Rochester exhales a shriek and tumbles toward me, his hands aimed for my throat, but I toss the letter opener to Bee, and, howling with delight, she finishes the job. When she’s done, the whole room is ragged and gaping open, and they’re coming now, even faster than I expected.

Dracula twists toward me, agony in his eyes, because this is what he never planned for: how well I know him. How I knew if given the chance, he’d use this letter opener to murder me. That’s why I brought it, why I plucked it from the wreckage of my life. So I could get it into this room, get it into the afterlife, and have a weapon waiting for me.

“Well done,” Dracula says finally, as he and Rochester come face-to-face with all the girls they’d forgotten. It never occurred to these men that the girls never forgot them.

But as the figures pour out of the wall, it isn’t just girls. There are so many of them—faces I recognize and faces I don’t. The maidens that Dracula dispatched centuries ago, and others too, the families the Rochesters evicted. The fathers who worked their hands to the bone before becoming bones themselves, the mothers who watched their only progeny wither away to dust, the children whose names have been blotted from the ledgers, tally marks and nothing more.

Except they’ve always been more than nothing, and they are going to remind Dracula and Rochester of that now.

They take Rochester first, and he doesn’t even have time to scream before their hands are cupped over his mouth and shoved straight through what’s left of his heart. It’s a blur of faces, all these countless families, and Bellflower too, right at the forefront, flowers in her hair, a smirk on her lips.

“So good to see you again so soon,” she says, and they drag him through the torn wall and into the gloom on the other side. As they vanish together, a macabre family all their own, the only thing we can hear is something like old leather tearing in two. It’s the rending of flesh. And this is eternity, after all. That rending could go on a long time.

Another moment before the hands materialize again. Dracula should look afraid. He should try to scream too. But when he turns back to me, he can’t help but smile.

“You know you can’t stop me forever,” he says, and he’s probably right. Even the darkest depths aren’t bottomless, and if anyone can find their way out again, it would be him.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I’ll settle with stopping you for now.”

A final hand emerges from the darkness, and I recognize it at once, even though it’s healed and smooth and strong again.