His heart beating faster, Michael’s hands move slowly beneath the sheet. “I love you,” he murmurs, and I wish I could say it back. But you can’t really love something you’ve trapped, a butterfly beneath a bell jar, a bird in a gilded cage.

He’s asleep in a minute, his chest rising and falling like the tides. I watch him, already knowing I should stay awake. I should get ready for this evening, for what’s to come. But last night’s still heavy in my bones, and before I can stop myself, I close my eyes too.

IT’S ALMOST SUNDOWN WHEN I jolt awake, Dracula’s voice stirring inside me. They’re close, somewhere inside the city limits.

I sit up, the urn still in my arms. Beside me, the bed’s empty, the sheets crumpled and cold. Michael’s long gone. I shrink from the mattress, my eyes bleary.

In the next room, Jane’s with Daisy, sitting in an antique rocking chair next to her bed.

“How is she?” I ask.

Jane forces a smile. “Better, I think,” she says, and holds a compress to Daisy’s forehead.

The light through the window is fading fast, and I grip the urn tighter. “You stay with her, okay? No matter what happens tonight, you two just stay locked in here.”

Jane shrinks away from me, defeated. “You don’t trust me around him, do you?”

“I don’t see any reason to chance it.”

“Bee doesn’t trust me either.” A long moment passes. “I don’t blame her.”

I ask Jane if she needs anything—for her, for Daisy—but she only shakes her head.

“Close the door behind you,” she says, and I slip back into the hallway, my heart heavy inside me.

In the kitchen, Walter’s hunched over a flimsy card table, his coffee cup gone cold next to him. When he sees me looming in the doorway, he gives me a big, toothy smile.

“So,” he says, leaning back in his chair, “Michael tells me you’re a vampire.”

I sigh. Small talk. Walter wants to make small talk about me being a monster.

“I guess that’s true,” I say.

He wipes the sweat from his brow. “I saw that love bite you left on him.”

My body goes rigid, and I brace for it. Retaliation. That fistful of buckshot I’ve been fearing since the first night I brought Michael back here, my black heart oozing bad intentions.

But Walter just shakes his head. “Kids these days,” he says.

The night sneaking closer to us, I start toward the screen door, but at the last moment, I look back.

“You’ll be in here, right? Holding down the fort with Jane and Daisy?”

“Sure,” he says, his eyebrow arching. “They’re coming, aren’t they? The men Michael warned me about?”

My stomach clenches. “I think so.”