Page 6 of Lucy Undying

My heart sinks. If it’s a vacation rental, odds are there’s nothing valuable there I can sell for quick cash. The revenue is probably folded into my mother’s strategically scattered bank accounts and investments. Dickie has an iron grasp on those, and I’m not willing to do what I have to in order to access them. I resist the urge to rub my arms, the scent of disinfectant a ghost haunting my sinuses forever.

“As for Hillingham,” Albert continues, “since it’s not far, I thought I would take you there, help you—”

“It belongs to me, right? It’s mine.”

“Yes.” His narrowed eyes make it clear he wishes he could answer differently. “The house is willed to the Goldaming line in perpetuity, and you are the only heir.”

“I’ll take the paperwork and the keys to both properties, then. Call me when I can see the Whitby house.” It’s his turn to look up at me. I stand and raise an eyebrow, coldly impatient. It’s easy to demand others bend to my will. I just pretend I’m my mother, a carefully honed impression that’s served me well for many years.

“Right, y-yes,” he stutters, patting the front of his suit coat until he finds a key. He unlocks one of the drawers in his desk and pulls out two sets of keys, which he places in front of me before scuttling to the wall of files. None of them are marked. He goes to the fourth row, seventh drawer, with no hesitation. Maybe he really has worked here for more than a century. The interior of the drawer brims with neatly sorted documents. Most of them are yellowed and brittle with age, but he skips those in favor of two sheaves of paper near the back. They’re still white, so recently printed I can practically smell the ink.

He closes the drawer, sealing away the history of my family and these houses. I have the oddest impulse to ask him to give me all of it. But what good are decades of documents to me? Can’t very well sell those. Besides, I don’t want to invest in my family tree. I want to prune my branch off forever.

He stares down at the deeds, stroking them as though they’re precious to him. “It all started with this house, you know. The first time we worked with Lord Goldaming. It was his patronage that allowed our office to survive all this time, to grow into what we are now.”

“And what is the office now?” I ask. A lightless box? An absolute coffin of a workplace?

He beams at me. “The protectors of legacy.” If I thought his scowl was unpleasant, nothing prepared me for his smile. His eyes have the same grasping pinch as his fingers, gaze reaching hungrily toward me.

“Cool,” I say with as much enthusiasm as I can manage, which is none at all. I take the papers from him—his crab fingers briefly spasm shut around them, but then he releases—and swipe the keys from the desk before he can stop me.

“Always an honor meeting Lord Goldaming’s blood,” he calls as I turn my back and hurry from the room. “After all, the blood is—”

I slam the door shut behind myself before he can finish the phrase.

9

Boston, September 25, 2024

Client Transcript

Dracula usually kept three brides, but they lost one in transit. I imagine she’s still wandering around Europe somewhere, trying to find her way to London. Or maybe I ended her existence at some point without realizing it. Doesn’t matter.

Although I never knew their names—they didn’t know them, either—for the sake of clarity we’ll call the two brides I met Raven and Dove. Raven had long, thick hair so black it swallowed all light, and Dove’s hair was so ephemeral and white it floated around her like a cloud.

Free from my mausoleum, I stood frozen in the cemetery. It was night, but like no night I had ever known. The air swirled with sound and scent, as if all my senses had merged into one. Had rotting roses always shimmered like that? Had birds always flown with such a clatter of wings and creaking feathers? Had the presence of the small creeping things of the earth really been a secret to me, when now they announced themselves with such obvious heat?

Heat. I needed heat. I was so brutally cold. I blurred in and out of myself, whole sections of the cemetery appearing and disappearing along with my consciousness. Somewhere close by, there was heat. I let out a cry as my teeth grew into sharp points with an aching pain close to pleasure. And then my teeth found the heat, and I lost myself to the sheer animal joy of satisfying a need.

I still don’t know who I killed. I’ll never know. When I think about what I did that night, I can feel the space where I should carry guilt, but there’s nothing there. I wasn’t a person yet—or at least, as much a person as I’m capable of being now. I was merely a squall, a newborn once more.

I sat on the ground, shivering in ecstasy, marveling as the heat of another life spread through my body. I hadn’t even remembered I had a body until then. I had only been my senses, and then my teeth. I stared at my hands, amazed at how small and white they were. And my neck—I kept touching my neck. There was nothing there, but I could sense those twin icy points, the holes where I had been drawn out of myself. Where I’d been removed. How had I gotten back in?

The brides found me there. I would have imprinted on anything that touched me gently that night, a duckling in their confident thrall. Raven hummed and stroked my hair as I trembled. Dove cooed at me, exclaiming over how small I was, how pretty, how new. They coaxed me back to my mausoleum.

I was as starving for loving touch as I had been for blood. A flaw that led me here. But we aren’t to that story yet.

Being with them felt like…Do you remember the first day you realized you could be the same woman on the inside and on the outside? That the you who had always nestled beneath, hidden and trapped, the you that had always been there, could be the only you?

You know who you are. You claim the woman you are and celebrate her. I wish I had been able to do that during my life, too.

But the pretty idiot I once was had died alone and afraid and didn’t understand how she felt and could never say what she longed for. What she wanted.

Meanwhile, this new pretty idiot I had become, freshly risen from the grave with someone else’s blood coursing through her? She knew what she wanted. I let Raven kiss me and Dove pet me. I felt flush with possibility. I didn’t know what or who I was anymore—and I quickly realized that meant I could be anything. Anyone. I could do whatever I desired, and who could tell me no? Who could say what was wrong, what was wicked, what was unnatural, when everything simply was?

I don’t regret what the brides and I did that night and others. I don’t regret losing myself in the rush and thrill of sensation. Letting myself want. I didn’t love the brides and they certainly didn’t love me, but at least there was finally one thing I understood about myself when everything I knew in the world had come undone:

Breasts really are fantastic.

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