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Chapter Eleven

My wife was just as obedient in death as she had been in life: when I returned to the car she wasn't there.

Something else was: the odor settled over me as soon as I closed the door and buckled on my shoulder harness. It smelled of wet leaves and musty attics—a far cry from the rotted perfume of my three previous supplicants. I looked in the rearview mirror but the backseat appeared to be empty.

A wispy voice spoke behind me: "You're him, ain'tcha? That Baron fella?"

I swallowed. It didn't help. "Actually, I'm not."

A pair of ancient eyes appeared at the top of my seat in the mirror: he was behind me, crouching on the floor. "Sure you are. That old juju woman says you are. And you got the Shine. I kin see it myself." A pair of eyes and a nose was all I could see without turning around. A saggy, billed woolen cap of faded blue covered the top of his head.

A soldier's cap.

A Union soldier's cap.

Circa middle 1800s.

"She says you got some neezia or sumpin."

I sighed. "What can I do for you, son?"

"The captain sends his regards and wants to know what you intend to do about the incursion of the enemy."

I was tired and my skin was starting to itch and burn again. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. "Which ones?"

"Why—all of 'em, I guess. Them long-tooths, the carpetbaggers, the gray men."

"Carpetbaggers?" I turned around—or tried but found myself hampered by the shoulder harness. "You don't talk like a Yankee soldier, boy."

"Guess I ain't no Yankee soldier no more." His voice was soft and sad, a whispery, ghostlike sound less real than the pale flesh crouching behind me. "We're all not what we were anymore."

"You-all being . . . who?"

"Twenty-third Infantry down out of Iowa and a bunch of Johnny Rebs from Colonel Harrison's Fortieth Louisiana Cavalry. We mixed it up here in the winter of—" he paused as if searching through tattered memories, "—'63. Cut each other up pretty good. Then somebody up and shot that nigra woman. Probably an accident. Nobody knows which side and it don't matter. She cursed both sides afore she died and pinned our souls here in the swamp where we fell."

"Here?" I asked, looking over the BioWeb complex of buildings.

"They drained the swamps 'bout near fifty year ago. Found some of us then and moved those remains to the local cemeteries and museum. Dug some more of us up about five year back when they built this abomination. Dug up some dragon bones, too."

"Dragon bones?"

"Captain calls it a fossil. Says it died milyuns a' years ago so its bones have turned to rock. They never tol' nobody, they just put it back alongst with those of us they found. Why would they do thet? Deny a soldier his release and final ticket home?"

I shook my head. "There are laws that would have guaranteed your final interment and rest, soldier. But the people who built this place are a lawless band. They only use the laws that will serve their purposes and ignore the rest. It was more important to them to finish construction on schedule than to honor the dead."

I saw him nod in the rearview mirror. "So other'n that little bit of excitement, the rest of us been lyin' under the silt and clay just talkin' amongst ourselves these past hundert-and-fifty-some year, figurin' out what's what and what's not.

"And lissenin' to the plans of the gray men," he added with some heat. "It ain't right!"

"The Confederates?"

"Naw, we all the same now: dead men, soldiers, patriots. This is as much my land as theirs now and we all salute the same flag. Hell, we been together so long we even talk the same. The captain wore the gray but I take my orders from him now as he's the ranking officer on post. He's the one what sent me as I'm the most presentable so far."

"But you said 'the gray men'."

"The enemy. They still breathe but they souls is all dead and gray inside. They the enemy. They allied themselves with the long-tooths and now they plot the deaths of millions. The gray men would destroy everything we've shed our blood for."

"The Civil War?"

"All of 'em! Revolutionary, 1812, 'Tween the States, WW One and Two . . ."

I unfastened my shoulder harness. "Tell me about the gray men. What are their plans?"

There was a distant ululation. "Cock's crow: I caint stay. Come back tamorrow night and we'll meet agin."

"I don't know that I'll be able—"

"There'll be a cotillion. Come out the west side and walk down to the pond. The captain will meet with you there."

The door opened and the dome light revealed a human caricature that was half flesh, half denuded bone, wrapped in rags. It flopped out and slammed the door shut behind it. As it galloped across the parking lot, flapping like laundry on a line in a high wind, I could only make out thin sticks where fleshed-out arms and legs should be.

No one was home when I returned: no ghostly wife, no Deirdre, no vampire watchdogs. If the dead had come looking for me, they had long since left as the sky was starting to lighten in the east. Maybe they didn't care for the weather. Even though the sky was relatively clear, a cold front had moved in during the night dropping the temperature fifteen to twenty degrees.

I reset the alarm system, then turned it off so Deirdre wouldn't trigger it when she returned. Then I wandered back into my study before retiring for the morning.

The bookshelves had been sampled, the texts and tomes still grouped by subject but slightly out of the order I normally kept them in. Over on the desk, a yellow legal pad was skewed between the computer and a couple of unshelved books. I picked it up and considered Deirdre's neat notations as I wandered back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

There should have been three or four blood packs left over from the box I had brought home last month. I usually needed a single bag every week to ten days to stop my stomach from cannibalizing itself. In a pinch, I could go without—for how long? The last time I had quit, cold turkey, I had managed to last two and a half weeks while going through the most agonizing versions of the Two-Stage process I had ever experienced.

Stage One: you're afraid you're going to die.

Stage Two: you're afraid you're not going to die.

While I had serious reservations about getting the crimson monkey off my back I was determined to keep my need in check. Except for periods of stress or injury, I'd been able to limit my intake of hemoglobin on a consistent basis.

Until now.

Still, there should have been enough O-positive in the fridge to see me through a couple of weeks in the best of times, a couple of days during the worst.

But there was nothing. And I wasn't sure I could last until sundown.

I picked up a shrink-wrapped Styrofoam tray of raw hamburger and popped the plastic at the corner. Tilted and sipped the watery run-off. Eewwww.

Disgusting.

I parted the curtains and peered out the kitchen window. I could see the bayou in the ambient, predawn light, its black waters restive against the gray bank of grass at the end of my backyard. I calculated the time it would take to drive to the blood bank, use my passkey to boost another carton, and return home. I could do it without risking my life but the morning sun would likely negate any good a fresh pack of blood might provide.

Suck it up, Cséjthe, I told myself. You can last another day.

Under normal circumstances, I reminded myself, starting up the stairs. But even adjusting for spending the past year and a half in the Outer Limits, there was nothing "normal" about the past few days of my unlife.

Take the cast of characters that had joined my one-man traveling show of late.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote: "Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art." I wondered what Mike would make of my ongoing associations with vampires, corpses, and a ghost.

