"As of now," said D.B., "we're setting up a night watch. We'll need four people patrolling the place front and back at all times, sundown to sunup. We'll switch off every, say, four hours."

"No way," said Duke Gates, skipping quickly up the hill. "I'm out of here."

"You're what?" Kathy Lee asked him.

Todd waited for a response that never came.

"What a chickenshit," Kathy Lee murmured.

For having incurred Kathie Lee's wrath, the overbearing Dukey Gates almost earned Todd's pity.

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

The Highsmiths had turned into harmless hypocrites upon undertaking the raising of their son. That was the only explanation Paul could come up with for the visit the three of them paid to Monroe, the nearest city of any size, so they could attend Sunday services with the Episcopalians. They'd decided on that denomination after setting out early enough to find the church that charmed them most. This Sunday, the Episcopalians. Perhaps they'd become Catholics next Sunday.

"It's nice here," Darby said as they cruised aimlessly along the Lake Erie coastline in Darby's Jeep after the service. "Makes you almost not want to go home."

More than almost, Paul thought. He couldn't help wondering why the most commonplace amenity of any town-at least a single church-had gone missing in theirs. And whether the Episcopalians' omnipotent Creator was any match for the darker gods that seemed to be roosting in Babylon.

Tuck was getting fussy in his car seat, so they couldn't dawdle. Paul took I-75 to Michigan 151, crossing over the South Dixie Highway, the way he knew best. It occurred to him as they slipped into an unmarked road buried in the trees, that there were probably quicker routes in and out. But the thought of exploring the back roads surrounding Babylon left him vaguely ill at ease.

Taking Darrow Road into the outskirts of town, Paul made a conscious effort to ignore the Sundown Motel as they passed it. Babylon seemed both dismal and watchful that morning, but he knew his impression of it was colored by recent events. The sky was blue, the air mild as they drove through the same town that had so excited them just weeks before. It couldn't have all gone that bad that soon-could it?

Paul hooked a left blocks before the vast Drake Municipal Complex on Main View, noticing for the first time that the cut-through street he'd arbitrarily chosen was named Drake.

Why not? Everything else was.

He wished Darby would talk, really talk to him about all of this, but she had her back turned to him and was cooing with Tuck in the backseat. Anyway, what was he looking for from her? A serious conversation about vampires?

"Who is it?" she asked him sharply as the Jeep turned down Crenshaw with its other large new homes sitting as far back off the street as their own.

She meant the green Chrysler in their drive. Paul could hear the tension in her voice.

Police Chief Bill Sandy, in street clothes, stepped out of the car as they pulled up. When the Highsmiths got out to join him, he made a stilted hat-tipping motion toward Darby even though he was hatless.

"Morning, folks," he said cheerfully.

Paul provided a hurried introduction, then stood about awkwardly as Darby freed their son from his car seat. "What's up?" he asked the cop, not even trying to mask his desire to wrap up whatever business it was that required the lawman's presence on their property.

Chief Sandy turned to glance at the house as Darby steered Tuck into it, but Paul ignored the hint and waited for him to speak from the driveway.

"Both prisoners are sprung," the cop said. "Released well before yesterday noon."

Saying it like he was looking for a pat on the back, but Paul wasn't going there. "I know," he said. "I've talked to them since."

He let the cop ponder this.

Chief Sandy seemed to do so for a moment, then said, "I'd like you to meet someone."

"Oh?" Paul said it with a careful lack of inflection.

"One of the town's leading citizens. He'd like to meet you."

"Who would that be?"

"Name's Miles Drake."

Paul cocked an eyebrow. "You mean, like, Miles Junior? Or Miles the Third?"

The chief looked momentarily lost. "I mean...Miles Drake."

Paul's mind went back to those two old photos in the police station, the one mounted on the wall and the other in the chief's office. Miles Drake from the 1940s, and from maybe three decades later. In both, a tall and slender but elderly man with a head of snow-white hair and a face that looked flushed with high blood pressure. He couldn't possible still be alive. Could he?

"Mr. Highsmith?"

It brought him back. At least a little. "Um...sure," he said. "But what does he-?"

"Just a chat," the chief said. "Say tonight at eleven at the police station?"

Paul felt the lump of panic like it was a physical obstruction in his windpipe. Tonight. Eleven o'clock. Three hours past sundown.

"No," he said, getting past that lump.

The cop's face worked it over. "What do you mean, 'no'?"

"I mean," Paul said, forcing more decisiveness into his voice than he felt, "that if Miles Drake wants to see me tonight, he'll have to come here."

"To your home?"

What you must never do, Van Helsing would have warned, is invite the vampire in.

Unless, of course, you needed home court advantage.

"Yes," he said. "To my home."

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

Darby yelped, a high hiccup of a sound, as the door chimed melodiously. "You didn't warn me," she cried out from an upstairs room.

That was his job. He'd had his face pasted to a dining room window that overlooked the driveway for the past half hour. They'd latched all of the doors and windows and had put Tuck to bed hours ago.

"He didn't drive," Paul said.

Be prepared, he'd reminded himself often that day. But already they'd been fooled.

Darby tripped down the stairs to lock sight on Paul as he came into the entry foyer, her eyes wide. "You didn't warn me," she said again, now little more than a whisper.

This was the young woman who'd laughed off the talk he'd brought home with him from his meeting with the motel residents the day before. She'd scoffed until the sun went down.

"Get back upstairs," he said thickly.

She nodded, but didn't move. He turned to the front door and stared at it. I'm walking, he told himself. Walking to the front door. And I don't believe in vampires.

