My fangs jutted from under my upper lip.

“Careful. Remember the girl,” Dragan warned. He twisted my head toward the candles and crucifix. “You are proof that Satan exists.”

“Really? I’ve never met him.” I pulled my face away.

Dragan withdrew his hands. “You are cut from his cloth.”

“You wanted time with me,” I said. “Time for what?”

“Time to learn a few things. How many vampires are in Denver?”

“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble for that answer. Hell, you could’ve called me and I would’ve told you.” I made up a number. “Thirty-seven.”

Dragan snapped his fingers. Teodor yanked on Wendy’s chain leash, slipped the baton under the hem of her blouse and pressed it against her stomach. The baton emitted its evil cackle. Wendy gritted her teeth to keep from crying out as she convulsed and jerked on the floor.

“Stop it,” I yelled.

Teodor grinned at me and raked the baton across Wendy’s skin. She tensed her body to withstand the pain, then sputtered and cried out.

I yanked against the chains and hollered again.

Dragan grabbed my hair and shook my head. “Joke and your woman pays for your stupidity. We’ll strip her naked, spread her legs, and jam the electric prod inside her. Understand?”

I choked down the bile welling in my throat. “Yes. Yes. Just leave her alone.”

Teodor withdrew the baton. Wendy retched. She raised her head. Tears glistened on her cheeks. She avoided looking at me, and I knew that in this moment of anguish she couldn’t help but blame me.

Dragan let go of my hair. “Who controls the vampires?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who is the supreme authority?”

“No one. We’re not like the army.”

“Someone issues orders and you all obey. I’ve studied your kind long enough to realize that vampires have resources too deep for an individual acting alone. When we begin a campaign of cleansing, you vampires collectively react and escape.”

“Maybe in Romania, in Transylvania, vampires are more organized than we are here. All that communism you lived under.”

“No. It’s everywhere. A vampire disappears, his human persona is listed as deceased, months later the vampire materializes in another country with a new human identity. Documents are forged. Bribes paid. Bank accounts vanish and reappear.”

“If you’re implying that there’s a secret vampire society, there is none.”

Dragan tapped my forehead. “But you’re wrong. I know much about you. I even know about the spaceship.”

These last words plowed through my desperation. “What spaceship?”

“The one that crashed in Roswell and brought the sickness.”

“Sickness?” I rose against the steel bar, alert and curious.

“The demonic lusting,” Dragan said. “Women becoming possessed with…”

I completed his thought. “Nymphomania?” Did the vânätori hold the key to the secret behind the conspiracy at Rocky Flats?

Dragan smiled agreeably. “Yes, you would know. The crash of the spaceship, which your government rather clumsily tried to hush up, aroused our suspicions. What demonic plague could come from space? Perhaps a new species of vampires? Or something worse? The onset of the nymphomania confirmed our fears, and sure enough, we found you bloodsuckers lurking to prey on the unfortunate victims.”

“We don’t need help seducing humans.”

“It’s more than mere seduction. At any time of human failure-war, revolution, and now this epidemic of nymphomania-you vampires circle about like vultures.”

“And the spaceship?”

“We’ve kept vigil over the spaceship as your government moves it from place to place. Roswell…Ohio…then here. And everywhere it went, at one time or another, there was an outbreak of nymphomania.”

“You said here. Where’s here? Rocky Flats?”

“Of course here in Rocky Flats.” Dragan’s forehead wrinkled with suspicion. “Why would you ask? Don’t you know?”

I just looked at him.

He grabbed my collar and repeated, “Don’t you know?”

I shook my head and replied softly, “No.”

“You know nothing about the spaceship?”

“Are you talking about the UFO from Roswell?”

Dragan nodded. He stared pensively at me and his eyebrows furrowed. “So you don’t know about the connection between the spaceship and the nymphomania?”

“No.”

He muttered something to Petru, who put the shotgun aside, turned around, and stooped into the shadows behind him. Petru picked up a shiny metal container the size of a shoe box. He cradled the container against his belly. The yellow and black warning symbol for radioactive material adorned the lid.

Dragan unsnapped the latches and opened the container. He carefully withdrew a thick glass bottle that was nestled in the black foam liner. A liquid in the bottle cast an exotic, shimmering glow, like that from a lava lamp.

Dragan held the bottle by the flange around the neck as if the contents made the glass barrel too hot to touch. He dangled the bottle before my face, close enough for me to feel the heat.

My aura turned yellow. Incredibly, every sensation was blanked out except for a pleasant warmth in my groin.

Dragan tapped my elbows. “Do you know what this is?”

“Only that it’s probably radioactive.”

“It’s red mercury, the source of the nymphomania. This leaked from the spaceship. Dr. Wong took samples to that secret place near Las Vegas.”

“You mean Area 51?”

“If that’s what it’s called.”

Dr. Wong. The red mercury. A spaceship. Now all the clues meshed together and the conspiracy unraveled into one continuous thread. The nymphomania had been caused by the red mercury brought by the Roswell UFO. Red mercury supposedly produced by Rocky Flats. This was the mysterious material that contaminated the women.

Was this true? How could it be? Project Redlight painted the entire story as a hoax. Even Gilbert Odin dismissed the red mercury. I was energized by the need to confirm the truth. I tensed my arms against the chains but the steel links were too strong for my wrists.

Dragan returned the bottle to the box. Petru latched the cover and put the box back on the floor.

“This is all new to me,” I said, feeling the warmth drain from my crotch. My aura returned to its orange color.

“Would any other vampires know?”

“No.”

“Then what’s your concern with Rocky Flats?”

“Because we vampires have questions of our own. Every time there’s an outbreak of nymphomania you scumbags show up. None of us ever connected the outbreaks to the UFO. This news about the red mercury is a complete surprise.”

Dragan crossed his arms. “Interesting.” He shrugged. “And now that you finally know, too bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“It means that I was planning for a long night interrogating you. But since I know more about this than you, why waste time? Petru, get the stake and mallet.”

Petru grasped the items from the table.

“I thought you wanted to talk,” I reminded Dragan.

“That was when I thought you had something important to share, which you don’t. Now it’s more useful for me to watch you die.” He motioned to the table and the bowl of blood. “When I have more questions, we can easily catch another vampire.”

Dragan unzipped my barn coat and took the stake from Petru. The wood reeked of buckthorn and I shrank back. The myth was that buckthorn resin burned us vampires like the most potent of acids.

Dragan cupped his hand behind my neck to hold me still while he dragged the pointed end of the stake across my shirt to the left of my sternum. He wiggled the tip into a gap in my ribs, directly over where my heart would’ve been. “It’s time that I send you to Hell. Give my regards to Satan, you bloodsucking serpent.”