The vampire stared at an index finger before nibbling the ragged nail. "But you haven't made a new and powerful friend tonight, Paul. I haven't unburdened myself because I see you as a trusted confidante. Quite the contrary, I don't trust you at all. And yet, what choice do I have? You're bright and inquisitive and quite stubborn. You've made it abundantly clear to everyone who's tried to intervene that you have no intention of leaving Babylon without answers."

"So now you have answers," said Tabitha Drake.

"And now it's very difficult for us to let you go," said Drake.

Paul's bladder felt heavy enough to release and spill down his legs, and yet he hadn't the strength to attend to the problem. There were no fully formed thoughts in his head, just cloudy, abstract images of death and dread.

"There's one more tale to tell," the vampire said softly. This one-I swear it's the last-concerns the people who lived in your home. The McConlons? You know the brother, the bastard working for Purcell. Jeff and Andrea and their two lovely kids, I don't believe you ever met. They were in such a rush to leave. If you listen carefully to this final tale of mine, I think you'll find in it a valuable lesson.

Chapter Thirty-Four.

Of all the laws governing the residents of Babylon, Michigan, those concerning population control were among the most seriously observed. Word would not seep out if no one got out.

While some worked in surrounding towns and even as far away as Detroit or Toledo, the town's dark secrets were guarded by the fact that emigration was strictly forbidden. The obvious problem with this decree was too many births and an absence of counterbalancing deaths. Even after annexing nearby farm acreage, not always voluntarily, civic leaders could foresee the town outgrowing all available expansion space.

To postpone a population crisis, the families of Babylon were limited to a maximum of two children.

"We're quite progressive," the vampire quietly boasted. "Condoms and a variety of female contraceptive options are widely available and inexpensive, and abortions are free and safe at Babylon Community Hospital. As a result, we've rarely had a problem."

Paul's eyes felt scratchy, prickly for the need for sleep. For the first time, he was struggling to keep up. "Rarely," he said.

The vampire's face grew more mottled. "Again, I was kept in the dark. The first I knew of the situation was Olan Buck telling me that the McConlons wanted special dispensation to have a third child. Such permission has never been granted, but I had Tabitha look into it."

"They'd already conceived. Apparently, the laws of the land are not meant for such as them," she spat.

A dark glance from her father returned the woman to her sullen silence.

Drake turned back to Paul, his white brows low over his eyes. "After careful consideration, I decided that making the one exception would only encourage disregard for the laws of logic that bind our society. The situation was handled firmly, but with compassion. An appointment was made for Mrs. McConlon at our hospital."

"The bitch never showed," Tabitha muttered.

"The next we knew, they were gone and the house was sold," said Drake, with all the hurt indignation of the offended party. "In a whirlwind of activity, they took off three weeks before you moved in."

Paul nodded. "The real estate agent said it was a highly motivated seller." Understatement of the year.

Very softly, the vampire said, "Oh, we know all about Savannah Easton."

"She's not responsible," Paul said. "We found the place ourselves, online, and she recommended against it."

"No matter. The house should not have even been on the market. There are certain things that area brokers have just picked up on without anyone having to hit them over the head with a hammer about it." Drake offered up a ghastly smile. "Or maybe that's exactly what we should have done."

The vampire scooted forward in the sofa and fixed his listener in his sights. "Here comes the part I want you to pay especially close attention to, Paul. It provides the moral that holds this entire long evening together. Listen carefully, please."

He could hardly do otherwise. Paul was snared in those twin beams under the thick set of brows.

"You and your lovely family moved in almost five weeks ago, and yet it's only in the last few days that we've begun to pressure you to leave. Why do you think it's taken that long, Paul?"

The long hours and the vampire's cool voice had nearly lulled him to sleep, but Paul managed to shake his head into wakefulness and provide a response: He had no idea.

"Of course not. It's because we had other things to do. Other activities occupying our time and attention and resources. Think hard, Paul. Why do you suppose it's taken this long?"

He would have liked to have said he didn't know, but he had a horrible suspicion. He broke eye contact with the vampire and stared at the bamboo floor. His voice rasped painfully in response. "You were hunting. The McConlons."

"Right!" the vampire shouted. "Right on the money, son!"

The only significant time Jeff McConlon had ever spent away from Babylon, Paul was told, was during a three-year Army stint ("We don't discourage patriotism, Paul"), and Andrea had never been out. Therefore, the fleeing family had few avenues of outside assistance.