Well, "maybe" on the ghost.

Maybe I could scratch ghost/wife off my dramatis personae.

Maybe along with werewolf/girlfriend.

Samuel Johnson advised that a man "should keep his friendships in constant repair" and wrote that "true happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and choice."

Obviously, I needed a lot of work on both counts.

Like the guy in that Barry Manilow song, I was "standing at the end of a long, lonely road" and was "waiting for some new friends to come . . ."

It suddenly occurred to me that if I was identifying with Manilow songs it was long past time to pull the plug.

I kicked my shoes off and flopped on the bed. The names on Deirdre's legal pad reminded me that I could be surrounded by far worse than I had right now.

Erzsébet Báthory had acquired a jolly group of sadists and psychopaths in her unholy hobbies. With friends like hers, the dead and the undead didn't seem like such a great social burden.

After the influence of some of her bent and twisted relatives at an early age, there was her old nurse, Iloona Joo—referred to as "Helena Jo" in some texts. She seemed to be involved in Erzsébet's practice of the dark arts and her sadistic inclinations early on.

Dorthea Szentes, an old maid who claimed to be a practicing witch, instructed her in the disciplines of black magic. While Dorthea—affectionately called "Dorka"—didn't start out teaching torture as a technique of witchcraft, she eventually became an enthusiastic participant.

Erzsébet had enjoyed a succession of lovers from a young age, and marriage to Count Ferencz Nádasdy, the "Black Hero of Hungary," did not hamper her sexual appetites for variety as he spent a great deal of time away from home on military campaigns. Two of her paramours are worthy of note. The first was an unnamed stranger, described by contemporary accounts as being slim, pale, and possessing sharp teeth. The villagers took him for a vampire. Both Erzsébet and her mysterious lover disappeared for some time. She eventually reappeared. He did not.

Thus gossip—and probably nothing more than that—linked the Dracula and Báthory clans again, albeit briefly.

Her other notorious liaison was with her maid, Anna Darvula, reputed to be "one of the most active sadists in Erzsébet's entourage." A stroke eventually left Darvula blind and severely incapacitated, so she had to pass the torch (as it were) to the other perverts in Castle Cséjthe. This list included the dwarf majordomo, Johannes Ujvary, also called Thorko and referred to as Ficzko (which means "lad" in Hungarian) in Erzsébet's journals, a drunken peasant woman named Kardoska who helped obtain girls for the countess' sadistic pleasures, and Katarina Beneczky, about whom little is known other than the fact that she was the only one found "innocent" in the subsequent trials and released.

Erzsi Majorova almost escaped punishment, as well. She came into the story after Anna Darvula was forced into retirement and was said to be responsible for Erzsébet's eventual downfall by pushing the "noble blood is more potent than peasant blood" theory. She wasn't around for the first trial but they eventually caught up with her and she was beheaded after a second trial.

Thorko was beheaded, too. Extra precautions were taken: the sword used in the beheading was "blessed," the blood was drained from his body, and then his body was burned along with the bodies of his cohorts.

Iloona Joo and Dorthea Szentes were given even harsher treatment. Both were sentenced to having all the fingers on their hands—which had "dipped in the blood of Christians"—torn out, one by one, by the public executioner with a pair of red-hot pincers. After that was accomplished, their bodies were to be thrown alive on the fire.

Mercifully (if that word should even be applied here) the old nurse fainted after only four fingers were extracted. She was thrown unconscious into the fire. Likewise Dorthea Szentes, all fingers intact, who had fainted in the presence of Iloona Joo's torture. Justice gone soft, I suppose.

Anna Darvula died well before the trial so her punishment was doubtless taken to a higher court.

One hoped, anyway.

The concepts of justice, good, and even God were starting to dim in my mind like fading memories of playing in the sun. Was it because the virus was starting to color my thinking? Or was I finally more cognizant of the greater darkness that surrounds us all?

There are dreams that come with all the clarity of being a dream but that does not make them less terrible.

I walk into the castle's courtyard and believe the dream itself to be as monochrome as the old photographs in the trunks in my grandfather's attic. The walls and outbuildings, the keep, and especially the great, brooding tower are all constructed of black stone, quarried from the Carpathian mountains that encroach on the land like dark dreams made manifest. The sky is nearly as black; dark, swollen clouds block the weak winter sun and are dense with the wanton power of a gathering storm.

The architecture is harsh and brutal; the icy winds that blast down the mountain passes, even more so. Only the gentle slopes of drifting snow add any touch of softness to the iron-edged tableau.

The naked girl stumbles, falling to her hands and knees, sinking up to her elbows and haunches in the frigid bank of whiteness. Her skin, as white as the snow she wallows through, is marked by purple splotches of bruise, mauve stripes of whip marks and cuttings, brick-red punctures that weep scarlet tears: the first hint of color in the black and white and gray landscape. She struggles to her feet and I see her clearly now: young and yet old before her time, her malnourished and abused body could be fifteen or nineteen.

It will never be twenty.

The dwarf cracks a short whip behind her, driving her forward and across the courtyard. Toward the great, black iron cauldron.

An hour ago the fire beneath it had burned brightly, the water within bubbled merrily. Now the fire is banked, only a wisp of smoke suggests its previous existence; the water inside is already slushy with ice.

Two women move to the cauldron and dip buckets into its stew of water and ice. Like the dwarf, they are well wrapped against the piercing cold.

Their prey can only shield herself with blistered hands.

The women step forward and fling the contents of their pails as the girl tries to change direction. The water breaks over her like a wave, plastering her dark hair against her shockingly pale skin, sluicing her wounds so that they weep pink, washing away the last vestiges of warmth from her goose-dimpled flesh. She slips and falls upon her back, disappearing in the deep snow. She does not get up and the women turn back to the cauldron.

"This unnecessary cruelty will be your undoing, Betya," says a familiar voice.

I turn my face up to a window in the great tower. Even though they are hundreds of feet away, I can hear them over the howl of the winter wind as if I stand in the chamber, beside them.

"You are a fine one to lecture me, Old Dragon. Your atrocities were the excesses of legend a hundred years ago and time has done nothing to redeem your reputation."

"My so-called 'atrocities' were acts of war. Against superior forces. If I had not struck terror in the hearts of my enemies, Wallachia would have been overrun."

She dismisses his argument with a shrug. "Did any of it really matter? The Turks are everywhere, now. I barely see my husband because he is always off fighting the Ottomans. On the battlefield," she adds archly. "I seem to recall certain events that were closer to home. Ambassadors at court and the use of nails, the poor locked up in burning buildings, forced cannibalism—"

"One's enemies are not confined to the battlefields, Betya."

