Chapter One
LUCY
It’s riled me a little, I can’t lie. I’m the kind of person who’s always ten minutes early to everything, so rolling in an hour late is very off-brand for me. That’s the first thing that’s making me sweat, aside from the unseasonably mild weather and the giant bags I’m lugging around.
The second thing? The vampire.
Yes, you heard me right. The vampire.
I know, when I say it like that it makes me sound crazy.
Honestly, as I’m standing here right now staring back at his dead eyes, I feel like maybe I am.
The truth is that I wasn’t even meant to be here.
My original plans for this weekend hadn’t included a whole lot more than a book, a bath and a bar of chocolate as big as a cocker spaniel. That’s my happy place.
They call me Fluff at the White Rose Gazette.
That’s the local newspaper that I’ve worked at for the last four years.
And no, I don’t love it as a nickname, but it’s an ongoing joke that if there’s a guinea pig fashion show or a primary school fun run within a hundred miles that needs a bit of media coverage, I’ll be the one clamouring to report on it, so I suppose it fits.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for heartwarming tales and happy endings.
There’s nothing in this world that I love more than that sense of pure, uncomplicated joy.
But right now, standing in the whip of cool sea mist rising from the North Yorkshire coastline, I’m not feeling any kind of joy.
In fact, I’d say I’m in the exact opposite of my happy place.
In just about twelve hours’ time, the streets of Whitby are going to be teeming with everything dark and gothic and spooky – just about as far from my general vibe as it’s possible to get.
But people-pleasing is in my DNA, so when Jon Baker asked me to take this job at the last minute, I was always going to say yes.
Particularly because I’m in love with him.
I know, I know, it’s a real cliché to be in love with your boss, but here we are.
I used to think I was imagining the way he looked at me sometimes, or the way he flirts, but then we all went out for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and he kissed me in the back of the taxi on our way home.
It was like a revelation. He likes me too.
Granted, I’m a hopeless romantic, but I’m ninety percent sure I’m not blowing it all out of proportion.
Ok, maybe eighty percent. I am a bit of a glass-half-full kind of person.
Anyway, that’s how I found myself here, in the dark, on the doorstep of Harker Cottage, screaming at the life-sized vampire which just leaped out of a bush and leered at me.
Ok, he’s a little smaller than life-sized, and now I’m looking properly I can see that he’s actually carved out of solid stone.
Plus, I now realise he didn’t even leap out of the bush, I just somehow managed to brush away the branch covering his face as I walked past him.
The panic, however, is very real, and it makes me fumble for my phone and dial Mina.
It’s automatic at times like these. Mina’s my best friend in the world.
My only friend in the world if we’re being picky, but still definitely my first port in any storm, and despite the strangely calm weather, there’s one hell of an internal storm raging here.
I can rely on Mina to calm me down, though. She always does.
She answers on the third ring, before I have the chance to remember that I shouldn’t be calling her at all.
‘Lucy Lou.’ Her voice is rough, and that’s the point at which I remember that she was forcibly parted from her appendix less than forty-eight hours ago.
‘Mina! I’m so sorry!’ My heart sinks. I hate the feeling of inconveniencing someone. Or, even worse, hurting them. I sigh, wiping away a wet leaf which has plastered itself to my cheek in the commotion. ‘You should be resting, and I shouldn’t be calling. I’ll let you go.’
‘Lou,’ she says softly. ‘Talking to you isn’t stopping me from resting, and all the drugs they’ve got me on keep me up half the night anyway.’
‘Fine,’ I relent. ‘But as soon as you feel even the slightest bit tired, you’ve got to sleep. I mean it. Don’t even say goodbye, just hang up on me, ok?’
Mina just ignores me. She’s as stubborn as an ox. ‘So, did you make it to the cottage?’
I step back, taking in the quaint brick building in front of me.
Harker Cottage is short and squat, with stone beams over the windows and a front door painted such a bright shade of red I can see it even in the darkness.
The loom of a hill rises up behind it, the ruins of the abbey only just visible in the moonlight.
