Page 7 of Lucy Undying

I mean, just the best. Absolutely divine. I could live for a thousand more years and never tire of them.

So that night I also discovered hands and tongues and teeth and a thousand surprising things to do with them. At the time I thought all those parts of me Raven was finding were entirely new and came with being a vampire. That was how little I’d been educated about the facts of life. It took me too long to realize I could always have felt those things. They didn’t have to be tied to blood and death and violence. They could have been based in love and sweetness and tenderness.

Love was never my destiny, though.

For a few days we slept tangled and inseparable in my mausoleum, and for a few nights we prowled the darkness, searching only for heat we could steal. Raven hunted with me, but Dove slipped away on her own. Dove always met us before dawn, though, so we could seal ourselves inside my mausoleum once again.

When it comes to healing, or regenerating, or merely building up strength, blood is good for a vampire. But sleep is even better—especially a deep mindless undreaming rest in your own grave dirt, but any unhallowed ground will do.

Because Dracula had turned each of us into vampires, Dove and Raven could use my grave dirt and find nearly the same level of restoration as they had in their own.

But sleeping in your own grave dirt isn’t the only way to find rest. My mausoleum feels like home, the way you sleep better in your own bed than anywhere else, but I can nearly always find somewhere good enough. Old blood helps, whether freely or violently spilled into the dirt. Makes it nourishing, like vampire fertilizer. A battleground, a plague pit, or some other hasty receptacle is best. Cemeteries aren’t actually good at all.

It’s not because of the sacred ground nonsense. Don’t take that concept as proof God is real. I rather think I exist as proof in the opposite direction. And if not me, certainly Dracula is evidence there’s no larger plan, no benevolent protector watching out for precious children.

No, the real reason is that cemeteries, especially modern ones, are filled with chemical-tainted bodies with almost no blood at all.

I haven’t thought of my own mausoleum since I left it the last time. But back then it was my home, one I happily shared with Raven and Dove. I was always eager to get back to it. Sunlight was a cage. We could survive with the rays of the sun beating down on us, but we were trapped by it. Unable to change form, sapped of much of our strength. Raven warned me to avoid it at all costs.

One night, though, I hesitated. While I still didn’t have much of myself back—I couldn’t have told you my name or my address, or even told you what my mother looked like, though she’d died nearly the same time I had—I still held on to one thing: I wanted to see my darling.

“I have to go home,” I said to Raven. “Can you help me find it?”

Raven stroked my hair. Then she pulled it, yanking my head back. She traced a single sharp nail along the line of my throat. “Pretty thing,” she said. “Silly thing. You can never go back. You forget whose bride you are now.”

She dragged me toward my mausoleum, but something made her freeze. She hissed and disappeared into the night. I kept going. People were waiting at my resting place. I could feel their heat radiating outward.

I arrived to find four men. It wasn’t their faces I recognized—I had lost those, in the space between dying and waking. But I knew the scent of their blood. Traces of it lingered in my body. How had I come to possess their blood, when I’d never tasted them?

One had a growth of pale hair above his lip, as though someone was trying to sweep away whatever came out of his mouth. “Lucy?” he asked.

My name! I was Lucy! Or at least, I had been. More names came to me in a sudden spilling rush. Memories are like that, now. Trapped behind a dam, waiting for the right crack to give way.

“Arthur!” I said.

He’d been my fiancé. There with the doctor, the cowboy, and the old Dutch man. All waiting for me. Longing for me, just as they had before I changed.

Flush with blood and full of secrets, knowing at last the pleasures I had been denied my whole life, I opened my arms. I hadn’t wanted my fiancé before, but he was warm. I would teach him such things. I would teach them all such things. They had tried to save me, in their own foolish way. I wanted to let them know it was okay. I was okay.

Better than okay. I had been good at showing them what they wanted to see. Now I showed them what they had always secretly hoped for from me. What they still hoped for, based on the blood rushing to their extremities. I was finally unbound, and hungrily curious. Affectionate, even. They were such breakable, mortal things, these four men who had altered the course of my life and death. I’d be careful with them.

“Come here,” I said with a laugh. “It’s all right. I’ll kiss you all, and tell you my secrets, and we can at last know one another truly.”

And do you know what they did, when I, the object of their mutual affection and lust, revealed myself ready at last to embrace them on my own terms? They recoiled in disgust and horror.

For so long I thought it was because I was a vampire. But I’ve been with enough people to know I’m not horrifying. Quite the opposite. My teeth weren’t even out. No, what disgusted them was that they had no power over me. I no longer fit their ideal of a virgin waiting for them to claim me. That was what repulsed them. That was what they found monstrous.

I wasn’t theirs anymore, and I never could be again.

Naturally, violence came next.

10

London, October 4, 2024

Iris

Still convinced I’m being followed, I opt for a cab rather than the Tube. At least then I can slump and zone out.

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