Regret hangs over me, heavy as burlap. “I drank from him,” I say, not looking at her. “From Dracula.”

It’s something I’ve never told anyone, something I’ve tried for years to forget.

How I tracked him to the Carpathian Mountains, my heart already cold in my chest from what he’d done to me. What he’d still do to so many others if I didn’t stop him. How when I got there, he took it as an invitation. Because once he realized I could return from dust like he did, murdering me became his courting ritual.

“For you, my darling,” he’d say and turn me to ash again and again, waiting patiently for my return. Waiting for me to come back, starved and desperate.

He counted on that. He counted on me needing him. And I did. I used him because it was the only way to stop him, the only way for me to be strong enough to fight back. But it also made me a monster like him. Because it wasn’t just his blood I was drinking. It was the blood of everyone he’d ever plucked from a crowd, the bodies he claimed for his own. I was drinking my own blood and Mina’s blood and the blood of a thousand other girls who’d come before us. Girls whose names have been forgotten to time, forgotten even by their own families. Girls who were tally marks, aperitifs for him.

One thing those girls got, though: they were lucky enough to die. Really die. A stake through their hearts, and they were gone for good. They didn’t come back from dust like me. Like Dracula.

“You’re not the same as the others,” he always whispered to me in the dark, as though it was a compliment instead of a curse.

I stand back, not saying anything else, shame boiling in me. For the way he made me just like him. For the way I went along with it, because I honestly felt I had no other choice.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bee says, but I only shake my head, wishing that were true.

The eyes on the wall are still watching me when the doctor bursts into the room. He’s younger than I expect—everyone’s so young here—but he’s got that serious look of someone who’s seen enough to know enough.

A sharp snap of a plastic glove, and he inspects the bite marks on Michael before glancing up at us. “How’d he get this wound?”

None of us say a word—none of us even look at him now—and he doesn’t ask again. Around here, this probably isn’t the first time he’s gotten a half answer or no answer at all.