Page 79 of Lucy Undying

“That makes two of us.” I pulled her closer, surprisingly happy to see her. And happy that she seemed nearly sane at the moment. But she didn’t wrap her arms around me, and the Queen seemed even tenser than usual. “I’m not going to kill either of you,” I said, rushing to reassure them. “You’re my friends.”

After all, I’d shared more with them in the last hundred plus years than I had with anyone else. I wished the Doctor was there, too, but she was well and truly lost.

“As if you could kill us.” The Queen waved dismissively. She did relax a little, though, softening from carved in stone to merely sculpted out of metal. “How did you kill so many?”

That was new. She had never asked me a question before without delivering it as a demand. Had she changed, or had I?

“I was trained by your girls, and they were the best. Besides, it isn’t difficult.” Part of it was the element of surprise. Vampires mostly avoid each other. So, at least at the beginning, no one was expecting an attack. The other part was the fact that I’ve never minded being vulnerable, which makes me better at surviving. Weakness is an old friend who holds no dread for me.

But the final and most obvious answer is that they wanted to die. Each of them was asking a question that would never be answered. I offered them an end, and they took it.

“This is nice.” I sat on their sagging sofa. The material was coarse and cheap, not up to the standards of the Queen or the Lover. But they had covered it in pretty handwoven blankets. Even on the run, they still appreciated beauty. They were the only two vampires I ever met who tried to build homes wherever they were, rather than being satisfied with a patch of unhallowed ground to rest in.

The Lover sat curled against me, staring dreamily into a distance no one else could see. “We’re going to America. I don’t think they’ll mind us there. They deal so much death and violence every day, no one will even notice us. And I’ll find so many new murderous friends to love me before they die.”

The Queen’s posture shifted like a sigh. She sat on a rattan chair across from us. It was a far cry from her throne. “That is not why we’re going.”

“Then why?” I asked. America seemed so far away. Such an immature, new country. I’d held its dying soldiers, and I’d held children dying because of its soldiers. Its wars were the same war there ever was. It wasn’t special or different, it was just too young to accept it yet.

“Because of the rumors,” the Lover said, giggling.

The Queen clarified. “According to the whispers of those fleeing your campaign of terror, he’s there.”

I stood, as charged as if every wire in Lagos connected directly to my dead heart. “Dracula? Dracula is in America?”

The Queen shrugged irritably. “I still think he’s dead. I had very good information that he was killed by a cowboy.”

“Impossible,” the Lover said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. It was clear they’d had this argument dozens of times. The grooves of it were worn into them. “The cowboy carried a regular knife. A knife made of steel stuck into Dracula’s chest would do nothing more than inconvenience him. Believe me, I know about being stabbed. He faked his death to escape pursuit. It’s hard to survive once you’ve been noticed.”

“Regardless,” the Queen said, “there are rumors that whole vampire groups live together in America. Something strange is happening there. Maybe we can find safety in that strangeness.”

Based on my extensive experience, large groups of vampires never banded together. Then again, here were two vampires, trying to survive through safety in numbers. Maybe my hunting had inspired a whole new form of vampire community living.

“And if Dracula’s there,” the Lover said, “he’s been surviving in secret for more than a century. So we can, too. And I’ve never been shot before! Everyone gets shot in America. It’ll be exciting.”

It was all I could do to hold my form and not burst into moonlight, spreading myself so thin I’d cover the whole earth and find him. I didn’t want to spend any more years looking. I didn’t even want to spend days. Hours felt infinite. “Where is he, exactly? Do you have any idea?”

The Lover stroked my arm. “Do you know about the magic boxes?”

I looked to the Queen for clarification. She closed her eyes wearily. “She figured out how to use phones. It is extremely annoying.”

The Lover beamed. “A birdie in my magic box told me Dracula was in a place called Boston.”

Don’t be frightened, Vanessa. He’s not the one who attacked me tonight. Let me finish. You’ll understand.

The Lover gave me an address from the little birdie inside her phone. I crossed the ocean clinging to the bottom of a plane, coated in ice and daring to hope. I found Boston. I found the address. It was a club, more frantic and violent than the clubs of my time in Paris. The beat pulsed so strongly it felt almost like my heart was working again. I wandered through the darkness and the smoke and the dancing, and then I smelled them. Everywhere. So many vampires.

I pressed close to one, luminous and gleaming in the darkness, and whispered my desperation in his ear. He nodded to the others, then took my hand and led me to a back room. It was quieter in there. Quiet enough to hear, and quiet enough to use my other senses. They smelled like him—almost. There was something different, something off. Maybe because they were young. Fresh. Maybe that’s what I smelled like, so soon after waking. All the vampires I’d met were at least a hundred years old.

“I need to find Dracula,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

“Yes,” said a woman, strung taut and deadly like a bowstring. I wanted to pluck her and listen to the vibration. “We can take you to him.”

I’d done it. I’d found him, at last. I hummed with the knowledge that I was going to look Dracula in the eyes. I was going to make him give me answers. And then I was going to drain him.

“So pretty,” the bowstring woman said, pressing her lips to my neck.

“So old,” the first man said with a hungry laugh, running his hands down my back. The others, five, six, seven of them, pressed close, too, with lust and desire and the promise of borrowed heat.

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