Lorraine looked at her over the edge of the book as they dawdled for a moment, lingering over the memory. “You were buying your family secret recipe pie at the grocery store?”

  Auntie Anne cupped a hand near—but not over—her mouth and tittered. She wasn’t the sort of person to silence herself for another’s benefit. “Well, that’s the secret to the recipe: I don’t actually make the pie. There’s enough to do already at Thanksgiving. There’s no guarantee at my age that I’ve got that kind of time left.” The old woman winked. “Now damn it, girl, write. It’s a damned good thing you’re no secretary.”

  Lorraine raised both eyebrows and, marching forward again, bore down and wrote.

  Part IV

  The End

  12

  Withrow

  The subterranean hallway with the sign for CRYPT was smooth-walled with a rounded ceiling and, like everywhere else down here, painted an uninteresting gray. Something about that surprised me, and that bugged me. As we mounted the plain concrete steps, each edged in rubber padding to prevent slippage, my eyes showing me everything despite the darkness, I found myself so lost in consternation—not exactly the same as thought, once it gets going in an unproductive circle—I didn’t even notice when H’Diane turned on her mag light.

  “Allow me,” The Bull’s Eye said, and lights mounted on her shoulders flashed bright blue-white in modern LED glory.

  “Uh…thank you,” H’Diane said. It was so soft it shook me out of my thoughts. I realized it was the first thing she’d said to The Bull’s Eye the whole time.

  “Before we get up here to whatever this is,” I said to H’Diane over my shoulder, “I want you to know how much I admire the way you’ve taken all this bullshit in stride.” My hand gestured at roughly everything in the goddamn universe.

  “I suppose it’s a lot easier for you,” H’Diane said, “being, well, you know.”

  I chuckled. I knew. “Being freaks in our own right.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘freaks,’” H’Diane replied.

  I laughed again. “Only because you’ve had that beaten out of you by HR.”

  Smiles came to a halt at the top of the stairs. As I caught up, I saw why. A big man stood in the darkness, his back to the door ahead of us. He carried no flashlight, and it was so tight in there, I almost got bowled over by the stench of vampirism coming off of him. He kept his eyes on Smiles, his arms crossed across his chest, his expression one of annoyed disinterest. He tried to look like he had better things to do than standing around in the darkness and getting sniffed by some mutt.

  “Withrow Surrett,” I said. “But I reckon you know that.”

  The guy didn’t nod or speak or salute or flip me off. He just stepped to the side, knocked four times in a once-twice-once pattern, and opened the door for us.

  “I hope it’s alright I don’t tip,” I said as Smiles and I strode by. “I just don’t have any ones on me.”

  The Bull’s Eye had again collapsed in on herself to make it up the stairs, and she waddled by without saying anything. H’Diane did the same. I wondered for a moment if he would stop her to take her gun, but he didn’t.

  That told me something for sure: everyone inside who mattered was a vampire. H’Diane could carry all the guns she wanted, and they wouldn’t care one bit.

  Dan

  Roderick and Dan mounted the steps at the front of the cathedral of steel and glass, hand in hand. Dan stopped halfway, tugging Roderick’s arm to get him to pause also. Dan leaned back, gazing up, and for a moment almost lost his balance trying to take it all in. The building’s façade had to be a dozen stories high. Surrounded by suburban streets and houses—most of them two-story, a few three—the cathedral clawed at the sky like something that had landed there, not something built there. Even in the starlight, it was a gleaming and alien thing, a giant rocket made to blast a city full of souls all the way to Heaven, hunkered on its pad as though waiting to launch.

  Roderick studied the sky beyond the façade and tugged back. “Come,” he murmured. “It is almost time.”

