"The man with the foresight to bring a rope first used it like a bullwhip to lash at naked flesh till Frederick barely had the strength to writhe in pain. We heard discussions on the removals of his genitals, it being falsely assumed that the young victim had been murdered to satisfy Frederick's earthly lust. Fortunately, such retribution was considered indelicate with ladies and children present.

"I watched them, Paul," the vampire said, staring at a point beyond his host's head as if watching the offenders still. "I memorized every face and in my most carrying whisper ordered the vampires and daylighters in my charge to do the same. I vowed that we'd be back, and Frederick would lead the assault.

"In due time, the rope was slung over a low limb and the other end tied to the neck of their victim, whose blood and fear perhaps even the daylighters among us could smell from our position a hundred yards away. He had, at this point, been mounted again on the back of the horse. 'Play dead,' I whispered. We'd rehearsed this countless times, under Frederick's direction, but I didn't know how he'd act when the time actually came. If he panicked...

"But he didn't. He was perfect. His body twitched spasmodically, but he didn't overdo it. I felt it played well, as did the others. We released a collective sigh of relief and I accepted words of congratulations from the others. It sounds odd, but it seemed natural to be praised for the accomplishments of my partner, as he would have been praised for mine. We were like that, Paul. We'd been together for seventeen unforgettable years by then, in a relationship much deeper than lovers. I carried his thought and he carried mine. It was as if-"

The vampire interrupted himself with a low growl of annoyance. He drained his water glass and stared at it as if contemplating another. He leaned forward and placed the glass on the very center of the table, then looked up with eyes that glittered with rage.

"In the clear moonlight we saw the profile of his body, hanging limp and lifeless," said the vampire in a tone as slack as his friend. "'Perfect,' I told those around me, and together we watched someone in the crowd spray him from water with a bucket, apparently to make sure he couldn't be revived. Once more I sent him a mental reminder to stay still, stay still.

"Only, it was as though he'd forgotten all that we'd rehearsed. His body began to twitch again, to quiver, then to thrash violently at the end of his tethering rope as panic overtook him. Who knew? Maybe the cold water had been a shock to his system and had broken his self-control. He screamed. I heard him scream my name. 'Miles!' he said. Or tried to, through the rope constricting his words. Shocked at his outburst, I muttered for the fool to stay quiet. I didn't know."

"Didn't know what?" Paul croaked. His heart slammed his ribcage as all hope dwindled for the child-murdering night creature. Darby's goddamn electronic clock beeped again, but he ignored it.

"I smelled it in the wind moments later."

"Smelled what?" Paul demanded in a barely audible whisper.

"I told you these men and boys carried lanterns, didn't I? And torches."

"Gasoline," Paul whispered.

"Close enough. Kerosene."

"Kerosene," repeated the vampire's daughter, the single word a condemnation of all humankind like herself.

Miles Drake shrugged. "He became a torch. Frederick lit the night sky with his brutalized, cindering body and with his screams."

The old man-the creature-began to knead his knees with gnarled hands as he'd done minutes or hours before.

Paul worked at almost physically pushing the lynching scene from his mind. He had to regain some semblance of perspective. "Yes, but...he was your friend, but...he did kill small children," he said with almost plaintive tact.

"Yes," the vampire boomed as he sprang from the sofa with the limber grace of a man half his apparent age. "Yes," he said again, pacing. "We must be perfectly candid here and acknowledge that the vampire Frederick Darrow did indeed suck the life from small children and drunks and low-life others and even from the occasional lady with purse. Yes, he was kind and loyal and a wonderful lifemate to my beloved daughter and a dear friend to me, but there was that bloodthirst thing."

The vampire strolled out of the living room and into the foyer and to the dining room across it. Paul followed meekly to find him cocking one leg on a straight-back chair. Drake twirled to face him.

"Remember this above all else, Paul. These are not fairly tales I'm telling you tonight. The good witches don't wear white and the evil ones black. You wish to deal with me, to confront me on a level you think you understand, as you dealt with our police chief. But let me tell you: I am no Bill Sandy. You have no comprehension of what you're up against." He flashed another yellow and brown smile. "And still there's so much to tell. Are you up to it, Paul? Would you like a beer, Paul? It might be a very long night."

Chapter Thirty-Three.

He did. He very much wanted a beer, and Tabitha Drake surprised Paul by wanting one as well. The master vampire only drank more water as they returned to the living room and Miles Drake continued the long story of his longer life.

