Page 84 of Now Comes the Mist

“Hello, love. What’s a pretty piece like you doing out here all alone?” A man is leaning on a wall nearby, grinning at me with an almost toothless mouth. He is perhaps in his fifties, with ruddy white skin, thinningginger hair, and a few large scars on his face. I can tell from his speech and his ragged clothing that he is a vagrant, and I smell old liquor on his foul breath.

I do not know this man. I do not know if he is good or bad, if he has fallen on hard times, or if the shadows of lost dreams linger behind those bloodshot eyes. I do not know his name, where he comes from, or whether there is someone out there who loves him.

All I know is that he is full of blood and I am empty of it. So,soempty.

My fangs are in his neck before either of us are even aware of it. My body is on fire as my new teeth, long and bright as shards, tear into the tissues and muscles of his throat to find his veins. The man thrashes in my arms, his cries incoherent under the glugging sound of blood leaving his body and entering mine, filling me with delicious warmth and vitality. I do not waste a drop, locking my mouth against his skin as I drain him of absolutely everything.

I let him go and he crumples to the ground, white as chalk. His milky eyes are still open, and in them, I see my own reflection once more. My face is pink with health and my pointed fangs drip blood upon my lip. And I notice something strange: my eyes are the same, wide and dark and tilting—not voids ringed with crimson, like Vlad’s. Why have my eyes alone remained human? My old self looks out at me through them, lost and sad and tortured, racked with self-hatred at this violent, merciless deed I have performed tonight.

I have taken a life. I have killed someone.

This man may have had a family. He may have had a daughter my age. I imagine a vampire happening upon Mamma or Papa and I fall to my knees, heaving, sick to my stomach, but I bring nothing up. I have stolen a life to pay for my new existence, like some dark goddess or blood-splattered demon, and I know the weight of this death will forever be a chain around my ankle. The first human life I will ever take—the first of how many more? Oh, God, forgive me. I bend my forehead to the ground, trembling with silent tears as I hold the man’s hand to my heart.

Vlad had lied to me. He had made subsisting on animal blood sound so easy. But he had not told me how it would smell as thin and bland as water in comparison to the bright, coppery bouquet of human blood. He did not tell me my predatory instincts would make it impossible to resist. But hedidtell me it was a curse, and perhaps that was the greatest truth he had ever shared.

An eternity of killing. An immortal life of endless death.

My scream of torment shakes the night like the toll of a church bell. In my terror of death, I have chosen an existence that has inexorably married me to it. My body is strong, my limbs are powerful, and my senses are heightened … but only ever through the blood and the life and the soul of another. The rushing tide of grief, fury, and remorse in me could drown all of London.

“I’ve done it, Vlad!” I shout. “You thought I could not, but I have!”

Movement in the shadows.

I hear flapping, rustling, scurrying. From every direction come rats, dark and sly, oily fat bodies slipping through the grass; maggots, slimy with the sheen of corpses, pushing up from the earth; snakes, coal-black and poisonous green, undulating over the cobblestones. The creatures of the night join me, their eyes watchful, but Vlad does not come. I do not know if he heard my cry, but I suppose it does not matter; he cares not what choice I make. As the creatures watch me, I scoop the dead man into my arms and stand. I am a small woman, but he weighs almost nothing as I lay him with newly prodigious strength in the shadow of the trees.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, gently closing his eyes with my fingers. “I am so sorry.”

Exhaustion overtakes me, so powerful that I am afraid I will fall asleep where I kneel. I turn my back on the man, knowing that the theft of his life has made its permanent mark on me. I wipe the heels of my hands over my wet face and clean what remains of his blood, and then I raise the mists and float home through the darkened streets.

I soar through my bedroom window and onto the bed beside Arthur, his long lanky body still stretched out in peaceful slumber. I tuck myself under his arm and press my face to his chest, committing every note of the music of his heartbeat to memory as I hold him close.

The mist wavers slightly.

Arthur stirs and looks down at me. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” he says drowsily with a sheepish laugh. And then he blinks in shock. “Why, Lucy. You look … you look so well.”

I can see myself in the shine of his eyes, more radiant and full of life than ever. But it is only a dangerous illusion, one that will make it harder for us to let go of each other the way I fear we must. I caress his stunned face, my fingers moving over his nose and lips to his neck, where a vein throbs with longing. But it is safe from me, and so is the blood that rushes through him.

“You’re glowing,” he says, cupping a hand around my face. “There are roses in your cheeks. Perhaps Van Helsing was wrong … but you are so cold.” He pulls me more tightly against him and covers me with the blanket, rubbing my shoulders to warm me.

“Van Helsing was not wrong. Iamdying, Arthur, but not in the way we know. Not in the way you think I am. Will you trust me? When I promise that I will come back to you?”

His face crumples. “But how? How can you come back to me if you die?”

I look into the soft hazel of his eyes. “I told you that I have made a choice, but there is a price I must pay first. This choice means that you would never lose me. I would never grow old. You would have me until the end of your life … if you still want me.”

“Of course I want you,” he says, his voice taut with distress and confusion. “But—”

“If you want me as I am now. As I am in the mirror.” He goes still at the memory of my reflection. I touch my upper lip, under which my fangs had emerged. “As you saw me earlier. I am the same Lucy who loves you, but there are changes in me. They are part of the price I must pay to be with you. To love you all your life and spare you pain.”

Arthur touches my lip, too. “Those long teeth … and your face in the glass,” he says hesitantly. “They are because that creature bit you?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“And you … you wanted to be bitten? That is what you mean by making a choice?”

“Yes.”

He is silent for a moment, his eyes locked on mine, trying so hard to understand. “But what bit you? How did it find you? Why—”

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