  “Almost time?” Dan glared at him. “Plans within plans, wheels within wheels. Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  Roderick did not smile this time. He leveled deadly serious eyes at Dan’s own. Dan thought Roderick’s expression the most serious he had seen his mad lover wear in the year—no, a little longer—they’d been on-again, off-again dating. Mostly off-again, Dan thought a bit sourly. And not quite dating. More like episodic fucking. Not that Dan really minded, but it had become increasingly apparent a high and well-defended wall stood between Roderick and the rest of the world. The smiling twink in the pleather and the high-heeled boots was as much a façade as the glass and steel towering above them, and what happened inside each remained just as much a mystery. Dan knew in his guts whatever lurked inside—in both cases—was very bad.

  “We must go.” Roderick’s voice lacked the high pitch and the foppish wisps around the edges. “Time is short. Forces are on the move.”

  Dan stood firm. “No.” His gaze hardened. “Tell me. Right now.”

  Roderick smiled, and to Dan’s surprise, Roderick’s eyes reflected it, too. “I am not sure myself,” he said, and Dan knew Roderick spoke the truth, with a conviction Dan never before experienced. “We have to go inside to see.” And with that, the mask of half-truths slipped back in place. Roderick was up to something, Dan knew that, but he also believed Roderick himself might remain unsure regarding exactly what.

  “Oh gods.” Dan swallowed hard. “Oh, gods, you don’t actually know what’s going on, do you?” His mind raced. “Oh, shit, Roderick, shit, I’ve been assuming this whole time that you’ve got an ace up your sleeve, the inside scoop, something, and it turns out you’ve basically gone all-in on a blind hand. Right? You know some of what’s been played, and you know what’s in the deck, but you have no idea which cards will get drawn.” Dan’s eyes grew wide and panicked. He looked back at Auntie Anne, having a conversation with herself and occasionally laughing. I am alone with crazy people. We’re all going to die.

  Roderick clearly considered his answer, opened his mouth, drew a breath, put a finger to his jaw to seem casual, and got interrupted by the front doors of the cathedral opening. Two thugs—Dan could think of no other word for them—loomed there, holding the doors open for them.

  “Mr. Surrett,” one of the thugs addressed Roderick.

  It occurred to Dan that was the first time he heard Roderick’s surname. He had never considered asking.

  “Hello,” Roderick replied. “Devlin? Am I correct in remembering that?”

  “Thank you, sir.” The thug nodded. “It’s a pleasure to see you again. I believe you’re expected.”

  Expected to what? thought Dan.

  Roderick led Dan up the final few steps. “I have brought some associates. I do hope that will not be a problem.”

  “Not at all, sir.” Another nod. The thug sized up Dan. “Ah.”

  “Ah?” Dan’s tone was not friendly. “Ah? My boyfriend gets a good-to-see-you-sir, and I get ah?”

  The thug smiled and didn’t even remotely mean it. “My apologies.” A heartbeat. “Sir.”

  “Oh helllllll no.” Dan waved an index finger back and forth as he spoke. He stared hard at Roderick. “For one thing, Mama didn’t raise me to take talkin’ to like that.” Dan’s voice shifted from neutral to queen without skipping a beat. “For another, I want to know what the hell is going on before we step foot inside.”

  “I assure you,” Roderick said, his voice soothing and soft, “you will come to no harm.”

  “Why?” Dan’s voice was a little shrill. “Because the spider family that attacked us didn’t mean to harm us? Because the super-snake-handlers who prayed Marty to death didn’t mean to hurt him? If you’ve got some kind of inside deal with these assholes, Roderick, then so far, it may get you all the good-evening-sir door service you could want, but it’s getting the rest of us killed.” Dan went to yank his hand away from Roderick and found he couldn’t. The vampire’s tiny hand clamped down around his, a cuff of cool flesh.

  Roderick gazed deep into Dan’s eyes, and Dan had the impression suddenly of a weight against his mind. It was like Roderick’s forehead touched his own, and merged into it, except that neither of them moved and Roderick simply beheld him with the darkest, most unflinching eyes Dan had ever seen. This wasn’t eye contact, Dan realized. It was that thing you hear, the old saying about the eyes being windows to the soul, except in Roderick’s case, it was less a friendly wave and more of a boarding party. “It is all going to be okay, my darling.” Roderick’s voice was very flat and very soft, and he smiled just a little.

