They Thirst Part 24

THREE.

Roach was down on the cold stone floor, whimpering like a dog at Prince Vulkan's feet. Vulkan, sitting in his chair at the long, waxed table covered with maps and diagrams, paid the human little attention. He stared into the fire, his face caught between light and shadow. The room still smelled of Falco's charred body; the dogs in the lower bas.e.m.e.nt had gone wild over the cooked meat. Dust to dust, Vulkan thought, and ashes to ashes. Over on the other side of the table, Kobra sat, his boots propped up before him, and watched Roach through narrowed, red-lit eyes; he held Falco's femur in his left hand like a hideous scepter.

Since after midnight couriers from Vulkan's lieutenants had been coming up the mountain to report on the shifting concentrations of activity-troops were now rampaging through Hollywood and Beverly Hills and a great part of southern L.A., including an area called Watts, which had already fallen. There had been several skirmishes with police officers who'd never known what they were chasing until it was too late. The control tower at the Santa Monica Munic.i.p.al Airport had been overtaken, and some of the less-disciplined ones had amused themselves by crashing a few private planes. A military school in Westwood Village had been taken, and along with it sixty-eight young boys who had been asleep in their beds when the attack came; they would make fine soldiers tomorrow night. But for the most part the action had been hit-and-run, which was how Prince Vulkan preferred it right now.

Individual houses broken into, the sleeping men and women and children quickly drunk dry and shrouded away from the sunlight to sleep awhile longer; cars flagged down on the avenues and boulevards, their drivers taken by surprise; apartment Icomplexes taken silently, one cubicle after the next. Prince Vulkan had been in L.A. a little over a month now, and by his conservative estimate there were over six hundred thousand of his kind spread across the city. Moreover, the number doubled every night. His fangs had sired the beginnings of a new race.

He touched Roach's shoulder; the man looked up at him, his face as joyous and dumb as a devoted puppy's. "You're safe now," Vulkan said quietly. "You recognized your weakness down there, and you were wise to call for-"

"I could've killed all those f.u.c.king cops," Kobra interrupted. "I could've done it easy, the Death Machine and me, killed them all . . ."

"I didn't speak to you," the prince said coldly. "I didn't ask you to speak. Did I?" "You don't need him." Kobra's gaze burned with a sullen glare. "You said I was going to sit at your right hand. You said that's why you called me from Mexico, because I was special-"I "I didn't speak to you!" Vulkan snapped. Kobra stared back at him for only a second or so, then dropped his gaze and flung the bone into the fireplace. "I need both of you," Vulkan declared, "equally." . i1 "Why do you need one of them?" Kobra said, and this time he looked away I immediately because Vulkan's green eyes had flared like blasts of napalm.

"Because," the prince said, "we'll need a human to go before us when we've finished here. I'll need him to arrange pa.s.sage, to care for the crates, to secure a proper dwelling just as my last servant did. And sometimes I forget how humans think, I forget what their needs are, what motivates them. Having one of them here is essential. Look on Roach as a ... a mascot. Kobra stared down at his knuckles.

III.

"You are at my right hand, Kobra. You're inexperienced yet? but before we're through you'll lead my army to victory . . ."

Kobra looked up again, his eyes shining like headlights.

"Yes!" Vulkan said. "I called you from Mexico because I could feel your presence, and the Headmaster helped me find you. Even as one of them you knew how to use Death. You were a true brother, even as a human." He placed his fingertips together and looked from Kobra to Roach. "To each their special place. Think back to Alexander . . ."

"Who?" Kobra asked.

Vulkan looked shocked. "Alexander! The boy king, the greatest warrior this world has ever seen! Don't you read? Don't you know anything about military strategy?"

His lips curled in answer to his own question. "No, I suppose not. You'll have to be taught, won't you? Alexander the Great carried a full contingent on his campaigns-archers, infantry, carpenters, cooks, scholars, prophets, even women to serve the needs of his men. He left nothing to chance, and each man knew his proper role. Am I less than Alexander? Would I not follow his example? As I say, to each their special purpose."

