Page 121 of Lucy Undying

No. He won’t allow it. It’s disgusting, they’re disgusting, but there—that scent. He calms down, soothed. They’re his. He made them. They already belong to him. He just needs to remind them.

He focuses on the small one who tried to kill him. He bends all his centuries of control and violence toward her, pinning her in place with his will. No matter what tricks or ploys other vampires might have, no one has taken as much as he has. And what he takes, he keeps.

The waves of his dominion flow out from him onto her. Her eyes go flat and distant, remembering some long-ago time when she answered that call and invited him in. Little does she know that, once invited, he can never be kept out. She’s his. They all are. They want to be.

I am your master still.

Her eyes fill with tears as she gazes on him. He’s won. He always wins. He is inevitable.

102

Moab, January 27, 2025

Lucy

Dracula, at last, looks at me.

I’m nineteen again. Real nineteen, new nineteen, raw and open and heartbroken nineteen. The whole world ahead of me, but a world so claustrophobic it feels as though my life has already ended. In love with someone who would never love me back, and lacking even the words to explain what I was feeling.

Waves of his will wash over me, and I understand why it happened. I see exactly the way he left me vulnerable and unable to fight back. The manipulation that had me questioning whether I somehow wanted that to happen, whether it was my fault, whether I deserved it. The way he turned my guilt and confusion back on me, making me feel complicit in my own assault.

I look in his eyes, and at last I find my answer. Why he took what he did, why he changed me forever. It had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t my choice, or my fault, or even because I was somehow special. It was only ever about him.

That’s the answer. The horrific, utterly banal answer. He did that to a nineteen-year-old girl because he could.

His power is still there. He’s the same predator, the same elemental force with cunning violence behind his gaze. Waves of his compulsion begin to pull me under once more. They draw me into his thrall with promises that if I let him do what he wants, things will be easier. If I stay small and quiet, if I give in, he’ll invite me into his world. I can be safe in his shadow. Iris will be safe there, too.

Through him is the only way we can ever be together. He’s already started his dance with her. Nothing can stop him, so why try? This is how I save myself. This is how I keep going, keep living. And this is how I get Iris, forever. I missed my chance with Mina, but this is a new opportunity.

His power flows into me through those little points of pain in my throat. Those hooks left inside, tugging me through time ever since. Iris, he reminds me. He’ll give her to me, after. When he’s finished.

I smile.

He picked exactly the wrong pressure point. Iris is the reason I’m no longer the girl he left broken and lost and alone. I look away from his eyes. He lets out a small noise of disbelief that I could break the gravity of his existence, but I don’t have time for his feelings. I’m worried about my friends. They all had the same hooks put into them when they were young, so very long ago.

The Doctor, the Queen, and the Lover each meet my gaze. Not his. My smile grows, because none of us are his victims. Not anymore. The suffering and the experiences and the growth we’ve gone through since? We’re mausoleums, holding the girls we were with tenderness, and love, and strength. His violence turned us into our own unhallowed ground, our own safe spaces to rest, carried with us wherever we go. And he’s no longer welcome.

He stands taller, glowering at us with a seductive twist of his lip. “Listen to me, my children of the—”

“You don’t get to speak anymore.” This time I don’t go for his head, merely his jaw. I twist and pull. With a wet pop and a ripping noise, the entire thing comes off in my hands.

His scream is a keening knife, but it sounds like music to my ears. He flails, a gargling noise pouring out of him along with a sludge of inky black blood. We watch impassively as, with the frenzied violence of a cornered and injured animal, he climbs up and down the wall, looking for a way out.

He leaps at the Lover and she meets him midair, flinging him back into the wall. He crawls, darting across the floor toward the door. The Queen moves in, statue turned to lightning. She stomps on his spine with brutal efficiency. The screaming pitches higher and more pathetic.

He drags himself toward the Doctor, blood and drool draining from his useless fangs. She gazes disinterestedly down at him. “No,” she says as he swipes at her ankle. She picks him up by the base of his neck, holding him away from herself like one might hold a leaking garbage bag.

“Iris isn’t here,” I say. “She’s not safe yet. Not in the Goldamings’ clutches.” If she’s right about what happened to me back when I was alive, Arthur Goldaming and his descendants have been perfecting the art of slowly draining women for several generations. That Iris is one of their own will make no difference. Not if they can profit off her. “Can you call your familiar?”

The Doctor lets out a sharp whistle. The familiar slinks into the room, eyes feverish and gleaming as he takes in the evidence of our violence.

“Yes, Master?”

The Doctor’s nose wrinkles in distaste. “We’ve talked about that term.”

He cringes, fawning, hands extended like he would pet her if he could, pull on her clothes and beg forgiveness. But there’s a writhing, jawless vampire in the way, so Kyle stays where he is. “Yes, Goddess?”

“Not much better,” she says wearily. “Do you know where Iris Goldaming is?”

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