“This way,” she says, his shadow devouring us as we shove between the dingy velvet ropes and behind the counter, desperate to reach the other door. We’re almost outside, almost to the closest thing to freedom we’ve got, when the necklace slips from Bee’s pocket. She turns back for it, but I shake my head.

“Leave it,” I say. Our last chance at another life, discarded in the dark.

Back out in the night, the air is sticky with summer, and we clamber across the lot, the smooth gravel slipping beneath our shoes.

The shotgun house is less than fifty paces away, and on the front porch, Daisy’s breezing down the steps. The screen door bursts open behind her, and Jane and Walter are charging after her, trying to pull her back, but she keeps wandering, her eyes fogged over, her body not her own.

“Get back inside,” I call to her, but Daisy can’t help herself. Dracula’s whispering on the wind to her. He’s taken her blood into him, put her under his thrall. So far as he’s concerned, she belongs to him now.

There are others who belong to him too, and scattered across the drive-in, they see us now. Bee grabs my hand and pulls me one way toward the projection booth, only for Bellflower and Vervain to block our way. I wrench Bee toward the nearest movie screen, but the outlines of other girls are blotting the view.

They’re everywhere, as unrelenting as the July sun. One by one, they surround us, their faces gaunt and ravenous, and we’ve got nowhere to run this time. No Buick to carry us off. They close in, quicker than before, and I try to count them in the dark. A dozen perhaps, or it could be more than that. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. All it takes is a single hand to drive a stake through a heart or strike a match that won’t be quelled. There are so many ways they could destroy us and so few ways we can escape.

But they haven’t all joined the throng. Across the lot, Rowan’s huddling against the cinder block walls of the projection booth, her dirty knees pulled into her chest.

“I’m so hungry,” she keeps saying, and I wish I could tell her that feeling will pass, but it won’t. It’ll only get worse.

Rochester glances back at her, rolling his eyes. “Looks like I picked the wrong one again.”

At this, his gaze flits to Bee, and he expects her to shrink beneath the weight of his insults. But she doesn’t even flinch. For years, he could unravel her with a word, but no more.

So he decides to unravel her in an entirely different way. He motions to Jane, still standing on the front porch of the house.