Page 1 of Lucy Undying

1

Salt Lake City, January 10, 2025

Dracula

It starts the moment you look out the window.

You don’t see him through the glare of the night-dark glass. You just look, safe inside but flinging your soul outward.

Your features transform whenever someone speaks to you, but you drop your sweet smile as soon as they turn away—a girl who wears a disguise to survive. It surprises and intrigues him, so he follows when you walk outside.

The night caresses with a grasping cold. Your head is down as you hurry to get home, soft brown curls hiding your face, hands shoved in the pockets of your coat. Rushing for safety and warmth. So dull and predictable, just like everyone else.

Though he has infinite time—a vast and depthless pool of it, holding him in place while the world’s currents drift around him—he no longer has any more time to waste here. He’s ready at last to moveon.

But.

Your steps slow as soon as you leave the pools of manufactured light. Your head drifts up, the curtain of your hair parts, and you gaze heavenward as though seeking the sun for warmth. The stars offer no such comfort. Theirs is a piercing, lifeless grace. You linger in the darkness and devour eternity with your eyes.

His own heart, stilled so long ago, seems to judder to life at the sight of you. You’re special. He aches to make your strange blood his own, to take everything you were or are or could have been.

If others weren’t watching, too, he might not have had the will to hold himself back. He loves the hunt, but you are a prize worth waiting for.

It doesn’t matter how many times he’s started this dance over the centuries, how many yous there have been. Because it feels new to him every time, when it’s right. And every time, for him, there is only you. There has only ever been you.

He is Dracula, and you are young and lovely and vulnerable, and he knows exactly how this dance will end.

You will invite him in.

2

London, October 4, 2024

Iris

Everything in London looks suitably old. Not in a run-down American way, but in a wearily ornate way. Like a grandma whose entire house is covered in plastic to preserve it in exactly the same state forever. England settled into “fussily impressive and obsessed with history” as its aesthetic and never changed. I admire the English for their commitment to it. The only thing I’ve ever been committed to is destroying my own family legacy.

I answer my phone without checking as I navigate out of the train station. Only one person ever calls me now, and I have to pick up so he doesn’t get suspicious. “Dick. Seriously. Give me at least a day to settle in before you start trying to lawyer me back to America.”

“Your mother,” Dad says, his voice as cracked as the ancient sidewalk beneath my feet. I stop dead. A tourist bumps into my oversized backpack, cursing. I barely hear them.

“Dad? Dad, what’s wrong?” I shout, both out of fear and so that he can hear me. My dad has always been an old man, nearing fifty when I was born, but he’s gone downhill fast recently. The slide started years ago, though, when I opened a door that should have stayed shut. My fault, my fault.

His voice drops as though he’s worried about being overheard. “She was here last night.”

I put my free hand to my forehead. I don’t know what hurts more—my head after the transatlantic flight and train ride into London, or my heart as I hear how scared and confused he is. I’m sorry to leave him alone, I really am, but—

But he abandoned me when I needed him most, didn’t he? The only way he can make it up to me is by letting me go, whether he knows he’s doing it or not. I can’t feel guilty about it. He’s in the nicest home money could buy, with the best staff, the best meals, and an upfront payment so large I can be assured he’ll be safe and taken care of for the rest of his life. That’s what we Goldamings do: slap some money on the problem and move on.

“Dad,” I say. “Mom wasn’t there last night. She’s dead.”

“She was beating against the window. She had red eyes and an evil smile. Please, Iris, you have to get me out of here. She knows where I am. You have to hide me or she’ll get in.”

I try to sound gentle, but I’m exhausted. “Mom couldn’t have been at your window. Both because you’re on the third floor, and because she’s dead.”

“I saw her, though. I saw—”

“I watched her die.” Blood being pumped out as fast as she could produce it, her body consuming itself. I rub my arm, tiny bumps of scars hidden beneath my sleeves, thinking about tubes sucking, sucking, sucking the blood. “I’m sorry you couldn’t come to the funeral, but I promise, we sealed her right up.”

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