"I know. Oft they can be found in the bedroom," she says with a red smile.

Down below, the two women raise the naked girl to her feet. A third woman joins them and helps the dwarf douse the pale, limp form with more buckets of water.

"In your bedroom, my dear, everyone is the enemy."

"Not so, dearest Vladimir. Unlike you, I do not fear those I take to my bed. I love them."

"To death," he agrees. "But they fear and hate you so that makes you the enemy. It makes your own bed a battleground."

"Oh please! You seduce your lovers with mind control and pretend they come to you of their own free will. You are such a poseur!"

"I do not torture them, Betya. I do not make new enemies when there is no need. As voivode, I served a higher cause than my own vanity. What do such cruelties serve here?"

The women release the girl and she now stands unsupported, her white flesh touched with a translucent blue sheen. The water has formed a transparent cast over her features, the mouth frozen open in a silent scream, the eyes dark and empty like piss holes in the snow, the wounds like jeweled adornments of rubies and tourmaline. An ice sculpture of torment frozen in time.

"I serve The Darkness inside me, my prince. I must feed it or it will surely devour me. As it would devour all of my bloodline. We are bound to its dark service."

"You serve the witch, Betya. She will betray you. She will betray you all."

The countess laughs. "Does she frighten you, my lord? You of all people?"

"You should kill her," he growls, "before she can make her power over you complete!"

I turn away and stumble into the extended arms of another young woman, her face a mask of frozen blood, her embrace the iron bands of winter. Cold limbs leech the warmth from my sides and I fall against the ice shelf of her bosom. I try to push away but my hands can't find purchase on the downhill slopes of shoulder and hip. I twist away and am drenched with another bucketful of icy water . . . 

. . . icy sweat. I pulled at a cold arm and disentangled myself from her flaccid embrace.

Deirdre stirred and murmured something, lost in her own crimson dreams. I slid from my bed and pulled a sheet over to cover her snowy nakedness. Then staggered down the hall to the guest bedroom, shedding the clothes I had fallen asleep in earlier that morning.

I crawled into the empty bed.

Stopped and then got back up.

Went to the door.

Locked it.

Staggered back to the alien sheets.

And slid into a hazed and confused slumber where I crawled through a dreamscape of parched desert sands and over dunes of ground glass.

At some point the dream changed and I had become Quasimodo, perched precariously on the castle ramparts.

A mob storms the walls with scaling ladders while a semi-organized phalanx shoulders a great log and uses it as a battering ram.

"Sanctuary!" I shout down at them, "sanctuary!" I can barely hear myself over the noise. The bells peal in the bell tower above me while the pounding against the great gate below grows louder and louder.

"Leave me alone!" I cry. "Go away!"

But they won't go away. I will have to kill them to make them stop coming after me.

And, God help me, that is no longer a guarantee.

I opened my eyes to see Deirdre bending over me.

The doorbell continued to chime and the pounding on the front door reverberated throughout the whole house.

"Someone's at the door," she said.

I groaned. "Thank you, Lucas Buck."

"What?" She was still naked.

"Never mind." I sat up and felt something slosh inside my brainpan.

"Why are you in my room?" she asked.

"Why were you in mine?"

"Send whoever is downstairs away and I will show you," she answered lasciviously.

"Oh God . . ." I groaned my way off the edge of the bed and up and onto my feet. I stumbled back into my pants and fumbled into my shirt on the way down the stairs. Heedless of the afternoon sun, I yanked the front door open.

She was putting her full—if not particularly considerable—weight into her pounding. When the door gave way, so did she. I ended up on the floor with the diminutive woman sprawled across my lap.

"Detective Ruiz," I observed. "I see you favor the Lady Shaft line of faux leather trench coats. To what do I owe this . . . pleasure?"

She scrambled back onto her feet. Behind her, out on my doorstep, Detective Murray smiled affably. I thought about lending him one of my hats: the little Tyrolean number he was sporting today was especially hideous.

"The 'long arm of the law' is meant to be a figure of speech, Captain," I continued, starting the process of finding my own way back up. Murray extended a long arm of his own and grasped my hand. I was standing in no time.

"I'm still a lieutenant, Mr. Haim."

"Please, let's not stand on formalities, Detective. Just call me 'skel.' "

"You took a long time to answer the door, Haim," she said finally.

"This is the middle of the night for me, ma'am."

"We were making enough noise to wake the dead." Her eyes lit up when she saw that that phrase slide under my skin.

"Why don't you just mace me and get it over with?" I asked with a scowl.

Murray cleared his throat. "Dorcas . . ."

I looked at Ruiz. "Dorcas?"

"We wanted to ask you a few more questions," she said hurriedly.

"Always happy to assist the police," I said, "but your tone suggests I may want to consult a lawyer."

"All we really want to do is have your permission to look around your property," Murray continued in a rare burst of verbosity.

"The grounds or inside my house?" I asked.

"Does it matter?" Ruiz wanted to know.

"A dead body was found in the woods adjacent to my front yard. The murderer may have left evidence in the vicinity and there's always the possibility that some of it ended up over the property line. I'd certainly look around if I were you."

"Then you—"

My face hardened. "But the only reason to look around the inside of my house is if I'm considered to be a suspect." I gestured out the door. "Be my guest, tromp around my yard, crawl through my bushes, go around back and wade in the bayou. But you'll need a warrant if you want to come into my house."

"Something inside you don't want us to see?"

I stared down at her. "I have company right now. You're interrupting." I cocked an eyebrow.

She glared back up at me. "A lady friend?"

"Ever hear of 'don't ask, don't tell'?"

Murray started humming the theme from The Flintstones.

"Depends," Ruiz said, "on whether your 'company' is alive or dead."

I struggled to keep my expression neutral.

"Oh shit," said Murray. He was looking down into the flower bed beside my porch.

We all looked.

Between the impatiens and the creeping phlox was a ridge of white toadstools.

Then I saw that they weren't five little toadstools in a row: They were toes.

Curtis "Pops" Berry didn't look like a lawyer. Unless you were thinking of a lawyer from the 1800s who was taking a week off to go camping. His graying hair looked as though he'd missed his barber's appointment two months in a row and his beard hadn't seen a pair of scissors in two years. As usual, he was wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans and work boots. The tee shirt was emblazoned with the message: "Jesus Is Coming!" in bold red lettering. Beneath this platitude, in smaller, gold typeface was the addendum: "And boy is He pissed!"

