“Lucy,” they hiss, and their voices are like asphalt against my skin.

I shift gears, the Buick bucking beneath me, but I can’t shake them. I can’t shake the wolves, either. They’re tracking us now, a whole line of them, yipping at the rust on the bumper, slobbering on the faded paint job.

The drive-in blurs around us, and the only thing that matters is drawing them away from the house, away from Jane and Daisy. Away from Michael and Walter, too.

The girls are crawling closer now, but they still can’t quite reach us, so they do the next best thing. They start pulling the Buick apart, piece by rotting piece. It’s been falling apart for ages, helped along by my decay and then by Dracula’s, so it makes their work easy. They tear off the bumper and the canvas top and thick handfuls of upholstery.

“That’s not fair,” I seethe, as the car jolts, and the girls lose their tenuous grip on the back seat, their bodies flung to the dirt like flotsam. I jerk the wheel, but the Buick fishtails across gravel, lurching to a stop right next to our favorite speaker. The best one in the place, never once been broken.

The world goes still around us, Bee and me heaving in the dark. We’re stuck now. These men are determined to steal our ride, one way or another.

But we’ve got something else on our side. On the dueling screens, the films flicker to life, and the floodlights cut out, the whole lot plunged into darkness. Michael, in the projection booth. Doing exactly what I asked him.

The girls are shaking themselves off, ready for round two, and the wolves are closing in, their howls almost deafening. I hold the urn tight with both hands, and Bee reaches across the seat, grabbing the letter opener and the necklace, tucking them in the pocket of her jacket, these last souvenirs from the house.

“Come on,” she says, and we race down the empty rows, cranking up every speaker as we go, loud enough to drown out the whispering urn. Loud enough to drown out our own footsteps, too.

We dodge behind a storage building. They don’t see us here.

“Keep looking,” Rochester calls, and they’re scattering like wedding rice. This is what I’d hoped for. To spread them out across the sprawling drive-in.

Besides, there’s something else to distract them now. I didn’t choose just any movies from the dusty stack in the projection booth. I found a pair I wish I could forget. Jane Eyre and Nosferatu. These films like ghosts, haunting us, spinning their lies into gold, into a story that’s turned Bee and me into afterthoughts.