Page 4 of Lucy Undying

“Can I buy you a new coffee—tea, I guess—to thank you for saving my life?” I gesture at the café that nearly got me killed.

“Surely your life is worth more than a cup of tea.” Her lips, rosebud pink and promisingly full, purse in a teasing smile. She knows I’m trying to pick her up. Am I that obvious?

I’m that obvious. I can’t stop staring at her. I give up on being coy and let myself smile as big and goofily as my body wants me to. “Depends on who you ask.”

That earns me another laugh. But then her head tilts and something closes off in her dark blue eyes. She’s still smiling, but I realize now what it is that makes it clear she’s not a teenager. It’s not confidence; it’s exhaustion. Beneath that perfect skin and beautiful face, she’s more worn down than most teenagers could ever understand being.

“Sorry, my little cabbage,” she says, and my soaring hopes plummet back to earth. “I’m afraid I’m very late.”

Right. She was coming from the train station, too. Clearly in transit, and here I am, trying to divert her. I shove my hands back in my pockets and shrug. “Another time, then.”

“Another time.” Her smile blooms from bud into a full rose, and I wish she would stay. Distract me from everything I have to do. “Until then…” She leans close enough that my heart picks up again—she’s flirting, too—and she whispers, “Look right.”

I laugh, half because it’s funny and half to release the tension of having her close enough to kiss. She glides down the sidewalk, weaving her way through the masses trying to interpret their phone map apps. When she reaches the corner, she glances over her shoulder at me. I will her to come back. To decide to be even later than she already is. I’ll be her little cabbage. I’ll be whatever she needs me to be for a few hours until I can’t pretend my life away anymore.

Instead, she disappears, swallowed by the crowd.

“Real smooth, Iris,” I mutter to myself. Just as well. It would be like painting a target on her back, and she doesn’t deserve that. The hairs on my neck prickle. I refuse to look over my shoulder to check if someone is watching me.

The sooner I get going, the sooner I can actually get going. I’m so close. A few more weeks and then I can leave my mother’s fucking cult behind forever. I’ll be where they expect me to be until the moment I never am again.

“Your precious blood,” someone says beside me.

I jump into the street without looking. I’m three blocks away before I stop running, gasping for breath. My lungs burn. So does my elbow, stinging and raw. It’s bleeding through my sleeve. I must have hurt it when I fell, but didn’t notice because I was so besotted with my angel. Whoever commented on my blood was pointing out that I was hurt. That was it, nothing else.

I tell myself that, but I don’t believe it. I know better by now. It’s always something else. Pressing a hand against the wound, I look left and right and behind myself, scurrying deeper into London as if a new city could ever hide me.

6

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

I was born in 1871, which makes me— What year is it? Doesn’t matter. Math is awfully tedious. Besides, you get less precious about age when all the years stretch behind and before you, infinite, empty, marking neither the passage of time nor a march toward death. Endless night without the hope of a dawn. But also, I know I look amazing for my age.

My first birth was hardly noteworthy: a tiny squall in a world that demanded girls be silent and still. I don’t care to think about that time, and it’s not what you’re interested in. You want what came in the second birth, where I emerged from the womb of life and the cavity of death as something not quite living, but certainly not dead.

If you’ve never woken up in your own coffin, I cannot say I recommend the experience. Darkness and pain and thirst—devastating thirst, like my entire body was parched and I would die if I didn’t do something to soothe it. I was closed in on all sides, certain there were red eyes in the black with me, teeth caressing my neck. I screamed and screamed and no one answered. Every spinning particle of dust that made up my body wanted to be somewhere, anywhere else.

And then I was. I found myself standing outside a mausoleum. If you had asked me my name, I wouldn’t have known it. We all lose that in the space between dying and waking. We lose most everything then.

Have you ever gone to sleep certain the world worked in predictable ways, and the next day woken up to find everything changed? Everything rendered absurd and meaningless such that you didn’t know whether to scream or laugh and were afraid if you chose to do either, you could never stop?

Laughter wasn’t really an option. My entire existence was one anguished scream, even now that I was free from my confinement. My throat was raw from thirst. I didn’t know exactly what I needed, but I had to drink something immediately.

Didn’t he know I was here? Didn’t he know I was hungry and terrified? I felt like he was near. Over my shoulder, in the shadows. I thought he would appear, and if not help me—I was not so naïve, even then—at least give some sense back to the world. Even not knowing who I was, barely remembering what I had been before becoming this creature filled with panic and need, I remembered Dracula.

He had wanted me. He had claimed me as his own. And yet I was alone. Not for long, though. Dracula’s brides were already on my trail. And not just them. There were so many like me out there, waiting. So many I’d meet and love and betray and hunt and kill.

Sometimes I feel like I never left that cemetery. Like I’m still standing there, screaming, waiting for Dracula.

Oh, dear. You’re lost. I can see it in your face. I know, because I’ve been lost for so long. You get used to it. Time isn’t a line. It’s a bottomless pit we throw more and more of ourselves into until we’re swallowed completely. Everything is still happening, has never happened, will always be happening, hasn’t happened yet. I walk with the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever been, and I don’t know which I am, or if I’m one of the dead that haunts me.

Stories are hauntings, aren’t they? The ghosts we carry with us everywhere. I’ll try to tell you my stories in order. Build a house for you where all my ghosts can be contained and haunt you in a way you can make sense of.

You’re already in the house. You don’t know how you got inside. All you know is there’s no way out, only deeper in. And behind the next door is a bride. She feels like velvet and smells like sex and tastes like blood.

So much blood.

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