He hadn't felt it necessary to don his denim ("working") blazer, he explained, since I was being released without bail, without even an arraignment. Apparently my whereabouts were fully checked out and accounted for during the period of time that Kandi Fenoli had once again disappeared from the morgue. My alibi appeared airtight.

It took Pops a little longer to get my hat and sunglasses out of lockup than it did to spring Yours Truly. He handed them to me before escorting me out into the late-afternoon daylight.

Outside the sky was heavily overcast and it looked about three hours later than it really was. I kept the hat and sunglasses on: clouds don't mean diddley when it comes to UV radiation.

"They did a quick search of your house," Pops said as he shepherded me across the street and fished for the remote in his pocket.

"They what?"

"Detective Ruiz is citing 'probable cause.' Says you alluded to a potential accomplice in the house. I say it's pretty damn weak even if there had been another party present and you may have grounds for a lawsuit." He found the remote and a purple Lexus chirped a row away from us. Pops liked comfortable things—clothes or cars, cost wasn't the determining factor.

"Did they trash the place?"

"Nope. Checked it out, myself, on the way over. They just looked around enough to ascertain that no one else was inside. The real damage would seem to be to Detective Ruiz's ego: she says you deliberately set her up."

"I don't think I've seen the last of Dorcas."

We opened the doors and slid in, buckling up.

"Now that we're out of earshot I want to ask you the same question they did, and remind you that anything you say will fall under the umbrella of lawyer-client privilege." He started the engine and navigated us back out into traffic as a few random drops began to kamikaze against the windshield.

I sighed. "I know: do I have any enemies? Any enemies who would replant a corpse right next to my front door?"

"Son, I've seen a lot of weird shit during my life—especially the last five years—and I don't think anything would totally surprise me anymore." He looked at me sidewise. "You may be keeping a couple of surprises from me and that's okay—I have a sense about most people and I won't abide a crooked client. You may have a couple of kinks in your closet but I don't read you for anything crooked. But I can't help you unless I know what kind of trouble you're really in.

"Speaking of which, you want to stop by the emergency room on the way home? You look like hell on roller skates!"

We stopped by the blood bank instead. My "medical condition" is just vague enough to most people for them to accept that I self-medicate and require occasional infusions of whole blood. Being owner of the blood bank and having all kinds of official-looking paperwork was sufficient to have me in and back out the door in five minutes. I wouldn't have to come back after closing with my passkey.

"Looks like you have a welcoming committee," Pops observed as we motored up my driveway.

Theresa-call-me-Terry was sitting on my front step.

"Two dead bodies were found on your property," she said as I tried to keep her from noticing the blood labeling on the box I was sliding into the refrigerator.

"Just one, actually," I said, trying to figure out how soon I could get her into a cab so I could tear through a packet of blood. "They found the same one twice." I filled a pan with water and set it on the stove to heat up.

"Really?" she said, eyes opening wide.

Oops—not thinking clearly at all!

"It's complicated," I said. "Look, Theresa—"

"Call me 'T.' "

"—I've had a really rough day and I'm not feeling too well—"

"Is that why you brought home that blood from the blood bank?"

"—and I need to go to bed. Please go home."

She stared at me, daring me for an explanation.

I stared back, gearing up to erase her memory of the last ten minutes. The trick was to be precise enough so that she didn't end up wondering how she suddenly ended up here in the first place.

The telephone rang. The answering machine picked and went into its "leave a message" spiel.

"After this call, I'm calling you a cab."

Terry-call-me-T cocked her head to the side and studied me as if I had spoken in tongues.

"Sam?" Chalice's voice. Interesting: we were on a first-name basis, now. "I'm still at the lab. I'm sorry I haven't called sooner but I've stayed over and run every test I can think of on your blood and—and—I don't know what to say!"

I looked at my uninvited guest, whose attention had shifted to the answering machine: Uh-oh.

I dodged toward the telephone as Chalice said: "I never would have believed your story about vampires and werewolves if I hadn't been responsible for the results, myself. Your blood—"

I snatched up the receiver. "Chalice, I'm here."

"Sam! This is incredible!"

Unfortunately, answering the phone did not immediately disconnect the answering machine: both of our voices were now amplified through the little speaker, producing squealy feedback.

"We've got to bring other researchers in on this!"

"No!" I said, looking back at Terry-call-me-T. "And I can't talk right now."

"But the genetic mutations in your hemoglobin, your DNA—you may be the key to all of our research projects! The more people we bring in on this—"

"Absolutely not!" I pushed, straining sub-vocals to impress my point. "You cannot tell anyone else!" 

"I won't," she said, the pout evident in her voice. "But running samples through the analyzers and sequencers is a guarantee that someone is going to notice sooner or later."

Shit! "I cannot stress this enough, Chalice: no one else must find out! It could well mean my life!"

"What about my life? If you bit me would my blood—"

"I can't talk right now!" I slammed the receiver down and leaned over the machine with my back to my precocious eavesdropper.

"How about if you bit me?" she said after a moment.

"Nobody's biting anybody here." I turned around. "And you are going home."

"Am I?"

"Yes. Look into my eyes."

She looked. "Oh, I see. You're going to hypnotize me—use mind control. Like you did with Rod." She positively beamed. "Was I right about you or what?"

"It doesn't matter," I said. "Because you won't remember any of this. In a moment you'll be leaving. You won't remember anything about coming here. You won't remember anything you heard or saw. You won't ever have the urge to come back and visit my house." I hesitated. "And you will go to the Registrar's office tomorrow and drop my class."

She turned away from me and walked back into the kitchen. I heard the clack of the stove burner as she turned it off and then the sound of a drawer opening. She returned with a paring knife.

"You know what?" she said with a bright and chipper tone, "you're the one who's getting sleepy. You can hardly keep your eyes open. You don't need that warmed-over stale plasma. You want the real deal, fresh and hot from the heart." She drew the blade across her forearm, and rivulets of red welled up in its wake. She extended the arm (the flow, the feast!) toward me as an offering.

I took a step, staggering. "No," I said. "Let me get you . . . some . . . bandages," I whispered. The world faded around me, Terry receded. The arm was all that was left. The ribbon of life, precious life—flowing, cresting, surging!

"Hello," said a voice from the stairway. "Are we having company?"

I forced my eyes away from the blood (the blood, yes, the blood) and looked over at Deirdre who was drifting down to the first floor. She yawned, putting three-quarter-inch fangs on display. "Planning on starting without me?"

Terry's eyes had grown large. "Coool!" she said.