Kobra shrugged. He didn't know what the Master was talking about exactly, but if the Master said it was important, then it was. The Master closed his eyes now, leaving Roach to fawn at his feet. Kobra didn't like that one. One the way up the mountain, the human had sat behind him on his Harley, grasping him with hot hands. If Kobra hadn't already fed tonight, he might've borne him down to the ground and . . . but not. The Master wouldn't like him even thinking like that; he wouldn't like it at all. But he still couldn't see what good that one was going to be. He would be slow and stupid, a lapdog trying to keep up with wolves. Already Kobra was delirious with the sense of power that coursed through him. Right after he fed, he felt invincible, tuned like a perfect chopper flying along the hot currents on the highway, able to concentrate on the glittering plain of the city and pick up bits of a hundred thousand conversations going on all at once, like overlapping radio stations that faded in and out when the antenna moved. It must have been easy for the Master to find him just by concentrating on the feeling Kobra had in his brain, the dark att.i.tude under the trapdoor of his soul. Every time he fed, the power was going to grow stronger; he was going to learn more, see more, know all the secrets in human hearts and minds. It would take time, yes, but he was going to be twenty forever, and time coupled with ageless youth was the great gift the Master had bestowed on him.

"Leave me," Vulkan said. He opened his eyes and stared at Kobra. "Take Roach to his quarters. See that no harm comes to him."

Kobra stood up. "Come on," he said to Roach. He motioned with his hand, and the man scurried after him. "No one is to touch him, Kobra," Vulkan ordered.

"Do you understand that? He is to have free run of the castle, and the one who touches his flesh or blood will answer to me."

Kobra bowed his head slightly and ushered Roach through the door. It closed behind them with a hollow noise that echoed up toward the vaulted ceiling. Prince Vulkan turned his head and stared into the fire. He thought he'd felt a cold breath stirring across the back of his neck, and his senses snapped on, vivid and aware. Paige LaSanda's blood, thrummed in his veins; it had made him sleepy for a while, but now he sat straight-backed, the pupils of his cat eyes slowly widening. The red embers in that fire reminded him of the ironsmith's forge in his father's castle, a long time ago. He remembered watching the ironsmith-a huge bear of a man with gray hair on his arms and shoulders-hammering out the raw blades that the swordsmith would painstakingly fashion into rapiers that glimmered like blue lightning. And he recalled those afternoon drills in a dusty hall with the sunlight streaming in through high, arched windows. Forward and back, forward and back, parry, thrust, attack. His father had been proud of his progress and proclaimed him an even better swordsman than his own father, Simon Vulkan the Strong. Now his father had been dust for many hundreds of years; now the castle of his birth was so many broken stones on a mountain ridge; now the pieces of the carriage that had crashed over a serpentine road on that wild, windswept night lay in a Budapest museum along with other odd memorabilia of the Vulkan brood. That night-September 29, 1342-had forever changed him and forever kept him the same. He remembered the scene vividly, could recall it down to the finest detail, simply by closing his eyes. His father, Jon the Hawk, sitting across from him in the i swaying gold-and-ebony coach, his father's wife, Sonya, beside her husband, pressed I close to him because the storm made her fearful. Sonya the Barren, she was called in the village mead halls, though never loudly enough for any of the Hawk's merce-' naries to overhear. Conrad knew she wasn't his mother. The Hawk was regaled by the minstrels for his prowess in bed as well as on the battlefield. Sonya bore him no ', grudge because the Hawk was aging now and had needed a son. The land was a wild, crazy quilt of powers, men building mountain fortresses and calling themselves kings and hiring mercenaries to take the next man's land. ' The Vulkan province had spread in all directions as far as a horseman could ride in a day, encompa.s.sing a great deal of what is now the northern part of Hungary. It was a varied landscape of harsh rock citadels, sudden deep valleys of dense, unexplored woodland, gra.s.sy plains, and lakes that caught mirror images of the sky. The land was beautiful, though unforgiving, but never at peace; there were very few nights when the torches of some ragged army or another didn't burn along the strategic mountain pa.s.ses. The Germanic tribes were always on the march, and if I the Hawk was not battling them in the wild northern forests, he was faced with the crawl of the Huns or the mercenary army of some jealous neighbor.

