1
Salt Lake City, January 10, 2025
Dracula
It starts the moment you look out the window.
You don’t see him through the glare of the night-dark glass. You just
look, safe inside but flinging your soul outward.
Your features transform whenever someone speaks to you, but you drop your sweet smile as soon as they turn away—a girl who wears a disguise to survive. It surprises and intrigues him, so he follows when you walk outside.
The night caresses with a grasping cold. Your head is down as you hurry to get home, soft brown curls hiding your face, hands shoved in the pockets of your coat. Rushing for safety and warmth. So dull and predictable, just like everyone else.
Though he has infinite time—a vast and depthless pool of it, holding him in place while the world’s currents drift around him—he no longer has any more time to waste here. He’s ready at last to move on.
But.
Your steps slow as soon as you leave the pools of manufactured light. Your head drifts up, the curtain of your hair parts, and you gaze heavenward as though seeking the sun for warmth. The stars offer no such comfort. Theirs is a piercing, lifeless grace. You linger in the darkness and devour eternity with your eyes.
His own heart, stilled so long ago, seems to judder to life at the sight of you. You’re
special. He aches to make your strange blood his own, to take everything you were or are or could have been.
If others weren’t watching, too, he might not have had the will to hold himself back. He loves the hunt, but you are a prize worth waiting for.
It doesn’t matter how many times he’s started this dance over the centuries, how many yous there have been. Because it feels new to him every time, when it’s right. And every time, for him, there is only
you. There has only ever been
you. He is Dracula, and you are young and lovely and vulnerable, and he knows exactly how this dance will end.
You will invite him in.
2
London, October 4, 2024
Iris
Everything in London looks suitably old. Not in a run-down American way, but in a wearily ornate way. Like a grandma whose entire house is covered in plastic to preserve it in exactly the same state forever. England settled into “fussily impressive and obsessed with history” as its aesthetic and never changed. I admire the English for their commitment to it. The only thing
I’ve ever been committed to is destroying my own family legacy.
I answer my phone without checking as I navigate out of the train station. Only one person ever calls me now, and I have to pick up so he doesn’t get suspicious. “Dick. Seriously. Give me at least a day to settle in before you start trying to lawyer me back to America.”
“Your mother,” Dad says, his voice as cracked as the ancient sidewalk beneath my feet. I stop dead. A tourist bumps into my oversized backpack, cursing. I barely hear them.
“Dad? Dad, what’s wrong?” I shout, both out of fear and so that he can hear me. My dad has always been an old man, nearing fifty when I was born, but he’s gone downhill fast recently. The slide started years ago, though, when I opened a door that should have stayed shut.
My fault, my fault. His voice drops as though he’s worried about being overheard. “She was here last night.”
I put my free hand to my forehead. I don’t know what hurts more—my head after the transatlantic flight and train ride into London, or my heart as I hear how scared and confused he is. I’m sorry to leave him alone, I really am, but—
But he abandoned me when I needed him most, didn’t he? The only way he can make it up to me is by letting me go, whether he knows he’s doing it or not. I can’t feel guilty about it. He’s in the nicest home money could buy, with the best staff, the best meals, and an upfront payment so large I can be assured he’ll be safe and taken care of for the rest of his life. That’s what we Goldamings do: slap some money on the problem and move on.
“Dad,” I say. “Mom wasn’t there last night. She’s dead.”
“She was beating against the window. She had red eyes and an evil smile. Please, Iris, you have to get me out of here. She knows where I am. You have to hide me or she’ll get in.”
I try to sound gentle, but I’m exhausted. “Mom couldn’t have been at your window. Both because you’re on the third floor, and because she’s dead.”
“I saw her, though. I saw—”
“I watched her die.” Blood being pumped out as fast as she could produce it, her body consuming itself. I rub my arm, tiny bumps of scars hidden beneath my sleeves, thinking about tubes sucking, sucking, sucking the blood. “I’m sorry you couldn’t come to the funeral, but I promise, we sealed her right up.”
Maybe if he’d been healthy enough to travel to Miami, he’d be convinced. It still makes no sense why she was buried there when she lived and died in the desert West.
“But I saw—”
“She’s gone, Dad. I promise.” I don’t tell him that I took a few minutes alone with the casket on the long flight to her custom mausoleum. I expected her waxen, bloodless face to haunt me. Instead, I keep returning to the memory as a comfort. She’s
dead, and I’m so close to being free.
“But she was here,” Dad whimpers. “She told me to open the window and let her in. She’ll be back tonight; I know she will.” He sounds like a child, scared of the dark. But he never protected me from the darkness
or from my mother.
I glance down the street, trying to get my bearings. All the buildings feel too close to each other, so there’s no way to see where the sun is. “Tell your nurse to make sure the window’s locked and close the drapes nice and tight. And if Mom comes back, tell her to f*** off. Bye.” I hang up and immediately regret it. And then try my hardest not to regret it.
God, I’m never going to escape. No matter where I go, she follows me. Exhaustion radiates from my core, like if I don’t sit down and dissociate right now, I might die. I have no idea what to expect when I get to the house, either. Will it be in good enough condition for me to stay there, or will I have to get a hotel? That bastard Robert Frost taunts me, my mind repeating,
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. I guess it’s “kilometers” here, though. Such a typically dry English joke, giving us their nonsense measurement system and then switching to metric themselves.
It’s so tempting to find a hotel and sleep off the jet lag. Burrow into white sheets, be blissfully unconscious for a day or two. But I can’t risk the delay. I can’t be sure they aren’t already following me. My beloved running-away-backpack straps dig into my shoulders, and I welcome the weight. It helps me focus. It reminds me why I’m here.
This is the only chance I’m ever going to get, and I won’t blow it because I’m tired.
My phone rings again and this time I check before answering. “Can I just burn the house down and be done with the estate that way?”
Dick’s voice is as dry as kindling. “That’s arson, Miss Goldaming, and even in the UK it’s quite illegal.”
“What a hassle.”
“You could always return home and address the responsibilities you have here.”
I want to punch his voice in the mouth. My mother really outdid herself when she put Dick Cox in charge of executing her will. A name like that, he should be a world-renowned adult film star, not a pedantic attorney so relentless I’ll never escape him.
“Don’t want any of it. The responsibilities, the company, even the money. Once I sell the London and Whitby houses, we’ll talk about getting me out of the rest.”
“You will want it,” Dickie says with bland assurance. “It’s in your blood. And the blood is life.”
I flinch at the hateful mantra. It feels like my mother, pinching me under the table so I’ll sit up straight and smile. “In my case, the blood is my eventual death, so thanks for your continued insensitivity. Bye, Dickie.” I hang up. Between my dad and Dick, I’m a walking panic attack. I thought I’d feel brave when I got here. Ready. Instead, I just feel haunted.
There’s a café across the street. Coffee is my greatest ally; it will help me fight my jet lag, fight my blood, fight my past. I can do this. I look to the left and step into the street.
Copyright © 2024 by Kiersten White. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
