Suddenly something smashed him out of the way even as Vic lunged in to bury the knife in his throat. As he fell, Mike saw something dark blur past him and crash into Vic, driving him backward, crashing him out into the hallway, propelling him down onto the bottom steps of the staircase.

He stared, dazed with unbelief, “Mom?”

She had leapt over the sofa and slammed Vic down, taking his knife wrist in one of her slim hands. Mike watched in horror, waiting for the moment in which Vic would tear his wrist free and slash her to death, but try as he might Vic couldn’t get free. With his other hand, though, he hit her, shoved her…but all to no effect.

“Mom?”

She shouted at him. “Run!”

“But, Mom!”

“Run, for God’s sake!”

It was impossible that she had held him even this long—Vic was twice her size, many times her strength—yet somehow, impossibly, she kept him pinned there with his knife arm hard against the floor.

“Run!” she screamed.

“Mom!” He took a step toward her, desperate to help.

Lois Wingate whipped her head around toward him, and for the first time in days he saw her face. Her skin was as white as new milk; her eyes were as red as fresh blood. Her mouth was a snarling mask of curled lips and bared teeth.

Mike felt every molecule in his body turn to ice. He wanted to scream, couldn’t remember how to do it.

In a voice that shook the walls of the house, a voice that was a bellow of sheer force and volume that it literally staggered him back a pace, his mother screamed, “RUN!”

He ran. Of course he ran.

He screamed as he backed away and then turned and ran out of the house. He was still screaming when he grabbed his bike and jumped on it and tore away into the night. He did not remember doing that, he did not remember the nightmare ride down the street past neighbors who stood on their porches and stared at him, or stared at Vic’s place. No one called the cops. No one on that block dared.

Mike tore down the street. His mind was black with shock except for the clear and vivid memory of his mother’s face.

Her white, white face.

Her eyes, her skin. Her teeth.

Oh, God , he thought as he fled into the darkness, her teeth .

Chapter 23

1

They all met for coffee in Weinstock’s office. Val, Crow, Jonatha, and Newton were seated on a ring of chairs pulled around Weinstock’s desk, which was covered with the evidence he had collected. Weinstock had gone over it step by step for Jonatha’s benefit. The morgue videos had rattled her, and she accepted the doctor’s offer of a stiff knock of Scotch in her coffee.

After she’d downed half of it, she said, “I’ve been on the Net all afternoon, and I’ve made a number of calls to friends and colleagues who are deeper into the vampire folklore than I am. I told them the story that I was doing deep background work for a book, and now they all want to be footnoted. I made a lot of promises here, so our boy Newton here had better write that book.”

“Did you find out anything new we need to know?” Val asked.

“Nothing you’ll like.”

“No offense, Jonatha,” said Crow, “but we haven’t liked anything you’ve told us so far.”

“Okay, I know we’re all pressed for time here,” she began—and Crow noted that she used “we.” He cocked an eye at Val, who had registered it, too, and she gave him a tiny nod.

“First, Professor Allenby at Rutgers, who’s written the definitive book on Peeter Stubbe, said that the likelihood that Stubbe was born in Serbia is near to one hundred percent, not in Bedburg as most books claim. There are records in Serbia of the Stubbe family—under a variety of name variations—dating back as early as the 1420s. He wasn’t known in Bedburg until around 1589. That means that he was at least one hundred and fifty years old when he was put on trial for werewolfism.”

Weinstock whistled.

“That would mean that he is likely to be a Vlkodlak, the dominant werewolf species of that part of Eastern Europe, and one widely believed—in folklore before now—to come back to life as a vampire.”

“I’m confused about something,” Val said. “I was looking through some of Crow’s books and they seemed to indicate that Stubbe, or Stumpp as they called him, was brutally executed. Why didn’t he come back as a vampire then?”

“Allenby’s theory is that like many of the more powerful vampires, some werewolves were known to have human familiars and confidants. It’s entirely likely that Stubbe, who was known for being extremely charismatic, suborned some local yokel and—since Stubbe was not truly a native of Bedburg—used that other person as a kind of stand-in or body double. Maybe he appealed to their religious mania—kind of like Manson or Jim Jones. In such cases the person under the charismatic control is more than willing to die for their master, even to the point of undergoing torture. Like a martyr. Even in ordinary psychology there are plenty of cases of it. Add to that some degree of supernatural persuasion and, well, there you go.”

