“And this PDF she sent – it contained the spell?”

“Uh-huh. I’ve read through it once already,” Rachel said, frowning. “The mathematics and symbology are pretty involved, but thank the Goddess for computer programs that handle most of that stuff.”

“So, can you do it?”

“Keep Karl awake and functioning past dawn tomorrow?”

“That’s what we need, yeah.”

Rachel blew out a slow breath. “Maybe. If I put all other work aside and bust my hump for the next twenty-four hours or so, I might – might – have the spell ready in time, and if I do, it might even work. No guarantees.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d make the effort,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

She stared at me for a couple of seconds, a hand on one slender hip. “Explain to me again what’s going to be achieved if I put myself through all of that – an activity for which I will almost certainly not be paid overtime.”

I’d had a little speech prepared, in case this question should arise. I was going to talk about duty, and sacrifice, and the greater good, and blah, blah, blah. But looking at Rachel, I knew she’d see all of that as the self-serving bullshit it really was.

Then I remembered a scene from All the President’s Men, that movie about the two reporters who broke the Watergate scandal all those years ago. As Richard Nixon said much later, “It wasn’t biting all those people’s necks that did me in – it was the cover-up afterward.”

I’d seen the movie a several times, most recently on HBO a couple of weeks earlier. I thought about what the editor of the Washington Post, played by Jason Robards, had told his two star reporters near the end of the story. So I said to Rachel, “Well, there isn’t very much riding on this, really – just the election, the future of our city, and maybe a few dozen lives – human and supe both.” I tried for a casual shrug. “Not that any of that matters.”

After a couple of seconds, Rachel gave a tired-sounding sigh. “Tell Karl not to go too far from the station house tomorrow night,” she said. “I’m not sure when I’ll be ready for him – but once I am, there won’t be any time to waste.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “And thanks, Rachel.”

She gave me a crooked smile. “Thank me if the fucking thing works.”

Twenty-six hours later, I was standing next to my partner in Rachel’s office, saying, “I owe you a big one, Rachel. I’ve got some of an idea of how hard this must’ve been to pull off in such a short time” – how could I look at her haggard face and think anything different? – “and I want you to know I really appreciate it.”

After looking from me to Karl and back again, Rachel said, “Why don’t you wait and thank me in” – she checked her watch – “an hour and forty-two minutes.” Rachel’s habit of cynically telling us to postpone gratitude might’ve started to annoy me if I hadn’t known about all the intense effort she’d put in for this thing to work. If it did.

“What happens then?” If I’d taken a second to think, I would’ve realized the answer to that question even before Karl and Rachel said, at the same time, “Sunrise.”

The Q-and-A session with Slattery was scheduled to take place in what McGuire calls the Media Room, where us detectives go whenever there’s a briefing that involves visual material. It’s got a four-foot-square white screen on one wall and a projection system that’s hooked up to both a Blu-ray player and an Apple computer on the opposite side of the room. I once had to watch a snuff film in there that still gives me nightmares. But the projector wouldn’t be in use today.

McGuire told me he’d picked the media room because it was about the only place in the building big enough to hold the number of people who were going to be present. I was pretty sure he had another reason for the choice, too – the media room doesn’t have any windows.

But there were windows between the Occult Crimes squad room and the media room, and covering them to keep out the sun would probably have roused Slattery’s suspicions. So Rachel and I were in the media room with Karl well before sunrise, which was due to arrive in Scranton at 7.24 this morning, according to Weatherwitch.com. The three of us sat in the last row of chairs, with Karl in the middle.

“How you feeling, buddy?” I asked Karl.

“About like usual,” he said. “A little hungry, since Rachel said it was better to do this on an empty stomach. But that’s no big deal – I been hungry before. I’ll survive.”

I sure as hell hope so, I thought.

“Do you normally conk out exactly at meteorological sunrise?” Rachel asked.

“Beats the shit out of me, Rachel,” Karl said. “I don’t go by the clock.”

“Then how do you know when it’s time to close the coffin lid?” Rachel smiled. “Metaphorically speaking, I mean.” She knew that most vampires don’t spend the day inside a mahogany box these days, if they ever did. Karl used a sleeping bag, just like Christine did. I found that thinking about Karl, Christine, and sleeping bags put an image in my mind that I didn’t much care to have there, so I banished it by focusing extra-hard on what Karl was talking about.

“It’s hard to describe,” Karl said. “You can feel it coming, getting closer you know? It’s like when they give you anesthesia before surgery.”

“When did you have surgery?” I asked. “You never mentioned that before.”

“Ah, I got gang-tackled during a football game when I was in high school,” he said. “Broke my leg in three places, and they had to operate on me to fix it – put plates in or something. So, yeah, I know what anesthesia’s like.”

“Count backward from one hundred,” Rachel intoned with a little smile.

“Yeah, kinda like that, except without all the counting,” Karl said. “You feel yourself going, and the feeling gets stronger, and then” – he snapped his fingers – “you’re gone.”

“Well, if you start to experience that sensation, be sure and say something,” Rachel said.

“So you can do what?” he asked.

She shrugged tiredly. “Catch you before you hit the floor, I guess.”

I didn’t tell them, but I had a back-up plan ready in case the spell failed. As a favor, Homer Jordan from the ME’s office had loaned me one of those green plastic body bags that they use to transport bodies to and from the morgue. If Karl turned into a corpse at dawn, the way he usually did, I was going to get him into the body bag and find somebody stronger than Rachel to help me carry him out of the building and to the trunk of my car. The deadly sunlight would never touch him.

I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about, the three of us, as we sat in that big, empty room, waiting for the sunrise. Somebody started a conversation about a TV program, but that didn’t go anywhere. Small wonder – we all worked nights, and at least one of us hadn’t seen any daytime TV for quite a while.

Then Rachel mentioned that she was a mixed martial arts fan. That surprised me a little, but then I’ve been accused of stereotyping people in the past. We got into a mild debate over whether supernaturals should have their own MMA league, and that went on until the moment when Rachel glanced at her watch, then looked up and smiled.

“What?” I asked her.

“Checked the time lately?” she said, the smile still in place.

I looked at my watch: 7.26.

Not wanting to put complete faith in either my Omega Spellmaster or the Internet’s posted time for sunrise, I stood up and said, “Excuse me a second.”

I turned left out of the media room and took the next right. Walking another twenty feet put me right in front of a window. I spent a few moments there, looking out at the sun rising over my city. This part of the building was still in shadow, dark enough for me to see my own reflection in the glass. I watch a smile sprout on my face and quickly grow into a full-out grin, like one of those high-speed films that shows a rose going from bud to bloom in only a few seconds.