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Chapter Twenty-one

"Oh my God!" I said, doubling over, "I'm going to be sick!" I jumped up off the bed and ran toward the bathroom, clutching my stomach. The bathroom was roomy—luxury-sized just like the bedroom. The tub was a doublewide Jacuzzi and the twin sinks were half-partitioned off from the rest of the facilities. There was no window, only a fine-meshed ventilation grill capping ductwork that would give a rat claustrophobia. The door had a lock and I pushed the button in for the illusion of privacy. If Báthory or her minions wanted in, neither the lock nor the flimsy door would give them a second's pause.

I sat on the toilet seat and bowed my head. I had but one chance and it was a slim one.

Since I first learned about vampiric translocation about a year before, I had managed to successfully pull it off fewer than a dozen times. My last attempt—following my little tussle with Je Rouge, Mr. Delacroix's brief resurrection, and hosting my post-mortem accident victim—was the first time I had managed to pull it off while under stress.

I usually failed, even when meditating under the most ideal of conditions. The question was, could I do it now? Hostile forces surrounded me. Deirdre and Theresa were on their way to protracted, horrific deaths. The third most ancient and powerful vampire I had ever known was just on the other side of a door that was one step up from papier-mâché.

My only chance was that my luck had hit bottom hard enough for me to hitch a ride on the rebound.

"Christopher . . . are you all right?" The door was barely a barrier to Báthory's voice.

"Leave me alone!" I yelled. "I'm sick!" I flushed the toilet for corroborative sound effects.

"Poor Christopher," she crooned. "I'll come back when you're feeling better." The sound of retreating footsteps was encouraging—until my hypersensitive ears heard her say: "Awake now, are we? I'm locking him in but I want you right outside the bathroom door, just in case. Think you can handle it, Viktor?"

"Y-yes, my lady!"

"Because if you can't, we can roll an extra gurney into Red Two."

Two sets of footfalls moved toward the outer door.

I tried to relax. I couldn't unclench my teeth.

Don't think about how little time you have. This is the only way past Báthory and her goons. This is the only way to reach Deirdre and Theresa. The only way. 

The only way.

Only way.

The tunnel.

Tunnel.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Stop breathing.

Death.

The tunnel.

Death is but the doorway . . . 

To new life . . . 

We live today . . . 

We shall live again . . . 

In many forms . . . 

Shall we return . . . 

Return . . . 

Return . . . 

I didn't know what forces still roiled through the charged atmosphere of BioWeb's labyrinthine facilities, but this time there was a sensation of movement, like tunneling through murky water. I felt my hackles rise and, with them, the fur along my spine. I ran in the darkness upon all four limbs, my snout straining for the scent that would lead me to Deirdre. A golden thread of pheromones looped off to one side and I followed, falling, tumbling.

I came out of the tunnel and into the brightness, rolling across the floor and into the backstop of a row of cabinets. I lurched to my feet to confront the vampire named Jahn. He was standing behind the autopsy table where Deirdre struggled against heavy straps buckled about her wrists and left ankle. Her right foot flailed about, Jahn having only made it that far when I popped in. Clearly, the sight of a naked man tumbling out of empty air was more of a major distraction than two naked women strapped down and apparently unable to move: Jahn's jaw dropped open, which made Deirdre's forceful, upwards kick all the more devastating as her foot smashed into his chin. His head snapped back and he went over backwards like a stunt double in a chop-socky kung-fu movie.

Jahn was down but not out. I had just enough time to unbuckle Deirdre's left wrist restraint before Jahn popped up like some giant, creepy Jack-in-the-Box from Vamps-R-Us.

"Look out!" Deirdre exclaimed unnecessarily.

"You're naked!" Theresa shrieked even more unnecessarily. "Omigod! Why are you naked?"

Jahn didn't attack me immediately. The whole "appear out of thin air" thing was not only a major showstopper, it was a provenance limited to the undead "ruling class." Manhandling the enlisted fangs and the occasional nosferatu noncom was one thing. Jahn might be Elizabeth Báthory's creature, but this was probably the first time he'd been confronted by someone with a Doman's credentials from the outside and off his home turf.

"They're mine!" I declared, following each word with an emphatic push. "You have no right! The law of the wampyr says you have no power over them! No rights!"

Jahn looked conflicted. Actually, he looked a little cross-eyed; he apparently hadn't come all the way back from that kick. This was probably why Deirdre was able to sucker him again.

