“And you haven’t heard from her since?”

Dinah’s eyes grew wide. “No! And that’s what worries me so. I mean, it’s not like Maureen to miss work. She’sdevoted to this job. She’s never out sick. The few times she’s had stuff come up, she’s always gotten hold of the boss the night before and arranged for someone to cover for her. Her running out of here was strange enough. But then when she didn’t come in tonight for her first shift, and nobody had heard from her-”

Jules spun toward the door. “Thanks, Dinah. You’re a peach.”

“Where’re you going now?”

Jules was already out in the hall when he answered. “To her house,” he called out hoarsely, not looking back.

“But, Jules, I already been there! I rang and rang, but nobody answered-”

Dinah’s words faded in his ears as Jules charged through the club. He didn’t even notice the consternation he caused the embattled dancer on-stage, or the exaggerated haste with which the greeter abandoned his stool and got out of Jules’s way. His mind had room for only two thoughts. The dreadful tableau he’d left behind at Doc Landrieu’s house. And the even more terrible vision he feared was ahead of him.

Back on the sidewalk, he began to run. He pushed himself as hard as he could, cursing his body for its inability to move faster. He couldn’t breathe the thick summer air fast enough. Were his heart an engine, it would’ve burned oil and thrown a rod. A skinny wolf would be faster, he thought. A cheetah, faster still. Not worth it, he told himself-he’d have to waste time squirming out of his clothing, and he only had a couple of blocks to go.

A calming notion sprang to mind, a counterweight to the wave of panic that was threatening to give him a coronary. Maybe he was imagining a horror show that didn’t exist? Doc Landrieu had meant nothing to Malice X; all the good doctor had been to him was a tool with which to jam splinters under Jules’s fingernails. Killing Doc Landrieu had been like spitting out a wad of gum.

But Maureen… Maureen was another story entirely. In the world of vampires Jules had been raised in, one’s blood parent was every bit as dear and precious as one’s birth parents were. Malice X had been willing to smash the rules in other ways-particularly in his blithe willingness to abandon the mutual nonaggression pacts that had stabilized vampire societies for untold centuries. But Maureen… hadn’t she told Jules that Malice X had loved her? Hadn’t this whole rotten feud been at least partly fired by jealousy? If the thought of Malice X’s romance with Maureen had been a dagger in Jules’s heart before, now he clung to that very same thought like a life raft in a storm surge.

He finally came to Maureen’s stoop. Her front door was locked. This was a good sign-if Malice X or his goons had been there, why would they have bothered to lock the door when they left? Some of the murderous tension unknotted in his shoulders as he fumbled through his pockets for the key. But as he unlocked the door, he couldn’t help thinking,What if he’d wanted to make sure no strangers walked in and disturbed things? What if he’d wanted to make sure only folks with a key could get in? And who else would have a key to Maureen’s house but me?

His heart pounding hard, he opened the door. The house was dark. All was silent, except for a steady, rhythmic swishing sound. After a second, Jules recognized the noise as the ceiling fans in Maureen’s front parlor, turned up to their highest setting. Maureen, like most vampires, enjoyed the heat. She wouldn’t have the fans on unless she was entertaining company. But the darkness ruled that out.

“Maureen?”

No one answered.

Jules stepped into the pitch-black entrance foyer. He held his hands extended in front of him, fumbling along the wall for the light switch. Something hard and blunt struck him in the face. He swung his fists wildly, blindly. His left forearm connected. Whatever his assailant was, it was surprisingly light. It clattered on impact. A second later, completely silent, it hit him in the face again.

Jules batted it away a second time. This time, he ducked before it could hit him. His fingers found the light switch.

His antagonist was an oblong black object hanging by a piece of twine from the light fixture. It was about the size of a large paperback book. Jules grabbed the rope to stop the thing from swinging. It was a videotape. It had a note taped to it. The words were written with a black marker, in large capital letters:

WATCH THIS-DON’T EAT IT

Jules yanked the plastic cassette from the rope and wadded up the note. He walked into the parlor, steeling himself for the worst. The heavy purple draperies that lined the windows billowed inward, outside breezes battling the countervailing wind power of the ceiling fans. Maureen never left her windows open. She hated the drunken chatter from tourists passing on the street. With her windows closed, the thick walls of her two-century-old house cocooned her in silence. But now the draperies fluttered inward. Not just in the parlor; the windows were open in every room that Jules could see.

“Maureen?”

It was a forlorn, useless holler. Jules knew that. But he repeated it twice more, as though her name were an incantation to drive away evil spirits-or turn back the clock. He turned on more lights. A thick coat of fine, white dust covered all the exposed surfaces in the parlor and dining room-end tables, seat cushions, Victorian red velvet sofas, the hardcover biography of “full-figured gal” Jane Russell that Maureen had been reading when he’d stayed with her last. He’d never seen dust in this house before. Maureen was an impeccable housekeeper; one more reason why it had been virtually impossible for them to live in the same home together. Jules touched the dust on the dining room table with his forefinger. He felt sick.

Listless, empty, Jules shuffled back into the parlor and shoved the videotape into Maureen’s combination TV–VCR. While the set was warming up, he gently cleared the dust away from one of the sofa cushions and sat down. He didn’t bother to check if the tape was rewound. He knew it would be.

What came on-screen looked at first like a modern, color remake of the old Claude Rains thrillerThe Invisible Man. A seemingly empty man’s suit-black jacket and trousers, white shirt, narrow black gangster’s tie-strutted around behind what looked like a gray-and-red mummy. Ribbons of gray duct tape partially encased a billowy-huge red satin mini dress and queen-sized fishnet stockings, which were both bound to a tall-backed kitchen chair. Unlike the men’s suit, the satin mini dress had an attached “face” of sorts. An oval of flesh-colored powder floated a few inches above the dress’s plunging neckline, highlighted with lips formed of fire-engine-red lipstick, almond-shaped ovals of black mascara surrounding empty eye sockets, and thick black false eyelashes that fluttered quickly, nervously, like dragonfly wings.

Jules recognized the room they were in. It was Maureen’s kitchen, only thirty feet from where he now sat. The red satin dress whimpered. Jules knew it was Maureen’s whimper; but it was easier to think of it as the red satin dress’s.

The black suit clapped its invisible hands together. “Welcome toChiller Theater, kiddies,” it said with Malice X’s mocking voice. “Tonight’s thrilling episode is calledThe Fuckin‘ Traitor Ho ’Fesses Up. Sponsored by those fine folks at Big Shot Beverage Company, the makers of cold drinks that turn black men sterile.”

“Malice, please,” Maureen begged. Her voice sounded choked with mucus and tears. “Please let me go. You said you just wanted to talk. What’s with all this crazy nonsense, baby? I’ve been good, honey. I swear. I never said anything to anybody that could get you in trouble. Let me loose. You said you’d tell me what had happened to Jules if I came here and met you without telling anybody. And I did exactly what you asked-”