Page 39 of Lucy Undying

“I’ll tell you what. You saved my life, gave me coffee and food and a hot bath, and offered expert evaluation of all this junk. In return, I’ll let you explore a dusty old attic. Totally seems fair.” I interrupt her laugh by holding up a hand and making my expression very serious. “But if you find a portrait of an evil, decrepit old gentleman, please wait until I get back. We’ll stab it together and see if it was a whole Dorian Gray scenario.”

“I promise, no portrait stabbing without you.” She ties her shimmering hair back. It’s the only vibrant thing in this weary space.

“Can I bring you anything from the café? Or pick up lunch?”

Elle gestures toward the kitchen, where she’d left her enormous tote. “Brought my own. Oh, but since we have the stove working, if you could pick up a kettle? That way we can make tea, and I’ll never need to leave again.”

If only keeping her forever were that simple. “Deal.” I grab my purse from the den, then retrieve the journals from the safe. On alert for crows, foxes, and stray wolves, I head out for my coffee date with research and Lucy.

As soon as I leave the neighborhood, my phone blows up with notifications. A pit forms in my stomach as I see a missed call from my dad’s assisted living center. And then an entire series of texted photos taken outside the house, plus an emailed invitation to join a brand-new Goldaming Life seminar in London.

The pit turns into a roiling maelstrom of dread and anger. They’re here, and they want to make sure I know it.

35

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

I had made it through most of World War One without so much as a scratch. And there I was, my very first night in Paris, lying in the street with my belly split open.

I wanted to change into moonlight, into mist, into dust. Anything to escape. But when pain is too overwhelming, it’s nearly impossible to shift into another form. Nothing makes us so mortal and flesh-bound as pain.

Well, except pleasure.

But there was no pleasure in trying to hold my abdomen closed as someone dragged me through dirty alleys. Thanks to my time with the Doctor, I knew exactly how many precious things a torso contained. Would I die if I lost them? Or would I merely be in unfathomable pain until I healed? It had itched in the most agonizing way as my nerves and bones put themselves back together after the Queen snapped my neck. How much worse would it feel to regrow internal organs? I put all my focus and strength into holding them in, paying little attention to anything else until I was dumped somewhere. I fell immediately asleep, curled around my wound.

When I awoke, I had more or less healed. I was in a collapsed culvert at the edge of a cemetery, used for centuries to dispose of unwanted or unclaimed bodies. It was perfectly unhallowed, and my rest had been depthless and restorative.

I wasn’t alone there, though. Lying beside me was a vampire. Her skin was white, her eyes were as colorless as the edge of the horizon on a sunny day, and her hair was a tangle of curls so matted with blood and gore that it was impossible to tell what color it actually was.

“You’re awake!” She leaned forward and kissed the tip of my nose. “Ludicrously brave of you, trying to save me! You silly, sweet thing.”

With pain no longer screaming for all my attention, I was able to sort through my memories of what had happened. I’d been wandering, enjoying the vitality and excitement of a city celebrating peace, when I heard a woman’s scream. I ran toward the sound and saw a body crumpled on the pavement. But something was off. Nothing smelled like it should. I had been so puzzled by what was wrong, I didn’t notice the ambush until I was stabbed from behind and then gutted.

“Were you the one who dragged me here?” I asked.

“It seemed only polite.” She stretched and yawned, showing perfect, shiny white teeth and pale gums.

“You were the body on the ground!” That was what had been wrong. I had expected to smell fresh blood, and I didn’t. She couldn’t bleed properly, even after being split open by a blade.

“Frequently!” She bounced to her feet and shook out her hair, idly pulling the larger clots free. “You must have startled him. What a mess he left! Come on, I’ll bet you’re starving.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me along after her. Though my dress was hopelessly destroyed, hers hung on her frame with jaunty playfulness, as though the blackened blood and smears of grave dirt were whimsical patterns. Strings of pearls around her neck, sticky and stained, clicked together like finger bones as she led me out of the cemetery and into an apartment abutting it. It was abandoned—one corner had fallen in from a bomb strike—but at the top a single apartment remained pristine.

She flung the door open and then flung herself onto a chaise longue, draping over it like the pearls draped over her breast.

“Pick anything you like, darling.” She gestured toward the next room, which was filled to bursting with clothes. Dresses and coats and hats, gloves and stockings and shoes, furs and jewelry and scarves: enough to clothe a whole army of devastatingly stylish French women.

Fashion had shifted so much during my time away! First in captivity and moonlight, and then in the muck and mire of the trenches. I took my time marveling over the textures and cuts of the dresses, wondering how my hair should be done to match; primping gets difficult without mirrors. But when I slipped off my own dress and saw the gaping gash in it, as well as the angry red line on my stomach that hadn’t yet fully healed, I remembered I had come here under rather odd circumstances.

You’d think it impossible to forget waking up in a bone-filled culvert, but it’s not that unusual in my line of existence. And what can I say, I have a short attention span. Or an infinite one, depending. Things feel less urgent when time doesn’t matter.

I was curious, however, as to why we’d been attacked, and who had done the attacking. I went back out to my new friend.

“What’s your name?” I figured that was a polite place to start.

She waved breezily. “I can’t remember, so I change it like I change my hairstyles: often and without reason.”

Just like the Queen and the Doctor and the brides. Most vampires I met had no name. I wonder if that’s part of why we become monstrous. It’s hard to hold on to humanity when you can’t see yourself reflected or even define yourself by something as simple as your own name. I owe my earnest would-be decapitator for that, at least. He gave me Lucy back.

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