Vampire$

should. That was the men’s job. They were hers.

Later, of course, when the horror was roaring in on them, it would be different. But she couldn’t have known that now.

Her thoughts turned to the move. They were leaving Pebble Beach and moving back home to Texas. To Dallas. They were going to miss their mansion with its view of the bay and the sculptured golf courses and the ocean fog rolling across the tops of the pine trees and, most of all, the miniature deer eating her flowers every morning.

She had claimed, loudly and often, that she hated the creatures and believed them to be a scourge of nature. The world, she insisted, would be better off if every single deer was burned at the stake.

“Bambi, too?” someone would invariably ask.

“Especially Bambi,” she would sharply retort. “That vile little mutt has only encouraged them.”

This fooled absolutely no one, of course. But still every morning she would put, on her sneakers and her one pair of blue jeans and her late husband’s lumberjack shirt, tie her hair back in a scarf, grab her weapon (the back porch broom), and rush out to do battle. Everyone would race to the windows, even braving some truly monumental hangovers, to laugh and applaud and tap on the glass and just generally egg on the deer. Especially that one awful creature who was certain was the leader. So smug and cocky and sure self, it would actually stop eating and stand there, just stand there and stare at her as she ran at it waving the broom, showing not one ounce of fear until just before she could whack it, and then vault effortlessly over the ten-foot fence she had had especially constructed. The boys loved him and named him Bambi after that silly movie and — And.

And the boys…

The boys were all gone. The boys, her boys were all dead, all destroyed horribly and forever and…

And for a long time the only sound in the room came from the muffled sobs filling the tiny stall.

It was why they were moving. The Zoo, the nickname for the wing now holding seven unoccupied bedrooms, was empty. Empty and hollow and dark and sad. It had been the only post massacre order Jack had been able to manage. Near-incoherent with pain and rage and shame, his last comment before boarding the plane to Europe was to take everything home to Texas where they belonged.

Annabelle had thus been left with the project of packing everything up, flying to Dallas, selecting and buying another house (with room for Carl’s workshop), and most difficult of all, sorting out the boys’ belongings.

So many belongings. And such, such… boyish things. She smiled at that thought and wiped away another tear.

Because they were such boys. They were grown men, too. All of them. The youngest almost twenty-five, the oldest just over forty, older even than Cat, the second in command.

But they were such boys, too. Oh, she knew why. She did. She understood why. It was their job, the nature of it, the fear of it, the…

The certainty of it.

They weren’t going to get married and raise children and grow old and pass away retired in some resort community. They were going to die. They were going to be killed by some desperate lunge of talon or teeth, too fast for anyone to do anything to stop it. And then they were going to have to be staked and beheaded by the survivors who couldn’t even use the funeral as a time to mourn because of it.

They were going to die. And soon. And they knew it. Every single one of them knew it. They were going to die.

And so they were kids. Her boys. She packed up so many toys. Video games and stereo sets and model airplanes and pinball games (everybody had to have his own machine) and hookah pipes and science fiction books and comic books, some of which were, inexplicably to Annabelle, in Japanese. (She could never understand that. None of the boys spoke Japanese, much less read it.) And then there were the stacks of porno books and magazines and she found it was apparently legal to actually entitle a magazine Fuck Me.

So much stuff and plenty of money for it — the Man saw to that knowing they would never live to accumulate their own fortunes. And they spent it.

But what was appalling and, she admitted it, endearing to Annabelle was what they did with it all. All that healthy maleness and alcohol and fear pent up in even so large a place as the mansion made for an extremely vibrant household to say the least.

The alcohol. So much alcohol. Team Crow got dead drunk the way normal people had a single cocktail. The monthly bill for liquor consumed on the premises was over a thousand dollars. And that didn’t even count the bar tabs Annabelle was forever driving around to pay off. The huge garage area was filled with Corvettes and four-wheel drives and motorcycles everyone was too drunk to drive home. After eight DWIs in two weeks, Jack had installed a taxi-home policy for everyone not going out with Cat (who drunk, could talk any cop out of his gun).

But it wasn’t just the booze. They were none of them alcoholics. It was just all that overgrown energy. They terrorized the maid service, inevitably springing themselves on the poor women stark naked and dripping from the shower and offering to help. It was so hard to keep cooks they were finally forbidden to even enter the kitchen while the cook was on the property. If they wanted something they had to phone in and ask for it. The amount of food pleased and frightened the cooks at the same time. They were able to consume astonishing amounts of food. Any kind of food. Junk food. Gourmet buffets. Munchies. Anything. Everything.

They never got fat. None of them — except for Carl, of course — even got beer bellies. Every morning they would get up and work out rigorously, the sweat running salty past their grins. It was not that they were especially disciplined. They most certainly were not. They were… committed. They were faithful. And they were alone together. It wasn’t just each one of them who worried about himself. If one couldn’t spin his body around quick enough with that brutish wooden stake in his grip, then it might not be just him slashed from throat to thighs. It might be one of his mates. No. It would be one of his mates. Because there was, quite literally, no one else in the world to save them but them.

It was why, recalled Annabelle, Jack had forbidden wrestling matches. Which were always happening in the stairwells, for some reason. She supposed it was because those broad shoulders were always clipping past one another in a hurry and then one thing led to another and…

Jack wouldn’t have it. They were already wrapped far too tightly to be adrenaline-bruising their only kin.

So instead they tore up the house. That time they decided to play indoor golf because of the rain.

She busied herself in front of the lounge mirror, thinking back and trying without success to keep the smile from her face. To be fair, Jack had not even been in town. He and Cat had gone up to San Francisco with Anthony to watch his old team beat the 49’ers. But that didn’t mean she believed for one single instant Jack would have stopped them. Probably would have just sat there in that big chair of his and laughed and bet on the winner.

Indoor golf. She sighed. They had broken six windows. Three of them cut glass.

She paused and inspected her appearance before returning to the bar. She supposed she looked fine.

For what she was.

For what was left. For what there was to look forward to. I’m so tired, she thought again. And then she thought: No. That’s a lie: I’m frightened. And then she thought: No. I’m both. Both.

Jack! Hurry back. Hurry back to us and still be you!

Father Adam looked to his left, at the seventy-ish man sleeping across the aisle from him and said in his silent TV commentator’s voice, There are, for your information, sir, over six hundred exorcisms officially performed in America each year. And to you, it’s just something that made a great movie that may or may not have been true once but isn’t now.

Adam’s gaze slid across the aisle to Jack, dozing in front of him.

And this man, he continued, kills vampires for a living. How about that?

Adam sighed, resting his eyes on Crow a bit longer before turning and viewing the mountains of the western United States sweeping below.

I’m in a dream. But maybe not. This is real and this has been happening, bile flowing from the Beast, since the dawn of man and before. This isn’t a dream.