"His brother is a rat's ass, but he came up with the identity of Jeff's best friend from his service days. With the help of our police department computers, we were able to track this man down to a trailer outside of Ithaca, New York. He was divorced and living alone on a weed-choked field owned by an alcoholic widower of a farmer whose own tumbledown home was at least a mile away. It couldn't have been a better setup."

The last thing Paul wanted was the details, but, as before, he couldn't stop himself. "You wiped out the entire family."

The vampire looked hurt. "You didn't give them enough money, Paul. You found your motivated seller and low-balled even their ridiculously low selling price in a terrible market. I'm not blaming you, just stating the facts. By the time their mortgage was paid off, well..."

Drake shrugged. Smiled, as Paul felt his stomach clench up.

"I'm sure young Jeff and Andrea planned to take the money and run for as long as it held out. Disappear for months, years, however long it took us to forget. That's easy enough to do with ample funds, but like I said, you found yourself in a well leveraged position. I think that's the term you use. I can picture the young couple, their two young children and a third on the way, trying to survive with nothing. No job, no plans and no experience on the road. That's the main thing, Paul: experience. It's taken me a century to learn that. But the McConlons had this one friend in the whole huge, scary outside world, so where are they likely to end up?"

Paul wanted the night to end, for dawn to break and the new sun to shatter either the vampire whom he'd invited into his family's home or his own delusion about the old man's power.

"I'm picturing Andrea protesting her husband's plans," Drake went on. "She'd tell him that it was too obvious, too risky. But Jeff would tell her that it'd been several weeks and that it looked like the town had forgotten them. Now, he'd probably know otherwise, but he was without options, Paul, so it was a lie he had to pull over both of them. Can you picture it, Paul? Can you see how two intelligent people can delude themselves out of a sense of desperation?"

The vampire chuckled. "Jeff and Andrea grew up here. They should have known we'd never give up looking for them."

Paul's system felt burned out on spent adrenalin. Listlessly, almost beyond caring, he said, "So you people slaughtered the entire family in the trailer home."

"And their host, too, of course. "But you're getting ahead of the story."

The family had most likely chosen such a desolate spot to avoid prying eyes, and yet it worked just the opposite.

"It was such a remote hideaway that we were able to take our time, set the stage. Our daylighters had preceded us to stake the place out, and I arrived with a handful of old men after sundown. We'd traveled by night and stayed at a nearby motel, but not so near that we'd be remembered, you understand. I recall it being such a lovely, cool evening that we could barely pull ourselves out of the tall grass where we'd been talking politics and philosophy and waiting for the children to be called in.

"The young ones, you see, had been playing outside for hours, tussling in the dirt and weeds under a full moon, chasing fireflies, just being kids. They looked lightning-quick, much too swift for old men like ourselves. We couldn't risk them flitting away in the dark, which is why we waited so patiently.

"But finally bedtime arrived-much too late for children so young, but that's just my old-fashioned opinion-and the whole family came together one last time."

The vampire's eyes twinkled. "Paul, I don't think you have a stomach for the details, so I'll spare them. But there is one thing I must tell you."

Drake shimmied his hips so that he edged farther forward on the sofa. His eyes looked painfully red-rimmed, as though the bright fires within had burned holes through his lenses. "Since Mrs. McConlon had missed her appointment at the hospital, I performed the surgery myself. No charge, in keeping with our community's generous family planning tradition." The vampire again gave up that yellow and brown grin. "It was a most tender meat."

Then he glanced at his watch and said, "Look at the time."

Father and daughter rose together and headed into the foyer. Paul found himself, as though floating rudderless, following them to the front door.

It was all a lie, he told himself. A dark and mad parable designed to strike fear in his heart. And yet he knew the truth was otherwise.

"I probably don't have to spell out the lesson to be learned from all of this, but I'll do so anyway."

The vampire's voice boomed from his powerful chest, under the cathedral ceiling. Though not quite as tall as Paul, the thing seemed to look down at him with eyes that had yellowed with age, irises wide and shiny with exhaustion. He looked like a time-ravished old man who'd stayed up too long.

