Page 105 of Lucy Undying

But I couldn’t have done any of that, because I didn’t have myself back yet. I couldn’t have fully loved Iris until she loved me, because I couldn’t fully love myself until she showed me how.

It’s all so breathtakingly unfair. I found myself again after so many lonely decades of searching, and I found Iris in the process, and now? Now I have to do the only task left to me. The only one that matters. The only one that will take me away from her, forever.

“You’re blurring,” the Lover cheerfully declares. She’s perched up in a tree for a better view of the hills and trail beneath us.

The Queen is still as stone, but she’s watching me, not the trail. “You love that girl. Does this change the plan?”

“No,” I snap. It’s times like these I long for the existential flattening of being moonlight. No one can ask moonlight questions moonlight doesn’t want to think about. “The plan is the same. No one’s safe until we find Dracula and destroy him. Especially not Iris.”

“You could make her a vampire. He can’t kill what’s already dead,” the Lover says. As I watch her braid her hair, for a moment I’m back in Istanbul, braiding Ingrid’s hair. Ingrid’s dead, and I’m still here. I won’t let that happen to Iris.

I look up at the Lover. “Would you do this to someone you cared about, if there were any other option?”

She blinks owl-wide eyes at me, then slowly shakes her head. “No. No, ma petite chou, I would not. But I’ve also never cared about anyone the way you do, so who can say?”

The Queen sounds tentative. She’s never sounded tentative before. “We could bury him so deep he can’t escape.”

“You kept me somewhere deep. I got out anyway,” I say.

The Lover jumps down between us. “Seal him in a cask and toss him in the ocean!”

“Casks break. Currents drift.”

The Lover tries to fuss with the Queen’s perfectly set hair. The Queen slaps her hands away, then makes another suggestion. “Stake him to the ground and cut off his limbs when they start to regrow. I would willingly sit sentinel and remove pieces of him long enough for you to have a life with Iris. A few decades is nothing to us.”

I wrap my arms around them both in a hug, holding them close. The Lover lets out a small, happy noise, returning the hug. The Queen stands as still as marble, but she doesn’t push me away.

“He needs to die,” I whisper. “Doesn’t he?”

At last the Queen moves. She pats my shoulder three times, carefully keeping her blades from piercing me. “Yes. We were only being nice. I’ll kill him no matter what.”

The Lover squeezes my waist and kisses my cheek. “You taught me I have to kill the killers, not just distract them.” She tilts her head to look up at the stars, smiling dreamily. “Besides, it’s so exciting! Finally finishing the first song, the one that started me down this endless dance. At last I’ll see what’s on the other side of death. I hope it’s nothing. Or I hope it’s everything! I can’t wait to find out.”

Not so long ago, a lifetime ago, a heartbeat ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Dracula and the rest of us alongside him. I was ready to be finished, too, because nothing ever changed, and I was tired.

Then I met Iris, and at last something changed. I changed. But if I choose myself over ending Dracula, I’m damning others to my own fate. Damning other innocent girls and women to this same torment.

The Queen and the Lover are right. The only way to truly be finished with him is to kill him. Anything less is selfish; anything less guarantees he’ll escape and prowl the world once more. He’ll find more desperately reckless Lucys. More lost girls like the Queen and the Lover, taken from trauma and pain and plunged into an endless nightmare. Countless lives, stolen and held forever in his limbo. All this misery, suffering, and death: a pyramid of it, with him at the top.

But it’s not an unassailable stone edifice. It’s a house of cards. I can knock it all down with a single blow.

He can’t have anyone else, and he especially can’t have Iris. Loving her makes me want to do anything but this; loving her makes it imperative I do exactly this. To save her from Dracula, and to save her from her family’s legacy. If he dies, so does Goldaming Life. And Iris is truly free, once and for all.

“Will you tell her goodbye, before we do it?” the Lover asks.

As much as my infinite afterlife has tried to snuff it out, I still have a flicker of hope. A dream of love and happiness. The old Lucy, sparking somewhere inside me. I can’t let that spark of hope turn into a flame. If I let myself, I would burn down the world to stay alive and keep Iris at my side.

“Killing him is the only way to save her.” I love Iris. This is how I show it. This is how I live it. “She can’t know.”

And so, alongside the Queen and the Lover, I perch and watch and wait as Iris paces the trail, trying to lure an ending. She just doesn’t know how final an ending it is.

88

Salt Lake City, January 20, 2025

My Little Cabbage,

She walks in beauty, like the night

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