tried to tear me apart.

I should have seen it coming. I practically invented this form of murdering other vampires. Though my method was always one on one, never seven on one. Hardly seems fair. They nearly killed me, but they’re still so young. Tied to their forms in a way I never was. It’s hard to murder moonlight, but do enough damage and even I can’t shift anymore.

It was a setup. The Queen and the Lover figured out a way of killing me without getting their own hands dirty. I’m not even angry. I’m impressed with their organization and innovation.

So, here I am. I didn’t find him, and I never will. I’m at the end of my search. Out of options, out of hope, out of reasons to keep existing. I was right about why it’s easy to kill old vampires. We’re so tired. We want someone to give us permission to sleep without the threat of waking.

You were right, too. There is something outside. Several somethings, now. It took them awhile to find me again and gather. I’m sorry I kept delaying you, but I wanted to finish my story before they finishme.

I think I’m ready to be finished. Telling you these stories, remembering everything I’ve done and everything I’ve failed at. I’m pathetic. So deeply pathetic, just like the rest of them. We were all mirrors to one another, all living the same story without end.

In her home, the Queen was trying to seize control from Dracula, who had never even set foot on her continent. He didn’t have to, because he has all the power anyway.

On every operating table and in every body, the Doctor was looking for what Dracula took from us. But she couldn’t find it, because it’s his now.

On the stage, the gaze the Lover was really hoping for was Dracula’s. The ending she craved was the one he denied her when he damned her to this endless mocking limbo.

We were, all of us, searching for Dracula. Reborn shaped around the horror of him, broken in the form he gave us. He claimed us and made us his own and tied us to him forever through violence. And then he never thought about us again.

Before you say anything else, Vanessa, I can smell the cancer eating away at you. I know you only listened to my story because you hoped I’d change you. You hoped I’d save you. But I would never do that to you. All I can offer is a swift, painless death right now, if you want. Or you can hide and pray the others pass you by. Not much of a choice, but few of us get any choice in the end.

At least we’ll both get an end. Stories only have meaning if they end, don’t they?

Lucy Westenra. Born in 1871, died in 1890. Forgotten, but not gone. At last about to rest in—