"I have my reasons for my present actions. I owe you no explanations. I owe you nothing-except for Mr. Csejthe, whose blood-bond-"

"You owe me my wife and my little girl, you son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h!" I was halfway across the length of the bed of a sudden, IVs popping from my arm and whipping about the room. "I want them back! I want my life back!"

Lupe caught me, held me back. Had I not already been seriously weakened, even her lycanthropic strength would not have been able to restrain me.

"But you can't!" I panted. "They're dead and there's nothing you can do to bring them back!" I strained against Lupe's grasp. "So what good is your f.u.c.king blood bond to me . . . or. . ." To my own horror I sagged in her arms and began to weep.

The old vampire seemed to rise off the floor, spreading his cape wide like the unfolding wings of a great, ancient bat. "As Warlord I slew tens of thousands of my people's enemies. As voivode of the unliving and, later, as Doman of the New York demesne, I personally took hundreds more, thousands through the actions of those whom I made dark immortals. Blood is spilled, Mr. Csejthe, among the innocent as well as the guilty. I cannot feel an obligation to a victim each time I must feed. I owe nothing to any mortal, save Victor here, and he is well compensated for his service.

"But you and I, Christopher Csejthe, share a blood-bond for our life-forces have been mingled. And, according to the code that our society has adopted from necessity, I must take responsibility for you until such time that you are fully a.s.similated.

"And I am sorry for the loss of your wife and child: it was needless and served no purpose."

"But that happened after the blood-bond was forged," Mooncloud pounced, "so you are not withoutresponsibility in the matter!"

Ba.s.sarab turned on her with a scowl. "Will you play the barracks lawyer with me, Doctor? Very well, let us split hairs and strain at gnats! If Mr. Csejthe is not truly wampyr, not fully undead, is the blood-bond fully in effect? If he is still mortal, then I owe him nothing and may do with him as pleases me!"

"Yeah?" I struggled to get past Lupe's arms and my tears and was only half successful. "Come on!

Float your candy-vampire-a.s.s over here and take your best shot! We'll settle all debts right here and now!"

"Shut! Up!" Mooncloud yelled at me. "It was an accident, Chris! There is nothing that any of us here can do that will bring them back! And you!" she continued, rounding on Ba.s.sarab. "If you would pretend to be Vlad Drakul Ba.s.sarab, called Dracula, it would serve your little masquerade to remember than the Voivode of Walachia was a man of honor! Further victimizing this man will not serve his memory or help your cause! What we must do, here and now, is forge an alliance that will prove mutually beneficial, insure our mutual victory, and bring death and vengeance down upon our enemies! To accomplish that we must begin with a truce and a modic.u.m of mutual respect!"

Ba.s.sarab lowered himself back into his chair. He still glowered as he turned to Dr. Mooncloud, but his lips twitched as if fighting a smile and there was a suspicion of respect in his voice as he spoke.

"Perhaps I was wrong about you, madam. I begin to believe that you may indeed be voivode and warlord in your own demesne."

Fifteen hours later we were back in Kansas City buying a new Ford Bronco. With cash.

"Who's Salmon P. Chase?" Lupe asked as she slid behind the steering wheel.

"Who?" I mumbled groggily. The infusion of blood by IV had helped a great deal, but I needed a good day's sleep. It was now eleven a.m. and my biological clock was insisting that it was hours past my bedtime.

"Salmon P. Chase. He wasn't a president. All the others were presidents."

I pushed the felt-brimmed fedora up off my face and adjusted my wraparound sungla.s.ses against the glare of the midday sun outside the Bronco's tinted windows. "What are you talking about?"

"These bills. . . ." She fanned the thick stack of grey-green paper at me.

"Federal reserve notes," I corrected, "not 'bills.' "

"Look here," she continued, pulling individual notes from the stack. "William McKinley on the five-hundred-dollar bill, Grover Cleveland on the thousand. . ."

I yawned. Felt my incisors to see if they'd grown. Nada.

" . . . and here's James Madison on the five-thousand. All presidents."

"Ben Franklin's on the hundred-dollar bill," I said, studying my indistinct reflection in the vanity mirror on the pa.s.senger-side visor. Picture Indiana Jones trying to pose as a Secret Service agent. "He's not a president." The sunblock I had slathered on felt like ancient cold cream gone bad and starting to curdle.

But . . . so far, so good: I hadn't burst into flame or started crumbling to dust, yet.

"Franklin I know," she retorted. "But this guy on the ten-thousand-dollar bill I never heard of." She turned the key in the ignition and the Bronco's engine growled into a purring idle.

Dr. Mooncloud tapped on my window and I lowered the gla.s.s. "Here's a list of the sporting goods dealers that carry crossbows," she said, handing me a list. "Victor and I have the other half of the list, and we'll meet you back at the motel as soon as we're done." She glanced over her shoulder. "Have you tried to call the Doman, yet?"

Lupe nodded. "Twice. Every time I get within ten feet of a telephone, I want to throw up!"