As the Hawk grew older and slower, a.s.sa.s.sination attempts became bolder. Three nights before that fateful coach trip, returning from the new fortifications the Hawk had built on the eastern frontier where groups of barbarians had been seen gathering in the mountains for a raid, one of his most trusted advisors had been caught r.i.m.m.i.n.g a wine goblet with poison. The man's arms and legs were torn from their sockets, his mutilated torso thrown to the castle dogs. Such was the fate of all traitors.

Conrad Vulkan had been weaned on warfare, drilled in cla.s.sical military strategy by such warriors as Jozsef Agna and Ernst the One-Eyed, taught to ponder the scope of his world by the philosopher Bran Lazlo, tutored in the myriad ways of man at the knee of his father. He was destined for greatness, the Hawk had always said. Conrad's mind had been steadily honed like the blade of a newly fired rapier. Even now, sitting in a high-backed chair worlds away from strife-torn Hungary, he i recalled a favorite lesson his father had taught him: Attack like the wind. Seem to be in all places at once. And never be there when the enemy turns to grasp at you.

Before the coach incident there was only one moment of foreboding in Conrad's life. It happened during the celebration of his tenth birthday in the castle's great hall. One of the guests had brought, as a gift, a gypsy woman who read fortunes in the palm of the hand. In the ruddy light of hearth and torch, she had grasped his wrist and bent over to see, her toothless gums masticating raw tobacco. Instantly she'd recoiled and asked him-through a translator because she spoke only a crude Germanic gypsy language-if he'd had those few hairs at the center of his palm since he was born. He'd nodded, and she'd begun clucking like a frightened hen. She'd dropped his hand and said something else, which when translated conveyed that she saw a great and terrible change ahead for him. His line of life had hardly begun when it seemed to disappear under the flesh and manifested itself in a thin blue thread that curved around the base of the thumb and circled the wrist once, twice, three times, and again. She refused to read anything more and had been sent on her way with a loaf of black bread.

But it was that night in September that remained most prominent in his memory-that night of terror and magic. The coach was moving through the Keyding Pa.s.s escorted by four soldiers when the driver suddenly slowed. One of the soldiers had sighted huge rocks, fallen from the slab of stone overhead to block the road. Suddenly, as the horses pawed the earth wildly and the driver tried to calm them, figures leapt from the rocks and trees, attacking the mounted soldiers. The horses screamed and reared. They took off with the coach racing, and suddenly a filthy, grinning death's head of a face peered in at a side window. The horses broke their harnesses; the coach shuddered and pitched off the road, crashing over and over down a rocky incline into the cold arms of a mountain stream.

Conrad had opened his eyes inside the coach to see dark, ragged figures scurrying outside, breaking in through the shattered wood. His father and Sonya lay before him like broken dolls, and he knew at once that they were dead. He'd tried to fight off the things as they came swarming in, but one of his arms wouldn't work, and a hulking form covered with filth and lice grabbed him up like a piece of kindling and carried him off into the night. Others chased after, and he was flung aside several times as the things fought, rolling over and over on the ground, hammering at each other, hissing and snarling with demonic fury. Finally, a long way from the Keyding Pa.s.s, he was carried into a cavern that smelled of Death and vermin. The thing that held him threw him to the floor, and it was then that he saw the vampir's face and recognized it for what it was. The thing looked more like an animal than a man, with long dirty black hair and a scraggly black beard. Its eyes glowed with bursts of red and silver, its fangs dripped saliva, and its fingernails were hooked like claws.

The vampir had approached, whining in its eagerness to feed, and had clasped on to the boy like a leech.

