Mina was better at a lot of things. She did what I never could. Thanks to Van Helsing coaxing her back from the brink of death, she lived out her life, one careful day at a time, through matrimony, through motherhood, finally passing away quietly in her sleep, crow’s feet around her eyes, a murmur in her heart. I don’t envy her for it. The thing about making it to old age is that not everyone else will. That means you get to sit back and watch the world slip away from you, one tragedy at a time. First it was her friends, the Texan and the laudanum-loving doctor and that odious lord I nearly married (sometimes, death is a mercy). Then it was her husband, Jonathan, his body frail, his spirit broken. And finally her only son, lost on the Western Front in a war the world said would end all wars, as though that could ever happen. People love slaughtering each other far too much to ever give up their favorite pastime.

Her face wears this grief like a luxurious veil, and she looks at me through the shadows that seem a little closer now. Then with a small, devious grin, she reaches out and entwines her hand with mine. Everything about this feels like home, like an innocence we never deserved to lose. This is what we used to do, me and Mina, how we used to cure our ills. It didn’t matter what it was—a thunderstorm, a nightmare, a heartbreak. We’d just take the other one’s hand and wait it out together. If only we could wait this out too.

“You’re colder than I remember,” she says with a laugh, and I laugh too, because I realize just how much I’ve missed her. Mina, my childhood friend, my first friend, the only one who ever came to visit my grave, always leaving me a bundle of wisteria tied neatly with Queen Anne’s lace.

“For you, my Lucy,” she would whisper, and sometimes, I was sure she saw me watching from the shadows. I wanted to go to her then, to tell her we could still run away like wayward schoolgirls, that it wasn’t too late to dream, but she never lingered in the cemetery. The darkness always frightened her away.

Voices leak into the room, so much louder now, Bee’s voice and Daisy’s too.

Mina gives me a sad smile. “It’s almost time, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, everything in me aching. I’d rather stay here with her. Away from Dracula, away from the world.

But then I hear her. Bee, calling out my name, doing her best to beckon me back. She’s singing, too, to steady herself, her voice too beautiful to bear. I won’t leave her behind, abandoning her in San Francisco without Jane, without anybody.