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Framed

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Chapter Eleven

My wife was just as obedient in death as she had been in life: when I returned to the car she wasn't there.

Something else was: the odor settled over me as soon as I closed the door and buckled on my shoulder harness. It smelled of wet leaves and musty attics—a far cry from the rotted perfume of my three previous supplicants. I looked in the rearview mirror but the backseat appeared to be empty.

A wispy voice spoke behind me: "You're him, ain'tcha? That Baron fella?"

I swallowed. It didn't help. "Actually, I'm not."

A pair of ancient eyes appeared at the top of my seat in the mirror: he was behind me, crouching on the floor. "Sure you are. That old juju woman says you are. And you got the Shine. I kin see it myself." A pair of eyes and a nose was all I could see without turning around. A saggy, billed woolen cap of faded blue covered the top of his head.

A soldier's cap.

A Union soldier's cap.

Circa middle 1800s.

"She says you got some neezia or sumpin."

I sighed. "What can I do for you, son?"

"The captain sends his regards and wants to know what you intend to do about the incursion of the enemy."

I was tired and my skin was starting to itch and burn again. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. "Which ones?"

"Why—all of 'em, I guess. Them long-tooths, the carpetbaggers, the gray men."

"Carpetbaggers?" I turned around—or tried but found myself hampered by the shoulder harness. "You don't talk like a Yankee soldier, boy."

"Guess I ain't no Yankee soldier no more." His voice was soft and sad, a whispery, ghostlike sound less real than the pale flesh crouching behind me. "We're all not what we were anymore."

"You-all being . . . who?"

"Twenty-third Infantry down out of Iowa and a bunch of Johnny Rebs from Colonel Harrison's Fortieth Louisiana Cavalry. We mixed it up here in the winter of—" he paused as if searching through tattered memories, "—'63. Cut each other up pretty good. Then somebody up and shot that nigra woman. Probably an accident. Nobody knows which side and it don't matter. She cursed both sides afore she died and pinned our souls here in the swamp where we fell."

"Here?" I asked, looking over the BioWeb complex of buildings.

"They drained the swamps 'bout near fifty year ago. Found some of us then and moved those remains to the local cemeteries and museum. Dug some more of us up about five year back when they built this abomination. Dug up some dragon bones, too."

"Dragon bones?"

"Captain calls it a fossil. Says it died milyuns a' years ago so its bones have turned to rock. They never tol' nobody, they just put it back alongst with those of us they found. Why would they do thet? Deny a soldier his release and final ticket home?"

I shook my head. "There are laws that would have guaranteed your final interment and rest, soldier. But the people who built this place are a lawless band. They only use the laws that will serve their purposes and ignore the rest. It was more important to them to finish construction on schedule than to honor the dead."

I saw him nod in the rearview mirror. "So other'n that little bit of excitement, the rest of us been lyin' under the silt and clay just talkin' amongst ourselves these past hundert-and-fifty-some year, figurin' out what's what and what's not.

"And lissenin' to the plans of the gray men," he added with some heat. "It ain't right!"

"The Confederates?"

"Naw, we all the same now: dead men, soldiers, patriots. This is as much my land as theirs now and we all salute the same flag. Hell, we been together so long we even talk the same. The captain wore the gray but I take my orders from him now as he's the ranking officer on post. He's the one what sent me as I'm the most presentable so far."

"But you said 'the gray men'."

"The enemy. They still breathe but they souls is all dead and gray inside. They the enemy. They allied themselves with the long-tooths and now they plot the deaths of millions. The gray men would destroy everything we've shed our blood for."

"The Civil War?"

"All of 'em! Revolutionary, 1812, 'Tween the States, WW One and Two . . ."

I unfastened my shoulder harness. "Tell me about the gray men. What are their plans?"

There was a distant ululation. "Cock's crow: I caint stay. Come back tamorrow night and we'll meet agin."

"I don't know that I'll be able—"

"There'll be a cotillion. Come out the west side and walk down to the pond. The captain will meet with you there."

The door opened and the dome light revealed a human caricature that was half flesh, half denuded bone, wrapped in rags. It flopped out and slammed the door shut behind it. As it galloped across the parking lot, flapping like laundry on a line in a high wind, I could only make out thin sticks where fleshed-out arms and legs should be.

No one was home when I returned: no ghostly wife, no Deirdre, no vampire watchdogs. If the dead had come looking for me, they had long since left as the sky was starting to lighten in the east. Maybe they didn't care for the weather. Even though the sky was relatively clear, a cold front had moved in during the night dropping the temperature fifteen to twenty degrees.

I reset the alarm system, then turned it off so Deirdre wouldn't trigger it when she returned. Then I wandered back into my study before retiring for the morning.

The bookshelves had been sampled, the texts and tomes still grouped by subject but slightly out of the order I normally kept them in. Over on the desk, a yellow legal pad was skewed between the computer and a couple of unshelved books. I picked it up and considered Deirdre's neat notations as I wandered back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

There should have been three or four blood packs left over from the box I had brought home last month. I usually needed a single bag every week to ten days to stop my stomach from cannibalizing itself. In a pinch, I could go without—for how long? The last time I had quit, cold turkey, I had managed to last two and a half weeks while going through the most agonizing versions of the Two-Stage process I had ever experienced.

Stage One: you're afraid you're going to die.

Stage Two: you're afraid you're not going to die.

While I had serious reservations about getting the crimson monkey off my back I was determined to keep my need in check. Except for periods of stress or injury, I'd been able to limit my intake of hemoglobin on a consistent basis.

Until now.

Still, there should have been enough O-positive in the fridge to see me through a couple of weeks in the best of times, a couple of days during the worst.

But there was nothing. And I wasn't sure I could last until sundown.

I picked up a shrink-wrapped Styrofoam tray of raw hamburger and popped the plastic at the corner. Tilted and sipped the watery run-off. Eewwww.

Disgusting.

I parted the curtains and peered out the kitchen window. I could see the bayou in the ambient, predawn light, its black waters restive against the gray bank of grass at the end of my backyard. I calculated the time it would take to drive to the blood bank, use my passkey to boost another carton, and return home. I could do it without risking my life but the morning sun would likely negate any good a fresh pack of blood might provide.

Suck it up, Cséjthe, I told myself. You can last another day.

Under normal circumstances, I reminded myself, starting up the stairs. But even adjusting for spending the past year and a half in the Outer Limits, there was nothing "normal" about the past few days of my unlife.

Take the cast of characters that had joined my one-man traveling show of late.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote: "Tell me what company thou keepst, and I'll tell thee what thou art." I wondered what Mike would make of my ongoing associations with vampires, corpses, and a ghost.

