Maybe he didn't get shot, maybe he got staked!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe he faked his own death and now he's writing music for Green Day or-I've got it-Coldplay. Get it?

What about this-? HE DOESN'T EVEN LOOK LIKE CHRIS MARTIN! Besides, he's a vegetarian. Lennon wouldn't go back to England. There's a rule like in Highlander. They have to go to another country. Hey, are you saying he went to Russia, dude?

This was getting me nowhere. I was about to apologize for the interruption and leave when someone I recognized answered.

I have friends in Russia.

Am looking for family member-name of Hugo.

What band does he play for? the Keith fan asked.

He's in that country band Bering Strait. I swear, no way those guys are REAL RUSSIANS.

I ignored the music critics and waited.

The pop-up for an instant message beeped. Name rings a bell. I'll have to get back to you, my contact said.

h.e.l.lo? Are you guys here to talk, or what? The partic.i.p.ants in the chat room had noticed our absence from their conversation.

I imagine that would be "or what." Have a nice evening. I signed out of the chat room and waited for another instant message.

It didn't take long.

We've only managed to retrieve one offspring from Hugo's influence. And the wretched creature is still damaged. We know a little and have guessed at more. Some very powerful vamps-especially the females. Have you lost someone?

No. We have reason to believe Hugo is interested in us.

Interested as in expansion?

More like annihilation.

Not good. Not good at all.

Did the one you recovered have anything which belonged to H or any in his family? Something you could send me to track him?

No. She was naked-hung by the neck with tendons they ripped from her own legs.

I see. And I did see. The old sires were known for their thorough methods of torture, compiled over centuries of watching humanity and eons of experimenting on one another. When one is unable to die, all things painful are possible. The main variable is how well or quickly one can heal and the process can start over again.

If you can, I need to know exactly where he is and how he travels. Also, any connections he had with my sire, Reedrek. Will do our best. Olivia says h.e.l.lo.

Tell her I'm waiting to hear from her. She'll know what I mean.

I deleted the record of the conversation. While I waited for more news, I decided to talk to Reedrek myself. Perhaps he'd be a little more malleable after being abandoned in the dark. An unlikely hope but...

I retrieved the bone box and proceeded outside to sit by the reflecting pool. The air was quite cool and the trees reflected in the dark water were bare of leaves. Most humans, save for the ones up to no good, would be snug in their winter beds. For me, the cool, crisp air was a pleasant sensation although I did miss the warmth of high summer nights when the heat radiated back from the rock and brick as though the sun still rode high in the sky. It was the closest I could ever get to daylight.

But at the moment I needed darkness. I tossed the sh.e.l.ls and went in search of my sire.

I smelled him before I saw him. Trapped in his own private preview of h.e.l.l, he lay huddled against one side of his coffin. Several small, spiny creatures were chewing furiously on his feet and ankles, growling in their greed. He didn 't seem to notice except to occasionally twitch and kick them away. They returned immediately, faces smeared with dark blood. This illusion of h.e.l.l could be quite convincing. Perhaps even real to those alive in it.

"Good evening, old man."

The vacancy evaporated from Reedrek's eyes and he peered into the gloom until he found me in my faint glow.

"You'll excuse me if I don't get up," he said with a grimace that might have been a sneer if he'd had the energy.

"Are you tired of this game yet?" I asked.

He made a huffing sort of laugh. "Me, tired? No, things are just getting interesting." He angled his head back and let out a howling wail.

Other wails answered him from the close darkness.

He wailed again.

This was getting us nowhere. I raised a glowing hand and pointed toward the demons. "Back in your hole," I ordered.

Before they could even register surprise, they disappeared. In a few seconds I floated over my sire in the empty silence, face-to- face. We were so close, we seemed to be breathing the same air.

The smell was even worse here.

"Tell me about Hugo."

His mouth worked; he was obviously deciding what to say and what to keep silent about. I didn't give him time to conjure more lies. "I know he's your offspring and my kin."

