Another moment, and I don’t have time to wonder. The rest of me turns to dust, and I can’t hold on to the urn anymore. It falls through my crumbling fingers, shattering into a thousand pieces on the floor. Overhead, Dracula’s muddy form smears across the ceiling before dripping down to meet himself, the parts of him mingling together, his body becoming stronger, while mine becomes nothing at all.

I won’t watch him now. I close what’s left of my eyes and let the darkness rush in to greet me.

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I died. Seventy years, give or take. Back then, I did it all the time, as though it was a sport, a diversion, my favorite hobby. There were so many different ways it happened. A stake through my heart, a blade across my throat, a silver cross that bisected me.

But I don’t want to remember any of that now. I don’t want to remember what they did to me. What he did to me.

The world stops spinning, and I open my eyes, already knowing what I’ll see. This same place from all the times before. What it is, where it is, is anyone’s guess. It might be heaven or it might be purgatory or it might simply be an odd sort of waiting room. Because that’s what it looks like—a tiny space, four walls, an antiseptic quality lingering in the air, as though even the afterlife doesn’t want to reek of death.

And, of course, there’s them. Hands pushing through the walls like taffy, the outlines of writhing fingers that are never quite strong enough to break through. Instead, the plaster just keeps contorting at their touch.

I don’t know who they are. I can’t see their faces, and I can’t hear their voices, either, only raspy whispers that fade out like a song at the end of an old record.

This is what I’ve come to expect when I die. A hundred hands here to greet me, reaching out, desperate to take hold, their bodies nowhere to be found. There’s only one difference now.

This time, there’s someone inside the room with me.

“Hello, Lucy,” a small crystalline voice says behind me.

I whirl around to face her, those familiar eyes, that curtain of dark hair, that turned-up nose.

“Hello, Mina,” I say.

This is the first time I’ve seen her since she died, and I can’t stop staring at her. She’s the way I remember her, the way we were when we were only girls who didn’t know any better.

She stands across from me, no more than a half dozen steps away, but it feels so far in this room. Everything feels far, and neither of us knows quite what to say.

“How are you?” I ask at last.

“Dead,” she says. “And you?”