I grit my teeth. “Go away,” I whisper, as it rustles past the weeds, still hidden from view. I’ve never liked coyotes. Too much like wolves, and wolves were always Dracula’s favorite. His “children of the night,” he called them. What a weirdo.

I wait at the window, listening for a howl, listening for hours, but whatever the animal is, it doesn’t return.

I WAKE UP HUNGRY.

It’s Thursday. Another day, another tally mark. I slink out of my tangled bedsheets. My shoes are somewhere on the floor where I left them, dirt from the Hollywood sign still caked around the heels. But as I lean down to search, bits of daylight creep across the room, and my chest constricts. I forgot to close the curtains last night.

My eyes bleary, I tiptoe to the window, as though I can sneak up on the day. With a careful hand, I reach toward the curtain, but a sliver of morning hits my face anyhow, and I flinch, nearly crying out, my mind whirling, my flesh tightening on my bones. There’s pain, but not the kind you might expect.

Sunlight doesn’t kill us. It never has. That wasn’t one of the original rules, but these stories become twisted, don’t they? They take on a mind of their own, and suddenly, you’re living in someone else’s invention of what you should be.

But here’s the thing: the sun does something else, something almost worse. It takes me away from here, pulling me into the past, putting images in my mind I’d rather forget. I see Dracula, the way he looked the night we met. So prim, so proper, so appallingly handsome. His scent like ash and roses, like a fistful of coffin dirt.

“Good evening, Miss Lucy,” he’d said, and I hate this part. I hate remembering how I swooned for him. How I believed him. The worst mistake I’ve ever made was trusting someone who only saw me as temporary.

And he’s not the only one awakening inside me. Mina’s with me too, back when we were only foolish girls, too young to know we should be afraid. Her fresh face is so gauzy in my memory that it’s almost lost to time. The face of my first friend, my only friend other than Bee. I see the garden maze where Mina and I used to giggle and run and share our secrets, the two of us weaving blooms of wisteria through our long hair.

“Let’s never grow old,” she would whisper, and I’d squeeze her hand and promise, never realizing the price I’d pay for keeping up my end of the bargain.