Vampire$

feel their shame. They reeked of it. And how they wept! It was the totally unleashed, uninhibited weeping of children, red-eyed, runny-nosed, and moaning.

No. It was too good a chance to pass up. He hated to do it. But he had to question them.

He paused, took a deep breath, and knelt down beside the one he’d grabbed away from the alarm button, Dan. The bruise on his wrist was now multicolored and swelling. He cradled it tenderly on his other forearm.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said tenderly.

But Dan just sobbed some more and shook his head as if to say he deserved it.

Part of Jack wanted to grab this man and shake him, this grown man crying like a baby. But the rest of him knew better. These four really couldn’t help it.

Supernatural.

“How many are down there?” he asked Dan.

Dan looked at him, uncomprehending. “How many?”

“Yeah. Downstairs. In the jail. How many?”

“How many… masters?”

Jack gritted his teeth but managed to keep his tone gentle. “Yeah. How many masters?”

The oldest of the bunch, the guy who had been sitting in front of the typewriter when Jack and the deputy had come through, shook himself and leaned forward. He held up three fingers.

Like a child.

“Three!” he whined.

Damn! thought Jack. He had been prepared for more than one. But goddammit, three?

Damn!

The other slaves began nodding. One of them, the kid who had been drinking from the fountain, held up three of his fingers and nodded fiercely.

And when he did his collar was pulled away from his throat and Jack saw the bite.

The deputy saw it, too, and gasped. Jack reached over to Dan, the closest one to him, and pulled his collar out and there it was.

“Jesus!” whispered Kirk.

It looked like the bit of a spider. But one impossibly large, impossibly vicious. Impossibly thirsty.

The two puncture marks were just over an inch apart, with overlapping black and yellow rings swollen out from their centers. The bites were recent, deep, and horribly infected.

Loss of blood, Jack had said.

Now he thought: loss of soul…

“They’re…” gushed Dan and his gaze was plaintive, with a terrible yearning. “They’re… They’re so beautiful!”

And all four of them began to weep again. Weep and nod and huddle together and Jack couldn’t stand it anymore. He stood up and grabbed two of them by the upper arms and led them outside. The deputy brought out the other two.

Jack said nothing to the wary stares of the six flak-jacketed patrolmen on the sidewalk except: “These men aren’t to be harmed. Just keep ’em out of the way.”

The patrolman who seemed to be their leader glanced first at Deputy Thompson for his nod of confirmation before taking the prisoners in tow and depositing them in the backs of two police cars.

Carl appeared beside Jack. “You were right?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question.

Jack sighed. “Yeah. They’re in there. Three of ’em, looks like.”

Cat whistled. “Three? Holy shit!”

Felix was there, too. “Is that a lot?” the gunman wanted to know.

“That’s the most so far,” offered Adam from off to one side.

Cat looked sharply at him, then relaxed. “Yeah. I keep forgetting you’re our historian.”

Adam smiled. “Not anymore.”

Cat smiled back. “Guess not.”

“We’ll be back in a second,” Jack informed them, and then he and the deputy went back inside, past the front desk, down a corridor, into another corridor, and down to the end of it to a vault door with a sign on it that said: “Johnson County Sheriff Property Room.” While Kirk went to work on the combination, Jack started to light a cigarette.

“I wouldn’t,” advised the deputy as he swung the vault open.

The chemical stench from inside the property room all but staggered Crow. He looked at the deputy.

“Ether,” Kirk explained. “We get a lot of speed labs in this part of Texas.”

“Oh.”

Kirk was waving the air with his hat. “It usually airs out in a couple of secs,” he explained. It seemed to, anyway. Though Jack wasn’t sure it wasn’t just his sense of smell numbing out.

In any case, they went inside and got to work. The evidence was found in thick, tightly sealed manila envelopes with names and case numbers on the outside. Kirk only read them long enough to see what was inside before tearing them open. Jack emptied one of the envelopes onto the floor and filled it with the stuff the deputy handed him.

They took one hundred and sixty tablets of “purple microdot” and thirty more hits of “Blotter” LSD. They took two and one half ounces of pure, uncut cocaine, three ounces, eighty-four grams, of PCP. They took three grams of raw brown Mexican heroin. They took six ounces, one hundred sixty-eight grams, of milk-white methamphetamine crystal. They took it all outside to where Cat and Carl had the jugs of pig’s blood and the aquarium set up on a little wheeled table. On the grass alongside slumped the various sacks of poison from Prather’s Feed & Seed. The balloons of various colors looked like water balloons now except for the rich smell of gasoline that wafted from them. Next to the balloons were the tear-gas grenades and the gas masks all ready to go.

Jack looked at his watch. Three hours and fifteen minutes to sundown.

“Okay,” he said to Carl, “can you rig the elevator now?”

“Yep,” Carl nodded and picked up his tool box. The two went back inside.

When Carl saw the elevator doors facing the front entrance he stopped and smiled. “My God, that deputy was right. I never would have believed it.”

Jack nodded. “Lucky.”

It was, in fact, incredibly lucky. Team Crow had known the cells were in the basement and they had known the only way to reach them was by a single elevator. But it wasn’t until Deputy Thompson had drawn his little sketch of the jail that they had known the route to the elevator was so short and clear. Crow had cringed at the thought of trying to winch a full-fledged master vampire around corners and up stairs into the sunlight with the damn thing trying to rip the crossbow free every step of the way.

But this was a straight shot. It was less than thirty feet from the elevator door to the sunshine, and the passageway was wide and free of obstacle.

Now all they had to do was get the fiends to get in the elevator.

He joined Carl, who stood fussing over an antique electrical box on the wall beside the elevator doors. He had wires running from the maze to a black metal box with a half dozen toggle switches on top.

Carl looked up from his work. “Okay, I think I’ve got you all set.”

Jack frowned. “You ‘think’ you do?”

Carl shrugged. “Jack, this elevator’s older than I am. I wouldn’t count on it being too responsive.”

“What can I count on?”

“Well, this switch starts it up. This one down. This one stops it. Anywhere. Between floors. Whatever you want. This one opens the doors. This one closes them. Again, anywhere you want.”

Jack nodded. “Okay. Label ’em.”

Carl groaned. “You can’t remember that much?”

Jack looked at him. “I don’t want to have to remember. I want to be able to know.”

Carl sighed. “Yes, bwana,” he said and set about doing it.