A chill creeps down my spine, and I clench my free fist against it.
‘That’s kind of why I’m calling.’ I can see the vampire figure off to my left, partially concealed in the bushes.
He still looks as if he’s staring at me.
‘Well, the main reason I called is because I just had an encounter with a vampire, and I panic-dialled you before I had time to think.’
She makes a strange sound. It’s not quite a huff, not quite a laugh. ‘A vampire?’
‘A stone vampire.’
Mina laughs properly then, before squeaking in pain, muttering something under her breath before she speaks again.
‘Is that damn thing still there? I’ve been trying to get them to get rid of it for years.
’ She chuckles gently, like she’s trying not to hurt herself this time.
‘Fair warning, though, that will not be the last vampire you come across this weekend.’
There’s something about the way she says it that makes something sharp dart through me, but I force a smile, though I know she can’t see it.
This job had been just right for her, but it feels completely alien to me.
Mina, who works as one of my fellow reporters at the Gazette, is five-foot-nothing with neon-blue hair and a horseshoe-shaped ring through her septum.
She has a spiderweb tattoo that runs the length of one forearm, and she listens to music by bands that sound as though they’ve been made up especially for Halloween.
She loves all this stuff: the gruesome and the gory, the spooky and the scary. She once went out with a guy who’d legally changed his name to Nosferatu. When the assignment came in to do a feature on the Whitby Goth Weekend, it had been a no-brainer. It had to be Mina.
But then she’d been rushed into emergency surgery, and instead it had to be me.
Lucy Partridge.
Squeaky clean good girl Lucy Partridge.
‘I’ll do my best, Meens.’ I chew on my lip – a nervous habit. ‘On this story, I mean.’
‘You’ll smash it,’ she singsongs back. She sounds much more confident than I feel. ‘So how are you liking the digs?’
I look back up at the cottage, which belongs to Mina’s aunt and uncle. It’s in a prime location, set back just a little from the North Yorkshire coastline. She’d arranged to stay in the old annexe attached to the cottage, and when she fell ill, her Aunt Peggy offered me the room in a heartbeat.
‘That’s actually the other reason I’m calling,’ I say sheepishly, my toes kicking up wet gravel on the path. ‘I can’t bring myself to knock on the door. It’s almost midnight!’
Mina chuckles again, and I hear her grunt softly, like she’s adjusting her position. ‘Don’t worry, Lou, you don’t need to knock. The annexe has its own door, and there’s a keypad entry, so you don’t need a key. Just the code.’
Relief rattles through me like a freight train.
‘Go round the back of that god-awful statue, and you’ll see a small archway in the wall. It’s just through there.’
I gather up my bags and shuffle past the statue, making sure to avoid eye contact with him, just in case. The archway comes into view, and I duck through it, hating the cold droplets of rain that plop from the wet stone onto my face.
To the left of the cottage is a smaller, lower building, made from slightly lighter, slightly newer bricks. I see the glossy black door immediately and head towards it, hoisting my biggest bag onto my shoulder to free up my other hand.
‘Ok, I’m here,’ I say, and I hear Mina’s small hum of approval.
‘Can you see the keypad?’
Can I? It isn’t immediately obvious. The doorframe is simple stone with just a doorbell on the left side, and a curious metal shape attached to the wall on the right side. Wait, unless that’s a—
‘It’s behind the coffin lid,’ Mina says, as if she can read my mind, and I can’t help but grin. I lift the coffin lid to find a very standard keypad beneath.
‘The code is 1897,’ Mina continues. ‘It’s the year Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.’
I huff a laugh. ‘Of course it is.’
‘I told you,’ she says, and though I can’t see her, I know she’s smiling. ‘My family loves this stuff.’
‘You love it too.’
‘Yeah.’ There’s a sadness in her voice that tugs at my stomach. ‘And maybe you will too by the end of the weekend.’
I love her optimism, but that doesn’t seem likely.
My style is the opposite of Mina’s in almost every way.
