Softly, almost purring, Barlow said, “Then will you throw away your cross and face me on even terms—black against white? Your faith against my own?”

“Yes,” Callahan said, but a trifle less firmly.

“Then do it!” Those full lips became pursed, anticipatory. The high forehead gleamed in the weird fairy light that filled the room.

“And trust you to let him go? I would be wiser to put a rattlesnake in my shirt and trust it not to bite me.”

“But I trust you…look!”

He let Mark go and stood back, both hands in the air, empty.

Mark stood still, unbelieving for a moment, and then ran to his parents without a backward look at Barlow.

“Run, Mark!” Callahan cried. “Run!”

Mark looked up at him, his eyes huge and dark. “I think they’re dead—”

“RUN!”

Mark got slowly to his feet. He turned around and looked at Barlow.

“Soon, little brother,” Barlow said, almost benignly. “Very soon now you and I will—”

Mark spit in his face.

Barlow’s breath stopped. His brow darkened with a depth of fury that made his previous expressions seem like what they might well have been: mere playacting. For a moment Callahan saw a madness in his eyes blacker than the soul of murder.

“ You spit on me,” Barlow whispered. His body was trembling, nearly rocking with his rage. He took a shuddering step forward like some awful blind man.

“ Get back!” Callahan screamed, and thrust the cross forward.

Barlow cried out and threw his hands in front of his face. The cross flared with preternatural, dazzling brilliance, and it was at that moment that Callahan might have banished him if he had dared to press forward.

“I’m going to kill you,” Mark said.

He was gone, like a dark eddy of water.

Barlow seemed to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seemed to float around his skull. He was wearing a dark suit and a wine-colored tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seemed part and parcel of the darkness that surrounded him. His eyes glared out of their sockets like sly and sullen embers.

“Then fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.”

“I’m a priest!” Callahan flung at him.

Barlow made a small, mocking bow. “ Priest,” he said, and the word sounded like a dead haddock in his mouth.

Callahan stood indecisive. Why throw it down? Drive him off, settle for a draw tonight, and tomorrow—

But a deeper part of his mind warned. To deny the vampire’s challenge was to risk possibilities far graver than any he had considered. If he dared not throw the cross aside, it would be as much as admitting…admitting…what? If only things weren’t going so fast, if one only had time to think, to reason it out—

The cross’s glow was dying.

He looked at it, eyes widening. Fear leaped into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. His head jerked up and he stared at Barlow. He was walking toward him across the kitchen and his smile was wide, almost voluptuous.

“Stay back,” Callahan said hoarsely, retreating a step. “I command it, in the name of God.”

Barlow laughed at him.

The glow in the cross was only a thin and guttering light in a cruciform shape. The shadows had crept across the vampire’s face again, masking his features in strangely barbaric lines and triangles under the sharp cheekbones.

Callahan took another step backward, and his buttocks bumped the kitchen table, which was set against the wall.

“Nowhere left to go,” Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. “Sad to see a man’s faith fail. Ah, well…”

The cross trembled in Callahan’s hand and suddenly the last of its light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper’s price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.

Barlow reached from the darkness and plucked the cross from his fingers. Callahan cried out miserably, the cry that had vibrated in the soul—but never the throat—of that long-ago child who had been left alone each night with Mr Flip peering out of the closet at him from between the shutters of sleep. And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.

“God damnyou!” he cried out.

“It’s too late for such melodrama,” Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. “There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross…the bread and wine…the confessional…only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes. If you had cast the cross away, you should have beaten me another night. In a way, I hoped it might be so. It has been long since I have met an opponent of any real worth. The boy makes ten of you, false priest.”

Suddenly, out of the darkness, hands of amazing strength gripped Callahan’s shoulders.

“You would welcome the oblivion of my death now, I think. There is no memory for the Undead; only the hunger and the need to serve the Master. I could make use of you. I could send you among your friends. Yet is there need of that? Without you to lead them, I think they are little. And the boy will tell them. One moves against them at this time. There is, perhaps, a more fitting punishment for you, false priest.”

He remembered Matt saying: Some things are worse than death.

He tried to struggle away, but the hands held him in a viselike grip. Then one hand left him. There was the sound of cloth moving across bare skin, and then a scraping sound.

The hands moved to his neck.

“Come, false priest. Learn of a true religion. Take mycommunion.”

Understanding washed over Callahan in a ghastly flood.

“No! Don’t…don’t—”

But the hands were implacable. His head was drawn forward, forward, forward.

“Now, priest,” Barlow whispered.

And Callahan’s mouth was pressed against the reeking flesh of the vampire’s cold throat, where an open vein pulsed. He held his breath for what seemed like aeons, twisting his head wildly and to no avail, smearing the blood across his cheeks and forehead and chin like war paint.

Yet at last, he drank.

TWENTY-ONE

Ann Norton got out of her car without bothering to take the keys, and began to walk across the hospital parking lot toward the bright lights of the lobby. Overhead, clouds had blotted out the stars and soon it would begin to rain. She didn’t look up to see the clouds. She walked stolidly, looking straight in front of her.

She was a very different-looking woman from the lady Ben Mears had met on that first evening Susan had invited him to take dinner with her family. That lady had been medium-tall, dressed in a green wool dress that did not scream of money but spoke of material comfort. That lady had not been beautiful but she had been well groomed and pleasant to look at; her graying hair had been permed not long since.

This woman wore only carpet slippers on her feet. Her legs were bare, and with no Supp-hose to mask them, the varicose veins bulged prominently (although not as prominently as before; some of the pressure had been taken off them). She was wearing a ragged yellow dressing gown over her negligee; her hair was blown in errant sheafs by the rising wind. Her face was pallid, and heavy brown circles lay beneath her eyes.

She had told Susan, had warned her about that man Mears and his friends, had warned her about the man who had murdered her. Matt Burke had put him up to it. They had been in cahoots. Oh yes. She knew. Hehad told her.

She had been sick all day, sick and sleepy and nearly unable to get out of bed. And when she had fallen into a heavy slumber after noon, while her husband was off answering questions for a silly missing persons report, hehad come to her in a dream. His face was handsome and commanding and arrogant and compelling. His nose was hawklike, his hair swept back from his brow, and his heavy, fascinating mouth masked strangely exciting white teeth that showed when hesmiled. And his eyes…they were red and hypnotic. When helooked at you with those eyes, you could not look away…and you didn’t want to.