This time her foot shot up, missing his face by a good three inches. He blinked as Deirdre's leg completed a ninety-degree arc, toes straining for the ceiling. "My lady commands—" he said, sounding for all the world like his tongue had developed a charley horse. He never got the chance to finish the sentence: Deirdre's leg came crashing down, catching Jahn behind his head at the base of his skull and propelling him face-first into the stainless-steel surface of the autopsy table. There was a soggy crunching sound as flesh, albeit undead, collided violently with reinforced steel alloy. Deirdre's subsequent attempt to pin him down with a scissor-lock about his neck was thwarted when Jahn dissolved into a loosely knit clump of dust and ashes.

"Wow," I said, as Deirdre rolled to her side and unbuckled her right wrist restraint, "now that's what I call a real ash kicking."

"Hey!" Theresa called. "Could use a little help over here!"

I was helping Theresa with her ankle straps when the door opened and Krakovski strode into the room. He stopped. Took in the sights of scattered ashes trailing across dissection table one and puddling to the floor, a naked redhead going through the cabinets in search of something to wear, a naked brunette nearly free of her restraints on dissection table two, and naked me who wasn't scheduled to be here. At least, not yet.

Krakovski was the only one dressed. And he was wearing (by God!) one of those white, button up the side, lab tunics that all the mad scientists used to wear in 1930s cinema. But he had enough "naked" fear in his eyes to make up for the unclothed state of the rest of us.

He opened his mouth and started to turn. To sound an alarm? To flee? Neither mattered: while his face was still turned toward us, his forehead sprouted a metal handle. A thread of blood traced a tiny tributary beneath the scalpel's grip and sought an estuary between Krakovski's bulging eyes. He collapsed as Deirdre raised two more surgical knives, throwing fashion, in her right hand and hefted a bone saw in her left.

"I'll keep the door covered," she said, "while you two get dressed."

There were extra surgical smocks in one of the lockers. I fastened the ties on Theresa's back then took the scalpels and covered the door while Theresa fastened mine and Deirdre dressed. The smocks gaped down the back but it was a vast improvement over "streaking" for the nearest exit.

Selecting handfuls of cutlery from the surgical tray, we crowded the door. Before I could ease it open, Deirdre grabbed me and pulled me around to face her. "You came for me," she said, her eyes shining. "Thanks . . ." She pulled my face down and pressed her lips against mine. Maybe it was because I hadn't caught my breath before the kiss started: I was definitely lightheaded when she finally broke the seal of her mouth against mine. It took another moment to forcibly uncurl my toes. "I won't forget what you did for me!" she vowed breathily.

I opened my mouth to say that she had done all the heavy lifting, I had just showed up; but she clutched the front of my smock with one hand and closed the other around my right hand, which was holding the bone saw. "Promise me!" she demanded fiercely, "that you won't let them take me alive!"

I looked over her head at the dissection tables where the heavy leather straps lolled like predators' tongues. "I promise," I said.

"Just get me out of here," Theresa moaned.

"I'm way ahead of you," I said.

Actually, I was only a little ahead of them both: they crowded my back as I eased the door open a crack. The outer chamber was deserted.

We moved through the anteroom and cracked the next door. It opened into a fourth-floor hallway. At least that's what I assumed from the number on the door across the hall. "Come on," I said. We moved out into the deserted corridor and headed for the stairs.

<Cséjthe . . .>  

I staggered: the voice inside my head didn't hurt so much as it caught me off guard.

"Chris?" Deirdre reached out to steady me. "What's wrong?"

I made a shushing motion with my hand.

"What do you want?" I murmured.

<I want to know if you are all right. Viktor says you haven't come out of the bathroom, yet, and that it has grown very quiet in there.>  

"So he's worried? How sweet."

<He's not so much worried as he is bored. I am the one who is worried. Viktor just wants to go to bed.>  

"Didn't he just take a nap against the bedroom wall? Well, tell him to go ahead. I'm going to take a long, hot bath."

<You should think about going to bed soon. I have a very comfortable bed down in my quarters.>  

We reached the bend in the hall: no stairwell. The stairs were another building's length away, at the end of the adjoining corridor.

"Not sleepy. Slept all night."

<You don't have to sleep to enjoy a comfortable bed.>  

"Grandmother, what big teeth you have."

<What does that mean?>  

"Vice is nice but incest is best?"

Theresa's eyes grew large while Deirdre's narrowed.

