The engine cuts out, and Bee and I climb out of the car. On the cracked cobblestone path, we walk together, past the former garden, gray and thorny and crying out silently for help, everything fading here.

When we get to the front step, the air turns heavy and fetid, and once again, I want to run. I want to be anywhere but here.

Bee studies my face, her eyes shining and calm. “Are you sure?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, and with a steady hand, I turn the key in the lock.

We open the door, and the rest of Dracula is waiting to greet us.

two

As we step into the house, the pieces of him murmur all around us, permeating every room like a sickly sweet cologne. Even locked inside his urns, he’s louder than he has any right to be.

If he’s still locked inside the other urns. I need to check on him. I need to make sure he hasn’t tried another escape.

Bee and I drift through the vestibule, past a decapitated statue of the Birth of Venus. (We didn’t do the beheading, by the way; it came like that with the house.) In the living room, the curtains flutter in the night breeze, and Bee crosses to an open window, gazing out at the skyline, glinting like faded diamonds in the distance.

It’s dark in here, so I strike a match and light a pair of taper candles. This is all we have. There’s no electricity running to the house. No heat or water, either. We can’t afford utilities, but then why would we need them? Being dead means being frugal.

Bee watches me with the match, her lips pursed. She doesn’t mind candles, but she never lights them. That’s because she won’t touch fire. Not anymore, not after what happened the last time she struck flint against steel.

“Sometimes,” she once told me, “it still feels like my skin is burning.”

Then she said no more about it, and I didn’t ask.

My hands steady, I leave one candle on the antique desk and take the other to guide my way. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Bee looks at me, her brow furrowed. “Do you need help?”

“I’m fine,” I say, and even though it’s a lie, she pretends to believe me.

“Good luck,” she says, and I’m off on my nightly errand. Checking on these murmuring remains. Guarding the urns of Dracula.

For seventy years, I’ve separated him from himself, his ashes never kept in one place, never even kept in the same room. He’s too powerful that way. If I put him in a single vessel, he’d break free and cobble himself together in an instant. Instead, the urns are scattered throughout the house like silly knickknacks.