Page 36 of Lucy Undying

I myself felt as though I was missing something vital, something irreplaceable, something precious and lost forever. What had been cut out of me while I crossed from life to death? Was it my soul? My future? My humanity? All I knew was that there existed a pit inside me, a hole that no amount of blood could fill.

Lights ahead made me see I’d become dangerously distracted. I had nothing to fear from an active battlefield—you can’t put a bullet in moonlight. The Doctor had to be much more careful. She couldn’t change form at all except to shift her fingernails into precise scalpels.

Vampires are not all the same. Raven could shift into darkness and ride it like a current. The Queen was strong and a ruthlessly efficient fighter after permanently modifying her body. And the Doctor’s senses were impossibly fine-tuned to be able to see, smell, and even hear the slightest changes in a human body. But none of them could change form as swiftly or easily as me—if they changed at all.

So it wasn’t myself I was afraid for as I neared the front. It was these two boys in the cart. I already knew English, French, and Mandarin. I had been adding to them, though learning languages from soldiers left me with rather more profanity than anything else. I can say the most beautifully horrendous things in Italian, German, and Hungarian. But I was hearing German and English. Not close, but too close for comfort. I had no idea which side these boys had been fighting on. Their uniforms were bloody rags at this point, and sides mean less when they’re represented by unconscious, bleeding teenagers dying for powerful men’s stubborn avarice and pride.

One of the boys stirred. The morphine was nearly out of his system. I didn’t have the heart to mesmerize him, not after what he’d been through. I pushed the cart closer to the English speakers.

But something gave me pause before I slipped back into the night. There was a train car surrounded by people in crisp, clean uniforms. Uniforms that hadn’t seen so much as a day of combat, blood that was healthy, bodies that were well-fed.

My teeth were already sharper as I watched these old men who fought a war with young men’s bodies, who counted them as supplies and weapons rather than people. They were German and English alike, and they entered the train car together.

I drifted inside, too, hovering in the moonlight near a window. I could taste the tension, smell all the chemicals and hormones and alcohol in these men. I watched as they sweated and swore and shouted over an armistice. It quickly became clear that whatever was supposed to happen in that train car was not going to.

I thought of those boys outside who had literally left pieces of themselves on the battlefield. I thought of the ones I hadn’t saved. The ones I had held as they slipped past the divide between life and death that I had merely ricocheted off of.

“Absolutely not,” I said, materializing in the middle of the train car. It was the only thing that could have gotten those men to shut up in unison. They stared at me, bewildered.

And then they all began shouting again, accusing the others of smuggling me in, questioning why they had smuggled me in, insinuating foul things about my presence there. So I bit them.

All.

Fortunately, they had been shouting so much already that the slight change in tone and tenor of the noise didn’t alert any of the guards. And once bitten, twice shy. Or at least, twice as malleable.

“Shut up, all of you,” I said, and they listened. I had never been listened to by men in my life, much less by a train car full of men convinced they were the most important people on earth.

“Sign.” I pointed at the documents. “Sign at once, and when you leave here remember that it was like an angel descended from on high and appealed to your better natures, or some other nonsense like that. But forget me. Just remember how badly you wanted to sign this and how readily you agreed. And then get these boys out of the trenches, you fucking monsters.” I said that last part in every language I knew so they’d all understand.

They signed. And, exactly as I had commanded, they were already forgetting me even while I was still there with them.

I was giddy. I’d done something good, something real. The Doctor wouldn’t have to try and save a few souls here and there. I’d saved them all. I flew home, a jubilant moonbeam shimmering among the smoke, dancing along the flares. I burst into being right beside the Doctor, which made her drop the beaker she was holding, which made her swear as fervently as any soldier ever had.

“I did it!” I declared.

“Yes, fine, now go and get me—”

“No, I did it! I ended the war! They’ve just signed an armistice. It’s over.”

The Doctor frowned at me. I had expected to earn a smile, or at least less of a frown, which counted as a smile for the Doctor. Instead, her frown deepened.

“What do you mean?”

I told her the story, my words shooting out faster than a volley of bullets. But they didn’t find the target I thought they would. She sighed and began carefully washing her instruments. “I wish you had consulted me first. It’s very inconvenient.”

“Inconvenient,” I repeated with numb lips.

“Now we’ll have to find another conflict somewhere else. This was such fertile ground for advancement of my work. It’s disappointing, Lucy.”

I wilted. I thought she’d be proud. I thought we wanted the same thing—to help these soldiers, these children. When we met, she’d been protecting them, too. Or so I thought.

I had to admit at last that, unlike me, she wasn’t looking for the faces of those she’d loved. She wasn’t looking at their faces at all. Only what was viscerally inside. What she could take apart and put back together to learn from. If she happened to fix them, fine. But healing had never been her main goal.

“I can’t help you anymore,” I said.

“Don’t be silly.”

My jaw clenched. It was not silly to protect the boys paying the price for this horrendous war. But I’d learn in a few years that she was right. I’d been very silly indeed, foolish and hopeful and shortsighted.

---