“I’m sorry,” I say, my legs giving out as I collapse at the edge of the yard.

“Are you on drugs?” Tyrone hollers from across the street, never taking a single step closer to help me. He probably thinks my reefer madness is contagious or something.

I don’t answer him, my throat raw with ash, my muscles soft and useless. The last remnants of Dracula glimmer across the sky above me, as everything fades to black.

WHEN I OPEN MY EYES, Bee and Jane are hovering over me, the ground cold and hard beneath my body. We’re in the vestibule. They must have dragged me back in here.

“Look what you did,” I practically spit at Jane.

She can’t stop trembling, her eyes red with grief. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t understand,” she keeps saying, her words slurred together.

Bee does her best to explain it, the two of them sitting together in the parlor. I stand sentry nearby, guarding the urn in the cabinet, guarding it from Jane.

“Lucy’s lived and died the same as us,” Bee says. “But she did it a different way. And she’s got different needs now.”

Bee, always very careful not to use the V word.

“But what was that dust?” Jane’s still shaking. “And why did it move like that?”

Bee hesitates. “It was a man. Once. Now it’s just a monster.”

And this is Bee being very careful never to use the D word. I wonder if Jane even knows who he is. Maybe she’s lucky. Maybe she’s never heard his name once in her very long life.

Either way, she’s listening quietly to Bee, finally starting to understand.

“Why the urns, though?” Jane turns to me. “Why are they so important?”

“Because,” I say, my voice like steel, my eyes on the wall, “they’re made from his native soil.”

It’s a familiar sight in the movies. A vampire towing boxes of dark earth, a remnant of his homeland, a way to keep himself safe. What those films never tell you is that you don’t need the earth, not really, not unless you want to be at your peak, at your most violent and glorious. There’s a power in the places we come from. They sustain us, give us strength.

But there’s a catch, one that Dracula never realized until he met me. The earth is stronger than he knew, even stronger than him. Rest on a mound of your native soil, and you preserve your power. Sealed inside a vessel fired from it, and your power’s still protected all right, but you can’t escape, either. It holds you in on all sides. The same thing that shelters you becomes your prison.

That’s why I built the urns myself, knee-deep in the wet earth of the Carpathian Mountains, over a bonfire that burned brighter than the moon.