<Assuming you are one of my descendants—something Kurt and the others will not accept until we test your DNA—there is ten times the distance between us as between what you call "kissing cousins." And if you believe in that collection of fairytales called the Bible, you must believe we are all guilty of incest since we all must come from the family of Noah.>  

I sighed. "What do you want? You're not attracted to me sexually. And definitely vice versa. So what would be the point?"

<An alliance of power, my dear Cséjthe. I have it. You want it.>  

"Sez who?"

<I have certain things that you want.>  

"Really? Like a pristine vinyl pressing of Blitzstein's Airborne Symphony—the Bernstein and Welles' performance?" We reached the end of the hall without being seen and opened the door to the stairwell.

<I was referring to the lives of your friends.>  

"Yeah? It was my understanding that you were having my friends dissected."

<Perhaps they will survive the process; the wamphyri are a very hardy species. But I was speaking of other friends. You have a fondness, have you not, for Dr. Delacroix? And then there is your secretary Olivia, and her nephew. You seem to have developed an affinity for dark meat, Cséjthe: compelling evidence that we are not so genetically similar.>  

"Hey, fuck you, witch, and the broom you rode in on."

<You might guarantee their safety by swearing fealty to me in front of the others.>  

"You want me to swear at you in front of an audience, I got no problem with that."

<You are my prisoner, Cséjthe. I don't require your cooperation; I can take what I want if necessary.>  

"Then why negotiate?" We were almost down to the third-floor landing.

<Come to bed with me and I will tell you.>  

"Haven't I seen this movie on late-night cable? Oh yeah, 'An Affair To Dismember'." But I knew what she really wanted. Sex magick, a powerful ritual of binding that would cement my allegiance in the eyes of her tribe and bind me into servitude with unseen cords of power. Her only true desire was her need to turn me into some emblematic trinket to be added to her charm bracelet of power.

<I could have Viktor break the door down and bring you to me.>  

"Now that would be a fatal mistake."

She snorted, producing a really unpleasant sensation between my ears. <You may be stronger and faster than an ordinary human but you are no match for a full-blooded vampire.> 

"Which is why I'd have to force him to kill me."

Now Deirdre's eyes grew wide while Theresa's narrowed.

<You are making this far more difficult than any reasonable person should. The sun will be up shortly and—>  

"Oh shit!" I said. My voice boomed and echoed up and down the stairwell.

<What is it?>  

"What is it?" Deirdre and Theresa echoed.

"Dawn is coming!" I said. "Run!"

We ran. Over the slapping thuds of bare feet pounding down the stairs I heard the whisper of Báthory's voice as she ordered Viktor to break down the bathroom door. In a few minutes she would probably have a full-scale security alert and the building in total lockdown. A few minutes beyond that and it probably wouldn't even matter: Once the sun came up we would be effectively trapped in the building for another twelve hours, anyway.

<Cséjthe? Where are you?>  

"Looking for Red Two. Where did you take them, you bitch?"

<You're bluffing. You've been bluffing all along, haven't you? You've already rescued them and you're trying to get out of the building. What will you do then? Burn?>  

"Sure. Better ash than hash."

<Such bravado. And such a clever, clever man. I have obviously misjudged you.>  

"Well," I puffed, "that's one of us."

<Stay. Stay willingly and I promise to let the others go and provide them with safe transport.>  

"You promise?"

<Yes!>  

"Ooo, there's something I can take to the bank! A promise from Bloody Báthory!"

Deirdre reached out and touched my arm as we hit the door on the first floor and spilled out into the hallway. "She offering you a better deal?"

"More like a bitter deal."

"Don't take it!" she said fiercely.

A security guard appeared around the corner of an intersecting corridor. From the look on his face I guessed that no one had sounded any alarms. Yet.

"Eeek!" Deirdre squealed, suddenly sounding very girly. She flung her arms out and put on an extra burst of speed. "Help me! Save me!"

The guard instinctively reached for his side arm, but the sight of a squealing, jiggling redhead running toward him in an abbreviated smock set one group of reflexes against another. The resulting hesitation cost him: instead of embracing her uniformed savior, she ran him down and stomped on him for good measure.

While she dealt with one roadblock I dealt with another.

Reginald, I called, Reggie! 

—What?— Not possessing a brain that had been rewired for telepathy, the lobby guard's voice was very faint in my head. If I hadn't opened his mind and poked around inside on my first visit, I wouldn't even have the vaguest of connections now.

Unlock the front door.  

—What? Who's there?—

Just do it, Reggie! Even at this distance I didn't have to push, just nudge. My initial contact with Reginald was paying off in a manner I hadn't originally envisioned. Oh, and Regg . . . what kind of a car do you drive? 

