Page 44 of Lucy Undying

She laughed. “I don’t know. I never see his face. But I always know when he’s found me again, when our dance is starting anew. I can hear his heart and the rush of his blood.”

“How many times has he killed you?”

She laughed again, the sound as simple and charming as children at play. “Oh, ever so many! Think of all the girls I’ve saved, all the victims I’ve taken the place of. We’ve been dancing together for years. I become a new woman, I get on a stage, and I wait. He finds me, courts me from afar, and then kills me. It’s like being in love, the way he watches me. The tender, obsessive care he devotes to following me, to getting closer and closer until, at last, he’s right behind me. Then he takes me in his arms and carves his feelings into me.”

Don’t look at me like that, Vanessa. I’m just quoting her. I’m perfectly aware it’s fucked up. Should I go on? Yes? Okay.

I made my voice as gentle as I could. “My darling, he isn’t courting you. He’s stalking and murdering you. Or at least, he thinks he’s murdering you. That’s not love.”

“Isn’t it? Doesn’t love make us obsess? Doesn’t love make us change ourselves to try and hold their attention? Doesn’t love make them want to change us, want to make us theirs, forever? To put us out of reach of anyone else? Didn’t it feel like love, when he made you his?”

If I’d had enough blood in me, it would have run cold. “Who?” I asked.

“Dracula, of course. I smelled him in you the moment we met. Didn’t you smell him in me?”

That was what drew us together. That was the scent I could always find. Not just any vampire. One of his vampires. One of his girls. Which meant the Doctor had been killed by him, too. How many of us were there, wandering the earth?

“I didn’t know,” I whispered. Was I still searching for him without realizing it, even knowing he was dead?

The Lover took my hands, holding my gaze with steadfast burning in her own. “Dracula saw me when no one else did. He remade me in his image, to his liking. He claimed me, and made it so he’d never have to let me go. It was like love. As close as I’d ever felt.” Her eyes went far away and as blank as the dead. “But then he let me go. He let you go, too. And he still hasn’t come back for us.”

I wanted to tell her what the Queen’s spies had discovered. Dracula was dead. He was never coming for either of us. But that hadn’t stopped her from looking for him in the arms of a serial killer, and it hadn’t stopped me from sniffing out the remains of his poison held in other vampires. We were both still desperate for answers he would never give us.

“I got lost,” the Lover said. “The first time I visited that borderland between life and death. I got lost, and I never found my way out. Not fully into death, and not fully back into life. I’ve been between ever since. But my admirer, he lets me relive it. Lets me twirl closer to that border once again. Lets me claw through those shadows, trying to catch a glimpse of the other side. One of these times, I know it—one of these times, I’ll see past the border. I’ll know what’s waiting for us. He’ll show it to me. Because he sees me, and he cares. Because he keeps coming back for me, no matter what.”

I had never noticed before, but the Lover was well and truly insane. With vampires, it’s a fine line between reason and madness. We all tiptoe along it. She just tiptoed firmly on the wrong side all the time, rather than some of the time, like I do.

But what devastated me was that I really did understand her. The Lover desired above all else to be coveted and claimed.

I had let Raven touch me and control me. I had let the Queen hold me captive. I had let the Doctor use me as one of her tools. And I had let the Lover spin me into her glittering web of madness and hedonism.

What would I give, to be seen? To be carefully studied and perfectly understood? Would I let someone carve me up, if it meant feeling like I was loved? I knew the answer was yes, because it had always been yes. I had let others bleed me dry for the sake of feeling wanted, even before Dracula came into my life. I wasn’t any different from the Lover. Staring into a face I adored and finding only pathetic need and madness, my questions shifted. I no longer cared why Dracula had killed and changed me.

I wondered why I had let it happen.

39

August 7, 1890

Journal of Lucy Westenra

Mina nearly caught me hiding my journal the other night. I had just tucked it away beneath the window seat when she sat up. I pretended to be sleepwalking, and let her lead me back to bed. She sat next to me and petted my hair like she used to. I could have died, I was so happy.

But then she went to her own bed, and in the morning told my mother I’d begun sleepwalking. Which led Mother to fretting. My father used to wander in his sleep. He would leave the house and disappear for hours at a time. Until the night he never came back.

When I was younger, I believed that story. I believed that he would dream himself upright, dream himself dressed, dream himself unlocking the door and setting out on a regular errand. As though his sleeping body was merely pantomiming his waking one.

But that wasn’t true. Awake or asleep—and I don’t believe he was asleep—he was trying to escape. Was it desire that drove him out? Or was he simply eager to get as far away from Mother and me as he could?

It will be desire that drives me out. My soul itches, crawling with ants as I try to lie still with Mina so close. I want to go to her. Take her in my arms. Kiss her not like the kisses we shared when I was younger, but something deeper, hungrier, full of need and want and

I must get out of this house before I do something I cannot take back.

Arthur came to visit today. It was agony, pretending to be happy to see him, pretending to care about anything he had to say, pretending I was not counting down the seconds until he left once more. Mina excused herself to give us time alone. If she has nothing to say to him and is allowed to leave, why am I not?

I did see them speaking in the hallway right before he left, when I was supposed to be changing for a walk. They were standing close, their conversation hushed and intense. When I asked Mina about it, she laughed and said she was certain now that he loves me as well as I deserve to be loved. He had been asking about all my favorite things so that once we are wed he can make me happy.

Mina. Mina is my only favorite thing.

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