  The thug—Devlin—cleared his throat with the polite impertinence of servants everywhere.

  “Lorraine,” Roderick said. “Auntie Anne. You may, of course, continue your work inside, but we must go inside now.” He glanced away from Dan, finally, and Dan could breathe again. “Apparently we are expected.”

  Auntie Anne stopped at the bottom of the step. Dan could hear her breathing a little heavily. “We are?” She sounded almost as wary as Dan suspected she should be.

  “We are.”

  Together, they all walked inside.

  Devlin and his colleague closed the doors behind them.

  Jennifer

  Maria and Jennifer clambered over a fence and burst through a high hedge with one narrow gap in it to find themselves standing on the street again. Immediately across from them stood the giant cathedral of glass and steel at the heart of the neighborhood.

  The werewolves behind them still bayed and howled and gave chase, but as soon as they caught up to within about fifteen feet, the pack suddenly froze, or nearly so, and began moving at maybe a hundredth of their normal speed. Maria had created around herself a field of slowness that stuck to anyone who entered it. They simply had to keep playing catch-up-and-keep-away like this until they found someplace safe, someplace they could hide or barricade themselves or fight back.

  Jennifer knew this had to end as soon as possible. Maria was growing increasingly exhausted, and her breathing had become labored. If Maria stopped running, even at a hundredth their normal speed, the werewolves would eventually reach them no matter how far out they were slowed.

  Jennifer also noticed the radius of this effect was shrinking and wearing off more quickly for werewolves caught by its effects. Their escape hatch was closing, inch by inch.

  “The church?” They spoke at the same time—Jennifer in full strength, Maria wheezing—but they grinned at each other and dashed across the street.

  Storming up the front steps, each grabbed one door—Jennifer the left, Maria the right—as werewolves poured through the hedge behind them.

  The doors did not open.

  Dan

  Roderick strode forward. Dan followed. Dan didn’t know exactly why he was cooperating, only that he lacked much choice in the matter. Auntie Anne tottered along behind them on shuffling steps, talking to herself all the while.

  The group passed through a huge narthex, itself bigger than most sanctuaries Dan had seen. Massive posters of sternly self-important white people in suits watched from the walls in silent judgment. Preachers, Dan figured. They were mostly male, and the few who smiled had the plastic quality of car salesmen. The banner-like posters, easily fifteen feet high from top to bottom, turned the faces of the ministers of this ridiculous church into vigilant demigods. Dan hated them all before he’d even seen all of them. Beneath the last banner, of a woman wearing a uniquely broad smile showing lots of teeth, a set of wide doors had SANCTUARY etched into the wood.

  “This is the end of the line for us, isn’t it?” Auntie Anne didn’t pussyfoot. “You’re going to kill us. You were with them all along.”

  Roderick glanced back at her and clucked his tongue.

  Lorraine

  Lorraine’s brow furrowed. “And what,” she asked, “do you assume I’ll just go along with you automatically?”

  Behind her, Lorraine observed The Others: the child, the old man, the Duke athlete. They marched in silence, their own unseen regiment. Occasionally the tot-sized vampire called out a number Lorraine had figured out was the number of followers this demon webcomic picked up on Facebook. It was going viral, as they say, and Roderick appeared more and more pleased.

  “He’s up to something.” Lorraine wasn’t even sure to whom she said it.

  Auntie Anne checked around herself when Lorraine spoke, then turned her eyes on Lorraine and blinked. “You’re…” She blinked again, rapidly, over and over. “Lorraine,” she said, squeezing the woman’s arm with her hand. “Yes. Lorraine. Yes.”

  Lorraine went back to writing. Now was not the time, apparently, to interrupt whatever magic they could accomplish.

  As the thugs escorted the four of them into the back of the sanctuary, Lorraine heard something from the narthex. Her vampire ears just barely picked up pounding feet, a yank on a door, and a shout from outside. That couldn’t be good, but then, what was good in this place?