I love pastel colours and romance novels and uplifting piano music, and even the stone vampire has sent me hurtling way out of my comfort zone.
One more jump-scare will probably tip me over the edge.
I tap in the code and feel another wave of relief as the light on the keypad flashes green. When I open the door, my jaw almost hits the ground.
As it turns out, the annexe at Harker Cottage is utterly adorable.
It’s all dark beams and whitewashed walls, a curious mix of vampire memorabilia and seaside charm.
A deep red velvet sofa sits along one wall opposite a tiny dining set, and in the far corner a small spiral staircase has been slotted in beside the cosiest little kitchen I’ve ever seen.
It’s perfect. And, somewhat alarmingly, I can see it all.
‘Meens, all the lights are on,’ I mutter, lowering my voice as a knot of panic rises back up in my chest. But Mina just laughs.
‘Peggy does that when she’s expecting people. She’ll have popped the heating on for you too, I bet. She likes it to feel warm and welcoming.’
My anxiety drops a notch. It actually is lovely and warm. I probably just have residual adrenaline buzzing around in me from the stone vampire incident, and I’m freaking out over every last thing. That said, I could swear I heard water running somewhere upstairs.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be someone in the main cottage,’ Mina says with another chuckle. Maybe I said that last bit out loud. ‘The plumbing is quite elderly. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could hear it two or three houses down.’
I need to get a hold of myself. It’s not like me to get this worked up over nothing.
I’m a ‘Steady Eddie’, as my nana used to say.
I’m sure it’s the combination of the last-minute job, the late train and the unexpected vampire that has me feeling all turned around, but Jon asked me personally to take this job, and I’m not about to let him down.
What I need is a good sleep. Everything will feel better in the morning; it always does.
‘The bedroom is up the stairs, I assume?’
‘Yep,’ Mina says. ‘It’s tiny up there, just a little bathroom and the bedroom, but you’re gonna love it. The bedroom has the best sea view.’
I smile at the genuine excitement in her voice, despite the fact that she must be in pain.
It’s so unfair that she hasn’t been able to come this weekend.
Whitby is her favourite place at the best of times – she grew up here, after all – but I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s waxed lyrical to me about the Goth Weekend.
I’ll get this job done, but I know she would have enjoyed every moment of it.
I must sigh then, because I hear Mina make her ‘come on, old girl’ noise over the phone.
‘Whatever you’re thinking,’ she says, ‘you need to stop. You’re going to have a brilliant weekend.’
I laugh a little. ‘I was just thinking that you’d have done a much better job on this feature than me.’
She snorts in disagreement. ‘You can do this. You’re a great reporter.’
Actually, I’m a pretty average reporter, but I’m grateful for Mina trying to make me feel better. She always does. She’s like a tiny sunbeam in black lipstick and leather.
I swap my phone to the other ear and readjust my bag on my shoulder to grab the banister. The stone steps look slippery, and I’d really prefer not to fall down them before I even settle in.
At the top of the staircase, there’s a tiny landing, maybe a metre square.
There’s a door to the left with a little ceramic bath hanging on a nail and an open door to the right.
The lights are low in the bedroom, but I can just about see the outline of a small cross on the wallpaper, a whisper of darkness against the faded lines of the paper which surrounds it.
The crucifix itself is missing, and for some reason that makes another wave of panic bite at my throat.
‘You’ve gone quiet again,’ Mina says gently, like she thinks she might scare me if she speaks any louder. ‘Did you find the—’
But my brain never gets the chance to process whatever she says after that.
Because that’s the precise moment the bathroom door suddenly swings open, the cloud of steam that billows out just dense enough to blur the lines of the shadowy figure which emerges.
There’s the rumble of a low growl, a flash of light glinting off fangs, and green eyes that narrow as they meet mine.
It feels like the point in a dream where you start to realise that it’s actually a nightmare.
I try to scream, but the sound sticks in my throat, my heart racing so fast that I genuinely fear it might burst clean out of my chest.
And then everything goes black.