—Subaru station wagon. Yel—yellow.—

Doesn't anybody buy American anymore? Parked out front? 

—Su—sure.—

I need to borrow your keys, my man. Have them ready. I sensed a growing resistance and had to push now.

—Ow.—

Sorry.

We rounded the corner at the end of the hall and headed for the main lobby, just seconds away. An alarm began to blare in strident pulse patterns.

"We're not going to make it!" Theresa wailed.

It looked like she was right. As we burst into the glass-walled vestibule at the front of the BioWeb complex it was obvious that the darkest part of the night sky was merely gray. The horizon was already limned with threads of gold and a blush of pink. Maybe "Je Rouge" was going to get us after all.

As we ran up to a rather dazed-looking Reggie, holding a set of keys in his trembling hand, Elizabeth Báthory's voice rang out.

"Stop!" she cried from above us.

We looked up. The Witch of Cachtice stood at the railing of the second-floor balcony. She was not alone. Jamal, wearing a smock similar to the ones we all sported, dangled limply from the vampire's grip about his neck. I wondered how long she had been holding him in reserve as a potential hostage?

"Surrender or I kill him!"

Maybe.

Maybe she already had—her test release of the Blackout Virus could well have already signed his death warrant.

Deirdre looked at me with haunted eyes. "I—I can't!"

I nodded slowly. "No. No, you certainly cannot." I looked back up at my secretary's nephew, who coughed feebly in Báthory's grasp. "But I have to stay." I looked back at her. "Do you understand?"

She nodded. "If you survive the day, I'll find a way to come back for you!" she whispered.

"Now you're just being silly." I swiped the keys out of Reggie's hand and threw them at her. "Run!" I yelled.

The sun peeked over the horizon as Deirdre slammed through the front door. "It's too late!" Theresa screamed as golden beams of light began to poke holes in the distant line of trees to the east. She began backing up even as Deirdre ran down the front steps and into the smooth, blacktopped killing field of the parking lot.

"Some rescue," Báthory sneered, releasing her hold on Olive's nephew. He fell at her feet with a muted sigh. At that moment it came to me that I hadn't stayed to save Jamal . . . 

. . . I had stayed to destroy the Witch of Cachtice.

Or die trying.

At that moment Deirdre reached the yellow Subaru at the far end of the lot.

She dropped the keys. In her haste and panic she ended up kicking them under the car.

"You should have left well enough alone, Cséjthe," Báthory crooned. "With me, she at least had a chance."

"I saved her," I said with more defiance than I felt. "This was her choice."

Báthory laughed. "Darkness spare me from your idea of salvation, Cséjthe! I thought burning was reserved for the damned!"

As she recovered the keys and stood, the rising sun caught her full in its pure and intensifying glare.

"Too bad we don't have popcorn," Báthory added.

Theresa made a gagging sound and a moment later I heard the sound of running footsteps retreating back down the corridor behind us.

I couldn't look away. I felt it was my duty to serve as witness to Deirdre's sacrifice. And I was counting on it to magnify my rage for the killing yet to come.

Now, I thought, now the solar radiation will be triggering the biochemical combustion that vampire flesh is heir to. Now her blood will start to boil.

Seeming to realize it was too late, Deirdre stopped trying to fit the key to the troublesome lock in the door. She turned to face the fiery orb of the rising sun, to acknowledge her own last moments of mortality.

Please, God, I prayed; if You exist, let it be quick.

But it wasn't quick.

The seconds dragged by.

Ten.

Twenty.

A half-minute.

The sun became too bright for us to bear, even through the heavily tinted glass. I moved back into the shadows and shielded my eyes. As I did, Deirdre finally reacted.

She convulsed. Spasmed. Leapt as if shocked or stung.

Then—the most shocking thing of all—she began to dance! Standing in a lake of molten gold, showered and drenched by the bright, unbearable light of the growing day, Deirdre danced and whirled, arms flung out to gather more light and heat unto her pale, unmarked flesh.

Finally she stopped.

Blew a kiss toward the first floor of the lobby.

Then, very deliberately, extended her middle finger in an unmistakable salute to the second-floor balcony.

"Guard!" Báthory screamed, "bring that woman to me!"

Reginald began to shake off his dazed expression as Deirdre unlocked the door of his station wagon. I stepped up and tripped him on his way to the front door. As we watched Deirdre drive away I heard Báthory say: "Mr. Cséjthe, you are a very dangerous man."

She had no idea.

