Connie ignored both of us. "One of you drive me back to town, now!"

"The only place you're going is back on the plane," Seth said.

"I'm a cop! I'm sworn to protect and serve, Seth, just like you are, remember?" she said, looking hard at him. "You, of all people, should know what that means."

Seth put his fists on his hips and strode away a few steps, letting fly a stream of curses I hadn't heard since I worked the docks.

"Didn't you hear anything that Travis said?" I asked her.

"You're not listening. It's my responsibility to go back and help in any way that I can."

I made a move to grab her, and she shook her finger at me. "Don't you dare!"

Another trembler sent all three of us to the ground, and knocked the keys to Seth's pickup right out of my hand. Connie got to her feet first, lunged for the keys, and sprinted for the truck.

"Hey!" I yelled.

"Where's that vampire speed, you toothy sonofab.i.t.c.h?" Seth taunted me as we raced after her.

"It went the same way as those werewolf after-burners, you fur-bearing b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

She'd gotten in and locked the doors by the time we reached the truck.

"Let me in," Seth yelled.

"You can ride in the truck bed or ride with Jack. It doesn't matter to me. But you're not going to stop me from going back to Savannah, you hear?" She cranked the truck and put it in gear. Seth jumped in the truck bed before she could take off, still cussing a blue streak. He was in for one rough and chilly ride, especially if the quake had damaged the roads. I ran back to my Corvette, hoping that no new potholes between here and town would damage the undercarriage of my prized vintage Stingray. I knew it was awful for me to think of my car at a time like this, but I couldn't help it. I'm not just a vampire. I'm also a guy.

As I was at a complete loss as to what I should do, I opened my mind to William. Before I could project my news to him, I heard him trying to reach me.

Jack! I'm in the tunnels next to Reedrek's crypt. He's about to get away. Come as quickly as you can!

I changed my mind about hoping the roads were open. Suddenly I wished a big old crack in the ground would open up and swallow me whole.

Nineteen.

William I'm coming, William, Jack told me.

Hurry, I replied.

As the tremor continued, I watched the coffin bounce on top of the pile of earth once. Twice. The third time it became airborne, it slid from its perch and hit the floor of the tunnel hard.

Hard enough to pop the chains on one end. Inside, Reedrek must have thrown himself against the side of his box with everything in him, because the last lurch of the steel coffin caused the chains to slide completely off.

I heard one more thump from the box and its lid flipped open. Like a particularly grisly jack-in-the-box, out popped my sire.

"I'm baaaaack!" he roared.

He looked like something out of a bad horror film. The months of starvation had rendered him nothing more than bone and sagging, sallow skin. He was covered in dirt, dust, and mold, his clothing in tatters. He smelled like a corpse that had been baking in the sun for a week. I had been sure I would never lay eyes on my sire again, but, to my shame, I'd underestimated him.

"I'm sorry I'm late, but I've been...tied up." He dissolved into insane laughter. "Has your sense of humor deserted you along with all your vampire friends?" He drew back his sagging lips to unsheathe his awful yellow fangs, and flexed his fingers to display his talonlike nails.

"Where's the rest of you?" he taunted as he crept toward me. "I can only see your top half. You remind me of a stuffed hunting trophy like those that hung in the great halls back in the day." He laughed heartily at his own joke. "Perhaps I'll hang you up on my wall when I kill you. What's the matter, boy? Cat got your tongue-along with the rest of you?"

"What did your cohorts do?" I opened my mind fully so that Jack, if he was still listening, could hear whatever explanation I might wring out of my sire. If I was to die at Reedrek's hand beneath this pile of rubble, I wanted Jack to know what had happened.

"Why, the Council's bidding, of course," he said.

"Damien came to Savannah on their instructions. They had sent a cohort to develop a cover story, complete with an ident.i.ty for Damien to a.s.sume. He was to perform the ritual that would free me. Little did he know that he would acquire such a lovely helpmate."

"That sounds like a lot of trouble to go through just to free the likes of you," I said. His eyes flashed his rage but only for a moment. He was too wily to rise to the bait. "You cut me to the quick, boy. I'll have you know the Council chose Savannah for this event precisely because they knew it would free me. And to make an example of you, of course. But I must admit, there was another objective as well."

"Which was?"

