We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel, a new gothic fantasy by Kiersten White, out from Del Rey on September 10th.
Her name was written in the pages of someone else’s story: Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula’s first victims.
But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula’s clutches—and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants.
Her undead life takes an unexpected turn in twenty-first-century London, when she meets another woman, Iris, who is also yearning to break free from her past. Iris’s family has built a health empire based on a sinister secret, and they’ll do anything to stay in power.
Lucy has long believed she would never love again. Yet she finds herself compelled by the charming Iris while Iris is equally mesmerized by the confident and glamorous Lucy. But their intense connection and blossoming love is threatened by outside forces. Iris’s mother won’t let go of her without a fight, and Lucy’s past still has fangs: Dracula is on the prowl once more.
Lucy Westenra has been a tragically murdered teen, a lonesome adventurer, and a fearsome hunter, but happiness has always eluded her. Can she find the strength to destroy Dracula once and for all, or will her heart once again be her undoing?
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?
Buy the Book
Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel
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.
I mean, just the best. Absolutely divine. I could live for a thousand more years and never tire of them.
So that I 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 only a day before 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.
Excerpted from Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel, copyright © 2024 by Kiersten White.
