She looked nothing like Jerry. Where he had been sharp and modern, she was ancient and worn smooth as river stone. Her skin was the color of old ivory. Her eyes had no pupils—just twin mirrors reflecting Charley’s own terrified face back at him.
“I’m not a real vampire killer, Charley. I told you. I just play one on stage.”
“No,” he said.
“Charles Brewster,” she said. Her voice was the scrape of a coffin lid. “You killed my fledgling. My son .”
Charley Brewster had been a coward for three weeks.
Charley ran.
“I watched my neighbor eat people. I set my best friend on fire—and he got better . I watched Peter Vincent, the world’s biggest fraud, stake a vampire with a broken pool cue. So no. I’m not doing the ‘watch and weep’ thing.” He stepped forward, into the marble chamber. “You want a debt? Here’s payment.”
And it was smiling.
“You said if I ever needed you, text the bat emoji.”
The shared wall was gone. Not broken— gone . As if erased. Beyond it stretched not the neighbor’s living room but a vast, circular chamber of black marble veined with red. Torches flickered along curved walls. And in the center, on a throne made of shattered headstones, sat a woman.
Behind her, shapes stirred. Not vampires. Worse. Things that had been human once, then vampire, then dead—and now something else. Their mouths were sewn shut with silver wire. Their fingers ended in bone needles.
The hallway to the living room was a dark throat. He pressed his back to the wall, breathing through his mouth. At the threshold, he risked a look.
“Then learn.”
Jerry’s apartment.
Beside it, a note in perfect handwriting: