Dracula waves goodbye at the tree things, who are now retreating into the background until I can’t see them clearly anymore. The strange energy goes with them, but at least now I can pick up on feelings of relief, like they’re finding freedom for the first time.
File that in another page of Strange Shit Lenore’s Seen Today.
We start going back the way we came, walking single file, Dracula behind me, Solon in front of me. At least I can stare at Solon’s perfect ass the entire walk back.
“I will say one thing,” Dracula says. “Being left there for eternity has made me appreciate things.”
“Like you have a new lease at life?” I ask. “Want to become a new man?”
“Something like that.”
Solon eyes him over his shoulder, his eyes twinkling. “Enough to finally settle down?”
Dracula barks out a laugh. “Don’t even joke about that, not after what I’ve been through.”
I glance back at him. “What have you been through?”
He just shakes his head. “I’ve been screwed over twice. That’s enough.”
“He had a wife, ages ago,” Solon explains. “She died.”
“Oh no, I’m so sorry,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “That’s what humans do, right? They die.”
And sometimes vampires do too.
“And then she got reincarnated,” Solon adds.
“Wait, wait. What?” I ask. “She got reincarnated? Like…like…”
He gives me a snippy look. “Yes. Like Dracula. The book. The movie. Whatever you want to call it.”
“So it was real?”
He shrugs again. “Some. Bram was an author. He specialized in fiction. And anyway, then she eventually died too. No happy ending for me.”
“Unless she comes back again,” Solon says. “Never give up hope, my friend.”
“Not your fucking friend, Solon.”
“Sorry, I forgot.”
And it goes like this all the way back to civilization.
Epilogue
Solon
Four months later
“What do you want to do for Halloween?” Lenore asks me.
I lower the copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and peer at her over it. “You’re being serious?”
She grins at me, crossing her legs. She’s not wearing underwear under that baby-doll dress of hers, and she’s been showing off that fact all morning long.
“Oh, come on,” she says, brushing her long hair back over her bare shoulder, drawing attention to her smooth skin there. Fucking hell, she knows I want to bite her too. Why is she torturing me like this when we only rolled out of bed a couple of hours ago? “You’re a vampire.”
“And you’re also a vampire,” I point out.
“Right. And this is my first Halloween as both a vampire and a witch. I need to take advantage of that.”
I look back to my newspaper. “I’m sure Amethyst will go out with you if you want to go on one of your little pub crawls.”
Even though I kind of hate it when she does that. I’ll admit I’m the jealous type and the idea of lots of men—humans—staring at her, hitting on her, gets me feeling all sorts of murderous. It’s enough that the last two times they went out for a girl’s night, I tagged along. They didn’t know that of course, but I was there in the background, just in case I needed to put any classless delinquents in their place.
“We could have a Halloween party,” she says, having a sip of her coffee. “For the vampires. Or the witches. Depending which way you’re swinging that day.”
I sigh, trying to hide my smile from her. She’s adorable when she gets like this, totally obsessed and in love with her newfound identities. It makes me even more obsessed and in love with her.
“We’ll see.”
“Solon, you love throwing parties.”
“Not theme parties, my dear. That’s a very human thing.”
“And you keep saying you need to embrace your humanity. Well, there you go. Let’s do it. Get a band to play the Monster Mash. Dress up in capes. Hire a bunch of bats to fly around.”
“Hire a bunch of bats?” I repeat, staring at her again. “Have you ever seen anyone train bats?”
“You have magic, you could do it.”
“You have magic, Miss I Know How to Fly. Training bats is your problem.”
She sticks her tongue out at me. “Whatever happened to being less grumpy?”
I lower the paper in an exasperated manner and give her a dry look. “When did I say that?”
“When you said you had a new lease on life.”
“That wasn’t me. That was Dracula.”
That said, she’s not entirely wrong. After everything that happened in the Arctic and in the Red World, I have been trying to put a better foot forward. It’s not every day that you actually physically die and then come back as a vampire again.
And yet, that’s what my Lenore was able to do.
She brought me back.
This time, as myself through and through. Not a hint of the beast, not a hint of madness. Just me.
And completely hers.
She owns me now. She always did, but now that she saved my life by giving me part of her life, well…I’m in it for the long run. For the ages, of course, but beyond that. Beyond life, beyond death. Beyond the universe.