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Framed

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Chapter Twenty-one

"Oh my God!" I said, doubling over, "I'm going to be sick!" I jumped up off the bed and ran toward the bathroom, clutching my stomach. The bathroom was roomy—luxury-sized just like the bedroom. The tub was a doublewide Jacuzzi and the twin sinks were half-partitioned off from the rest of the facilities. There was no window, only a fine-meshed ventilation grill capping ductwork that would give a rat claustrophobia. The door had a lock and I pushed the button in for the illusion of privacy. If Báthory or her minions wanted in, neither the lock nor the flimsy door would give them a second's pause.

I sat on the toilet seat and bowed my head. I had but one chance and it was a slim one.

Since I first learned about vampiric translocation about a year before, I had managed to successfully pull it off fewer than a dozen times. My last attempt—following my little tussle with Je Rouge, Mr. Delacroix's brief resurrection, and hosting my post-mortem accident victim—was the first time I had managed to pull it off while under stress.

I usually failed, even when meditating under the most ideal of conditions. The question was, could I do it now? Hostile forces surrounded me. Deirdre and Theresa were on their way to protracted, horrific deaths. The third most ancient and powerful vampire I had ever known was just on the other side of a door that was one step up from papier-mâché.

My only chance was that my luck had hit bottom hard enough for me to hitch a ride on the rebound.

"Christopher . . . are you all right?" The door was barely a barrier to Báthory's voice.

"Leave me alone!" I yelled. "I'm sick!" I flushed the toilet for corroborative sound effects.

"Poor Christopher," she crooned. "I'll come back when you're feeling better." The sound of retreating footsteps was encouraging—until my hypersensitive ears heard her say: "Awake now, are we? I'm locking him in but I want you right outside the bathroom door, just in case. Think you can handle it, Viktor?"

"Y-yes, my lady!"

"Because if you can't, we can roll an extra gurney into Red Two."

Two sets of footfalls moved toward the outer door.

I tried to relax. I couldn't unclench my teeth.

Don't think about how little time you have. This is the only way past Báthory and her goons. This is the only way to reach Deirdre and Theresa. The only way. 

The only way.

Only way.

The tunnel.

Tunnel.

Breathe.

Breathe.

Stop breathing.

Death.

The tunnel.

Death is but the doorway . . . 

To new life . . . 

We live today . . . 

We shall live again . . . 

In many forms . . . 

Shall we return . . . 

Return . . . 

Return . . . 

I didn't know what forces still roiled through the charged atmosphere of BioWeb's labyrinthine facilities, but this time there was a sensation of movement, like tunneling through murky water. I felt my hackles rise and, with them, the fur along my spine. I ran in the darkness upon all four limbs, my snout straining for the scent that would lead me to Deirdre. A golden thread of pheromones looped off to one side and I followed, falling, tumbling.

I came out of the tunnel and into the brightness, rolling across the floor and into the backstop of a row of cabinets. I lurched to my feet to confront the vampire named Jahn. He was standing behind the autopsy table where Deirdre struggled against heavy straps buckled about her wrists and left ankle. Her right foot flailed about, Jahn having only made it that far when I popped in. Clearly, the sight of a naked man tumbling out of empty air was more of a major distraction than two naked women strapped down and apparently unable to move: Jahn's jaw dropped open, which made Deirdre's forceful, upwards kick all the more devastating as her foot smashed into his chin. His head snapped back and he went over backwards like a stunt double in a chop-socky kung-fu movie.

Jahn was down but not out. I had just enough time to unbuckle Deirdre's left wrist restraint before Jahn popped up like some giant, creepy Jack-in-the-Box from Vamps-R-Us.

"Look out!" Deirdre exclaimed unnecessarily.

"You're naked!" Theresa shrieked even more unnecessarily. "Omigod! Why are you naked?"

Jahn didn't attack me immediately. The whole "appear out of thin air" thing was not only a major showstopper, it was a provenance limited to the undead "ruling class." Manhandling the enlisted fangs and the occasional nosferatu noncom was one thing. Jahn might be Elizabeth Báthory's creature, but this was probably the first time he'd been confronted by someone with a Doman's credentials from the outside and off his home turf.

"They're mine!" I declared, following each word with an emphatic push. "You have no right! The law of the wampyr says you have no power over them! No rights!"

Jahn looked conflicted. Actually, he looked a little cross-eyed; he apparently hadn't come all the way back from that kick. This was probably why Deirdre was able to sucker him again.