"Yesssss," he hissed. "Your brother, of a sort." A wheezing laugh followed. "So much more obliging than you. None of those milksop sensibilities about human pain and death." His gaze sharpened. "He especially liked to make females and to watch them suffer. It didn't matter if they died in the making; the suffering was the wine of his debauchery.

"Once he took three young sisters in one night. He bled them, killed them, then locked them together in a dungeon with a viewing port. As they were making, they shrieked and tore at one another like rabid dogs." Reedrek sighed in the ecstasy of remembering, as though he'd been there. "Then, when it came time to mate them, he took all at once, forcing them on one another as well. By the end of it, he'd killed one with the pounding of his c.o.c.k." He tsked. "Such a small and fragile little thing she was-meant for the nunnery, no doubt." I had not come here to help Reedrek revisit his joyful past. "If you love Hugo so much, why didn't you bring him across the ocean with you? Why not let him share in the triumph of bringing me to heel? Or perhaps he could have gotten the task done."

He held his silence for a few seconds. "He had his own business to attend to. But mark my words, he will come."

"For you? Does he love you so well then?"

Reedrek's leathery face tightened. "Yessss, he loves me well. But he loves another even more."

"And who might that be?"

"Diana." He laughed this time until a coughing fit took him. When he recovered, he rasped, "Your Diana. I gave her to him and his c.o.c.k the night I made you."

I'd been prepared for this. After all, he'd said the same the morning I set out in a boat to kill us both. Even so, I could feel my fury doubling. I purposely kept my voice level, as one might scold a child. "We both know that's a lie. I saw her buried. I sent someone to follow her lineage. He may have someone named Diana but she is not my Diana."

That seemed to surprise him into silence again. He swallowed several times, clearly hungering for blood or even water in his dry tomb.

"And did the one you sent come back alive to tell you lies?" he asked.

I was tired of bandying words. "How will Hugo come? How does he travel?"

"He rides a wild mare and her name is Diana," he said in a singsong voice. "Diana, Diana, humping your lovely Diana..."

I couldn't stand for one more second his filthy mouth forming her name. Fury fueled by my voodoo blood flashed through me, bringing a shocking wave of power.

"Silence!" I shouted like a thundering curse.

The choking odor of burnt blood seared my lungs. I stared down at my sire in shock. He had turned to stone.

Jack The next night I got to the plantation early, hoping to have a talk with Travis Rubio about his being a warrior for the "cities of gold." Could he possibly be old enough to have fought the conquistadores? The Web pages Werm had printed out for me about the Maya had left me with more questions than answers. Even if Rubio wasn't old enough to have been around before the Maya died out, if he fought Cortes, he wasn't far behind. I wanted to pick his brain for any knowledge he had that might help shed light on Connie's origins.

Melaphia had been closemouthed about her dawn ritual with Connie. She wouldn't tell me if they'd learned anything new, but she still seemed convinced she was on the right track with the Mayan G.o.ddess thing. She told me only that Connie was continuing to see her during the day-for more hocus-pocus sessions, I figured.

I found Travis sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gazebo out back, looking out at the bay. He sat so still he looked like the carved wooden Indian they used to have in a fancy tobacco store in town around the turn of the century. The turn of the twentieth century, that is.

He spoke before he turned to see me. "I love the sea," he said. "It reminds me of my youth in what is now called Belize."

"Do you get back there much?" I asked, taking a seat on the wooden bench that ran along the inside of the gazebo. "Every few years." He got up and sat on the bench opposite so he could look me in the eye. "It's not the same as when I was a boy, of course. Parts of it are still mercifully unspoiled, but the great jewel of a city I grew up in has been overtaken by the jungle. It saddens me still."

I took a deep breath. Belize. Mayan territory. "Yesterday you mentioned being a warrior for the cities of gold. You fought the Spanish in Central America?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "For all the good it did." He looked back out at the water and his eyes grew as cold and black as a crow's.

"Cortes was embraced as a G.o.d. By the time we realized he was a devil, it was too late."

"Wow," I breathed. "You actually fought Cortes. If you don't mind me asking, how far back do you go, exactly?"

Travis smiled then. "To about five centuries after the birth of Jesus Christ," he said. "So you see, I am rather ancient, already a blood drinker for a thousand years before the Europeans came."