Well, "maybe" on the ghost.

Maybe I could scratch ghost/wife off my dramatis personae.

Maybe along with werewolf/girlfriend.

Samuel Johnson advised that a man "should keep his friendships in constant repair" and wrote that "true happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and choice."

Obviously, I needed a lot of work on both counts.

Like the guy in that Barry Manilow song, I was "standing at the end of a long, lonely road" and was "waiting for some new friends to come . . ."

It suddenly occurred to me that if I was identifying with Manilow songs it was long past time to pull the plug.

I kicked my shoes off and flopped on the bed. The names on Deirdre's legal pad reminded me that I could be surrounded by far worse than I had right now.

Erzsébet Báthory had acquired a jolly group of sadists and psychopaths in her unholy hobbies. With friends like hers, the dead and the undead didn't seem like such a great social burden.

After the influence of some of her bent and twisted relatives at an early age, there was her old nurse, Iloona Joo—referred to as "Helena Jo" in some texts. She seemed to be involved in Erzsébet's practice of the dark arts and her sadistic inclinations early on.

Dorthea Szentes, an old maid who claimed to be a practicing witch, instructed her in the disciplines of black magic. While Dorthea—affectionately called "Dorka"—didn't start out teaching torture as a technique of witchcraft, she eventually became an enthusiastic participant.

Erzsébet had enjoyed a succession of lovers from a young age, and marriage to Count Ferencz Nádasdy, the "Black Hero of Hungary," did not hamper her sexual appetites for variety as he spent a great deal of time away from home on military campaigns. Two of her paramours are worthy of note. The first was an unnamed stranger, described by contemporary accounts as being slim, pale, and possessing sharp teeth. The villagers took him for a vampire. Both Erzsébet and her mysterious lover disappeared for some time. She eventually reappeared. He did not.

Thus gossip—and probably nothing more than that—linked the Dracula and Báthory clans again, albeit briefly.

Her other notorious liaison was with her maid, Anna Darvula, reputed to be "one of the most active sadists in Erzsébet's entourage." A stroke eventually left Darvula blind and severely incapacitated, so she had to pass the torch (as it were) to the other perverts in Castle Cséjthe. This list included the dwarf majordomo, Johannes Ujvary, also called Thorko and referred to as Ficzko (which means "lad" in Hungarian) in Erzsébet's journals, a drunken peasant woman named Kardoska who helped obtain girls for the countess' sadistic pleasures, and Katarina Beneczky, about whom little is known other than the fact that she was the only one found "innocent" in the subsequent trials and released.

Erzsi Majorova almost escaped punishment, as well. She came into the story after Anna Darvula was forced into retirement and was said to be responsible for Erzsébet's eventual downfall by pushing the "noble blood is more potent than peasant blood" theory. She wasn't around for the first trial but they eventually caught up with her and she was beheaded after a second trial.

Thorko was beheaded, too. Extra precautions were taken: the sword used in the beheading was "blessed," the blood was drained from his body, and then his body was burned along with the bodies of his cohorts.

Iloona Joo and Dorthea Szentes were given even harsher treatment. Both were sentenced to having all the fingers on their hands—which had "dipped in the blood of Christians"—torn out, one by one, by the public executioner with a pair of red-hot pincers. After that was accomplished, their bodies were to be thrown alive on the fire.

Mercifully (if that word should even be applied here) the old nurse fainted after only four fingers were extracted. She was thrown unconscious into the fire. Likewise Dorthea Szentes, all fingers intact, who had fainted in the presence of Iloona Joo's torture. Justice gone soft, I suppose.

Anna Darvula died well before the trial so her punishment was doubtless taken to a higher court.

One hoped, anyway.

The concepts of justice, good, and even God were starting to dim in my mind like fading memories of playing in the sun. Was it because the virus was starting to color my thinking? Or was I finally more cognizant of the greater darkness that surrounds us all?

There are dreams that come with all the clarity of being a dream but that does not make them less terrible.

I walk into the castle's courtyard and believe the dream itself to be as monochrome as the old photographs in the trunks in my grandfather's attic. The walls and outbuildings, the keep, and especially the great, brooding tower are all constructed of black stone, quarried from the Carpathian mountains that encroach on the land like dark dreams made manifest. The sky is nearly as black; dark, swollen clouds block the weak winter sun and are dense with the wanton power of a gathering storm.

The architecture is harsh and brutal; the icy winds that blast down the mountain passes, even more so. Only the gentle slopes of drifting snow add any touch of softness to the iron-edged tableau.

The naked girl stumbles, falling to her hands and knees, sinking up to her elbows and haunches in the frigid bank of whiteness. Her skin, as white as the snow she wallows through, is marked by purple splotches of bruise, mauve stripes of whip marks and cuttings, brick-red punctures that weep scarlet tears: the first hint of color in the black and white and gray landscape. She struggles to her feet and I see her clearly now: young and yet old before her time, her malnourished and abused body could be fifteen or nineteen.

It will never be twenty.

The dwarf cracks a short whip behind her, driving her forward and across the courtyard. Toward the great, black iron cauldron.

An hour ago the fire beneath it had burned brightly, the water within bubbled merrily. Now the fire is banked, only a wisp of smoke suggests its previous existence; the water inside is already slushy with ice.

Two women move to the cauldron and dip buckets into its stew of water and ice. Like the dwarf, they are well wrapped against the piercing cold.

Their prey can only shield herself with blistered hands.

The women step forward and fling the contents of their pails as the girl tries to change direction. The water breaks over her like a wave, plastering her dark hair against her shockingly pale skin, sluicing her wounds so that they weep pink, washing away the last vestiges of warmth from her goose-dimpled flesh. She slips and falls upon her back, disappearing in the deep snow. She does not get up and the women turn back to the cauldron.

"This unnecessary cruelty will be your undoing, Betya," says a familiar voice.

I turn my face up to a window in the great tower. Even though they are hundreds of feet away, I can hear them over the howl of the winter wind as if I stand in the chamber, beside them.

"You are a fine one to lecture me, Old Dragon. Your atrocities were the excesses of legend a hundred years ago and time has done nothing to redeem your reputation."

"My so-called 'atrocities' were acts of war. Against superior forces. If I had not struck terror in the hearts of my enemies, Wallachia would have been overrun."

She dismisses his argument with a shrug. "Did any of it really matter? The Turks are everywhere, now. I barely see my husband because he is always off fighting the Ottomans. On the battlefield," she adds archly. "I seem to recall certain events that were closer to home. Ambassadors at court and the use of nails, the poor locked up in burning buildings, forced cannibalism—"

"One's enemies are not confined to the battlefields, Betya."