Frederick's agonizing death played havoc with Drake, left him yearning for his own oblivion. Maybe there really was a Hell on the other side, but there was one here as well. If that one was populated with Amanda and Frederick, it might have fewer torments than where he was stuck.

The clan fled Louisiana. Drake lost all memory of leading or being led, but they escaped. They traveled north for a hundred aimless miles before Drake was able to take command again. He'd arrived at a decision.

"Wait a minute," said Paul, vaguely irritated. "What about the lynch mob in Chitimacha Bend?"

Drake halted with the drinking glass halfway to his lips. He moved it to uncover a thin smile. "You want me to say that vengeance was mine. That we slaughtered to our hearts' content, don't you?"

"No, of course not. "I'm...curious, is all."

"You want revenge, Paul, because you've only heard our side of the story. My side demands retribution, but what if it were the mother of Frederick's final small victim telling the tale? Would you want your closure then, Paul?"

The vampire offered nothing more on this subject, and the story continued.

The clan was too ravished both physically and emotionally to do anything but flee. Day after day, night after night, their ranks thinned. Their emotionally numbed leader didn't even care when, despite his standing order, sharecroppers were harvested in Mississippi, children snatched from mountain shacks in Tennessee. But as they traveled, an idea formed.

"A new society, Paul. I talked it over with James Chaplin and Olan Buck and a handful of the others. John Tolliver was against it, of course. He opposes everything, but he's an excellent devil's advocate.

"The times had changed and the hunters had become the hunt. The days of plundering and pillaging and slipping into the night were numbered. We'd eventually all die, victim of automobile chases, telephones and newspaper reporters. We had to change. To evolve. To blend in to a civilized society."

"Babylon," Paul said, thinking that it had taken him a good deal of the night to comprehend even the smallest fraction of the vampire's history.

"Babylon," Drake echoed.

It wasn't their first chosen home. They settled initially in small towns in Tennessee, Ohio and elsewhere, but the locals always got too curious, too soon.

"It took us three more years of traveling and stopping and moving on before we discovered Babylon. In the meantime, we'd taught ourselves how to peacefully siphon blood from cooperative daylighters and, in an emergency, from a donated vein of one of our own.

"Oh, it's not the same at all," Drake said, shaking his head. "Life without the hunt is like eating without taste buds. Like seeing the world in black and white." He sighed. "It's vanilla, but it's survival."

In 1898, the Michigan town consisted of a feed store, a saloon and a handful of homes. Even then, the roads leading to it were dirt or gravel afterthoughts. The clan numbered just eleven vampires and eight daylighters by then, so it was relatively easy to fit in as a small, inoffensive religious sect.

"Babylon," Drake said, chuckling softly. "The name appealed to me from the first. What a horror Babylon has become among nations." Drake winked. "Jeremiah forty, verse forty-two."

"Scriptures?" Paul asked, bewildered.

"Know the competition. The irony amused me. God cursed the Babylonians because they massacred and enslaved His Chosen. They were as accursed as us, I would like to think." Drake shrugged as if the joke might not be readily apparent to everyone. "As I say, it appealed to my sense of irony."

Paul rubbed his face. It was tingly, numb, covered in cobwebs. Thin grains of sand seemed to dig at his eyelids when he blinked. He heard tiny claws scratching at the front door. "Did you...what did you do with the locals?"

"Did I kill them, you mean? Massacre them like my Biblical predecessors? Some of them, I must admit. But not most. My intention, if you'll recall, was to fit in. And yet all you can imagine is murder. I married them." He grinned. "Well, not all of them, of course.

"The worst sin we committed in our town's early days was to cut a sickly calf from a herd or grab a dog. Our few poor daylighters must have looked a bit wan as our idea of transfusions took hold, but it kept down the crime rate. And we did something else. Something we'd never done before. We socialized. You see, it's much easier to introduce a spouse or lover to our non-traditional lifestyle than a total stranger, wouldn't you agree?

"By that time, I'd been what I am for twenty years. I was sixty-two years old, and still looked to be in my early forties. At worse, a couple years had been added to my appearance. The dramatic slowdown of the aging process is a powerful sales tool, Paul."

"I'll bet you had them lined up at the door," Paul replied dryly.