"Mental domination. It's like a post-hypnotic suggestion.""d.a.m.n vampires and their mind control!" Lupe patted my hand. "Present company excepted."

"Well," Mooncloud said, "if you can think of anything else that will help, get it. Any questions?"

"Yeah," I said, jerking my thumb, "Lupe wants to know who Salmon P. Chase was."

The doctor frowned quizzically. "He was a lawyer, politician, and an antislavery leader before the American Civil War-three-term senator, governor of Ohio. Tried to win the Republican candidacy for president twice, and the Democratic candidacy once. He served as Secretary of the Treasury on Lincoln's war cabinet. He was instrumental in establishing a system of national banks that could issue notes as legal tender. Ended up being the fifth-no-sixth chief justice of the Supreme Court." She smiled. "Anything else?"

I shook my head. "Let's get this done so we can get back and get a little shut-eye."

She nodded and headed back over to the Duesenberg where Wren was waiting.

"Still seems a funny choice for a picture on the ten-thousand-dollar bill," Lupe muttered as she shifted gears and headed toward the lot's exit.

"She left out the part about him running against Lincoln," I said, leaning my seat back into a thirty-degree incline and pulling my hat back down over my face. "He put his own face on most of the denominations and the ten-thousand-dollar note as a campaign gimmick. The ten thousand is the sole survivor."

"How-"

"I watch a lot of Jeopardy."

"Jeopardy?"

"Call me old-fashioned and Trebek is fine, but he's not Art Fleming."

"I hate you now." I couldn't see her smile but I could hear it in her voice. "So, do you think he's legit?"

"Alex Trebek?" I grunted.

"Count Dracula. You know: Mr. Death to his many friends and admirers."

"Hmmp. For a servitor, you seem to be lacking the appropriately reverent tone in discussing a member of the Master Race. Particularly the Grand Prince of said race, himself."

"If himself he actually is."

"Does it really matter?"

"Well, it is a pretty incredible story: Dracula as head of the New York demesne. . . ."

In addition to claiming that he was the Count-excuse me, Prince-Dracula, our host had told us that he had ruled the New York demesne for over a century. Eventually, he explained, he had grown tired of the responsibilities: the intrigues, plots, the infighting. One of the factions had become involved with organized crime, opening a Pandora's box that even the self-styled Prince of Darkness found distasteful. There had been attempts on his life (or unlife, if you prefer) even by his own kind-the ancient tradition of advancement by a.s.sa.s.sination.

There had finally come a day, he'd explained, when he had grown weary of the games and decided to live free, once more.

Of course, one doesn't "retire" from a vampire enclave any more than one retires from certain covert governmental agencies or the Mafia. Especially if you are the Vlad Dracula.

"And so I had to disappear," he'd told me on the long, night drive back up to Kansas City. "I planned it very carefully, liquidating selected a.s.sets that had been acc.u.mulated over the centuries, preparing a dozen different safe-houses with sheltered networks of investments and income, h.o.a.rding equipment and supplies, building false ident.i.ties and essentially creating a secret demesne for myself that would be as invisible to the other underground enclaves as they were to the world of mortals.

"And so, I reasoned, where would one look for the Voivode of Walachia, the Prince of Darkness,the king of the wampyr? London? Paris? Monaco? One of the world's great cities with a never-ending night life and millions of human cattle to hunt and hide among?

"Ah. Maybe someday. . . .

"But for awhile-and what are a few years when one has lived for centuries, may live for millennia?-it made sense to lie low and regroup where no one would think to look for the legendary Dracula.

"Kansas."

Now one might think that Count Dracula would stand out in the cornfields of Kansas like Liberace at a black tie and tails affair.

Especially since Liberace is no longer among the living.

But as Blowfeld once said to 007: "If I destroy Kansas, Mr. Bond, it will be two years before the rest of the world would notice that it's missing."

Well, it's not really quite that bad: hardly anyone really believes that Eisenhower is still president and a few of us have heard rumors that we might be putting a man into s.p.a.ce almost any year now. But Kansas still provides the opportunity to drop out of the cultural and social mainstream if one so wishes, and neighbors tend to mind their own business. There are farmhouses adrift on vast tracts of fenced land where G.o.d-knows-what has gone on for generations. Don't get me wrong; Kansas is full of good-hearted, friendly, and even wonderfully wise and talented folk. . .

. . . but there are certain lonely dirt roads that you should hope to never run across by day and G.o.d help you should you run out of gas by night. The southeast corner of the Sunflower State has more than its share of tales murmured around campfires at night-stories of drifters and hitchhikers and pits and hungers and abandoned houses that weren't quite empty. . . . Away from the gatherings in the cities and towns, a man's privacy is respected and certainly never challenged without risk.

Ba.s.sarab had chosen carefully. And it had almost worked.