"I know. Oft they can be found in the bedroom," she says with a red smile.

Down below, the two women raise the naked girl to her feet. A third woman joins them and helps the dwarf douse the pale, limp form with more buckets of water.

"In your bedroom, my dear, everyone is the enemy."

"Not so, dearest Vladimir. Unlike you, I do not fear those I take to my bed. I love them."

"To death," he agrees. "But they fear and hate you so that makes you the enemy. It makes your own bed a battleground."

"Oh please! You seduce your lovers with mind control and pretend they come to you of their own free will. You are such a poseur!"

"I do not torture them, Betya. I do not make new enemies when there is no need. As voivode, I served a higher cause than my own vanity. What do such cruelties serve here?"

The women release the girl and she now stands unsupported, her white flesh touched with a translucent blue sheen. The water has formed a transparent cast over her features, the mouth frozen open in a silent scream, the eyes dark and empty like piss holes in the snow, the wounds like jeweled adornments of rubies and tourmaline. An ice sculpture of torment frozen in time.

"I serve The Darkness inside me, my prince. I must feed it or it will surely devour me. As it would devour all of my bloodline. We are bound to its dark service."

"You serve the witch, Betya. She will betray you. She will betray you all."

The countess laughs. "Does she frighten you, my lord? You of all people?"

"You should kill her," he growls, "before she can make her power over you complete!"

I turn away and stumble into the extended arms of another young woman, her face a mask of frozen blood, her embrace the iron bands of winter. Cold limbs leech the warmth from my sides and I fall against the ice shelf of her bosom. I try to push away but my hands can't find purchase on the downhill slopes of shoulder and hip. I twist away and am drenched with another bucketful of icy water . . . 

. . . icy sweat. I pulled at a cold arm and disentangled myself from her flaccid embrace.

Deirdre stirred and murmured something, lost in her own crimson dreams. I slid from my bed and pulled a sheet over to cover her snowy nakedness. Then staggered down the hall to the guest bedroom, shedding the clothes I had fallen asleep in earlier that morning.

I crawled into the empty bed.

Stopped and then got back up.

Went to the door.

Locked it.

Staggered back to the alien sheets.

And slid into a hazed and confused slumber where I crawled through a dreamscape of parched desert sands and over dunes of ground glass.

At some point the dream changed and I had become Quasimodo, perched precariously on the castle ramparts.

A mob storms the walls with scaling ladders while a semi-organized phalanx shoulders a great log and uses it as a battering ram.

"Sanctuary!" I shout down at them, "sanctuary!" I can barely hear myself over the noise. The bells peal in the bell tower above me while the pounding against the great gate below grows louder and louder.

"Leave me alone!" I cry. "Go away!"

But they won't go away. I will have to kill them to make them stop coming after me.

And, God help me, that is no longer a guarantee.

I opened my eyes to see Deirdre bending over me.

The doorbell continued to chime and the pounding on the front door reverberated throughout the whole house.

"Someone's at the door," she said.

I groaned. "Thank you, Lucas Buck."

"What?" She was still naked.

"Never mind." I sat up and felt something slosh inside my brainpan.

"Why are you in my room?" she asked.

"Why were you in mine?"

"Send whoever is downstairs away and I will show you," she answered lasciviously.

"Oh God . . ." I groaned my way off the edge of the bed and up and onto my feet. I stumbled back into my pants and fumbled into my shirt on the way down the stairs. Heedless of the afternoon sun, I yanked the front door open.

She was putting her full—if not particularly considerable—weight into her pounding. When the door gave way, so did she. I ended up on the floor with the diminutive woman sprawled across my lap.

"Detective Ruiz," I observed. "I see you favor the Lady Shaft line of faux leather trench coats. To what do I owe this . . . pleasure?"

She scrambled back onto her feet. Behind her, out on my doorstep, Detective Murray smiled affably. I thought about lending him one of my hats: the little Tyrolean number he was sporting today was especially hideous.

"The 'long arm of the law' is meant to be a figure of speech, Captain," I continued, starting the process of finding my own way back up. Murray extended a long arm of his own and grasped my hand. I was standing in no time.

"I'm still a lieutenant, Mr. Haim."

"Please, let's not stand on formalities, Detective. Just call me 'skel.' "

"You took a long time to answer the door, Haim," she said finally.

"This is the middle of the night for me, ma'am."

"We were making enough noise to wake the dead." Her eyes lit up when she saw that that phrase slide under my skin.

"Why don't you just mace me and get it over with?" I asked with a scowl.

Murray cleared his throat. "Dorcas . . ."

I looked at Ruiz. "Dorcas?"

"We wanted to ask you a few more questions," she said hurriedly.

"Always happy to assist the police," I said, "but your tone suggests I may want to consult a lawyer."

"All we really want to do is have your permission to look around your property," Murray continued in a rare burst of verbosity.

"The grounds or inside my house?" I asked.

"Does it matter?" Ruiz wanted to know.

"A dead body was found in the woods adjacent to my front yard. The murderer may have left evidence in the vicinity and there's always the possibility that some of it ended up over the property line. I'd certainly look around if I were you."

"Then you—"

My face hardened. "But the only reason to look around the inside of my house is if I'm considered to be a suspect." I gestured out the door. "Be my guest, tromp around my yard, crawl through my bushes, go around back and wade in the bayou. But you'll need a warrant if you want to come into my house."

"Something inside you don't want us to see?"

I stared down at her. "I have company right now. You're interrupting." I cocked an eyebrow.

She glared back up at me. "A lady friend?"

"Ever hear of 'don't ask, don't tell'?"

Murray started humming the theme from The Flintstones.

"Depends," Ruiz said, "on whether your 'company' is alive or dead."

I struggled to keep my expression neutral.

"Oh shit," said Murray. He was looking down into the flower bed beside my porch.

We all looked.

Between the impatiens and the creeping phlox was a ridge of white toadstools.

Then I saw that they weren't five little toadstools in a row: They were toes.

Curtis "Pops" Berry didn't look like a lawyer. Unless you were thinking of a lawyer from the 1800s who was taking a week off to go camping. His graying hair looked as though he'd missed his barber's appointment two months in a row and his beard hadn't seen a pair of scissors in two years. As usual, he was wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans and work boots. The tee shirt was emblazoned with the message: "Jesus Is Coming!" in bold red lettering. Beneath this platitude, in smaller, gold typeface was the addendum: "And boy is He pissed!"