He clapped his hands together in glee, and a shower of dust and dirt rose from them. "It was supposed to be a surprise, but since you're trapped you might miss the show. So I'll go ahead and tell you just to see your face when you hear what the Council has wrought."

"Do enlighten me," I said, trying to mask my dread.

"Since you and your friends have been so naughty as to shirk your responsibilities to your sires, the Council decided to enlist the aid of some more reliable blood drinkers."

"What do you mean?"

"A deal was struck with the ones who have gone on before you."

I felt suddenly sickened; I didn't know whether from the blood loss or from the comprehension of the disaster that was beginning to dawn on me. "You mean-those in the underworld."

"Just so, my boy. Just so. You're not so stupid as I had begun to think."

At the meeting of vampires the other night at my home, Olivia had said the Council was rumored to have discovered how to raise from the dead every vampire who had ever been slain at the hands of another blood drinker since the beginning of time. I recalled her exact words: ma.s.sive, worldwide panic. The nightmare of every civilized blood drinker in the world was upon us.

"How does the Council know that they can resurrect dead vampires to do their killing for them?"

"That is the truly marvelous part," Reedrek said, his putrid face splitting with a fiendish grin. "An agreement was reached with the Dark Prince-"

"Satan?"

"Bingo! He agreed to let our people go if the Council could engineer their means of upward mobility, if you get my drift. My continental drift."

I grimaced. What pa.s.sed for Reedrek's sense of humor was getting on my nerves. "How did they know the vampires would be viable once they returned to earth?"

"That brings me to the marvelous part I just alluded to, my dear boy. They didn't know it would work until you proved it to them."

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"Eleanor, of course. Your bringing her back by accident played right into their hands. It provided a test case. She is a prototype, if you will. The scenario that you set in motion could not have been more perfect for the Council's ends if I had planned it myself. Of course, you used different means than the Council, but the result was the same."

I knew that Jack was hearing Reedrek's rant through our psychic connection, because I could hear him cursing. At this moment he would be racing his automobile toward where I lay trapped.

I'm sorry. All my fault, he said. Can't be helped now, I told him.

"So the ritual Damien and Eleanor performed was to cause the earthquake and to call the twice-killed vampires to the surface."

"Double bingo! Give that vampire a prize! They called for the others of their kind to rise up from the underworld and inherit the earth!"

I thought of all the evil rogue blood drinkers that Jack and I had personally dispatched to h.e.l.l. Ones who had had decades or more to suffer the punishments of Lucifer himself, all the while wishing for a way to revenge themselves on me and my offspring.

Jack- I know. I heard. s.h.i.t.

Go to Melaphia. Tell her what's happening.

What about you?

Forget me. Just go. Melaphia is working on a way to close the portal to h.e.l.l. If she's close enough- I'm on it.

I could feel that Jack was changing direction. Thank the G.o.ds he hadn't chosen to argue with me.

"You seem unusually pensive, my son," Reedrek observed. "A penny for your thoughts."

"You said the Council wanted to make an example of me. What does that mean?"

"They're aware that you've led the efforts to thwart their goals for hundreds of years. So naturally, they wished to unleash the twice-killed vampires on you and yours first."

"So the earthquake isn't happening everywhere? Just Savannah?"

Reedrek turned peevish at this. "I'm sure in time they will develop the ability to produce worldwide events. But for now, they are satisfied with striking specific targets with precision. You should be honored that they selected your home first. Why, I suspect your guests from the underworld are making their way to the surface even as we speak."

If the damage was confined to Savannah, and if Melaphia had made progress developing her spells, there might still be a chance of limiting the destruction. I remembered the implications of Melaphia's research and her admonition about what it meant. If Jack or I were to be killed by one of the risen vampires, that would be our end. There would be no way back from the underworld for any of us once the door was shut permanently.

So be it.

"Are there any more surprises you want to tell me about?" I asked my sire.

"Isn't that enough?" He looked disappointed that I did not display more fear.

"Quite," I admitted.

"Oh, there is one surprise I'd mention," he said.

"Now that we know what Eleanor is capable of, it seems that the risen vampires have a choice of stealing a human body to inhabit or resurrecting their own, complete with the ability to a.s.sume the evil form that Satan personally selected for them when he made them Sluagh." "You mean Eleanor could just as easily have come back as herself and been able to shape-shift into a snake at will instead of stealing that other young woman's body?" The horror was almost beyond my comprehension.