And the following night Conrad Vulkan had awakened as one of the Undead. For a while he'd lived as the rest of them did-in a series of deep, winding caverns cut through the mountains, feeding independently on whatever he could find, usually rats, boars, or an occasional human who'd taken the wrong road. He fought like an animal to defend his sleeping and eating s.p.a.ces, losing both of them many times and always digging out new ones in the cavern's clay floors.

Eventually he realized that several of them always followed him to the stream where he washed the lice and roaches out of his clothes. They watched him curiously and eventually began to do the same thing. Many of them babbled in strange tongues he'd never heard before, and most of them couldn't communicate at all. After a while he began to speak with several of them through a crude sign language and organized them into hunting parties. And then came the great realization of his new existence. He was, after all, a prince. Why could he not be a king to his new subjects? He organized the group into foodgatherers, scouts, and firetenders, and he began teaching them a common language. It was a slow process, but after a long while they began to trust each other, to see themselves as brothers and sisters of the night. They expanded their hunting range, raiding the nearby villages for children who would add the gifts of youth and speed to the collective. In those days ' Conrad knew very little of what he was or the powers he could control; he simply craved survival and recognized blood as Life.

And finally he was ready to return to the castle of his birth. His scouts reported that it was in Germanic hands now. So this was to be a mission of warfare as well as a mission of survival. Vulkan contemplated the problem of taking the castle. He knew its interior as well as he knew the palm of his star-crossed hand, but its high sheer walls would stop even an army of the Undead.

And while he contemplated, he watched a rat scurrying back and forth from its nest down in the guts of the cavern where the rock was riddled with cracks and holes.

He began to stretch his power, to test its limits. He stared at the scuttling rat and, concentrating fiercely, made it freeze in mid-step. He made it turn, made it run backward, made it spin like a child's top. Then he let it go deeper into the cavern, following it with his mind, and made it return to him day after day. Then he did the same to two rats. Three. Four. A dozen rats, spinning in circles before jji him while the other vampir looked on in amazement. He laughed and clapped his hands because now it was becoming effortless. He could feel his will build upon itself, like the dark stones of his father's castle piled one on top of another. Soon a hundred rats danced for him, chittering and squeaking in mindless ecstasy. When he could bring three hundred rats out of the cavern's bowels and control them with H j. a mere squint of his mind, he sent his army out into the mountains. The rats found it a simple task to squeeze through the holes and cracks in the walls of Castle Vulkan. It took less than a week for the plague to follow. Prince Vulkan could stand on a hillock, hidden by the forest, and see the dark plumes of smoke rising from within the castle keep-bodies were being burned by the dozens.

The death wagon rattled in and out of the castle every night with its cargo of icorpses. He could hear the screams and moans of the dying, and the death song brought a smile to his face. On a cold, snowy February night, while the doors were unbarred to let the deathwagon out, he led his vampir army into the castle. They met no resistance.

Prince Vulkan opened his eyes. Again he'd felt a cold breath stirring at the back of his neck.

A bow sobbed across violin strings. The music echoed like a wail through the chamber.

Vulkan turned his head and saw the Headmaster standing before the fire, I holding a bone-white violin beneath its chin; a gnarled claw gripped the bow with cunning delicacy. The Headmaster's eyes burned low, as deceptively cool as the last embers of the fire. The music went on for a few minutes more and ended with a low growl that sent vibrations shivering through the prince.

"My pupil, my favorite," the Headmaster said. "Your army grows. How many?"

"More than six hundred thousand," Vulkan replied.

"Ah, good. Very good. But we must have more, Conrad. And quickly. You recall our agreement: In return for my services you must hand this city over to me on All-Hallow's Eve. That time approaches quickly, Conrad. I expect eight million in my service as my due by tomorrow midnight."

"We double in strength every night. How can I give you that many?" The Headmaster's teeth flashed. "An orgy of hunger, Conrad. A celebration of power unlike any the world has ever seen. Let them gorge and throw up and gorge again, like a vast Roman orgy. Let them run wild and take as many victims as they can. I've observed how you saw fit to deal with the problem of your servant Roach. That may have been less than wise, Conrad. You forget the power of the media, and you also forget that special element that blinds the human race to your existence, their dogged determination-no, let's call it hope-that your kind doesn't exist. The element of surprise and confusion may soon be gone. We have to act now, in accord." The Headmaster's eyes closed for a few seconds. When they reopened, they were as bright as blast furnaces, and the prince could hardly stand to look at them for fear of dwindling to a cinder.

