Nearby, Vervain’s stirring in the water, and so is Rowan. There’s movement all around us, like the skittering of roaches. The wolves are closing in too. Everyone here, everyone watching.

“About time,” Rochester says, as they force us back across the patio, closer to the house, past the moldering pool where the girls climb out on hands and knees, their limbs strange and angular as spiders.

With Daisy wilting between us, Bee and I dash back inside, trying for the front door, stumbling past all the things that can’t be used as weapons. The Formica table, the chrome candleholder, the wood paneling that isn’t really wood at all.

Of course, we could have brought a stake or a piece of silver or even a small cross, but that seemed too dangerous. Anything we can use on Dracula, someone else could use on me.

And maybe I don’t need a weapon at all. Maybe I’m more than enough on my own, my hunger tightening like a screw in my belly, the decay rising inside me, crackling in my fingertips like a dark spell ready to unfurl.

We’re at the front door now, and Bee wrenches it open, but I turn back. Dracula’s right behind us, tracking us into the house, and he must sense it within me, the resolve budding inside my cold heart.

“Don’t even try it, Lucy,” he warns, his eyes darker than sin, and I can’t help but smile.

“It’s only fair, though,” I say. “You did the same thing to our house, didn’t you?”

I close my eyes, and it doesn’t take much. Only a little coaxing, my hunger heavier now, before the decay bursts forth from me. It puddles beneath my fingertips and drips out, bit by sticky bit, leaking onto the floor, cracking it in two. The decay that’s already here, all the deterioration Dracula’s wrought on this place, must be jealous, because it ripples through the walls and floors, greeting my own decay, the rot mingling together until the entire foundation is starting to shake beneath us.

“Stop,” Rochester says, tripping over himself, nearly toppling into the chasm I’ve cut clean through the center of the house.

Bee’s eyes go bright as fire. “Stop?” She gazes at Rochester. “You want us to stop?”

He doesn’t answer her. He doesn’t even move. That quiet look on her face must be one he recognizes. The same look before she turned his last house to cinders.

“Bertha,” he says, his hands extending slowly, his palms turned upward. “Bee. Please.”

But it’s too late. It’s been too late for years. Her face like stone, Bee pierces the tip of her ring finger. It isn’t much, but it’s more than enough, the gray tar leaking toward the walls, toward every shadowy crevice. The last bit of rot this place can take.