But some ancient wiring in an old Kansas farmhouse had nearly done what time and armies and a.s.sa.s.sins could not. And, even though he had survived the fire, there was something in the aftermath-a fireman's story, a hospital record, a police report, a newspaper article-that had been enough to flag the hunters back in New York. The privacy screen of eighty acres of fenced pasture land had failed.

When Mooncloud and Garou had turned up in Pittsburg, Kansas, it was to rope a stray and solve a medical mystery. New York's retrieval team had had a different agenda: I was their best clue to finding Dracula.

But now the hunters had become the hunted.

"Yes," I said to Lupe, "I think he actually is who he claims to be." I smiled, picking up the huge roll of bills from between the seats. "But, as I was saying before, it really wouldn't matter. He's providing us with everything we need to finish this mission and he solved the big mystery about my own circ.u.mstances and condition." I looked out the window. "And maybe given me a few ideas of my own. . . ."

The crossbows were easy.

We found a dealer who carried the Barnett International line from England. We started with six Trident models with single-hand pistol grips. Their forty-five-pound draw had an effective range of forty-five feet and would hurl a bolt approximately one hundred and twenty-two feet per second.

We then selected four Ranger models with a one-hundred-fifty-pound draw and a bolt speed of two-hundred and thirty feet per second.

Lupe was comparing the Desert Storm model for its additional ten yards of range and ten feet per second bolt speed when I noticed a unique-looking rifle with a spear protruding from the muzzle.

"It's an Air Bow," the dealer explained, noting my interest. "Uses liquid carbon dioxide orcompressed air as a propellant and has a muzzle velocity of two-hundred and twenty FPS. There's a fishing attachment that puts fifty feet of seventy-pound braided line onto a barrel-mounting reel and attaches to a special fishing arrow. And you can get a twelve-gram quick-change unit that will give you extra shots and make changing your propellant bottles quick and easy."

"I'll take the rifle and the quick-change unit," I said, "but I don't think I'll need the fishing stuff." I tried to imagine reeling in a vampire once I had nailed him. Ugh.

"As you wish. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

I nodded. "I notice all bolts and quarrels are primarily aluminum or plastic. Do you have any wooden ones?"

"A few. But I think you'll find the aluminum ones perform just as well and hold up a lot better-especially with repeated use out in the field."

"Oh," I said casually, Lupe watching me like a hawk, "I prefer wood. Especially ash, if you have any."

He shook his head. "No ash. But I can call a couple of places in town that specialize for archery tournaments."

While he did that, I picked out a couple of Splatmaster Rapide Semi-Automatic paint pistols, a Spartan Paintball rifle, twelve tubes of paintb.a.l.l.s, and five dozen CO2 cartridges. "What do you think you're doing?" Lupe hissed as I dumped our additional purchases on the counter.

"Trust me," I said, as the shopkeeper came back with an address.

"They may be able to help you with ash dowels for your bolts," he said. "Will there be anything else?"

"Well, we'd like carrying cases and four belt-mounted quivers. . . ."

Lupe grinned wolfishly and leaned across the counter. "And we'd like all of these outfitted with your best hunting scopes."

Two hours later we were ready to head south, loaded down with two additional compound bows, seventy-three ash dowels, six fletching kits, five hypodermic syringes, four bottles of solvent, two bicycle tire repair kits, five knapsacks, four handbags, and two dozen small gla.s.s bottles.

"Pull over," I said.

Lupe looked up at the cathedral as she parked at the curb. "You don't need to do this," she said.

"Taj already has it on her list."

"I want to try something and if it works, we're going to need more." I opened the door and stepped out onto the curb. "This shouldn't take long."

The sunlight seemed to hit me with a palpable force and I felt vaguely nauseated as I climbed the stone-blocked steps that stretched across the front of the church. At the top I hesitated, realizing that I hadn't really spent enough time thinking this one out.

For openers: did the "welcome" sign const.i.tute an invitation to cross the threshold, to enter? Of course it did-but in terms of a personal invitation? To a vampire? Or half a vampire? Maybe a halfway invitation was sufficient for a halfway undead person.

Or did I really require an invitation at all?

What would Freud say?

Never mind that: what would the pope say?

I took a deep breath and reached for the door. My real discomfort in entering, I decided, had nothing to do with vampire lore and possibly being in a state of d.a.m.nation. It had to do with the simple fact that I was Protestant.

Though I had certain Catholic friends who would delight in pointing out that there is no real difference between being d.a.m.ned for eternity or being Protestant, my main concern was that I didn't know my wayaround a Catholic church. Fortunately, the object of my quest was not far from the entryway: the marble font containing water consecrated for ceremonial use.

It should have been easy: the coast was clear, no one was around. But now it occurred to me that there was no way for me to dip the bottles into the basin of holy water without getting my fingers wet.

And I hadn't thought to buy gloves.

I am not Catholic, so holy water is not part of my belief system, I told myself. Furthermore, I am a rational man: I know that there is no scientific principle to support holy water having any different qualities than regular water. I know that it cannot harm me. . . .