"I hunger for souls, Conrad. I hunger . . ." The headmaster held the white violin in its hands and very slowly crumpled it into a ball as if it were paper.

The claws clapped shut. Vulkan stared, seeing something begin to glow yellow-orange between the Headmaster's hands. The Headmaster opened its hands as slowly as it had crushed the violin. Something was taking shape between them, glowing golden. When the brightness dimmed, the prince saw it was a gold urn about two feet high, filled to the top with coa.r.s.e sand. "I give you this gift,"

the Headmaster said softly, and held the urn out to Vulkan. It radiated heat.

"Take up a handful of sand."

The prince hesitated only a second, then scooped up some sand. It burned in his palm.

"Drop it back in," the Headmaster said. Vulkan did so, and the Headmaster leaned forward, blowing softly on the falling column of sand. It began to writhe, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed. The column stood upright, about six inches high like a small cyclone. Vulkan thought he could hear the distant shrieking of wind.

The Headmaster stepped past Prince Vulkan and set the urn at the center of the table. "Our powers are united. No one is to disturb this in any way, Conrad. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"Good. The sun's graying the sky to the east; soon you'll sleep. Rest well and easy. When you awaken, you'll see that my gift has brought you the ability to move at will with your entire army throughout the whole of this city. And the humans will be powerless to run, powerless to escape in their cars or planes or boats.

So sleep well, Conrad, there'll be much work for you when you awaken." The Headmaster stared at the urn again, grinned, and then began to fade away. The last thing to disappear was the terrible fanged grin. Then it, too, was gone. Prince Vulkan looked at the golden urn. The sand was twisting with more force now, a corkscrew of power. The cry of distant wind sounded like the droning of an insect, greedy and voracious.

The fire was almost cold now. Outside the hateful sun would be climbing the eastern peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was time to rest, to plan, to prepare for the next night.

And oh, he thought, oh, what a night that will be!

FOUR.

Palatazin awakened to the sound of something creaking. At least he thought he was awake because he could see the ceiling and feel Jo pressed against him. He'd been dreaming of a shadowy forest where hands seemed to snake out of the underbrush to grasp at him. The trees bent over from both sides, making the pathway I ahead look like a narrow tunnel walled with thorns and brush. Pallid faces grinned, I floating in the foliage like balloons from a satanic carnival.

Jo was with him, and Jn they were running headlong through the tunnel when something hulking and monstrous stepped into their path, reaching out to welcome them with hooked claws.

And now he knew he was awake, and something was creaking softly in his bedroom.

Another earth tremor, he thought, and he reached out for the lamp switch. The f creaking stopped immediately. Palatazin later regretted not switching on the light, but instead he turned his head and peered into the darkness. His mother was sitting in her rocking chair again, watching him; her face bore a stern, grim expression that reminded him of the times when she got so angry if he dared creep back iftto bed for a few extra moments of sleep before getting dressed for school. Sleepyhead! she'd chide, wrenching all the covers off the bed. And then, clapping her hands with the noise of righteous thunder: Get up!

Get up! Get up! He didn't realize until later how she'd equated sleeping with death.

Palatazin stared at the figure in the chair. Her eyes were frightened but determined, too. They were the eyes of the woman who'd fired a shotgun at the unholy thing that wore her husband's flesh like a suit of clothes. She rose from the chair, and Palatazin could see the window-with its spray-painted cross at the center-through her form. She motioned to him. Get up, sleepyhead! He was frozen with "I wonder for a few seconds, but then he carefully rolled out of bed so as not to disturb Jo. She murmured something in her sleep, stirred slightly, and then was quiet.