The face looking in the window set into the carved door was white and craggy with age, stern as a monument. The mouth was a straight line, the eyes hard, dark.

Paul glanced over his shoulder one final time to see his wife skipping up the stairs like a schoolgirl.

His fingers moved numbly over the various locks. He gripped and turned and pulled the door handle prematurely, then had to eat up more time turning more locks until it would swing open smoothly and admit the face in the door panel.

Miles Drake was not alone. A woman stood next to him. She was middle-aged and, though moderately tall, managed to appear short and squat next to the much taller and more slender man. Her hair hung limp, her face unremarkable, her expression put-upon.

"My daughter Tabitha," the elderly man said. He seemed to know that no self-introduction was necessary.

Something chittered at the vampire's feet, and Paul caught a quick glimpse of meaty bodies and slithering tails before Miles Drake shuffled past Paul and into the house ahead of his daughter. From the white foyer with its thirty-foot ceiling, the two surveyed the premises while Paul closed and latched the door with his eyes shut, anxious to see no more than he had to out there in the dark.

Drake turned as he did. "Well?" he rumbled. The next move was obviously Paul's.

The man's pressed blue slacks, his short-sleeved white dress shirt, dull necktie and scuffed shoes gave him the appearance of a minor bureaucrat or a fuddy-duddy grandpa.

Paul motioned and led the way through the tall arch and into the family room and to the same sofa that had held three soggy old men just days before. He considered offering food and drink, but the protocol for hosting vampires was a mystery to him.

This last thought came with a grim, hidden smile. This whole vampire thing...he was just playing along.

"Please take a..." he finally murmured, but the two had already taken such action.

While Miles centered himself on the offered sofa, his daughter sat alone on a wingback leather chair angled next to but slightly behind him. Paul backed into a chair on the other side of a Persian rug the color of sunlight.

Even seated, Miles Drake loomed. Though not quite Paul's six-two, the other man had a long neck, ramrod spine, narrow waist and lean physique, all of which seemed to lend inches.

His slender hands caressing his knees, just as he had in his formal photo, Drake said, "You've heard stories."

His voice was rich, deep. Beneath the ceiling track lighting his face lost the ghastly pallor Paul had observed in his door pane. Quite the contrary, his complexion was ruddy, even mottled. His irises were of a non-reflective blue, the whites of them tinged with yellow. His thick hair was unattractively white, more like yellow snow, his teeth primarily that same unappealing color, but brown where tooth met tooth. He looked like his photos. No better, no worse.

Meaning he closely resembled his appearance sixty years ago.

"Like with most stories, most gossip, there's truth and partial truth and untruth all mixed together until you don't know exactly what to think. And so," Drake said, rubbing his knees as tenderly as a lover's breast, "I'll tell you what to think."

Don't look up, Paul told himself. Don't lift your eyes to find Darby crouched behind the balcony railing, her sightline taking in this section of the family room visible through the tall doorway.

But of course the command only brought about the action and he let his gaze flicker to the shadow he'd thought he'd seen peripherally-but he saw nothing.

"I could do as the others," the old man was saying. "I could promise you money, more than you've yet been tempted with, but I think you're used to money and a generous offer would only make you wonder how much better the next offer might be."

As if reading Paul's career trajectory.

"There's a limit," Drake continued, "to my finances and my patience. And I won't waste time issuing silly threats like my annoying friend Tolliver." He chuckled dryly. "Oh yes, I heard about your meeting with my three ageless cronies. They do things the old-fashioned way, especially John."

Miles Drake moved his head ever so subtly, but the movement caused the track lighting to lose him momentarily, and his watery eyes to sparkle and gleam like some moist gem. Then the head turned back into the light and the sparkle was gone, and he was just an old man with rheumy eyes like his three old friends. Elderly, but strangely intense.

Discomfited by the old man's naked scrutiny of him, Paul turned his attention to Tabitha Drake. Or at least he assumed Drake to be her last name. He couldn't imagine her giving up her name to a man as she sat slumped and sullen.

"Threats from old men seem empty and toothless," her father was saying.

Drake leaned forward until he could stand all ten of his long fingers at attention on the glasstop table in front of him. "To fear a threat, you must first be convinced that the gun is loaded."

Paul heard a sound from upstairs. Maybe just Tuck tossing in his sleep. As he gave the possibility more attention, he heard everything: bumps, creaks, settling timbers, each sound more stealthy and portentous than the previous. He also thought he heard the rats outside, scratching to get in.

It had seemed so easy, so heroic, to tell the police chief that if Miles Drake wanted a face-to-face, he'd have to face him here. So dramatic an act with the sun shining, the birds singing.

But here he sat. Hunched forward to tent his long fingers, his aged eyes gleaming with unexpected depth. And the daughter so calmly contemptuous, watching him with the same detached interest and repugnance she might show apes fornicating behind glass at the zoo.

"Paul," the elderly man said, "for you to truly understand how loaded my gun is, you must hear my story."

Paul's breath went ragged. The old man's icy use of his name was like a chain binding him, as though his name had been captured, not merely spoken. He had no desire to hear whatever Miles Drake had to share. But he'd listen. He had no choice.

"I was born..." the vampire began, flicking a tongue across his brown and yellow teeth, "...on April Fourteenth, 1836."

No. Paul very definitely did not want to hear this.

Part Two.

The Vampires Drake and Darrow.

The few who survived were taken away to Babylon...

2 Chronicles 36.