There are nights that Dracula and Death stay in one-room apartments, windows open to the humid air, hearing airplanes fly above them with a sound like roars against the sky.
"I suppose there's no more room for a European chateau," Dracula mutters. "Where on earth would we put it, anyway?"
"I'm sure we could find a place, Lord Dracula."
"Please," groans Dracula, rolling his eyes. "Just call me Vlad."
The castle is with them, always, in many shapes and sizes. They pack it in a suitcase, carry it on flights, stuff it in a steamer trunk and take it overseas. They lay it on the ground in an alleyway somewhere and it springs up around them like weeds, growing hotels and apartment buildings and, once, an amusement park.
They can feel it straining to be a castle again, to grow stone and glass and buttress where it now has concrete and stucco, and it breaks their hearts to say no. They could retire to craggy, cold Ireland or back to their roots in Wallachia, but their place is among the roiling masses of humanity. There's no two ways around it. They are humanity.
"What I need is a cult," Dracula explains one night over curry and rice. "A good, old-fashioned cult, center it in one place, somewhere nice and out-of-the-way. None of this Internet stuff. It's so decentralized. Sources of power fluctuate, magic fluctuates…"
"Belief fluctuates," Death offers, and Dracula nods with a grim look. It's true: on the list of things people are afraid of nowadays, monsters are pretty low on the list. Other humans? Very high.
But they make do. Raising zombies and vampires is out, except as a brief moneymaking venture for Hollywood movies, perhaps. Instead, Death and Dracula move in the liminal spaces of peoples' conversations, the blind spots in their brains, the ambiguity in their machines and media. Glitches are good: people are terrified by the idea of something manmade with its own will, deviating from fixed logic like a castle that changes its shape.
Death, of course, still has his day job, reaping the souls of the living and striking fear into the hearts of men, except he somehow still has time to pop down to the corner store and have a pot roast nearly done by the time Dracula gets up in the evening. Vlad has no idea how he does it; he himself has his hands full trying to formulate his plans every night.
"Did you know there's almost 3,500 people in the States with the last name 'Belmont?'" Dracula sighs. "In the United States alone. Even higher if you add in 'Belmondo.' I thought I'd try to get the jump on them by tracking them down this time, so they don't just march up to my front door like they always do…"
"There's a good chance we won't even have to worry about that," Death posits. "A bit harder to track us down this way, isn't it?"
Dracula furrows his brow, sighs, and rolls over onto his side. The idea of not having to deal with his archnemeses is an oddly depressing one. It'd be nice to have something to cling to, throughout the centuries, aside from Death himself.
"Well," Death reconsiders, "I'm sure they'll find a way."