His mother motioned him closer. He took a step forward; he could see the deep lines around her mouth and eyes as if they were superimposed on the wall. Then she turned and pointed past his shoulder. He looked and saw she was pointing toward the closet door. He glanced between her face and the closet, not knowing what she meant. Her face was clouded with despair, her mouth working but no sound coming out. Then, abruptly, she stepped past him-he felt a breath of air, and for a second he smelled the childhood aromas of cookies baking, the breeze through a stand of pines, a coat Papa had bought her in Budapest-and then she walked right into the closet through the closed door. Like smoke that has whirled through an open window, she was gone. Palatazin found himself unable to move for a moment. He realized he'd been holding his breath, and now he let it all out. He turned, switched on the bedside lamp and went to the closet.

"Andy! What is it?" Jo was sitting up in bed, her face as white as the sheets that were bunched around her.

"It's all right," he said, and heard his voice shake. "It's nothing." But no, he knew it was something. His mother had been trying to speak to him through the barrier between life and death, and he knew the message was of vital importance.

He gripped the doork.n.o.b, turned it, and pulled open the closet door. He didn't know what he'd expected to find-his mother's spirit standing in there, perhaps, staring at him through the clothes? The closet all torn up as if a violent storm had whipped through the walls?

But there was nothing. The clothes were undisturbed. On the top shelf cardboard boxes were stacked up just as they always had been.

"What is it?" Jo asked. "What are you looking for?"

"I ... don't know," he told her. What's in here? What is it that's important enough to disturb my mother's rest?

"It's getting light outside," Jo said. "Can't you sleep?"

"No." He pushed the clothes back and forth for a moment, even felt the wall behind them. What am I looking for? A secret pa.s.sage in my own house? He reached up to the shelf and moved a couple of the boxes around. Jo's skeins of wool and knitting materials were in one, some old shoes he'd even forgotten he'd had in another. There were some sweaters packed in mothb.a.l.l.s. He was putting the boxes back when he saw the glint of rusted metal in the far corner behind a box he used to store his gun and holster.

The metal box his mother had saved all her newspaper clippings in. The box that had been at her bedside when she'd died.

Palatazin lifted it down from the shelf. "Andy . . ." Jo began to protest, but she was instantly quiet when she saw how tight his face had become and how his eyes had begun to shine with what looked like to her a maniacal fascination. She watched in silence as he sat on the bed, opened the old metal box, and began to look through the clippings, some of them so yellowed they were barely legible.

She could see some of the headlines-Prominent College Prof Says Vampires Do Exist; What Strange Force Turned Lizbethville Into A Ghost Town?; Fourth Cow Found Killed By Vandals; Line McRae, Powhatan Civic Leader, Still On Missing Persons List; Bats Plague Midwestern Town For Third Day. Most of them were cut from the National Enquirer, Midnight, The Star, and Fate magazine, but there were dozens clipped from the pages of the Times, the Herald-Examiner, a host of smaller L.A.

papers, and whatever out-of-state papers Andy's mother could get her hands on. At one time her room in this house had been filled with old magazines and newspapers, and there were boxes stacked tall with them down in the bas.e.m.e.nt. The silverfish had started coming in droves, and Jo had demanded that the papers go immediately. Andy had hauled them away but only to make room for the next batch his mother had begun saving. Jo had gone half-crazy trying to keep the place clean, always vacuuming and dusting and picking up sc.r.a.ps of newspapers.

It had been the worst just before she'd gone into Golden Gardens. Palatazin turned the box upside down, dumping all the clippings out in a thick pile.

"What are you doing?" Jo gasped. "You'll get the sheets dirty!" He paid no attention to her. He began reading the clippings one by one. The first was ragged and yellow and bore the headline: Crate Filled With Dirt Found In NYC Hotel Room. The story from the New York Times was only two paragraphs long but went on to say that police had found the imprint of a human body on top of the dirt and speculated that it had served as some kind of strange makeshiftI casket. The next item was also from the Times and was headed Rash of Disappearances Continues-ConEd Exec Latest Missing. Palatazin picked up the next yellowed item, a small squib with the headline Bats In NYC Subways? A workman inspecting a section of track had seen some, thing large and black down there, clinging to a wall like a bat with enfolded wings.

