“It was all an act with Jane, right? She was just pretending to still love me back in L.A.?”

A tremor in her voice, so soft, so small, and it nearly cuts my heart in two. This is what she wants to believe, what will make everything so much easier. That Jane doesn’t love her and never has.

“I don’t know, Bee,” I say. “Maybe it’s complicated.”

She scoffs. “It was never complicated with you and Dracula.”

I rasp out a laugh. “It’s always been complicated with me and Dracula.”

A heavy silence cuts between us. Bee and I have never discussed this. We promised we wouldn’t ask questions the other didn’t want to answer. But after all these years, there are things we barely know about each other. Things we should know, things we should have talked about, screamed about, not held inside us like malignant tumors.

A rustling in the nearby coastal scrub, and Bee’s face goes wan. “Maybe you should call Michael.”

We creep farther along the ridge and down to the nearest road. When we reach the potholed shoulder, all the white lines worn away, Bee stands back, and I close my eyes.

Even from miles off, I can hear Michael’s heartbeat, slow and steady. I envision him, alone behind the wheel of Walter’s rickety Ford pickup. Where did his grandfather think he was going when he asked to borrow the truck? Not to pursue a vampire, that’s for sure.

I hold him in my mind, hold him close. “I’m here,” I say.

This is an imprecise art, and we don’t have much time left. Michael might not make it before sunrise. If he’s still back in the city, it could take him an hour to find us, maybe longer, and that’s if he even heard me.

He’s here in less than ten minutes. The truck idles up beside us, that familiar robin’s-egg blue, the passenger door flicking open.

“Need a ride?” he asks, smiling. Bee clambers inside, but I seize up, Michael’s heartbeat threading through me.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to use him, and I certainly don’t want to sit right next to him, not when I’m this famished. Nothing about me is safe.

But what’s coming up behind us isn’t safe either. Their voices echo in the shadows, that faceless crowd, their bloodlust rivaling my own.

Bee turns back to me, the dome light bathing the interior of the pickup in a sallow yellow. She senses it in me, the way I’m frozen again.

“Come on, Lucy,” she says, her voice soft, her hand outstretched to me.