This time her foot shot up, missing his face by a good three inches. He blinked as Deirdre's leg completed a ninety-degree arc, toes straining for the ceiling. "My lady commands—" he said, sounding for all the world like his tongue had developed a charley horse. He never got the chance to finish the sentence: Deirdre's leg came crashing down, catching Jahn behind his head at the base of his skull and propelling him face-first into the stainless-steel surface of the autopsy table. There was a soggy crunching sound as flesh, albeit undead, collided violently with reinforced steel alloy. Deirdre's subsequent attempt to pin him down with a scissor-lock about his neck was thwarted when Jahn dissolved into a loosely knit clump of dust and ashes.

"Wow," I said, as Deirdre rolled to her side and unbuckled her right wrist restraint, "now that's what I call a real ash kicking."

"Hey!" Theresa called. "Could use a little help over here!"

I was helping Theresa with her ankle straps when the door opened and Krakovski strode into the room. He stopped. Took in the sights of scattered ashes trailing across dissection table one and puddling to the floor, a naked redhead going through the cabinets in search of something to wear, a naked brunette nearly free of her restraints on dissection table two, and naked me who wasn't scheduled to be here. At least, not yet.

Krakovski was the only one dressed. And he was wearing (by God!) one of those white, button up the side, lab tunics that all the mad scientists used to wear in 1930s cinema. But he had enough "naked" fear in his eyes to make up for the unclothed state of the rest of us.

He opened his mouth and started to turn. To sound an alarm? To flee? Neither mattered: while his face was still turned toward us, his forehead sprouted a metal handle. A thread of blood traced a tiny tributary beneath the scalpel's grip and sought an estuary between Krakovski's bulging eyes. He collapsed as Deirdre raised two more surgical knives, throwing fashion, in her right hand and hefted a bone saw in her left.

"I'll keep the door covered," she said, "while you two get dressed."

There were extra surgical smocks in one of the lockers. I fastened the ties on Theresa's back then took the scalpels and covered the door while Theresa fastened mine and Deirdre dressed. The smocks gaped down the back but it was a vast improvement over "streaking" for the nearest exit.

Selecting handfuls of cutlery from the surgical tray, we crowded the door. Before I could ease it open, Deirdre grabbed me and pulled me around to face her. "You came for me," she said, her eyes shining. "Thanks . . ." She pulled my face down and pressed her lips against mine. Maybe it was because I hadn't caught my breath before the kiss started: I was definitely lightheaded when she finally broke the seal of her mouth against mine. It took another moment to forcibly uncurl my toes. "I won't forget what you did for me!" she vowed breathily.

I opened my mouth to say that she had done all the heavy lifting, I had just showed up; but she clutched the front of my smock with one hand and closed the other around my right hand, which was holding the bone saw. "Promise me!" she demanded fiercely, "that you won't let them take me alive!"

I looked over her head at the dissection tables where the heavy leather straps lolled like predators' tongues. "I promise," I said.

"Just get me out of here," Theresa moaned.

"I'm way ahead of you," I said.

Actually, I was only a little ahead of them both: they crowded my back as I eased the door open a crack. The outer chamber was deserted.

We moved through the anteroom and cracked the next door. It opened into a fourth-floor hallway. At least that's what I assumed from the number on the door across the hall. "Come on," I said. We moved out into the deserted corridor and headed for the stairs.

<Cséjthe . . .>  

I staggered: the voice inside my head didn't hurt so much as it caught me off guard.

"Chris?" Deirdre reached out to steady me. "What's wrong?"

I made a shushing motion with my hand.

"What do you want?" I murmured.

<I want to know if you are all right. Viktor says you haven't come out of the bathroom, yet, and that it has grown very quiet in there.>  

"So he's worried? How sweet."

<He's not so much worried as he is bored. I am the one who is worried. Viktor just wants to go to bed.>  

"Didn't he just take a nap against the bedroom wall? Well, tell him to go ahead. I'm going to take a long, hot bath."

<You should think about going to bed soon. I have a very comfortable bed down in my quarters.>  

We reached the bend in the hall: no stairwell. The stairs were another building's length away, at the end of the adjoining corridor.

"Not sleepy. Slept all night."

<You don't have to sleep to enjoy a comfortable bed.>  

"Grandmother, what big teeth you have."

<What does that mean?>  

"Vice is nice but incest is best?"

Theresa's eyes grew large while Deirdre's narrowed.