When the man had shined his flashlight, the thing had screeched and come swooping toward him, but he'd run like h.e.l.l to the nearest platform. One of the man's quotes intrigued Palatazin-"Mr. Luftek told police, 'If it was a bat, it was one the size of a man! It'll be a cold day in h.e.l.l before I go back down in that tunnel! Palatazin went through the next few stories, all about disappearances and prowlers in the New York City area, and found one that chilled his blood-Historic Cemetery Vandalized. It was dated August 24, 1948, and the cemetery was located near Martha's Furnace, Pennsylvania. There were more clippings of people missing, animals found drained of blood, most of them in the Pittsburg area. Another cemetery was vandalized near Canton, Ohio. The town of Paulinwood, Indiana, had to be evacuated because of a siege of rats and flies. A banker and his family were missing from their home in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, and his neighbors were frightened because they'd heard insane laughter in the middle of the night. In May of 1950 the townspeople of Dean's Field, Illinois, vanished overnight; food was still on the table in farmhouse kitchens, sheets were turned down in beds that would never be slept in again, lights were on, and doors unlocked; the only sign of "foul play" were several shattered mirrors. The next few clippings concerned similar events in Missouri.

"My G.o.d," Palatazin said softly. "They've been moving westward all this time."

"What?" Jo's brow was furrowed deeply. She rose from the bed and put on her robe. "Do you want some coffee?"

He looked up at her, blinking heavy-lidded eyes. "My mother knew. All these years she knew they were slowly moving west. My G.o.d! She knew and had to keep silent because no one would believe . . ." He quickly turned through the rest of the clippings his mother had saved just before she died. The last one was an Enquirer article about a man in Caborca, Mexico, who'd murdered three women with a hatchet and drank their blood because, he told the police, he'd felt possessed by a vampiro.

"I'll make coffee," Jo said. "Do you want yours the usual way? Black with sugar and nails?"

"Yeah, fine," he said. She grunted, rolled her eyes and went out the bedroom door. He went back to his reading. There was an item from the L.A. Times with the headline No Bats In Reno? Don't Gamble On It! The pilot of a Delta jet, circling for a landing at Reno International, had suddenly picked up a huge ma.s.s on his radar, closing in fast. The control tower had advised him to drop a couple of hundred feet, and as the pilot started down, the jet was engulfed by a cloud of bats heading westward. Luckily none were sucked into the jet intakes, and the pilot was able to bring his plane in. "Must've been hundreds of the things," the pilot said when he got his feet firmly on the ground. Do the bats precede the vampires, Palatazin wondered, or do they follow? In either case, their presence had meant something to his mother in the days just before her death. He picked up the next item and saw with some amazement that it was a Rona Barrett column dated September 3. He read, "... a major Hollywood studio is searching for a successor to the late JOHN WAYNE in a planned remake of the Duke's cla.s.sic Red River. Mentioned most often are Dallas big daddy JIM DAVIS and new face CLAY SANDERS. Watch for CLAY in the new Paramount film The Long Haul... for the fans who asked, JANE DUNNE is alive and well and living in Beverly Hills. She'll be interviewed by this reporter on an upcoming ABC special . . . more royalty's moving to Hollywood. It's all very hush-hush, but rumor has it that a European prince, no less, will soon be remodeling the Hollywood Hills castle that once belonged to horror-film star ORLON KRONSTEEN . . . wedding bells may soon be tolling for JOHN TRAVOLTA. The lucky girl's name is still a secret, but this reporter hears the church bells ringing on Christmas Day . . ." His eyes snapped back to the reference to Orion Kronsteen. He'd worked briefly on that case about ten or eleven years ago. He'd never seen the decapitated corpse, but he'd seen the expressions of a couple of the officers who had. Their faces were pale, and their lips drawn up into grim gray lines. That case had never been solved, he recalled. But what bothered him about those lines of type were the two words European prince. Those were the words, he was certain, that had caught his mother's attention. If this prince were the vampire king he sought, the castle would be a perfect refuge, hidden away in the hills and probably high enough to be a strategic observation point as well. And now he recalled how the Roach had stared up into those hills and begged his master for help.