"We recognize the irrationality of killing you for what you've learned about us, so we must trust you to keep our dark secrets. And yet I trust no one, so hear me now: If Babylon is to be destroyed by you, there's no place to hide that we won't find you. We want you and your lovely family-your attractive young wife, Darby-I'm sure there's a story there-and your beautiful son, Tuck-to accept our generous offer for your home. We want you to take your capital gain and move quickly and quietly. But talk to Police Chief Sandy rather than Savannah Easton to complete the transaction. I shouldn't think the whole process would take more than three weeks. We'll cut through the red tape."

"Why not Savannah?" Paul asked quietly as his heart juddered in his chest.

The vampire pulled open the door to the night. "You know the answer to that, Paul."

He stepped out, setting off an alarm of squealing rodents. Paul could see dozens of the plump night shadows slithering across the vampire's feet, dragging long tails in their ponderous wake. Drake cocked one leg and launched a kick into the ribs of one. It cracked like a hardshelled nut, and Paul could hear its breath wheezing from ruined lungs.

"Damned things," the vampire said with an absence of heat. He spread his arms to indicate the creatures just out of reach of his long legs. "When my ego is running dangerously high, Paul, I'll glance down and see my most fervent disciples." He issued a tired chuckle. "That always puts me in my place."

Chapter Thirty-Five.

"Did you-?"

"Yes," she hissed, flying down the stairs. "My God, he must be insane. There's got to be-"

"Shush," he warned. "Don't say anything. We don't know what he can pick up or how he does it."

"That's right, Paul." Darby kept coming until she stood before him. She looked up, her eyes raging with a fire that seemed as lethal as anything the vampire had shown him. "We don't have any idea what that thing sees or hears. For all we know, he's already aware of what we have in mind. And then what, Paul? What do we do if he knows?"

Paul checked the door. He'd locked it, of course, when the vampire and his daughter left, but he checked again. "I don't know," he said.

He felt utterly defeated by the night, by a century of tales.

"You don't know." She spoke in a slow, heavy whisper. "You don't know, and yet you invited that thing into our home." Her voice turned to a strained rasp, a shout without volume. "Then we have to stop, Paul. We can't go on with it. You heard what happened to that other family."

The windows at each wing of the entry door were without curtains, and now the glass looked too inviting, too black with intrusive night.

"I can't," he said finally. "I can't just leave those people."

He was trapped. Every thought, each plan was blocked by those two competing nests of vampires in which he still didn't allow himself to fully believe, and by the fate of the people in the Sundown Motel. And, more than anything else, by his wife and child in the house with him.

"I can't," he said again. "I won't leave them. We're relatively safe compared to them. We have to go through with it."

Darby continued to glare up at him, but at least she didn't ask him if he was sure that they'd be okay.

So he didn't have to lie.

Part Three.

War.

Against the walls of Babylon raise a signal, make strong the watch; post sentries, arrange ambushes!

Jeremiah 51,12.

There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth...

Luke 13:28.

Chapter Thirty-Six.

Sunday night, all hell broke loose at the Sundown.

Later, after they'd buried the dead in a shallow grave, Todd followed D.B. through a door behind the counter in the motel office and into Mona Dexter's living room.

The air was frosty as the Sundown's only working window unit hummed contentedly behind a fluttering pair of drapes. In a bookcase filled with knick knacks and on tables and a fireplace mantle with no fireplace-just a basket of tall dried flowers where the flames should be-were framed photos of Mona and a man with a graying beard.

"You can take a shower, take your stuff off if you want," she told him, her voice still tight.

Todd shook his head.

She took another look at his bloody clothing and said, "Well, no offense, but..." She led him to a small love seat she hastily covered with plastic dry cleaning bags. "The furniture's kind of new."

D.B. sat next to him, uncomfortably close. There was a much longer couch on the other side of the coffee table, but no plastic.

At the top of the "L," before the room took a hard right toward a doorway that seemed to lead to the kitchen, was a round wooden table with spindly legs and four blue placemats. As he sat placidly in his plastic-covered seat, Todd wondered whether she'd been expecting three guests for her next meal or if there were four settings merely because there were four chairs.

"We want answers, Mona," D.B. said. His demand began on a firm note, but ended with a slight hitch that betrayed his tamped down panic.

She'd changed into a robe, but her black hair was still damp from the shower she'd taken immediately following her part in the evening's frenzy. She'd gotten all the blood out, it looked to Todd.

As he inspected her, she did the same to him. She took in his gouged shoulder, then his drained face. Her eyes were a warm shade of brown.