“Are we the same?” she asked as we sat together at the St Katharine Docks, watching the ships come and go in the dark. I wanted to tell her yes, but it wasn’t true. Bee’s never been like me. There’s no bloodlust in her heart, no faint scar on her throat. Like Dracula, Rochester did something to her, something violent, something arcane, but those men had different methods. Dracula stole me from my bed at midnight, but Rochester was always more elaborate than that, having a flair for the dramatic. He lured Bee all the way from her home in Spanish Town, Jamaica, carrying her across the Atlantic, just to lock her in that attic. Then when she finally escaped, when she burned her prison to ashes, he started calling out to her, searching the world for her. And he hasn’t stopped since.

His voice from earlier tonight still burns in my bones. “Where do you think he is?”

Bee hesitates, her hands clenched in her lap. “Too close.”

“In L.A.?”

“No,” she says, her mouth a harsh line. “But somewhere else in California.”

I nod, not asking any more. I’ve probably asked too much of her already.

The candles burn down to nothing, the breeze carrying the darkness into the room, and we know what that means: it’s time to call it a night. Another day of eternity crossed off the list.

Upstairs in the hall, Bee glances back from her bedroom doorway.

“Good night, Lucy,” she says.

“Good night, Bee.”

She leaves her door open, anything to keep the claustrophobia from seeping in, but when I get to my room, I lock myself in tight. Anything to keep Dracula out.

In the dark, I kick off my shoes and curl up on my dusty four-poster bed. I don’t own a coffin, never have. I also don’t sleep during the day. I don’t need to sleep much at all, so long as I’m not like him, wasting all my precious energy stalking unsuspecting victims. It’s remarkable how much spare time you have when you don’t fritter it away on being a monster.

But that’s all he is, all he knows. His whispers linger on my skin, and even though the pieces of him are downstairs, a whole floor and a locked door separating us, it still feels like he’s right here, in the same bed with me, his breath hot on the back of my neck, his fingertips tracing a path up my thigh. I can’t escape him. He’s everywhere at once.

Defiant to the last, I close my eyes and drift out of myself, out of my body, back to the places I came from. Across a continent, across an ocean, back to England. Past Carfax Abbey, long since abandoned, and over the house where I grew up, where I died, curled in a bed not so different from this one.