"What?"

Reflecting how nothing could spoil the moment like a cat, Claire got her legs free, rolled onto her side, and noticed, right at eye level, a stack of ten-inch baseboards. As far as she could tell, given her position, they'd been taken from the wall in ten- or twelve-foot lengths. "This is great!"

"Falling?"

"Baseboards." Scrambling to her feet, she retrieved her flashlight from a pile of old Reader's Digest Condensed Books, part of the obligatory attic door, and headed for the stairs. "They were probably taken off when they replaced the plaster and lathe with drywall. Come on. I've got to measure the walls in the dining room because I think baseboards go on before the wallpaper."

Happily working out a renovation schedule that would keep Dean busy for the next six or seven lifetimes, Claire raced down the attic stairs, along the third floor hall, and down to the second floor where she stopped cold. There was a man at the other end of the hall; at the door to room four.

Instinct overwhelmed cognitive function and she ran toward him. "Hey!"

When he spun around, she saw it was the deliveryman, no big surprise, and that he was picking the lock.

So much for the simple solutions. "Get away from there!"

"Don't try and stop me." The cliche's warning made his voice sound harsher than it had, the voice of a man barely clinging to sanity.

One hand searching her clothing for a thread, Claire reached for power, touched seepage, and hesitated.

The intruder dove toward her, grabbed her upper arms, and threw her against the wall. He was stronger, much stronger than he looked; madness lending strength.

"Why?" he demanded, smashing her head against the wall on every other word "Why are you protecting that undead, bloodsucking, soulless creature?"

Limp in his grasp, unable to concentrate enough to use even the seepage, Claire was only vaguely aware of being dragged toward the storage cupboard. Through a gray haze and strangely shifting world view, she saw Jacques swoop down from the ceiling, shrieking and howling and having no effect at all.

Oh, swell, she thought, as the cupboard door swung open. He believes in vampires but not in ghosts. A heartbeat later, the implications of that sank in and she began to struggle weakly.

She hit the floor beside the mop bucket, barely managing to keep her head from bouncing, and collapsed entirely when a heart-stopping screech set the bottles of cleanser vibrating.

A deeper howl of pain rose over the noise the cat was making; then, just as Claire attempted to sit up again, the door slammed shut and Austin landed on the one thing guaranteed to break his fall.

For a moment, the need to breathe outweighed other considerations; then, lying in the dark listening to Austin hiss and spit, she grabbed for the first power she could reach and used it to clear her head. Sucking up seepage had just become a minor problem. "I understand how you feel, Austin, but shut up. We haven't time for this."

A whiskered face pressed into her cheek. "Are you all right?"

"No. But I'm fixing it." Anger burned away the damage, power riding in on her rage to replace what she spent. At the moment, it didn't matter where that power came from. With all body parts more-or-less back under her control, she stood and flung herself at the door. The impact hurt, a lot, and bounced her onto her b.u.t.t. The door didn't budge.

He'd done something to hold it in place.

"Calm down!" the cat snarled. "You nearly landed on top of me!"

"Calm?" Claire struggled back onto her feet. "What do you think a murder in this building will do to the pentagram's seals?" Breathing deeply, once, twice, she placed her hands on the wood and blew the door off its hinges.

Staggering slightly, she raced down the hall, through Jacques, and into room four.

He was standing over the bed, a sharpened stake in an upraised hand.

There was no seepage left, blowing the door had wiped it clean. Sagging against the wall, Claire reached into the possibilities, knowing she wouldn't be in time.

A black-and-white streak landed on his back as the stake came down.

Pulling Austin clear with one hand, Claire tossed her bit of thread with the other. As the deliveryman stiffened, she shoved him behind her to fall, shrieking, wrapped in invisible bonds, onto the floor of the outer room.

The stake protruded from Sasha Moore's chest just below the collarbone. At first, in the forty-watt glow of the bedside lamp, Claire thought it was all over, then she realized that he'd missed the heart by three full inches. Either he had a poor understanding of biology or Austin's leap had misdirected the blow.

"She is Nosferatu! She must die!" The crazed voice echoed in the closed room. "Those who protect her have made a covenant with evil!"

"Hey! Don't tell me about evil," Claire snapped at him over her shoulder. "I'm a trained professional." She spread her fingers and one of the bonds expanded to cover his mouth.

His tail still twice its normal size, Austin panted as he looked from the stake to Claire. "Now what?"

"Now we pull it out." There was a pop of displaced air as the first-aid kit from the kitchen appeared on the bedside table. "And we bandage the wound and see what happens when she wakes up."

"I'm guessing she'll be hungry."

Claire glanced toward the man thrashing impotently about and grunting in inarticulate rage. "I think we can find her a bite of something."

AT THIS RATE, THE DAMPENING FIELD WILL NEVER GO DOWN. SHE BARELY CLEARED THE WAY FOR FURTHER SEEPAGE. THE COUSIN DID MUCH MORE DAMAGE WITH HIS TOYS AND DIVERSIONS.

PATIENCE.

PATIENCE... The word sounded as though it had been ground out through shards of broken gla.s.s... IS A VIRTUE!

The ruddy light reflected in the copper hood grew brighter, as though h.e.l.l itself blushed. SORRY.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Sunset was at seven-forty-one. Claire called the local radio station for the exact time and, while she had them on the line, asked them to play "Welcome to My Nightmare." The song, discovered on one of her parents' old alb.u.ms, had meant a lot to her during the earliest years of her sister's training and the events of the afternoon had made her nostalgic for those simpler, albeit equally dangerous, times.

At seven-thirty, she started up the stairs.

At seven-thirty-five, she unlocked the door to room four, pa.s.sed the man lying in the dressing room, who stirred restlessly in his involuntary sleep, and entered the cubicle holding the bed and the wounded Sasha Moore. In the dim light of the bedside lamp, she stood by the wall and waited for sunset.

At seven-forty-six, either the radio station or her watch off by the longest five minutes in recorded history, she saw the vampire's lips, pale without their customary sheen of artificial color, slowly part and draw in the first breath of the night. Ebony brows dipped in as both wound and bandage pulled with the movement of the narrow chest. Muscles tensed beneath the ivory skin. Eyes snapped open. A dark gaze swept over the red-brown stains along the left side of the bed and then locked on Claire's face.

"Spill, Keeper," Sasha Moore snarled. "What the f.u.c.k is going on here?"

At seven-fifty-two, as the newly awakened vampire-slayer began to whimper, Claire stepped out into the hall and locked the door to room four behind her.

"How did you know I wouldn't kill him when he had every intention of killing me?"

"He's crazy, you're not," Claire answered calmly. "You've lived too long to risk exposure by modem forensics." She turned her attention to the gla.s.sy-eyed man, who swayed where he stood, oblivious to his surroundings. Centuries of arriving at accident sites after the inevitable, and invariably messy, cause and effect had already taken place, had given Keepers a distinctly fatalistic, some might even say unsympathetic att.i.tude toward people who played with matches. A Keeper's responsibility involved keeping the whole metaphorical forest from going up, and they figured the more people who got their fingers burned, the less likely that was to happen. Claire shuddered to think of what might have occurred had she stayed in the attic a few moments longer. "How much will you allow him to remember?"

A spark of cruel amus.e.m.e.nt gleamed in the shadowed eyes. "Let's put it this way: He's going to p.i.s.s himself whenever he's outside after the sun goes down and he's not going to know why."

"Isn't that a bit extreme?"