“The same.” For a moment, I want to laugh, and I want to cry, too. “How long have you been in this room?”

She crinkles her nose. “It’s hard to tell,” she says, and I know exactly what she means. Time passes differently in this place, everything wrapped in an instant and an eternity.

We keep watching each other, and I think how strange it is, how after all these years, she’s the ghost, and I’m the one who can’t help but stay among the living.

Another hand pushes through the wall and takes hold of Mina’s arm. A strong grasp, but not an unkind one. She pulls away, shaking her head.

“Do you have any idea who they are?” I ask.

“I’m not sure.” Mina presses her fingertips into the wall, and a small hand presses back. “But I think they’re like us, Lucy.”

Like us. The other girls, the ones he’s bitten. The ones the world has forgotten.

I inch forward and put my hand to the wall, too. “Have any of them ever gotten through?”

Mina turns to me, her eyes gray. “Not yet.”

I look back as something rolls across the floor nearby. It’s the stake Renfield buried in my heart. That’s the one thing I can carry through, other than myself. A morbid little souvenir of what got me here.

Not that I get to stay. My body coils into itself, my skin pulling like it’s on too tight. I feel whole, I look whole, but it’s only an illusion. I never stay dead for long. That means we don’t have much time. Mina and I inch closer, tentative at first, almost like strangers. Then we sit together on the floor. There are no chairs in the afterlife, no amenities at all, but maybe that’s not so terrible. At least we have each other.

Our heads down, as if in prayer, we listen to distant voices. They’re coming from Daisy’s house, no more than whispers, too far away to matter.

“Can you hear me when I’m over there?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” Mina says, and blushes. “I try not to eavesdrop, though.”

I smile back at her. Of course she doesn’t. That would be rude, something that’s anathema to Mina. She was always so much better at being a well-behaved Victorian than I was.