<Assuming you are one of my descendants—something Kurt and the others will not accept until we test your DNA—there is ten times the distance between us as between what you call "kissing cousins." And if you believe in that collection of fairytales called the Bible, you must believe we are all guilty of incest since we all must come from the family of Noah.>  

I sighed. "What do you want? You're not attracted to me sexually. And definitely vice versa. So what would be the point?"

<An alliance of power, my dear Cséjthe. I have it. You want it.>  

"Sez who?"

<I have certain things that you want.>  

"Really? Like a pristine vinyl pressing of Blitzstein's Airborne Symphony—the Bernstein and Welles' performance?" We reached the end of the hall without being seen and opened the door to the stairwell.

<I was referring to the lives of your friends.>  

"Yeah? It was my understanding that you were having my friends dissected."

<Perhaps they will survive the process; the wamphyri are a very hardy species. But I was speaking of other friends. You have a fondness, have you not, for Dr. Delacroix? And then there is your secretary Olivia, and her nephew. You seem to have developed an affinity for dark meat, Cséjthe: compelling evidence that we are not so genetically similar.>  

"Hey, fuck you, witch, and the broom you rode in on."

<You might guarantee their safety by swearing fealty to me in front of the others.>  

"You want me to swear at you in front of an audience, I got no problem with that."

<You are my prisoner, Cséjthe. I don't require your cooperation; I can take what I want if necessary.>  

"Then why negotiate?" We were almost down to the third-floor landing.

<Come to bed with me and I will tell you.>  

"Haven't I seen this movie on late-night cable? Oh yeah, 'An Affair To Dismember'." But I knew what she really wanted. Sex magick, a powerful ritual of binding that would cement my allegiance in the eyes of her tribe and bind me into servitude with unseen cords of power. Her only true desire was her need to turn me into some emblematic trinket to be added to her charm bracelet of power.

<I could have Viktor break the door down and bring you to me.>  

"Now that would be a fatal mistake."

She snorted, producing a really unpleasant sensation between my ears. <You may be stronger and faster than an ordinary human but you are no match for a full-blooded vampire.> 

"Which is why I'd have to force him to kill me."

Now Deirdre's eyes grew wide while Theresa's narrowed.

<You are making this far more difficult than any reasonable person should. The sun will be up shortly and—>  

"Oh shit!" I said. My voice boomed and echoed up and down the stairwell.

<What is it?>  

"What is it?" Deirdre and Theresa echoed.

"Dawn is coming!" I said. "Run!"

We ran. Over the slapping thuds of bare feet pounding down the stairs I heard the whisper of Báthory's voice as she ordered Viktor to break down the bathroom door. In a few minutes she would probably have a full-scale security alert and the building in total lockdown. A few minutes beyond that and it probably wouldn't even matter: Once the sun came up we would be effectively trapped in the building for another twelve hours, anyway.

<Cséjthe? Where are you?>  

"Looking for Red Two. Where did you take them, you bitch?"

<You're bluffing. You've been bluffing all along, haven't you? You've already rescued them and you're trying to get out of the building. What will you do then? Burn?>  

"Sure. Better ash than hash."

<Such bravado. And such a clever, clever man. I have obviously misjudged you.>  

"Well," I puffed, "that's one of us."

<Stay. Stay willingly and I promise to let the others go and provide them with safe transport.>  

"You promise?"

<Yes!>  

"Ooo, there's something I can take to the bank! A promise from Bloody Báthory!"

Deirdre reached out and touched my arm as we hit the door on the first floor and spilled out into the hallway. "She offering you a better deal?"

"More like a bitter deal."

"Don't take it!" she said fiercely.

A security guard appeared around the corner of an intersecting corridor. From the look on his face I guessed that no one had sounded any alarms. Yet.

"Eeek!" Deirdre squealed, suddenly sounding very girly. She flung her arms out and put on an extra burst of speed. "Help me! Save me!"

The guard instinctively reached for his side arm, but the sight of a squealing, jiggling redhead running toward him in an abbreviated smock set one group of reflexes against another. The resulting hesitation cost him: instead of embracing her uniformed savior, she ran him down and stomped on him for good measure.

While she dealt with one roadblock I dealt with another.

Reginald, I called, Reggie! 

—What?— Not possessing a brain that had been rewired for telepathy, the lobby guard's voice was very faint in my head. If I hadn't opened his mind and poked around inside on my first visit, I wouldn't even have the vaguest of connections now.

Unlock the front door.  

—What? Who's there?—

Just do it, Reggie! Even at this distance I didn't have to push, just nudge. My initial contact with Reginald was paying off in a manner I hadn't originally envisioned. Oh, and Regg . . . what kind of a car do you drive? 

