Page 70 of Lucy Undying

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.

61

London, October 7, 2024

Iris

“Pull over here,” I say to Rahul, a block from the house. I don’t want him driving all the way there. I trust that Ford will obey orders, but I don’t want poor Rahul traumatized by rogue wildlife. “Do you know any lawyers? Solicitors, I mean. Good ones. Not pathetic, creepy little sycophants.”

Rahul laughs. “I do, actually. One of my primary school mates, Levi Richardson. We still play cricket together. He’ll do you right.”

“Great. Can I have his contact info?”

Rahul gives it to me. I send a quick email while I still have access to a phone signal, then reluctantly open the door to get out.

“Hold up! Let me take you all the way home,” Rahul offers. “I don’t like you walking alone at night. Especially after what happened earlier.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, and I appreciate it. I resolved that situation through lying,” I say. “As scary as my family’s company is, they follow rules. If they think I’m following the rules, too, they’ll leave me alone. Listen, though. Before I get things officially in motion, I should warn you: I’m going to give you and Anthony the house. Hillingham, I mean.”

“What?” Rahul turns toward me, eyes wide.

---