Page 110 of Lucy Undying

“Do I smell like Mina?” Iris asks, her bloodied lip trembling.

It stops me short. I have no answer for her. Does she?

“You didn’t know who I was when you saved me. But if you can smell Dracula’s blood in someone, surely you could smell Mina’s blood in me. It wasn’t fate or a miracle that you found me outside that train station, Lucy. You were still looking for Mina. You just want to be with her, however possible. Including by dying, since apparently I’m not close enough to the real thing for you to love me.”

“No.” I shake my head, try to pull her closer. I have to make her understand. I’m doing this for her. Not for Mina. “We have to kill Dracula, because that’s how I keep you safe.”

“You’re doing it again and you can’t even see it.” She laughs darkly, no humor or joy in the sound. It’s the laughter of the trenches, the laughter of the condemned, the laughter of the hopeless. “You’re sacrificing yourself all over again to the memory of a woman who didn’t even notice you died for her the first time around. Fuck this. I love you, Lucy. I’m not going to help you kill yourself.”

Iris rips the backpack strap off her wrist and shoves it at me. Then she storms out. I stay where I am. The punishing, stinging stench of perfumes assaults my senses. I don’t cry, because I can’t. I don’t deserve to. I found Iris, and I found myself again, and now I’m losing both.

All I can do for either one of us is finish what I started.

93

Salt Lake City, January 25, 2025

Dracula

Satisfied with the taste of your blood on his lips, he watches as you scurry away, eager for your appointment with destiny tomorrow. You’re his accomplice. A willing victim. Not because you hope for transformation or salvation, but because you understand: There is no salvation. There is no future. There is only him. His are the endlessly patient teeth of eternity, the ravenous, relentless passage of seconds into years into lifetimes. And when you are weeping and emptied at last of everything you thought was yours, he’ll bind you to him, forever.

He licks his lips and shudders, bites his tongue so the traces of your blood mix with what’s left of his. He follows, silently stalking. There is no tomorrow. There is only now.

But you don’t go home.

His irritation flares. Were he not bound by the sun, he would shift into a bat or wolf—whatever pursued you the fastest, whatever drove you home with enough haste for his appetite.

You hurry instead to a shopping center. A tacky, teeming, distracting mass of people and stores. Everything is too loud, too chaotic, so many heartbeats and scents and noises. He misses the quiet of the old world, the pleasure of stalking a single pulse through the night.

Worse still, you enter a store with a riot of scents so violent he’s forced to recoil and watch from a shadowed alcove.

Why are you there? Why does any girl wear perfume, though. You’re unsure how to keep him, what to do to make yourself most appealing. You’re in there, yearning for him and frightened by your yearning. He’s tempted to follow you inside, but that smell. He can’t abide it.

You usually have the good sense not to wear perfume. You don’t cover the heady, perfect scent of your blood with anything that confuses or offends his senses. Even when you don’t know you’re doing it, you’re making yourself available to him.

But there, under the barrage of man-made scents—a hint of something colder. His lips draw back in a snarl. He drops into a crouch, every sense on highest alert. There’s a vampire nearby. He has to get you first.

Before he can tear through the store and kill everything in his path, you rush out. Tears blind you to everything. Your face is flush with emotion. The blood lingers at the surface, calling to him.

He follows at a careful distance, but you never turn around. You never so much as look over your shoulder. There’s something wrong. Not just the hint of a chill scent clinging to you—did another vampire dare touch you when you belong to him?—but your blood.

There’s a subtle difference between lust and fear, but also anger. He can’t tell which is coursing through your veins. Those veins belong to him. That blood is his. No one else should be able to affect it.

Was it her? His demonic vampire foe? He can’t kill her, but that shouldn’t stop him. He’s eternal, he’s inevitable, he’s the teeth in the night that always find their prey. A smile twists his full, sensual lips, revealing all the sharp teeth lurking beneath as an idea forms.

He can’t kill her, but you’ll be able to. Once he’s finished. Once you’re his.

You retreat inside your house and close your door. He should wait until nightfall, but he’s waited too long already. He has you so close, and his vengeance even closer. Ecstasy and violence, control and satisfaction, and revenge.

His teeth ache. His fingers twitch. He lifts a fist to knock on the door. He knows exactly how it will go, because it’s gone the same way countless times. The circle, always spinning back on itself. You, over and over, curious and excited and filled with potential, then scared and broken, yielding at last. Everything consumed by him. As is his right.

94

Salt Lake City, January 25, 2025

Iris

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Miss Goldaming?” Dickie says.

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