His blood went cold.

Yes, he told himself. This is what my mother wanted me to find. And now another question racked him-was this the same European prince and/or vampire king who had conquered the village of Krajeck on a stormy winter night so long ago? Was this the same creature who had taken his father?

He put the clippings back in the box and snapped the lid down. Rising from the bed, he stepped to the window and looked down on Romaine Street. The earth was still layered with blue shadows. The sky was a dull slate gray, but he could see the faint pink light coming up in the east. There was a bitter coppery taste in his mouth-the taste of utter dread at what had to be done. His fingers clamped on the windowsill; the black-painted crucifix was centered in his vision and seemed to be burned across his face. Terror writhed in his stomach. "I can't do it alone," he heard himself whisper. "Not that. I can't." But then who will?

"I can't." He shook his head, his lower lip trembling. He would have to go to that crumbling old castle and find the vampire king to drive an ash stake through the thing's heart and sever the head from the body, then do the same to as many others as he could find. He would have to set the bodies on fire or drag them out to let the sun bake them into dust. G.o.d help him if he was caught up there when the sun went down.

He remembered his father's face, streaked with orange light from the hearth. Those gleaming, terrible eyes. Remembered the shotgun blasts and the hideous thing-not Papa anymore-that rose from the floor, its face ripped away and the long, glistening fangs exposed.

"I can't," he said to his reflection in the gla.s.s. Then who will?

He didn't hear Jo call him from downstairs, finally yelling in exasperation, "You don't want coffee? You won't get coffee!"

Oh, G.o.d, why me? And then he answered the question himself. Because you know them. Because you ran from them once, never knowing they were following, day after day, year after year, all across the United States. And now they are here, and there is nowhere else to run. If you don't do it, what will happen to this city? To the millions of people, all of them unaware? Los Angeles would eventually fall, just as Krajeck had fallen, and a tidal wave of vampires would move eastward across America, possibly to link up with other isolated pockets of vampires that awaited their coming. The entire world would lie before them, before their ravenous thirst.

In the window's gla.s.s his face looked thirty years older. His remaining hair seemed to have gone white all at once, like a man who has had a nightmare of grinning Death slowly stalking closer.

There was much to be done, and it had to be finished before dusk. But he knew he couldn't do it alone, and he was going to have to have protection. The taste of fear in his mouth was acrid.

Across the street and one house down, he saw a German shepherd settling itself on a front porch. He hadn't realized that the Zemkes had bought a watchdog. Good luck to you, he mentally told the sleeping family in that house. You'll need every bit of it and more.

He turned away from the window and began to dress hurriedly. FIVE "Blackberry brandy," the old woman in the wheelchair offered as she poured from a crystal decanter into three tulip-shaped gla.s.ses. There had been four in the set, but the fourth now lay in shards on the hardwood floor. "One hundred proof," she promised, winking at Wes. "Knock the fear of Satan right out of you. Here."

Wes handed one gla.s.s to Solange and sipped from the other one. His mouth instantly flamed, and he could feel the liquor spiraling down into his stomach, where it seethed for a moment like lava. He drank down the rest of it, squeezed the tears from his eyes, and held the gla.s.s out again. "More," he said.

Jane Dunne smiled, the lines across her heart-shaped face deepening, but there was a center of cold fear in her brown eyes that refused to thaw. "Sure you can handle it, kiddo?" He nodded, and she poured again. Solange stood on the other side of the wrecked room and drew aside a heavy wine-red curtain to look out onto the lawn. The first trace of new light hovered in the sky. "The sun's coming up," she said softly. "It'll be daylight soon."

"Thank G.o.d," Wes breathed. "Any of them still out there?"