He hadn't felt it necessary to don his denim ("working") blazer, he explained, since I was being released without bail, without even an arraignment. Apparently my whereabouts were fully checked out and accounted for during the period of time that Kandi Fenoli had once again disappeared from the morgue. My alibi appeared airtight.

It took Pops a little longer to get my hat and sunglasses out of lockup than it did to spring Yours Truly. He handed them to me before escorting me out into the late-afternoon daylight.

Outside the sky was heavily overcast and it looked about three hours later than it really was. I kept the hat and sunglasses on: clouds don't mean diddley when it comes to UV radiation.

"They did a quick search of your house," Pops said as he shepherded me across the street and fished for the remote in his pocket.

"They what?"

"Detective Ruiz is citing 'probable cause.' Says you alluded to a potential accomplice in the house. I say it's pretty damn weak even if there had been another party present and you may have grounds for a lawsuit." He found the remote and a purple Lexus chirped a row away from us. Pops liked comfortable things—clothes or cars, cost wasn't the determining factor.

"Did they trash the place?"

"Nope. Checked it out, myself, on the way over. They just looked around enough to ascertain that no one else was inside. The real damage would seem to be to Detective Ruiz's ego: she says you deliberately set her up."

"I don't think I've seen the last of Dorcas."

We opened the doors and slid in, buckling up.

"Now that we're out of earshot I want to ask you the same question they did, and remind you that anything you say will fall under the umbrella of lawyer-client privilege." He started the engine and navigated us back out into traffic as a few random drops began to kamikaze against the windshield.

I sighed. "I know: do I have any enemies? Any enemies who would replant a corpse right next to my front door?"

"Son, I've seen a lot of weird shit during my life—especially the last five years—and I don't think anything would totally surprise me anymore." He looked at me sidewise. "You may be keeping a couple of surprises from me and that's okay—I have a sense about most people and I won't abide a crooked client. You may have a couple of kinks in your closet but I don't read you for anything crooked. But I can't help you unless I know what kind of trouble you're really in.

"Speaking of which, you want to stop by the emergency room on the way home? You look like hell on roller skates!"

We stopped by the blood bank instead. My "medical condition" is just vague enough to most people for them to accept that I self-medicate and require occasional infusions of whole blood. Being owner of the blood bank and having all kinds of official-looking paperwork was sufficient to have me in and back out the door in five minutes. I wouldn't have to come back after closing with my passkey.

"Looks like you have a welcoming committee," Pops observed as we motored up my driveway.

Theresa-call-me-Terry was sitting on my front step.

"Two dead bodies were found on your property," she said as I tried to keep her from noticing the blood labeling on the box I was sliding into the refrigerator.

"Just one, actually," I said, trying to figure out how soon I could get her into a cab so I could tear through a packet of blood. "They found the same one twice." I filled a pan with water and set it on the stove to heat up.

"Really?" she said, eyes opening wide.

Oops—not thinking clearly at all!

"It's complicated," I said. "Look, Theresa—"

"Call me 'T.' "

"—I've had a really rough day and I'm not feeling too well—"

"Is that why you brought home that blood from the blood bank?"

"—and I need to go to bed. Please go home."

She stared at me, daring me for an explanation.

I stared back, gearing up to erase her memory of the last ten minutes. The trick was to be precise enough so that she didn't end up wondering how she suddenly ended up here in the first place.

The telephone rang. The answering machine picked and went into its "leave a message" spiel.

"After this call, I'm calling you a cab."

Terry-call-me-T cocked her head to the side and studied me as if I had spoken in tongues.

"Sam?" Chalice's voice. Interesting: we were on a first-name basis, now. "I'm still at the lab. I'm sorry I haven't called sooner but I've stayed over and run every test I can think of on your blood and—and—I don't know what to say!"

I looked at my uninvited guest, whose attention had shifted to the answering machine: Uh-oh.

I dodged toward the telephone as Chalice said: "I never would have believed your story about vampires and werewolves if I hadn't been responsible for the results, myself. Your blood—"

I snatched up the receiver. "Chalice, I'm here."

"Sam! This is incredible!"

Unfortunately, answering the phone did not immediately disconnect the answering machine: both of our voices were now amplified through the little speaker, producing squealy feedback.

"We've got to bring other researchers in on this!"

"No!" I said, looking back at Terry-call-me-T. "And I can't talk right now."

"But the genetic mutations in your hemoglobin, your DNA—you may be the key to all of our research projects! The more people we bring in on this—"

"Absolutely not!" I pushed, straining sub-vocals to impress my point. "You cannot tell anyone else!" 

"I won't," she said, the pout evident in her voice. "But running samples through the analyzers and sequencers is a guarantee that someone is going to notice sooner or later."

Shit! "I cannot stress this enough, Chalice: no one else must find out! It could well mean my life!"

"What about my life? If you bit me would my blood—"

"I can't talk right now!" I slammed the receiver down and leaned over the machine with my back to my precocious eavesdropper.

"How about if you bit me?" she said after a moment.

"Nobody's biting anybody here." I turned around. "And you are going home."

"Am I?"

"Yes. Look into my eyes."

She looked. "Oh, I see. You're going to hypnotize me—use mind control. Like you did with Rod." She positively beamed. "Was I right about you or what?"

"It doesn't matter," I said. "Because you won't remember any of this. In a moment you'll be leaving. You won't remember anything about coming here. You won't remember anything you heard or saw. You won't ever have the urge to come back and visit my house." I hesitated. "And you will go to the Registrar's office tomorrow and drop my class."

She turned away from me and walked back into the kitchen. I heard the clack of the stove burner as she turned it off and then the sound of a drawer opening. She returned with a paring knife.

"You know what?" she said with a bright and chipper tone, "you're the one who's getting sleepy. You can hardly keep your eyes open. You don't need that warmed-over stale plasma. You want the real deal, fresh and hot from the heart." She drew the blade across her forearm, and rivulets of red welled up in its wake. She extended the arm (the flow, the feast!) toward me as an offering.

I took a step, staggering. "No," I said. "Let me get you . . . some . . . bandages," I whispered. The world faded around me, Terry receded. The arm was all that was left. The ribbon of life, precious life—flowing, cresting, surging!

"Hello," said a voice from the stairway. "Are we having company?"

I forced my eyes away from the blood (the blood, yes, the blood) and looked over at Deirdre who was drifting down to the first floor. She yawned, putting three-quarter-inch fangs on display. "Planning on starting without me?"

Terry's eyes had grown large. "Coool!" she said.

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Framed