Wendy rolled her window down. The night chill blasted into the car. She wrinkled her nose. “Phew. All I smell is arsenic trioxide and sodium nitrate. Americans don’t garden, they wage chemical warfare on their plants.”

Zipping up her jacket, she tipped her head out the window and made a faint hooting sound.

Bob pulled off his sunglasses. I took his cue and removed mine. The fuzzy auras of cats and small rodents slinking beneath the hedges sharpened. I spied two bright-red auras clumped together behind a thick bush along the wall of a house. A pair of very excited humans. Ziggy’s killers waiting in ambush?

“On the left,” I said. “Two humans.”

Bob scrambled to his left window. He chuckled. “Relax. It’s a couple of kids fooling around. One of them’s getting a blow job.”

“Homework for a sex ed class?” I asked.

“Hope she gets an A,” Wendy added.

“They’re both boys,” Bob replied. “I doubt they’ll ask for extra credit.”

Something darted in front of the windshield. I tapped the brakes. The flying streak vanished as rapidly as it had appeared. “What the hell was that?”

“What was what?” Bob gripped the top of my seat and searched past my shoulder.

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes. Maybe I was hallucinating.

Wendy rolled her window back up. “It’s safe. No one’s waiting for us.”

“How do you know?”

“A little bird just told me.”

Bob pointed to a house at the right where a cottonwood tree grew in the center of the lawn. The curtains were drawn across an illuminated picture window. A small, battered sedan sat beside the curb. “That’s the chalices’ car. Pull up behind it.”

I parked my Dodge close to the rear bumper of the little Toyota. Stickers of rock bands and slogans were plastered across the trunk lid and rear window: Guano Apes. Devotchka. Depression Is Anger Without Enthusiasm. A Clear Conscience Is Usually the Sign of a Bad Memory. And my favorite: Oral Sex Won’t Cause Brain Freeze.

Wendy jerked her door open and started for the house. We followed her across the lawn and past the cottonwood tree. Bob and I surveyed the area as we approached the front door.

“How come you’re so sure it’s clear?” I asked.

A horned owl fluttered to a tree branch above us. The owl hooted and flew off.

Wendy hooted back and remarked, “Like I said, a little bird told me.”

“Got any more tricks, Dr. Dolittle?”

“Lots, but the night’s young yet.”

Bob strode ahead and his silhouette crossed before the picture window. He placed his hands on the wooden front door. Bob stood quiet for a moment, then declared, “I’m not detecting anything dangerous.”

Nudging Bob aside, Wendy grasped the brass door handle and clicked the thumb latch. “How many times do I have to say that the coast is clear? Whoever did this is long gone.”

“How would the owl know?” I asked.

“That’s what the cat told the owl.” Wendy pointed to the small red aura hiding underneath a car across the street. She pushed the door open, leading us into a foyer. Most of the interior lights were on. Plush carpets in beige accented the restrained furnishings of pale oak and earth-toned leather.

“I figured Ziggy to be heavy into industrial fetish,” I said. “This place looks like a Marriott hotel.”

“For a Kinko’s manager he lived well,” Wendy noted. “Where’d he get the money?”

“Besides satisfying his carnal appetites,” Bob replied, “Ziggy polished his skills as a scam artist, hence his many enemies. Don’t act surprised. Vampires aren’t known for their moral scruples.”

We followed a soft sobbing drifting from the back of the house.

The closer we approached the sobbing, the more my vampire senses tingled. My fangs grew. I pulled Wendy’s petite frame behind me. She elbowed me in the ribs and took a place next to me.

We stepped into a sunken den. The male chalice lay curled in the fetal position. Shivering, he sobbed quietly and stared up at the woman chalice, who knelt beside a prostrate figure. Tears dripped from both chalices’ reddened eyes. Wrinkled white shirts clung to their sweaty bodies.

Despite Wendy’s assurances that we were safe, the hairs on my skin stood in fear. I walked forward a step to examine the body.

Ziggy’s decapitated corpse lay supine, surrounded by the flakes of his dried vampire blood. What had been his sternum was a black pit marked by a ragged hole in his shirt. The gruesome stump of his neck looked like a rolled slice of bacon. His head rested against the leg of an end table, a lock of long white hair flopped over his eyes, which stared emptily up at the ceiling. His mouth gaped open, as if he’d been killed in mid-howl. Our collective gaze lifted to a darkly spattered pattern of holes punched into the wall.

I said, “Looks like someone pressed a shotgun to our friend Ziggy and gave him both barrels.”

Wendy opened a pocketknife and knelt beside the body. She poked into the wound and dug out a pellet of buckshot the size of a pinkie fingernail. Polishing the pellet on her sleeve, she revealed a shiny ball. “Sterling silver. Someone’s taking their vampire killing seriously.”

“You’ve noticed? I thought the decapitation was a good clue.”

Orange auras shone through the blinds covering the French doors along the back wall.

“It’s Andre,” Bob said.

The doorknob clicked. One door swung open. A vampire wearing a green velvet sport coat and denim jeans entered, crawling upside down like a spider across the header above the door. Bracelets on his wrists reflected the den lights. His ponytail dangled to the floor. He crept across the ceiling and scowled suspiciously at us and Ziggy’s corpse.

Two more vampires came through the door, walking onto the carpet in normal fashion. The woman was the petite brunette we’d seen earlier at the El Pingüino lounge. A padded-shoulder leather motorcycle jacket covered her torso, giving her a muscular, intimidating appearance. The man was older and thin. His close-cropped gray hair started from a well-defined widow’s peak.

Bob welcomed him. “Andre. Sorry I couldn’t tell you more over the phone. We just got here ourselves.”

They made introductions among us all. Andre spoke in a heavy accent. Carmen, the vampire woman, unzipped her jacket and displayed the cleavage within her leather halter-top. Dan Sky-Pony, the vampire on the ceiling, let his cowboy boots swing down and he hung for an instant by his fingertips before dropping to the floor. He paced around the female chalice and caressed her head as he licked his lips.

Bob picked up Ziggy’s head and pushed the upper lip back to reveal holes in the jaw where the incisors had been pried out. “Vânätori de vampir. This was a ritual killing, and they’ve taken his fangs as proof.”

Andre stroked his face in a gesture I’d describe as nervous. His eyes flitted from side to side as if looking for something the rest of us hadn’t seen.

“You okay, Andre?” Bob asked. “You look…”

Scared, I thought.

“I’m fine,” Andre blurted. He coughed to mask a glint of embarrassment. Vampires aren’t supposed to show fear.

Dan stood over the body. “I can’t figure how this happened. Ziggy hasn’t lived this long by being careless.”

“I’m not so sure,” I interrupted. “Remember how he scoffed when you first brought up the question of the vampire hunters. I think maybe he did get careless.”

“Or maybe it was someone trying to make it look like vampire hunters,” Wendy said.

“What do we know about these vânätori?” Carmen asked.

“Very little, unfortunately,” Bob answered.

“So what do we do?” Sky-Pony asked.

Bob took Ziggy’s head and cradled it under his arm like a basketball. “Learn more. Stay alert.”

Carmen pointed to the corpse as if it were a heap of misplaced trash. “What about that?”

“The usual means of disposal. Solar immolation.” Bob studied the layout of the den. A large bay window faced east across an open yard. “This place is perfect.”