Thin fingers of daylight seep in at the perimeter of the curtains. They’re not near enough to be a danger, but I watch the light anyhow, desperate for something to focus on, wondering where Dracula and Rochester and their followers are now. Wondering where Renfield is too. A fragment of hope blooms in my chest as I remember what Dracula said. The last urn. It’s still out there somewhere. Renfield must not have found it.

I think again of the furnace vent upstairs in that house, that strange and busy house where people come and go, hidden behind closed doors.

A sudden chill seizes me. The urn’s not just somewhere. I already know exactly where it is.

At dusk, Michael drives Bee and me across town. Back to Haight-Ashbury. Back to Daisy’s house.

She greets us at the front door, her eyes bright. “I knew you wouldn’t leave for good,” she says, but I’m not looking at her now.

There’s a piece of cardboard tacked to the outside of the door, with skull and crossbones drawn in magic marker and a simple message scribbled in cheerful, bubble letters.

German measles

KEEP OUT

Apparently, the sign’s worked, too, because as Bee and I edge inside, Michael lagging behind us, everything’s different, the downstairs quiet as a tomb. This party house with nobody around to party except for Daisy.

“I’m not sure they’re really sick,” she says, her worried eyes flitting up the steps. “But they sent everyone away anyhow.”

“Who sent them away?” Bee glances between us. “Lucy, what’s going on?”

“Come on,” I whisper, taking her hand, leaving Michael behind.

Together, we tiptoe upstairs to the bedroom at the end of the hall. The one that was closed yesterday. Even now, girls are still giggling inside.

Without making a sound, I nudge open the door, and there they are. Five of them, the same girls Daisy introduced us to that first morning here. They’re sitting cross-legged in a circle, reverent and wide-eyed, the urn in the center of the room. It’s limned in a ring of flowers, the stems all knotted together, the petals wilted from being so close to him, to his decay.

An altar. This is their altar to him.

And that’s not all the girls have done. The outside of Dracula’s urn is practically Technicolor now, nearly every bit of surface area arrayed in colorful tempera paint. Tulips and peace signs and—my personal favorite—at least three different dandelion-yellow suns. The girls have turned the clay into a canvas for their own tiny mural, and I’ve got to admit, it doesn’t look half-bad. If nothing else, Dracula would hate it, which makes me like it even more.