Renfield grins out at me. “Thank you, Miss Lucy,” he says, before pulling Dracula down into the gloom.

At last, the stale air is silent, the walls go still, and there are two fewer of us standing in the room.

Rochester and Dracula aren’t the only ones who have vanished. The whispering voices are gone too. No more hands reaching through. No more restless ghosts.

Bee stares into the empty sockets in the wall. “Where are they?”

“Somewhere they can rest,” Mina says, and it’s somewhere we can rest too. The shadows shift beyond the walls, and I can feel it in my bones, the afterlife calling to us.

Mina can feel it too. She holds out her hand. “Are you ready, my Lucy?”

I hesitate. “I think so,” I say finally. Mina’s been waiting a long time for this, for the beyond to unfurl to her. I’ve been waiting a long time too.

My throat tightening, I look at Bee, and her face has gone frantic.

“Lucy, don’t,” she says, pleading with me, grabbing my hand, but I pull away. She doesn’t understand. There’s a reason for her to return, a life she can stitch together, a lost love she can repair. I don’t have that. It’s like Dracula said. I’m the annoying little sister, the one who’s always in the way. The one who belongs here.

My chin tipped up, I put both hands on the wall, the gloom hungry and eager for me. And I’m eager for it, ready for this to be over.

But then I hear something else, echoing from a thousand miles away.

Rowan and the other girls back at the drive-in, nursing their newfound hunger, their fear bone-deep. They’re lost, exactly the way Dracula and Rochester wanted them to be.

I know what that’s like, to be abandoned with nothing. I know all too well. Only it isn’t hopeless. I could show them how you can survive it, how you can control it, how it doesn’t have to control you. What those men did to us isn’t destiny. We deserve more than that. We deserve our own story. I could help those girls. They could help me, too.

It’s something I should have realized by now: that Dracula was wrong about a lot of things. Maybe I’ve never been in the way. Maybe I have a reason to go back.

I look to Mina, and she sees it in me, a vague hope swirling behind my eyes, a chance for a future that was stolen from me. A future she once had. She got to grow old, got to build a life, free of fear, free of Dracula. Now I get to have mine.

My heart twists in my chest, and I squeeze her hand, the hand of my friend, my very first friend, the one who never forgot me.