—Subaru station wagon. Yel—yellow.—

Doesn't anybody buy American anymore? Parked out front? 

—Su—sure.—

I need to borrow your keys, my man. Have them ready. I sensed a growing resistance and had to push now.

—Ow.—

Sorry.

We rounded the corner at the end of the hall and headed for the main lobby, just seconds away. An alarm began to blare in strident pulse patterns.

"We're not going to make it!" Theresa wailed.

It looked like she was right. As we burst into the glass-walled vestibule at the front of the BioWeb complex it was obvious that the darkest part of the night sky was merely gray. The horizon was already limned with threads of gold and a blush of pink. Maybe "Je Rouge" was going to get us after all.

As we ran up to a rather dazed-looking Reggie, holding a set of keys in his trembling hand, Elizabeth Báthory's voice rang out.

"Stop!" she cried from above us.

We looked up. The Witch of Cachtice stood at the railing of the second-floor balcony. She was not alone. Jamal, wearing a smock similar to the ones we all sported, dangled limply from the vampire's grip about his neck. I wondered how long she had been holding him in reserve as a potential hostage?

"Surrender or I kill him!"

Maybe.

Maybe she already had—her test release of the Blackout Virus could well have already signed his death warrant.

Deirdre looked at me with haunted eyes. "I—I can't!"

I nodded slowly. "No. No, you certainly cannot." I looked back up at my secretary's nephew, who coughed feebly in Báthory's grasp. "But I have to stay." I looked back at her. "Do you understand?"

She nodded. "If you survive the day, I'll find a way to come back for you!" she whispered.

"Now you're just being silly." I swiped the keys out of Reggie's hand and threw them at her. "Run!" I yelled.

The sun peeked over the horizon as Deirdre slammed through the front door. "It's too late!" Theresa screamed as golden beams of light began to poke holes in the distant line of trees to the east. She began backing up even as Deirdre ran down the front steps and into the smooth, blacktopped killing field of the parking lot.

"Some rescue," Báthory sneered, releasing her hold on Olive's nephew. He fell at her feet with a muted sigh. At that moment it came to me that I hadn't stayed to save Jamal . . . 

. . . I had stayed to destroy the Witch of Cachtice.

Or die trying.

At that moment Deirdre reached the yellow Subaru at the far end of the lot.

She dropped the keys. In her haste and panic she ended up kicking them under the car.

"You should have left well enough alone, Cséjthe," Báthory crooned. "With me, she at least had a chance."

"I saved her," I said with more defiance than I felt. "This was her choice."

Báthory laughed. "Darkness spare me from your idea of salvation, Cséjthe! I thought burning was reserved for the damned!"

As she recovered the keys and stood, the rising sun caught her full in its pure and intensifying glare.

"Too bad we don't have popcorn," Báthory added.

Theresa made a gagging sound and a moment later I heard the sound of running footsteps retreating back down the corridor behind us.

I couldn't look away. I felt it was my duty to serve as witness to Deirdre's sacrifice. And I was counting on it to magnify my rage for the killing yet to come.

Now, I thought, now the solar radiation will be triggering the biochemical combustion that vampire flesh is heir to. Now her blood will start to boil.

Seeming to realize it was too late, Deirdre stopped trying to fit the key to the troublesome lock in the door. She turned to face the fiery orb of the rising sun, to acknowledge her own last moments of mortality.

Please, God, I prayed; if You exist, let it be quick.

But it wasn't quick.

The seconds dragged by.

Ten.

Twenty.

A half-minute.

The sun became too bright for us to bear, even through the heavily tinted glass. I moved back into the shadows and shielded my eyes. As I did, Deirdre finally reacted.

She convulsed. Spasmed. Leapt as if shocked or stung.

Then—the most shocking thing of all—she began to dance! Standing in a lake of molten gold, showered and drenched by the bright, unbearable light of the growing day, Deirdre danced and whirled, arms flung out to gather more light and heat unto her pale, unmarked flesh.

Finally she stopped.

Blew a kiss toward the first floor of the lobby.

Then, very deliberately, extended her middle finger in an unmistakable salute to the second-floor balcony.

"Guard!" Báthory screamed, "bring that woman to me!"

Reginald began to shake off his dazed expression as Deirdre unlocked the door of his station wagon. I stepped up and tripped him on his way to the front door. As we watched Deirdre drive away I heard Báthory say: "Mr. Cséjthe, you are a very dangerous man."

She had no idea.

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