In the vestibule, the statue of Venus is already crumbling in the heat, her body breaking apart, her chest split down the middle. I whisper a useless goodbye to her, as Bee pulls me through the door.

Outside, the air tastes stale and chalky. There are sirens in the distance, drawing closer, wailing like eager banshees. We need to get out of here. We certainly can’t stick around and answer questions from the police about who we are and what happened to us. Nobody would understand. Hell, I barely understand it.

Bee grabs the two urns off the lawn before scrambling behind the wheel of the Buick and turning over the croaking engine. I wilt on the seat next to her, bruised and aching. I always forget how much a body can break without just doing the decent thing and dying. The weight of the decay heaves through the house, flames billowing out all the windows, a fault line cracking across the center. Through the chasm, Renfield lurches out of the darkness, the shadow of Dracula swirling over him. They spot us here, but from across the yard, they’re not fast enough to catch us.

As we screech down the driveway, neighbors we’ve never seen before are pouring out of their houses, clutching their robes and their pearls, shocked at the spectacle we’ve made of ourselves.

Tyrone’s standing on his front stoop, his striped flannel pajamas sagging around his shoulders.

“I told you that place was a fire hazard,” he calls out, and my last regret as the rest of the house collapses into cinders is that I don’t have enough time to charge across the street and snap his reed-thin neck.

Bee twists the wheel hard, and we burst onto the road, rocketing in the opposite direction of the sirens. I put the last urn on the back seat, and the three of them murmur to one another, speaking a language I can’t decipher.

Shivering, I turn away. “We need to find somewhere to hole up.”

Bee’s dark eyes glint in the moonlight. “But we’ve got nowhere else, Lucy.”

My gaze shifts to her. “You know that’s not true.”

If she wants to go after Rochester, if she doesn’t want to hide anymore, there’s only one place left.

Her face like stone, Bee doesn’t answer me, doesn’t argue either. My head lolls back, a smear of palm trees above us, the streetlights glinting like distant stars. The world fades to black for a while, and I relish it, the escape from everything.

When I open my eyes again, it’s still dark, and Bee’s hands are steady on the wheel, her jaw set, a flinty determination flickering across her face. A road sign flashes past the Buick. We’re headed north on the 101, and I already know where we’re going.

Up the sinuous highway, straight toward the heart of San Francisco.

six