I drift on, through the streets of London, down back alleys and into the gloom where nobody goes. At least almost nobody. There’s someone else with me now, someone I haven’t heard from in a very long time.

Miss Lucy, the voice singsongs, slicing through the dark like a dull knife. Where are you, lovely?

Renfield. He materializes like fog in my mind. His clothes are tattered, his face obscured, his appetite for strange creatures unabated. If I look closely, I can see a cockroach leg, thinner than a toothpick, stuck between his molars. I do my best not to look closely.

He’s calling me from afar, lingering like a specter in the margins of the city. He shouldn’t still be alive, but then again, neither should I.

Even after all these years, Renfield and I have never met, but we know of each other anyhow. Through whispers and rumors and visions we can’t escape. When we close our eyes, we can both see it. The past, as though it’s still happening. I’m the one Dracula chooses first, plucked from my bedchamber like a daisy in May, and Renfield is the one he casts aside, a useless weed, a vestigial limb.

You never realized how lucky you were, Renfield says, gnashing his teeth in envy, and I wonder what he knows of luck or love or anything else.

He’s not a vampire, never has been. He’s a drudge, a thrall, mesmerized against his will, powerless and lost. So long as I don’t call back to him, he can’t see me the way I see him. That doesn’t stop him from trying, his graying eyes staring into the gloom, searching for me. Or rather, searching for what I have.

Master, he whispers, but before the urns can try to answer, I open my eyes and let him slip away.

Shivering, I bolt up in bed. I’m alone now. Dracula’s receded from the room, and there’s a yawning emptiness in his wake. An emptiness inside me, too. I hate the way he comes and goes, the way he still claims me for his own, how I can’t stop him even when I’ve got him captured. Rage rises in the back of my throat, acrid and stifling, and I can’t sit still. My blanket gathered up around me, I wander to the window. It’s quiet outside. Hollywood is settling down for the night. Only the glitzy denizens of Chateau Marmont are still up at this hour.

And maybe something else too. A shadow’s moving at the edge of the yard, the figure lithe and close to the ground. A coyote maybe, come up from the canyon, prowling for squirrels or stray cats.