William told me once that the older a vampire, the more powerful he was. I wondered how old a bloodsucker would have to be to rival the power of the voodoo blood. I hoped I never had to find out firsthand. Travis might look placid most of the time, but I felt in my bones that he would be a mighty adversary. Luckily he was on our side.

"If you were in Belize a thousand years before Cortes, that would have made you a...Mayan, wouldn't it?" I held my breath waiting for his answer.

"Yes. I am Mayan," Travis said.

I let my breath out. "That was quite a culture." It was quite a b.l.o.o.d.y culture, all right. They did more slicing and dicing than the guys in the Ginsu knife commercials, and that was just on themselves. I couldn't believe the things I read about that they did to their prisoners of war, and I'm not what you'd call the squeamish type, what with being a guy who has eaten my share of bad guys alive.

But I figured if I wanted to get Travis talking, I should stick to the more flattering aspects of his heritage. "You had arithmetic, a calendar-is it true you could predict eclipses because your knowledge of astronomy was so good?"

Travis smiled again, looking pleased. "You're interested in history, I see. Yes, Jack, all that is true. And we were expert farmers and traders as well. The Maya built a mighty civilization and maintained it for hundreds of years before it crumbled to ruin."

"That was way before the conquistadores came, though, right? If they didn't destroy it, who did?"

Travis sighed and reached into the pocket of his shearling coat for a pipe and a pouch of tobacco. "Modern historians blame drought, or war. The truth is, the blame lies squarely with the men who called themselves kings. And later...G.o.ds."

Mayan G.o.ds. Pay dirt. "Tell me what happened," I said. And for the next half hour, I listened as Travis told the whole, sad, horrifying tale.

I was a priest as was my father before me and his father before him. We conducted sacred rituals, controlled holy festivals, computed time, and recorded history. But there were darker duties as well.

The n.o.bility had become drunk-figuratively drunk on power and literally drunk on hallucinogenic mushrooms from our own land in addition to peyote from the north and coca leaves from Inca lands to the south. The royal court imbibed these substances and their hallucinations were thought to be sacred divinations.

I knew them for what they were: the ravings of drunken lunatics. But what was a priest to do? The n.o.bility had declared themselves G.o.ds and the people worshipped them. Somewhere along the way, these kings became obsessed with blood. In the youth of my ancestors, the n.o.bility sacrificed only animals. By the time I came along, the sacrifices were human.

We speak today of the old European lords and their liking for torture. In my duties as a human priest, I would pluck the beating heart from a human being and show it to him while he was still alive to watch it throb until it became still. I then took the sacrificial blood, anointed the statues of the G.o.ds, and smeared it onto the faces and chests of the king and queen.

It was thought that blood shed in the sacrifice of a human could open the portal between heaven and h.e.l.l. And thinking back on it, as I have many times through the centuries, I've come to the belief that it actually did.

The sacrifices came from the ranks of the prisoners we took from wars with other tribes. The higher the rank of the captive, the more valued he was as a sacrifice, so as you can see, the most rare and prized sacrifice of all was that of a king. In one of our tribe's many wars, our warriors actually captured one. We kept him captive for months, bleeding him gradually, using his blood in rituals and ceremonies until he grew weak and delirious.

Finally, our own king decided that the captured king should make the ultimate sacrifice, so I and the other priests organized a grand festival, complete with hundreds of musicians and dancers. Thousands of peasants gathered around the palace for the celebration, and when the time for the great sacrifice came, the captive king was brought out and held down on a stone altar. As I raised the obsidian knife above his heart, he placed a curse on the king of our land.

The Maya believed that when the sun sets, it travels to the underworld, called Xibalba. After its nightly triumph over the lords of death, it rises again. The doomed king called out to Itzamna, the lord of the heavens, to curse our king so that he could never again see the sun and-if he was such a lover of blood-to require that it be the only food that would ever nourish his body.

