Brimming with eager anticipation, Jules rang the doorbell. While waiting for Doc Landrieu to come to the door, he continued grinning like a kid who’d just won a shiny ten-speed bicycle. But Doc Landrieu didn’t come. Jules rang the bell again. The house remained dark.

He checked the driveway. Doc Landrieu’s car was there. Maybe he was down in his workshop and hadn’t heard the bell? Jules squeezed past the doctor’s car and circled to the back of the house. No lights shone through the narrow windows of the basement workshop.

Maybe the doctor had gone to bed early. That had to be it. He was a heavy sleeper, perhaps, and the bell wasn’t loud enough to wake him. Or maybe the bell was busted. Sure. It could be any of those things.

Whatever the deal was, Jules sure couldn’t wait for morning to talk with his ex-boss. It was kind of rude to wake the old man up if he was sleeping, but considering how eager Doc Landrieu had been to take Jules away from New Orleans, surely the doctor wouldn’t get too miffed over missing a few hours of shut-eye.

With his vampiric strength, Jules was certain he could knock a heck of a lot louder than any doorbell. Hoping he wouldn’t crack the door’s fresh coat of forest-green paint, he rapped the stout wood panels.

Yielding to his assault, the door swung open.

Jules was frozen with surprise. He hadn’t hit itthat hard. Not hard enough to bust the lock. Not even hard enough to dislodge the latch. Someone had left the door only partially shut.

Jules pushed the door the rest of the way open. “Doc Landrieu? Hey, Doc? It’s Jules Duchon.”

The house was quiet. Jules’s fingers fumbled along the wall until they located the light switch. The front parlor was unoccupied, but seemingly undisturbed. The big-screen television and stereo set were still where he remembered them. So the house hadn’t been burglarized. Maybe the doc was getting forgetful in his advanced age?

“Doc?” he called, louder than before. “It’s Jules. Hate to wake you, pal. But I decided to take you up on your offer.”

Still no response. Jules walked deeper into the parlor. Behind the sofa, between the edge of an expensive Persian rug and the hallway leading to the study and the kitchen, he found a brass floor lamp. It had tipped over and fallen onto the hardwood floor. Shattered pieces of colorful Tiffany glass were scattered across the polished teak.

Jules felt his heart sink. His boots crunched bits of broken glass. Dreading what he might find, he checked the kitchen, then the study, turning on lights as he went. He climbed the stairs, fear making his heart pound more unbearably than exertion ever had. The three upstairs bedrooms were empty and mute, betraying no traces of violence.

There was only one place left for him to check. He descended the stairs to the first-floor basement, where Doc Landrieu had his workshop and lab. Halfway down the stairs, the odor hit him. Jules’s last, brittle hopes disintegrated. After eighty-plus years in the vampire business, he knew the stench of decaying flesh all too well.

He found Doc Landrieu stretched out on his main worktable. His clothing and loose folds of his skin had been pinned to the table with long, skinny nails, as though he were a beetle on a high school biology dissecting tray. Broken lengths of glass tubing, tubing that the doctor had used for distilling his compounds, projected from his corpse like the quills of a porcupine.

Transfixed by this desecration of a man who had been his friend and mentor, Jules stumbled closer to the table. The unfrozen part of his mind noted that the fragments of glass tubing had not been driven into the doctor’s body haphazardly. The entry points had been chosen very carefully, sited to intersect with major veins and arteries. Dried residue of blood marked the inside of each hollow piece of glass.

Straws. That’s what the glass tubes had been. His killers had sucked Doc Landrieu dry, like a shared ice cream soda.

Something had been forced into the doctor’s mouth. Something dark brown and roughly egg shaped. Half of it still protruded from his dead, blue lips. Jules stared at it. It was a coconut. A small, painted coconut. It didn’t make sense. Not until Jules pulled it from his friend’s mouth and saw what was painted on it.

It was a Zulu coconut. Not a true Zulu coconut, but a close facsimile of that most prized throw from New Orleans’s oldest black Mardi Gras krewe. It was painted just like a real Zulu coconut, a dark smiling face with white rings around its eyes and mouth. The only difference from the authentic article was that this Zulu coconut had fangs.

Jules had seen many dead bodies during his long sojourn on earth. Hundreds of them. But apart from his brief viewing of his mother’s lifeless body before he had consigned her plain pine coffin to the damp earth of the paupers’ cemetery, Jules had never seen a friend’s corpse before.

Doc Landrieu’s grotesquely disrespected body expanded until it filled Jules’s entire field of vision. Staring into this horrible abyss, he saw his own future. He had three antidiabetes pills left; they were jangling in a little plastic pill bottle in his pocket. When they were gone, he would degenerate back into the arthritic, breathless, almost immobile hulk he’d been five weeks before. He would be a sitting duck. They would catch him without even breaking a sweat. They wouldn’t be satisfied with simply killing him. He would be humiliated. He would be disgraced. He would be put on display.

His fleshless skull would be mounted on a spear, a painted coconut jammed between its jaws.

Jules hadn’t been back to his old place of employment in years. He pushed open the heavy, art-deco doors that led into the morgue’s examination rooms, and the overwhelming odor of formaldehyde sent thirty years of memories cascading through his weary brain. He’d never had any reason to come back here after he’d retired; with all the changeovers in city administrations, none of the staff working there now would even remember him. With one important exception. One employee would still remember Jules, and after Doc Landrieu’s demise, only he could prevent Jules from becoming a helpless, crippled target.

Marvin Oday owed Jules a big favor. As the first black employee above the level of janitor hired by the coroner’s office, and then only at Doc Landrieu’s insistence, Oday hadn’t had any friends among the otherwise all-white technical staff. With the exception of Jules, that is. Jules knew what it felt like to be the odd man out, so he’d befriended Oday and shown him the ropes.

Since Jules’s retirement, Oday had gone on for several advanced degrees, and he was now the office’s highest-level civil servant, second only to the publicly elected coroner. During the few years they’d worked together, Oday had always shown a marked preference for working the graveyard shift. Jules hoped this trait had remained constant.

For once, Jules was in luck. He found Oday in the gunmetal-gray office behind the examination rooms.

Jules knocked on the large window that separated the office from the closest examination room. The short, gray-haired chemist-physician looked up from his paperwork, and his eyes immediately widened with surprise when he saw his old coworker.

“Jules Duchon! Is that you?”

Jules walked through the door into the office. Despite renewing a friendly acquaintance, a circumstance he’d normally have treasured, his voice was leaden. “Hey, Marvin. Yeah, it’s me. How ya been?”

Oday stared at him with disbelief in his eyes. “Jules, you must be blessed with some of the mostyouthful genes on earth! I swear, you haven’t aged aday since the night you retired. You’ve, uh, well, you’ve put on a little weight since I saw you last, but then haven’t we all?” He shook Jules’s hand vigorously. “What brings you back here? You aren’t looking for your old job back, are you? Heh. I’m only a few years away from retirement myself, you know. Amazing as it seems. I was just getting started when you were still here, and now I’m gray-headed and ready to be put out to pasture.”