I held up the bag from Sup'r-Natural Foods. "Got you something." I brought out the frozen package of plasma and said, "Type A – your favorite."

  She clapped her hands together a couple of times. "Oh, Daddy, how sweet. Thank you!" She rose, came around the table, and gave me a hug. As she stepped back, I said, "Do you want some now?" Warming it up in the microwave wouldn't take long.

  "I better not," she said. "Gotta go beddy-bye in less than fifteen minutes. I'll save it for breakfast."

  "Sure," I said, and put the package in the freezer.

  "Oh, I found out about Victor Castle for you."

  "Who? Oh, the Supefather, right."

  "You probably ought not to call him that when you meet him, which you can do at 'Magic Carpets, Mystic Rugs', on Susquehanna Avenue."

  I smiled at that, a little. "The capo di tutti supe is a rug merchant?"

  "He has a bunch of business interests, or so I hear, but that's the one he uses as headquarters."

  "OK, I'll be paying him a visit. Thanks."

  "No prob." She grew a smile of her own. "Capo di tutti supe," she said, and shook her head. "You've been watching The Sopranos again, haven't you?"

  "I sneak one every once in a while." I didn't mention that one of the reasons I liked the HBO series was that all the bad guys were human, and whenever somebody shot one of them, they stayed dead. No wonder it was considered fiction.

  Not long afterward, Christine was on her way downstairs for her day's rest. She left the laptop on the kitchen table.

  I waited a couple of minutes to be sure she wasn't going to come back for something. When I saw the first rays of sunlight creep in through the kitchen window, I went over and sat down where Christine had been when I'd come home. I opened the laptop and the screen came alive immediately, asking me for a user name and password.

  Her email account was christinevamp@aol.com, and I was pretty sure the first part of that was her user ID. She'd never told me her password, but I understand my daughter better than she realizes. I typed in ritaelainemarkowski, clicked, and watched the screen welcome me back to the world of cyberspace.

  The password was her mother's name. Like I said, I know my daughter.

  She'd logged off from whatever page she'd been viewing, but I went to the bar that ran across the top of the screen and clicked on the drop-down menu. The most recent site visited was something called "Drac's List." It was a name I'd heard before. I double-clicked on it.

  A second later, I was looking at

DRAC'S LIST

FOR VAMPIRES AND THOSE WHO LOVE THEM.

It's my job to know what's going on in the supe community, and I was aware of a couple of websites, like Witch.com, that are devoted to bring together supernatural creatures for whatever it is that they want to do together. But this place, I knew, was different.

  "Looking for a bite?" it said. "Drac's List is the place to go for vampires looking for a willing… partner, as well as humans who just can't wait to know what the undead's 'touch' feels like."

  This was a business that brought together vampires and those who wanted to be bitten by one. And Christine had been looking at it, then tried to conceal that fact from me. I didn't go any deeper into the site. If she had a profile in there, I didn't think I could stand to read it.

  I shut the computer down and lowered the lid. The "click" as it closed seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet kitchen. I sat looking at the vampire rights sticker that Christine had put on the lid. It had a drawing of a wooden stake, and superimposed on it was a red circle with a diagonal line through it – the kind of thing they use in airports over a picture of a cigarette to mean No Smoking. Inside the circle were the words: "Van Helsing bites it."

  I don't know how long I sat there, but eventually I got up and went to bed. There have been days when I've slept better. Quite a few of them, in fact.

I left for work without waiting for sundown. It didn't matter if McGuire wasn't paying overtime – I wouldn't put the extra couple of hours on my time sheet. I didn't know yet what I was going to say to Christine about Drac's List, and I didn't want to sit around the house with her and pretend nothing was wrong. She knows her old man pretty well, too.

  I decided to pay a call on Harmon Pettigrew, head of the local chapter of the Homo Sapiens Resistance. It started out as an anti-vamp organization back in the Fifties, when it was known as the Johannes Birth Society. The name was a reference to a guy who was supposedly the first human vamp victim in the USA, but that story's a myth. In the late Sixties, the Birthers changed the name and broadened their focus to include all supernatural creatures. These fuckers hate everybody – except humans, that is. And they don't always respect the law.

  I thought a conversation with Pettigrew might go easier if Karl wasn't with me. Those HSR jerks don't like cops much – they regard us as human race traitors, or something. You can imagine what their attitude is toward a vampire cop.

  Having Karl with me when I talked to Pettigrew would be fun, in some ways. Pettigrew would hate having Karl there, but the badge meant he'd have to be civil – just like in that old movie In the Bright of the Day, about a vampire cop from Philly stranded in the Bible belt. Rod Steiger was great in that, but Jonathan Frid should've won the Oscar.

  But that conversation with Pettigrew, fun though it might be for me and Karl, probably wouldn't produce any worthwhile information. Talking to the guy alone increased the odds that I might actually learn something useful.

  Pettigrew runs a motorcycle repair shop called Born to Be Wilding at the edge of town. A lot of HSR types hang out there, which isn't too surprising. Don't get me wrong – not all bikers are human racist assholes. But a lot of the local racist assholes do seem to be bikers.

  As I walked into the main repair bay I saw Pettigrew kneeling on the cracked cement floor with the engine from a beat-up Harley spread out on the floor all around him. He was alone, which was my good luck. I don't think any of these HSR clowns would ever make a move on me, but Pettigrew's an even bigger asshole when his posse's around – it's like he has to show the others what a tough guy he is.

  He heard my footsteps and pivoted his head toward me at once, like an animal does when it hears a twig snap in the forest. Seeing who I was, he got slowly to his feet, the tool he'd been holding still in his right hand. I walked a few yards closer, then stopped, my eyes pointedly on what he was holding, which looked like a Number Seven flare nut wrench. After a second, Pettigrew got the idea and tossed the wrench on the floor, as if that was what he'd intended to do all along.