Our king laughed at the curse of his enemy and ordered me to carry out the sacrifice. I did as I was told, although there was a fear beating in my chest like the wings of a great bird. I anointed the king and queen and the stone idols with blood and then I drenched the sacred cloths with it. The cloths we burned in great braziers so that the smoke could drift out and encircle the people and empower them with the essence of the sacrificial blood.

The people cried out in awe as the smoke from the fire formed itself into a column and took the shape of a vision serpent. This was a rare and holy event, one that had not happened in my lifetime, although the old priests told of it in stories pa.s.sed down through the generations. The whole city stared in silence as the vision serpent grew and began to speak.

"Iztamna, lord of the day and the night, declares that it is so. The blood thirst of this king will never be satisfied, and he shall never see the sun, but will always be banished to the underworld, the world of darkness and shadow."

And with that, a mighty wind arose and blew away the smoke. The people panicked and ran screaming, stampeding one another to get away from the fearsome sight and sound of the G.o.d of the heavens. I was as frightened as anyone, especially when I saw my king fall upon the floor of the platform, writhing in agony, clutching his throat.

The other priests and I carried him into the palace and laid him upon his bed. It fell to me to sit with him all through the night and the following day. I was the high priest and it was my responsibility to see to the king-the king who had declared himself a G.o.d. After sundown on the second day, I was asleep sitting straight up when the king wakened me.

He seemed cured of whatever had stricken him, and he bade me lie on his bed. I was tired, he said, and needed to rest, good servant that I was. He thanked me for guarding him. I did as I was told, but no sooner had I lain my body down than the king was on me, powerful arms holding me down on the bed. I struggled and fought but was helpless against his power. Then I saw his mouth open into a great maw and there were awful fangs where human teeth should be.

The pain was both terrible and sublime. I'll never forget it if I survive to see five thousand summers. When the pulse thundering in my ears began to die out, my king ripped the flesh of his own wrist and forced me to drink. And so I became as cursed as he was. Cursed to feed on blood and never see the sun. But also to have eternal life.

How, you may ask, did the people react? Why, they filed their teeth to points in the fashion of the king and took his new nature in stride. They were used to blood sacrifice, after all, so it was all the same to them. However, the making did not end with me. The king made all his n.o.bles into blood drinkers and they set out on an orgy of blood and hallucinogens that eventually spread to other tribes and caused the people to desert their great cities from fear and scatter into the jungles far and wide.

I blinked, mesmerized by Travis's story, and watched the smoke from his pipe curl around his head as I thought about the vision snake. Some of the images Travis described were enough to curl my fangs. That trick about pulling the beating heart out of a guy's chest and showing it to him sounded like something out of the Jackie Chan movie from h.e.l.l. And to think that humans had done that. It sounded more like something Reedrek and some of his posse would do. "What happened to the other blood drinkers? Are there any more of you still around?"

"No." Travis shivered and not, I thought, from the cold. "When the aristocracy's debauchery reached its zenith, the slayers came. From the overworld."

"Slayers?" A p.r.i.c.kle of what could only be called fear crept down my spine. I breathed deeply of the aromatic pipe tobacco. It was cured with honey. "You mean, like vampire slayers? Did somebody go all Buffy on you guys?"

Travis looked confused. I guess he wasn't tuned in to the pop culture vamp scene.

"The Mayan heavens have many G.o.ds and monsters. I suppose which is which depends on your point of view. Anyway, they came when we slept and slew everyone except me. I escaped. To this day I don't know how, or why."

I had to shake off a momentary vision of Buffy sneaking up on me in my sleep. Hey, that might even be worth being staked. I had so many questions I didn't know where to begin, so I started with the biggest one. "Are you saying that you're the first made vampire? In the whole world?"

Travis raised his hand and smiled. "No, Jack. I'm not the grand-ancestor of all the vampires on earth."

"But how-"

"I don't know how vampires originated on other continents, only on the one where I was born and made. Perhaps the forces of evil that manifest themselves into vampires belong to a realm of the underworld that exists in all parts of the globe, simply waiting to be freed by some elemental force."

"And then it's, Katie, bar the door."

"Precisely." Travis took another puff and looked back out onto the bay. "Perhaps we'll never know. But on the other hand, perhaps someday we will."