Page 52 of Lucy Undying

Besides, I adored that dress. Blue silk draping down with a coy swish around my calves. It was from the Lover’s collection in Paris, and it made me think of the smells of bread and blood and sex and her. I still think of it sometimes. The dress, not the smells of Paris or the Lover. Though I haven’t forgotten those, either.

“You have that look,” the Doctor told me. “You’re going to make my life more difficult.”

“How can you know what look I have when you haven’t even greeted me properly?” I leaned on the table with my chin on my fist and batted my eyes at her. Flirting never worked on the Doctor, but it always entertained me. Maybe even more because it didn’t work on her.

She didn’t humor me. Her voice was like a door slamming in my face. “Because you always have that look. You’re sad, and lost, and you think I can fix it. We both know I cannot. And even if I could, I wouldn’t care. You’re the one who left me. You criticized me and told me for all my claims of studying, I was never helping. As if you’ve done anything except flit about the world, inflicting yourself on others. Well, here I am. Understanding. And helping. I have a whole system in this city, and I share all my findings with doctors at the university, and I’m quite busy doing it.”

I linked fingers with the body on the table. He was still warm, though he wouldn’t be for long. The Doctor was doing something that couldn’t be undone, rummaging around in the twists and loops and tubes of his abdomen. When insides become outsides, it never ends well.

“I’m busy, too,” I told her.

“Really.” It wasn’t a question, because she wasn’t curious.

I leaned closer, forcing her to meet my gaze at last. I loved looking at her. The Doctor was beautiful—rich black skin, obsidian eyes, cheeks as full as the moon, body all curves and soft folds. So many vampires become thin and rigid and sharp, outer reflections of insatiable, constant hunger. But not her.

I think it makes it a little easier, that she’s the last thing so many dying people have seen. I wouldn’t mind if she were the last thing I ever looked on. Though I would be dying in an unfathomably painful way if that were true.

Anyhow, she didn’t believe me that I was in Istanbul to do something interesting. I pouted, a little. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wanted her good opinion. “I really am here for an important reason,” I insisted.

She let out a small scoffing noise. “You left me to carouse in Paris.”

I lifted an eyebrow, surprised. “How do you know what I did?”

With a dismissive sniff, she continued her work. “I thought you might reconsider and join me here, once you knew what I was doing. But I saw that you were otherwise engaged.”

The Doctor was jealous. It was adorable, but I couldn’t press it or she’d shut me out. And I couldn’t afford to lose this unexpected ally in a city I was determined to conquer. There was a war on again. I had to get it right this time. It felt as essential as blood, as imperative as sleep.

Have you ever held a child’s body as they claw at their throat, choking, their own lungs drowning them? It changes even the unchangeable. I made the Doctor hold one of them, near the end of our time together before. I made her hold him and watch. Not study, not dissect, not assess. Just hold. Not so much as a hair on his chin. Soldier’s uniform hanging on him like it was set there to dry. A child. Ended.

I held a lot of them, back then. Far from home and anyone who had ever loved them. It’s a gasping, choking death, being gassed in a trench. Dying alongside so many anonymous brothers, so many other children. I held them, and promised them they would be okay, and then I snapped their necks to give them the gentle kindness of a swift ending.

It’s the physicality of the snap that lingers. I’ve ushered many people across the divide, but that snap. I can still feel each and every one of them in my hands.

Look. Look at them. Look at my hands. People say they know things like the backs of their hands, but do they know their hands at all? Do they know what they’re capable of? Do they take account of all the things those hands have done, all the things they could have done, all the things they didn’t do?

The Doctor accused me of leaving because I wanted to have fun in Paris, but she never understood. I couldn’t stop crying over those boys, and I couldn’t protect them, and I couldn’t save them.

Before I died, my fiancé and the cowboy and the doctor and the old Dutch pervert tried to save me. I know you only heard about their attempt to cut off my head, but they really did try to keep me alive. They failed. And they didn’t give me the grace of a quick death. I lingered and suffered. No snap for poor young Lucy.

At least my sacrifice paved the way for Mina to be saved, though. But after Paris, I knew better than to throw my body in front of death and hope it was enough. This time, I was going to be clever and smart. I was going to keep so many lives from getting to the point where a quick death was the only thing I could give them.

“I’m not here for fun,” I said to the Doctor as the man on the table’s heart stopped. “I’m here because the war is back, and I have men to kill. I’m going to be a spy.”

The Doctor at least had the decency not to laugh at me. She merely sighed. I think she breathed just to have the opportunity to sigh over me whenever possible. “You missed the real Istanbul, anyway. I was here, at the fall of Byzantium. When the city opened and scholars and teachers and students from all over the world were welcomed in. When it was a beacon of learning and progress. Built on a foundation of blood and horror, but all cities and empires are.”

“You were here then? Tell me about it!” I hopped up on a clean table, kicking my legs, but she ignored me. She never did humor me with stories of her life, much as I wanted to know how she had become what she was.

It didn’t matter. I still loved Istanbul. Even then, a city crushed between two wars, pinched and conquered and controlled, trapped in a long slow decline that would drive out so much of what made it vibrant, Istanbul was a wonder. And, like all wonders, it was equal parts incredible and terrible. Awe and horror are the same emotions, they just depend on the outcome.

I wanted to inspire awe and horror, and I knew who I wanted to inspire it in. Soldiers are just unfortunate children, but the machines behind them? The hands trading the information, moving the pieces? That’s who I would take care of this time.

“It’s pointless,” the Doctor said.

“This?” I held up the scalpel I was toying with, which seemed quite pointed.

“Muddling around in the internal affairs of humans.”

I waved at the man on the table. “You’re muddling around in his internal affairs right now.”

---