"You'd lose that bet," the vampire said, jumping to his feet. He paced the living room, dining room, sunroom. Paul could picture him out in the foyer, craning his neck up at the balcony that overhung it, both of them wondering at shadows up there. Drake returned to the family room, examined book covers, touched vases, studied his reflection in a mirror.

Yes, it showed.

"The key to our continued survival-and I can't stress this enough-was putting an end to the kind of violent activity that could bring attention upon us. Sure, we might feast on a lonely outsider now and then if we could be absolutely certain nobody would come looking, but for the most part we lived in peace and goodwill in our adopted community."

Drake returned to the sofa and settled into it like he meant to stay. "Can you comprehend the difficulty in refraining from such primal urges? No, of course you can't. You've never experienced bloodthirst, and I think the whole subject would be too gruesome for your sensibilities. What a madman I must seem."

Paul took his old seat and the vampire turned his head to confront him full-on, as if he expected to read the truth on his face.

"Well, so be it," Drake said after a moment. "I really should get points for good behavior because right now I can visualize you quite easily with your throat torn open. And yet, I can stifle my urges when it suits me to do so. Why? Because I'm strong, Paul. Because my desires are suborned to my superior will. Because I have age and maturity and discipline working to my advantage. So, to finally answer your question, while the daylighters might have been lining up at the door to be converted, we weren't indiscriminately opening that door."

The vampire rubbed his face as Paul had done earlier. Exhaustion perhaps catching up with him as well.

"There's another issue involved," Drake said. "A town needs daylighter activity to stay alive and to allay suspicion. What if you had driven into Babylon for the first time in the middle of the day and the streets were deserted, all the shades drawn? What would you think, Paul? How do you operate factories and sweep streets and run banks and answer phones only at night? I knew even a century ago that civilization would creep to our doorstep no matter where we holed up, so it was imperative that our town look and feet like every town in America-at least to the casual observer."

"Wait," Paul said. "I'm confused." For a moment, he'd been on the verge of comprehension, but now he had more questions than before. He took a healthy slug from his beer can and said, "If you're so cautious, how come you're practically dragging strangers off the highway and killing them in public?"

The vampire was on his feet even before the question was out. In three steps he crossed the room to pound his white fist on a wall. There might have been words in the snarl that followed, but they were incomprehensible.

"Keep it down," Paul ordered, as annoyed as he was chilled by the outburst. "There's a child upstairs trying to sleep."

The vampire turned. Sniffed the air like a dog. "I know. A woman, too."

Paul's hands fisted on the arms of his chair. He watched the vampire slowly relax until he leaned loose-limbed against the wall. His face, which had grown more mottled with his scarlet rage, faded back to a shade closer to normal for him. "The situation now developing," he said thickly, "is not of my doing."

"Purcell," said the nearly forgotten daughter, the name dribbling from her mouth like sour milk.

"Yes. Duane Purcell. It happened just four months ago. And now that I think of it, it is my fault. The problem, Paul, is that I'm too compassionate for my own good."

Laws, Drake had told his people on more than one occasion, must be obeyed, for the law is the heart of a civilized society. Those who'd remained with him after Chitimacha Bend gave him no argument for they were the most fiercely loyal. There were no major transgressors for more than a century.

Until the night Frank Dexter killed Duane Purcell.

"I believe John and I were bloodletting a rat at the time," Drake reminisced, "when James Chaplin blundered in to tell me in that officious manner of his that we had a situation. That's how James would have put it, too: 'We have a situation.'

"The two daylighters had been feuding for years. I don't know why, and quite frankly I don't care. That was my downfall: not keeping closer tabs on my town. Anyway, I let James drag me to the Winking Dog Saloon, which is where, if anything tawdry happens around here, it will take place."

"My head reeled with bloodscent as soon as I walked in. Frank Dexter held a dripping knife blade, and that ocean of blood...he must have hit an artery.

"I'm going to use that bloodlust as a partial excuse for my foggy thinking. At least I didn't do like John Tolliver and Vern Chambers and drop to my knees to lap the pooling liquid from the bare floorboards. But when I saw that the bloody mass at my feet was Duane Purcell, I wanted to celebrate then and there. White trash, Paul. Riffraff, as we called it in my day." He snickered. "Or at least one of my days."

The vampire wiped his mouth. "The point is, the entire Purcell clan should have been wiped out long ago. No loss."

But Purcell's mother had been called and by now she'd thrown herself down on the floor with her dying son, sobbing.