"My, but you do catch on fast. That is exactly what I mean." Reedrek stretched and I could hear tendons and ligaments creaking.

"That was a satisfying long winter's nap," he said. "I'm feeling peckish. A taste of the voodoo blood would hit the spot right now."

He held up his hands and waved his claws. "Fee, fi, foe, fum. I smell the blood of a vampire Englishman," he said, and began to make his way through the field of debris toward me.

I tried again to wrench myself free, but it was no use. I could only brace myself for the clamp of his daggerlike fangs on my neck.

Jack As I careened into Savannah proper, I could see red and blue police and firefighters' lights everywhere. Connie and Seth would be out there somewhere helping with the rescue efforts. For lots of reasons I was glad to see that there didn't seem to be that much structural damage-miraculous when I thought about how hard the ground had shaken. Still, I figured there were people who were trapped in elevators or who had suffered heart attacks or gotten hit on the head by falling objects all over the city.

Traffic lights were out here and there, but I wouldn't have stopped at them anyway, so what did I care? Small groups of people stood on street corners and in the squares in their nightclothes. They stopped talking to stare at me as I raced by, taking the corners on two wheels.

I couldn't believe I still hadn't gotten around to getting a new battery for that d.a.m.ned cell phone. It hadn't been able to hold a charge since the first time Connie accidentally zapped me. When would I ever learn? At least the mansion wasn't far from where William was. I could run in, tell Mel to get a move on with her spell-casting, and be at William's side in no time flat.

I screeched to a stop in the driveway and jumped out of the 'Vette just in time to see a dark form peering into William's mansion through the panes of gla.s.s to one side of the front door. I sneaked up behind him, grabbed him by the shoulder, and whirled him around to face me.

"Well if it ain't Mr. Black Jack McShane, the very feller who sent me to h.e.l.l," he drawled, using the nickname that folks used to call me way back in the old days. The bad old days.

"Yancy the muleskinner, you dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d." I was mighty glad that William and I had opened communication on my way over here.

It would have taken precious seconds for me to figure out what Yancy was doing here and get over the shock of it if I hadn't already known I might be running into the revived undead. It was shocking enough even with the warning.

I shook him and dirt-either from the underworld or from his grave-fogged the air around us. "The last time I saw you, you were burning on the same cross you tried to light on fire in that black congregation's churchyard," I said. "That scheme backfired on you, didn't it, you filthy Klansman?"

During the Reconstruction, William and I stayed fat and sa.s.sy on the blood of Ku Klux Klansmen and other evildoers. It was real satisfying to dispatch those KKK sons of b.i.t.c.hes to h.e.l.l.

We'd heard rumors of a cross-burning one night and thought we'd attend. The humans were easy pickings. It was a mite hard for them to run in those long robes. Yancy, the only vampire in the bunch, gave us a little more trouble.

He'd come for the pickings as well, but he was intent on preying on the black folks trying to protect their little clapboard church.

Bad idea. He put up a good fight, but William and I tore him apart like a wishbone and threw him on the pyre of his own making.

"I'm back," Yancy said. "Somebody opened the gate down in h.e.l.l and it was Katie, bar the door. I decided to come on up and give my favorite killers a little taste of their own medicine. Right after I have a taste of that little black filly I just saw run up the stairs in yonder."

The thought of him touching Melaphia threw me into a rage. "That's not going to happen," I told him, and unsheathed my fangs. "I killed you before, and I'll kill you again." "I figured you'd be too yellow to take me on without William Thorne.

"You figured wrong."

"Y'all double-teamed me last time. It warn't a fair fight a'tall."

"It's one against one this time. Is that fair enough for you?"

"That sounds more like it, but I got me a little secret weapon."

"Bring it on."

Yancy's head and torso started to stretch, and I had to step back for a second to collect my wits. The mule driver had been called "muleskinner" for the way he mercilessly whipped the animals that pulled barges down by the docks. Now he was changing right in front of me, much like the twins and Seth shifted into their canine forms. But Yancy wasn't turning into a dog or wolf. He was turning into a...mule man?

I remembered what Eleanor had said about the special, tailor-made punishments reserved just for fallen vampires in h.e.l.l.

Appropriately enough, Yancy was now morphing into one of the same creatures he'd deviled while he was on earth.

d.a.m.nation. How many other moldy oldy vamps were crossing the great divide even as I watched this hideous transformation?