  In the sanctuary, at the far end of what felt like half a mile of deep crimson carpet, was a small group of figures Lorraine instantly recognized as vampires. Devlin was a vampire, too, but the ones arranged around the altar were vampires: movie monsters, insanely inhuman, their skin so much paler than their original colorings they reminded her, ironically, of bones beached in the sun. Five of them stood atop a raised circle of stones of different colors, arranged to depict a pattern: not a pentagram, but something more obscure and interesting. In light and dark rocks, the floor instead created a decagram, the ten-pointed star formed by layering two pentagrams atop one another, with one spun just a few degrees so they would be offset. The average neopagan might not recognize it, but it showed up in plenty of old occult books. It was a favorite of the sort of secret mystical society Lorraine knew had flourished in the late nineteenth century.

  One of the vampires turned to them and intoned in a loud, firm voice, “Ah, Mr. Surrett. It’s good of you to join us. I take it you’ve made up your mind?”

  “I have.” His own soft tones trickled down the aisle. That was Roderick for you, Lorraine reflected: he sounded so soft, so inoffensive, but he was a monster inside. “Are we ready to begin?”

  One of the other vampires spoke up. “We’re hearing some rather bad things about you from Ross.” He wore the attire and the arrogance of an old plantation owner and, Lorraine realized, he probably was. That ridiculous overdone drawl and a walking cane and an old-fashioned suit all proclaimed the War Between the States had ended too soon. He wasn’t even trying to pass as modern. But then, with hipsters around, who could define “modern” anyway? He probably got by just fine.

  Roderick was smiling when he spoke. Lorraine could hear it in his voice. “Well, demons do have a tendency to mislead. It is, I think, the quality for which they are best known.”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” said the first one. Lorraine couldn’t see the speaker, but they were getting awfully close. Much closer than she wanted to be to any of these creatures. “For now, Mr. Surrett, welcome. We are almost ready to begin. The guest of honor is arriving now.”

  Jennifer

  Jennifer and Maria stole hasty glances behind them. Werewolves—Jennifer quickly counted heads, thirteen of them, just like before, but wait, was that number right, but of course it was—were rushing toward them. From a dozen feet away—two arm lengths for some of these monsters—they suddenly slammed into almost frozen.

  Maria stared up at the side of the building. “I wish I read more Spider-Man,” she sighed. “I always preferred Scarlet Witch.”

  Jennifer grinned at Maria, and said, “I actually have one for this. Batman ‘66.”

  Their perspective shifted as their personal gravity shifted. With a squeal and a hop, she and Maria hopped “down” onto the glass exterior of the cathedral. It was as though for them—and only them—the world tilted ninety degrees so that the natural surface for walking or running was the vertical side of the cathedral. Probably fifty yards of glass and steel stretched “ahead” of them.

  “I say we run for it. See what’s up top. Maybe another way in, maybe just a place to take a break.” Jennifer grabbed Maria’s hand again and started to run, slipped on the glass, and face planted.

  “Okay,” Jennifer said as she tried to get up onto her hands and knees. “Slippery.”

  Maria kicked her shoes off and peeled off her socks. “Come on,” she said to Jennifer. “We do not have time to take it slow.”

  Jennifer swung a shoe over her shoulder and, doing so, beaned one of the—quick check—eleven werewolves behind them. Wait, eleven?

  Then, barefoot, the two of them took off again at a run, the glass side of the cathedral free of obstacles and free of pursuers.

  Werewolves howled behind/beneath them, and Maria let herself laugh. “Oh my gods,” she said. “What the hell is this?”

  “You know the old Batman show from the ‘60s? Adam West?” Jennifer was grinning back at her.

  “No,” Maria said. “Sorry.”

  “They used to film scenes of Batman and Robin scaling the exterior of a building, but they just angled the camera and had them crouch down and walk on a sideways set.”

  “I love it!” Maria laughed again. “Do you get to just do whatever you want with magic? It seems a lot less, you know, restricted.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “Magic always has a price,” she said. “I’ll regret this later. Probably massive vertigo. My body is not so happy after a few years of magical practice.”

 

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