"He lived with her. Almost thirty years old and he still lived with his mother. Typical Purcell. But like I say, I'm too compassionate for my own good."

Since the town's daylighters were all converted as they matured and therefore expected to live exceedingly long and glorious lives, premature death was a particularly grisly prospect. The onlookers gaped in horror as the life pumped from the twitching man on the floor. Take him, the man's mother implored in the presence of the master vampire.

"Anyone who tells you that rules are made to be broken leads an undisciplined existence," said Drake.

"You converted him."

The vampire's eyes flashed. "I might as well have put a loaded gun into the hands of a disturbed child. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I'd done it. Even before. But that woman...she was relentless."

There was more to it than that, Drake admitted. With eventual conversion being the basis of the vampires' unwritten pact with the humans, there was no telling what affect an eyewitness account of that pact being broken would have. Anything from mass exodus to open rebellion would devastate the community.

After a review of the assault, it was determined that Frank Dexter had been provoked by Purcell and his friends, and since no permanent injuries had been sustained, the matter was officially closed.

"Then we heard rumor that Jason Penney and Gary Leckner, two cronies of Purcell's, were spending their days behind closed blinds and prowling the streets after dark.

"Naturally, I confronted Purcell and he apologized. He pointed out-quite correctly, though impertinently stated, as it turned out-that conversion of the young was not strictly forbidden in our community. We hadn't had to establish such formal laws before his kind came along. We'd always let common sense dictate that anyone under the age of at least fifty was too young to have the self discipline to assume such grave responsibilities."

Again, Drake stopped. He sipped water, almost daintily, and stared into the distance.

"I should have cut him down then and there, while I was still stronger than him. But the truth is, my killer instinct had been dulled over the years, and I took my time thinking about it. Trying to be fair."

The next rumor to befall the town was that Jason Penney had converted his teenage girlfriend, Patty Craven, and that she'd taken her younger brother, Ethan. Even as the master vampire went about his business of collecting and sorting through the evidence of the latest conversions, Purcell changed his strategy and began threatening, cajoling and bribing daylighters.

"Imagine a society, he must have told his listeners, where you don't have to be withered and senile and near death before joining the hunt. Eternal life, he would have promised, as only the young might enjoy it.

"Not everyone listened, I'm proud to say. Plenty reported back to me, but plenty didn't." Drake frowned at the memory. "Frank Dexter disappeared four months ago and hasn't been seen since. Four months ago, the conversions took up again, this time openly. They converted one officer on the police force, and the strangers started being pulled into town by the daylighter McConlon and a couple cops working for him. But first, McConlon got hold of some of the business owners and made them donate jobs as bait. Many, like my good friend James Chaplin, agreed out of fear. Others are looking toward their final reward."

Drake ran a finger along his mouth. "I don't know how Purcell did it, but that hayseed has somehow managed to set up a competing society right in the shadow of my own. If I were younger," he hissed, "this would not be happening."

"The outsiders...they're here to be hunted," Paul said in a hushed tone. "They're here for...harvesting?"

"It's an outrage," said Tabitha Drake as she teethed her empty beer can. "Sooner or later someone important is going to be taken, and then where will we be?"

And now Paul understood, as the vampire frowned his daughter to silence, why he'd been handled with kid gloves.

"If you must know," said Drake, "a few have already fallen victim."

"Doyle Armstrong," Paul shot back. "Judd Maxwell."

"Unfortunately, all it did was feed their appetites."

Paul sprang from his chair. "You have to stop them." He began to pace the room.

"I can't." Rheumy, yellow eyes followed him. "They're young, and too strong to be stopped without triggering a vampire war." He flapped his hand in a tired gesture. "They got out of control. I should have kept better track of them and I didn't. I accept responsibility."

Paul wheeled and faced the vampire. "You accept responsibility? They're killing innocent people and you 'accept responsibility?'"

The eyes, which had seemed so old and weak just moments before flared with white brilliance in an instant. "Watch how you talk to me, daylighter. Purcell and the others are problems. You, on the other hand, are an irritation."

Paul fell to his seat, breathless. He'd almost allowed himself to forget who-or what-he'd been addressing.

Drake said, "My purpose for coming here tonight was to let you make a rational, informed decision regarding the sale of your home. I've rambled some, but I'll now get to the point. I know you have business associates and relatives and friends and bankers and lawyers and accountants, all who'd raise more questions than we'd care to answer if you were to just disappear."