“That fits with what we know of Griswold,” Crow said. “He had a whole crew of local guys who pretty much worshipped the ground he walked on. My own father was one of them. When Oren Morse killed Griswold, it’s a pretty good bet that these followers were the ones who murdered Morse.”

“Reasonable,” Jonatha said. “Scary as hell, but reasonable. How many of them are still around?”

“Except for my father? All of them.”

“Then we are going to have to work them into the equation…take a good hard look at them.”

Val said, “Did you find out anything more concrete about the process of becoming a vampire?”

“Well, the consensus from among my colleagues is that, folklorically speaking, a psychic vampire like Griswold would be able to create other vampires at will. As I mentioned before, all he needs to do is impose his will on anyone who has recently died through violence.”

“You mean anyone bitten by a vampire?”

“No…not exactly. There are as many ways to become a vampire as there are vampire species, but I think we can distil that down to the three most common methods,” Jonatha said. “The first is also the oldest. A person has to die with a corrupt heart and unrepentant. That creates a kind of schism between them and the next world—call it Heaven or whatever. An evil person who dies, typically by violence, and who does not repent of their sins is likely to come back as a vampire of one kind or another. We see this in the folklore of dozens of nations.”

“That could explain Ruger easily enough,” Crow said.

“And probably does.”

“But Boyd was corrupt rather than evil,” Weinstock said, “at least according to what the cops told us.”

“Which brings us to the second most common cause of vampirism worldwide—death by violence. Any death, any kind of violence. There isn’t a lot of commentary on why this is, but generally I take it as a feeling of unresolved anger at having died and the need for some kind of revenge for having been killed. In Boyd’s case it appears that somebody killed him. Maybe even Ruger, who knows? When he rose from death he was a vampire, but for some reason we don’t know his anger was not directed at Ruger but at humans.”

“Griswold?” Val ventured.

“Could be,” Jonatha agreed. “If he is the directing force behind this, then his will would be strong enough to turn Boyd’s anger and aim it like a gun.”

“At my family.”

“You told me your dad was no friend of Griswold’s, and he was a friend of Oren Morse. Griswold also killed your uncle. Maybe there are other reasons he doesn’t like your family, but clearly he wants you all dead.”

Val said nothing but the muscles at the sides of her jaws flexed and bunched.

Crow said, “What’s the third method?”

“That one is closer to the traditional view,” Jonatha said. “In the more modern stories, meaning those from parts of Europe beginning in the early eighteenth century, we see a pattern of vampire stories being built around a bite and an exchange of blood. Not the willing and bizarrely sensual exchange you see in movies where Dracula bites some chick and then she drinks his blood—that’s a Hollywood distortion. No, once a person has been killed by a vampire, then any human blood will reactivate them, so to speak. Not animal blood…it has to be human, according to the stories. Even a few drops will do it.”

“Otherwise they stay dead?” Val asked. She took Crow’s hand and held it.

“Well, that’s a bit cloudy. In about half of the stories the vampire’s victim is caught between Earth and Heaven in a kind of purgatory. Some even rise as ghosts, but they have little or no power.”

“God…” Val said, touching her cross.

“In the other stories the victim is just plain dead unless human blood is poured into their mouth. At that point a demonic spirit enters into them and reanimates their flesh. They have all of the memories and personality of the person they were before they died, but that’s all a trick. What’s inside is pure demon, or ghost, depending on who you talk to.”

“Damn,” Crow said. “So we don’t know what state Mark’s in.”

“No, we don’t,” Jonatha said, “and bear in mind, we don’t know how much of the vampire legend is even true. We’re really fishing in the dark here and for every bit of reliable folklore—if we can call it that—there’s a hundred times as much nonsense, bullshit, and storytelling embellishment. We could be wrong about all of this.”

“Swell.”

“Now, there’s one more thing. In a few of the older stories, if a person is brought to the point of death but not killed outright they can simply transition into a vampiric state without going through the process of actual death. You follow me? In those cases the person retains their soul and true personality only as long as they drink animal blood, but should they take so much as a taste of human blood their human soul is pushed out and the demonic spirit takes over forever.” She paused. “I know this doesn’t apply to your brother or sister-in-law, Val…but in going over everything with Newt I can see that we don’t actually have proof positive that Ruger or Boyd actually died prior to becoming vampires. They could have transitioned.”