Page 27 of Lucy Undying

Though I had scouted out a bedroom, I opt to set up my bed on the den rug. It feels safer here—more potential exits. But the sleeping bag provides almost no padding between my bones and the boards. I’m paranoid that I’m going to get too cold, like the night air is death creeping closer, flowing sinister and ready through my veins. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight.

As usual, I’m wrong. Foxes with razor teeth pull Rahul and Anthony into the hedges; wolves jump through the window and scream at me in my mother’s voice; Elle lies down on that disturbing bed in the back bedroom, then is slowly folded into it, all while looking at me with the saddest eyes.

I wake with a start from that one. The quiet acceptance in her gaze, as though she knew it would always end that way, haunts me right out of slumber. My relief at being awake quickly turns to dread, though. I can’t move. I can’t move.

Sleep paralysis has plagued me ever since I moved into that bedroom with the monster closets. I try my breathing and counting exercises. I wait anxiously for my body to catch up to my brain. But I still can’t move. All I can do is stare at where the moonlight is streaming in through the window. No. That’s wrong. The moonlight is streaming out. My eyes can barely process the wrongness of it, but the moonlight is moving of its own accord. It’s slipping away, dimming as it pours back through the window I left cracked open.

I let out a whimper. Everything freezes. The moonlight, the dust motes, the air itself. Like the whole house is holding its breath. It’s realized I’m awake, and that I know it’s awake, too.

I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them again, the room is empty once more and I can move.

I sit up, freezing, heart racing. I can’t be cold, I can’t get cold, but the cold is always waiting for me, ready to kill me the way it killed my mother. Maybe it’s her. Maybe my dad was right. Maybe she’s come back to get her revenge.

I stumble to the window, slamming it shut. Then I grab my lantern and check the whole house, room by room. All the doors are locked, all the windows shut. Not a fox, a wolf, a dead mother, or an anthropomorphic moonbeam in sight.

When at last I return to the den, I know I’m alone. I can feel it, because it’s such a change from the sensation I had when I woke up.

But I don’t like this new feeling, either. Without my phone, there’s no way to distract myself. No shows to watch and lose myself in, no mindless scrolling. Just the cold and the fear and my own past creeping in the darkness.

I wish I could call Elle. That we could talk about nothing, fill the silence and the loneliness with each other’s voices. Instead, I open the safe and grab the floor journal. It seems like it has more potential to be interesting than the other one. I’ll take cleverly hidden over officially locked up any day. I’ve been both, and I definitely preferred hidden.

Then I curl up to live someone else’s life for a while. It’s got to be less of a nightmare than my own.

26

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

You look surprised that the Queen trapped me instead of helping me, Vanessa. You’re forgetting this is a story about vampires. And while vampires can be many things, they’re never nice. No more than a falcon is nice, or a snake, or a spider.

But it’s okay that you forgot. I forgot, too. She was so beautiful and elegant and commanding. I don’t know if it was a particular vampiric power of hers or if I was just easily dazzled, but I was completely under her sway.

“You can be useful,” she said, “as long as you never defy me or break my rules.” I agreed readily. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to be anything at all. Dracula was dead, Mina was safe, and I had to stay away forever to keep her that way.

I joined the training. Though the Queen’s girls lacked my vampiric strength, they had studied the few ways to kill my kind. I learned about anatomy: the fastest way to a heart, better methods of decapitation than my fiancé or I had used. Mostly I learned this by being their new practice dummy. They could stab me without killing me. It’s quite the sensation, feeling a blade punch between your ribs. I’d always twisted myself into unpleasant shapes in order to be accepted. Pincushion was a new one, though.

I also learned how to recognize the signs of someone being fed on by a vampire. The point at which it was too late to save them. The ways to kill them and make certain they never came back.

The Queen didn’t do any of this teaching herself, of course. I barely saw her. On the rare occasions she walked through the courtyard, everyone went still and silent with reverence. I pretended to do it, too, but I didn’t feel the same way toward her. I wanted to get to know her.

I wanted to get to know everyone there, but they refused to talk to me outside of training. It made sense. They’d spent their whole lives hunting and fighting my kind to keep their land free of us. Why should they trust me, even if their Queen allowed me to stay?

I spent as much time as I could patrolling. The Queen had a pair of leopards—did I mention the leopards? She was so fucking cool back then. They prowled the valley and surrounding hills, and I stalked them. They tolerated me much the same as the rest of the Queen’s subjects did. Barely, and at a distance.

I’d hoped by inviting me to stay, the Queen saw me as a potential companion or friend. But I’d been at the palace for over a month, and she still hadn’t said a word to me, and made it clear I was not invited to speak to her, either. I could feel her, though. Watching. Whether in approval or to make sure I didn’t step out of line I couldn’t say.

She needn’t have bothered monitoring me. I would have sooner clawed out my own throat than bite any of those girls. There was something sad and…not old, but weary, about even the youngest of them. They were tidy and quiet and devoted to their tasks, but so many of them had visible scars, and I suspected all of them had scars I could not see.

One afternoon, however, they seemed a bit rowdier. The sound of laughter rang through the usually silent courtyard. It woke me from my partial sleep. I still don’t know how the Queen managed to fully rest there. She kept everything so meticulously clean, there wasn’t even blood-soaked dirt from the leopards’ hunting.

I crept close to the sound of happiness, drawn like a moth to a flame. I had learned a lot in my month at the Queen’s palace, but I hadn’t had much fun. I desperately missed fun.

“Come out, little vampire,” called one of them, as lean as a whip and deadly with blades. I hadn’t been able to sneak up on them, tired as I was and bound by daylight. “It’s okay. She’s gone for a while.”

I emerged from behind a pillar. The girls were lounging around the garden, sharing a bottle of wine. I hadn’t smelled alcohol once while I’d been here. The one who called out to me patted a stone next to herself.

I sat, delighted. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know any of your names.” We never used them during training.

---