“Are you all right?” A voice materializing, thin as mist, next to me. I turn and see her, moving like a phantom in the twilight, so quiet I never heard her coming.

I smile. “Hello, Bee.”

She grins back. “Hello yourself.”

The melody of the city fades to static, and it’s just me and her and these ashes that won’t ever rest. Her head down, Bee huddles close to me, and the hollowness, the silence within her, reminds me of how we’re connected. There’s no heartbeat inside either of us. We’re at once alive and dead, even though we aren’t the same. Bee’s no vampire like me. She died and came back a different way, a way she doesn’t like talking about.

That means Dracula’s not her problem, he’s mine, so I try to keep her out of this. When I left, she was waiting in the car, back where I parked it on the street, in a quaint little neighborhood where the only boogeyman they know is rising inflation.

“You didn’t have to come all the way up here,” I say, digging a little faster now.

“Figured you could use the company.” Bee fidgets in the dirt next to me. “Besides, I’d rather not be alone.”

An uneasy silence twists between us. I’m not the only one with secrets.

The Hollywood sign looms over us, the rusted sheet metal trembling in the breeze. For a lonesome town, this might be its most lonesome landmark. At the far end, the H rocks back and forth, the same letter actress Peg Entwistle chose when she took a swan dive off the sign back in ’32. That was thirty-five years ago, ancient history in this town, and by now, everyone’s mostly forgotten her. That’s how it goes here. This is a glittering city haunted by the ghosts of dead girls and dead dreams. In that way, Bee and I fit right in.

The shovel hits sandstone, and this is it, the best I can do. My hands shaking, I deposit the urn of Dracula into the dark. There are no words of prayer and no curses, either. Just a flick of the wrist, and he’s nestled in the ground. I fill the hole back in, almost frenzied, my fingernails limned with darkness, my pumps pounding on the earth, packing down the soil.

Bee helps too, kicking some dirt into the grave. “How long do you think he’ll stay put?”

I shake my head. “Not long.”

Beneath our feet, I already feel him, restless as always. He’ll work his way back up, bit by bit, crawling like an earwig, the urn writhing in the earth on his command.